"or use their Linux foothold as a means to eventually entice Linux users back to Windows"
It seems like Apple is doing a much better job of enticing Linux users. Almost all Linux users I know have already switched to OSX, at least on the desktop.
I think marking this as Flamebait is unfair. The poster has a valid point. Opera's interface leaves a lot to be desired, and there aren't very many skins that both look nice and integrate well into the native OS look.
The offshore guys love Java. They love Java because American IT directors love Java and give them a ton of money to develop in Java. That doesn't necessarily mean Java is always the answer.. Java is a one-size-fits-all language. It's known to be good at a lot of things but not necessarily great at any one thing. C++ is the speed-optimized object oriented language. It's fast, and maintains most benefits of OOP. It's also very flexible and sort of a one-size-fits-all language as well, with the exception that it is very fast.. so is more usefull for applications that require speed. I know your familiar w/ C++ but bear w/ me...
IME, Java is slightly faster to develop than C++. It's garbage collection helps reduce memory leaks, and it's typeing is safer, which will reduce _some_ bugs for you. IMO it doesn't offer enough to do a complete migration away from C++. I see a lot of places do this and I think it's often a mistake. If you were starting from scratch, Java may be worth it. With 6 years of C++ and several C++ experts in the group. I say stick to what you do best unless you find something that can dramatically improve productivity.
What you really need to look for to make this dramatic difference is a framework, regardless of what language it uses. If you are doing web software, something like Ruby on Rails will work wonders for you. This isn't the only framework though.. there are a many for all types of applications. There are things like SAS for data processing and QT for cross-platform widgets. If there aren't any frameworks to give you a head start, than you may need to roll your own or try to migrate your existing codebase into a working framewok. This will obviously take a lot of time and resources.. but there's no getting around that. At least it will get you on a good footing for the future.
Also... try and convince your management that sending a pile of code overseas is not going to make it come back as a higher quality product. Usually the effect is the opposite.
people said the same about the PS2...and we all know what happened there.
That's funny... I don't remember it that way. In fact I remember it being extremely late to market, in extreme short supply for almost two years... and despite the fact that the Dreamcast beat it to market by years and had competitive specs.. EVERYONE said they were waiting for a PS2 beacause *drumroll* "it plays DVDs" (rolls eyes). I don't remember anyone saying PS2 was doomed, what I remember was amazement that a system that was a year from release date was already beating the snot out of a what was probably the most revolutionary console ever created (to date).
In the end everyone got their PS2 and found that the DVD functionality didn't amount to much of anything. Most people rarely used it and they just used the PS2 for games. That one time marketing fiasco worked for Sony then, but now I think people are pretty much on to it. Now people are looking at the games and game functionality and really don't care about anything else. No one really cares about Blu-Ray.
More and more people are resenting forking out a boatload of money for more polygons. Parents are resenting their kids crying for a $500-$600+ gaming systems and being left with the choice of (A - spending a rediculous amount of money on a christmas present or B - have to deal with the kid's "crushed dreams" and explain that the neighbor's kid is just a spoiled brat). Especially when the kid really just wants to play the next Final Fantasy and could give a crap about polygons. Hell.. _I_ just want to play the next Final Fantasy and don't give a crap about polygons.
clamXav beats the snot out of McAfee IMO. Uses fewer resources, better response time, the software itself is less buggy. Even if I was worried about getting a virus on a Mac I wouldn't use McAfee! Strangely, most Mac users tend to go with the McAfee/Norton crowd (at least those few that have any AV at all). Most linux users that converted or co-use OSX tend to use clam. It uses few enough resources and is easy enough to set up that it's just a few minutes to get going and then you can pretty much forget about it. If an outbreak happens (unlikely) just check that it's up to date.
At least keep yourself protected though, regardless of what you use. There is one point that is correct, and this is the "it only takes once" argument. One well designed OSX virus could take Macs by storm and if you have no AV, you're a sitting duck. It's highly unlikely (especially that it could somehow unknowingly gain admin access), but it is ALWAYS possible.
Most Mac users don't want to drain resources by using McAfee or Norton.. so they just use nothing. That's why I push for clam. Actually, I don't see why Apple doesn't ship OSX with a clam system already installed...
Just because companies shouldn't be wasting money doesn't mean they don't do it.
