> This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument > against VB because I'm not familiar enough with it.
I, as system programmer, for three years did ported number of VB applications to C/C++. Funny job for system programmer, don't you think?;-)
The list of problems of my employer was:
1. Run-time libraries conflicts. VB applications affected worse of all by "DLL-Hell" probles of Windows: lots of functionality resides in ActiveX components developped by third parties. People usually quote ActiveX support as VB first advantage, but from POV of deployment and support it is hell.
2. Run-time libraries dependencies. Since VB is all into ActiveX, you might start using some component you haven't explicitely installed. Then when you ship the application to your customers you might find yourself in silly situation: half of them report everything is Ok, half - scream that nothing is working. Apparently, first half have the similar set of applications installed - and VB application finds the library missing from its own installation.
3. Internationalization. That was huge problem for my employer. We have had quite number of customers in Japan. M$ did internationalizion of VB in straight way: it didn't. In other words, VB as we have it in Europe/US and VB in Asia are two different VBs. Absolutely different. Since Japanese love VB, most of our customers had it installed. The situation looked so: if customer installs our application - other and her/his own applications stop working; if s/he reinstalls VB anew - our application stop working. Interpreter is the same, but run time libraries are very very different.
4. Upgradability. VB applications are one hell to maintain. We have had lots of reports that installation of our application made with VB4 was breaking VB5/VB6 installations. According to M$, the cure was to upgrade everyone to VB6. But VB6 introduced some problems so our custormers were split - half used VB5 and other half VB6.
To conclude. One can write good application in VB. But M$ doesn't make that very easy. The whole ActiveX thing is one hell to deploy and maintain..Net at moment has only two versions - 1.x and 2.0 - and all components of next "XXX-Hell" are there: M$ doesn't do excplicit versioning of libraries nor APIs.
All that stuff - all 14 traits - are very easy to derive. Most of the regimes were authoritive regimes - with male figure on the top. Some sort of freaked out dictatorship. My homeland Belarus with Lukashenko looks very much like it.
For easiness, figurehead of such regime below will be called "the president". Anyway all such modern regimes claim to be democratic or republic.
1. "Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism." See (3).
2. "Disdain for the importance of human rights." There is only one man is such system - president. Everything else is just cogs that need to mesh. What doesn't mesh - is broken cog. We do not need broken cogs. And of course rest assured the president's rights are well respected.
3. "Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause." Closely related to (1). Since there is only one man - president - in the whole country, everyone else is mere servant. Sparing between servants isn't welcome - that might look like call to the power of our beloved president. But servants need something to make a carrier on. Neighbors are good candidates for such enemies.
4. "The supremacy of the military/avid militarism." Only real man can be soldier. Only man can protect his country from evil enemy's conspiracies ploting against us. Since there is only one man in whole country - sooner or later he becomes head of army. (e.g. Putin & Lukashenko are heads of respective armies.)
5. "Rampant sexism." No comments. This is the man's world. And we his name - president. Every other male cog has to mimic example set by president. Women, well, they cannot mimic president since they are women. Blame God. Etc.
6. "A controlled mass media." Option 1. Elite which wants to control the president need to cut all independent channels of information for the president. Option 2. In fact media are not controlled. It's just president makes sure that his/rights/ and his/privacy/ are respected.
7. "Obsession with national security." Nation == president. Since president is the only man of the country, sure we do not want to loose him. Thus we have to protect him no matter what.
8. "Religion and ruling elite tied together." That's clear. The Man - the president already stands so high above mere mortals, that only Maker is left above him. Since he is closest to the God, everyone else has to respect his as if he was God. (e.g. Russia has more or less officially integrated churce and gov't)
9. "Power of corporations protected." No, no. You got it wrong. It's just our president need some cash. To have cash he needs a cash cow. Since mere mortals cogs do not have money, indistry has to be tightened to produce something valueable for export. (All such regimes live off export: e.g. Russia lives 80% off crude oil export.)
10. "Power of labor suppressed or eliminated." What you talking about? The cogs? The mortals and rights? We have only one man in the country and his rights have priority above anything else.
11. "Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts." Funniest part, is that dictators and presidents often protect such people. It's just elite closest to the president do not like people who can break plans of their. Of course people who can think and think freely - are the people who might give wrong idea to others. God save if they would give wrong idea to his highness president. Also the artists are quite weak in bureaucracy - that makes them good target for carrierists.
12. "Obsession with crime and punishment." See (2) and broken cogs. We do not need them.
13. "Rampant cronyism and corruption." This is the curse of all such regimes. That creeps slowly in. The president ends up living in some sort of condom: sterile tightly controlled environment made up by his closest ministers. Influencing environment would obviously influence the president. The elite of course charges premium for such interventions. (e.g. post of minister in Russia costs about $2.5mln, hiring person to be
To be frank, I needed such tool only once in my whole 15 years carrier - to prove that performance problem users where experiencing wasn't mine.
