Flash (most notably Flex which runs in Flash Player) has only one real advantage over Silverlight. It runs on Linux and Mac. Now that advantage just got smaller. Pretty soon, Flex is about as popular as Delphi. Maybe 2 years? Because the Silverlight player will go out to everyone through MS automatic updates.
Despite popular opinion, that Microsoft only takes the ideas of others and somehow makes giant piles of money, they do have a research branch. And that research branch is remarkably open about at least some portion of their own work.
If you're going to last, you'll need to communicate the cool stuff from R&D to the billable consultants in a way they find useful. If you don't want to spend half your time talking about the cool stuff you do in R&D, then don't bother. Go work in R&D at Microsoft or Google or Apple where they actually translate the R&D into products in the marketplace.
In 20 years, we'll smell our avatar's farts. Huge advance. As a result, we'll all be having sex in 3d virtual worlds instead of the real world. For the first time in human history, recreation will be fully separated from procreation.
On average, office space in mid-town Manhattan goes for approximately $50 / square foot / year.
An acre of space is 43,000 square feet.
Therefore, an acre of farm space in a Manhattan vertical farm is worth, roughly, $2,000,000 per year. That's 50 times the price of vineyard land in Napa Valley which is quite probably the most expensive agricultural land in the USA.
Normal farm land in the mid-west is $2,000 per acre, so the Manhattan farm is more like 1,000 times as expensive to rent for one year as it would be to buy in the Midwest.
Forget light, water, operating costs, and fuel costs. The money that could be made from putting the same space to another use causes the whole thing to fall apart from a cost perspective. Food prices in Manhattan are high and gas prices are going up, but for this to work, gasoline would have to go from $3 per gallon to $300,000 per gallon.
Read it. When you finish, weep because it is all over.
Neil Gaiman is one of the best writers working in the English language today. He has worked in an unusually wide variety of formats, from comics (not my thing really) to children's books (Coraline and I Traded My Dad for Two Goldfish) to novels to short stories to movie scripts. I've probably missed some.
That Gaiman happens to write stuff Nerds tend to like makes it Slash-dot-worthy.
At some point, does e-mail become more cost than benefit?
The idea that I would communicate anything both important and urgent via e-mail is funny. I no longer trust the incoming e-mail, too much of it is spam. And now the efforts to deal with spam...the filtering and flagging and whatnot kill any confidence I have that the recipient will receive and read the message when I hit the send button.
Minnesota Public Radio runs a regular (every 3 months or so) chat with former governors. Wendell Anderson (the one on the cover of Time Magazine in the 1970's holding up a big Walleye...or was it a Northern, oh well, you get the idea) and Arne Carlson and maybe they had one other but I can't remember his name.
They both clearly, seriously (and humorously) claimed that writing actual letters (not e-mail) to state legislators or governors had an impact. And if they got 3-5 letters, they assumed that small number of people sufficiently motivated to write and post a letter represented a much larger number of people who felt the same way.
Maybe it's just in Minnesota or in the past, or both, but I doubt it.
This is derived from their Steam software, yes? If so, the insight is on Steam subscribers' hardware, and it's probably useful to extrapolate it out to gamers, but beyond that it gets a little dicey, no?
The largest, most successful car company on the planet? Toyota. The leader on going Green through higher fuel economy and smarter technology? Toyota. Coincidence?
Which city in the rust belt has a trade surplus with China and why? Erie PA. Because GE makes the most fuel efficient locomotives on the planet in Erie and even though the Chinese have lower labor costs and environmental protection standards, the GE locmotives, while costing more to purchase, pay-back the extra cost very rapidly in fuel savings. The greenest tech is the most efficient tech and it wins economically.
So, protecting and subsidizing stupidity might protect one particular set of players in an industry (GM & Ford, for instance) but overall it doesn't do the USA any good.
Why is writing a plug-in different from "hello world"?
Well, a plug-in could, philosophically be viewed as the same thing as "hello world", but that's not a useful way to view "hello world" or plug-ins because a plug-in, like the unit test plug-in of the original post extends the function of Visual Studio in a way that might, if I could only get it in the professional version, compell me to upgrade from the freeware version.
There's a game, Galactic Civ 2, that has a freeware demo where you can play 40 turns. If you want to play more than 40 turns, you have to pay for the game. Philosophically, this is what I think Microsoft is trying to do with their express product. In the past, they really screwed up with the free version of MSSQL, it was too capable and people didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade.
Personally, I think the license should state their position on add-in software much more explicitly and they might lose a legal battle.
"9. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. For more information, see www.microsoft.com/licensing/userights. You may not
work around any technical limitations in the software;
reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;
make more copies of the software than specified in this agreement or allowed by applicable law, despite this limitation;
publish the software for others to copy;
rent, lease or lend the software; or
use the software for commercial software hosting services."
