"The design of NT was exceptionally forward-thinking."
It was indeed.
"The problem is the lack of such foresight (or even just simple common sense) on behalf of application developers."
No, the problem is that most of the market was running Windows 9X, which was not remotely forward-looking in any shape or form. Thus, while many developers were using NT Workstation because it didn't fall over when debugging, loading the IDE, sitting there for an hour doing nothing, etc., market realities meant that they still had to target Win9X, despite the fact that many of them loathed it with a passion. And guess what? Nearly five years after the release of XP, a lot of us still have to target sodding Win9X, because significant numbers of people are still running the blasted thing.
Speak for yourself. I'm 46, and derive great pleasure from computer games, especially when my wife is watching some piece of dross on the TV that I don't like (to be fair, I like very little of what's on TV). Currently playing Morrowind and its two expansions (bargain bin price), and loving every single minute of it. And I know several extremely enthusiastic gamers with ages ranging from 40 to 55: we sometimes meet up to play networked versions of various games, and an excellent time is had by all.
NB: most older gamers seem to be male, which is likely due to the fact that women tend to become adults at a certain age, while men are simply bigger versions of kids who have lots more money to spend on toys.
"To try to come a bit on topic I would ask what would be the differences in science development had the Catholic religion been replaced by another religion. I mean, Catholisism brought the Inquisition and the so called Dark Ages (again I am just stating this from my very limited history knowledge) and in one way or another opaqued science development trough the ages. While to the best of my knowledge, religions as the Egypcian or Aztec promoted science (even before it was called science) on their own."
Religion and science tend to happily coexist when science does not contradict the basic tenets of the dominant religion. This was no more or less true of Catholicism than anything else: the inquisition was seldom invoked against scientists, doctors, engineers, etc., because few of them did anything that challenged the Church's authority. Even Galileo, who is often cited as an example of clerical repression of scientific thought actually caused most of his own problems. He had been told that he could freely publish his ideas about the Earth not being the centre of the Universe by the simple expedient of stating that it was a _theory_ (as Copernicus had), and he chose not to do this. Furthermore, his book was published in the form of a series of dialogues between a brilliant know-all based on himself, and a complete idiot who was obviously a caricature of the Pope. He thus did everything he possibly could to provoke the Church, so it is hardly surprising that they responded, yet his punishment was simply house arrest and being prohibited from publishing anything else -- positively benign when compared with what they did to religious heretics.
Any condemnation of Catholicism for repression of scientific thought must also consider that the Jesuit order, almost from its inception, has not only embraced science in general, but also produced a large number of excellent scientists (the debate between Galileo and some Jesuits during his trial is interesting, because they make him look quite foolish on several occasions). Not many other religions can claim to have an order almost exclusively dedicated to the pursuit of science, and it is the Jesuits as much as anyone who have resulted in Catholicism's eventual acceptance of a non-geocentric universe, the theory of evolution, and various other viewpoints which contradict a rigid interpretation of the Bible.
NB: I am not in any way defending Catholicism: the point of my post is simply to put it in context with other dominant religions, few of which have displayed any notable tolerance for opposing viewpoints (Buddhism being a notable exception).
They are charging a flat fee per item, not a percentage of the selling price for a product. MS have used the "percentage of selling cost" ploy to sting companies such as Stac and Spyglass, so they would hardly be silly enough to license their own technologies in a similar manner.
"We where wondering why did a religion from a poor, non important country/place like Israel (please correct me if I am wrong in the facts) or the Jews (in some way a minority) came to conquer the world?,"
Well, it hasn't exactly conquered the world: there are other religions which have rather more followers. So a better question would be: how did it conquer much of Europe, and by extension, areas colonized by Europeans? Answer: a Roman emperor called Constantine decided to adopt it as the "official" religion of Rome and her empire, mainly for political rather than religious reasons (he was not baptised himself until he was on his death bed).
"Being (on that time) the Romans the most powerful civilization, its religion is the one that *should* have dominated humankind (at least, being spread)."
You mean the old Roman religion, which was based on that of the Greeks? It didn't dominate the Roman world (which was far from being all of humankind) because it didn't insist that it was the _only_ religion, so people were free to have as many other religions as they liked as long as they observed certain aspects of the Roman one as well. This meant that while the Roman religion was in some respects compulsory throughout the empire, it happily coexisted with other religions such as Mithraism and Zoroastrianism because of its non-exclusive nature. And it was this non-exclusionary nature that led to its downfall from a religious perspective, because the majority of those who observed various aspects of it did so because it was required of them, while their actual religious beliefs were invested in something entirely different. Thus did Constantine adopt Christianity as the new Roman religion, because having something that people were required to believe rather than merely respect eliminated potential sources of friction between fanatical followers of other religions.
"Also, unlike Catholicism, other religions were not as "machista" (don't know the exact word in English) as it is. If you read the bible or study (as I did) 9 years in a catholic school you will realize that this religion is focused on men (masculine) and Women tends to be just something men owns in order to continue his legacy."
A good many of the ones you cite were even more "machista" than Roman Catholicism. Traditional Judaeism for example is extremely male-centred, and the Norse religion was even more so; same for those of the Aztecs and Mayas, most of the oriental ones, and the Graeco-Roman system (in which women really were property: a husband could kill his wife or children with no more legal repercussions than if he'd killed a pig for meat). All are all reflections of the societies of their practitioners, which were (and in many parts of the world still are) male-dominated.
"My opinion is that it would have been better if other religion (like Greek or Roman) was the one spread around the world."
They did spread a Roman religion around parts of the world: it's called Roman Catholicism.