And from the demos it looks way too complicated to be used by mere mortals. Bit like good ol' "expect": great tool, but beyond comprehension of most mere mortals. IMHO.
Thou, I'm quite an exception. For example I do not use debuggers at all. And I do not need one - I can tell precisely what went wrong in my program by just description of the symptoms. Other (normal) guys spend 90% of their working time in debuggers. Probably normal developers would appreciate the tool.
It's just my experience that in many case additional info on how program runs does HARM development process: people concentrate too much micro optimizations and miss completely overall performance picture.
To reiterate classics: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" (c) Hoare.
P.S. The only viable application of dtrace (or any other profiler for that sake) I know is the improved communication between users and developers. With dtrace user can profile application in his configuration and then send report to developer so he can try to evaluate what/why went wrong at user's site. But again, most of the applications already have some sort of logging facility specifically for that purpose developed.
The point is how useful the gathered info is. In my experience more or less all OSs do not have problems with stats one can gather. It's the stats one can NOT gather.
E.g. under Linux most of the memory is file cache. What would you gain by knowing that cache went from 95% to 96% of RAM and then went down to 94%?If you can't dissect the value (e.g. 10% belong to that file, 20% to that process, 40% are that info, etc) nor change the behaviour of kernel - there is no point in knowing that info.
And again, if there is tool which provides some info, there are good chances that people looked at that info and already optimized/tuned all what was possible to optimize/tune.
Remember, problems most of the time lie somewhere we cannot look at.
In Peter Hamilton's The Night's Dawn trilogy, Earth have had a kind of very high towers reaching out of Earth gravitation.
It's basicly elevator - but more like real one. That sounds less fictious than super strong wire. And honestly something humanity - if wanted - can do even now.
That damm URGE thing looks *so* *much* like iTMS!! M$/MTV seem not to think about user interface twoce and plainly ripped it off of iTunes/iTMS.
P.S. Would Apple sue for stealing look'n'feel? I guess - as long as URGE remain underdog - not. But then again, with all the limitations would it be able to dig into the market? I guess not. New product trying to compete with e.g. Napster giving *less* for the same money? What's the guy are smoking over there?..
P.P.S. IMHO M$ sould ditch the "Windows Media Player" altogether. The name has bad reputation. In fact none of my friends use it, since everyone knows it is broken. Even if M$ fixed version 11, many people wouldn't even know about the URGEnt thing because the first thing they do is installation of some other media player. God knows, even Apple-made iTunes is magnitude better compared to pretty unusable WMP 8/9/10. (WMP: "poor UI" && "crap quality WMA" => unusable, iTunes: "useful UI" && "AAC above average quality" => "works for me" (-: )
Sure there are people who don't understand all this, but i think most people who are spending this much money will do a little research.
Precisely the point people try to tell all over the thread: target audience of the game console doesn't have such money, to begin with. No such money. Period.
Probably shops would come with some financing plans. But again, how many of target audience (kids) can apply to any kind of financing? Be I kind, I definitely wouldn't want to give up on my pocket cash for half of year. And the kid would want to buy some games too. Isn't it?
Have no clue how it would be on launch, but at moment even $500 seems to be over any margin.
There are so many ways you can secure communication...
Thin Client will have another advantage is that you would move all security problems to single place - server - single potential point of security breach. Securing single server is magnitude easier task, compared to securing tens of terminals installed around the place.
In fact, such architecture is mandated in many application fields. For example banking and bankomats. You trust it to securily manage you account? aren't you?
Somebody! Please over there at Sun!!! Do not give that grass to Gosling "The Father of Java" anymore!!!! Or my heart would definitely break.
"Java is already open source for 10 years" and "Eclipse destroyed interoperability" is... *NO* *COMMENTS*.
Sun for last ten years - and 6 versions of Java - jumped from one application field to another. Sun's lack of the focus - and Gosling sayings confirm that lack - is sole reason for the problems of Java. Companies just can't trust Sun at that point. (*)
Eclipse claims are just plainly laughable. And in fact one of the most spoken problems of Java and Sun's control over Java. Since Java slowly moved to server side of computing, Sun payed less and less attention to the one simple thing - GUI. There is no standard Java GUI API. Period. People tried what is shipped with Java SDK - AWT & Swing - shivered and moved on. Plainly unusable. In fact, I do not know single successful Java GUI application which uses Java's native GUI toolkits. Eclipse foundation just did what it had to - filled the gap. Now we have GUI toolkit. Which is quite performant, usable on Windows/Linux/BSD/Mac. And people are pretty happy about it. Even me. And many applications already use it (Azureus as an example pops up in my head). Check the http://www.eclipse.org/swt/community.php for more.
