What kind of person tries to develop applications without the proper tools? Visual Basic is a lot cheaper than a Macintosh.
On the other hand, if one is knowledgeable, it is very possible to write VBScript or JScript scripts with just a text editor. Those can drive Photoshop and iView Pro, and can talk ftp as well. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the submitter's ignorance, given the number of people suggesting batch files (yuck!).
If VBScript and JScript don't turn your crank, then it is quite possible to install some open source tools and do some automation with python, perl, or shell scripts. Perl and python can both be plugged into the Windows Scripting Host, so that you can use them to drive Photoshop and iView Pro.
The 970MP wouldn't be the same as the Freescale processor. The 970MP uses a different pipeline, and includes the 64-bit PowerPC instructions, unlike the Freescale processor.
The Freescale chip was deemed to hot to be used in an Apple laptop. Presumably the 970MP would be too hot as well, but the low power ones would be well suited to a laptop.
The obvious application for these newly announced chips will be low-end servers and workstations, particularly high density servers for the low power chips. I say low-end not because the chips are slow, but because IBM's OpenPOWER machines are pretty reasonably priced already. In fact, there's enough overlap that I'm not really sure how appealing the 970MP will be to anyone. Apple would have been an obvious customer, but that is pretty temporary, now.
I guess the big question is when these announced products will be released. Even when they do, the low power chips won't be competitive in performance with current Pentium M and Athlon 64 chips. I bet the same will apply to the dual core chips when compared with AMD's dual core Athlon 64 processors, also available now.
Still and all, Apple has been harping on about the superiority of PowerPC for so long that I'm even more surprised to see them switch when IBM has these things, which look like the answers to a couple of Apple's problems, coming up.
I'd be interested in seeing what Steve Jobs saw on Intel's roadmap for the next few years that convinced him...
Given that the hype is so high already, they may want everyone in silent mode so that there isn't so much hype-deflation going on. People don't believe the hype as much as they used to, and they may want to keep articles about prerendered demos, low performance processors, and GPUs that are available in PCs already out of the mainstream press.
He was wrong about the Mac-on-Intel thing. He said that Apple was going to use Itanium processors. So strike one against him.
As for Avalanche being FUD, it's not. Microsoft didn't announce it. Someone picked it up from an academic research conference. All sorts of stuff goes on under the banner of research, and no one that I know of at Microsoft is claiming that it will make it to market. BitTorrent has well known problems, and the researchers were presenting ideas to address those problems, but there was no message of BitTorrent is bad, don't use it. So Avalanche isn't FUD of any kind.
As for being vaporware, that's a bit premature. Since no one from Microsoft has indicated that there will be a product, it's not vaporware. I've thought about high performance web servers, but I've never announced the impending release of one, or even started developing one. Avalanche is no more vaporware than my high performance web server. Someone from Microsoft has to at least indicate an intention of releasing a product before it can be vaporware.
So I think you're dead wrong. JD isn't nailing the obvious. He's seen the broad side of the barn and thrown the basketball, but he sure didn't hit it.
It's not even a code name. Avalanche is an academic research product coming out of Microsoft's research organization. I guess there are not plans at Microsoft to make Avalanche into a product. If it were ever released, there is a decent chance it would be shared source, since researchers tend to like that kind of thing.
But, yeah, like he said. Avalanche isn't supposed to take over the world. It isn't a product, and it doesn't exist in source code form.
IBM does like open source in a number of places, but they don't seem to be shy about contributing themselves or hiring people who are already working on stuff they want. IBM may see open source as a way to share costs of development, but I suspect that it is more marketing position and increasing efficiency by avoiding internal politics that drives IBM to open source. IBM tries to be a good community player, and seems to be succeeding in most cases.
From the article: "I think that managed code is a way of referring to a structured component and we've got a number of names for them ourselves."
Aside from the interviewer not knowing what "managed code" is, I think that sums up a lot of IBM's difficulty. Everyone else does something simple, IBM does something complicated. Later in the article, Heintzman compares the Windows codebase with Lotus Notes. From the leaked source code, though, we know that the Windows codebase is very clean for its size. Complex and messy code affects every large piece of software, but Microsoft seems to have managed at least moderately well, perhaps unlike IBM.