It is wrong. Dell will use AMD when analysts start claiming that Dell will never use AMD, and not before. This is not because Dell are hanging on the analysts' every word, but is due to the fact that analysts are invariably wrong about everything.
The rumour sites and various analysts were also pretty sure there would be (variously) an Intel Mac Mini; a media centre Mac Mini; a Mac Mini with a dock for an iPod on top; and various combinations of the preceding. Meanwhile, the people at Apple were quietly working on (among other things) an Intel iMac, which nobody foresaw, and doubtless laughing themselves silly at all the wankers who were spouting the usual unfounded crap so that they can pretend they know something we don't, and therefore look important.
To avoid being disappointed in the future, it helps to remember a few facts:
1) There is one, and only one qualification that is necessary for the job of analyst: the ability to be completely and utterly wrong about everything all the time.
2) Both analysts and rumour sites often quote "unnamed sources inside Apple", implying that they have access to somebody _who knows about product development_, not their sister's best friend who knows someone that makes sandwiches in the Apple cafeteria, or drives a truck that picks up some of Apple's trash.
3) Wanting Apple to do certain things is not the same as Apple actually doing them. Publishing wish lists on web sites disguised as "rumours" does not therefore magically transform them into something that Apple will suddenly take notice of and do. This is especially the case when such disguised wish lists come from analysts, because Apple are fully aware of (1) above.
4) Apple react to a rumour about a future product in one of two ways: if it is wrong, they ignore it; if it is correct, they start suing rumour sites, and roasting the feet of employees in kilns until the source of the leak is identified and eliminated. Any rumour that does not elicit a flurry of threatening letters from lawyers and agonised screams during the night in Cupertino is therefore _wrong_.
Apple's developer transition information indicates that Intel Macs will use the new Intel / Microsoft Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is not BIOS or open firmware, but is conceptually similar to open firmware in a number of ways. This specification is newer than Windows/XP, so it is unlikely that current versions of Windows will install without some sort of emulation layer; Windows Vista on the other hand will be EFI-aware, and may therefore be directly installable on Intel Macs. Note though that a working, stable installation of Vista will very likely require drivers for various pieces of Mac-specific hardware, and the likelihood of Apple making these available is I think fairly remote. However, MS or third parties might offer them if there is enough demand -- Microsoft do after all already support the Mac in various ways, and would doubtless be very enthusiastic indeed about the idea of selling an extra few million copies of Vista to owners of Intel-based Macs.
NB: various versions of Linux are already EFI-aware, and it is likely that these will have driver support for the new Macs fairly soon after the Linux developer community gets their hands on some. This job is made easier by the fact that there is much less variance in Mac hardware than is the case for more "generic" PCs, and the very newness of the Intel versions means that there aren't even any legacy systems to worry about, a factor that will also doubtless be a consideration for the boys in Redmond.
The iMac is part of their "home line". If Apple's speed claims are correct (past experience would indicate that we should take them with several pinches of salt), it is now somewhat faster for most tasks than most of their "pro" PowerMac line. Of course, the fact that most OS X apps will be running via Rosetta will mean that it is unlikely to actually be faster in practice for a while at least.
Indeed, but this is a matter of consumer choice, not something that is inherent in the medium itself. There is a big difference between deciding to throw something away, and differences in media, formats, DRM etc. rendering something that has not been thrown away unreadable.
"As we saw in the late 90's - companies can't trade at insane levels without a supporting financial infrastructure. For GOOG to trade so highly means that either a) they are GOD and every other company out there knows it, or b) see item a."
It isn't so much that Google hasn't got an infrastructure as the fact that they aren't really doing anything particularly special. Their primary business is as a search engine whose revenue comes from advertising, and there were plenty of those with insane stock values prior to "the reckoning". What else do they offer? A free EMAIL service which is much like lots of others that were already around long before Google entered the fray; an instant messaging service, again much like others that were already around; a piece of Windows-only software for managing photos that they bought; and Google Earth, which is basically an atlas made up from satellite photos taken by others. They probably offer some things I forgot about, and yes, some of their services have a twist that the others don't, but the fact of the matter is that there's nothing particularly unique or innovative about what Google are doing.
Now, they're going to offer media downloads, just like Apple, and Yahoo, and Napster, etc. Ah, but these are TV shows and movies, which of course Apple have also been offering for a while now. Yet again, a "me too" service to go along with their existing "me too" services, yet the market will go crazy because it's Google, and Google can do no wrong.
Perhaps I'm too cynical: after all, MS have made a mint with "me too" services, and Yahoo seem to be doing fine with the same. But I cannot help remembering all those "me too" portals and companies selling dog food over the Internet that sprang up during the '90s, did an IPO, were worth billions in days, and made paper billionaires out of 19 year-olds. And lest we forget, it is largely the same analysts that boosted these fundamentally worthless companies who are now boosting Google, and many of the same people who threw money at them are now throwing it at the big G.
I am by no means anti-Google, and I wish them every success. But I cannot help having a unpleasant feeling of deja-vu after hearing that Google is now worth more than IBM, a company which has billions of dollars worth of real annual sales, and a considerable amount of valuable physical assets.
And dynamically typed languages tend to run poorly under Microsoft's CLR, while they work very well indeed with the JVM, despite the fact that it was primarily written for a statically typed language.
NB: while MS are aware of the CLR's issues with dynamic languages, and will in all likelihood resolve them in the not too distant future, I doubt that supporting C and C++ has any importance whatsoever for Sun or anyone else involved with the JVM's specifications. The CLR after all was primarily designed as a multi-language system, and turned out to be nothing like as multi-language as MS had intended; the JVM on the other hand was meant for Java, and ended up being suitable for lots of other languages largely by accident.
