I've never heard of Banshee. I suspect most people haven't. Now it will appear with every new Ubuntu 11.04 install.
What if the amount of money heading to Gnome (the 25% of Amazon's 10% kickback) is actually greater than the 100% Banshee has been donating? What if it's many times greater? What if this, in part, also means that Ubuntu gets to keep its doors open? What if folks made lots of Amazon purchases via Ubuntu's Banshee instead of inventing.... yet another... reason to act like malcontents?
Canonical needs to figure out a business model that amounts to more than Shuttleworth’s good graces. There are no profitable desktop Linux desktop publishers. That is not a workable long term situation. In 2008 Canonical said Ubuntu had 3-5 years to get profitable. If the low end of that range means anything then Times Up! as they say..
"insane"... Slashdot's editorial judgement is actually regressing.
Does anybody know where we are with Javascript now?
There is always the The Computer Language
Benchmarks Game. There you will find V8 competitive with Python, Ruby and other such languages, which is to say slower than the usual compiled suspects by about the same degree.
It wasn't all about space cowboys. In terms of cosmology, if this had been only thing Ares V had ever accomplished it would have been worth every cent.
The review failed to mention that OSGi is the basis of Eclipse; Eclipse is primarily a collection of OSGi managed components. Eclipse 'Rich Client Platform' (GUI, in other words) applications also inherit this model. The point is that OSGi is not merely another web application container specification; it is entirely suitable for non-web related work. The specification is free and several of the best implementations (Equinox, in Eclipse) are open source.
With KDE 4.4/5 the basic desktop (window manager, taskbar thinge, desktop, etc) became worthy (stable, mostly feature complete, etc.) Memory use is entirely reasonable. The file manager (konqureror) even survived. Yay KDE.
I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.) Fortunately it can be removed with few consequences; think I've seen one program that spewed some console errors because the dbus services were missing. Now the only goofy thing left is the 'kde wallet' nag that jumps up once in a while for software you wouldn't suspect of being integrated with KDE by default (that one may actually belong in the distro's lap.)
(This isn't an appeal to have these things explained; I'm not interested and won't be developing an interest.)
Thanks for the great work on the basic desktop stuff KDE. Please consider that some folks would prefer a less integrated experience; KDE is found in places where unloading your life into various 'social' databases or configuring your personal info into single-sign-on 'helper' stuff is very inappropriate. A 'just works without all the personal info/high touch integration and corresponding configuration nags' option would be ideal. Overlooking this is entirely understandable; enthusiastic developers often have tunnel vision and fail to consider the simpler use cases while building their visions. Without those people nothing would be built at all.
Also, KDE needs a built-in (meaning no extra stuff to install, lightweight, no glitches, no elaborate tray pop-ups) no-mouse-required, minimal-keyboard-gymnastics way of entering all Unicode characters into everything that accepts text.
emerging, leading edge industries instead of wasting time and effort propping up mature, minimally skilled ones
What makes you believe we must pick one or the other? From whom did you learn that the former was even viable without the latter? People that know more than you say it isn't:
Andy Grove on evacuating the 'mature' bits to asia: "Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."
This vision you and Obama share where we do all the neato high value stuff and leave the dirty bits for China is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your heads; the real world doesn't work like that.
If having current Android OS software is important then you get a Google phone. Otherwise you are putzing around. None of these other manufacturers+carriers actually care about supporting people that have already signed up. As far as their concerned you're done. On the books. `Next!' The only vendor that is motivated to support their systems with their latest work is Google.
Nexus One owners got upgraded to 2.2 They will get 2.3 as well. Nexus S came out with 2.3 (while others are still shipping 2.2) and will get 3.0, etc.
Please, if you care at all about staying current then stop inflicting Samsung et. al on yourself and get what Google is supporting. When the answer is so clear it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy for those that get it wrong.
The phone business wants to retain its classic model where the (feature) phone keeps the firmware that shipped forever. The whole notion of 'upgrading' phone operating systems is foreign and they're doing it badly as a result. It will take some time for this to change. If buyers start demanding ongoing OS upgrades as a condition of purchase instead of signing up for the latest shiny and then bitching about it, it just might.
Until then you may a.) buy Google, b.) use unsupported software if possible or c.) live in anger hating the choice you made.
