I don't get why they treat Oracle like AOL acquiring Netscape. It is a database development company which has no solution to fill MySQL'es place if I haven't mistaken.
I think after these incidents, large companies will think 1 billion times when they got the idea of acquiring an open source project. They treat Oracle like AOL for God's sake.
e-mail is supposed to be reliable because of its distributed nature. It is not supposed to be on single "cloud", distributed machines should be caring for it. It is just like XMPP vs. old fashion MSN/AIM etc. junk.
Let me show what I see with the "cloud" (which is one of the worst abused terms) right now: (wget) s3.amazonaws.com[72.21.207.242] Saving to: `423.dmg'
10% [===> ] 4109203 5,54K/s eta 79m 33s
So, highly successful mac shareware which I love couldn't deal with bandwidth issues and offloaded the downloads to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 on the other hand, showing it works perfectly (on status page) has 450 ms ping response and I am back to 56K speed on a 4 mbit ADSL line. It looks like something wrong with Level3 hops.
Cloud is not offloading all mail to one central server nor putting all files to Amazon S3, it doesn't even exist yet. When people do 10x realtime h264 encoding with their Xgrid enabled portable Macs running Snow Leopard and store the file anonymously to thousands of other machines, that would be some kind of "cloud". Right now, Cloud is just an icon for that overpriced me.com (dotmac) service:)
Recently McDonalds decided to race with Starbucks etc. coffee shops. It is also related to "fast food" phobia, like 150 mg of caffeine won't really break anything:)
So, free Wi-Fi and attempts to change decoration etc. are all related to it. They also attempt to offer local tastes in hamburger form which are generally slower to eat.
IMHO McDonalds is also thinking about "...must read... while eating something..." people which includes me:) Well, for that, cell phone+rss reader is enough.
If you set the DNS to OpenDNS on router level and block outgoing DNS traffic from clients (mostly not needed), set it very strict, e.g. no piracy sites, no porn (obvious), not even lingerie, no proxies (so they can't bypass), most of sticky and shameless give up in about 10-20 mins.
Oh if they say you are censoring? Well, they can subscribe to Cell company 3G and even EDGE and use their _own_ bandwidth for whatever they do. It is a public/free service, "a privilege, not a right" in IRC fashion.
Do you know what most of Apple Intel newcomers (those switches from PPC to Intel) did when they first had Boot Camp? Install Half Life 2 and play for hours. It was them for years asked MS to provide some kind of functionality to Virtual PC 7 (very expensive piece of software which focuses on office) so they can run Half Life 2.
Do you think they were for the amazing technology (!) in Half Life 2 or they were looking for something they can actually enjoy playing on their boxes which can run Doom 3/Quake 4 perfectly and natively?
I gave up FPS genre after first Quake 3 and never came back. That is allthough I paid significant money for it as it was Linux version by Loki Games. This kind of fun and really targeted for adults game could make me buy it instantly or even finally switch to Intel from my Quad G5.
I keep having this name in my mind... "John Carmack". Purchase the engine/assets and make money from them or just do it for "game programming is an art, games are pieces of art" attitude.
Game has nothing to do with their titles either, it would introduce a new kind of customer/fan to ID software which feels like they really owe them.
EA, the Disney of game companies can't release such a tough title. A real miracle would be dukenukem3d.sourceforge.net . It could change the shape of open source gaming forever.
Imagine creating a foundation to acquire game engine and art from the company just to release it open source. It can even pay back profit with PS3/XBox360 etc. release sales.
Can you say "Observables for the Analysis of Event Shapes in e+ e- Annihilation and Other Processes" without taking a breath? Mr. Wolfram can:)
Seriously, that is not a general search engine or even engine as we understand today. It is something else. It is the click happy IT media which compares it to Google and I am sure people at Wolfram research either laughs or cries because of it.
I know the IBM not giving what Apple wants (portable) is a big reason but trust me, IBM was also capable of a low power PowerPC. I wouldn't have to be a G5, it could be something else. It is just IBM didn't want to give Apple that thing, giving them reason to dump them.
