You're using Windows. If you want IE to start automatically, just put a shortcut to it on your startup folder and quit trying to make computers less useful for everyone who still see big benefits in running things locally.
I probably should have been more specific: I'm not trying to force everyone to switch to an online world. When I said that you should come up with new ideas, I meant that you should try to be the best at something that wasn't done right before. Whoever cares about what you do better than everyone else will start using your solution. People who don't have a need for what you are solving can keep using their good old platform.
Regarding your approach about starting IE automatically, sorry but you missed my point. That's the kind of answer that shows you have not actually thought about the problem and are trying to use old technology and hope it will be good enough. The "good enough" mindset is the #1 reason you won't come up with a killer app.
In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.
Here's the beginning of an idea for you: if you were to implement the ultimate Google Apps PC, which relies on a web browser for word editing, presentations, etc. Would it look like IE and a start menu, or could you make it really seamless?
In other words: I use my computer more and more just to interact online, not so much to run applications locally on my machine. But every OS out there still thinks of the web as just another program. Can't we do better?
ARM-based netbooks won't be powerful enough, therefore Linux will shine on them? That doesn't sound very convincing. First of all, with Moore's law this means that a few months later, netbooks *will* be powerful enough. Will that then be the end of Linux? Nonsense.
I'm a Linux fan. The main reason why "the year of Linux" never happens is that the press (and analysts) keep comparing Linux to what they know: a Windows desktop.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them. What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces. For instance, look at web applications: that's hurting Microsoft 10 times more than any 3D effect in KDE ever will. The Web made a lot of Microsoft software irrelevant. Linux needs to do the same, by doing something *different*.
-- Application iPhone Les Meilleurs Jeux et Utilitaires pour iPhone et iPod Touch
The problem with personalization is that it's an extremely sensitive topic for 1% of the population (us, the geeks), but 99% of end-users couldn't care less.
Google is in the very risky position where the wrong move could destroy the positive image they currently enjoy.
Do the right thing: there needs to be legal means by which I can obtain, verify and erase all personal data associated with me. Voluntary programs from corporations are not good enough. Privacy policies can and do change, based on the corporations' financial interests. It doesn't mean the government needs to be involved, real contracts could do the trick: just get rid of the "we reserve the right to change those terms any time for any reason and steal your house as well."
I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but at least they never owned any private data on me. Remember the outcry when it was discovered that Windows may sometimes phone home? With Google, it never phones home, you are using Google's phone to place your calls:-)
I have been following Apple for more than 20 years, including stints at MacWorld and today's headline is a repeat of the mini-drama that Apple has been having with the Expo for decades. But today is different.
Ignore the dispute about who controls MacWorld Expo's agenda. Apple feels like on top of the world (always has) and they want absolute control. But they also had found a great recipe for success. Two years ago, on the cab from the caltrain station to Moscone, the taxi driver asked us if we were there for this new "iPhone thing". The hype was just so big, the distortion field so powerful, the force was with Apple.
Somehow, no cab driver ever asked me about Android.
Think of the history: the iPod, the MacBook Air, the iPhone... By having someone else present the keynote this year, our collective expectations just sunk by an order of magnitude. I, for one, don't expect anything amazing this year. But on the other hand, it's only fair: even Apple can't pull off revolution after revolution, year after year. Give them a break, they are doing so much already by showing everyone how boring other products are.
Some of my favorite highlights from recent incidents (I know, I shouldn't RTFM):
Names and Social Security numbers of at least 250,000 found through search engine Date: 2008-12-02 Organizations: Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation
I guess there are many different ways you an innovate...
Social Security numbers of 341 posted on web Date: 2008-12-04 Organizations: Economic Research Institute
If it's for research, then it's ok to post on the web...
Stolen laptop contains names and Social Security numbers of "several thousand " employees Date: 2008-12-11 Organizations: Hewlett-Packard
If you thought only small time loser organizations like the first two on my list where subject to embarrassing data loss, that one would set you straight.
Enforcement would be nice. How hard would it be for some FBI office to sign up to get all the possible spam out there, and start replying to all the great offers from African banks?
Of course, a lot of the perpetuators do not reside in the US, but quite a few do. The more legitimate a business looks like, the more likely it has a US presence that can be used to stop it.