A stubby little plasma antenna lives in the plasma stream. It's made of hypereutectic unobtainium, a exotic form of unobtainium unique to Russian science.
massively different user experience on different devices
consider: different user experience on massively different devices
Why should it be otherwise? Should a quad-core i7 SLI provide exactly the same 'user experience' as an Atom netbook? Obviously not. It is not reasonable to expect the same results from increasingly diverse hardware. Android will be found on the lowest end freebee 'smart' phone China can make, while also appearing on the most outrageous hardware that doesn't present an immediate fire hazard. Where, exactly, was it written that the limits of one must apply to the other?
This problem has been solved over and over again. An architecture must exist that provides fall-back software implementations of hardware accelerated functions. When some app performs poorly due to inadequate hardware the user may find some other preoccupation or upgrade to a sufficient device.
What is the problem? At the moment it appears to be Google's obstinacy. This is a losing battle for them; they're creating a differentiating point among the manufacturers because the manufacturers can alter Android, including accelerating stuff with hardware. Marketing will then make claims about how xyz's Android is better than the other Androids because of xyz's special sauce (that may or may not port easily to some other collection of chips.) If the manufacturers don't the users will.
Lets hope Google wises up and deals with the issue properly.
I found OnLive tolerable for non-FPS games; good enough that you won't care it isn't local. For FPS, OnLive has UT3 in its 'marketplace'. When playing there is 'lag'; the time between your input and the display update is noticeable. On the other hand, the other players are all on the same OnLive LAN, apparently, so there is very little lag between players. The net result amounts to a different kind of lag and, unfortunately, it is unpleasant for FPS play.
OnLive makes trying things out very easy. You can 'trial' almost every game they have and switch among them in seconds. The client is small, unobtrusive and robust. The user interface is interesting; aside from the marketplace and actual game play they provide a screen where live thumbnails of many games are multiplexed together. You can pan around and 'spectate' any of these games. I've actually spent more time in there then actually playing anything.
Just how many of these systems are out there, in which areas of the private & public sectors?
Lots and most of them. MSA2000 are common. HP been selling them for years. Although it has been superseded by newer models the channel still has a large supply. Pretty good hardware for the money.
The reduction in cores from 16 to 8 was part of the Sparc road-map before Sun was acquired by Oracle. Despite a lot of speculation it appears Oracle is following through with the plans they bought from Sun.
... Sun was going to cut back the number of cores to eight and crank the clocks to 2.5 GHz...
It doesn't matter; we're going to hit 'peak phosphorous' in 30 years and entirely exhaust supplies in 50-100 years. Because practically every biological process on Earth requires phosphorous we're not going to be around to worry about illuminating our trees in UV.
Amusingly enough....Maryland has also been a leader in the nation for job growth
Yep. That is mostly due to huge deficit spending by the Federal government, a lot of which somehow failed to make it out of the "Washington area", including Maryland, which surrounds D.C (for those unfamiliar with the geography.) You can see the effect of this here; the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area has seen far less decline than the rest of the nation.
"The hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus money -- that was an enormous shot in the arm, and we really benefited from it in this area,"
Federal hiring accounted for roughly 19,700 of the D.C. area's new jobs...Federal spending also led to increased hiring in D.C.'s private sector. Professional and business service firms, which often provide contract work for the government, added about 13,500 new jobs last year thanks to an estimated $84 billion in government procurement spending.
Thing to keep in mind is that we just had an election here in the US. The stated goal of our newly elected House of Reps leadership (the folks actually responsible for writing the budget) is to revert discretionary spending to pre-TARP/stimulus 2008 levels. That 'discretionary' spending is the part that has propped up your local economy.
I suspect the next few years may be less 'amusing.'
HP has partnered with Hynix to develop the manufacturing process and commercialize memristor products. Memristors used for storage will eventually appear as ReRAM (resistive RAM.) Meanwhile, other companies are working on memristor designs based on material other than TiO2 as is used by HP.
Would someone with a good grounding in semiconductors please elaborate on why MIM diodes are significant? I have a good handle on basic electronics but not enough experience to deduce how MIM diodes would improve circuit design.
