It's pretty easy for us to determine that our computer labs are necessary, primarily because the students really like them. We know this from surveying them and from the ultimate metric: hourly head counts.
Yes, but that's because they are able to use the labs with zero or marginal cost. If you were to refund them the cost of the labs in their tuition (or stipend them a computation allowance, looks better on the aid applications), and then charge them to use the labs, would they make the same decision, or would they prefer independently buying their own system with the money?
Obviously people will still need the Sun workstations and other niche rigs...
Of course, he also said our computer labs were obsolete, which was bullshit,
Interesting, calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How much do all the computers, wired ethernet, office space and IT compare with buying everyone a windows or linux netbook and putting in some Wifi? The ongoing IT and support staff has to be the biggest expense. Ten years ago, I was on a help desk at USC and you generally had to hold peoples hands, particularly the 40-year-olds who were coming back for their MBAs. But now, people are generally self-supporting, and if you make them have to walk a distance with the netbook in order to get support, you incentivize them helping their damnselves.
Of course, I almost never got support calls on the Mac machines, except to replace keyboards, and was constantly having to reimage the lab PCs. But they were all running either Win98 or NT4 at the time. Times change after all.
But because people tell everyone about apps they got, or read about iPhone apps, or find them when searching for them - you get a lot of cross promotion from users.
Oh. That's not Network effect, that's bandwagon effect. Those that confuse an economic process with clever marketing are doomed to incorrect predictions until they learn otherwise.
Where is the "network effect" of the App Store? Most of the apps on the store are network-less, or only trivially use the network to access web services, not to interact with each other. And when they DO interact with each other, it's usually pretty trifling... I've bought and downloaded a lot of iPhone apps, have owned an iPhone from the first day and am surrounded by iPhone owners, and I've never downloaded an app because I wanted to access a resource that was only available to users of a particular iPhone app. And I think it's unheard of that someone would buy an iPhone because they wanted access to a service that was only available on the iPhone. Everything that an iPhone can do a Blackberry can do as well, just the interface is different (or "better," as your taste may be).
It's not like Word or Windows, where people buy Dells because they're merely the cheapest way to continue accessing their Word/Windows formatted data.
Schwartz goes on to boast Java market penetration, careful to mention " billions of... mobile devices, and smartcards, millions of enterprise servers, set top boxes, Blu-Ray DVD players"
Reading this sentence, I get the image in my head of six space shuttles with tourism modules docking with a wagon-wheel space station (projected date of completion: 1985). They promise the moon (Write once!) and they paint a lot of pretty pictures to show elementary school assemblies, but they have no idea how to realize these things or make a business model out of these things, and really they're just trying to turn their overextended and abused niche enterprise dev environment into the next hot-shit buzzword factory.
I know it's not a particularly popular observation, but generally the success or failure of a console generally depends on the branded content that gets developed for it. What games does the system have? Does the system manufacturer have good relations with the major publishers? Does it have good tools? People buy consoles, particularly plug-into-the-wall systems, for the games. Without support of developers, it just turns into one of those Wall-Mart knockoffs.
It seems sorta premature (and logically peculiar) to declare the G1 to be possibly "the most popular console evar!" It's a bit like seeing a slashdot story 15 years ago about how the Mac will possibly become the most popular console evar! because someone took apart a Pippin and discovered it had a abunch of Apple ICs in it.
As far as the success or failure of a particular game platform is, the actual hardware, once exceeding a certain minimum threshold of performance, is basically redundant.
I dunno, I was recently installing Pro Tools 8 and the copyright warning on the splash screen starts in 1991(!), and Pro Tools is still considered the top of the line in sound editorial. I don't think "old" necessarily means bad, it's just that the people who run Avid got lazy and comfortable with their $100,000 turnkey systems (a hell of a lot of money for a Quadra 950 and Nubus cards) and locked-in clientele.
Avid is pretty miserable on any platform at this point...
I'm a features guy though, people who use it for television seem to tolerate it, but the ease-of-use really doesn't compare to FCP. And the only features Avid adds over and above FCP, things like film conforming, are no longer much of an issue, since everyone is doing DIs now.