In the sense they are reporting, Windows growth has been approximately zero for years. When you have a presences in every company, it's hard to increase the percentage of companies that are considering your software. The article does mention one company switching from Linux to Windows because they can't afford consultants to write Linux applications that their in-house Windows team can write at a third the price, but that is not the main point. The conclusion seems to be that Linux usually comes in as a proprietary UNIX replacement, and most companies with proprietary UNIX systems have already mixed in some Linux as well.
Well, let's just think about that. Perhaps you're familiar with the following instruction sequence from many PowerPC programs:
ld 0,0x10(1)
mtlr 0
blr
Of course, then you wonder what the ld 0,0x10(1) does. r1 is the stack pointer, and 0x10 is the standard offset onto the stack for storing the return address. Yuppers, you still need somewhere to store the return address, and the stack is the obvious place for that.
So my answer is that yes, you would have had exactly the same problems with that mechanism.
Does this mean that AOL is about to go the way of Netscape? I wonder if someone will pick up the software pieces and make something decent of them. Winamp is ok, but AIM is a much larger piece of the AOL hegemony. AIM has quality issues that make Microsoft look sweet and refreshing.
Personally, I'm very surprised that virus and worm makers haven't homed in on IM clients yet. I imagine AOL will be very hard hit when they do. Although, an open source AIM client that really was bigger than Mozilla might be able to turn that around.
IIS 6 already rivals (and may even exceed) Apache as far as security goes. These changes seem designed to reduce risk more than increase security, since the security is already there. The other features seem to address one of the biggest complaints with Windows from Administrators, namely that it is too centralized and too hard to administer remotely. Think of these as going further along the direction of the perfect operating system to run Hotmail on.
Even if Microsoft does release the most secure web server ever, they will still have a huge problem to address: how to convince customers to move off of IIS 5, which has been exploited many times. Until that happens, all the new features do them no good at all.
I think the issue is that Microsoft refuses to buckle down to pressure from Walmart. That situation is likely to continue as long as most computers are sold through outlets other than Walmart, which is a situation I hope continues indefinitely. Microsoft doesn't even come close to Walmart in terms of evilness. I'd go as far as to say that if you ripped out the last lab of Macs in your school district and replaced them with a bevy of Windows PCs and two moronic techs at $40k/year to maintain them, and you shop at Walmart, then the shopping at Walmart is the bigger moral outrage that you ought to fix first.
There is actually a theoretical reason why a reboot is a good idea in some cases (not just in kernel replacements, either). Not rebooting can leave long running programs using old versions of libraries, which is a bad thing if the the long running process is a server and the new version is a security fix. In some cases involving dynamic loading and linking of libraries, it can even result in unpredictable behavior, such as data loss or a crash (although it would the application crashing, not the OS).
The problem is pretty theoretical, but when I mentioned it to a friend who has administered Linux systems for clients, his response was, "Oh, so that's why that happens." He said that when upgrading libraries he would restart all his important long running processes because he had experienced problems in the past. So apparently this actually does affect people.
I actually prefer the Windows approach of forcing a reboot in order to preserve correctness. I'm not saying Microsoft gets it perfect; the number of reboots forced on a Windows system is way more than it should be. Microsoft has improved over time, but I hope (as a Windows user) that they improve a lot more. I also hope that someone finds a way to eliminate this problem on both platforms.
I haven't read this patent with a fine tooth disecting comb, but I've read a lot of the other patents criticized on this august form. Rather than defending something I haven't read, I'll give you the words of the author, which weren't reported in the story. I guess he deserves a little space to defend himself. Quoting Dan Crevier:
* Patents are written in legalese, not in english. Unless you are a patent lawyer, I don't think you can really judge them. That's why you see stories like Microsoft patenting the double-click or Apple patenting alpha compositing.
* This is not a patent for autocomplete. It is much more specific.
* We did innovate in this space in MacOE.
* Patents are a good defensive strategy for any company. We get sued all the time. Witness the current Eolas lawsuit.
* I think there are a lot of things that are lame about the patent system.