Java is ubiquitous in the corporate market. It is the Jack-of-All-Trades. It's what CTOs look for on a resume because they think Mr. Java can do ANYTHING, and Mr. Ruby might be able to learn Java after a year or so, but would be limited in what he could do until then.
I still can't fathom why people think Ruby lacks transaction, security, and connectivity. My experience with it is that it's highly reliable and connects to almost anything. I've never had security problems w/ it.. but it is still a bit obscure. I have ruby apps on a site drawing 30 million hits a month with no problems. I have it connecting Solaris, Linux, OSX, and Windows. If I want to add full transaction support I could connect it to Postgress, ORACLE, DB2 etc etc. Is that good enough? Where is the feature set not working? It seems to me like you haven't spent much time with Ruby.
Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
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· Score: 1
Ajax components don't degrade quite as gracefully as standard JS does. There just isn't any getting around this for Ajax apps. Rails does include degrade functionality for Ajax though. The difference is that the developer must add checks for this functionality. You will also need to add Ajax and non-ajax versions of pages for this to work. An Ajax page will only contain the html of the element that gets updated. A non-ajax page will contain all of the html for that page (at least that which is not in the layout.. but that's digressing..)
This can add a lot of extra development time though, so you really need to consider that before going down the Ajax route. All-in-all.. Rails makes ajax much easier than other frameworks (IMO), but you still need to cover the extra bases.
In practice, I shoot for 90% functionality for non-ajax mode Meaning that the user will be able to use a majority of the site w/o JS, but the experience will be a little more limiting. It's rarely noticable to user. This is similar to the Gmail aproach.
Apple contracts out construction of their laptop, so in a way you're correct that it goes down the same assembly line. The difference is that they contract out to highly respected manufactures. So your MacBook is likely to come off the line next to a Toshiba, but probably not an Acer. Acer always contracts to the lowest bidder. So of course they cost less, but are less well manufactured. The REALLY important thing regarding manufacturing , however, is the hardware that actually goes into it. This makes a big difference in stability and durability. Apple uses higher quality hardware, so you're Mac is likely to be around much longer than your Acer. I have a 6 year old mac running dual 1.6ghz G4s (upgrade) that does core image and everything. You wouldn't know it was that old, and it spent half of it's life sitting in a dusty warehouse waiting to be thrown away. Even my 6 year old linux box is consigned to the file sharing roll now.. and likely to lose even that lowly function before long. The mac is doing some pretty heavy graphics work.
It's not really fair compairing the price of a Mac to an Acer. If you compare it to premium Windows brands, it's about the same. Also.. if you want to use anything other than Windows, you'll be making big compromises w/ the Acer (a lot of hardware is not likely to work).
In the end I find Mac laptops to be only a $100-200 more than the equivelant offerings. That's fairly negligable in mind and worth the added benefits. At least that's for the Power/MacBooks. I honostly wouldn't bother with an iBook. They are (IMO) this worst of the Mac products. I'd just wait for the next paycheck and get the Power/Pro.
This must be what caused the little Japanese girl at the zoo to wear the baby seal outfit to the polar bear exhibit. Fortunately the polar bear only jumped and howled on the glass. Causing the young lady to shriek and fall backwards in panic but no flesh eaten.
OS X is well built. Vista, we'll have to see when it comes out.
I apologize for more of the tired M$ bashing, but I don't see how Vista could possibly be well built. Considering that it's based on a Windows code base that has 20 or so years of legacy code that was all a hodge podge to begin with, combined with the 5 year old code base for just the current revision, it seems very very unlikely that it could be well built. Most likely it was a huge pool of great ideas that didn't work and a last ditch effort to stitch something usable out of it.
This comes up in Gentoo Forums/IRC all the time. Gentoo is built w/ Python, so Python is part of the system core. I guess if you have such an aversion to it being there, don't use Gentoo. It takes up very little space and really runs just as fast as a C based system would. That's because the system is bound by the algorithms used to traverse the portage tree and not the overhead of the language used to code it. Recoding portage in C would have little to no effect on the speed of portage operations. It would just start that portage operation a few milliseconds faster, which isn't noticeable. The portage scan itself would take just as long. It would also have a huge effect on the amount of time required to write portage code. So you're trading a small positive for a big negative.