Apple's product style and IBM's current style doesn't match and I think (based on attitude of SJobs), things were already very bad between them. The core users of Apple will never need such thing (they are already running pure Mac from beginning) but trust me, if you talk to switchers, people coming from PC World, even if Apple had something like "G6 4700 Mhz" but it wasn't capable of x86, they wouldn't abandon x86 PCs. I have even seen a "100% Vista" Macbook Pro. I didn't know it even was possible. Yes, a Mac with no OS X, only Windows installed. When I asked the user if he lost his mind, he said "I wanted a quality PC which is supported, that's all"
Do you still ask that question? I gave up asking almost a year ago when I saw an iPhone user telling me how backwards I am for using MMS/J2ME and living happily now with my Symbian devices.
The real evil thing is, they made Nokia (!) and Microsoft (!!!) look open market place compared to them. I wouldn't think one day I would defend Nokia's Symbian signed/ Sun's ultra paranoid J2ME certification but when you see the alternative "App Store", you end up defending it.
IMHO iPhone developers should also add "Garage Band" to their order and find a way to sell millions of albums to get treated well:)
Biggest fight between Apple and IBM came from IBM not keeping the promise of shipping a 3 Ghz G5 for Apple right? Also they didn't make something for portable which is the future. Months later, they shipped an architecture which can scale to 6 Ghz (by some exclusive tech) and shipped a real working 4.7 Ghz enterprise CPU (POWER6) which they keep selling. So, IBM isn't just capable of 3Ghz, they have such a technology in hand making competitors Mhz look so funny. It is almost like ultimate justice for years of Mhz myth by X86 vendors.
Apple didn't design the entire G5. It is actually scaled down POWER4+Apple design choices+Altivec (which almost shouts like "I come from Apple").
IBM wants to stay away from "end user" and they want to sell CPUs to companies who makes consoles/very high end TV/BluRay etc. XBox 360, Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii are all IBM CPUs designed with the respective partners. XBox 360 is almost designed for MS engineers needs, that is how it does serve them great. I was visiting a friend at IBM one day, one line had a 10.000 client network having some speed issues and other line was a teenage bitching about his FPS performance... It was in 1990s and when IBM sold their PC division to Chinese, I wasn't surprised a bit. Enterprise and end user really doesn't go together.
Apple also wanted this situation: Consumers should be able to run x86 software and even can run Windows as exclusive OS (if needed). Don't let the comments/rants fool you, there are some amazing numbers of virtualisation software/ boot camp updates downloads from sites like versiontracker, macupdate etc. It is only x86 which can do it, you won't be emulating a same generation CPU with something completely different down to endianness. I actually run MS Virtual PC 7 (with their exclusive info,undocumented access) on Quad G5 2500 Mhz. Trust me, x86 isn't easy to emulate even if you are Microsoft itself. For year, before iPod, people had question "What happens if Apple dies?". If you ship them something that can run Windows even better than generic PCs, you won't have that question asked at all.
Basically both companies wanted to end partnership. Steve Jobs likes to have "No 3Ghz for me, damn you IBM" and IBM likes to exit end user chaos, both are happy and interestingly, consumers are also happy. People actually hoping for CPU arch competition aren't happy, that is it Intel also lost a good reason to push SSE etc. achievements, who will ship something like Altivec now? AMD?
I think many misses the fact that Sun makes some great blades running Windows enterprise... Or the entire "enterprise" market which POWER is the king, Intel, Sparc are fighting each other, AIX is a huge player, Cell started to have huge popularity as HPC newcomer etc. It is something like different universe.
Of course, I won't see a Sun workstation in my usual life, I won't sit and admin a Enterprise server but that doesn't make me treat Sparc as something so sucky that can be easily abandoned by an enterprise software company...