"I think Sony are trying to establish the e-book equivalent of the iPod"
There is however a notable difference in the market for recorded music and the one for books that invalidates such comparisons. The distribution media for recorded music has always required a playback device which has to be purchased separately, and the market has become completely accustomed to this. It has also become accustomed to the fact that there are usually several different music media formats, each of which requires a special device that must also be purchased, so they happily accept the fact that "digital music" requires "an iPod" to play it, just as CDs need a CD player, cassettes need a cassette player, etc. And they accept the fact that media formats become obsolete and fall into disuse over time, while other new ones appear, which again require specialist devices to play them.
Text storage media on the other hand have never, in the several thousand years since writing was invented, needed anything beyond at least one eye and a light source to view them. Unlike the iPod therefore, electronic book readers are trying to _establish a market_ where people pay extra for a device with the ability to play something that is already widely available in another format which does not require buying such a device. And while the E-Book readers have the singular advantage of allowing one to carry several books, most of the book-buying public have no real desire to do so. And this singular advantage must be weighed against several disadvantages:
1) Battery life. Irrespective of how long this is, the fact that books do not require batteries means that it will always be too short. Note also that battery life is more critical because of the difference in format: most popular music pieces last a few minutes, whereas books usually take several hours to read, so the effect of a battery failure in the middle of something can be a lot more annoying.
2) Media durability and long-term accessibility. How long does the media that E-Books are stored on last? Will we be able to access it with whatever passes for an E-Book reader in 50 or 100 years? Books can last for several centuries if they are cared for, and other book-like things (e.g. Egyptian papyri, vellum scrolls) have endured for thousands of years. And while such extreme durability is not a consideration for most book purchases, some degree of future accessibility is desirable. As an example, I have a large collection of SF, much of which was bought 2nd. hand over 30 years ago, and is now out of print. Yet all I have to do to read one of these books (not an uncommon occurrence) is pick it up and open it. I also have a fair collection of computer-related stuff from the same period stored on 8" floppies that can no longer be read by any of my machines, and in any case has probably become corrupted in the intervening years.
3) Many people actually like owning physical books. Publishers know this, so they often release several different editions of popular works: hardback, leather-bound hardback, large format hardback, paperback, large format paperback, etc., etc.
4) DRM. In addition to the durability and accessibility concerns in (2) above, we have to consider the fact that DRM schemes may make an E-Book unusable in another manufacturer's player, or even the same manufacturer's player a few years down the line. We're already in this situation with digital music, where the most popular player uses a system that nobody else can decode, and everything else uses a different one that the most popular player can't decode. This is simply not an issue with physical books.
5) Theft. If somebody walks away with your Harry Potter paperback, you're out a few dollars. An electronic reader with several E-Books on it on the other hand represents a significant investment that most people would be pretty cut up about losing, yet the fact that it is so valuable means that thieves will be much more likely to steal it. Those who want something to read while travelling will there
Exactly. I wrote significantly more lines of code per day when I was younger than I do now. But I write far more _useful_ lines of code nowadays. Of course, LOC style metrics would probably rate me as notably unproductive, just as a metric which graded carpenters by the volume of wood consumed per day would rate the experienced ones who don't waste wood poorly.
What realistic alternative do they have? Governments know from history that the only way to maintain laws which potentially criminalise most of the British population is by using them very rarely. The alternative has been tried at various times, and it inevitably ends up with the law being repealed, and (worse from the viewpoint of the government), highly-placed heads rolling as politicos scramble to lay the blame anywhere but at their own feet.
Of course, you _can_ get laws passed that potentially criminalise lots of people if you can convince the public that they will benefit from them. Thus did mandatory wearing of safety-belts and crash-helmets get general support because it was argued that not wearing these safety items increased one's likelihood of ending up in hospitals that are paid for from taxes. Likewise with forthcoming anti-smoking laws, which have various generally accepted arguments in their favour. Draconian copyright legislation does not however fall into this category, because the public are unlikely to regard making media companies richer as a compelling reason for putting large numbers of ordinary people in jail, especially given the prevailing British antagonism towards "fat cat" executives who (in the public's eyes) draw massive salaries for doing nothing useful whatsoever.
I used to run Win95 on a 486/66 with 16MB, and it was OK (the machine originally came with Win 3.1). Mind you, the same computer also ran Slackware Linux pretty well with a GUI (can't remember which one -- it was a long time ago!). Interestingly, XWindows could be configured to use a Weitek P9000 graphics coprocessor that the machine had, so it could use the GUI at fairly high resolution (for the time) without compromising usability. It was still in service until quite recently as a test rig for software development, because some customers were still running old crates with similar specifications.
"If you can find it, I'd advise reading "Code reuse, concrete classes, and inheritance" by Scott Meyers. Unfortunately, it's an article from the July/August 1994 issue of The C++ Report, so finding it probably won't be easy (and while Scott cites it on his site, he doesn't have a link to an online copy)."
I couldn't find it, which is a shame, because Meyers is usually well worth reading. However, the other reference you included describes the problem quite clearly. It possibly indicates that there is a fundamental design flaw in the language itself, at least in this respect, although Meyers' suggestion of identifying and classifying abstractions would in any case be a good one even if this problem was not present (at least in the conceptual sense, irrespective of what language one is working in).
"Learning Oberon well enough to use it is one thing -- the question was whether most users really know all the rules in their entirety. Quite frankly, I can't answer that very well. Offhand, I don't think I've ever known anybody who really did, but I've known only a few people who used Oberon at all, and it's possible they were the exception to the rule."