So vote with your US tax dollars and force your government to allocate serious funds to the problem. Please!
-- http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create
When Apple launched the iPhone two years ago, they announced that their goal was to ship 10 million iPhones by year end. Frankly, no one had any clue how many or how few would sell. It was just a guess on the part of Apple management (really!).
And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry. For once innovation pays, I love it. In he last 5 years I was involved as an engineer with some of the companies designing cell phones. Ground-breaking innovation is not in their DNA. Instead, they take last year's technology and make it 20% better and faster. Middle management has no clue how to foster innovation.
You need those companies around because they drive down cost and make technology accessible. But you also need a few Apples that forego incremental improvements and shoot for the moon.
Very chilling. Do not take your freedom for granted. I'll share my personal story to show how quickly a thriving democracy can turn into an oppresive regime, here in the US.
Remember the times that led to the invsasion of Iraq? American flags on every highway overpass?
I just happened to be in the process of getting my green card, which means my future was at the mercy of a faceless US government bureaucrat. A rejection and I'd have to pack with my family (including two US born children) and find another place in the globe to settle.
I had published a couple of letters to the editors in the San Jose Mercury News, discussing politics. I was reading foreign media which were hinting that US intelligence on Iraq WMD was bogus. Guess what? I stood very quiet, very silent. Who knows who was listening and how far the goverment was willing to go to silence dissent. If it had been just me, I would have stood up and fought for my rights, but with my family in mind, I decided to cave.
Think about this for a second: the best place on earth, and still scared of what the government might do to me. Call me paranoid, but it felt like a very real threat. It's only in the last two years or so, with Obama rising, that the oppressive feeling has left.
USB 2.0 gave us high-speed and full-speed. Some marketing department had to work really hard on the USB 3.0 specs, to come up with... super-speed.
Now let's talk about the obvious problem: at 5 Gbit/s, it's faster than the Ethernet in my house (1 Gbit/s). Am I the only one who didn't really notice a 10X speed improvement when moving from 100 Mbit Ethernet to gigabit Ethernet? Conventional hard drives are just too slow.
Maybe SSD + USB 3.0 would be really cool. Imagine a Flash based HD camera talking to a Flash based hard drive. Is 2009 the year of the Flash?
Which brings me back to my original point: for the next generation USB, I propose the name flash-speed:-)
PS: thanks to Intel for helping Linux stay on the leading edge. It looks like Linux may even support this before Windows, thanks to the Windows 7 schedule... I just wish Intel's pre-conditions on contributing to the xHCI specs didn't start with stuff like:
Step 1. Print and execute the xHCI Contributor agreement. Note: The agreement must be executed by a corporate officer.
Not surprising if you look at the 3D effects that Apple put into Time Machine and the document stack. I love these.
What will make this really interesting is the navigation itself: since Apple is about to get rid of all buttons on the trackpad (and mouse?), I'm wondering if they have thought of some fancy 3 or 4-finger gestures to move around in 3D. I can think of some games that could use that.
The first time I saw the idea of 3D navigation for the desktop was when Hypercard came out (was that 10, 15 years ago?). Someone came up with this concept of a house where you'd store various things. In the basement would be the backups. On the desk in the office would be the open documents, etc. You'd just walk around your house in what (at the time) felt like 3D.
-- http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create
According to the FSF blog: "Cisco also provides written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going unfulfilled."
I hope the entire case won't revolve around whether Joe failed to click on the proper button to download the source code. It looks like Cisco has some way to pretend they are in compliance.
It would be bad if the case was lost by the FSF on such technicality, since the headlines would just say "GPL lost in court". Anyway, any decision is probably years away, if it even goes that far. -- alain - fairsoftware.net
Focusing on Startups 2.0
on
Enterprise 2.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In my view of the world, there are 5 key companies that completely redefine the way businesses are created using the web, aka "startup 2.0":
- http://ycombinator.com/: Paul Graham can take a bunch of smart college kids, feed them $15K for 3 months, bring them to Silicon Valley and watch them succeed - his success rate is amazing.
- http://fairsoftware.net/ (disclosure: I'm one of the founders): eliminate the need for any startup capital when you have a good idea for a software or a web site, just go ahead and create a virtual online corporation, hire friends or strangers, ship and share revenue. Never talk to a lawyer. Shopping and banking are online nowdays, why not the corporation itself?