P.S. Original article includes the pointer that Sun's planing to try assault on embedded space again. Good Luck Gosling. You freaking need it.
(*) My company wanted to standartize of Java, but backed off the plans. Middle management wanted Java for its stable and rich development environment. R&D manager flat out refused since Java is in fact closed source and there is no sence in adding another dependency to the already huge software package we have. And nobody can assure us what Sun will do tommorow - what if they drop support for M$ Windows?? There is *no* competing Java implementations. And there is no standard for Java.
s/text of beatified hex dump/text or beatified hex dump/ # monday morning...
P.S. Most wanted feature of microkernel OS - redirecting flow of message from/to file. In Unix you can split pipeling and use intermidiate files. Same is next to impossible with messages.
People tend to look into "bunch of small programs" aspect of Unix approach and disregard other important aspect - "connecting those programs with...".
Human readable form of most of the information is text and represented quite often as text lines. And Unix, providing you the bunch of small applications and also way to interconnect them, facilitate solution of many day to day problems involving text. (Do not forget, even programs themselves are text.)
Microkernels might look that way - OSs composed of bunch of interconnected programs (or processes). But to understand the problem and conflict between classical Unix approach and mucrokernels you have to look in second aspect - that's interconnections. Unix uses text and lines. Most of the exising microkernel OSs use very very very formal interface between the processes - normally called protocols. You can dissect Unix and put another application in pipeline in under five minutes - thus effectively changing behaviour of OS to the desired one. But in microkernel OS such changes might lead to change of the protocol what would lead to change in all applications in system using the process and protocol.
To conclude, classical microkernel systems use binary messages. Traditional Unix uses text lines. Believe me - I have first hand use/development experience with both - Unix approach is *magnitude* easier to develop and comprehend. Under Linux/BSD, I do not remember myself spending even a single day finding problem with message passing. During my work with microkernel system debugging message passing and parsing eats up to half of my work time and can span sometimes up to *weeks*. In the end, what's easier to check on screen - text of beatified hex dump??
> FreeBSD may be an excellent operating system, > but it's lack of a good journaling file system > is a major barrier to adoption.
I'm not sure about journaling file systems. I was helping people in data centres and they have described me way they use FreeBSD there.
First of all, they have specially customized distro packed into single file for network boot. Then, every time something happen they just (re)plug new/replacement board, BSD is loaded with net boot over network, unpacked and booted. OS formats harddrive and run special software to attach local hard drive to networked RAID array. That software does mirroring/etc/whatever is configured.
In other words (and that's pretty logical) you do not need journaling with RAID. You need journaling when you do not have UPS. But if you have money to throw at RAID - then you definitely need an UPS - to protect your investments in RAID.
What journaling does for single hard drive operation is replaced by mirroring in RAID configurations. But that's my limited knowledge of how it works. Had RAID only once - but it was way too noisy. So I replaced RAID config with simple daily backup to the second hard drive.
Thou additional security provided by journaling can definitely help;-) Probably people with experience of Linux in data centres can elaborate on the details. From all what I have seen it is precisely advantage of journaled file systems that you can get quite short recovery time w/o more expensive RAID.
Old tried - and wrong - argument. Analyst already warned couple of years ago that Sun is turning from hardware company into software one. At a time, Java unit which sell development tools and enterprise buzz-word related stuff was only growing and profiting unit at Sun.
You can't expect the product Sun somehow is selling and brining money be changed drastically right away.
P.S. And Sun is still losing in its hardware business.
The result is that standardized computer algorithms and formats are rarely incorrect. However, they do become obsolete in relatively short periods of time due to increases in computing power and informational storage/transmission requirements.
In engineering, building blocks are developped probably once per decade. How old concept of building houses of bricks? of wood? etc. You can't do much with physics, which describes the laws of the world we see around us.
In software engineering, earth gets reinvented completely more or less every decade. Every new generation of computers allows newer improved algorithm and new application fields to be sucked in. And everytime people find that the algorithms can be improved even more. 200 hundred years ago, simple automation of money counting was unimaginable. Try to consider what happen in the two centuries. And how the process evolved, if now amount of money has *no* physical equivalent: it's just number our bank stores along with rest of account information. Numbers can evolve thou they exist only in our imagination. You hardly can expect brick or lump of iron to evolve in any similar way.
Standards if they want to remain useful has to evolve. IMHO standard has to include way to add improvements and way to move the improvements under standard umbrella. E.g. HTML is tag based. There is a definition of tag along with its properties. Improvement to HTML can be done in two ways: new property of an exsiting tag or a completely new tag. And with next revision, schemas can be updated to include the improvement. It worked that ways with HTML evolution from ver 1.0 to 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Make HTML an international standard requiring strict compliance and 6 month aprove period for every new feature - and you would find that the HTML would have never evolved that far the way it did under the rule of W3C.
