This is not news in the slightest. Regardless of the details or lack thereof, this architecture nears the end of its life. While extremely powerful, the power draw and heat generation is positively killer for the average system, and an annoying hurdle to jump for the serious custom PC builder. I had to fully watercool every 6800 I have owned just to keep the operating temperature at something that wouldn't be worrisome.
Let's be fair, the X800 is no slouch on power draw either. I am not trolling in the slightest.
What I am saying is that the future architectures that are down the pike, while designed for greater performance, also give much consideration to power draw and heat generation. The X850 series with its liquid metal cooling stock is a step in considerations of heat generation and power consumption. Nvidia's new core uses significantly less power if I read the latest buzz correctly.
This is the next great fight in the graphics card market: power and heat vs performace. Round 1, fight.
To say this is to not have a clue of just how much power these consoles draw. Unlike PC power supplies which may draw much more voltage than is needed for the average hardware inside, the console has traditionally been designed for a lower voltage draw with more of an appliance design in mind. Your sarcasm being noted, would you prefer these parents to buy a bunch of PCs which waste more energy, or a few consoles?
Aside from sarcasm, promoting distributed processing to more than just PCs is a welcome move. There is so much data out there that has yet to be processed, and we should not stand in the way of increased clock times for that data to be processed. It's not like we are promoting nuclear power plants in the backyard.... these are standard electical devices.
I concede the first point you addressed. Upon further consideration, Joe Schmo didn't break the email: the email was broken to harm Joe Schmo. Duh and duh.
The average user not seeing the computer as a general machine is a problem that should have never happened. There are plenty of users that run more than one type of application. How, then, does one reach the prismatic perception you describe of the end user? Plenty of non-technical end-users do not suffer from this predeliction. If a game, word processor, and a video conferencing application can run on the same device, clearly it is more advanced than the toaster oven. The appliance mentality fails, because most common dictionaries, which are supposed to be indicative of common vernacular, define appliances as single-purpose devices.
The personal offense bordered on a flamebait, and it was not meant that way. To be fair though, in the examples you cite, the taming is not so close to absolute. Apple's Unix basis, while reasonably tamed, still pops up the occasional unintelligible permissions error on the occasional installation, for example. Firefox has a perception of security, but it is difficult to gauge as it is not apparent that malware vendors have Firefox in their sights, considering the user base still pales to IE.
At the time of the purchase, there was no XP. This software also had been upgraded relatively seamlessly from older operating systems we had, so we had no way of knowing all of a sudden the product line got ditched and no more patching.
Your points are well taken, but I do take issue with a few of them, and feel it important to respond as follows.
"You're talking about educating human nature out of people." - If this was the implication derived, I spoke too strongly. I am not implying an absolute solution here, but I am implying we spend far more effort making bullet-proof software then slowing the sale of as many of the armor-piercing bullets as possible.
"The lesson of stories like this one are not that we need to somehow engineer smarter users -- it's that modern information systems are not designed around users to begin with." - Antivirus software, malware removers, spam-reducing solutions.... these are not designed around users? These systems were designed explicitly to deal with the consequences users encountered. They were not designed in a vaccuum: that is to say, it wasn't reduced to "what are the specs?". It was a bunch of companies capitalizing on the suffering USER base.
"But who would expect opening an e-mail to be a risky proposition?" - A person who has any idea that a computer is a general purpose machine. That is the point of its design. It can do MANY THINGS. Why should anyone be surprised when it does something new or malicious? IT IS COMPLETELY MALLEABLE! A user that does not know this was never given a proper foundation for operating the machine in the first place. The computer does not equal the toaster oven.
"Having to train users to do alien things should be taken as a sign that your system may not be so well-designed, not as a sign that we need to get cracking on Human Being 2.0." - Considering how at least a third of the world's adult population can't read in DEVELOPED nations, to say software that some users don't immediately understand and make the stretch to say the software sucks is quite a stretch to make. Why can't we assail all sides of these issues? Why must the responsibility be placed solely on the software developer, and the user be indemnified of all wrong-doing? You can't plan for every possible contigency as to why the problems of the IT world happen, but ruling out one possible angle that you can't disprove and blaming a group of people who, by and large, strive to produce workable solutions is an insult to the good work many among us have done.