Syncing (and to a lesser extent) searching operations are slow simply due to the vast size of portage. Portage was not originally designed to be so massive. So while it does need to be re-architected, it's not due to any "slowness" incurred by Python.
If they'd bundled Starcraft instead of Messenger/Media Player there wouldn't be any problem.
It sure would be once the University students got ahold of it. Starcraft must have resulted in more students failing than any game known to man. It's also known as GPA killer 3000 in some areas...
There's a good chance that if you "call" your dog, it's going to go looking for you. Since it's outside, and it hears your voice, it may not necessarily look for you at home. There's a good chance that it will wonder off further thinking it's going to find you.
When my dog has gotten off her leash, she'll run around for a bit and then go looking for me. If the last time she saw me was when I drove off to work (meaning someone else took her out), then she just keeps going down the road thinking I'm down there somewhere. I could see "calling" having a similar effect.
64bit has been way overhyped. First, 64 bit code doesn't necessarilly run faster than 32bit code because only extremely high precision floating point instructions need so many bits, and even then it's easy to use two 32 bit registers to send 64bit floats. It's actually a real challenge to try and find ways to send instructions down the pipeline in a way that doesn't cause a lot of overhead. It can actually make things SLOWER.
The primary reason for going 64 bit will be to address larger memory areas. Until you need more than 4GB of ram, 64bit will not have much to offer you unless you do high precision calculations. Those 64bit versions of Windows... probably won't run any faster for your desktop than the 32bit. Those of us that have been running 64bit *NIXes since the mid 90s can attest to that.
Intel, a corporation formerly known for engineering and now basically just a bunch of marketing nazis selling re-branded AMDs
Seriously.. do you really think this? Granted, AMD is (rightfully) beating down Intel on desktops and servers right now... but where do you get this from? Rebranded AMDs... on an x86 archetecture that Intel created?! Plus all of that MMX and SSE crap that AMD also uses.. About the only technology Intel has copied from AMD are the 64 bit extensions. That's not even close to warranting a statement like that. We all know the P4 is a terd, but it's defeinitely no rebranded AMD...
at twice the price and twice the temperature. Price is not really that much higher these days. Yeah the temp is sad, basically a side-effect of the general suckiness of the P4.
I don't understand how it warrents this kind of blanket attack though. Previous Intel chips have been quite nice, and the Pentium-M based chips are some of the best Intel has ever produced. AMD targets the hobbyist market where people like you do their marketing for them. THAT's why you don't see so many AMD commercials. If the tables turn... you'll see that change, garaunteed. Intel has it's problems, but statements like that go too far.
Some distro's are making strides in this area. Unfortunately it's been three steps forwards, two steps back. Some distro's (like Red Hat and Suse) had a very real chance of breaking through on the desktop, but stagnated due to a lessening of corporate support and less effective community organization. Not that they're bad distros. It's just that Red Hat chose to pursue the server market (where it has excelled) and Suse is lower on Novell's priority list. If things had continued how they were 5 years ago with these distro's, I bet we would have had a real desktop linux contender in 04.
Fortunately, Ubuntu/Kubuntu may have come in to save the day on this. It is laying the groundwork for a great linux desktop OS. It's already very far along. If the trend continues, it will likely become a real contender in the desktop market before long.
In the end.. the important thing is that you enjoy your "computing experience." Personally, I don't enjoy using Windows. But if that's what you like, more power to you. Just don't put it on my network, forcing me to deal w/ all of the spam and viri. ugh...
That is one important point regarding Windows... we're all neighbors on the net. And living next to Windows is like living next to a sewage plant that has a legion of catapults flinging crap at your house.
I use smbfs with automount (autofs) to mount my share. That way I can work with mp3s etc normally on the share. It just works like a normal filesystem. It's not all that hard to set up. My entire mp3 collection is on it. I can even play them through itunes on OSX.
So... you're saying that it will be earlier than expected (2nd half of 2006), by shipping sometime before Christmas 2006? Doesn't this mean "not late," rather than "early?"
I suppose that for M$, the two may be about the same. It may be even a newsworthy event... maybe...
new xbox: $400
decent game for xbox: $70
controller allowing you to play your game: $50
"live" system to play online: $150
blue screen at the boss: priceless
I have used nvidia drivers for linux over the past two years with virtually no problems. Nvidia probably makes the best of the closed source 3rd party linux drivers. Although, the competition is admittedly.. sad.
Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic?
I keep seeing this Developer/Mechanic comparison. It's misleading. Would most people have a problem w/ a mechanic using a computer to diagnose a problem.. no of course not. But.. what about the Engineers that design the car? Would you rather have a computer auto-design your engine? What if it was an airplane? This is a different story and is a closer analogy. I know I wouldn't want a car where the Engineer couldn't tell me what part X is for, when he was the one that "designed" it. Especially if he is actually in the process of designing it.
You really don't know where your software may be used. It may not seem like a critical program, but it could be used in conjunction with a critical system. I've seen "fancy" screen savers crash medical equiptment. The user has to trust that your software is reliable, even when it seems like it shouldn't need to be.
Auto-generated code is more likely to lead to unreliable software. Especially, if the coder doesn't know exactly how it works. Auto-generated code is also usually the sign of a poor API. A well designed API will not need any auto-generated code. It would be concise enough to only take up a line or two and would be flexible enough to do what you want in most cases. Unfortunately Win32 is not such a well designed API.. such a thing is very hard to create though.
There are many things about VS that are nice, but it is pretty much made to work with auto-generated code. Sure, you don't HAVE to use it, but (as an earlier post suggested) you are strongly encouraged to. In fact, it's pretty hard to figure out how to NOT use it. The whole visual design process seemed like a novel concept, but it seems to fail in practice. The RAD aspect of it will just get a crappy product out the door faster... yippee. There are plenty of ways to do RAD w/o auto-generated code. You CAN produce a product quickly without sacrificing quality. In a vast majority of cases, auto-generated code is going to sacrifice quality. In most cases, the productivity improvement is pretty much negligable. In fact, I've had many cases where it seemed to slow things down. That's just my experience though...
Keep in mind that the launch cost is the most expensive part of the mission. These rovers cost a lot less than the hardware they fly on, so it makes sense to overengineer them. Sure you could leave out backup systems A through D, but that will only save $10 to $20,000 on a $.5 million+ project. What's the point? You may as well take all the precautions possible to keep your hardware going once it gets there.
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"or use their Linux foothold as a means to eventually entice Linux users back to Windows"
It seems like Apple is doing a much better job of enticing Linux users. Almost all Linux users I know have already switched to OSX, at least on the desktop.
I think marking this as Flamebait is unfair. The poster has a valid point. Opera's interface leaves a lot to be desired, and there aren't very many skins that both look nice and integrate well into the native OS look.
The offshore guys love Java. They love Java because American IT directors love Java and give them a ton of money to develop in Java. That doesn't necessarily mean Java is always the answer.. Java is a one-size-fits-all language. It's known to be good at a lot of things but not necessarily great at any one thing. C++ is the speed-optimized object oriented language. It's fast, and maintains most benefits of OOP. It's also very flexible and sort of a one-size-fits-all language as well, with the exception that it is very fast.. so is more usefull for applications that require speed. I know your familiar w/ C++ but bear w/ me...
IME, Java is slightly faster to develop than C++. It's garbage collection helps reduce memory leaks, and it's typeing is safer, which will reduce _some_ bugs for you. IMO it doesn't offer enough to do a complete migration away from C++. I see a lot of places do this and I think it's often a mistake. If you were starting from scratch, Java may be worth it. With 6 years of C++ and several C++ experts in the group. I say stick to what you do best unless you find something that can dramatically improve productivity.
What you really need to look for to make this dramatic difference is a framework, regardless of what language it uses. If you are doing web software, something like Ruby on Rails will work wonders for you. This isn't the only framework though.. there are a many for all types of applications. There are things like SAS for data processing and QT for cross-platform widgets. If there aren't any frameworks to give you a head start, than you may need to roll your own or try to migrate your existing codebase into a working framewok. This will obviously take a lot of time and resources.. but there's no getting around that. At least it will get you on a good footing for the future.
Also... try and convince your management that sending a pile of code overseas is not going to make it come back as a higher quality product. Usually the effect is the opposite.
people said the same about the PS2...and we all know what happened there.
That's funny... I don't remember it that way. In fact I remember it being extremely late to market, in extreme short supply for almost two years... and despite the fact that the Dreamcast beat it to market by years and had competitive specs.. EVERYONE said they were waiting for a PS2 beacause *drumroll* "it plays DVDs" (rolls eyes). I don't remember anyone saying PS2 was doomed, what I remember was amazement that a system that was a year from release date was already beating the snot out of a what was probably the most revolutionary console ever created (to date).