Maybe Microsoft is trying to say that he violates the "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software;" clause of the scope section?
It seems clear to me, as a person running a for-profit software company, that free "express" versions of software must be limited in some way so that potential customers will pay for the "enterprise" or "professional" versions of the software.
"Honey, have you seen my firewall? Where'd I put that dang firewall...I know it's around here somewhere...oh geez, it was in my pocket the whole time."
I do this now with keys, wallets and cell phones. Do I really need to do it with my firewall?
"Writing a massively parrallel web spider is conceptually very easy."
Honest curiousity here, not argument...
Can you think (serially or in parallel, it doesn't matter to me) of an example where a programming technique is the right one for the problem but conceptually very difficult?
Recursive tree traversal seem conceptually very easy to me, binary searches through sorted data, much of SQL, XML, Web Services, etc... When some technique is complicated and "difficult" it usually means we (the larger we) have not figured out the good solution. Once we get the good solution, elegance and simplicity tend to emerge as characteristics of the solution.
P.S. For examples of humans who think naturally about many things at one time, just look at women. I had to leave my parents' basement to find one, but sure enough, they think about many things at once, and they do it all the time. How interesting.
The common tools (Java, C#, C++, Visual Basic) are still primitive for parallel programming. Not much more than semaphores and some basic multi-threading code (start/stop/pause/communicate from one thread to another via common variables). I've made programs, specifically, spiders, that can run 200-1,000 simultaneous threads usefully on a PC. They work ok, as long as the inter-thread coupling is minimized. Until we get enough exposure to parallel systems that we develop new languages to express the solutions, parallel programming will remain accessible to the few, the proud, the geeks. But I don't think it's because of our brains architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
my gear make me a little nervous.
Lots of bands are giving it away. It's reminiscent of shareware from the 80's. To see an example, check out The Bastard Fairies on Youtube.
at you or with you? Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference in the Irony Folding Zone.
Flash (most notably Flex which runs in Flash Player) has only one real advantage over Silverlight. It runs on Linux and Mac. Now that advantage just got smaller. Pretty soon, Flex is about as popular as Delphi. Maybe 2 years? Because the Silverlight player will go out to everyone through MS automatic updates.
Despite popular opinion, that Microsoft only takes the ideas of others and somehow makes giant piles of money, they do have a research branch. And that research branch is remarkably open about at least some portion of their own work.
http://research.microsoft.com/
Them darn commies are always hanging out at Universities...it's where they can drain us of our precious bodily fluids most easily.
If you're going to last, you'll need to communicate the cool stuff from R&D to the billable consultants in a way they find useful. If you don't want to spend half your time talking about the cool stuff you do in R&D, then don't bother. Go work in R&D at Microsoft or Google or Apple where they actually translate the R&D into products in the marketplace.
In 20 years, we'll smell our avatar's farts. Huge advance. As a result, we'll all be having sex in 3d virtual worlds instead of the real world. For the first time in human history, recreation will be fully separated from procreation.
r -has-arrived.html/ + http://www.fuckingmachines.com/ + http://www.nvidia.com/page/home.html/ = http://www.3d-sexgames.com/
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/day-smelly-compute
Probably won't take 20 years. All the pieces are there, just waiting for some shameless pervert to assemble and market them.
On average, office space in mid-town Manhattan goes for approximately $50 / square foot / year.
An acre of space is 43,000 square feet.
Therefore, an acre of farm space in a Manhattan vertical farm is worth, roughly, $2,000,000 per year. That's 50 times the price of vineyard land in Napa Valley which is quite probably the most expensive agricultural land in the USA.
Normal farm land in the mid-west is $2,000 per acre, so the Manhattan farm is more like 1,000 times as expensive to rent for one year as it would be to buy in the Midwest.
Forget light, water, operating costs, and fuel costs. The money that could be made from putting the same space to another use causes the whole thing to fall apart from a cost perspective. Food prices in Manhattan are high and gas prices are going up, but for this to work, gasoline would have to go from $3 per gallon to $300,000 per gallon.
Read it. When you finish, weep because it is all over.
Neil Gaiman is one of the best writers working in the English language today. He has worked in an unusually wide variety of formats, from comics (not my thing really) to children's books (Coraline and I Traded My Dad for Two Goldfish) to novels to short stories to movie scripts. I've probably missed some.
That Gaiman happens to write stuff Nerds tend to like makes it Slash-dot-worthy.
P.S. It is pronounced gay-man.
"well, it allows some rich asshole to buy his way into a game he should have worked hard at."
In this respect, it's just like real life.
The thing I found most amazing was that after a 12-hour shift grinding, some of these guys played their own toons for fun.
At some point, does e-mail become more cost than benefit?