Come on people... Lets go to some enterprise focused sites (Register has a great section) to see the real deal before talking eh? A database company who hasn't produced any kind of "small" (sub 10 users) serving software pays billions just to kill mysql which doesn't compete in any of their segments, closes down Java, kills Sparc... If they are _that_ stupid, how come they are one of the largest software companies on Earth?
Apple is a software company which happens to design hardware that they believe will run their software perfectly. It is hard to explain but, if you look at pre touch iPods, they are significantly weaker than other offerings in hardware specs. What makes people buy them is the software they run. Same thing can be said for iPhone vs. Nokia 5800. They didn't change overnight, it is same deal since first Apple 1. That is why people dreaming about official OS X on generic PC are kinda... Dreaming.
If Oracle has this neat idea of having devices, gigantic mainframe like servers (Sun's top line), portable enterprise database servers.. They are going with Apple's idea. Of course, they aren't stupid to abandon their "runs on Linux/AIX/zOS/Windows/Whatever" software.
Just imagine a Sparc which have accelerator functions just for database operations. That kind of possibilities kept Apple in PowerPC for years, G4/G5 especially have some excellent functions for media which came from Apple. Of course, times has changed and IBM started to hate end user desktop except consoles so they sold them out and moved to Intel. If you look at how easy was for Apple to move to Intel and how easy for them to release software for Windows when they want, you can't call them just a hardware company.
If something really bad happened to Apple, it is even possible to release OS X/iTools/iWork for Windows. Of course, we wouldn't get the same experience on millions of different configurations and substandard $10 cards. That is why you see Apple hardware.
I don't think Kurzweil speaks about silicons, wafers etc. He suggests a breakthrough in how processors work and advanced AI will change shape of things so bad that one day, you won't even figure what the heck is going on or you won't even know/care that you have a computer.
A breakthrough may happen, just imagine the change in one day between candles etc. and electric bulb. If you look at early experiments, theories about quantum computing, you will see that we can't even imagine what kind of power it brings us when realised. In fact, it may even help us to understand how human brain actually works. People above (comments) are arguing the Mhz speed of it etc. are missing one thing, it is not "1" or "0"s in human brain.
I started to wonder if people bitching about COBOL have written a single business/enterprise application serving to thousands or even millions?
I see there is a language which is designed for writing business applications and even named that way, runs on mainframes which are worth millions and serving to thousands in mission critical environments and people who didn't write a single line of code (in that sense) keep bitching about it. It is not you I talk about, it is a general thing.
In Video business, we keep seeing Audio guys using old technology like JVC SCSI hard disk recorders, sometimes analogue mixers and even pro DATs. One thing we learned is never to question them or joke about their hardware. Guy can come up with 5-6 multi hundred million Hollywood productions in his CV and can start technically and artistically explaining why he uses that DAT and that Mac G4 box running Protools old MacOS version. Of course one can ask me what that "analogue" Betacam is doing in AVID production environment at a fully digital TV studio and I can explain the reason.
You people make it look like COBOL is the pyramid scheme of all times, the people who are in charge of purchasing 100M dollar hardware doesn't know shit, COBOL programmers are evil geniuses who can convince businessman to run outdated software. That kind of thinking always makes one wonder if it is the real deal or it is simply COBOL coders doesn't care enough to hit reply button?
Why isn't one of the oldest (and still used) languages isn't in GNU collection? Some kind of elitism or patent hell, lack of standards to follow (like ANSI C) etc.? If it is elitism, it is really sad but I don't think so.
For years, I wondered one thing... Why on earth Symbian developers are so paranoid about the.sisx (installer) size while everyone on planet who can afford a $20 application has a flat/wifi line? For a goodly written Symbian application, the "device on board flash" is not an issue either, you can install the application to memory card and it can swap in/out to built in flash (e.g. temp files). J2ME developers on other hand, has some issues and I can understand them. The deep issue with J2ME is the sandbox system which requires apps to play around in their own directory. Great security comes with a price as usual.