ODF inherited from XML easy way to add improvements. If ISO workgroup isn't made up of complete [CENSORED] - and luckily to us it isn't - standartization would not stand in a way for improvements.
What is remaining for ODF to be healthy standard - is competing implementations. KOffice is limited to KDE which doesn't run under Windows. Working with OOo every day I wish it was never ported to Windows in first place. I hope the Corel would deliver on promise and add to competion. Having at moment under Windows only OOo as an option - hardly helps ODF adoption.
One thought came to my mind. In all, I can't imaging any other explanation why Apple would want to throw money on such litigations.
Imaging scenario. Company X (Apple in the story) develops new cool product. Employee A leaks (for money or for fun) info about the product. Patent holding companies/competitors Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc start patenting *everything* possibly related to the product. Product comes on market. Patents as usually get granted and competitors start sueing company X.
What Apple (or any other company) can possibly do to avoid such situations???
...millions more happily use thier products without a problem.
Precisely my - driver developer's - point.
All the "Open Source Drivers" campaign is in fact has only one big stimulus: shitty proprietary drivers. In fact *very* *very* *very* shitty proprietary drivers. (Even M$ started developing drivers for supported hardware - quality is just outrageous).
When you have open source driver - you can fix it in matter of hours. I did that several times. With shitty drivers, normally comes shitty support. Piece of junk hardware might just happen to work - but drivers may be just plainly broken.
Another point people are pursueing - and I am 100% with them - is that hardware *must* be open. Just of situation when you buy a hammer with driver. How many chances hammer would break? How many chances that driver will break with next OS upgrade? IANAL, but some "interoperability" bells are ringing inside of me. IOW, hardware manufacturers may not be allowed to dictate how and for what purpose their products are used. In that situation, having Open Source Driver is must.
P.S. The "Open Source Drivers" campaign has no future. I would gave my vote to "Open/NDA-free Documentation" campaign. Documentation is what really matters.
Still I think ban is something too strict. I have similar experience - on both sides of the issue. I once hit other car when my sister distrubed me from the back sit. And I was hit by guy talking on cell. (Most ridiculuos part of later accident was that guy did NOT notice he hit my car - he was busy talking and guess that - he hit me *second* time. Got to remake left side completely).
I beleive that use of mobile has to be a weightening factor when accident happens. When driver gets into something while talking on cell he has to be charged twice/thrice/etc times more. IOW, similar to drunk driving.
I have friend who can multitask perfectly. He can drive car perfectly and at the same time keeping an eye on FM and talking to his friend on cell. If person *can* multitask - then why not?
You all miss the point. All 2nd/3rd party applications will sooner or later start depending on Aero. Just like most applications now depend on versions of Internet Explorer, WMPlayer, DirectX, MDAC, MFC,.NET, etc.
You will see not only less shiny desktop, but also every other (presumambly pirated) application will complain that Aero isn't available and app can't run. Just think about how happy every software company would be - to add another Wind0ze version to their release schedules: not only Vista, but also Vista minus Aero. Beleive me, nobody would bother.
Anyway, since chances of buying PC w/o Windows are close to NULL, all the worries are overblown. If one has enough brain to assemble computer - I presume one would have enough brain to use Linux on it anyway.
Internationalization doesn't work. In 2.0 you had no choice of language for auto spell check at *all*. IIRC, 2.0.1/2 fixed that.
Instalation of additional dictionaries in 2.0/2.0.1 was borken. People say that 2.0.2 fixed that - but nobody in our company managed to make it working. (Yes, we updated that magic document for downloading dictionaries. No, it didn't help.)
Also, GUI became even more bloated compared to one in OOo1. Before it looks weird - but was practical. Now it looks nice - but very distracting and at times annoying.
For me - touch-typist - OOo1 works better. OOo2 does some redundant redraws on screen while typing. Especially in on-line view (normal mode in WinWord terms). Needless to say page view is even worse - it's quite hard to type when pages jump on screen.
In the end, I still use VIM to prepare large chunks of documentation and only then paste them into OOo. It's sort'a good compromise: VIM is good text editor but can't formatting while OOo isn't good as text editor but can format text. Also, I can check-in the raw text files into SVN/CVS - and have version history for all modifications. Thou, since final document has no relation to raw text file, the revision history become obsolete quite fast.
Slashdot Mirror
> This scares me, but I honestly can't make a good argument
;-)
.Net at moment has only two versions - 1.x and 2.0 - and all components of next "XXX-Hell" are there: M$ doesn't do excplicit versioning of libraries nor APIs.
> against VB because I'm not familiar enough with it.
