Erlang may not end up being 'the' massively concurrent language of the future, but it's arguably the closest thing by far, that we have today. The shift in thinking that it involves will conceptually prepare you very well for a C-core, K-core, M-core future. A properly architected application will transparently scale.
I can't speak for the others, but it's certainly true that Erlang can be used in declarative ways, as its function signatures are patterns which are matched and bound at runtime. Idiomatic Erlang is therefore much shorter then ordinary imperative code (Java, C,...), some people have estimated by a factor of 4-10.
For an example of declarative style, see my simple minded Tic-Tac-Toe Erlang web application - for example, ttt.erl.
I lament not having documented my observations of these practices
Some of the paper trail of these crimes is recorded here.
After skimming this list one wonders when they get time to "innovate". But nice to know that Windows/Office profits (from customers' pockets, ya know?) are being shared with plenty of needy lawyers.
Every single apple I used growing up was completely non-user friendly.
I didn't like the Apple II either. But then came the Mac.:)
So there have been superior mainstream alternatives to Microsoft for at least 23 years - despite MS' best efforts to destroy the alternatives. I have no sympathy for people who use Windows "because that's what was on this cheap PC I bought". Exercise choice, or, as a brilliant post above can be paraphrased: Suck it up!
you could become a millionaire today if you truly wanted to. At the end of the day, it breaks down to exactly what YOU want, and how far you are willing to go to achieve that.
And *that's* the problem many of us have with Bill, Inc.: His greed has no ethical restraints.
with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.
Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market.... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows..." (timeline)
Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.
Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.
This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)
we will start to feel the crunch well before we physically run out of oil
The current food crisis is just the start.
And people seem to overlook the military's reliance on oil. Imagine the COLOSSAL expenditure of fossil fuels by the US military... and imagine the stockpiling they have been undertaking over the past century to make damn sure everyone else runs out before they do (except that some traditional adversaries such as Russia inconveniently have their own supplies: Cue Iraq...) Civilians are last on the list, after military (first of course), then big business.
In short: No Oil = No Military. The logic isn't too difficult, is it?
Sounds like a classic example of attacking the person rather than what he is saying
The fact is that nothing he says can be trusted, because he's in the pay of Microsoft. Furthermore we have substantial evidence he is happy to lie for money (viz SCO). Wouldn't you like to know that before you waste your time on his press release that is clearly angled to spread FUD about Microsoft competition?
As Apple has been (over)selling for years: Your Mac is your Digital Life.
Home users should be much more concerned about data durability and integrity than performance (not that performance would ever be bad).
A physical photo album will last a couple of centuries. Your hard disk may not last 2 years. And there's only 1 of them in any consumer Macs.
People are going to lose their digital snapshots, their unfinished novels, their emails and love letters, because nobody understands the inherent fragility of digital media and that hard disks are disposable consumables - even professionals.
The killer features for ZFS have nothing to do with "structured" filesystems; ZFS is essentially POSIX.
Everybody has their own favourites:
uncompromising data integrity through checksums and transactional copy-on-write; high durability using scrubs and redundancy
cheap snapshots
manage filesystems as simply as directories
pooled storage for manageability
very high throughput for certain workloads
etc.
While snapshotting and COW are not entirely new, many of its features are not available elsewhere, though initiatives such as btrfs for Linux may eventually cover some of them.
Plenty more information out there on Sun's web sites (ZFS isn't Apple, nor vaporware, it's out there in production at thousands of sites and has been available in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris for a few years.)
Also, a version of ZFS was actually included in Leopard, but without GUI access (AFAIK).
my twin 2.7 g5 has retained suitable responsiveness through X.5
Not surprising; OS X users should be accustomed that every major release has been faster than the previous, on the same hardware. Apple is doing something right.
It's obvious OS X on PCs won't happen, and even fairly obvious why.
The white box PC hardware market is full of junk. If Apple tried to support it, they'd end up in the same Hell Microsoft is in. True, all Microsoft products are shit, but they get blamed for driver issues as well, which is probably fair since they bundle and "certify" them in some sense.
Not only is Apple hardware higher quality ("it just works... and keeps working") - the drivers are integrated (like Sun). PC people don't seem to get that point. They live in a different world, I guess, with much lower expectations and a much drearier experience.
Those who want OS X, quit whining and buy a Mac, and go ahead and enjoy computing again. There's ebay to get rid of your PC.
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but no programming languages or tools to take advantage of them.
You expect that to come in the CPU box? Good tools exist, but you will have to learn how to use them.
Erlang may not end up being 'the' massively concurrent language of the future, but it's arguably the closest thing by far, that we have today. The shift in thinking that it involves will conceptually prepare you very well for a C-core, K-core, M-core future. A properly architected application will transparently scale.
I can't speak for the others, but it's certainly true that Erlang can be used in declarative ways, as its function signatures are patterns which are matched and bound at runtime. Idiomatic Erlang is therefore much shorter then ordinary imperative code (Java, C, ...), some people have estimated by a factor of 4-10.
For an example of declarative style, see my simple minded Tic-Tac-Toe Erlang web application - for example, ttt.erl.
finally figure out a way to program them that's practical.