I was updating my brothers iPhone 3G and noticed there are even 10-12 MB card deck games, real stuff is way bigger. I guess it is one of the reasons why iPhone apps are so eye candy, they really don't care about size. Recently shipped "Myst" is 700 MB. Even iPhone users went crazy for that one, I just ask "So what?".
If they limit to 10 MB, Developers will have 3 options and nothing else. 1) Compress using better (but slower) algorithms 2) Give up eye candy 3) Have a base application install and get the rest from Web (e.g. Yahoo Go! 3.x J2ME does it, good surprise when you are on GPRS on first launch)
Why bother? Really, Windows Mobile devices have good internal flash memory and massively expandable with memory card. Bandwidth cost for consumer? If 12 MB is problem for him, he has a "byte by byte ripping" provider, 10 MB will hurt too. iPhone is successful because Apple's attitude is "enough, it is a smart phone, use it like that, 2010 is arriving soon" and they keep it that way.
The entire "App store" success comes from that. It is not the LOOK of it, it is how it does have different attitude on doing things. Once again MS misses the "real thing" while copying, that is why Apple came up with "photocopying" term I guess.
It is not impossible to make it a desktop friendly, even easier than Windows operating system but you will need to give up so much stuff that it would be nothing like BSD.
Don't get me wrong, OS X is not Cocoa on FreeBSD but it uses BSD parts enough that you can get glimpse of what kind of features to expect on next OS X. I always watch FreeBSD releases for that reason.
If I had a x86 PC, I would try Slackware first, then Debian and if all goes wrong, FreeBSD. New fashion eye candy stuff is either too Windows like or OS X like for me. Especially Ubuntu which its fanatics really started to become irritating.
I am using some kind of FreeBSD anyway, OS X, some of/etc is identical even. Of course, there are BSD-Lite parts and several changes but without FreeBSD, it would be a real bad experience.
I reply to your parent too. In another way of thinking, FreeBSD has 10% market share;)
I guess you changed it and posted it back getting approval.
What makes me wonder with such draconian app store policy, some idiots sitting there behind iMacs and give it ''pass'' ''go'' is: Isn't iPhone developers afraid to tell their mind on slashdot etc? How much of bad feedback we can actually hear from them?
I mean that idiot put in charge of allowing your app or not, from random pool, could read your comment and say ''Ha! Bastard, let me put you to waiting game a bit'' or find a issue which he wouldn't find if he didn't look that closely. If there was a (c) regarding polaroid paper, we would sure hear it as it is almost classical thing in movies, several apps, intros and some Apple iTools as far as I remember.
Such policies made me keep my Symbian devices and reject a free iPhone 3G. With 3 macs at home, I am free of iphone installing whatever.sisx I wish to Symbian.
If the application was released in ALL mobile platforms except iPhone/iPod soon as weeks, Apple would sure get the message.
I love developers whining about iphone app store and not sending out this message by releasing it to all competing platforms.
Their development tools are harder? Well, they are real smart phone operating systems with multi tasking and various other stuff not found in Apple's fake smart phone. In case of Symbian we talk about thousands of different models from many manufacturers. Needless to say, capable developers already release apps with features iPhone can't even dream off, without breaking system stability and battery. Fring, Opera, CorePlayer etc.
Well, KDE 4 with Qt 4 is installed to my OS X, running as native application, using OS X frameworks although it needs some testing. I suspect it is same deal on KDE/4 Windows too.
KDE 4 has made such a revolution with possible future of running in embedded systems, phones and anything you can imagine. What did Vista or 7 achieve?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get why they treat Oracle like AOL acquiring Netscape. It is a database development company which has no solution to fill MySQL'es place if I haven't mistaken.
I think after these incidents, large companies will think 1 billion times when they got the idea of acquiring an open source project. They treat Oracle like AOL for God's sake.
e-mail is supposed to be reliable because of its distributed nature. It is not supposed to be on single "cloud", distributed machines should be caring for it. It is just like XMPP vs. old fashion MSN/AIM etc. junk.