- http://thefunded.com/: once your business is showing potential, maybe (just maybe) you want to raise money from VCs. Thanks to TheFunded, VCs are not the ruling masters of their universe anymore.
- http://vator.tv/: once you have a cool product, it's time to pitch it to the world. You don't need to have a friend at CNN anymore. Well, actually with vator, you do:-)
- http://partnerup.com/: you need to find co-founders to start your enterprise 2.0. Traditional job boards are for 9-5 jobs at Fortune 500 companies. PartnerUp is the only one I have seen that really focuses on early stage opportunities.
I believe innovation will come from all these new startups that can now be created online, with collaborators distributed potentially all over the world, just like Open Source. That's big enough that it may create an entirely new economy within 5 years.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
Secure or not, it goes against the main founding principle of the web, which is portability. There are other ways to solve the performance issue, I thought just-in-time compilers were getting pretty close anyway (50% according to http://www.mobydisk.com/softdev/techinfo/speedtest/index.html).
On the security side, I'll just quote Google's description: "modules may not contain certain instruction sequences". That doesn't sound like a robust way to detect malicious code.
http://fairsoftware.net/ where software developers share revenue from the apps they create together
That's great in theory, but the problem with Netflix is that the selection of movies that they let you stream is, shall we say... poor.
At least the good news is that they are opening up and trying to support as many distribution channels as possible. It's a pain to connect my laptop to my TV, just because by definition, a laptop is always on the go, and a TV connection means plugging and unplugging two cables each time (one for video, one for audio). It's just too much of a hassle.
That's why I eventually got an AppleTV: it's the best way to browse music on a HiFi system which has an HD TV attached to it (that is to say, 90% of the standard geek setup) - and it may even be able to display video content too:-) I wish they had called it iTunes TV, it would not have confused people so much.
Now my AppleTV will get more content from its Internet connection. All good to me. As streaming movies becomes commonplace, maybe pirates and DRM will not be such an obsession of Hollywood...
First, let me start by saying that the definition of an experienced programmer is that they don't care about the particulars of any given language. Experience means they have seen many languages come and go and they will continue to adapt.
That's the long-term skill that will keep putting money in your pocket. Coming out of college, it's important you know that.
That being said, congratulations on sticking with Linux in a Windows world. Purely from a job perspective, there might be more jobs on the Windows platform, but they are also more boring. So your school is doing the right thing by exposing you to as much Windows IT as possible, and you are doing the smart thing by escaping to the better side.
To answer your question: Linux is not so different from a programming point of view, but it has a set of standard libraries and utilities that can be combined in many amazing ways. I'm old-fashioned, so I still program in C++, but what I would also recommend that you explore are some of the fun scripting languages like Perl. I wouldnt' particularly recommend more modern and high-level languages on purpose: they hide too much of Linux, so what's the point for you?
Learn about true modularity: whatever it is that you are trying to build on Linux, someone already did 90% of the work. You just have to build up from there. Algorithms are the same on Windows and Linux, but that mindset makes all the difference.
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
So all the physical memory installed in your PC is used by the processor as one big pool of resources. Processes can think whatever they want and address huge memory spaces, that's all in virtual land. Virtual memory only starts impacting performance when pages are being swapped in and out, because all your processes need more resident memory than you actually have.
Swapping means accessing the disk and freezing the requesting process until its page of memory has arrived from the disk, which takes millions of processor cycles (a lifetime from the processor's point of view). It's not so bad if you swap once, as the processor can work on other processes while waiting for the data to arrive, but if all your programs keep pushing each other out of physical memory, you get thrashing and consider yourself happy if the mouse pointer is still responsive!
So you may want to change the title of your post to: "why use physical memory in modern systems?". I would point you to an article I wrote on that topic in 1990, but somehow I can't find a link to it on the web:-)
fairsoftware.net - software developers share revenue from the apps they build
To be fair, since the other pictures look authentic, I'd say the meeting really happened. It's just that Google wasn't fast enough to record it. That shows you a limitation of Google:-) There are still a few things you can do without Google noticing right away.
I don't buy the conclusions of this article. There is a clear difference in quality with true HD versus DVD. But it's true that at some point, you can't tell the difference anymore, so nobody cares. Sort of like why does anyone want a 4 GHz Pentium processor for Microsoft Office, is that really useful?
