I've had some training in statistics, and I see a number of problems. First, the slashdot editors are making the perennial journalists' mistake of misinterpretting statistics. Statmarket only claims to be measuring web client usage, and doesn't make any claims about the desktop market in general (at least from what I saw).
In terms of the study itself, statmarket admits that the sample is "self-selected" rather than randomly selected. This results in a biased sample. In particular, since they are offering a service to business users, the sample is likely biased in favour of business sites. The bias is then against more "arty" or technologically-oriented sites, resulting in lower-than-expected numbers from Macintosh and Linux users. It might also be biased against home users.
That said, while the survey may be off by an order of magnitude, I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than an order of magnitude. Most other surveys don't put Linux usage at more than 2 or 3%
I'm having a hard time understanding what you've written! You're saying that the DRAM market is hard to understand because once you have it, you don't want it anymore? But isn't this true of most goods? Also, the "wearing out" bit doesn't make any sense: I have a Maytag washing machine that hasn't worn out since the days when DECs had 64K of memory. This doesn't make the market for washing machines any harder to understand.
How does having a huge domestic market imply you'll be in constant over-supply?
Rather than some pseudo-economic reasons as to why the DRAM market is bottoming out, how about some real ones. First it is a commodity, so there is no chance of making an "economic profit" on DRAM. Second, the main market for DRAM, personal computers, it itself declining, causing a decline in the DRAM market. Third, better technology has made DRAM cheaper and cheaper. While in the early days of computing, the declining cost of RAM was matched by increasing volumes (ie every computer coming with more RAM). Recently, however, the cost to produce a megabyte has been decreasing faster than the avg. megabyte/computer has been increasing.
Tisk tisk... if it's changing so often why it is integrated right into the logic of the code?...write a config file for other options
Right. C isn't interpretted. Don't be stupid and use an interpretted language. Just be smart and write an interpretter in C!!
There are definately cases where this approach makes sense (i.e. if you're writing a web server for millions of admins who really don't want to tinker with your code). There are cases where it is overkill (i.e. you need to toy with the UI of a small custom app). The danger of being a know-it-all is that you give people hammers when they definately don't have nails.
I can't really think of any basis for this to tell you the truth. Well designed c/c++ projects shouldn't be any harder to modify than any other language. If they are then the initial design is too inflexible which usually means the original coder didn't know the language at hand well enough to properly put together a project.
I can think of plenty of basis for this. Have you ever used any of the other languages? Have you ever felt the freedom from not having to chase stack overwrite bugs or memory leaks? Of not having to design your interface to track memory AND implement an algorithm rather than just designing it to implement an algorithm? The time spent on doing these needless tasks makes things harder to modify. And these are tasks which C++ forces you to do.
...just disagreeing with the overall "blanket" type nature of the post.
My sentiments exactly.
Re:Why does Gates get the credit ?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Please mod the parent down. It isn't insightful.
Gates liscensed DOS from SCP. SCP based their product on CP/M, originally written by Gary Kildall.
DOS was advanced by the standards of microcomputers of the day. CP/M's 16-bit version, CP/M-86 wasn't ready when MS-DOS 1.0 hit the market, and by the time CP/M-86 did ship, MS-DOS already hit version 2.0. Version 2 had neat-o features like subdirectories and a Unix-like C API that pushed it ahead of CP/M. CP/M eventually did surpass DOS, but it was called DR-DOS by that time.
Of course, DOS was well behind most all versions of Unix, including Microsoft's Xenix. Peter Norton once wrote that Xenix might have been the "operating system" of the future. Unfortunately, Mitch Kapor wrote Lotus 1-2-3 to run under MS-DOS rather than Xenix. In those days, people bought PCs to run Lotus. The operating system was just the black screen with gibberish text you saw before Lotus booted up.
Yes, the Windows API is a de facto standard controlled by Microsoft and not a "de jure" standard controlled by a "benevolent" organization, but it is a standard.
When 95% of the world's for-profit makers of end-user software want to write code, it is code for the Windows API. To me, that's a standard.
Because if Intel released it's compilers as open source, anyone (read: AMD) could look at Intel's optimizations and use that to make their chips better.
As we move to RISC VLIW processors, compilers become more and more important.