:)
Let me show what I see with the "cloud" (which is one of the worst abused terms) right now:
(wget)
s3.amazonaws.com[72.21.207.242]
Saving to: `423.dmg'
10% [===> ] 4109203 5,54K/s eta 79m 33s
So, highly successful mac shareware which I love couldn't deal with bandwidth issues and offloaded the downloads to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 on the other hand, showing it works perfectly (on status page) has 450 ms ping response and I am back to 56K speed on a 4 mbit ADSL line. It looks like something wrong with Level3 hops.
Cloud is not offloading all mail to one central server nor putting all files to Amazon S3, it doesn't even exist yet. When people do 10x realtime h264 encoding with their Xgrid enabled portable Macs running Snow Leopard and store the file anonymously to thousands of other machines, that would be some kind of "cloud". Right now, Cloud is just an icon for that overpriced me.com (dotmac) service
Recently McDonalds decided to race with Starbucks etc. coffee shops. It is also related to "fast food" phobia, like 150 mg of caffeine won't really break anything :)
So, free Wi-Fi and attempts to change decoration etc. are all related to it. They also attempt to offer local tastes in hamburger form which are generally slower to eat.
IMHO McDonalds is also thinking about "...must read... while eating something..." people which includes me :) Well, for that, cell phone+rss reader is enough.
If you set the DNS to OpenDNS on router level and block outgoing DNS traffic from clients (mostly not needed), set it very strict, e.g. no piracy sites, no porn (obvious), not even lingerie, no proxies (so they can't bypass), most of sticky and shameless give up in about 10-20 mins.
Oh if they say you are censoring? Well, they can subscribe to Cell company 3G and even EDGE and use their _own_ bandwidth for whatever they do. It is a public/free service, "a privilege, not a right" in IRC fashion.
http://www.opendns.com/
I know you can achieve all with own stuff but opendns is just couple of clicks and please don't tell me how to bypass it with direct IP etc. I know.
Do you know what most of Apple Intel newcomers (those switches from PPC to Intel) did when they first had Boot Camp? Install Half Life 2 and play for hours. It was them for years asked MS to provide some kind of functionality to Virtual PC 7 (very expensive piece of software which focuses on office) so they can run Half Life 2.
Do you think they were for the amazing technology (!) in Half Life 2 or they were looking for something they can actually enjoy playing on their boxes which can run Doom 3/Quake 4 perfectly and natively?
I gave up FPS genre after first Quake 3 and never came back. That is allthough I paid significant money for it as it was Linux version by Loki Games. This kind of fun and really targeted for adults game could make me buy it instantly or even finally switch to Intel from my Quad G5.
I keep having this name in my mind... "John Carmack". Purchase the engine/assets and make money from them or just do it for "game programming is an art, games are pieces of art" attitude.
Game has nothing to do with their titles either, it would introduce a new kind of customer/fan to ID software which feels like they really owe them.
Of course, I don't know how realistic my hope is.
EA, the Disney of game companies can't release such a tough title. A real miracle would be dukenukem3d.sourceforge.net . It could change the shape of open source gaming forever.
Imagine creating a foundation to acquire game engine and art from the company just to release it open source. It can even pay back profit with PS3/XBox360 etc. release sales.
Can you say "Observables for the Analysis of Event Shapes in e+ e- Annihilation and Other Processes" without taking a breath? Mr. Wolfram can :)
Seriously, that is not a general search engine or even engine as we understand today. It is something else. It is the click happy IT media which compares it to Google and I am sure people at Wolfram research either laughs or cries because of it.
I know the IBM not giving what Apple wants (portable) is a big reason but trust me, IBM was also capable of a low power PowerPC. I wouldn't have to be a G5, it could be something else. It is just IBM didn't want to give Apple that thing, giving them reason to dump them.