The same will happen for HD for maybe 10 years: there will be only minor tweaks, prices will fall, but no new jump in quality. What I see (hope) as the next jump is "experience immersion". When I take a picture or short movie with my digital camera, I want the audience to fell exactly what I felt. When I hike a mountain at 5,000 meters, it's freezing, breathing is hard... I snapped a picture, but you can't see what experience it was. I'm willing to wait another 10 years, but this has to happen at some point. It's all about sharing our experiences, after all.
Sun is opening the source code of their processors because they are losing the battle against x86 processors. Their marketshare of workstations and servers (not to mention PCs) is crashing. They hope (it won't happen) to get some momentum, maybe some second-tier vendor will build their next chip using a T2. I believe a few did for the T1 (the previous open source processor from Sun). It made no difference in marketshare.
If (it won't happen) more chips use Sparc cores inside, then the need for Sparc software and knowledge will grow, and Sun will eventually profit. They don't want the Sparc ecosystem (whatever is left of it) to die.
So I'll thank Sun for releasing such a big piece of RTL. In the field of hardware design, I think it's the largest open chip available. It means EDA tools will have one more testcase, their quality will improve. And that, in the end, will help the entire semiconductor industry. But not Sun especially. I'd recommend to sell your SUN stock if you have any.
Hey, you just reminded me of similar fond memories I had long forgotten. In high school, the computer science teacher would always be asking us what we are up to, and she would try to learn from our code. But since we spent most of our time coding pranks that made fun of her, it was a lot of fun keeping the hidden messages from her view.
Slashdot Mirror
You're using Windows. If you want IE to start automatically, just put a shortcut to it on your startup folder and quit trying to make computers less useful for everyone who still see big benefits in running things locally.
I probably should have been more specific: I'm not trying to force everyone to switch to an online world. When I said that you should come up with new ideas, I meant that you should try to be the best at something that wasn't done right before. Whoever cares about what you do better than everyone else will start using your solution. People who don't have a need for what you are solving can keep using their good old platform.
Regarding your approach about starting IE automatically, sorry but you missed my point. That's the kind of answer that shows you have not actually thought about the problem and are trying to use old technology and hope it will be good enough. The "good enough" mindset is the #1 reason you won't come up with a killer app.
In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.
Here's the beginning of an idea for you: if you were to implement the ultimate Google Apps PC, which relies on a web browser for word editing, presentations, etc. Would it look like IE and a start menu, or could you make it really seamless?
In other words: I use my computer more and more just to interact online, not so much to run applications locally on my machine. But every OS out there still thinks of the web as just another program. Can't we do better?
--
fairsoftware.net -- home of the Software Bill of Rights
ARM-based netbooks won't be powerful enough, therefore Linux will shine on them? That doesn't sound very convincing. First of all, with Moore's law this means that a few months later, netbooks *will* be powerful enough. Will that then be the end of Linux? Nonsense.
I'm a Linux fan. The main reason why "the year of Linux" never happens is that the press (and analysts) keep comparing Linux to what they know: a Windows desktop.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them. What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces. For instance, look at web applications: that's hurting Microsoft 10 times more than any 3D effect in KDE ever will. The Web made a lot of Microsoft software irrelevant. Linux needs to do the same, by doing something *different*.
--
Application iPhone Les Meilleurs Jeux et Utilitaires pour iPhone et iPod Touch
From the article:
The latest study was based in part on [Cisco's] ability to monitor 30 percent of all Web and e-mail traffic
I hope the journalist misunderstood something, otherwise all my fears about the NSA just got crunched.
--
iPhone Apps review site looking for bilingual testers
The problem with personalization is that it's an extremely sensitive topic for 1% of the population (us, the geeks), but 99% of end-users couldn't care less.
Google is in the very risky position where the wrong move could destroy the positive image they currently enjoy.
Do the right thing: there needs to be legal means by which I can obtain, verify and erase all personal data associated with me. Voluntary programs from corporations are not good enough. Privacy policies can and do change, based on the corporations' financial interests. It doesn't mean the government needs to be involved, real contracts could do the trick: just get rid of the "we reserve the right to change those terms any time for any reason and steal your house as well."