There were 802.11 networks serving whole cities by the late '90s. All you needed was a high gain dish and line-of-sight. These guys were up and running in 1999. Every one of them had some form of *nix based "wireless router" setup. My own was FreeBSD, so clearly that has no relevance to a patent for something as brilliant as an integrated Linux wireless router.
Much like fusion power is 10 years away, and always will be.
The Standard Perpetual Interval for fusion is 50 years. Plan accordingly. The SPI for balancing the US Federal budget is 10 years. SPI to market for all exciting new microelectronic/quantum dot/spintronic/nanomechanical/etc. systems is 5 years. Duke Nukem Forever SPI is next year.
Can somebody more familiar with Java and the overall Java scene clue us in as to whether this is a good thing?
These joint announcements would appear to break the log jam that has prevailed over Java for the last few years. Sun simply didn't scale to open projects and gradually found itself at odds with the JCP on many fronts. Oracle and IBM have now slated specific items from the JCP backlog for future OpenJDK implementations, implicitly anointing both the JCP and the (open source) OpenJDK as the official future of Java. That is the closest thing to a 'plan' that has appeared in the Java world in about four years.
The Oracle vs. Google thing is very troubling. Google made Java work in a huge way on Android. Networked, mobile, embedded stuff was use case for which Java was originally intended. Java badly needs to inculcate that success. Otherwise it will assume the role its detractors have often accused of it; the COBOL of our day.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never heard of Banshee. I suspect most people haven't. Now it will appear with every new Ubuntu 11.04 install.
What if the amount of money heading to Gnome (the 25% of Amazon's 10% kickback) is actually greater than the 100% Banshee has been donating? What if it's many times greater? What if this, in part, also means that Ubuntu gets to keep its doors open? What if folks made lots of Amazon purchases via Ubuntu's Banshee instead of inventing.... yet another ... reason to act like malcontents?
Canonical needs to figure out a business model that amounts to more than Shuttleworth’s good graces. There are no profitable desktop Linux desktop publishers. That is not a workable long term situation. In 2008 Canonical said Ubuntu had 3-5 years to get profitable. If the low end of that range means anything then Times Up! as they say..
"insane"... Slashdot's editorial judgement is actually regressing.
big company pushing out new releases to a major product as fast as they are
Yeah. They're so great they've caught up with and passed IE (still at v9) in only three years.
Does anybody know where we are with Javascript now?
There is always the The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. There you will find V8 competitive with Python, Ruby and other such languages, which is to say slower than the usual compiled suspects by about the same degree.
Who wrote that?
Don't know, but I doubt anyone will praise them with great praise.
Anyhow, does this mean 'anonymous' should no longer be qualified with 'coward'?
JWST is great and I'm glad their building it. Prior to canceling Constellation, NASA was investigating this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YsNvpVSzbI
It wasn't all about space cowboys. In terms of cosmology, if this had been only thing Ares V had ever accomplished it would have been worth every cent.
Maybe China will get there.
The review failed to mention that OSGi is the basis of Eclipse; Eclipse is primarily a collection of OSGi managed components. Eclipse 'Rich Client Platform' (GUI, in other words) applications also inherit this model. The point is that OSGi is not merely another web application container specification; it is entirely suitable for non-web related work. The specification is free and several of the best implementations (Equinox, in Eclipse) are open source.
With KDE 4.4/5 the basic desktop (window manager, taskbar thinge, desktop, etc) became worthy (stable, mostly feature complete, etc.) Memory use is entirely reasonable. The file manager (konqureror) even survived. Yay KDE.
I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.) Fortunately it can be removed with few consequences; think I've seen one program that spewed some console errors because the dbus services were missing. Now the only goofy thing left is the 'kde wallet' nag that jumps up once in a while for software you wouldn't suspect of being integrated with KDE by default (that one may actually belong in the distro's lap.)
(This isn't an appeal to have these things explained; I'm not interested and won't be developing an interest.)
Thanks for the great work on the basic desktop stuff KDE. Please consider that some folks would prefer a less integrated experience; KDE is found in places where unloading your life into various 'social' databases or configuring your personal info into single-sign-on 'helper' stuff is very inappropriate. A 'just works without all the personal info/high touch integration and corresponding configuration nags' option would be ideal. Overlooking this is entirely understandable; enthusiastic developers often have tunnel vision and fail to consider the simpler use cases while building their visions. Without those people nothing would be built at all.
