I see you've been modded funny but I don't think that it was the aim of your post.
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. Linux is not a company so it doesn't have the same goals as a company. It started as a geek pet project and it's goal was fun and learning. What it does now is providing a kernel to whoever wants to use it. Anyway, with Linux you probably mean the companies or just the geeks building distributions on the top of the Linux kernel and the GNU software, plus Google with their Linux/Android products. Or you might even mean the desktop environments like Gnome, KDE and many others. But if you compare apples with apples, let's say Apple with Canonical, you see that they are moving more or less in the same way. Canonical is even going through the pain of reinventing the UI because they want to be more user friendly.
By the way, I installed the Mint desktop on the Ubuntu 11.10 VM I'm experimenting with because I discovered that I can't stand Unity or Gnome Shell. They're both very unfriendly to me but I understand how they could be better suited to some casual users or (in the case of Unity) to devices with a small screen.
Actually the smartphone/app store combo is a good example of a computing appliance. I can imagine a dystopic future in which an A666 chip will run only software signed from the store. No more jailbreaking or rooting, no more sideloading. This hardly damages the phone manufacturers, the chip manufacturers, the developers, the companies running the stores. All of them will make exactly the same amount of money as before but the Apples of that time will have a stronger grip on what we are allowed to see on our phones. No need for legislation, only commercial agreements among companies. They could even get paid by some industry to do that.
The trojan horse could be (pun intended) our own protection from malware. One of Doctorow's points is that most people won't care and will be actually happy to own a safer phone. That approach will move from phones to laptops and desktops and servers as the app store/walled garden is doing now. Want to be a developer/startup in that future? Get a license to go around the locks in the chip because people like us could be dangerous criminals (spammers, black hats, etc). That's no different than working with explosives. Again, no need for legislation, only a deep inspection we developers will have pay for the privilege of writing software for those platforms.
Do I believe it's going to happen? It's not impossible because I see more profit for those companies there as that's a way to control competition. We'll see if there is a stronger market force going in the opposite direction.
In the case of Ruby it looks like it is a flaw in the implementation of the Hash class. Ruby 1.9 is OK but Ruby 1.8 had to be fixed. The safe version is 1.8.7-p357.
Eventually every single country with a big debt will suffer because the world is understanding that debt is not sustainable and it can't be a way of living. Countries are going to repay it or default. Both options are painful. The U.S.A. might be the last one to suffer (big banks are American and you protect your home as long as you can) but a really big financial crisis will strike there in due time. 2008 was just an appetizer.
In principle yes, in practice it doesn't work so well. Moving has costs and we're writing about millions of people and possibly billions on a global scale in future. A lot of them won't move or will be left behind. Furthermore there is historical evidence that people living in places that are still good don't like the idea of getting snowed under by immigrants and oppose resistance to their arrival. There is no need to go back in time, just think of all the restriction to immigration any country has in place, from visa to border patrols. That might be a display of lack of compassion but it's is also true that if living in a place is OK with one million people around, that very same place could become ecologically unsustainable when many more people arrive. We can't move all the people of the world in some "still good areas". They'd be destroyed as well. Where would be a nice place to live in a one billion people USA? What about a two billion people Europe? We'd better have kept climate under (its own) control.
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units. I remember I read that Napoleon forced the metric system into his army because it let his artillery perform ballistic calculations faster than the enemy (*).
It should be easy to see why using only base 10 for both counting and measuring is better than mixing base 10, base 4, base 8, base 12 and maybe a few others I miss because of ignorance (I've been living all my life in a metric country).
(*) After a little googling I found the web page where I read that. It's about the physics of motorsport http://www.getfaster.com/Techtips/Physics6.html so it's not an authoritative source for historical matters but it's a clear example of why metric is better.
I quote
It is worthwhile to note, as an aside, that a great deal of the difficulty of doing calculations in the physics of racing has to do with the traditional units of feet, miles, and pounds we use. The metric system makes all such calculations vastly simpler. Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to convert the world the metric system (mostly so his own soldiers could do artillery calculations quickly in their heads) but it is still not in common use in America nearly 200 years later!
Exactly. We'd be stuck with billions of km of gears and transistors would be a fringe technology with no commercial future because of all the investments on the mechanical computing platform.
If companies realize that some 50% of the work can be done on tablets (all the email/meeting stuff) the working environment will change. This is how it might become (disclaimer: forecasts for the futures are unreliable).