You haven't heard of Erlang yet?
...or is it actually designed to break the open web in the cause of Microsoft lock-in?
I lament not having documented my observations of these practices
Some of the paper trail of these crimes is recorded here.
After skimming this list one wonders when they get time to "innovate". But nice to know that Windows/Office profits (from customers' pockets, ya know?) are being shared with plenty of needy lawyers.
Every single apple I used growing up was completely non-user friendly.
I didn't like the Apple II either. But then came the Mac. :)
So there have been superior mainstream alternatives to Microsoft for at least 23 years - despite MS' best efforts to destroy the alternatives. I have no sympathy for people who use Windows "because that's what was on this cheap PC I bought". Exercise choice, or, as a brilliant post above can be paraphrased: Suck it up!
To compliment you on your very cool user id. :)
you could become a millionaire today if you truly wanted to. At the end of the day, it breaks down to exactly what YOU want, and how far you are willing to go to achieve that.
And *that's* the problem many of us have with Bill, Inc.: His greed has no ethical restraints.
(The Foundation is just reputation laundering.)
with Windows 95. Then they started acting like a monopoly.
Exhibit 1: "Government interest in Microsoft's affairs had begun in 1991 with an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission over whether Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the PC operating system market. ... the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of [1993], resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows ..." (timeline)
See MS Litigation page and Court TV Library for more details.
Another former competitor, approximately coëval with Windows 95, was BeOS. Microsoft settled an anti-competitive complaint brought by Be Inc. in 2002.
Windows 95 had barely been released when Sun launched complained of breach of contract followed by serious anti-competitive claims in 2002 regarding Microsoft's Java tactics.
This is not the legal record of an honest company. The leopard never changes its spots. Gates was a "sharp" businessman from the day he opened office. (Which is a polite way of saying, white collar criminal.)
Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French!
Oh, I see - you'd prefer them in Spanish. *rimshot*
we will start to feel the crunch well before we physically run out of oil
The current food crisis is just the start.
And people seem to overlook the military's reliance on oil. Imagine the COLOSSAL expenditure of fossil fuels by the US military... and imagine the stockpiling they have been undertaking over the past century to make damn sure everyone else runs out before they do (except that some traditional adversaries such as Russia inconveniently have their own supplies: Cue Iraq...) Civilians are last on the list, after military (first of course), then big business.
In short: No Oil = No Military. The logic isn't too difficult, is it?
Thanks for finding another reason to illegally clear the Amazon. (Cash crops already being a major driver.)
Sounds like a classic example of attacking the person rather than what he is saying
The fact is that nothing he says can be trusted, because he's in the pay of Microsoft. Furthermore we have substantial evidence he is happy to lie for money (viz SCO). Wouldn't you like to know that before you waste your time on his press release that is clearly angled to spread FUD about Microsoft competition?
Care to provide comparative benchmarks?
I just switched from Apple to Windows.
As Apple has been (over)selling for years: Your Mac is your Digital Life.
Home users should be much more concerned about data durability and integrity than performance (not that performance would ever be bad).
A physical photo album will last a couple of centuries. Your hard disk may not last 2 years. And there's only 1 of them in any consumer Macs.
People are going to lose their digital snapshots, their unfinished novels, their emails and love letters, because nobody understands the inherent fragility of digital media and that hard disks are disposable consumables - even professionals.
What other filesystems do end to end checksumming and self healing, on any operating system today?
Once your drive has been corrupted ZFS will kick in and prevent you from accessing any corrupt data.
If you have redundancy (such as mirror or RAIDZ), ZFS will also repair the data.
The killer features for ZFS have nothing to do with "structured" filesystems; ZFS is essentially POSIX.
Everybody has their own favourites:
While snapshotting and COW are not entirely new, many of its features are not available elsewhere, though initiatives such as btrfs for Linux may eventually cover some of them.
Plenty more information out there on Sun's web sites (ZFS isn't Apple, nor vaporware, it's out there in production at thousands of sites and has been available in Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris for a few years.)
Also, a version of ZFS was actually included in Leopard, but without GUI access (AFAIK).
my twin 2.7 g5 has retained suitable responsiveness through X.5
Not surprising; OS X users should be accustomed that every major release has been faster than the previous, on the same hardware. Apple is doing something right.
Haha @ you fools who bought Vista...
It's obvious OS X on PCs won't happen, and even fairly obvious why.
The white box PC hardware market is full of junk. If Apple tried to support it, they'd end up in the same Hell Microsoft is in. True, all Microsoft products are shit, but they get blamed for driver issues as well, which is probably fair since they bundle and "certify" them in some sense.
Not only is Apple hardware higher quality ("it just works... and keeps working") - the drivers are integrated (like Sun). PC people don't seem to get that point. They live in a different world, I guess, with much lower expectations and a much drearier experience.
Those who want OS X, quit whining and buy a Mac, and go ahead and enjoy computing again. There's ebay to get rid of your PC.
John Howard's gone now! That said, I'm not going back. :)
Guaranteed revenue stream... protection money... ;)
Champaign is the city in Illinois. Champagne (DOC) is the French sparkling beverage.