"The 1/4 of longhorn's code will be in.Net"
Please cite your source, as I remember seeing stories here on/. to the contrary.
Like this. When one says native, it implies an implicit inability to be separated from any install of the OS. Foley's article seems sound enough for me to buy that.NET is no longer NATIVE, but an OPTION, despite having been promoted heavily. The code is not in Longhorn, it is an option just like MSN Messenger is an option.
These kinds of stories, while making the majority among us cringe at the stupidity of the user that falls for this, underlies an important point.
THIS IS WHAT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT HAS TO DEAL WITH!
Millions of man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars go down the tubes to user ignorance. As these costs spiral, the IT sector diminishes. At some point, we will have to stop the patchwork of protecting the users from themselves and engage in the proactive education from these people so they don't hurt themselves and cost their companies, ISPs, and our economy in lost man hours and dollars. How to do this merits exploration, as for every new procedure we establish to protect the user, the user seems to find a way to break it somehow.
I can recall similar tales of various versions of NT back in the day suffering from slow adoption. Aside from what has been previously stated in this thread about just what XP offers to business users as opposed to 2000 (almost nothing), let's keep mitigating factors in mind.
The enterprise costs of XP in support are greater than 2000 in a number of cases. Many companies bought into 2000 in the very beginning, and got hardware that worked at that time. Resources are a problem for many of the machines built OEM for Win2k. Additionally, compatibility issues with other software and hardware solutions arise. Speaking from personal experience, our company committed to a software phone system which, as it turned out when we tried to upgrade to XP, just STOPPED WORKING. This is really bad for a CALL CENTER. Compatibility issues such as these mar XP's widespread corporate adoption.
I will go so far as to predict Longhorn will have the same adoption problem if Redmond continues current patterns. With WinFS and.NET being scrapped as native to the OS, there are less headaches than one could initially surmise. I will stress, however, that the pattern of not being able to get something to work right and trashing it demonstrates a development problem which, if not rectified by now or soon, could result in an extremely poor product coming out of Redmond. They need to be at the top of their game, as their enemies come from all fronts with attractive offerings of their own these days...
All of the forces of the universe cannot save Disney in its present form. Should they produce better works, they might hold on to some blind and hardcore Disney fans. What Hayao Miyazaki can do is begin a reshaping for Disney. Very few companies can make so many blunders and have a chance to stay afloat. They should take the hint and redefine themselves to stay alive.... because I don't see longevity for this company if they blunder this time.
Either that, or how Slashdot posters are becoming Apple's show pony by keeping this story burning when we truly need to see what comes of this pairing before levelling judgment?
Seriously, I don't see the point of venom unless Apple thunders into x86 country with poor offerings.
Two words one never strings together.... understandable and wrong. This is, however, the perception of the EU's debate over the extension of length of copyrights. I will also preface my remarks by outright stating my anathema towards IP and its handling in the US.
That having been said....
Imagine for a moment that you are a patent holder in the US. You put out a product that does well in the US. Now imagine another patent holder from the EU. His product does well in the EU. Assuming both do well in their respective markets, the US patent holder garners revenue for use of the patent long after the EU patent holder does. What are EU innovators to do?
Leave the EU, that's what.
Aside from the right or wrong of IP, the EU seemingly wishes to address this long-term market value of a work and adjust to losing innovators overseas to the US. How to properly deal with that is another matter, but we must be careful to acknowledge all aspects of the issue.
I concur, and this is why I regret using the world monopoly when I wanted to speak to market share concerns. It was hyperbolic of me, and I take the remark back and apologize.
Then again, what about iTunes tracks only working on iPods and not other music players? One could perceive this as monopolistic, and then the monopoly point would be non-hyperbolic.
While this could, why wouldn't the RIAA be more openly proclaiming this? Wouldn't it be in the interest of this group to maximize points of sale to maximize the revenues they assert they are hemorrhaging due to piracy and the like?
It seems more likely that the artist owns the track, and Apple owns the method of transmission itself as a result.
Assuming this isn't a lie, this would constitute a majority of the market share, and begins to breach monopoly status. I was speaking to a more general point, however, in regards to loss of market share. Call it hyperbole if you wish. Here's some more support of the market penetration in the legal downloading category by iTunes.