You don't get your cubicle, you get some smaller shared space where you can sit with your tablet, talk with your coworkers, move around and make instant meetings. Nobody owns a specific chair or couch. You'll get some docking stations to do the heavy work with mouse and keyboard. You boss will still be there to watch you and make sure you don't slack off and yes, bosses up in the hierarchy still have their own office with their own desk and chair.
The company will be happy because they need less space, you bring in your hardware (you pay for it, they don't), the working environment looks more cool and it's easier to hire younger people. The trend will start with smaller companies and move to the bigger ones.
Is that going to happen and be more productive than a standard workplace? I don't know but in some cases making it easier for people to meet and share thoughts improves productivity. In other cases people want to sit alone without nobody to disturb them. An environment that offers both opportunities should be the best one.
So did my old N70 (I seem to remember). After all these years of patent trolling I don't assume anymore that companies do obvious mistakes when filing patents. In this case the patent is for a "portable electronic device with a touch screen display" and those phone didn't have a touchscreen. So they don't qualify as previous art.
Why did Windows 95 copy the placement of the X11 window manager I was using years before MS started developing Win95?
Actually I remember Win95 added the X button to close a window with a single click, something I thought very dangerous back then but I never made that many misclicks on it.
I discovered RockMelt today but even if it could run on my two computing platforms (Android and Linux - it doesn't) I'd say "no AdBlock + no NoScript == no thanks."
Anyway I agree that it's a compelling browser for most of the people out there (in here being/.)
I wanted to mod you up but I prefer to reply and share the nostalgia for those never ending Netrek and XTank games. I even managed to graduate.
Actually I think my dual core phone has much more CPU than those computers we were using back in the early 90's. With the right software stack it would be a good server. Nevertheless it seems that somebody managed to run Ubuntu on it but I don't feel like trying.
A phone screen is too tiny for Netrek but a tablet should be fine. Tapping to direct the ships instead of clicking seems ok but we need lots of buttons for the other hand to do all the other actions.
I think you have a point. I wasn't looking back as far as to 1998, my bad. By the way, that was the year of IE5 and Netscape 4.
The dynamic you describe is real and happens all the time. Anyway, we're writing about web applications for an intranet so the case for native applications was not so desperate. Furthermore managers and developers should have started re-writing them in a cross browser way somewhere in the early 2000s, at worst in 2004 when Firefox was launched and gained traction among developers or in 2006 when with IE7 it was clear that the long period of technological stagnation was over. But yes, I know the difference between the right thing to do and what and why management decide to allocate budget for.
That's not always possible. The big international company I was working for at the end of 2006 had Windows 2000 laptops running a version of IE6 customized by MS for them. Those laptops didn't have the processor or the RAM to run a VM. Furthermore the intranet developers made a lot of those strategic mistakes I described in my reply to GP, the first one being asking MS for those customizations. I know that they switched to Vista the month before the launch of Windows 7.
I agree that MS is going to piss off a lot of people but they should have seen this coming a long time ago: bad investments pay bad dividends. In this case the original mistake was made by those developers (and/or managers) that coded a web application for a specific browser instead of for all browsers. The occasional need of using ActiveX is not an excuse. If they really needed to run native code they should have written a desktop application and distributed it with the usual Windows management tools.
The same happens with parts exchanged sometimes. I recently started to take care of a project in which the original developers coded an intranet application for Firefox on a Mac but the customer runs only mixed versions of IE on mixed versions of Windows. Guess what happened when they installed the application on the production server. That's an extreme case of lack of care and of control but again: if it's web technology, develop as if you were developing for the web.
You're lucky because it's an internal application. You should know your users or have easy access to them. Go talking with them when you get bug reports. If they reported a bug they care about it and they'll be pleased that you care about them. They'll show how they got it and you'll teach them how to report it properly when something else happens. Then be sure to fix those bugs or explain them face to face why you're not going to fix them. The keyword is cooperation.
Or notice that 288.80 / 40 is 72.2 (quite easy) and the decimal 2 times the unit 9 in 29 is 18. There is only one answer ending with a 8, that's it and that's the problem with multiple answers.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you've been modded funny but I don't think that it was the aim of your post.