Also, KDE needs a built-in (meaning no extra stuff to install, lightweight, no glitches, no elaborate tray pop-ups) no-mouse-required, minimal-keyboard-gymnastics way of entering all Unicode characters into everything that accepts text.
Thanks again.
emerging, leading edge industries instead of wasting time and effort propping up mature, minimally skilled ones
What makes you believe we must pick one or the other? From whom did you learn that the former was even viable without the latter? People that know more than you say it isn't:
Andy Grove on evacuating the 'mature' bits to asia: "Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry."
This vision you and Obama share where we do all the neato high value stuff and leave the dirty bits for China is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your heads; the real world doesn't work like that.
Good stuff.
It is noticeably faster! Also, it works better on my nexus s.
Lots of people noting excessive white space. They may have a point, but not a very important one. They'll probably adjust to it in a day or so.
This technology always seems to be less than 10 years away.
There may be hope for this one. These researchers appear to have confidence enough not to adopt usual 5 year microelectronic SPI.
I was concerned about something like this.
If having current Android OS software is important then you get a Google phone. Otherwise you are putzing around. None of these other manufacturers+carriers actually care about supporting people that have already signed up. As far as their concerned you're done. On the books. `Next!' The only vendor that is motivated to support their systems with their latest work is Google.
Nexus One owners got upgraded to 2.2 They will get 2.3 as well. Nexus S came out with 2.3 (while others are still shipping 2.2) and will get 3.0, etc.
Please, if you care at all about staying current then stop inflicting Samsung et. al on yourself and get what Google is supporting. When the answer is so clear it's hard to feel a lot of sympathy for those that get it wrong.
The phone business wants to retain its classic model where the (feature) phone keeps the firmware that shipped forever. The whole notion of 'upgrading' phone operating systems is foreign and they're doing it badly as a result. It will take some time for this to change. If buyers start demanding ongoing OS upgrades as a condition of purchase instead of signing up for the latest shiny and then bitching about it, it just might.
Until then you may a.) buy Google, b.) use unsupported software if possible or c.) live in anger hating the choice you made.
About the worst summary I've seen, and I've seen most of them.
How is that solved?
A stubby little plasma antenna lives in the plasma stream. It's made of hypereutectic unobtainium, a exotic form of unobtainium unique to Russian science.
massively different user experience on different devices
consider: different user experience on massively different devices
Why should it be otherwise? Should a quad-core i7 SLI provide exactly the same 'user experience' as an Atom netbook? Obviously not. It is not reasonable to expect the same results from increasingly diverse hardware. Android will be found on the lowest end freebee 'smart' phone China can make, while also appearing on the most outrageous hardware that doesn't present an immediate fire hazard. Where, exactly, was it written that the limits of one must apply to the other?
This problem has been solved over and over again. An architecture must exist that provides fall-back software implementations of hardware accelerated functions. When some app performs poorly due to inadequate hardware the user may find some other preoccupation or upgrade to a sufficient device.
What is the problem? At the moment it appears to be Google's obstinacy. This is a losing battle for them; they're creating a differentiating point among the manufacturers because the manufacturers can alter Android, including accelerating stuff with hardware. Marketing will then make claims about how xyz's Android is better than the other Androids because of xyz's special sauce (that may or may not port easily to some other collection of chips.) If the manufacturers don't the users will.
Lets hope Google wises up and deals with the issue properly.
The overwhelming consensus SPI for flying cars is twenty years.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040825_4462_tc119.htm
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/why-flying-cars-are-a-long-way-off
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TuZyTN2xWuwJ:www.slideshare.net/RichStrong/magic-dragon-flying-car-project-presentation+flying+car+20+years+-%22your+flying+car+awaits%22&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://www.davinciinstitute.com/papers/where-is-my-flying-car/
http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/flying-cars-just-give-it-20-years-or-so/page-2/
http://markctu.blogspot.com/2007/08/failed-prediction-flying-car.html
20 years
Please avoid careless speculation. The SPI of racetrack memory, as with other microelectronic breakthroughs is five years.