"quarterdeck" means "the lobby," for those of you who haven't ever worked with Marines:)
They're a cool bunch, if you are sitting in a conference room in very dry downtown Los Angeles and tell them all to sit by the "aft bulkhead", they'll know exactly what wall you're talking about.
Yes, there's nothing more awful than a civil administrator who knows what they're doing. They're all sellouts and frauds, what our country needs is One Strong Man to bring us order./snarky
This cynicism thing is sorta the easy way out, and when the people in democracies presume all their leaders are liars, without actually making the effort to figure out who is and who isn't, tyranny is the final result. Hitler promised to kill all the jews and start a war to reclaim Germany's "place in the sun" in Mein Kampf, in the 1920s, and everybody just assumed he was another lying politician.
Silly AC, stop contributing to the Slashdot monopoly. You aren't helping matters when you post to it. We consumers end up with less choice of technology news sites and more problems. The Slashdot threads are all crap web service lock-in and not even real "platforms" despite people acting like it is something you can develop for.
Ditto on the deadline... I'm just one of those people that needs to be told that it'll get reviewed at 6PM Thursday.
I tend to have two kinds of bosses:
The one who shows you the calendar and gives you a good idea about what day you should be done with X.
The one who tells you to be done with X at time T, and reliably cancells the review on T, but never reschedules, just gives you a call completely unwarned 2 days later and says "Bring it over and show it to me now."
The second kind is a bit maddening, because you get the work done and end up sitting around for a day or two posting on slashdot, and you can't ever factor the cancellation in, because you never knwo when the review is going to actually happen and you can't pace yourself -- you never know when you should be spending time tweaking, or rushing to get the big parts minimally done.
With a full-featured 1/3 octave spectrum analyser as well. Please
You aren't actually going to tune a room with that thing are you? Have you any idea how bandy those cellphone microphones are? The only thing a cellphone FFT "frequency analyzer" would be analyzing is it's owners attraction to Teh Blinkie.
Disney, in fact, was one of the biggest pushers of this change, because lots of Mickey Mouse cartoons were due to pass into the public domain.
In fact, all of the extensions of copyright in the United States in the last 10 years have been calibrated specifically to keep Steamboat Willie protected. Every time Steamboat is down to it's last year (it came out in 1928), more years get tacked on. All of Disney's silent works up to that point are in the public domain, but the emergence of the sound film basically coincides with motion pictures becoming hugely profitable. All of the studios silent film catalogues were basically forgotten by 1932.
1927-29 is very much a watershed era in media. That year was the first year with practical mass-market sound films, Threepenny Opera was published, Ravel published Bolero, Arthur Freed wrote "Singin' in the Rain," and the Depression caused all of the popular musical styles up to that point change and we begin to see recognizably modern groups and genres. As long as media companies from that era and their successors hold sway, it's very unlikely there will be any change in the state of affairs. Sadly.
I think not. I actually met one of the programmers that did the flight control software for the Buran. He used to joke, Americans put astronauts in spaceships because their remote control is not as good as ours.
The Soviets had a sort of cultural issue with autonomy to begin with, so they tended to have pretty elaborate telemetry tech, and a much more open technological culture to remote-controlled spaceflight-- They didn't have to deal with astronauts running around demanding glory. These are the same people that were able to get us color pictures of the effing surface of Venus(!)
In the case of the shuttle, though, the gear aren't remotely deployable for the very good reason that if they're opened too early in reentry, everyone dies, so the switch is strictly in the hands of the, uh, "vital stakeholders."
The more important step is that it will encourage programmers to actually attempt to track both size1 and size2.
I think you misunderstand his point... the 'size' parameter isn't the number of bytes in either buffer, it's the number of bytes you want to move. Obviously this has a lot to do with the size of either allocated buffer, but it's not the same thing.
memcpy doesn't know what a buffer is-- no, it really doesn't. At it's heart, all it does is copy a byte from one pointer to another and increment both, until it's done 'size' of them. There's no requirement that the pointers passed to memcpy be pointers to arrays. They just have to be pointers.