I, as system programmer, for three years did ported number of VB applications to C/C++. Funny job for system programmer, don't you think?
The list of problems of my employer was:
1. Run-time libraries conflicts. VB applications affected worse of all by "DLL-Hell" probles of Windows: lots of functionality resides in ActiveX components developped by third parties. People usually quote ActiveX support as VB first advantage, but from POV of deployment and support it is hell.
2. Run-time libraries dependencies. Since VB is all into ActiveX, you might start using some component you haven't explicitely installed. Then when you ship the application to your customers you might find yourself in silly situation: half of them report everything is Ok, half - scream that nothing is working. Apparently, first half have the similar set of applications installed - and VB application finds the library missing from its own installation.
3. Internationalization. That was huge problem for my employer. We have had quite number of customers in Japan. M$ did internationalizion of VB in straight way: it didn't. In other words, VB as we have it in Europe/US and VB in Asia are two different VBs. Absolutely different. Since Japanese love VB, most of our customers had it installed. The situation looked so: if customer installs our application - other and her/his own applications stop working; if s/he reinstalls VB anew - our application stop working. Interpreter is the same, but run time libraries are very very different.
4. Upgradability. VB applications are one hell to maintain. We have had lots of reports that installation of our application made with VB4 was breaking VB5/VB6 installations. According to M$, the cure was to upgrade everyone to VB6. But VB6 introduced some problems so our custormers were split - half used VB5 and other half VB6.
To conclude. One can write good application in VB. But M$ doesn't make that very easy. The whole ActiveX thing is one hell to deploy and maintain.
All that stuff - all 14 traits - are very easy to derive. Most of the regimes were authoritive regimes - with male figure on the top. Some sort of freaked out dictatorship. My homeland Belarus with Lukashenko looks very much like it.
/rights/ and his /privacy/ are respected.
For easiness, figurehead of such regime below will be called "the president". Anyway all such modern regimes claim to be democratic or republic.
1. "Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism." See (3).
2. "Disdain for the importance of human rights." There is only one man is such system - president. Everything else is just cogs that need to mesh. What doesn't mesh - is broken cog. We do not need broken cogs. And of course rest assured the president's rights are well respected.
3. "Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause." Closely related to (1). Since there is only one man - president - in the whole country, everyone else is mere servant. Sparing between servants isn't welcome - that might look like call to the power of our beloved president. But servants need something to make a carrier on. Neighbors are good candidates for such enemies.
4. "The supremacy of the military/avid militarism." Only real man can be soldier. Only man can protect his country from evil enemy's conspiracies ploting against us. Since there is only one man in whole country - sooner or later he becomes head of army. (e.g. Putin & Lukashenko are heads of respective armies.)
5. "Rampant sexism." No comments. This is the man's world. And we his name - president. Every other male cog has to mimic example set by president. Women, well, they cannot mimic president since they are women. Blame God. Etc.
6. "A controlled mass media." Option 1. Elite which wants to control the president need to cut all independent channels of information for the president. Option 2. In fact media are not controlled. It's just president makes sure that his
7. "Obsession with national security." Nation == president. Since president is the only man of the country, sure we do not want to loose him. Thus we have to protect him no matter what.
8. "Religion and ruling elite tied together." That's clear. The Man - the president already stands so high above mere mortals, that only Maker is left above him. Since he is closest to the God, everyone else has to respect his as if he was God. (e.g. Russia has more or less officially integrated churce and gov't)
9. "Power of corporations protected." No, no. You got it wrong. It's just our president need some cash. To have cash he needs a cash cow. Since mere mortals cogs do not have money, indistry has to be tightened to produce something valueable for export. (All such regimes live off export: e.g. Russia lives 80% off crude oil export.)
10. "Power of labor suppressed or eliminated." What you talking about? The cogs? The mortals and rights? We have only one man in the country and his rights have priority above anything else.
11. "Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts." Funniest part, is that dictators and presidents often protect such people. It's just elite closest to the president do not like people who can break plans of their. Of course people who can think and think freely - are the people who might give wrong idea to others. God save if they would give wrong idea to his highness president. Also the artists are quite weak in bureaucracy - that makes them good target for carrierists.
12. "Obsession with crime and punishment." See (2) and broken cogs. We do not need them.
13. "Rampant cronyism and corruption." This is the curse of all such regimes. That creeps slowly in. The president ends up living in some sort of condom: sterile tightly controlled environment made up by his closest ministers. Influencing environment would obviously influence the president. The elite of course charges premium for such interventions. (e.g. post of minister in Russia costs about $2.5mln, hiring person to be
Every country has "draconian" law enforcement when local traditions come into question.
Every country is lax on regulations enforced by some very unrelated party.