I found it extremely easy to learn, but again, that could just be me: I didn't have any great difficulty learning C++ either, at least to the level where I was confidently writing code that worked as expected (which is after all the raison d'etre of any programming language). Of course, this was probably helped by having been exposed to it in its V1.0 days, when it was a considerably simpler beast; I therefore had the luxury of being able to absorb new features as they were added instead of trying to digest today's much bigger and more complex version in one huge, sustained gulp.
"FORTRAN has about the most god-awful grammar ever invented, but doesn't seem significantly more difficult to learn than most of the other mainstream imperative languages."
No, but given the fact that most imperative languages were inspired by grandaddy FORTRAN, and many still contain constructs with similar names that do similar jobs, it's not really very surprising. Unfortunately, I have no evidence about whether those new to programming find the language easy or not, as I've never met a beginning FORTRAN programmer: most people who use it seem to be engineers etc., and were taught to use it as part of their degree courses.
"The point is that the OED does not concur with your distinction, and neither do I because I don't feel it's a useful distinction to make in this forum."
A fair point.
"From a cognitive viewpoint, I also suspect morals/applications works the other way around -- that morals are shortcut rules for a connected sequence of thoughts, and thus applications are likely to turn into morals rather than morals simply leading to applications."
That is an extremely interesting observation, because a society's morality is usually at least in part a reflection of the environment in which it exists. Peoples who live in extremely harsh environments for example often have moral codes which demand that they treat any traveller as an honoured guest because failing to do so would be tantamount to condemning them to death, while most modern city dwellers in the Western world feel no moral obligation to passing strangers whatsoever.
"Morals as atomic units rather than thought-out applications can come from a wide variety of sources, everything from Aesop's fables and common literary background to law to religion to, in weaker cases, simple experience ("don't mix family and business") or what your gran kept telling you when you were young."
I don't think we're talking about quite the same thing, here. The sort of morals I was arguing about are those that form a social framework which allows an individual to interact with his or her peer group, i.e. basic behavioural rules that help promote harmonious co-existence (don't kill other people, don't take their stuff without asking, etc.). You on the other hand are using a more expansive definition which includes such things such as "the moral of this story", which while perfectly valid, has much which falls outside the scope of what I was arguing about. For example, Aesop's fables would not be examples of morals by my more restrictive definition, whereas Jesus' "The Good Samaritan" is (and on many more levels than traditional Christian teachings suggest). The difference here revolves around the inverse of "moral", i.e. "immoral": not looking before you leap may be a bad idea, but it isn't considered immoral, whereas wandering past a severely injured person without assisting them in any way definitely would be immoral by the standards of almost any society.
"without a large quantity of experimental data to back it up (and even then it's likely to vary from community to community)."
It does vary from community to community, even within the same nation, especially those such as the United States whose populations are spread over a very large geographical area. Consider for example the "moral relativism" that the neo-cons detest with such vehemence: it is still extremely strong in secular areas such as San Francisco, yet has never really had any notable presence at all in the "Bible Belt", even when it was the prevailing moral model of much of the rest of the country. Historical evidence indicates that it varies considerably over time as well, and that profound changes can happen very suddenly indeed, e.g. when the Roman Empire changed from a largely Greek-influenced secular moral base to a Judaeo-Cristian one in the space of a few years.
"Nonetheless, being a bit argumentative, I felt I should refute your rhetorical allegation that I was "confused" about any of this."
You have done so very successfully indeed.
"just my argumentative side kicking in. As for "misreading" what you said - you might wish to check the context of your original post to see why I naturally assumed you were concurring with the OP's assertion that morals are unaffected by religion."
I can indeed see why you would easily think that this was the case. And I did make various references to "religious dogma", but that was not because I any way refute the role that religions have played in either providing moral foundations or codifying existing ones (a chicken and egg subject that could in itself be the subject of considerable debate!). My point was simply t
"Just because guys get old, doesn't mean they stop learning. Good ones are always updating their skill set."
That was actually the point of my post, i.e. that management don't think experience is necessarily worth paying for. I am 46 years old in a few weeks, and am constantly investigating new languages, methodologies, and tools, because they fascinate me. And while I know that it takes me longer to learn new things than was the case 20 years ago, I now have a much larger knowledge base to work from, and this allows me to see similarities between the new and old that would not have been anything like as apparent to my younger self. This has often meant that I am the radical proponent of things such as aspect-oriented programming and agile development in the jobs I do, while some (but by no means all) colleagues half my age seem to have no motivation to learn anything beyond what theymp He taught at university.
"I'm interested to know -- does anyone know if there are any open source development projects with a large community involvement which have anything remotely similar to the commercial software development cycle?"
Most of the successful ones that deal with projects of any complexity have to be just as effectively managed as their commercial equivalents. The main difference lies in how they motivate their contributors: commercial developers work because they are paid to, and will often put up with being managed by idiots because of this. In the mostly voluntary open source movement however, a "management team" cannot function effectively unless those it is managing acknowledge its authority, and this usually requires both respect for, and faith in those managers and their ability to make decisions that are beneficial to the project as a whole. It is therefore likely that many open source project "managers" are at least as good as the better commercial ones, and superior to the commercial average, which is in my experience dominated by mediocrity.
NB: I am not, have never been, and do not aspire to be an open source project manager, so my comment is not motivated by a desire for self aggrandisement.
"The key, then, is to actually use some computer science and mathematics and do proofs instead of relying on trying to test all the possible cases."
Just as those in more traditional manufacturing use statistical sampling for QA instead of testing every single product. Exhaustive testing is reserved for specialist markets which are willing to pay a significant premium to ensure that every single item performs according to a stringent set of specifications "out of the box".
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"The design of NT was exceptionally forward-thinking."
It was indeed.
"The problem is the lack of such foresight (or even just simple common sense) on behalf of application developers."