The idea that 'size' actually corresponds to the number of allocated elements in an array is a leaky abstraction. Obviously you never want to copy more bytes than either buffer has the capacity for, but that's really not the language's responsibility to enforce, because the language has no first-class concept of a "buffer" of known length. By making the function 'safer,' all they're doing is encouraging the leaky abstraction and confusing people who think memcpy's job is to copy "buffers" when all it really does is copy n bytes. These developers who have written memcpy_s may have made it "safer," but at the expense of giving it another error condition that must be tested for, and making the actual workings of the function more obscure.
Let's say, If I only want to copy the first 3 bytes of src to dest, do I put in "3" for the source length or the destination length? And I'd better test that against the length of both first, because if the function fails, was it because there's only 2 bytes available in dest, or because there's only 2 available in src? OR, if I'm starting at byte 2 of src to dest, do I put "1" in for srcLength, because that's alll that's left in the array, or "3," because that's how big the array is? I know it probably should be the first one, but the people who don't know better, the people this function is theoretically trying to engineer against, probably will make the wrong choice, because they have it in their head the array is length "3" and this function wants to know the length of the array, right?
But that would lose MS even more marketshare, something they can not afford to do
All things being equal, you'd be right, but in this crazy world we live in, people buy computers based on how well they support Windows; hardly anyone buys the hardware and then select the OS that supports the hardware's featureset best. Well, people who buy Macs do, but then again I did say "hardly anyone."
For instance, Windows forbids users from electronically circumventing Protected Media Path. This doesn't cause hardly anyone to stop using Windows, because Windows is pretty much the only game in town.
On the other hand, if MS were to forbid on-chip hypervisors, this might be considered an abuse of their monopoly power, particularly if you could make the argument that MS materially benefited from hypervisors not being present on computers (questionable) and hypervisors had failed to take hold in the market because of MS's anti-phoenix ukase (hasn't happened yet).
I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit.
Bring it UP to a geosynchronous orbit. The shuttle usually orbits at LEOs around 5200 miles (semi-major axis). Geosync is up around 26,200 miles . (In that chart, the little blue fuzz is LEO, and the black dashes are geostationary.)
The shuttle can't attain that high an orbit, and I dont' think the shuttle can survive outside the van allen belts. When it has to deliver satellites to geosynchronous orbit they use a second stage booster out of the cargo bay.
Try remotely controlling a Mac with VNC over a cellular broadband connection. It's like sucking a watermelon through a straw. Try creating a virtual network of virtual machines for testing before deployment...
Is this really what the future of the computer industry is going to look like?
Macs are lifestyle machines mainly for the home, with a certain legacy installed base in certain high-end markets, and they really don't make any bones about that. There's a lot more money to be made in the consumer market, particularly the margins can be a lot higher. Apple's last quarter was the best non-Xmas quarter they ever had, even in the mini depression, so clearly they aren't charging too much.
To the contrary, I think Apple's calling the medium-term outlook pretty well, in that they're banking on home/casual computing products, and writing of corporate customers for the time being. Let Dell and HP and Lenovo fight for the scraps of what's left of the US corporate IT budget, while Apple rakes in entertainment/content dollars and the profits off the expansion of the consumer market for casual computing devices and the networks that bind them.
I have to say, I'm glad of this trend lately for open source projects to primarily publish their source through Git, and particularly through these very able Git hosting sites like gitorious and github. If you've worked with CVS and SVN open-source projects most of your career, the experience is simply incomparable. With the way Git works, and particularly with the implementations the hosting companies provide, it's very easy to fork a project, make the changes you want, and always have the power to commit to a remote repository that not only keeps track of all your commits but ALSO how all your commits relate back to the original forked project...
Instead of downloading someone's tarball and (maybe) emailing them a diff (or just posting your own duplicate of their source with your little changes), it's like you're making a shadow copy of a projects source, where you have all the control but no information is duplicated or lost.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty easy for us to determine that our computer labs are necessary, primarily because the students really like them. We know this from surveying them and from the ultimate metric: hourly head counts.