No doubt it's true for China. And I know it's true for US. (*)
(*) Adaptation of metric system being good example.
To be frank, I needed such tool only once in my whole 15 years carrier - to prove that performance problem users where experiencing wasn't mine.
And from the demos it looks way too complicated to be used by mere mortals. Bit like good ol' "expect": great tool, but beyond comprehension of most mere mortals. IMHO.
Thou, I'm quite an exception. For example I do not use debuggers at all. And I do not need one - I can tell precisely what went wrong in my program by just description of the symptoms. Other (normal) guys spend 90% of their working time in debuggers. Probably normal developers would appreciate the tool.
It's just my experience that in many case additional info on how program runs does HARM development process: people concentrate too much micro optimizations and miss completely overall performance picture.
To reiterate classics: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" (c) Hoare.
P.S. The only viable application of dtrace (or any other profiler for that sake) I know is the improved communication between users and developers. With dtrace user can profile application in his configuration and then send report to developer so he can try to evaluate what/why went wrong at user's site. But again, most of the applications already have some sort of logging facility specifically for that purpose developed.
The real question has China any will to enforce the law? Would anyone there cooperate with RIAA/MPAA as much as they do in EU/US?
No doubt many (me included) see the passed law only as a step needed to please World Trade Organization.
The point is how useful the gathered info is. In my experience more or less all OSs do not have problems with stats one can gather. It's the stats one can NOT gather.
E.g. under Linux most of the memory is file cache. What would you gain by knowing that cache went from 95% to 96% of RAM and then went down to 94%?If you can't dissect the value (e.g. 10% belong to that file, 20% to that process, 40% are that info, etc) nor change the behaviour of kernel - there is no point in knowing that info.
And again, if there is tool which provides some info, there are good chances that people looked at that info and already optimized/tuned all what was possible to optimize/tune.
Remember, problems most of the time lie somewhere we cannot look at.
That's silly question, but how physics relates to fiction??? Fiction is fiction even if it's science-fiction.
It's just I can hardly beleive that wire would work better than pole.
It's basicly elevator - but more like real one. That sounds less fictious than super strong wire. And honestly something humanity - if wanted - can do even now.
That damm URGE thing looks *so* *much* like iTMS!! M$/MTV seem not to think about user interface twoce and plainly ripped it off of iTunes/iTMS.
P.S. Would Apple sue for stealing look'n'feel? I guess - as long as URGE remain underdog - not. But then again, with all the limitations would it be able to dig into the market? I guess not. New product trying to compete with e.g. Napster giving *less* for the same money? What's the guy are smoking over there?..
P.P.S. IMHO M$ sould ditch the "Windows Media Player" altogether. The name has bad reputation. In fact none of my friends use it, since everyone knows it is broken. Even if M$ fixed version 11, many people wouldn't even know about the URGEnt thing because the first thing they do is installation of some other media player. God knows, even Apple-made iTunes is magnitude better compared to pretty unusable WMP 8/9/10. (WMP: "poor UI" && "crap quality WMA" => unusable, iTunes: "useful UI" && "AAC above average quality" => "works for me" (-: )
Precisely the point people try to tell all over the thread: target audience of the game console doesn't have such money, to begin with. No such money. Period.
Probably shops would come with some financing plans. But again, how many of target audience (kids) can apply to any kind of financing? Be I kind, I definitely wouldn't want to give up on my pocket cash for half of year. And the kid would want to buy some games too. Isn't it?
Have no clue how it would be on launch, but at moment even $500 seems to be over any margin.
I haven't seen computer DVD9 yet. Only DVD5.
All PC DVD games I own - are all on DVD5.
The only DVD9s I have seen - are movies. About of 95% of DVD movies I have are DVD9. Few are DVD5.
P.S. DVD5 is the name for single layer DVD with capacity about 4.7GB. DVD9 is the name for dual layer DVD with capacity about 8.5GB.
P.P.S. cost of DVD5 is $0.50, DVD9 on other hand is $2.50 IOW, DVD5 are much cheaper compared to DVD9s.
Wild guess: Sony doesn't do software.
Oh, stop, what's "Sony Connect"?!? It doesn't give you trouble? Probably you haven't used it yet.
Virtual Private Networks anyone?
SSL/TLS connections?
SSH tunneling?
There are so many ways you can secure communication...
Thin Client will have another advantage is that you would move all security problems to single place - server - single potential point of security breach. Securing single server is magnitude easier task, compared to securing tens of terminals installed around the place.
In fact, such architecture is mandated in many application fields. For example banking and bankomats. You trust it to securily manage you account? aren't you?
Somebody! Please over there at Sun!!! Do not give that grass to Gosling "The Father of Java" anymore!!!! Or my heart would definitely break.
"Java is already open source for 10 years" and "Eclipse destroyed interoperability" is... *NO* *COMMENTS*.