There is this story in the late 80's of how a lot of independent hardware vendors were choosing MIPS over SPARC because MIPS were perceived as being faster. Sun promptly hired MIPS' compiler team and found that, with their opimizations, the SPARC chips were actually faster. Of couse, by this time the market had moved to MIPS, so MIPS was able to pump more money into hardware R+D...
The meaning of randomness has to do with Kolmogorov complexity. While Kolmogorov was primarily a statistician, Kolmogorov complexity could actually be considered a topic in theoretical computer science.
Let's say you have a string s of length |s|. If the smallest possible Turing machine that can output s has size > |s|, then s is a random string.
On the other hand, if the smallest Turing machine that can output s has size some Turing machine exists that can write down s and yet is smaller than |s|. Thus pi isn't random.
NB: for the other poster who was trying to use information theory to prove pi isn't random, please not that the probability that the nth digit takes on a certain value is now known to be a deterministic function... this may change your results.
This post isn't insightful. Rather, it reminds me of the blindness the we (the Amiga crowd) once had.
The technology the programmer sees... the operating system, the API is irrelevent. The technology the end user sees is king.
The most important technology for PDAs is the ability to sync with their desktop mail & contact information. This is a technology that Psion doesn't have. The EPOC OS may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if you can't download the email addresses you entered in your PDA right to your mail program with ease, it's useless.
Also, on a more mundane note, the reason the first poster got the Psion for $100 was because of something called *a sale* (on a discontinued item, no less). You might look into the concept - in particular, it doesn't contract the fact that Psions are generally more expensive than Palms.
This is probably going to be a tough question for you (if you ever get it, that is - given the bias on Slashdot, this probably won't be modded up).
A big problem I see with your methodology is that you probably overcount Linux server shipments. From what I understand (I may be incorrect here) you count each sale of Linux as a server shipment. However, many of these copies may be tested but never used, a great many are used in home computers or development workstations. The problem is, unlike with Windows or OS/2, there is no ``client version'' vs. a ``server version''. There is no easy way to tell if a copy of Linux is used in a server environment or a client environment by sales figures alone. So my question is: given total Linux sales figures, how do you estimate the number used in server environments?
Secondly, is it possible that the descrepancy between your numbers and Gartners' is due to a problem in the way you estimate Linux server sales?
I don't think consumers will be dumb enough to allow the record and movie industries to move from selling copies to selling licenses. Nor will they allow themselves to be duped into high-costing service contracts.
First, service contracts exist in the computer industry because computers are relatively complicated beasts. Most people have a hard time figuring them out. Most people, on the other hand, can play videotapes, DVDs or CDs. Would people switch from something they know and understand to something they don't and costs more and gives no additional benefit? Nope. If Sony and Phillips decide to stop making CD players or VCRs and move to proprietary formats with high service costs, they will quickly learn why OS/2 failed to catch on in the late 80's : clone killers don't work. (NB: It failed to catch on in the early 90's for different reasons). If Sony and Phillips don't make it, the 2nd tier players will fill up the space.
Second, licensing in the software industry exists for a number of reasons. Again, it is more complicated than songs or movies, and has a high probability of having bugs in it. If you sold software, all sorts of people would cash in their warranties. With licensing, you don't need to make warranties, and you get away with having bugs. How many bugs are there in music or video? That's right - unless the CD or videotape is broken, there is nothing stopping you from using the product.
In short, Suck is spewing without understanding why things are the way they are in the software industry - namely, software and computers are hellishly more complicated to use than movies or music. I don't see how the MPAA or RIAA can use software tactis in their industries when it is so easy to "just press play" to use their wares.
Your post "Good Law But illegal under FTAA" is probably referring to Chapter 11 of the FTAA. I suggest you reread Chapter 11 and the details of the case you mention.
Chapter 11 allows companies to sue governments if governments enacts legislation that decrease corporate profits DUE TO TRADE BARRIERS. The last part is capitalized because I think that's the key point you're missing.
You can restrict commerce to all hell, but as long as foreign goods or services are restricted as much as local ones, Chapter 11 is useless.
I'm not as familiar with the Canada Post case as with another common complaint (the Ethyl Corp one - which most anti-free traders get wrong as well), but my understanding is that it didn't have as much to do with Canada Post being a Crown (ie, government owned) company as much as Canada Post owning and subsidizing Purilator Courrier, a large Fed-Ex-like company.
