It would be more logical for Apple to ship the Intel version of OS X as a Virtual PC image. That way, people could run it on both PPC Macintosh and Windows.
VMware had done the hard work of virtualizing a processor that wasn't designed to be virtualized. But upcoming chips from Intel and AMD will support virtualization directly. While you still need some additional code (device emulation, etc.) to get a full hypervisor or virtual machine environment, that code already exists. In different words, the virtualization features of the next generation of x86 chips basically erase VMware's competitive advantage. And that spells trouble for VMware, which is probably why they are trying desparately to tie other companies to themselves.
I disagree. 99% of the nessisary technology exists already, and the remaining percent consists of engineering problems not stuff where we need radical new scientific discoveries.
I see. So, you think we have the technology to lift millions of people into space, together with all the building materials, factories, and other stuff necessary to grow food and produce replacement parts? Because that's what it would take for a self-sustaining colony. Well, that's a neat trick. Do tell us more.
it's still the best plan for species survival.
In different words, you are saying that we are a doomed species.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate,
Our current population size is already not sustainable; any non-negative population growth rate is therefore too high.
nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
The predictions were generally of the form "if growth continues unchecked, then...". Fortunately, limiting growth and family planning have put a damper on that. Unfortunately, some populations are increasingly being limited through natural consequences of overpopulation (famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict), which was bound to happen sooner or later.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level
Over the last century, technology has primarily allowed us to increase population size by increasing the rate at which we extract non-renewable resources; it has not appreciably increased the sustainable population size.
You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
It's either family planning or environmental disaster or war or disease; take your pick.
No, the best plan is to work to produce self sustaining off planet / underwater / deep-antarctic colonies. That way when the climate changes it'll just be expensive rather than fatal to the species.
Just think it through what a "self-sustaining off-world colony" would actually mean; it is utterly implausible using current or foreseeable technologies.
Have you been asleep for the last couple of decades? We are doing great things with space exploration: probes going to the outer reaches of the solar system, solar sails, new propulsion methods, hibernation, you name it, it's being worked on.
However, sending human astronauts to Mars or even the moon at this point will just take funding away from important space related programs and delay meaningful manned space travel by decades.
Continued human activity isnt a good cause, tho; it doesnt require totalitarian style central control of, well, pretty much everything. Odd how the solution to "global cooling" "global warming", "nuclear winter", etc etc is always an unelected, unaccountable ruling clique of "enlightened ones", isnt it.
Take of your tinfoil hat.
The solution to pollution and greenhouse gas emissions is simple economics: stop subsidizing inefficient technologies, and impose taxes that correspond to the true cost of an activity. Then, let the market work it out.
It's been known for a long time that the oxygen in earth's atmosphere first arose as the result of microbial action. It's pretty self-evident that that must have gone along with major climatic changes. What appears to be new about this story is that they link a particular glaciation event to this change in the planet's atmosphere.
The scientific details aside, this story is an important reminder: our global climate is not necessarily stable. Earth could become a frozen snowball again, or it could become like Venus. Furthermore, we don't know what would trigger either transition (it's possible, for example, that short term global warming leads to long-term freezing).
The best way of preventing that for the time being is to drastically reduce our changes to the planet's atmosphere because we know that, without human intervention, the global climate has at least supported higher life forms for hundreds of millions of years.
The moment there is a way to reserve an area for GL use, all that is drawn in it will be provided by the GL drivers for the specific card. Hence, GL performance is not dropping for NVidia or ATI users. It will drop for all those that use generic MS drivers.
I'm sorry, but that's total BS. If Microsoft wants to restrict OpenGL in Vista to only their own, outdated generic OpenGL implementation, they most certainly can.
Why would they do that? If they just dropped support for OpenGL, OpenGL vendors would set their own standards. This way, they both provide backwards compatibility and interfere with the future use of OpenGL.
And even if Microsoft doesn't actively prevent native OpenGL implementations from running, the fact that their generic implementation is stuck at an old level pretty much achieves the same thing.
With the addition of SVG to browsers, AJAX should become even more powerful.
However, while what one can do with the platform now is great, the amount of complexity and crap in the underlying standards (in particular, Javascript, DOM, CSS) is mind boggling, as is the fact that it takes something as bloated as IE or Firefox to display it.
As far as I can tell, Atlas isn't Microsoft's "AJAX equivalent", it's a.NET toolkit for building AJAX applications; the applications themselves will be AJAX applicatiosn.
Basically, they are saying that by probing ports in particular patterns, and then looking for mention of their probes in published summary reports, they can determine the identity of systems contributing to the reports. (If a trivial idea like that manages to get the USENIX best paper award, then it's no wonder computer security is so bad.)
I, for one, hope that these kinds of techniques will be widely adopted by worm writers. Why? Because it sets up an incentive system to have systems monitored and contribute to public interenet statistics: you contribute monitoring and statistics information, and worms won't attack you.