Sun for last ten years - and 6 versions of Java - jumped from one application field to another. Sun's lack of the focus - and Gosling sayings confirm that lack - is sole reason for the problems of Java. Companies just can't trust Sun at that point. (*)
Eclipse claims are just plainly laughable. And in fact one of the most spoken problems of Java and Sun's control over Java. Since Java slowly moved to server side of computing, Sun payed less and less attention to the one simple thing - GUI. There is no standard Java GUI API. Period. People tried what is shipped with Java SDK - AWT & Swing - shivered and moved on. Plainly unusable. In fact, I do not know single successful Java GUI application which uses Java's native GUI toolkits. Eclipse foundation just did what it had to - filled the gap. Now we have GUI toolkit. Which is quite performant, usable on Windows/Linux/BSD/Mac. And people are pretty happy about it. Even me. And many applications already use it (Azureus as an example pops up in my head). Check the http://www.eclipse.org/swt/community.php for more.
P.S. Original article includes the pointer that Sun's planing to try assault on embedded space again. Good Luck Gosling. You freaking need it.
(*) My company wanted to standartize of Java, but backed off the plans. Middle management wanted Java for its stable and rich development environment. R&D manager flat out refused since Java is in fact closed source and there is no sence in adding another dependency to the already huge software package we have. And nobody can assure us what Sun will do tommorow - what if they drop support for M$ Windows?? There is *no* competing Java implementations. And there is no standard for Java.
s/text of beatified hex dump/text or beatified hex dump/ # monday morning...
P.S. Most wanted feature of microkernel OS - redirecting flow of message from/to file. In Unix you can split pipeling and use intermidiate files. Same is next to impossible with messages.
Devil in details.
People tend to look into "bunch of small programs" aspect of Unix approach and disregard other important aspect - "connecting those programs with...".
Human readable form of most of the information is text and represented quite often as text lines. And Unix, providing you the bunch of small applications and also way to interconnect them, facilitate solution of many day to day problems involving text. (Do not forget, even programs themselves are text.)
Microkernels might look that way - OSs composed of bunch of interconnected programs (or processes). But to understand the problem and conflict between classical Unix approach and mucrokernels you have to look in second aspect - that's interconnections. Unix uses text and lines. Most of the exising microkernel OSs use very very very formal interface between the processes - normally called protocols. You can dissect Unix and put another application in pipeline in under five minutes - thus effectively changing behaviour of OS to the desired one. But in microkernel OS such changes might lead to change of the protocol what would lead to change in all applications in system using the process and protocol.
To conclude, classical microkernel systems use binary messages. Traditional Unix uses text lines. Believe me - I have first hand use/development experience with both - Unix approach is *magnitude* easier to develop and comprehend. Under Linux/BSD, I do not remember myself spending even a single day finding problem with message passing. During my work with microkernel system debugging message passing and parsing eats up to half of my work time and can span sometimes up to *weeks*. In the end, what's easier to check on screen - text of beatified hex dump??
> FreeBSD may be an excellent operating system,
;-)
> but it's lack of a good journaling file system
> is a major barrier to adoption.
I'm not sure about journaling file systems. I was helping people in data centres and they have described me way they use FreeBSD there.
First of all, they have specially customized distro packed into single file for network boot. Then, every time something happen they just (re)plug new/replacement board, BSD is loaded with net boot over network, unpacked and booted. OS formats harddrive and run special software to attach local hard drive to networked RAID array. That software does mirroring/etc/whatever is configured.
In other words (and that's pretty logical) you do not need journaling with RAID. You need journaling when you do not have UPS. But if you have money to throw at RAID - then you definitely need an UPS - to protect your investments in RAID.
What journaling does for single hard drive operation is replaced by mirroring in RAID configurations. But that's my limited knowledge of how it works. Had RAID only once - but it was way too noisy. So I replaced RAID config with simple daily backup to the second hard drive.
Thou additional security provided by journaling can definitely help
Probably people with experience of Linux in data centres can elaborate on the details. From all what I have seen it is precisely advantage of journaled file systems that you can get quite short recovery time w/o more expensive RAID.
You can't expect the product Sun somehow is selling and brining money be changed drastically right away.
P.S. And Sun is still losing in its hardware business.
In software engineering, earth gets reinvented completely more or less every decade. Every new generation of computers allows newer improved algorithm and new application fields to be sucked in. And everytime people find that the algorithms can be improved even more. 200 hundred years ago, simple automation of money counting was unimaginable. Try to consider what happen in the two centuries. And how the process evolved, if now amount of money has *no* physical equivalent: it's just number our bank stores along with rest of account information. Numbers can evolve thou they exist only in our imagination. You hardly can expect brick or lump of iron to evolve in any similar way.