If the proposed legislation had a statue where an Argentine company could sell non-free software, but Microsoft couldn't, then FTAA would have something to say about it. As it is, Argentine companies are treated on the same grounds as foreign companies, so a company like Microsoft (or Corel in Canada or Connectiva in Brazil) have no recourse through FTAA (as they should).
This is probably too late in the discussion for anyone to see this, but an interesting tidbit is that the $1 billion IBM is spending on Informix, they are spending on something.... that was made from the same codebase as Postgres!!!
Computer Associates' Ingres is another Postgres-based commercial database.
Of course, both these databases have many enterprise-level features Informix doesn't...
Take your pick (listed in order of size by revenue):
General Electric (owns NBC)
AT&T (owns world's largest content delivery system, stake in portal/ISP excite@home, Liberty Media)
NT&T (cable & telephone monopoly in Japan)
Deutch Telekom (cable & telephone monopoly in Germany)
AOL/TimeWarner (need I say anything?)
Disney
Vivendi
Microsoft (2nd largest ISP/portal, partner in DreamWorks)
Bertlesmann (publishing giant, Napster partner)
News Corp (own Fox Networks, studio, magazines)
BCE (owns canada's largest private network and biggest national newspaper along with satellite TV)
OOPS that's more than 6 and I still haven't got to most of the newspaper companies, the radio company they mentioned in the article, or regional media firms (beleive it or not, you can't get ABC-NBC-CBS-Fox in Germany)
Will someone please tell me which six they are talking about?
The article got it wrong, too. Obviously, they didn't have a computer scientist as a peer reviwer. So much for the theory that all scientists are computer scientists...
The editor got it wrong, and so did a number of posters, but here is a quick run down of some major complexity categories:
NP: A problem which can be *verified* in polynomical time. This even includes constant time problems, like, is 5*6=42?
P: problems in NP that can be solved in polynomial time (ie quickly)
NP-hard: those problems in NP that can't be solved in P-time. This is probably what all Slashdotters mean when they say "NP".
NP-complete: a class of problems that all other problems in NP reduce to. One of the biggest open questions in computer science is determining if any NP-complete problem does not reduce to any problem in P (then any NP-hard problem would have any easy solution...)
Don't forget that NCR invented the idea of a palmtop "pen" computer in the late eighties and early ninties.
NCR, and later Apple, threw a lot of money at pen computing before Palm got it right. Did Palm learn from NCR's mistakes, or would they have gotten everything right on the first try?
Of course, when people say that "design" will save the world, they usually mean their idea of design, which might not jibe with yours or mine.
No timothy, when they say "design", I beleive they are referring to things like usability testing. In other words, taking a software package to groups of users, and designing statistically sound experiments to see what users find easy and fast to use. In other words, users ideas of good design - not yours, not mine.
Moreover, I think they are also saying that VC's should at least be aware of what theoreticians are thinking about so they make better use of their investor's dollars
Oh dear. While the poster does a good job of explaining how collusive oligopolies can be thought of as monopolies, this post does not deserve a +5 score.
The problem is that cable companies don't acheive their monopolies through collusion but rather through spatial monopolies. For instance, here in Canada, there are a number of cable companies: Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, etc. However, my only choice in cable company is Rogers Cable or no cable.
The problem is that Shaw and Videotron only have cable running to people's houses in their territories. The situation is no different in the US (or for that matter, pretty much anywhere in the developed world). If you have AT&T you can't pick TW. This is a monopoly.
Are these monopolies dangerous? In some sense, because they do control the flow of information into households, this might be a problem. However, as time goes on, there are more and more sources of information (ie dialup internet, satellite TV & internet, not to mention newspapers, magazines, etc).
Oh, and BTW, check out AT&T's website. There you'll see that, far from being in danger of buying more cable networks, the US's largest cable system is actually selling off parts of it's network.
After the great earthquake, San Fransisco was rebuilt in a matter of months. Why? Although all the buildings were totalled, the people (well, most of the people) with the know-how to rebuild it were still around.