No, the problem is that most of the market was running Windows 9X, which was not remotely forward-looking in any shape or form. Thus, while many developers were using NT Workstation because it didn't fall over when debugging, loading the IDE, sitting there for an hour doing nothing, etc., market realities meant that they still had to target Win9X, despite the fact that many of them loathed it with a passion. And guess what? Nearly five years after the release of XP, a lot of us still have to target sodding Win9X, because significant numbers of people are still running the blasted thing.
My dad's better than your dad, and my dad says it can't, so there.
Speak for yourself. I'm 46, and derive great pleasure from computer games, especially when my wife is watching some piece of dross on the TV that I don't like (to be fair, I like very little of what's on TV). Currently playing Morrowind and its two expansions (bargain bin price), and loving every single minute of it. And I know several extremely enthusiastic gamers with ages ranging from 40 to 55: we sometimes meet up to play networked versions of various games, and an excellent time is had by all.
NB: most older gamers seem to be male, which is likely due to the fact that women tend to become adults at a certain age, while men are simply bigger versions of kids who have lots more money to spend on toys.
"To try to come a bit on topic I would ask what would be the differences in science development had the Catholic religion been replaced by another religion. I mean, Catholisism brought the Inquisition and the so called Dark Ages (again I am just stating this from my very limited history knowledge) and in one way or another opaqued science development trough the ages. While to the best of my knowledge, religions as the Egypcian or Aztec promoted science (even before it was called science) on their own."
Religion and science tend to happily coexist when science does not contradict the basic tenets of the dominant religion. This was no more or less true of Catholicism than anything else: the inquisition was seldom invoked against scientists, doctors, engineers, etc., because few of them did anything that challenged the Church's authority. Even Galileo, who is often cited as an example of clerical repression of scientific thought actually caused most of his own problems. He had been told that he could freely publish his ideas about the Earth not being the centre of the Universe by the simple expedient of stating that it was a _theory_ (as Copernicus had), and he chose not to do this. Furthermore, his book was published in the form of a series of dialogues between a brilliant know-all based on himself, and a complete idiot who was obviously a caricature of the Pope. He thus did everything he possibly could to provoke the Church, so it is hardly surprising that they responded, yet his punishment was simply house arrest and being prohibited from publishing anything else -- positively benign when compared with what they did to religious heretics.
Any condemnation of Catholicism for repression of scientific thought must also consider that the Jesuit order, almost from its inception, has not only embraced science in general, but also produced a large number of excellent scientists (the debate between Galileo and some Jesuits during his trial is interesting, because they make him look quite foolish on several occasions). Not many other religions can claim to have an order almost exclusively dedicated to the pursuit of science, and it is the Jesuits as much as anyone who have resulted in Catholicism's eventual acceptance of a non-geocentric universe, the theory of evolution, and various other viewpoints which contradict a rigid interpretation of the Bible.
NB: I am not in any way defending Catholicism: the point of my post is simply to put it in context with other dominant religions, few of which have displayed any notable tolerance for opposing viewpoints (Buddhism being a notable exception).
They are charging a flat fee per item, not a percentage of the selling price for a product. MS have used the "percentage of selling cost" ploy to sting companies such as Stac and Spyglass, so they would hardly be silly enough to license their own technologies in a similar manner.
"We where wondering why did a religion from a poor, non important country/place like Israel (please correct me if I am wrong in the facts) or the Jews (in some way a minority) came to conquer the world?,"
Well, it hasn't exactly conquered the world: there are other religions which have rather more followers. So a better question would be: how did it conquer much of Europe, and by extension, areas colonized by Europeans? Answer: a Roman emperor called Constantine decided to adopt it as the "official" religion of Rome and her empire, mainly for political rather than religious reasons (he was not baptised himself until he was on his death bed).
"Being (on that time) the Romans the most powerful civilization, its religion is the one that *should* have dominated humankind (at least, being spread)."
You mean the old Roman religion, which was based on that of the Greeks? It didn't dominate the Roman world (which was far from being all of humankind) because it didn't insist that it was the _only_ religion, so people were free to have as many other religions as they liked as long as they observed certain aspects of the Roman one as well. This meant that while the Roman religion was in some respects compulsory throughout the empire, it happily coexisted with other religions such as Mithraism and Zoroastrianism because of its non-exclusive nature. And it was this non-exclusionary nature that led to its downfall from a religious perspective, because the majority of those who observed various aspects of it did so because it was required of them, while their actual religious beliefs were invested in something entirely different. Thus did Constantine adopt Christianity as the new Roman religion, because having something that people were required to believe rather than merely respect eliminated potential sources of friction between fanatical followers of other religions.
"Also, unlike Catholicism, other religions were not as "machista" (don't know the exact word in English) as it is. If you read the bible or study (as I did) 9 years in a catholic school you will realize that this religion is focused on men (masculine) and Women tends to be just something men owns in order to continue his legacy."
A good many of the ones you cite were even more "machista" than Roman Catholicism. Traditional Judaeism for example is extremely male-centred, and the Norse religion was even more so; same for those of the Aztecs and Mayas, most of the oriental ones, and the Graeco-Roman system (in which women really were property: a husband could kill his wife or children with no more legal repercussions than if he'd killed a pig for meat). All are all reflections of the societies of their practitioners, which were (and in many parts of the world still are) male-dominated.
"My opinion is that it would have been better if other religion (like Greek or Roman) was the one spread around the world."
They did spread a Roman religion around parts of the world: it's called Roman Catholicism.
It is wrong. Dell will use AMD when analysts start claiming that Dell will never use AMD, and not before. This is not because Dell are hanging on the analysts' every word, but is due to the fact that analysts are invariably wrong about everything.