In the end everyone got their PS2 and found that the DVD functionality didn't amount to much of anything. Most people rarely used it and they just used the PS2 for games. That one time marketing fiasco worked for Sony then, but now I think people are pretty much on to it. Now people are looking at the games and game functionality and really don't care about anything else. No one really cares about Blu-Ray.
More and more people are resenting forking out a boatload of money for more polygons. Parents are resenting their kids crying for a $500-$600+ gaming systems and being left with the choice of (A - spending a rediculous amount of money on a christmas present or B - have to deal with the kid's "crushed dreams" and explain that the neighbor's kid is just a spoiled brat). Especially when the kid really just wants to play the next Final Fantasy and could give a crap about polygons. Hell.. _I_ just want to play the next Final Fantasy and don't give a crap about polygons.
clamXav beats the snot out of McAfee IMO. Uses fewer resources, better response time, the software itself is less buggy. Even if I was worried about getting a virus on a Mac I wouldn't use McAfee! Strangely, most Mac users tend to go with the McAfee/Norton crowd (at least those few that have any AV at all). Most linux users that converted or co-use OSX tend to use clam. It uses few enough resources and is easy enough to set up that it's just a few minutes to get going and then you can pretty much forget about it. If an outbreak happens (unlikely) just check that it's up to date.
At least keep yourself protected though, regardless of what you use. There is one point that is correct, and this is the "it only takes once" argument. One well designed OSX virus could take Macs by storm and if you have no AV, you're a sitting duck. It's highly unlikely (especially that it could somehow unknowingly gain admin access), but it is ALWAYS possible.
Most Mac users don't want to drain resources by using McAfee or Norton.. so they just use nothing. That's why I push for clam. Actually, I don't see why Apple doesn't ship OSX with a clam system already installed...
Just because companies shouldn't be wasting money doesn't mean they don't do it.
Java is ubiquitous in the corporate market. It is the Jack-of-All-Trades. It's what CTOs look for on a resume because they think Mr. Java can do ANYTHING, and Mr. Ruby might be able to learn Java after a year or so, but would be limited in what he could do until then.
I still can't fathom why people think Ruby lacks transaction, security, and connectivity. My experience with it is that it's highly reliable and connects to almost anything. I've never had security problems w/ it.. but it is still a bit obscure. I have ruby apps on a site drawing 30 million hits a month with no problems. I have it connecting Solaris, Linux, OSX, and Windows. If I want to add full transaction support I could connect it to Postgress, ORACLE, DB2 etc etc. Is that good enough? Where is the feature set not working? It seems to me like you haven't spent much time with Ruby.
Ajax components don't degrade quite as gracefully as standard JS does. There just isn't any getting around this for Ajax apps. Rails does include degrade functionality for Ajax though. The difference is that the developer must add checks for this functionality. You will also need to add Ajax and non-ajax versions of pages for this to work. An Ajax page will only contain the html of the element that gets updated. A non-ajax page will contain all of the html for that page (at least that which is not in the layout.. but that's digressing..)
This can add a lot of extra development time though, so you really need to consider that before going down the Ajax route. All-in-all.. Rails makes ajax much easier than other frameworks (IMO), but you still need to cover the extra bases.
In practice, I shoot for 90% functionality for non-ajax mode Meaning that the user will be able to use a majority of the site w/o JS, but the experience will be a little more limiting. It's rarely noticable to user. This is similar to the Gmail aproach.
Apple contracts out construction of their laptop, so in a way you're correct that it goes down the same assembly line. The difference is that they contract out to highly respected manufactures. So your MacBook is likely to come off the line next to a Toshiba, but probably not an Acer. Acer always contracts to the lowest bidder. So of course they cost less, but are less well manufactured. The REALLY important thing regarding manufacturing , however, is the hardware that actually goes into it. This makes a big difference in stability and durability. Apple uses higher quality hardware, so you're Mac is likely to be around much longer than your Acer. I have a 6 year old mac running dual 1.6ghz G4s (upgrade) that does core image and everything. You wouldn't know it was that old, and it spent half of it's life sitting in a dusty warehouse waiting to be thrown away. Even my 6 year old linux box is consigned to the file sharing roll now.. and likely to lose even that lowly function before long. The mac is doing some pretty heavy graphics work.