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. Linux is not a company so it doesn't have the same goals as a company. It started as a geek pet project and it's goal was fun and learning. What it does now is providing a kernel to whoever wants to use it. Anyway, with Linux you probably mean the companies or just the geeks building distributions on the top of the Linux kernel and the GNU software, plus Google with their Linux/Android products. Or you might even mean the desktop environments like Gnome, KDE and many others. But if you compare apples with apples, let's say Apple with Canonical, you see that they are moving more or less in the same way. Canonical is even going through the pain of reinventing the UI because they want to be more user friendly.
By the way, I installed the Mint desktop on the Ubuntu 11.10 VM I'm experimenting with because I discovered that I can't stand Unity or Gnome Shell. They're both very unfriendly to me but I understand how they could be better suited to some casual users or (in the case of Unity) to devices with a small screen.
Actually the smartphone/app store combo is a good example of a computing appliance. I can imagine a dystopic future in which an A666 chip will run only software signed from the store. No more jailbreaking or rooting, no more sideloading. This hardly damages the phone manufacturers, the chip manufacturers, the developers, the companies running the stores. All of them will make exactly the same amount of money as before but the Apples of that time will have a stronger grip on what we are allowed to see on our phones. No need for legislation, only commercial agreements among companies. They could even get paid by some industry to do that.
The trojan horse could be (pun intended) our own protection from malware. One of Doctorow's points is that most people won't care and will be actually happy to own a safer phone. That approach will move from phones to laptops and desktops and servers as the app store/walled garden is doing now. Want to be a developer/startup in that future? Get a license to go around the locks in the chip because people like us could be dangerous criminals (spammers, black hats, etc). That's no different than working with explosives. Again, no need for legislation, only a deep inspection we developers will have pay for the privilege of writing software for those platforms.
Do I believe it's going to happen? It's not impossible because I see more profit for those companies there as that's a way to control competition. We'll see if there is a stronger market force going in the opposite direction.
Devices like the Raspberry Pi prove him wrong.
As long as they are legal. That was the point of the speech.
In the case of Ruby it looks like it is a flaw in the implementation of the Hash class. Ruby 1.9 is OK but Ruby 1.8 had to be fixed. The safe version is 1.8.7-p357.
Don't know about Dell but I'm paying about 90 Euro per year at HP and they come at my home and replace broken parts. $250 looks expensive.
Italy's debt is 118% of its GDP. U.S.A. debt is 102% of its GDP. The EU averages at 82%. Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt
Eventually every single country with a big debt will suffer because the world is understanding that debt is not sustainable and it can't be a way of living. Countries are going to repay it or default. Both options are painful. The U.S.A. might be the last one to suffer (big banks are American and you protect your home as long as you can) but a really big financial crisis will strike there in due time. 2008 was just an appetizer.
In principle yes, in practice it doesn't work so well. Moving has costs and we're writing about millions of people and possibly billions on a global scale in future. A lot of them won't move or will be left behind. Furthermore there is historical evidence that people living in places that are still good don't like the idea of getting snowed under by immigrants and oppose resistance to their arrival. There is no need to go back in time, just think of all the restriction to immigration any country has in place, from visa to border patrols. That might be a display of lack of compassion but it's is also true that if living in a place is OK with one million people around, that very same place could become ecologically unsustainable when many more people arrive. We can't move all the people of the world in some "still good areas". They'd be destroyed as well. Where would be a nice place to live in a one billion people USA? What about a two billion people Europe? We'd better have kept climate under (its own) control.
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units. I remember I read that Napoleon forced the metric system into his army because it let his artillery perform ballistic calculations faster than the enemy (*).
It should be easy to see why using only base 10 for both counting and measuring is better than mixing base 10, base 4, base 8, base 12 and maybe a few others I miss because of ignorance (I've been living all my life in a metric country).
(*) After a little googling I found the web page where I read that. It's about the physics of motorsport http://www.getfaster.com/Techtips/Physics6.html so it's not an authoritative source for historical matters but it's a clear example of why metric is better.
I quote
Plenty of examples are provided there.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism was not a general purpose computer but as a computing machine pre dates any known device.
Exactly. We'd be stuck with billions of km of gears and transistors would be a fringe technology with no commercial future because of all the investments on the mechanical computing platform.
If companies realize that some 50% of the work can be done on tablets (all the email/meeting stuff) the working environment will change. This is how it might become (disclaimer: forecasts for the futures are unreliable).
You don't get your cubicle, you get some smaller shared space where you can sit with your tablet, talk with your coworkers, move around and make instant meetings. Nobody owns a specific chair or couch. You'll get some docking stations to do the heavy work with mouse and keyboard. You boss will still be there to watch you and make sure you don't slack off and yes, bosses up in the hierarchy still have their own office with their own desk and chair.