I really thought that the low quality of Slashdot could be blamed on the fact that the majority of readers were idiotic whining high school children. The fact that my age is younger than average is quite disturbing.
The 97% male thing is fully expected, though. I bet that the other 3% are visually indistinguishable from males.
Technically, that may be correct (Mach developed without aim for POSIX compliance), but considering the title of the original Mach paper was, "Mach: A New Kernel Foundation for UNIX Devlopment," it's a silly statement. Mach was made explicitly for implementing UNIX-like operating systems.
The level of Mach-iness of OS X is another good question, though. From what I gather, OS X looks more like a monolithic BSD kernel ported to a Mach/PPC architecture (where instead of targeting the PPC architecture, OS X's BSD kernel targets the higher level Mach abstractions), rather than a microkernel operating system of the type one would normally expect to find running on top of Mach.
What strikes me most when I talk to undergrads is how ignorant and unmotivated many of them are. Most of them are better off being put in an entry level job, because they really need more training and experience before they are suitable for anything else.
And the start-up-and-get-bought-out idea just doesn't work as well as Graham claims. I've seen it. Some few people get millions of dollars for their start-up companies, but most single person or very small operations that get bought out only take in a few hundred thousand. It works like this: smart and motivated guy has good idea and forms company, works hard for a few years making pennies and growing debts, gets bought out and ends with a plum job and a few hundred thousand in his pocket. It's only slightly ahead of plan B: smart and motivated guy gets entry level job and advances. It's behind plan C: smart and motivated guy gets entry level job, then gets poached by someone else and ends up with a plum job.
I've nothing against start-ups, and for smart and motivated undergrads who have a good idea that is actually marketable, a start-up may be a better option than a job or graduate studies. But my experience tells me that lots of companies will pay market value for smart and motivated people regardless of whether they come from a purchased start-up, or from the ranks of entry level people they hire. I'm sure there are lots of companies that won't do that, but good people can always choose to leave bad employers and take a different job.
Intel is certainly losing the x86 performance race to AMD right now, but they are still selling more 64-bit x86 desktop and server chips than AMD is. With lower prices, the same may well happen for Intel's dual core chips.
Intel is also ahead technologically, with their mobile Pentium-M line having lower power use and higher IPC than AMD's Athlon 64 line, while running at slightly lower clockspeeds. Even the lower clock speeds may be due more to the desire to keep power low for notebooks than the abilities of the chip. That's somewhat beside this story, though, since the Pentium-M chips are neither 64-bit nor dual core.
Photoshop can be driven by Javascript, VBscript and Applescript. Those aren't limited to Photoshop. Although, now that I think about it, the premise of Automator seemed to be that you could easily create scripts. So it's probably just using the existing scripting capability of Photoshop, but exposing it to users in a simpler package.
My guess is they are thinking something like, "No one will think that this is finished if we show something that doesn't even have the words shut down correct."
A nice strategy for presentations and demos is to make missing functionality look strange. That way when you give someone a screenshot and they see that the "Uplodes tests TOO DATABAse" button is bright orange and in an ugly font, they ask why, and you get to explain that that part isn't finished yet. It avoids the problem of people thinking that everything is finished just because there is a mock-up of the UI.
First SF for NASA, maybe; first OS, no
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
World Wind ( http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.html )is also open source. I think there are other NASA open source projects as well. This definitely isn't NASA's first venture into open source, although it may be their first project release on SourceForge.
The slate form is very nice when taking notes or sitting in tight quarters, but it sucks for coding. Plus, I'm a C++ person, so I don't mind multiple inheritance.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, if one is knowledgeable, it is very possible to write VBScript or JScript scripts with just a text editor. Those can drive Photoshop and iView Pro, and can talk ftp as well. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the submitter's ignorance, given the number of people suggesting batch files (yuck!).
If VBScript and JScript don't turn your crank, then it is quite possible to install some open source tools and do some automation with python, perl, or shell scripts. Perl and python can both be plugged into the Windows Scripting Host, so that you can use them to drive Photoshop and iView Pro.