It's not really fair compairing the price of a Mac to an Acer. If you compare it to premium Windows brands, it's about the same. Also.. if you want to use anything other than Windows, you'll be making big compromises w/ the Acer (a lot of hardware is not likely to work).
In the end I find Mac laptops to be only a $100-200 more than the equivelant offerings. That's fairly negligable in mind and worth the added benefits. At least that's for the Power/MacBooks. I honostly wouldn't bother with an iBook. They are (IMO) this worst of the Mac products. I'd just wait for the next paycheck and get the Power/Pro.
This must be what caused the little Japanese girl at the zoo to wear the baby seal outfit to the polar bear exhibit. Fortunately the polar bear only jumped and howled on the glass. Causing the young lady to shriek and fall backwards in panic but no flesh eaten.
OS X is well built. Vista, we'll have to see when it comes out.
I apologize for more of the tired M$ bashing, but I don't see how Vista could possibly be well built. Considering that it's based on a Windows code base that has 20 or so years of legacy code that was all a hodge podge to begin with, combined with the 5 year old code base for just the current revision, it seems very very unlikely that it could be well built. Most likely it was a huge pool of great ideas that didn't work and a last ditch effort to stitch something usable out of it.
This comes up in Gentoo Forums/IRC all the time. Gentoo is built w/ Python, so Python is part of the system core. I guess if you have such an aversion to it being there, don't use Gentoo. It takes up very little space and really runs just as fast as a C based system would. That's because the system is bound by the algorithms used to traverse the portage tree and not the overhead of the language used to code it. Recoding portage in C would have little to no effect on the speed of portage operations. It would just start that portage operation a few milliseconds faster, which isn't noticeable. The portage scan itself would take just as long. It would also have a huge effect on the amount of time required to write portage code. So you're trading a small positive for a big negative.
Syncing (and to a lesser extent) searching operations are slow simply due to the vast size of portage. Portage was not originally designed to be so massive. So while it does need to be re-architected, it's not due to any "slowness" incurred by Python.
If they'd bundled Starcraft instead of Messenger/Media Player there wouldn't be any problem.
It sure would be once the University students got ahold of it. Starcraft must have resulted in more students failing than any game known to man. It's also known as GPA killer 3000 in some areas...
There's a good chance that if you "call" your dog, it's going to go looking for you. Since it's outside, and it hears your voice, it may not necessarily look for you at home. There's a good chance that it will wonder off further thinking it's going to find you.
When my dog has gotten off her leash, she'll run around for a bit and then go looking for me. If the last time she saw me was when I drove off to work (meaning someone else took her out), then she just keeps going down the road thinking I'm down there somewhere. I could see "calling" having a similar effect.
You would think they'd have learned from the xbox...
64bit has been way overhyped. First, 64 bit code doesn't necessarilly run faster than 32bit code because only extremely high precision floating point instructions need so many bits, and even then it's easy to use two 32 bit registers to send 64bit floats. It's actually a real challenge to try and find ways to send instructions down the pipeline in a way that doesn't cause a lot of overhead. It can actually make things SLOWER.
The primary reason for going 64 bit will be to address larger memory areas. Until you need more than 4GB of ram, 64bit will not have much to offer you unless you do high precision calculations. Those 64bit versions of Windows... probably won't run any faster for your desktop than the 32bit. Those of us that have been running 64bit *NIXes since the mid 90s can attest to that.
Intel, a corporation formerly known for engineering and now basically just a bunch of marketing nazis selling re-branded AMDs
Seriously.. do you really think this? Granted, AMD is (rightfully) beating down Intel on desktops and servers right now... but where do you get this from? Rebranded AMDs... on an x86 archetecture that Intel created?! Plus all of that MMX and SSE crap that AMD also uses.. About the only technology Intel has copied from AMD are the 64 bit extensions. That's not even close to warranting a statement like that. We all know the P4 is a terd, but it's defeinitely no rebranded AMD...
at twice the price and twice the temperature.
Price is not really that much higher these days. Yeah the temp is sad, basically a side-effect of the general suckiness of the P4.