Apple's product style and IBM's current style doesn't match and I think (based on attitude of SJobs), things were already very bad between them. The core users of Apple will never need such thing (they are already running pure Mac from beginning) but trust me, if you talk to switchers, people coming from PC World, even if Apple had something like "G6 4700 Mhz" but it wasn't capable of x86, they wouldn't abandon x86 PCs. I have even seen a "100% Vista" Macbook Pro. I didn't know it even was possible. Yes, a Mac with no OS X, only Windows installed. When I asked the user if he lost his mind, he said "I wanted a quality PC which is supported, that's all"
Do you still ask that question? I gave up asking almost a year ago when I saw an iPhone user telling me how backwards I am for using MMS/J2ME and living happily now with my Symbian devices.
The real evil thing is, they made Nokia (!) and Microsoft (!!!) look open market place compared to them. I wouldn't think one day I would defend Nokia's Symbian signed/ Sun's ultra paranoid J2ME certification but when you see the alternative "App Store", you end up defending it.
IMHO iPhone developers should also add "Garage Band" to their order and find a way to sell millions of albums to get treated well :)
I think people forgot how computers looked before iMac (except the always interesting Packard Bell and the real IBM PS/2 designs)
This is Apple Macintosh Classic, a budget model even (for Apple standards)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh_classic.jpg (Apple Mac Classic)
This is a computer which was designed to please home user/teens by a company who can easily spend billions and no question about its future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PCjr_expanded_cropped.jpg (IBM PCJr)
PCs were white/beige boxes just caring about how many millimetre that component is and amps of power supply.
Biggest fight between Apple and IBM came from IBM not keeping the promise of shipping a 3 Ghz G5 for Apple right? Also they didn't make something for portable which is the future. Months later, they shipped an architecture which can scale to 6 Ghz (by some exclusive tech) and shipped a real working 4.7 Ghz enterprise CPU (POWER6) which they keep selling. So, IBM isn't just capable of 3Ghz, they have such a technology in hand making competitors Mhz look so funny. It is almost like ultimate justice for years of Mhz myth by X86 vendors.
Apple didn't design the entire G5. It is actually scaled down POWER4+Apple design choices+Altivec (which almost shouts like "I come from Apple").
IBM wants to stay away from "end user" and they want to sell CPUs to companies who makes consoles/very high end TV/BluRay etc. XBox 360, Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii are all IBM CPUs designed with the respective partners. XBox 360 is almost designed for MS engineers needs, that is how it does serve them great. I was visiting a friend at IBM one day, one line had a 10.000 client network having some speed issues and other line was a teenage bitching about his FPS performance... It was in 1990s and when IBM sold their PC division to Chinese, I wasn't surprised a bit. Enterprise and end user really doesn't go together.
Apple also wanted this situation: Consumers should be able to run x86 software and even can run Windows as exclusive OS (if needed). Don't let the comments/rants fool you, there are some amazing numbers of virtualisation software/ boot camp updates downloads from sites like versiontracker, macupdate etc. It is only x86 which can do it, you won't be emulating a same generation CPU with something completely different down to endianness. I actually run MS Virtual PC 7 (with their exclusive info,undocumented access) on Quad G5 2500 Mhz. Trust me, x86 isn't easy to emulate even if you are Microsoft itself. For year, before iPod, people had question "What happens if Apple dies?". If you ship them something that can run Windows even better than generic PCs, you won't have that question asked at all.
Basically both companies wanted to end partnership. Steve Jobs likes to have "No 3Ghz for me, damn you IBM" and IBM likes to exit end user chaos, both are happy and interestingly, consumers are also happy. People actually hoping for CPU arch competition aren't happy, that is it Intel also lost a good reason to push SSE etc. achievements, who will ship something like Altivec now? AMD?
I think many misses the fact that Sun makes some great blades running Windows enterprise... Or the entire "enterprise" market which POWER is the king, Intel, Sparc are fighting each other, AIX is a huge player, Cell started to have huge popularity as HPC newcomer etc. It is something like different universe.