"... Microsoft is also considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they've purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod."
Wouldn't Microsoft's new service, to remain legal, have to verify that the purchase was in fact made from iTunes, and that the purchase was made by that subscription holder and not another? To do this, wouldn't Microsoft need the purchase data and information from Apple, or at least a mechanism for obtaining it? Absent these assurances that the music is in fact purchased, what is the difference between this idea and JHymn?
What are the chances that Apple will give ground to Microsoft, release all their information, and set themselves up for loss of the market monopoly? They need to survive long enough (Apple) for the Intel announcement to bear fruit.... they risked enough revenue announcing this early as it is. Apple would undoubtedly focus on the fact that while the artist owns the music, who is providing the service, servers, and the encoding for the files? Undoubtedly there are other contractual ties as well between artist, label, and iTunes restricting this. Would Apple be that fast and loose with their service? Is there any direct evidence to believe as such?
Yes but that is typical conversion in code that is not multi-platform. I assume the question was directed at matters aside from syntactical adjustment.
It would truly depend what they used to write it. It seems difficult to say at this stage of the game.... I would guess some kind of C, but the question of what they use to render the visualization is suspect. Do they use Direct X? OpenGL?
Unless they truly use some concoted scheme for the other logic, only the way in which the vis is rendered is an issue.... I never used the winamp plugins, but writing software all day, if my boss plunked that on my desk that would be my first thought..
SETI engages in seeking distributed computing power through legitimate means..... to endorse this would undermine the purpose of SETI in the first place.
To condone users' computers being used for someone else's profit without their knowledge is a vicious form of exploitation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not news in the slightest. Regardless of the details or lack thereof, this architecture nears the end of its life. While extremely powerful, the power draw and heat generation is positively killer for the average system, and an annoying hurdle to jump for the serious custom PC builder. I had to fully watercool every 6800 I have owned just to keep the operating temperature at something that wouldn't be worrisome.
Let's be fair, the X800 is no slouch on power draw either. I am not trolling in the slightest.
What I am saying is that the future architectures that are down the pike, while designed for greater performance, also give much consideration to power draw and heat generation. The X850 series with its liquid metal cooling stock is a step in considerations of heat generation and power consumption. Nvidia's new core uses significantly less power if I read the latest buzz correctly.
This is the next great fight in the graphics card market: power and heat vs performace. Round 1, fight.
To say this is to not have a clue of just how much power these consoles draw. Unlike PC power supplies which may draw much more voltage than is needed for the average hardware inside, the console has traditionally been designed for a lower voltage draw with more of an appliance design in mind. Your sarcasm being noted, would you prefer these parents to buy a bunch of PCs which waste more energy, or a few consoles?
Aside from sarcasm, promoting distributed processing to more than just PCs is a welcome move. There is so much data out there that has yet to be processed, and we should not stand in the way of increased clock times for that data to be processed. It's not like we are promoting nuclear power plants in the backyard.... these are standard electical devices.
I concede the first point you addressed. Upon further consideration, Joe Schmo didn't break the email: the email was broken to harm Joe Schmo. Duh and duh.
The average user not seeing the computer as a general machine is a problem that should have never happened. There are plenty of users that run more than one type of application. How, then, does one reach the prismatic perception you describe of the end user? Plenty of non-technical end-users do not suffer from this predeliction. If a game, word processor, and a video conferencing application can run on the same device, clearly it is more advanced than the toaster oven. The appliance mentality fails, because most common dictionaries, which are supposed to be indicative of common vernacular, define appliances as single-purpose devices.
The personal offense bordered on a flamebait, and it was not meant that way. To be fair though, in the examples you cite, the taming is not so close to absolute. Apple's Unix basis, while reasonably tamed, still pops up the occasional unintelligible permissions error on the occasional installation, for example. Firefox has a perception of security, but it is difficult to gauge as it is not apparent that malware vendors have Firefox in their sights, considering the user base still pales to IE.
At the time of the purchase, there was no XP. This software also had been upgraded relatively seamlessly from older operating systems we had, so we had no way of knowing all of a sudden the product line got ditched and no more patching.
Your points are well taken, but I do take issue with a few of them, and feel it important to respond as follows.