Fortunately, in the computer business, many of the people who built the first computers are still around. Even if they were gone, humans often strive to greatness in the face of necessity - engineers, physics and computer scientists could work together for once (ie no "sorry, that's a hardware problem...";) to rebuild knowledge of the basics.
How would we do it? Well, I probably don't know enough about hardware to say for sure. At the worst, we could go through the stages we went through the first time, to bootstrap ourselves to the next level, relearning lessons that we didn't think we'd need to know. At best, we can skip some stages (I think basic photolithography could be done without going through the transistor stage).
What would be different? Well, some serious architectural mistakes were made for historical reasons - path dependence and all that (ie the best choice in 1981 may not be the best choice today, but we are locked in by yesterday's decisions). All our chips would probably be RISC VLIW. All COBOL code would be rewritten in Visual BASIC, Java or C++.
However, if we happened to be attacked by aliens while we were rebuilding, well, then all our base would belong to them.
When does ignorance turn into FUD?
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 3
Justin,
Thanks for the informative post on KDE. However, while your information about KDE is useful, it worries me that your post got modded to +5, Informative given that you do state some things about GNOME which are at best ill researched, at worst... FUD.
I remember a quote... "never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by ignorance." And honestly, much of the FUD ever laid against the Amiga, or OS/2, or th Mac, or Linux was not so much based on malice as it was based on ignorance.
Now, what worries me is when FUD sligns not between big, bad, Windows, but between free software projects. Perhaps I'm over reacting, and yes - I know that people on "the other side" (ie GNOME users) do the same thing - but what I want to say is that we shouldn't think of people as one "one side" or the "other".
Does GNOME have comparable programs? Yes, another poster mentions some. Some of these programs, such as Gnumeric, are probably more functional than their KDE equivalents. But this isn't really the point. My underlying point is this: there's a thin line between cheerleading and FUD.... just be careful of it!
Slashdot Mirror
I've had some training in statistics, and I see a number of problems. First, the slashdot editors are making the perennial journalists' mistake of misinterpretting statistics. Statmarket only claims to be measuring web client usage, and doesn't make any claims about the desktop market in general (at least from what I saw).
In terms of the study itself, statmarket admits that the sample is "self-selected" rather than randomly selected. This results in a biased sample. In particular, since they are offering a service to business users, the sample is likely biased in favour of business sites. The bias is then against more "arty" or technologically-oriented sites, resulting in lower-than-expected numbers from Macintosh and Linux users. It might also be biased against home users.
That said, while the survey may be off by an order of magnitude, I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than an order of magnitude. Most other surveys don't put Linux usage at more than 2 or 3%
CaptainAlbert,
I'm having a hard time understanding what you've written! You're saying that the DRAM market is hard to understand because once you have it, you don't want it anymore? But isn't this true of most goods? Also, the "wearing out" bit doesn't make any sense: I have a Maytag washing machine that hasn't worn out since the days when DECs had 64K of memory. This doesn't make the market for washing machines any harder to understand.
How does having a huge domestic market imply you'll be in constant over-supply?
Rather than some pseudo-economic reasons as to why the DRAM market is bottoming out, how about some real ones. First it is a commodity, so there is no chance of making an "economic profit" on DRAM. Second, the main market for DRAM, personal computers, it itself declining, causing a decline in the DRAM market. Third, better technology has made DRAM cheaper and cheaper. While in the early days of computing, the declining cost of RAM was matched by increasing volumes (ie every computer coming with more RAM). Recently, however, the cost to produce a megabyte has been decreasing faster than the avg. megabyte/computer has been increasing.
*sigh* another know-it-all :)
...just disagreeing with the overall "blanket" type nature of the post.
Tisk tisk... if it's changing so often why it is integrated right into the logic of the code?...write a config file for other options
Right. C isn't interpretted. Don't be stupid and use an interpretted language. Just be smart and write an interpretter in C!!
There are definately cases where this approach makes sense (i.e. if you're writing a web server for millions of admins who really don't want to tinker with your code). There are cases where it is overkill (i.e. you need to toy with the UI of a small custom app). The danger of being a know-it-all is that you give people hammers when they definately don't have nails.
I can't really think of any basis for this to tell you the truth. Well designed c/c++ projects shouldn't be any harder to modify than any other language. If they are then the initial design is too inflexible which usually means the original coder didn't know the language at hand well enough to properly put together a project.