The company will be happy because they need less space, you bring in your hardware (you pay for it, they don't), the working environment looks more cool and it's easier to hire younger people. The trend will start with smaller companies and move to the bigger ones.
Is that going to happen and be more productive than a standard workplace? I don't know but in some cases making it easier for people to meet and share thoughts improves productivity. In other cases people want to sit alone without nobody to disturb them. An environment that offers both opportunities should be the best one.
The same logic can apply: you accuse me to infringe one of your patents, the judge says I don't, I pick one of your patents and I can infringe it.
Here are some examples http://www.lawdit.co.uk/reading_room/room/view_article.asp?name=../articles/11000-ad-Apple-Samsung-Patents.htm Result of googling phone patent invalidated prior art
So did my old N70 (I seem to remember). After all these years of patent trolling I don't assume anymore that companies do obvious mistakes when filing patents. In this case the patent is for a "portable electronic device with a touch screen display" and those phone didn't have a touchscreen. So they don't qualify as previous art.
Why did Windows 95 copy the placement of the X11 window manager I was using years before MS started developing Win95? Actually I remember Win95 added the X button to close a window with a single click, something I thought very dangerous back then but I never made that many misclicks on it.
At https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/versions/ I read "Version 3.0.4 Released August 8, 2011 212.0 KB Works with Firefox 3.0 - 10.* "
I discovered RockMelt today but even if it could run on my two computing platforms (Android and Linux - it doesn't) I'd say "no AdBlock + no NoScript == no thanks." Anyway I agree that it's a compelling browser for most of the people out there (in here being /.)
I wanted to mod you up but I prefer to reply and share the nostalgia for those never ending Netrek and XTank games. I even managed to graduate.
Actually I think my dual core phone has much more CPU than those computers we were using back in the early 90's. With the right software stack it would be a good server. Nevertheless it seems that somebody managed to run Ubuntu on it but I don't feel like trying.
A phone screen is too tiny for Netrek but a tablet should be fine. Tapping to direct the ships instead of clicking seems ok but we need lots of buttons for the other hand to do all the other actions.
I think you have a point. I wasn't looking back as far as to 1998, my bad. By the way, that was the year of IE5 and Netscape 4.
The dynamic you describe is real and happens all the time. Anyway, we're writing about web applications for an intranet so the case for native applications was not so desperate. Furthermore managers and developers should have started re-writing them in a cross browser way somewhere in the early 2000s, at worst in 2004 when Firefox was launched and gained traction among developers or in 2006 when with IE7 it was clear that the long period of technological stagnation was over. But yes, I know the difference between the right thing to do and what and why management decide to allocate budget for.
That's not always possible. The big international company I was working for at the end of 2006 had Windows 2000 laptops running a version of IE6 customized by MS for them. Those laptops didn't have the processor or the RAM to run a VM. Furthermore the intranet developers made a lot of those strategic mistakes I described in my reply to GP, the first one being asking MS for those customizations. I know that they switched to Vista the month before the launch of Windows 7.
I agree that MS is going to piss off a lot of people but they should have seen this coming a long time ago: bad investments pay bad dividends. In this case the original mistake was made by those developers (and/or managers) that coded a web application for a specific browser instead of for all browsers. The occasional need of using ActiveX is not an excuse. If they really needed to run native code they should have written a desktop application and distributed it with the usual Windows management tools.
The same happens with parts exchanged sometimes. I recently started to take care of a project in which the original developers coded an intranet application for Firefox on a Mac but the customer runs only mixed versions of IE on mixed versions of Windows. Guess what happened when they installed the application on the production server. That's an extreme case of lack of care and of control but again: if it's web technology, develop as if you were developing for the web.
You're lucky because it's an internal application. You should know your users or have easy access to them. Go talking with them when you get bug reports. If they reported a bug they care about it and they'll be pleased that you care about them. They'll show how they got it and you'll teach them how to report it properly when something else happens. Then be sure to fix those bugs or explain them face to face why you're not going to fix them. The keyword is cooperation.
iPhones and other 500+ € smartphones are selling very well here in Italy too.
Or notice that 288.80 / 40 is 72.2 (quite easy) and the decimal 2 times the unit 9 in 29 is 18. There is only one answer ending with a 8, that's it and that's the problem with multiple answers.
I know the others but what is Xe?