The rumour sites and various analysts were also pretty sure there would be (variously) an Intel Mac Mini; a media centre Mac Mini; a Mac Mini with a dock for an iPod on top; and various combinations of the preceding. Meanwhile, the people at Apple were quietly working on (among other things) an Intel iMac, which nobody foresaw, and doubtless laughing themselves silly at all the wankers who were spouting the usual unfounded crap so that they can pretend they know something we don't, and therefore look important.
To avoid being disappointed in the future, it helps to remember a few facts:
1) There is one, and only one qualification that is necessary for the job of analyst: the ability to be completely and utterly wrong about everything all the time.
2) Both analysts and rumour sites often quote "unnamed sources inside Apple", implying that they have access to somebody _who knows about product development_, not their sister's best friend who knows someone that makes sandwiches in the Apple cafeteria, or drives a truck that picks up some of Apple's trash.
3) Wanting Apple to do certain things is not the same as Apple actually doing them. Publishing wish lists on web sites disguised as "rumours" does not therefore magically transform them into something that Apple will suddenly take notice of and do. This is especially the case when such disguised wish lists come from analysts, because Apple are fully aware of (1) above.
4) Apple react to a rumour about a future product in one of two ways: if it is wrong, they ignore it; if it is correct, they start suing rumour sites, and roasting the feet of employees in kilns until the source of the leak is identified and eliminated. Any rumour that does not elicit a flurry of threatening letters from lawyers and agonised screams during the night in Cupertino is therefore _wrong_.
Apple's developer transition information indicates that Intel Macs will use the new Intel / Microsoft Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is not BIOS or open firmware, but is conceptually similar to open firmware in a number of ways. This specification is newer than Windows/XP, so it is unlikely that current versions of Windows will install without some sort of emulation layer; Windows Vista on the other hand will be EFI-aware, and may therefore be directly installable on Intel Macs. Note though that a working, stable installation of Vista will very likely require drivers for various pieces of Mac-specific hardware, and the likelihood of Apple making these available is I think fairly remote. However, MS or third parties might offer them if there is enough demand -- Microsoft do after all already support the Mac in various ways, and would doubtless be very enthusiastic indeed about the idea of selling an extra few million copies of Vista to owners of Intel-based Macs.
NB: various versions of Linux are already EFI-aware, and it is likely that these will have driver support for the new Macs fairly soon after the Linux developer community gets their hands on some. This job is made easier by the fact that there is much less variance in Mac hardware than is the case for more "generic" PCs, and the very newness of the Intel versions means that there aren't even any legacy systems to worry about, a factor that will also doubtless be a consideration for the boys in Redmond.
The iMac is part of their "home line". If Apple's speed claims are correct (past experience would indicate that we should take them with several pinches of salt), it is now somewhat faster for most tasks than most of their "pro" PowerMac line. Of course, the fact that most OS X apps will be running via Rosetta will mean that it is unlikely to actually be faster in practice for a while at least.
Indeed, but this is a matter of consumer choice, not something that is inherent in the medium itself. There is a big difference between deciding to throw something away, and differences in media, formats, DRM etc. rendering something that has not been thrown away unreadable.
"As we saw in the late 90's - companies can't trade at insane levels without a supporting financial infrastructure. For GOOG to trade so highly means that either a) they are GOD and every other company out there knows it, or b) see item a."
It isn't so much that Google hasn't got an infrastructure as the fact that they aren't really doing anything particularly special. Their primary business is as a search engine whose revenue comes from advertising, and there were plenty of those with insane stock values prior to "the reckoning". What else do they offer? A free EMAIL service which is much like lots of others that were already around long before Google entered the fray; an instant messaging service, again much like others that were already around; a piece of Windows-only software for managing photos that they bought; and Google Earth, which is basically an atlas made up from satellite photos taken by others. They probably offer some things I forgot about, and yes, some of their services have a twist that the others don't, but the fact of the matter is that there's nothing particularly unique or innovative about what Google are doing.
Now, they're going to offer media downloads, just like Apple, and Yahoo, and Napster, etc. Ah, but these are TV shows and movies, which of course Apple have also been offering for a while now. Yet again, a "me too" service to go along with their existing "me too" services, yet the market will go crazy because it's Google, and Google can do no wrong.
Perhaps I'm too cynical: after all, MS have made a mint with "me too" services, and Yahoo seem to be doing fine with the same. But I cannot help remembering all those "me too" portals and companies selling dog food over the Internet that sprang up during the '90s, did an IPO, were worth billions in days, and made paper billionaires out of 19 year-olds. And lest we forget, it is largely the same analysts that boosted these fundamentally worthless companies who are now boosting Google, and many of the same people who threw money at them are now throwing it at the big G.
I am by no means anti-Google, and I wish them every success. But I cannot help having a unpleasant feeling of deja-vu after hearing that Google is now worth more than IBM, a company which has billions of dollars worth of real annual sales, and a considerable amount of valuable physical assets.
And dynamically typed languages tend to run poorly under Microsoft's CLR, while they work very well indeed with the JVM, despite the fact that it was primarily written for a statically typed language.
NB: while MS are aware of the CLR's issues with dynamic languages, and will in all likelihood resolve them in the not too distant future, I doubt that supporting C and C++ has any importance whatsoever for Sun or anyone else involved with the JVM's specifications. The CLR after all was primarily designed as a multi-language system, and turned out to be nothing like as multi-language as MS had intended; the JVM on the other hand was meant for Java, and ended up being suitable for lots of other languages largely by accident.