I can think of plenty of basis for this. Have you ever used any of the other languages? Have you ever felt the freedom from not having to chase stack overwrite bugs or memory leaks? Of not having to design your interface to track memory AND implement an algorithm rather than just designing it to implement an algorithm? The time spent on doing these needless tasks makes things harder to modify. And these are tasks which C++ forces you to do.
My sentiments exactly.
Please mod the parent down. It isn't insightful.
Gates liscensed DOS from SCP. SCP based their product on CP/M, originally written by Gary Kildall.
DOS was advanced by the standards of microcomputers of the day. CP/M's 16-bit version, CP/M-86 wasn't ready when MS-DOS 1.0 hit the market, and by the time CP/M-86 did ship, MS-DOS already hit version 2.0. Version 2 had neat-o features like subdirectories and a Unix-like C API that pushed it ahead of CP/M. CP/M eventually did surpass DOS, but it was called DR-DOS by that time.
Of course, DOS was well behind most all versions of Unix, including Microsoft's Xenix. Peter Norton once wrote that Xenix might have been the "operating system" of the future. Unfortunately, Mitch Kapor wrote Lotus 1-2-3 to run under MS-DOS rather than Xenix. In those days, people bought PCs to run Lotus. The operating system was just the black screen with gibberish text you saw before Lotus booted up.
Yes, the Windows API is a de facto standard controlled by Microsoft and not a "de jure" standard controlled by a "benevolent" organization, but it is a standard.
When 95% of the world's for-profit makers of end-user software want to write code, it is code for the Windows API. To me, that's a standard.
Because if Intel released it's compilers as open source, anyone (read: AMD) could look at Intel's optimizations and use that to make their chips better.
As we move to RISC VLIW processors, compilers become more and more important.
There is this story in the late 80's of how a lot of independent hardware vendors were choosing MIPS over SPARC because MIPS were perceived as being faster. Sun promptly hired MIPS' compiler team and found that, with their opimizations, the SPARC chips were actually faster. Of couse, by this time the market had moved to MIPS, so MIPS was able to pump more money into hardware R+D...
OK, OK pure caching is out of the question.
But one more question:
If google can link to both the original document and a cached copy, then why can't Slashdot?
The meaning of randomness has to do with Kolmogorov complexity. While Kolmogorov was primarily a statistician, Kolmogorov complexity could actually be considered a topic in theoretical computer science.
Let's say you have a string s of length |s|. If the smallest possible Turing machine that can output s has size > |s|, then s is a random string.
On the other hand, if the smallest Turing machine that can output s has size some Turing machine exists that can write down s and yet is smaller than |s|. Thus pi isn't random.
NB: for the other poster who was trying to use information theory to prove pi isn't random, please not that the probability that the nth digit takes on a certain value is now known to be a deterministic function... this may change your results.
Pray tell, how is buying a stake in a company that is pegged to go under anti-competitive?
Rumors have it that CmdrTaco and Hemos are astroturfing Slashdot...
So that's where all the first posts come from...
This post isn't insightful. Rather, it reminds me of the blindness the we (the Amiga crowd) once had.
The technology the programmer sees... the operating system, the API is irrelevent. The technology the end user sees is king.
The most important technology for PDAs is the ability to sync with their desktop mail & contact information. This is a technology that Psion doesn't have. The EPOC OS may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if you can't download the email addresses you entered in your PDA right to your mail program with ease, it's useless.
Also, on a more mundane note, the reason the first poster got the Psion for $100 was because of something called *a sale* (on a discontinued item, no less). You might look into the concept - in particular, it doesn't contract the fact that Psions are generally more expensive than Palms.
Hi Dan,
This is probably going to be a tough question for you (if you ever get it, that is - given the bias on Slashdot, this probably won't be modded up).
A big problem I see with your methodology is that you probably overcount Linux server shipments. From what I understand (I may be incorrect here) you count each sale of Linux as a server shipment. However, many of these copies may be tested but never used, a great many are used in home computers or development workstations. The problem is, unlike with Windows or OS/2, there is no ``client version'' vs. a ``server version''. There is no easy way to tell if a copy of Linux is used in a server environment or a client environment by sales figures alone. So my question is: given total Linux sales figures, how do you estimate the number used in server environments?