The idea that I would communicate anything both important and urgent via e-mail is funny. I no longer trust the incoming e-mail, too much of it is spam. And now the efforts to deal with spam...the filtering and flagging and whatnot kill any confidence I have that the recipient will receive and read the message when I hit the send button.
Minnesota Public Radio runs a regular (every 3 months or so) chat with former governors. Wendell Anderson (the one on the cover of Time Magazine in the 1970's holding up a big Walleye...or was it a Northern, oh well, you get the idea) and Arne Carlson and maybe they had one other but I can't remember his name.
They both clearly, seriously (and humorously) claimed that writing actual letters (not e-mail) to state legislators or governors had an impact. And if they got 3-5 letters, they assumed that small number of people sufficiently motivated to write and post a letter represented a much larger number of people who felt the same way.
Maybe it's just in Minnesota or in the past, or both, but I doubt it.
Make him open and read aloud every SPAM he ever sent.
...then it's all over for Powerball. [I hate the minimum time between Reply/Submit]
...must be one of most redundant statements in the English language.
In the stomach. Once a day. Every day. Except Sunday.
This is derived from their Steam software, yes? If so, the insight is on Steam subscribers' hardware, and it's probably useful to extrapolate it out to gamers, but beyond that it gets a little dicey, no?
The largest, most successful car company on the planet? Toyota. The leader on going Green through higher fuel economy and smarter technology? Toyota. Coincidence?
Which city in the rust belt has a trade surplus with China and why? Erie PA. Because GE makes the most fuel efficient locomotives on the planet in Erie and even though the Chinese have lower labor costs and environmental protection standards, the GE locmotives, while costing more to purchase, pay-back the extra cost very rapidly in fuel savings. The greenest tech is the most efficient tech and it wins economically.
So, protecting and subsidizing stupidity might protect one particular set of players in an industry (GM & Ford, for instance) but overall it doesn't do the USA any good.
Green is efficient, so Green is smart business.
There's green in going green -- Friedman
when the NRA weighs in on this one.
Why is writing a plug-in different from "hello world"?
Well, a plug-in could, philosophically be viewed as the same thing as "hello world", but that's not a useful way to view "hello world" or plug-ins because a plug-in, like the unit test plug-in of the original post extends the function of Visual Studio in a way that might, if I could only get it in the professional version, compell me to upgrade from the freeware version.
There's a game, Galactic Civ 2, that has a freeware demo where you can play 40 turns. If you want to play more than 40 turns, you have to pay for the game. Philosophically, this is what I think Microsoft is trying to do with their express product. In the past, they really screwed up with the free version of MSSQL, it was too capable and people didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade.
Personally, I think the license should state their position on add-in software much more explicitly and they might lose a legal battle.
From the license:
"9. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. For more information, see www.microsoft.com/licensing/userights. You may not
work around any technical limitations in the software;
reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that applicable law expressly permits, despite this limitation;
make more copies of the software than specified in this agreement or allowed by applicable law, despite this limitation;
publish the software for others to copy;
rent, lease or lend the software; or
use the software for commercial software hosting services."
Maybe Microsoft is trying to say that he violates the "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software;" clause of the scope section?
It seems clear to me, as a person running a for-profit software company, that free "express" versions of software must be limited in some way so that potential customers will pay for the "enterprise" or "professional" versions of the software.
"Honey, have you seen my firewall? Where'd I put that dang firewall...I know it's around here somewhere...oh geez, it was in my pocket the whole time."
I do this now with keys, wallets and cell phones. Do I really need to do it with my firewall?
"Writing a massively parrallel web spider is conceptually very easy."
Honest curiousity here, not argument...
Can you think (serially or in parallel, it doesn't matter to me) of an example where a programming technique is the right one for the problem but conceptually very difficult?
Recursive tree traversal seem conceptually very easy to me, binary searches through sorted data, much of SQL, XML, Web Services, etc... When some technique is complicated and "difficult" it usually means we (the larger we) have not figured out the good solution. Once we get the good solution, elegance and simplicity tend to emerge as characteristics of the solution.
P.S. For examples of humans who think naturally about many things at one time, just look at women. I had to leave my parents' basement to find one, but sure enough, they think about many things at once, and they do it all the time. How interesting.
People may or may not process information in a linear fashion, but human brains are, apparently, massively parallel computational devices.
Addressing architecture for Brain-like Massively Parallel Computers
or from a brain-science perspective
Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation
The common tools (Java, C#, C++, Visual Basic) are still primitive for parallel programming. Not much more than semaphores and some basic multi-threading code (start/stop/pause/communicate from one thread to another via common variables). I've made programs, specifically, spiders, that can run 200-1,000 simultaneous threads usefully on a PC. They work ok, as long as the inter-thread coupling is minimized. Until we get enough exposure to parallel systems that we develop new languages to express the solutions, parallel programming will remain accessible to the few, the proud, the geeks. But I don't think it's because of our brains architecture.