"I think Sony are trying to establish the e-book equivalent of the iPod"
There is however a notable difference in the market for recorded music and the one for books that invalidates such comparisons. The distribution media for recorded music has always required a playback device which has to be purchased separately, and the market has become completely accustomed to this. It has also become accustomed to the fact that there are usually several different music media formats, each of which requires a special device that must also be purchased, so they happily accept the fact that "digital music" requires "an iPod" to play it, just as CDs need a CD player, cassettes need a cassette player, etc. And they accept the fact that media formats become obsolete and fall into disuse over time, while other new ones appear, which again require specialist devices to play them.
Text storage media on the other hand have never, in the several thousand years since writing was invented, needed anything beyond at least one eye and a light source to view them. Unlike the iPod therefore, electronic book readers are trying to _establish a market_ where people pay extra for a device with the ability to play something that is already widely available in another format which does not require buying such a device. And while the E-Book readers have the singular advantage of allowing one to carry several books, most of the book-buying public have no real desire to do so. And this singular advantage must be weighed against several disadvantages:
1) Battery life. Irrespective of how long this is, the fact that books do not require batteries means that it will always be too short. Note also that battery life is more critical because of the difference in format: most popular music pieces last a few minutes, whereas books usually take several hours to read, so the effect of a battery failure in the middle of something can be a lot more annoying.
2) Media durability and long-term accessibility. How long does the media that E-Books are stored on last? Will we be able to access it with whatever passes for an E-Book reader in 50 or 100 years? Books can last for several centuries if they are cared for, and other book-like things (e.g. Egyptian papyri, vellum scrolls) have endured for thousands of years. And while such extreme durability is not a consideration for most book purchases, some degree of future accessibility is desirable. As an example, I have a large collection of SF, much of which was bought 2nd. hand over 30 years ago, and is now out of print. Yet all I have to do to read one of these books (not an uncommon occurrence) is pick it up and open it. I also have a fair collection of computer-related stuff from the same period stored on 8" floppies that can no longer be read by any of my machines, and in any case has probably become corrupted in the intervening years.
3) Many people actually like owning physical books. Publishers know this, so they often release several different editions of popular works: hardback, leather-bound hardback, large format hardback, paperback, large format paperback, etc., etc.
4) DRM. In addition to the durability and accessibility concerns in (2) above, we have to consider the fact that DRM schemes may make an E-Book unusable in another manufacturer's player, or even the same manufacturer's player a few years down the line. We're already in this situation with digital music, where the most popular player uses a system that nobody else can decode, and everything else uses a different one that the most popular player can't decode. This is simply not an issue with physical books.
5) Theft. If somebody walks away with your Harry Potter paperback, you're out a few dollars. An electronic reader with several E-Books on it on the other hand represents a significant investment that most people would be pretty cut up about losing, yet the fact that it is so valuable means that thieves will be much more likely to steal it. Those who want something to read while travelling will there
Exactly. I wrote significantly more lines of code per day when I was younger than I do now. But I write far more _useful_ lines of code nowadays. Of course, LOC style metrics would probably rate me as notably unproductive, just as a metric which graded carpenters by the volume of wood consumed per day would rate the experienced ones who don't waste wood poorly.
Books don't have DRM because they are not digital.
"A 25 year old programmer is usually more productive than a 65 year old programmer."
And your evidence for this is...
What realistic alternative do they have? Governments know from history that the only way to maintain laws which potentially criminalise most of the British population is by using them very rarely. The alternative has been tried at various times, and it inevitably ends up with the law being repealed, and (worse from the viewpoint of the government), highly-placed heads rolling as politicos scramble to lay the blame anywhere but at their own feet.
Of course, you _can_ get laws passed that potentially criminalise lots of people if you can convince the public that they will benefit from them. Thus did mandatory wearing of safety-belts and crash-helmets get general support because it was argued that not wearing these safety items increased one's likelihood of ending up in hospitals that are paid for from taxes. Likewise with forthcoming anti-smoking laws, which have various generally accepted arguments in their favour. Draconian copyright legislation does not however fall into this category, because the public are unlikely to regard making media companies richer as a compelling reason for putting large numbers of ordinary people in jail, especially given the prevailing British antagonism towards "fat cat" executives who (in the public's eyes) draw massive salaries for doing nothing useful whatsoever.
I used to run Win95 on a 486/66 with 16MB, and it was OK (the machine originally came with Win 3.1). Mind you, the same computer also ran Slackware Linux pretty well with a GUI (can't remember which one -- it was a long time ago!). Interestingly, XWindows could be configured to use a Weitek P9000 graphics coprocessor that the machine had, so it could use the GUI at fairly high resolution (for the time) without compromising usability. It was still in service until quite recently as a test rig for software development, because some customers were still running old crates with similar specifications.
Who got many of their ideas from Doug Englebert's Online System, which was in its turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex...
"If you can find it, I'd advise reading "Code reuse, concrete classes, and inheritance" by Scott Meyers. Unfortunately, it's an article from the July/August 1994 issue of The C++ Report, so finding it probably won't be easy (and while Scott cites it on his site, he doesn't have a link to an online copy)."
I couldn't find it, which is a shame, because Meyers is usually well worth reading. However, the other reference you included describes the problem quite clearly. It possibly indicates that there is a fundamental design flaw in the language itself, at least in this respect, although Meyers' suggestion of identifying and classifying abstractions would in any case be a good one even if this problem was not present (at least in the conceptual sense, irrespective of what language one is working in).
"Learning Oberon well enough to use it is one thing -- the question was whether most users really know all the rules in their entirety. Quite frankly, I can't answer that very well. Offhand, I don't think I've ever known anybody who really did, but I've known only a few people who used Oberon at all, and it's possible they were the exception to the rule."