I'm no big fan of Microsoft, but at least they never owned any private data on me. Remember the outcry when it was discovered that Windows may sometimes phone home? With Google, it never phones home, you are using Google's phone to place your calls :-)
--
iPhone Apps review site looking for bilingual testers
I have been following Apple for more than 20 years, including stints at MacWorld and today's headline is a repeat of the mini-drama that Apple has been having with the Expo for decades. But today is different.
Ignore the dispute about who controls MacWorld Expo's agenda. Apple feels like on top of the world (always has) and they want absolute control. But they also had found a great recipe for success. Two years ago, on the cab from the caltrain station to Moscone, the taxi driver asked us if we were there for this new "iPhone thing". The hype was just so big, the distortion field so powerful, the force was with Apple.
Somehow, no cab driver ever asked me about Android.
Think of the history: the iPod, the MacBook Air, the iPhone... By having someone else present the keynote this year, our collective expectations just sunk by an order of magnitude. I, for one, don't expect anything amazing this year. But on the other hand, it's only fair: even Apple can't pull off revolution after revolution, year after year. Give them a break, they are doing so much already by showing everyone how boring other products are.
--
iPhone Apps review site looking for bilingual testers
Some of my favorite highlights from recent incidents (I know, I shouldn't RTFM):
Names and Social Security numbers of at least 250,000 found through search engine
Date: 2008-12-02
Organizations: Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation
I guess there are many different ways you an innovate...
Social Security numbers of 341 posted on web
Date: 2008-12-04
Organizations: Economic Research Institute
If it's for research, then it's ok to post on the web...
Stolen laptop contains names and Social Security numbers of "several thousand " employees
Date: 2008-12-11
Organizations: Hewlett-Packard
If you thought only small time loser organizations like the first two on my list where subject to embarrassing data loss, that one would set you straight.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- Software Bill Of Rights
Enforcement would be nice. How hard would it be for some FBI office to sign up to get all the possible spam out there, and start replying to all the great offers from African banks?
Of course, a lot of the perpetuators do not reside in the US, but quite a few do. The more legitimate a business looks like, the more likely it has a US presence that can be used to stop it.
So vote with your US tax dollars and force your government to allocate serious funds to the problem. Please!
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create
When Apple launched the iPhone two years ago, they announced that their goal was to ship 10 million iPhones by year end. Frankly, no one had any clue how many or how few would sell. It was just a guess on the part of Apple management (really!).
And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry. For once innovation pays, I love it. In he last 5 years I was involved as an engineer with some of the companies designing cell phones. Ground-breaking innovation is not in their DNA. Instead, they take last year's technology and make it 20% better and faster. Middle management has no clue how to foster innovation.
You need those companies around because they drive down cost and make technology accessible. But you also need a few Apples that forego incremental improvements and shoot for the moon.
--
French iPhone Apps review site applicationiphone.com looking for contributors
Very chilling. Do not take your freedom for granted. I'll share my personal story to show how quickly a thriving democracy can turn into an oppresive regime, here in the US.
Remember the times that led to the invsasion of Iraq? American flags on every highway overpass?
I just happened to be in the process of getting my green card, which means my future was at the mercy of a faceless US government bureaucrat. A rejection and I'd have to pack with my family (including two US born children) and find another place in the globe to settle.
I had published a couple of letters to the editors in the San Jose Mercury News, discussing politics. I was reading foreign media which were hinting that US intelligence on Iraq WMD was bogus. Guess what? I stood very quiet, very silent. Who knows who was listening and how far the goverment was willing to go to silence dissent. If it had been just me, I would have stood up and fought for my rights, but with my family in mind, I decided to cave.
Think about this for a second: the best place on earth, and still scared of what the government might do to me. Call me paranoid, but it felt like a very real threat. It's only in the last two years or so, with Obama rising, that the oppressive feeling has left.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/
USB 2.0 gave us high-speed and full-speed. Some marketing department had to work really hard on the USB 3.0 specs, to come up with... super-speed.
Now let's talk about the obvious problem: at 5 Gbit/s, it's faster than the Ethernet in my house (1 Gbit/s). Am I the only one who didn't really notice a 10X speed improvement when moving from 100 Mbit Ethernet to gigabit Ethernet? Conventional hard drives are just too slow.