The Freescale chip was deemed to hot to be used in an Apple laptop. Presumably the 970MP would be too hot as well, but the low power ones would be well suited to a laptop.
The obvious application for these newly announced chips will be low-end servers and workstations, particularly high density servers for the low power chips. I say low-end not because the chips are slow, but because IBM's OpenPOWER machines are pretty reasonably priced already. In fact, there's enough overlap that I'm not really sure how appealing the 970MP will be to anyone. Apple would have been an obvious customer, but that is pretty temporary, now.
Still and all, Apple has been harping on about the superiority of PowerPC for so long that I'm even more surprised to see them switch when IBM has these things, which look like the answers to a couple of Apple's problems, coming up.
I'd be interested in seeing what Steve Jobs saw on Intel's roadmap for the next few years that convinced him...
Given that the hype is so high already, they may want everyone in silent mode so that there isn't so much hype-deflation going on. People don't believe the hype as much as they used to, and they may want to keep articles about prerendered demos, low performance processors, and GPUs that are available in PCs already out of the mainstream press.
As for Avalanche being FUD, it's not. Microsoft didn't announce it. Someone picked it up from an academic research conference. All sorts of stuff goes on under the banner of research, and no one that I know of at Microsoft is claiming that it will make it to market. BitTorrent has well known problems, and the researchers were presenting ideas to address those problems, but there was no message of BitTorrent is bad, don't use it. So Avalanche isn't FUD of any kind.
As for being vaporware, that's a bit premature. Since no one from Microsoft has indicated that there will be a product, it's not vaporware. I've thought about high performance web servers, but I've never announced the impending release of one, or even started developing one. Avalanche is no more vaporware than my high performance web server. Someone from Microsoft has to at least indicate an intention of releasing a product before it can be vaporware.
So I think you're dead wrong. JD isn't nailing the obvious. He's seen the broad side of the barn and thrown the basketball, but he sure didn't hit it.
But, yeah, like he said. Avalanche isn't supposed to take over the world. It isn't a product, and it doesn't exist in source code form.
IBM does like open source in a number of places, but they don't seem to be shy about contributing themselves or hiring people who are already working on stuff they want. IBM may see open source as a way to share costs of development, but I suspect that it is more marketing position and increasing efficiency by avoiding internal politics that drives IBM to open source. IBM tries to be a good community player, and seems to be succeeding in most cases.
Aside from the interviewer not knowing what "managed code" is, I think that sums up a lot of IBM's difficulty. Everyone else does something simple, IBM does something complicated. Later in the article, Heintzman compares the Windows codebase with Lotus Notes. From the leaked source code, though, we know that the Windows codebase is very clean for its size. Complex and messy code affects every large piece of software, but Microsoft seems to have managed at least moderately well, perhaps unlike IBM.
In the sense they are reporting, Windows growth has been approximately zero for years. When you have a presences in every company, it's hard to increase the percentage of companies that are considering your software. The article does mention one company switching from Linux to Windows because they can't afford consultants to write Linux applications that their in-house Windows team can write at a third the price, but that is not the main point. The conclusion seems to be that Linux usually comes in as a proprietary UNIX replacement, and most companies with proprietary UNIX systems have already mixed in some Linux as well.
ld 0,0x10(1)
mtlr 0
blr
Of course, then you wonder what the ld 0,0x10(1) does. r1 is the stack pointer, and 0x10 is the standard offset onto the stack for storing the return address. Yuppers, you still need somewhere to store the return address, and the stack is the obvious place for that.
So my answer is that yes, you would have had exactly the same problems with that mechanism.
Personally, I'm very surprised that virus and worm makers haven't homed in on IM clients yet. I imagine AOL will be very hard hit when they do. Although, an open source AIM client that really was bigger than Mozilla might be able to turn that around.
Even if Microsoft does release the most secure web server ever, they will still have a huge problem to address: how to convince customers to move off of IIS 5, which has been exploited many times. Until that happens, all the new features do them no good at all.