"You're talking about educating human nature out of people."
- If this was the implication derived, I spoke too strongly. I am not implying an absolute solution here, but I am implying we spend far more effort making bullet-proof software then slowing the sale of as many of the armor-piercing bullets as possible.
"The lesson of stories like this one are not that we need to somehow engineer smarter users -- it's that modern information systems are not designed around users to begin with."
- Antivirus software, malware removers, spam-reducing solutions.... these are not designed around users? These systems were designed explicitly to deal with the consequences users encountered. They were not designed in a vaccuum: that is to say, it wasn't reduced to "what are the specs?". It was a bunch of companies capitalizing on the suffering USER base.
"But who would expect opening an e-mail to be a risky proposition?"
- A person who has any idea that a computer is a general purpose machine. That is the point of its design. It can do MANY THINGS. Why should anyone be surprised when it does something new or malicious? IT IS COMPLETELY MALLEABLE! A user that does not know this was never given a proper foundation for operating the machine in the first place. The computer does not equal the toaster oven.
"Having to train users to do alien things should be taken as a sign that your system may not be so well-designed, not as a sign that we need to get cracking on Human Being 2.0."
- Considering how at least a third of the world's adult population can't read in DEVELOPED nations, to say software that some users don't immediately understand and make the stretch to say the software sucks is quite a stretch to make. Why can't we assail all sides of these issues? Why must the responsibility be placed solely on the software developer, and the user be indemnified of all wrong-doing? You can't plan for every possible contigency as to why the problems of the IT world happen, but ruling out one possible angle that you can't disprove and blaming a group of people who, by and large, strive to produce workable solutions is an insult to the good work many among us have done.
"The 1/4 of longhorn's code will be in .Net"
Please cite your source, as I remember seeing stories here on /. to the contrary.
Like this. When one says native, it implies an implicit inability to be separated from any install of the OS. Foley's article seems sound enough for me to buy that .NET is no longer NATIVE, but an OPTION, despite having been promoted heavily. The code is not in Longhorn, it is an option just like MSN Messenger is an option.
These kinds of stories, while making the majority among us cringe at the stupidity of the user that falls for this, underlies an important point.
THIS IS WHAT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT HAS TO DEAL WITH!
Millions of man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars go down the tubes to user ignorance. As these costs spiral, the IT sector diminishes. At some point, we will have to stop the patchwork of protecting the users from themselves and engage in the proactive education from these people so they don't hurt themselves and cost their companies, ISPs, and our economy in lost man hours and dollars. How to do this merits exploration, as for every new procedure we establish to protect the user, the user seems to find a way to break it somehow.
I can recall similar tales of various versions of NT back in the day suffering from slow adoption. Aside from what has been previously stated in this thread about just what XP offers to business users as opposed to 2000 (almost nothing), let's keep mitigating factors in mind.
.NET being scrapped as native to the OS, there are less headaches than one could initially surmise. I will stress, however, that the pattern of not being able to get something to work right and trashing it demonstrates a development problem which, if not rectified by now or soon, could result in an extremely poor product coming out of Redmond. They need to be at the top of their game, as their enemies come from all fronts with attractive offerings of their own these days...
The enterprise costs of XP in support are greater than 2000 in a number of cases. Many companies bought into 2000 in the very beginning, and got hardware that worked at that time. Resources are a problem for many of the machines built OEM for Win2k. Additionally, compatibility issues with other software and hardware solutions arise. Speaking from personal experience, our company committed to a software phone system which, as it turned out when we tried to upgrade to XP, just STOPPED WORKING. This is really bad for a CALL CENTER. Compatibility issues such as these mar XP's widespread corporate adoption.
I will go so far as to predict Longhorn will have the same adoption problem if Redmond continues current patterns. With WinFS and
All of the forces of the universe cannot save Disney in its present form. Should they produce better works, they might hold on to some blind and hardcore Disney fans. What Hayao Miyazaki can do is begin a reshaping for Disney. Very few companies can make so many blunders and have a chance to stay afloat. They should take the hint and redefine themselves to stay alive.... because I don't see longevity for this company if they blunder this time.
Either that, or how Slashdot posters are becoming Apple's show pony by keeping this story burning when we truly need to see what comes of this pairing before levelling judgment?