Of course, I won't see a Sun workstation in my usual life, I won't sit and admin a Enterprise server but that doesn't make me treat Sparc as something so sucky that can be easily abandoned by an enterprise software company...
Come on people... Lets go to some enterprise focused sites (Register has a great section) to see the real deal before talking eh? A database company who hasn't produced any kind of "small" (sub 10 users) serving software pays billions just to kill mysql which doesn't compete in any of their segments, closes down Java, kills Sparc... If they are _that_ stupid, how come they are one of the largest software companies on Earth?
Apple is a software company which happens to design hardware that they believe will run their software perfectly. It is hard to explain but, if you look at pre touch iPods, they are significantly weaker than other offerings in hardware specs. What makes people buy them is the software they run. Same thing can be said for iPhone vs. Nokia 5800. They didn't change overnight, it is same deal since first Apple 1. That is why people dreaming about official OS X on generic PC are kinda... Dreaming.
If Oracle has this neat idea of having devices, gigantic mainframe like servers (Sun's top line), portable enterprise database servers.. They are going with Apple's idea. Of course, they aren't stupid to abandon their "runs on Linux/AIX/zOS/Windows/Whatever" software.
Just imagine a Sparc which have accelerator functions just for database operations. That kind of possibilities kept Apple in PowerPC for years, G4/G5 especially have some excellent functions for media which came from Apple. Of course, times has changed and IBM started to hate end user desktop except consoles so they sold them out and moved to Intel. If you look at how easy was for Apple to move to Intel and how easy for them to release software for Windows when they want, you can't call them just a hardware company.
If something really bad happened to Apple, it is even possible to release OS X/iTools/iWork for Windows. Of course, we wouldn't get the same experience on millions of different configurations and substandard $10 cards. That is why you see Apple hardware.
I don't think Kurzweil speaks about silicons, wafers etc. He suggests a breakthrough in how processors work and advanced AI will change shape of things so bad that one day, you won't even figure what the heck is going on or you won't even know/care that you have a computer.
A breakthrough may happen, just imagine the change in one day between candles etc. and electric bulb. If you look at early experiments, theories about quantum computing, you will see that we can't even imagine what kind of power it brings us when realised. In fact, it may even help us to understand how human brain actually works. People above (comments) are arguing the Mhz speed of it etc. are missing one thing, it is not "1" or "0"s in human brain.
I started to wonder if people bitching about COBOL have written a single business/enterprise application serving to thousands or even millions?
I see there is a language which is designed for writing business applications and even named that way, runs on mainframes which are worth millions and serving to thousands in mission critical environments and people who didn't write a single line of code (in that sense) keep bitching about it. It is not you I talk about, it is a general thing.
In Video business, we keep seeing Audio guys using old technology like JVC SCSI hard disk recorders, sometimes analogue mixers and even pro DATs. One thing we learned is never to question them or joke about their hardware. Guy can come up with 5-6 multi hundred million Hollywood productions in his CV and can start technically and artistically explaining why he uses that DAT and that Mac G4 box running Protools old MacOS version. Of course one can ask me what that "analogue" Betacam is doing in AVID production environment at a fully digital TV studio and I can explain the reason.
You people make it look like COBOL is the pyramid scheme of all times, the people who are in charge of purchasing 100M dollar hardware doesn't know shit, COBOL programmers are evil geniuses who can convince businessman to run outdated software. That kind of thinking always makes one wonder if it is the real deal or it is simply COBOL coders doesn't care enough to hit reply button?
Why isn't one of the oldest (and still used) languages isn't in GNU collection? Some kind of elitism or patent hell, lack of standards to follow (like ANSI C) etc.? If it is elitism, it is really sad but I don't think so.
They may have psychological reasons because of name... dialers on windows you know ;)
For years, I wondered one thing... Why on earth Symbian developers are so paranoid about the .sisx (installer) size while everyone on planet who can afford a $20 application has a flat/wifi line? For a goodly written Symbian application, the "device on board flash" is not an issue either, you can install the application to memory card and it can swap in/out to built in flash (e.g. temp files). J2ME developers on other hand, has some issues and I can understand them. The deep issue with J2ME is the sandbox system which requires apps to play around in their own directory. Great security comes with a price as usual.