I think the issue is that Microsoft refuses to buckle down to pressure from Walmart. That situation is likely to continue as long as most computers are sold through outlets other than Walmart, which is a situation I hope continues indefinitely. Microsoft doesn't even come close to Walmart in terms of evilness. I'd go as far as to say that if you ripped out the last lab of Macs in your school district and replaced them with a bevy of Windows PCs and two moronic techs at $40k/year to maintain them, and you shop at Walmart, then the shopping at Walmart is the bigger moral outrage that you ought to fix first.
The problem is pretty theoretical, but when I mentioned it to a friend who has administered Linux systems for clients, his response was, "Oh, so that's why that happens." He said that when upgrading libraries he would restart all his important long running processes because he had experienced problems in the past. So apparently this actually does affect people.
I actually prefer the Windows approach of forcing a reboot in order to preserve correctness. I'm not saying Microsoft gets it perfect; the number of reboots forced on a Windows system is way more than it should be. Microsoft has improved over time, but I hope (as a Windows user) that they improve a lot more. I also hope that someone finds a way to eliminate this problem on both platforms.
* Patents are written in legalese, not in english. Unless you are a patent lawyer, I don't think you can really judge them. That's why you see stories like Microsoft patenting the double-click or Apple patenting alpha compositing.
* This is not a patent for autocomplete. It is much more specific.
* We did innovate in this space in MacOE.
* Patents are a good defensive strategy for any company. We get sued all the time. Witness the current Eolas lawsuit.
* I think there are a lot of things that are lame about the patent system.
The 97% male thing is fully expected, though. I bet that the other 3% are visually indistinguishable from males.
The level of Mach-iness of OS X is another good question, though. From what I gather, OS X looks more like a monolithic BSD kernel ported to a Mach/PPC architecture (where instead of targeting the PPC architecture, OS X's BSD kernel targets the higher level Mach abstractions), rather than a microkernel operating system of the type one would normally expect to find running on top of Mach.
And the start-up-and-get-bought-out idea just doesn't work as well as Graham claims. I've seen it. Some few people get millions of dollars for their start-up companies, but most single person or very small operations that get bought out only take in a few hundred thousand. It works like this: smart and motivated guy has good idea and forms company, works hard for a few years making pennies and growing debts, gets bought out and ends with a plum job and a few hundred thousand in his pocket. It's only slightly ahead of plan B: smart and motivated guy gets entry level job and advances. It's behind plan C: smart and motivated guy gets entry level job, then gets poached by someone else and ends up with a plum job.
I've nothing against start-ups, and for smart and motivated undergrads who have a good idea that is actually marketable, a start-up may be a better option than a job or graduate studies. But my experience tells me that lots of companies will pay market value for smart and motivated people regardless of whether they come from a purchased start-up, or from the ranks of entry level people they hire. I'm sure there are lots of companies that won't do that, but good people can always choose to leave bad employers and take a different job.
Intel is also ahead technologically, with their mobile Pentium-M line having lower power use and higher IPC than AMD's Athlon 64 line, while running at slightly lower clockspeeds. Even the lower clock speeds may be due more to the desire to keep power low for notebooks than the abilities of the chip. That's somewhat beside this story, though, since the Pentium-M chips are neither 64-bit nor dual core.
As my uncle always says, "I'd rather push a Chrysler than drive a Ford." I believe him, too, based on the number of times he's done it.
Photoshop can be driven by Javascript, VBscript and Applescript. Those aren't limited to Photoshop. Although, now that I think about it, the premise of Automator seemed to be that you could easily create scripts. So it's probably just using the existing scripting capability of Photoshop, but exposing it to users in a simpler package.
What's that, when you stand behind an Apple X-Serve?
A nice strategy for presentations and demos is to make missing functionality look strange. That way when you give someone a screenshot and they see that the "Uplodes tests TOO DATABAse" button is bright orange and in an ugly font, they ask why, and you get to explain that that part isn't finished yet. It avoids the problem of people thinking that everything is finished just because there is a mock-up of the UI.
World Wind ( http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.html )is also open source. I think there are other NASA open source projects as well. This definitely isn't NASA's first venture into open source, although it may be their first project release on SourceForge.
The slate form is very nice when taking notes or sitting in tight quarters, but it sucks for coding. Plus, I'm a C++ person, so I don't mind multiple inheritance.