Standards if they want to remain useful has to evolve. IMHO standard has to include way to add improvements and way to move the improvements under standard umbrella. E.g. HTML is tag based. There is a definition of tag along with its properties. Improvement to HTML can be done in two ways: new property of an exsiting tag or a completely new tag. And with next revision, schemas can be updated to include the improvement. It worked that ways with HTML evolution from ver 1.0 to 4.0 to XHTML 1.0. Make HTML an international standard requiring strict compliance and 6 month aprove period for every new feature - and you would find that the HTML would have never evolved that far the way it did under the rule of W3C.
ODF inherited from XML easy way to add improvements. If ISO workgroup isn't made up of complete [CENSORED] - and luckily to us it isn't - standartization would not stand in a way for improvements.
What is remaining for ODF to be healthy standard - is competing implementations. KOffice is limited to KDE which doesn't run under Windows. Working with OOo every day I wish it was never ported to Windows in first place. I hope the Corel would deliver on promise and add to competion. Having at moment under Windows only OOo as an option - hardly helps ODF adoption.
We are talking business here. No freaking charity, no loyalty. Money first, faith last.
Why Americans are so unhappy about their two greatest inventions - show business and entertainment industry???
One thought came to my mind. In all, I can't imaging any other explanation why Apple would want to throw money on such litigations.
Imaging scenario. Company X (Apple in the story) develops new cool product. Employee A leaks (for money or for fun) info about the product. Patent holding companies/competitors Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc start patenting *everything* possibly related to the product. Product comes on market. Patents as usually get granted and competitors start sueing company X.
What Apple (or any other company) can possibly do to avoid such situations???
All the "Open Source Drivers" campaign is in fact has only one big stimulus: shitty proprietary drivers. In fact *very* *very* *very* shitty proprietary drivers. (Even M$ started developing drivers for supported hardware - quality is just outrageous).
When you have open source driver - you can fix it in matter of hours. I did that several times. With shitty drivers, normally comes shitty support. Piece of junk hardware might just happen to work - but drivers may be just plainly broken.
Another point people are pursueing - and I am 100% with them - is that hardware *must* be open. Just of situation when you buy a hammer with driver. How many chances hammer would break? How many chances that driver will break with next OS upgrade? IANAL, but some "interoperability" bells are ringing inside of me. IOW, hardware manufacturers may not be allowed to dictate how and for what purpose their products are used. In that situation, having Open Source Driver is must.
P.S. The "Open Source Drivers" campaign has no future. I would gave my vote to "Open/NDA-free Documentation" campaign. Documentation is what really matters.
Still I think ban is something too strict. I have similar experience - on both sides of the issue. I once hit other car when my sister distrubed me from the back sit. And I was hit by guy talking on cell. (Most ridiculuos part of later accident was that guy did NOT notice he hit my car - he was busy talking and guess that - he hit me *second* time. Got to remake left side completely).
I beleive that use of mobile has to be a weightening factor when accident happens. When driver gets into something while talking on cell he has to be charged twice/thrice/etc times more. IOW, similar to drunk driving.
I have friend who can multitask perfectly. He can drive car perfectly and at the same time keeping an eye on FM and talking to his friend on cell. If person *can* multitask - then why not?
You will see not only less shiny desktop, but also every other (presumambly pirated) application will complain that Aero isn't available and app can't run. Just think about how happy every software company would be - to add another Wind0ze version to their release schedules: not only Vista, but also Vista minus Aero. Beleive me, nobody would bother.
Anyway, since chances of buying PC w/o Windows are close to NULL, all the worries are overblown. If one has enough brain to assemble computer - I presume one would have enough brain to use Linux on it anyway.
Internationalization doesn't work. In 2.0 you had no choice of language for auto spell check at *all*. IIRC, 2.0.1/2 fixed that.
Instalation of additional dictionaries in 2.0/2.0.1 was borken. People say that 2.0.2 fixed that - but nobody in our company managed to make it working. (Yes, we updated that magic document for downloading dictionaries. No, it didn't help.)
Also, GUI became even more bloated compared to one in OOo1. Before it looks weird - but was practical. Now it looks nice - but very distracting and at times annoying.
For me - touch-typist - OOo1 works better. OOo2 does some redundant redraws on screen while typing. Especially in on-line view (normal mode in WinWord terms). Needless to say page view is even worse - it's quite hard to type when pages jump on screen.
In the end, I still use VIM to prepare large chunks of documentation and only then paste them into OOo. It's sort'a good compromise: VIM is good text editor but can't formatting while OOo isn't good as text editor but can format text. Also, I can check-in the raw text files into SVN/CVS - and have version history for all modifications. Thou, since final document has no relation to raw text file, the revision history become obsolete quite fast.