Yes, but that's because they are able to use the labs with zero or marginal cost. If you were to refund them the cost of the labs in their tuition (or stipend them a computation allowance, looks better on the aid applications), and then charge them to use the labs, would they make the same decision, or would they prefer independently buying their own system with the money?
Obviously people will still need the Sun workstations and other niche rigs...
Of course, he also said our computer labs were obsolete, which was bullshit,
Interesting, calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How much do all the computers, wired ethernet, office space and IT compare with buying everyone a windows or linux netbook and putting in some Wifi? The ongoing IT and support staff has to be the biggest expense. Ten years ago, I was on a help desk at USC and you generally had to hold peoples hands, particularly the 40-year-olds who were coming back for their MBAs. But now, people are generally self-supporting, and if you make them have to walk a distance with the netbook in order to get support, you incentivize them helping their damnselves.
Of course, I almost never got support calls on the Mac machines, except to replace keyboards, and was constantly having to reimage the lab PCs. But they were all running either Win98 or NT4 at the time. Times change after all.
But because people tell everyone about apps they got, or read about iPhone apps, or find them when searching for them - you get a lot of cross promotion from users.
Oh. That's not Network effect, that's bandwagon effect. Those that confuse an economic process with clever marketing are doomed to incorrect predictions until they learn otherwise.
Where is the "network effect" of the App Store? Most of the apps on the store are network-less, or only trivially use the network to access web services, not to interact with each other. And when they DO interact with each other, it's usually pretty trifling... I've bought and downloaded a lot of iPhone apps, have owned an iPhone from the first day and am surrounded by iPhone owners, and I've never downloaded an app because I wanted to access a resource that was only available to users of a particular iPhone app. And I think it's unheard of that someone would buy an iPhone because they wanted access to a service that was only available on the iPhone. Everything that an iPhone can do a Blackberry can do as well, just the interface is different (or "better," as your taste may be).
It's not like Word or Windows, where people buy Dells because they're merely the cheapest way to continue accessing their Word/Windows formatted data.
Schwartz goes on to boast Java market penetration, careful to mention " billions of ... mobile devices, and smartcards, millions of enterprise servers, set top boxes, Blu-Ray DVD players"
Reading this sentence, I get the image in my head of six space shuttles with tourism modules docking with a wagon-wheel space station (projected date of completion: 1985). They promise the moon (Write once!) and they paint a lot of pretty pictures to show elementary school assemblies, but they have no idea how to realize these things or make a business model out of these things, and really they're just trying to turn their overextended and abused niche enterprise dev environment into the next hot-shit buzzword factory.
I know it's not a particularly popular observation, but generally the success or failure of a console generally depends on the branded content that gets developed for it. What games does the system have? Does the system manufacturer have good relations with the major publishers? Does it have good tools? People buy consoles, particularly plug-into-the-wall systems, for the games. Without support of developers, it just turns into one of those Wall-Mart knockoffs.
It seems sorta premature (and logically peculiar) to declare the G1 to be possibly "the most popular console evar!" It's a bit like seeing a slashdot story 15 years ago about how the Mac will possibly become the most popular console evar! because someone took apart a Pippin and discovered it had a abunch of Apple ICs in it.
As far as the success or failure of a particular game platform is, the actual hardware, once exceeding a certain minimum threshold of performance, is basically redundant.
I dunno, I was recently installing Pro Tools 8 and the copyright warning on the splash screen starts in 1991(!), and Pro Tools is still considered the top of the line in sound editorial. I don't think "old" necessarily means bad, it's just that the people who run Avid got lazy and comfortable with their $100,000 turnkey systems (a hell of a lot of money for a Quadra 950 and Nubus cards) and locked-in clientele.
Avid is pretty miserable on any platform at this point...
I'm a features guy though, people who use it for television seem to tolerate it, but the ease-of-use really doesn't compare to FCP. And the only features Avid adds over and above FCP, things like film conforming, are no longer much of an issue, since everyone is doing DIs now.