Seriously, I don't see the point of venom unless Apple thunders into x86 country with poor offerings.
"It is really hard to build a solid desktop OS when you've got thousands of developers operating independently or in small groups."
It is really hard to build a consortium to state a common direction telling OSS coders how to code without smacking of FUD tactics.
It is not impossible, but care must be taken.
What if those who have it don't want to leak it via a torrent for other reasons?
I got it privately actually, so as for where to download it, undoubtedly torrents have been seeded.
You would probably find it interesting to know it just booted on my Athlon 64 X2.
Not for the common consumer.... but what about the market that just lost revenue?
These bodies aren't in existence to lose money, are they?
The point being that this is revenue generated outside the EU that they are making.
Was I wrong to say move? Yes.
Is it wrong to say this revenue is NOT being made in the EU? I don't think so. That is the point I was shooting for....
Two words one never strings together.... understandable and wrong. This is, however, the perception of the EU's debate over the extension of length of copyrights. I will also preface my remarks by outright stating my anathema towards IP and its handling in the US.
That having been said....
Imagine for a moment that you are a patent holder in the US. You put out a product that does well in the US. Now imagine another patent holder from the EU. His product does well in the EU. Assuming both do well in their respective markets, the US patent holder garners revenue for use of the patent long after the EU patent holder does. What are EU innovators to do?
Leave the EU, that's what.
Aside from the right or wrong of IP, the EU seemingly wishes to address this long-term market value of a work and adjust to losing innovators overseas to the US. How to properly deal with that is another matter, but we must be careful to acknowledge all aspects of the issue.
I concur, and this is why I regret using the world monopoly when I wanted to speak to market share concerns. It was hyperbolic of me, and I take the remark back and apologize.
Then again, what about iTunes tracks only working on iPods and not other music players? One could perceive this as monopolistic, and then the monopoly point would be non-hyperbolic.
Any thoughts?
While this could, why wouldn't the RIAA be more openly proclaiming this? Wouldn't it be in the interest of this group to maximize points of sale to maximize the revenues they assert they are hemorrhaging due to piracy and the like?
It seems more likely that the artist owns the track, and Apple owns the method of transmission itself as a result.
Well, is there any reason to think Apple is lying?
Assuming this isn't a lie, this would constitute a majority of the market share, and begins to breach monopoly status. I was speaking to a more general point, however, in regards to loss of market share. Call it hyperbole if you wish. Here's some more support of the market penetration in the legal downloading category by iTunes.
"... Microsoft is also considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they've purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod."
Wouldn't Microsoft's new service, to remain legal, have to verify that the purchase was in fact made from iTunes, and that the purchase was made by that subscription holder and not another? To do this, wouldn't Microsoft need the purchase data and information from Apple, or at least a mechanism for obtaining it? Absent these assurances that the music is in fact purchased, what is the difference between this idea and JHymn?
What are the chances that Apple will give ground to Microsoft, release all their information, and set themselves up for loss of the market monopoly? They need to survive long enough (Apple) for the Intel announcement to bear fruit.... they risked enough revenue announcing this early as it is. Apple would undoubtedly focus on the fact that while the artist owns the music, who is providing the service, servers, and the encoding for the files? Undoubtedly there are other contractual ties as well between artist, label, and iTunes restricting this. Would Apple be that fast and loose with their service? Is there any direct evidence to believe as such?
Doesn't make sense to me....
Yes but that is typical conversion in code that is not multi-platform. I assume the question was directed at matters aside from syntactical adjustment.
It would truly depend what they used to write it. It seems difficult to say at this stage of the game.... I would guess some kind of C, but the question of what they use to render the visualization is suspect. Do they use Direct X? OpenGL?
Unless they truly use some concoted scheme for the other logic, only the way in which the vis is rendered is an issue.... I never used the winamp plugins, but writing software all day, if my boss plunked that on my desk that would be my first thought..
It should scare everyone away.
Using legitimate programs for illegitimate means is garbage. It should not be funny to anyone for any reason.
SETI engages in seeking distributed computing power through legitimate means..... to endorse this would undermine the purpose of SETI in the first place.
To condone users' computers being used for someone else's profit without their knowledge is a vicious form of exploitation.