Maybe SSD + USB 3.0 would be really cool. Imagine a Flash based HD camera talking to a Flash based hard drive. Is 2009 the year of the Flash?
Which brings me back to my original point: for the next generation USB, I propose the name flash-speed :-)
PS: thanks to Intel for helping Linux stay on the leading edge. It looks like Linux may even support this before Windows, thanks to the Windows 7 schedule... I just wish Intel's pre-conditions on contributing to the xHCI specs didn't start with stuff like:
Step 1. Print and execute the xHCI Contributor agreement. Note: The agreement must be executed by a corporate officer.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/
Not surprising if you look at the 3D effects that Apple put into Time Machine and the document stack. I love these.
What will make this really interesting is the navigation itself: since Apple is about to get rid of all buttons on the trackpad (and mouse?), I'm wondering if they have thought of some fancy 3 or 4-finger gestures to move around in 3D. I can think of some games that could use that.
The first time I saw the idea of 3D navigation for the desktop was when Hypercard came out (was that 10, 15 years ago?). Someone came up with this concept of a house where you'd store various things. In the basement would be the backups. On the desk in the office would be the open documents, etc. You'd just walk around your house in what (at the time) felt like 3D.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers share revenue from the apps they create
According to the FSF blog: "Cisco also provides written offers for source, but we regularly hear about requests going unfulfilled."
I hope the entire case won't revolve around whether Joe failed to click on the proper button to download the source code. It looks like Cisco has some way to pretend they are in compliance.
It would be bad if the case was lost by the FSF on such technicality, since the headlines would just say "GPL lost in court". Anyway, any decision is probably years away, if it even goes that far.
--
alain - fairsoftware.net
In my view of the world, there are 5 key companies that completely redefine the way businesses are created using the web, aka "startup 2.0":
- http://ycombinator.com/: Paul Graham can take a bunch of smart college kids, feed them $15K for 3 months, bring them to Silicon Valley and watch them succeed - his success rate is amazing.
- http://fairsoftware.net/ (disclosure: I'm one of the founders): eliminate the need for any startup capital when you have a good idea for a software or a web site, just go ahead and create a virtual online corporation, hire friends or strangers, ship and share revenue. Never talk to a lawyer. Shopping and banking are online nowdays, why not the corporation itself?
- http://thefunded.com/: once your business is showing potential, maybe (just maybe) you want to raise money from VCs. Thanks to TheFunded, VCs are not the ruling masters of their universe anymore.
- http://vator.tv/: once you have a cool product, it's time to pitch it to the world. You don't need to have a friend at CNN anymore. Well, actually with vator, you do :-)
- http://partnerup.com/: you need to find co-founders to start your enterprise 2.0. Traditional job boards are for 9-5 jobs at Fortune 500 companies. PartnerUp is the only one I have seen that really focuses on early stage opportunities.
I believe innovation will come from all these new startups that can now be created online, with collaborators distributed potentially all over the world, just like Open Source. That's big enough that it may create an entirely new economy within 5 years.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
Secure or not, it goes against the main founding principle of the web, which is portability. There are other ways to solve the performance issue, I thought just-in-time compilers were getting pretty close anyway (50% according to http://www.mobydisk.com/softdev/techinfo/speedtest/index.html).
On the security side, I'll just quote Google's description: "modules may not contain certain instruction sequences". That doesn't sound like a robust way to detect malicious code.
http://fairsoftware.net/ where software developers share revenue from the apps they create together
That's great in theory, but the problem with Netflix is that the selection of movies that they let you stream is, shall we say... poor.
At least the good news is that they are opening up and trying to support as many distribution channels as possible. It's a pain to connect my laptop to my TV, just because by definition, a laptop is always on the go, and a TV connection means plugging and unplugging two cables each time (one for video, one for audio). It's just too much of a hassle.
That's why I eventually got an AppleTV: it's the best way to browse music on a HiFi system which has an HD TV attached to it (that is to say, 90% of the standard geek setup) - and it may even be able to display video content too :-) I wish they had called it iTunes TV, it would not have confused people so much.
Now my AppleTV will get more content from its Internet connection. All good to me. As streaming movies becomes commonplace, maybe pirates and DRM will not be such an obsession of Hollywood...
First, let me start by saying that the definition of an experienced programmer is that they don't care about the particulars of any given language. Experience means they have seen many languages come and go and they will continue to adapt.