"quarterdeck" means "the lobby," for those of you who haven't ever worked with Marines :)
They're a cool bunch, if you are sitting in a conference room in very dry downtown Los Angeles and tell them all to sit by the "aft bulkhead", they'll know exactly what wall you're talking about.
Yes, there's nothing more awful than a civil administrator who knows what they're doing. They're all sellouts and frauds, what our country needs is One Strong Man to bring us order./snarky
This cynicism thing is sorta the easy way out, and when the people in democracies presume all their leaders are liars, without actually making the effort to figure out who is and who isn't, tyranny is the final result. Hitler promised to kill all the jews and start a war to reclaim Germany's "place in the sun" in Mein Kampf, in the 1920s, and everybody just assumed he was another lying politician.
Silly AC, stop contributing to the Slashdot monopoly. You aren't helping matters when you post to it. We consumers end up with less choice of technology news sites and more problems. The Slashdot threads are all crap web service lock-in and not even real "platforms" despite people acting like it is something you can develop for.
Ditto on the deadline... I'm just one of those people that needs to be told that it'll get reviewed at 6PM Thursday.
I tend to have two kinds of bosses:
The second kind is a bit maddening, because you get the work done and end up sitting around for a day or two posting on slashdot, and you can't ever factor the cancellation in, because you never knwo when the review is going to actually happen and you can't pace yourself -- you never know when you should be spending time tweaking, or rushing to get the big parts minimally done.
With a full-featured 1/3 octave spectrum analyser as well. Please
You aren't actually going to tune a room with that thing are you? Have you any idea how bandy those cellphone microphones are? The only thing a cellphone FFT "frequency analyzer" would be analyzing is it's owners attraction to Teh Blinkie.
Add "Direct Stream Digital" and "protected amplifier content path" and they can start demanding patent royalties...
Disney, in fact, was one of the biggest pushers of this change, because lots of Mickey Mouse cartoons were due to pass into the public domain.
In fact, all of the extensions of copyright in the United States in the last 10 years have been calibrated specifically to keep Steamboat Willie protected. Every time Steamboat is down to it's last year (it came out in 1928), more years get tacked on. All of Disney's silent works up to that point are in the public domain, but the emergence of the sound film basically coincides with motion pictures becoming hugely profitable. All of the studios silent film catalogues were basically forgotten by 1932.
1927-29 is very much a watershed era in media. That year was the first year with practical mass-market sound films, Threepenny Opera was published, Ravel published Bolero, Arthur Freed wrote "Singin' in the Rain," and the Depression caused all of the popular musical styles up to that point change and we begin to see recognizably modern groups and genres. As long as media companies from that era and their successors hold sway, it's very unlikely there will be any change in the state of affairs. Sadly.
I think not. I actually met one of the programmers that did the flight control software for the Buran. He used to joke, Americans put astronauts in spaceships because their remote control is not as good as ours.
The Soviets had a sort of cultural issue with autonomy to begin with, so they tended to have pretty elaborate telemetry tech, and a much more open technological culture to remote-controlled spaceflight-- They didn't have to deal with astronauts running around demanding glory. These are the same people that were able to get us color pictures of the effing surface of Venus(!)
In the case of the shuttle, though, the gear aren't remotely deployable for the very good reason that if they're opened too early in reentry, everyone dies, so the switch is strictly in the hands of the, uh, "vital stakeholders."
I think you misunderstand his point... the 'size' parameter isn't the number of bytes in either buffer, it's the number of bytes you want to move. Obviously this has a lot to do with the size of either allocated buffer, but it's not the same thing.
memcpy doesn't know what a buffer is-- no, it really doesn't. At it's heart, all it does is copy a byte from one pointer to another and increment both, until it's done 'size' of them. There's no requirement that the pointers passed to memcpy be pointers to arrays. They just have to be pointers.