I found it extremely easy to learn, but again, that could just be me: I didn't have any great difficulty learning C++ either, at least to the level where I was confidently writing code that worked as expected (which is after all the raison d'etre of any programming language). Of course, this was probably helped by having been exposed to it in its V1.0 days, when it was a considerably simpler beast; I therefore had the luxury of being able to absorb new features as they were added instead of trying to digest today's much bigger and more complex version in one huge, sustained gulp.
"FORTRAN has about the most god-awful grammar ever invented, but doesn't seem significantly more difficult to learn than most of the other mainstream imperative languages."
No, but given the fact that most imperative languages were inspired by grandaddy FORTRAN, and many still contain constructs with similar names that do similar jobs, it's not really very surprising. Unfortunately, I have no evidence about whether those new to programming find the language easy or not, as I've never met a beginning FORTRAN programmer: most people who use it seem to be engineers etc., and were taught to use it as part of their degree courses.
"The point is that the OED does not concur with your distinction, and neither do I because I don't feel it's a useful distinction to make in this forum."
A fair point.
"From a cognitive viewpoint, I also suspect morals/applications works the other way around -- that morals are shortcut rules for a connected sequence of thoughts, and thus applications are likely to turn into morals rather than morals simply leading to applications."
That is an extremely interesting observation, because a society's morality is usually at least in part a reflection of the environment in which it exists. Peoples who live in extremely harsh environments for example often have moral codes which demand that they treat any traveller as an honoured guest because failing to do so would be tantamount to condemning them to death, while most modern city dwellers in the Western world feel no moral obligation to passing strangers whatsoever.
"Morals as atomic units rather than thought-out applications can come from a wide variety of sources, everything from Aesop's fables and common literary background to law to religion to, in weaker cases, simple experience ("don't mix family and business") or what your gran kept telling you when you were young."
I don't think we're talking about quite the same thing, here. The sort of morals I was arguing about are those that form a social framework which allows an individual to interact with his or her peer group, i.e. basic behavioural rules that help promote harmonious co-existence (don't kill other people, don't take their stuff without asking, etc.). You on the other hand are using a more expansive definition which includes such things such as "the moral of this story", which while perfectly valid, has much which falls outside the scope of what I was arguing about. For example, Aesop's fables would not be examples of morals by my more restrictive definition, whereas Jesus' "The Good Samaritan" is (and on many more levels than traditional Christian teachings suggest). The difference here revolves around the inverse of "moral", i.e. "immoral": not looking before you leap may be a bad idea, but it isn't considered immoral, whereas wandering past a severely injured person without assisting them in any way definitely would be immoral by the standards of almost any society.
"without a large quantity of experimental data to back it up (and even then it's likely to vary from community to community)."
It does vary from community to community, even within the same nation, especially those such as the United States whose populations are spread over a very large geographical area. Consider for example the "moral relativism" that the neo-cons detest with such vehemence: it is still extremely strong in secular areas such as San Francisco, yet has never really had any notable presence at all in the "Bible Belt", even when it was the prevailing moral model of much of the rest of the country. Historical evidence indicates that it varies considerably over time as well, and that profound changes can happen very suddenly indeed, e.g. when the Roman Empire changed from a largely Greek-influenced secular moral base to a Judaeo-Cristian one in the space of a few years.
"Nonetheless, being a bit argumentative, I felt I should refute your rhetorical allegation that I was "confused" about any of this."
You have done so very successfully indeed.
"just my argumentative side kicking in. As for "misreading" what you said - you might wish to check the context of your original post to see why I naturally assumed you were concurring with the OP's assertion that morals are unaffected by religion."
I can indeed see why you would easily think that this was the case. And I did make various references to "religious dogma", but that was not because I any way refute the role that religions have played in either providing moral foundations or codifying existing ones (a chicken and egg subject that could in itself be the subject of considerable debate!). My point was simply t
"Just because guys get old, doesn't mean they stop learning. Good ones are always updating their skill set."
That was actually the point of my post, i.e. that management don't think experience is necessarily worth paying for. I am 46 years old in a few weeks, and am constantly investigating new languages, methodologies, and tools, because they fascinate me. And while I know that it takes me longer to learn new things than was the case 20 years ago, I now have a much larger knowledge base to work from, and this allows me to see similarities between the new and old that would not have been anything like as apparent to my younger self. This has often meant that I am the radical proponent of things such as aspect-oriented programming and agile development in the jobs I do, while some (but by no means all) colleagues half my age seem to have no motivation to learn anything beyond what theymp He taught at university.
"I'm interested to know -- does anyone know if there are any open source development projects with a large community involvement which have anything remotely similar to the commercial software development cycle?"
Most of the successful ones that deal with projects of any complexity have to be just as effectively managed as their commercial equivalents. The main difference lies in how they motivate their contributors: commercial developers work because they are paid to, and will often put up with being managed by idiots because of this. In the mostly voluntary open source movement however, a "management team" cannot function effectively unless those it is managing acknowledge its authority, and this usually requires both respect for, and faith in those managers and their ability to make decisions that are beneficial to the project as a whole. It is therefore likely that many open source project "managers" are at least as good as the better commercial ones, and superior to the commercial average, which is in my experience dominated by mediocrity.
NB: I am not, have never been, and do not aspire to be an open source project manager, so my comment is not motivated by a desire for self aggrandisement.
"The key, then, is to actually use some computer science and mathematics and do proofs instead of relying on trying to test all the possible cases."
Just as those in more traditional manufacturing use statistical sampling for QA instead of testing every single product. Exhaustive testing is reserved for specialist markets which are willing to pay a significant premium to ensure that every single item performs according to a stringent set of specifications "out of the box".