That's the long-term skill that will keep putting money in your pocket. Coming out of college, it's important you know that.
That being said, congratulations on sticking with Linux in a Windows world. Purely from a job perspective, there might be more jobs on the Windows platform, but they are also more boring. So your school is doing the right thing by exposing you to as much Windows IT as possible, and you are doing the smart thing by escaping to the better side.
To answer your question: Linux is not so different from a programming point of view, but it has a set of standard libraries and utilities that can be combined in many amazing ways. I'm old-fashioned, so I still program in C++, but what I would also recommend that you explore are some of the fun scripting languages like Perl. I wouldnt' particularly recommend more modern and high-level languages on purpose: they hide too much of Linux, so what's the point for you?
Learn about true modularity: whatever it is that you are trying to build on Linux, someone already did 90% of the work. You just have to build up from there. Algorithms are the same on Windows and Linux, but that mindset makes all the difference.
Gentle answers is what 6 years in customer support teaches you.
That, or hating everyone ;-)
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
So all the physical memory installed in your PC is used by the processor as one big pool of resources. Processes can think whatever they want and address huge memory spaces, that's all in virtual land. Virtual memory only starts impacting performance when pages are being swapped in and out, because all your processes need more resident memory than you actually have.
Swapping means accessing the disk and freezing the requesting process until its page of memory has arrived from the disk, which takes millions of processor cycles (a lifetime from the processor's point of view). It's not so bad if you swap once, as the processor can work on other processes while waiting for the data to arrive, but if all your programs keep pushing each other out of physical memory, you get thrashing and consider yourself happy if the mouse pointer is still responsive!
So you may want to change the title of your post to: "why use physical memory in modern systems?". I would point you to an article I wrote on that topic in 1990, but somehow I can't find a link to it on the web :-)
fairsoftware.net - software developers share revenue from the apps they build
To be fair, since the other pictures look authentic, I'd say the meeting really happened. It's just that Google wasn't fast enough to record it. That shows you a limitation of Google :-) There are still a few things you can do without Google noticing right away.
Alain - fairsoftware.net
I don't buy the conclusions of this article. There is a clear difference in quality with true HD versus DVD. But it's true that at some point, you can't tell the difference anymore, so nobody cares. Sort of like why does anyone want a 4 GHz Pentium processor for Microsoft Office, is that really useful?
The same will happen for HD for maybe 10 years: there will be only minor tweaks, prices will fall, but no new jump in quality. What I see (hope) as the next jump is "experience immersion". When I take a picture or short movie with my digital camera, I want the audience to fell exactly what I felt. When I hike a mountain at 5,000 meters, it's freezing, breathing is hard... I snapped a picture, but you can't see what experience it was. I'm willing to wait another 10 years, but this has to happen at some point. It's all about sharing our experiences, after all.
Alain - fairsoftware.net
I just went through the entire slide presentation. Scary how much we depend on DNS and how many tricks you can play if you can control name lookups.
I'm just happy there are very active people to take care of those issues!
Alain - fairsoftware.net
I take offense to that. Good coders deserve to be paid for the code they write.
If the only motivation for open source was to have a shiny resume to get a "real" job, it would be a sad day indeed.
Alain.
Sun is opening the source code of their processors because they are losing the battle against x86 processors. Their marketshare of workstations and servers (not to mention PCs) is crashing. They hope (it won't happen) to get some momentum, maybe some second-tier vendor will build their next chip using a T2. I believe a few did for the T1 (the previous open source processor from Sun). It made no difference in marketshare.
If (it won't happen) more chips use Sparc cores inside, then the need for Sparc software and knowledge will grow, and Sun will eventually profit. They don't want the Sparc ecosystem (whatever is left of it) to die.
So I'll thank Sun for releasing such a big piece of RTL. In the field of hardware design, I think it's the largest open chip available. It means EDA tools will have one more testcase, their quality will improve. And that, in the end, will help the entire semiconductor industry. But not Sun especially. I'd recommend to sell your SUN stock if you have any.
Hey, you just reminded me of similar fond memories I had long forgotten. In high school, the computer science teacher would always be asking us what we are up to, and she would try to learn from our code. But since we spent most of our time coding pranks that made fun of her, it was a lot of fun keeping the hidden messages from her view.