The idea that 'size' actually corresponds to the number of allocated elements in an array is a leaky abstraction. Obviously you never want to copy more bytes than either buffer has the capacity for, but that's really not the language's responsibility to enforce, because the language has no first-class concept of a "buffer" of known length. By making the function 'safer,' all they're doing is encouraging the leaky abstraction and confusing people who think memcpy's job is to copy "buffers" when all it really does is copy n bytes. These developers who have written memcpy_s may have made it "safer," but at the expense of giving it another error condition that must be tested for, and making the actual workings of the function more obscure.
Let's say, If I only want to copy the first 3 bytes of src to dest, do I put in "3" for the source length or the destination length? And I'd better test that against the length of both first, because if the function fails, was it because there's only 2 bytes available in dest, or because there's only 2 available in src? OR, if I'm starting at byte 2 of src to dest, do I put "1" in for srcLength, because that's alll that's left in the array, or "3," because that's how big the array is? I know it probably should be the first one, but the people who don't know better, the people this function is theoretically trying to engineer against, probably will make the wrong choice, because they have it in their head the array is length "3" and this function wants to know the length of the array, right?
...ever since he died.
But that would lose MS even more marketshare, something they can not afford to do
All things being equal, you'd be right, but in this crazy world we live in, people buy computers based on how well they support Windows; hardly anyone buys the hardware and then select the OS that supports the hardware's featureset best. Well, people who buy Macs do, but then again I did say "hardly anyone."
For instance, Windows forbids users from electronically circumventing Protected Media Path. This doesn't cause hardly anyone to stop using Windows, because Windows is pretty much the only game in town.
On the other hand, if MS were to forbid on-chip hypervisors, this might be considered an abuse of their monopoly power, particularly if you could make the argument that MS materially benefited from hypervisors not being present on computers (questionable) and hypervisors had failed to take hold in the market because of MS's anti-phoenix ukase (hasn't happened yet).
Nah, they'd probably bring the crippled one down by computer (no one on board) at a different landing site on a different day.
Can they actually do that? My understanding is that the landing gear are still not remotely deployable.
I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit.
Bring it UP to a geosynchronous orbit. The shuttle usually orbits at LEOs around 5200 miles (semi-major axis). Geosync is up around 26,200 miles . (In that chart, the little blue fuzz is LEO, and the black dashes are geostationary.)
The shuttle can't attain that high an orbit, and I dont' think the shuttle can survive outside the van allen belts. When it has to deliver satellites to geosynchronous orbit they use a second stage booster out of the cargo bay.
Where does Hg succeed over Git? My understanding is that a lot of people really don't like the way git merges..
Is this really what the future of the computer industry is going to look like?
Macs are lifestyle machines mainly for the home, with a certain legacy installed base in certain high-end markets, and they really don't make any bones about that. There's a lot more money to be made in the consumer market, particularly the margins can be a lot higher. Apple's last quarter was the best non-Xmas quarter they ever had, even in the mini depression, so clearly they aren't charging too much.
To the contrary, I think Apple's calling the medium-term outlook pretty well, in that they're banking on home/casual computing products, and writing of corporate customers for the time being. Let Dell and HP and Lenovo fight for the scraps of what's left of the US corporate IT budget, while Apple rakes in entertainment/content dollars and the profits off the expansion of the consumer market for casual computing devices and the networks that bind them.
Where can I by these Xserve blades? Sound really useful, I wish they'd market them more than their 1RU jobs without a replaceable power supply.
Pixar's operation uses mostly Intel Xeon/Linux rigs in the farm.
I have to say, I'm glad of this trend lately for open source projects to primarily publish their source through Git, and particularly through these very able Git hosting sites like gitorious and github. If you've worked with CVS and SVN open-source projects most of your career, the experience is simply incomparable. With the way Git works, and particularly with the implementations the hosting companies provide, it's very easy to fork a project, make the changes you want, and always have the power to commit to a remote repository that not only keeps track of all your commits but ALSO how all your commits relate back to the original forked project...
Instead of downloading someone's tarball and (maybe) emailing them a diff (or just posting your own duplicate of their source with your little changes), it's like you're making a shadow copy of a projects source, where you have all the control but no information is duplicated or lost.