Secondly, is it possible that the descrepancy between your numbers and Gartners' is due to a problem in the way you estimate Linux server sales?
I don't think consumers will be dumb enough to allow the record and movie industries to move from selling copies to selling licenses. Nor will they allow themselves to be duped into high-costing service contracts.
First, service contracts exist in the computer industry because computers are relatively complicated beasts. Most people have a hard time figuring them out. Most people, on the other hand, can play videotapes, DVDs or CDs. Would people switch from something they know and understand to something they don't and costs more and gives no additional benefit? Nope. If Sony and Phillips decide to stop making CD players or VCRs and move to proprietary formats with high service costs, they will quickly learn why OS/2 failed to catch on in the late 80's : clone killers don't work. (NB: It failed to catch on in the early 90's for different reasons). If Sony and Phillips don't make it, the 2nd tier players will fill up the space.
Second, licensing in the software industry exists for a number of reasons. Again, it is more complicated than songs or movies, and has a high probability of having bugs in it. If you sold software, all sorts of people would cash in their warranties. With licensing, you don't need to make warranties, and you get away with having bugs. How many bugs are there in music or video? That's right - unless the CD or videotape is broken, there is nothing stopping you from using the product.
In short, Suck is spewing without understanding why things are the way they are in the software industry - namely, software and computers are hellishly more complicated to use than movies or music. I don't see how the MPAA or RIAA can use software tactis in their industries when it is so easy to "just press play" to use their wares.
Whoa a Linux enthusiast who has heard about Slashdot... WHAT A SURPRISE!!!
Oops that last line should have read "which is as it should be". Sorry!
IamLarryboy,
Your post "Good Law But illegal under FTAA" is probably referring to Chapter 11 of the FTAA. I suggest you reread Chapter 11 and the details of the case you mention.
Chapter 11 allows companies to sue governments if governments enacts legislation that decrease corporate profits DUE TO TRADE BARRIERS. The last part is capitalized because I think that's the key point you're missing.
You can restrict commerce to all hell, but as long as foreign goods or services are restricted as much as local ones, Chapter 11 is useless.
I'm not as familiar with the Canada Post case as with another common complaint (the Ethyl Corp one - which most anti-free traders get wrong as well), but my understanding is that it didn't have as much to do with Canada Post being a Crown (ie, government owned) company as much as Canada Post owning and subsidizing Purilator Courrier, a large Fed-Ex-like company.
If the proposed legislation had a statue where an Argentine company could sell non-free software, but Microsoft couldn't, then FTAA would have something to say about it. As it is, Argentine companies are treated on the same grounds as foreign companies, so a company like Microsoft (or Corel in Canada or Connectiva in Brazil) have no recourse through FTAA (as they should).
This is probably too late in the discussion for anyone to see this, but an interesting tidbit is that the $1 billion IBM is spending on Informix, they are spending on something.... that was made from the same codebase as Postgres!!!
Computer Associates' Ingres is another Postgres-based commercial database.
Of course, both these databases have many enterprise-level features Informix doesn't...
Take your pick (listed in order of size by revenue):
General Electric (owns NBC)
AT&T (owns world's largest content delivery system, stake in portal/ISP excite@home, Liberty Media)
NT&T (cable & telephone monopoly in Japan)
Deutch Telekom (cable & telephone monopoly in Germany)
AOL/TimeWarner (need I say anything?)
Disney
Vivendi
Microsoft (2nd largest ISP/portal, partner in DreamWorks)
Bertlesmann (publishing giant, Napster partner)
News Corp (own Fox Networks, studio, magazines)
BCE (owns canada's largest private network and biggest national newspaper along with satellite TV)
OOPS that's more than 6 and I still haven't got to most of the newspaper companies, the radio company they mentioned in the article, or regional media firms (beleive it or not, you can't get ABC-NBC-CBS-Fox in Germany)
Will someone please tell me which six they are talking about?
The article got it wrong, too. Obviously, they didn't have a computer scientist as a peer reviwer. So much for the theory that all scientists are computer scientists...
The editor got it wrong, and so did a number of posters, but here is a quick run down of some major complexity categories:
NP: A problem which can be *verified* in polynomical time. This even includes constant time problems, like, is 5*6=42?