I found OnLive tolerable for non-FPS games; good enough that you won't care it isn't local. For FPS, OnLive has UT3 in its 'marketplace'. When playing there is 'lag'; the time between your input and the display update is noticeable. On the other hand, the other players are all on the same OnLive LAN, apparently, so there is very little lag between players. The net result amounts to a different kind of lag and, unfortunately, it is unpleasant for FPS play.
OnLive makes trying things out very easy. You can 'trial' almost every game they have and switch among them in seconds. The client is small, unobtrusive and robust. The user interface is interesting; aside from the marketplace and actual game play they provide a screen where live thumbnails of many games are multiplexed together. You can pan around and 'spectate' any of these games. I've actually spent more time in there then actually playing anything.
Just how many of these systems are out there, in which areas of the private & public sectors?
Lots and most of them. MSA2000 are common. HP been selling them for years. Although it has been superseded by newer models the channel still has a large supply. Pretty good hardware for the money.
The reduction in cores from 16 to 8 was part of the Sparc road-map before Sun was acquired by Oracle. Despite a lot of speculation it appears Oracle is following through with the plans they bought from Sun.
How bad is the LED phosphor for the environment?
It doesn't matter; we're going to hit 'peak phosphorous' in 30 years and entirely exhaust supplies in 50-100 years. Because practically every biological process on Earth requires phosphorous we're not going to be around to worry about illuminating our trees in UV.
Amusingly enough....Maryland has also been a leader in the nation for job growth
Yep. That is mostly due to huge deficit spending by the Federal government, a lot of which somehow failed to make it out of the "Washington area", including Maryland, which surrounds D.C (for those unfamiliar with the geography.) You can see the effect of this here; the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area has seen far less decline than the rest of the nation.
Government hiring, spending spurs D.C.-area job creation
Choice quotes:
"The hundreds of billions of dollars of stimulus money -- that was an enormous shot in the arm, and we really benefited from it in this area,"
Federal hiring accounted for roughly 19,700 of the D.C. area's new jobs...Federal spending also led to increased hiring in D.C.'s private sector. Professional and business service firms, which often provide contract work for the government, added about 13,500 new jobs last year thanks to an estimated $84 billion in government procurement spending.
Thing to keep in mind is that we just had an election here in the US. The stated goal of our newly elected House of Reps leadership (the folks actually responsible for writing the budget) is to revert discretionary spending to pre-TARP/stimulus 2008 levels. That 'discretionary' spending is the part that has propped up your local economy.
I suspect the next few years may be less 'amusing.'
Whatever happened to memristors?
HP has partnered with Hynix to develop the manufacturing process and commercialize memristor products. Memristors used for storage will eventually appear as ReRAM (resistive RAM.) Meanwhile, other companies are working on memristor designs based on material other than TiO2 as is used by HP.
Would someone with a good grounding in semiconductors please elaborate on why MIM diodes are significant? I have a good handle on basic electronics but not enough experience to deduce how MIM diodes would improve circuit design.
There were 802.11 networks serving whole cities by the late '90s. All you needed was a high gain dish and line-of-sight. These guys were up and running in 1999. Every one of them had some form of *nix based "wireless router" setup. My own was FreeBSD, so clearly that has no relevance to a patent for something as brilliant as an integrated Linux wireless router.
Much like fusion power is 10 years away, and always will be.
The Standard Perpetual Interval for fusion is 50 years. Plan accordingly. The SPI for balancing the US Federal budget is 10 years. SPI to market for all exciting new microelectronic/quantum dot/spintronic/nanomechanical/etc. systems is 5 years. Duke Nukem Forever SPI is next year.
Can somebody more familiar with Java and the overall Java scene clue us in as to whether this is a good thing?
These joint announcements would appear to break the log jam that has prevailed over Java for the last few years. Sun simply didn't scale to open projects and gradually found itself at odds with the JCP on many fronts. Oracle and IBM have now slated specific items from the JCP backlog for future OpenJDK implementations, implicitly anointing both the JCP and the (open source) OpenJDK as the official future of Java. That is the closest thing to a 'plan' that has appeared in the Java world in about four years.
The Oracle vs. Google thing is very troubling. Google made Java work in a huge way on Android. Networked, mobile, embedded stuff was use case for which Java was originally intended. Java badly needs to inculcate that success. Otherwise it will assume the role its detractors have often accused of it; the COBOL of our day.