I don't understand how it warrents this kind of blanket attack though. Previous Intel chips have been quite nice, and the Pentium-M based chips are some of the best Intel has ever produced. AMD targets the hobbyist market where people like you do their marketing for them. THAT's why you don't see so many AMD commercials. If the tables turn... you'll see that change, garaunteed. Intel has it's problems, but statements like that go too far.
I don't use Tivo so I can't comment on that.
Some distro's are making strides in this area. Unfortunately it's been three steps forwards, two steps back. Some distro's (like Red Hat and Suse) had a very real chance of breaking through on the desktop, but stagnated due to a lessening of corporate support and less effective community organization. Not that they're bad distros. It's just that Red Hat chose to pursue the server market (where it has excelled) and Suse is lower on Novell's priority list. If things had continued how they were 5 years ago with these distro's, I bet we would have had a real desktop linux contender in 04.
Fortunately, Ubuntu/Kubuntu may have come in to save the day on this. It is laying the groundwork for a great linux desktop OS. It's already very far along. If the trend continues, it will likely become a real contender in the desktop market before long.
In the end.. the important thing is that you enjoy your "computing experience." Personally, I don't enjoy using Windows. But if that's what you like, more power to you. Just don't put it on my network, forcing me to deal w/ all of the spam and viri. ugh...
That is one important point regarding Windows... we're all neighbors on the net. And living next to Windows is like living next to a sewage plant that has a legion of catapults flinging crap at your house.
I use smbfs with automount (autofs) to mount my share. That way I can work with mp3s etc normally on the share. It just works like a normal filesystem. It's not all that hard to set up. My entire mp3 collection is on it. I can even play them through itunes on OSX.
So... you're saying that it will be earlier than expected (2nd half of 2006), by shipping sometime before Christmas 2006? Doesn't this mean "not late," rather than "early?"
I suppose that for M$, the two may be about the same. It may be even a newsworthy event... maybe...
new xbox: $400 decent game for xbox: $70 controller allowing you to play your game: $50 "live" system to play online: $150 blue screen at the boss: priceless
Losing traction? Seriously?? Since when? K's are bad, but Gn's i's and Win's are OK?
I have used nvidia drivers for linux over the past two years with virtually no problems. Nvidia probably makes the best of the closed source 3rd party linux drivers. Although, the competition is admittedly.. sad.
No they use Command+F ;-)
Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic?
I keep seeing this Developer/Mechanic comparison. It's misleading. Would most people have a problem w/ a mechanic using a computer to diagnose a problem.. no of course not. But.. what about the Engineers that design the car? Would you rather have a computer auto-design your engine? What if it was an airplane? This is a different story and is a closer analogy. I know I wouldn't want a car where the Engineer couldn't tell me what part X is for, when he was the one that "designed" it. Especially if he is actually in the process of designing it.
You really don't know where your software may be used. It may not seem like a critical program, but it could be used in conjunction with a critical system. I've seen "fancy" screen savers crash medical equiptment. The user has to trust that your software is reliable, even when it seems like it shouldn't need to be.
Auto-generated code is more likely to lead to unreliable software. Especially, if the coder doesn't know exactly how it works. Auto-generated code is also usually the sign of a poor API. A well designed API will not need any auto-generated code. It would be concise enough to only take up a line or two and would be flexible enough to do what you want in most cases. Unfortunately Win32 is not such a well designed API.. such a thing is very hard to create though.
There are many things about VS that are nice, but it is pretty much made to work with auto-generated code. Sure, you don't HAVE to use it, but (as an earlier post suggested) you are strongly encouraged to. In fact, it's pretty hard to figure out how to NOT use it. The whole visual design process seemed like a novel concept, but it seems to fail in practice. The RAD aspect of it will just get a crappy product out the door faster... yippee. There are plenty of ways to do RAD w/o auto-generated code. You CAN produce a product quickly without sacrificing quality. In a vast majority of cases, auto-generated code is going to sacrifice quality. In most cases, the productivity improvement is pretty much negligable. In fact, I've had many cases where it seemed to slow things down. That's just my experience though...
Keep in mind that the launch cost is the most expensive part of the mission. These rovers cost a lot less than the hardware they fly on, so it makes sense to overengineer them. Sure you could leave out backup systems A through D, but that will only save $10 to $20,000 on a $.5 million+ project. What's the point? You may as well take all the precautions possible to keep your hardware going once it gets there.