I was updating my brothers iPhone 3G and noticed there are even 10-12 MB card deck games, real stuff is way bigger. I guess it is one of the reasons why iPhone apps are so eye candy, they really don't care about size. Recently shipped "Myst" is 700 MB. Even iPhone users went crazy for that one, I just ask "So what?".
If they limit to 10 MB, Developers will have 3 options and nothing else.
1) Compress using better (but slower) algorithms
2) Give up eye candy
3) Have a base application install and get the rest from Web (e.g. Yahoo Go! 3.x J2ME does it, good surprise when you are on GPRS on first launch)
Why bother? Really, Windows Mobile devices have good internal flash memory and massively expandable with memory card. Bandwidth cost for consumer? If 12 MB is problem for him, he has a "byte by byte ripping" provider, 10 MB will hurt too. iPhone is successful because Apple's attitude is "enough, it is a smart phone, use it like that, 2010 is arriving soon" and they keep it that way.
The entire "App store" success comes from that. It is not the LOOK of it, it is how it does have different attitude on doing things. Once again MS misses the "real thing" while copying, that is why Apple came up with "photocopying" term I guess.
Generally speaking, trolls get motivated when you spare time to reply them instead of leaving to mods.
It is not impossible to make it a desktop friendly, even easier than Windows operating system but you will need to give up so much stuff that it would be nothing like BSD.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
Don't get me wrong, OS X is not Cocoa on FreeBSD but it uses BSD parts enough that you can get glimpse of what kind of features to expect on next OS X. I always watch FreeBSD releases for that reason.
If I had a x86 PC, I would try Slackware first, then Debian and if all goes wrong, FreeBSD. New fashion eye candy stuff is either too Windows like or OS X like for me. Especially Ubuntu which its fanatics really started to become irritating.
I am using some kind of FreeBSD anyway, OS X, some of /etc is identical even. Of course, there are BSD-Lite parts and several changes but without FreeBSD, it would be a real bad experience.
I reply to your parent too. In another way of thinking, FreeBSD has 10% market share ;)
I guess you changed it and posted it back getting approval.
What makes me wonder with such draconian app store policy, some idiots sitting there behind iMacs and give it ''pass'' ''go'' is: Isn't iPhone developers afraid to tell their mind on slashdot etc? How much of bad feedback we can actually hear from them?
I mean that idiot put in charge of allowing your app or not, from random pool, could read your comment and say ''Ha! Bastard, let me put you to waiting game a bit'' or find a issue which he wouldn't find if he didn't look that closely. If there was a (c) regarding polaroid paper, we would sure hear it as it is almost classical thing in movies, several apps, intros and some Apple iTools as far as I remember.
Such policies made me keep my Symbian devices and reject a free iPhone 3G. With 3 macs at home, I am free of iphone installing whatever .sisx I wish to Symbian.
If the application was released in ALL mobile platforms except iPhone/iPod soon as weeks, Apple would sure get the message.
I love developers whining about iphone app store and not sending out this message by releasing it to all competing platforms.
Their development tools are harder? Well, they are real smart phone operating systems with multi tasking and various other stuff not found in Apple's fake smart phone. In case of Symbian we talk about thousands of different models from many manufacturers. Needless to say, capable developers already release apps with features iPhone can't even dream off, without breaking system stability and battery. Fring, Opera, CorePlayer etc.
Well, KDE 4 with Qt 4 is installed to my OS X, running as native application, using OS X frameworks although it needs some testing. I suspect it is same deal on KDE/4 Windows too.
OS X one: http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/browse.php?summary=kde4
KDE 4 has made such a revolution with possible future of running in embedded systems, phones and anything you can imagine. What did Vista or 7 achieve?