P: problems in NP that can be solved in polynomial time (ie quickly)
NP-hard: those problems in NP that can't be solved in P-time. This is probably what all Slashdotters mean when they say "NP".
NP-complete: a class of problems that all other problems in NP reduce to. One of the biggest open questions in computer science is determining if any NP-complete problem does not reduce to any problem in P (then any NP-hard problem would have any easy solution...)
Don't forget that NCR invented the idea of a palmtop "pen" computer in the late eighties and early ninties.
NCR, and later Apple, threw a lot of money at pen computing before Palm got it right. Did Palm learn from NCR's mistakes, or would they have gotten everything right on the first try?
Of course, when people say that "design" will save the world, they usually mean their idea of design, which might not jibe with yours or mine.
No timothy, when they say "design", I beleive they are referring to things like usability testing. In other words, taking a software package to groups of users, and designing statistically sound experiments to see what users find easy and fast to use. In other words, users ideas of good design - not yours, not mine.
If you're interested, maybe read some sites on design.
Moreover, I think they are also saying that VC's should at least be aware of what theoreticians are thinking about so they make better use of their investor's dollars
Oh dear. While the poster does a good job of explaining how collusive oligopolies can be thought of as monopolies, this post does not deserve a +5 score.
The problem is that cable companies don't acheive their monopolies through collusion but rather through spatial monopolies. For instance, here in Canada, there are a number of cable companies: Rogers, Shaw, Videotron, etc. However, my only choice in cable company is Rogers Cable or no cable.
The problem is that Shaw and Videotron only have cable running to people's houses in their territories. The situation is no different in the US (or for that matter, pretty much anywhere in the developed world). If you have AT&T you can't pick TW. This is a monopoly.
Are these monopolies dangerous? In some sense, because they do control the flow of information into households, this might be a problem. However, as time goes on, there are more and more sources of information (ie dialup internet, satellite TV & internet, not to mention newspapers, magazines, etc).
Oh, and BTW, check out AT&T's website. There you'll see that, far from being in danger of buying more cable networks, the US's largest cable system is actually selling off parts of it's network.
Unlike some of the other posters, I'm optimistic.
;) to rebuild knowledge of the basics.
After the great earthquake, San Fransisco was rebuilt in a matter of months. Why? Although all the buildings were totalled, the people (well, most of the people) with the know-how to rebuild it were still around.
Fortunately, in the computer business, many of the people who built the first computers are still around. Even if they were gone, humans often strive to greatness in the face of necessity - engineers, physics and computer scientists could work together for once (ie no "sorry, that's a hardware problem..."
How would we do it? Well, I probably don't know enough about hardware to say for sure. At the worst, we could go through the stages we went through the first time, to bootstrap ourselves to the next level, relearning lessons that we didn't think we'd need to know. At best, we can skip some stages (I think basic photolithography could be done without going through the transistor stage).
What would be different? Well, some serious architectural mistakes were made for historical reasons - path dependence and all that (ie the best choice in 1981 may not be the best choice today, but we are locked in by yesterday's decisions). All our chips would probably be RISC VLIW. All COBOL code would be rewritten in Visual BASIC, Java or C++.
However, if we happened to be attacked by aliens while we were rebuilding, well, then all our base would belong to them.
Justin,
Thanks for the informative post on KDE. However, while your information about KDE is useful, it worries me that your post got modded to +5, Informative given that you do state some things about GNOME which are at best ill researched, at worst... FUD.
I remember a quote... "never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by ignorance." And honestly, much of the FUD ever laid against the Amiga, or OS/2, or th Mac, or Linux was not so much based on malice as it was based on ignorance.
Now, what worries me is when FUD sligns not between big, bad, Windows, but between free software projects. Perhaps I'm over reacting, and yes - I know that people on "the other side" (ie GNOME users) do the same thing - but what I want to say is that we shouldn't think of people as one "one side" or the "other".
Does GNOME have comparable programs? Yes, another poster mentions some. Some of these programs, such as Gnumeric, are probably more functional than their KDE equivalents. But this isn't really the point. My underlying point is this: there's a thin line between cheerleading and FUD.... just be careful of it!
Thanks,
Amit Dubey