The reason Linus is using a G5 is to test the PPC side of things and because he got it free, not because he thinks it's "better".
The G5 is probably the best of Apple's machines for running Linux (but also the least interesting); iBook, Powerbook, and iMac lose significant functionality.
That graphics card/chipset manufacturers provided their own implementations of OpenGL through their drivers anyway. (That's definitely the case for NVidia-based cards at least) Therefore, this would only apply to the system default drivers, which almost no-one will be using anyway.
Permitting vendor-installable OpenGL drivers requires an infrastructure and standards from Microsoft. If Microsoft drops that infrastructure, that would make it much harder to support OpenGL on Windows.
This is going to be a non-issue for the vast majority of people, and certainly for anyone who cares about 3D performance. Don't let that deny you an opportunity to bash "M$" though.
For the "vast majority of people", the fact that Microsoft has cheated them out of a couple of decades of potential innovation and thousands of dollars is not an issue--they just don't know about it. That doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist.
I think having people with (successful) field experience in the decision structure is tremendously important.
People with field experience should be consulted when the situation warrants it, but making the "part of the decision structure" is probably not a good idea. Astronauts have already demonstrated by their participation in the program that they are willing to make irrational sacrifices for a ride into space. Participation of people with that kind of psychological profile only risks wasting more money on unnecessary space flights.
Decisions about the shuttle program should be made by impartial and disinterested scientists and engineers, in a broadly-based peer review process, based on the scientific and technological merits alone.
Note that Aldrin doesn't seem to question the merit of manned space travel, only the vehicle.
as someone that deals with canon repair regularly, 100% of warrenty rejections are because of customer abuse. Water damage is the #1 attempt at a warrenty repair on canon cameras.
As someone who had a camera break because of "water damage", the manufacturer may be to blame as well. I had a new camera break during a hike; I never took it out of my backpack and there was no rain. The sweat condensing on the camera was enough to destroy it through "water damage". When I disassembled it, it turned out that the camera had no seals in it whatsoever. Needless to say, I'm not going to buy that brand again; that kind of design is not acceptable even for a low-end consumer camera.
the customer signs a paper that states that they will be charged up to 2X full retail value if they try to ship an item that they damaged in for warrenty repair. it usually stops 30% of the returns as he makes them read that line.
Hopefully, they also stop buying at your shop; your customer service sounds like it is rude and poor.
First, I should say that it is, of course, illegal and unethical to do this sort of thing.
However, this sounds like it would mostly affect businesses whose employees don't know their customers and don't know their products very well; that is, it affects mostly the large chains whose sales staff isn't very competent.
The overall effect of this kind of fraud may actually be to help small and high quality retailers become more competitive again. And maybe that's actually a good thing.
It is a matter of survival for an "information economy" - if you can't make money because someone is "sharing" it out from under you, there can't be an "information economy".
Good: let's get rid of the "information economy" then.
Well, one day (actually more likely a dark night) the police come. Not just your usual two officers assigned to the neighborhood patrol car, but tens or even hundreds of cops in vests carrying all kinds of heavy weapons.
Sounds like Nazi Germany or the USSR. Granted, for people like you, who enjoy that sort of thing, the opportunities are dwindling, but North Korea may still be willing to take you in.
Sure, Microsoft may not have invented many of those products you mentioned, but they certainly have taken each and turned them into major players in ways that their original inventors were not able to.
That's just not true. Almost everything Microsoft ships now was a successful product by another company long before Microsoft copied it.
The secret to Microsoft's success is that they not only let other people do the research, they also let other people develop the market and establish a customer base. Only then do they sweep in and take over that market, often by illegal monopolistic means.
Some guys love to get tied up, fscked, and flogged, and even pay for the privilege. We accept that, just like we accept Varun's love of Microsoft, which amounts pretty much to the same thing.
Really? Can you link some? What language/toolkit? I'd love to see them.
Just look on eclipse.org and/or eclipseplugincentral.com; there are several (WindowBuilder, Jigloo, etc.).
but I would say that, even if you compare C++ or C# (or VB, but we won't mention that again) under VS 2005 to Java under Eclipse, the tables are pretty much even.
Just that would be amazing in and of itself. But I think Eclipse actually goes further because of the plugins. Eclipse is where all the research on software development environments is happening, and it's the tool many vendors build on these days.
Yes, VisualStudio and Eclipse are targetted at different languages. But we can also just ask the question: if you are free to choose your language, which is the better IDE? And I think it's pretty clear that Eclipse is. (Incidentally, there are GUI designer plug-ins for Eclipse.)
You can keep splitting hairs about "standards" and all that, but the fact remains that Linux does not fully work on Macintosh hardware because Macintosh hardware is not fully documented. In contrast, there are vendors of PC hardware where all functions are fully supported in Linux, and that won't change with DRM and TCPA. Overall, PC hardware remains a better platform for running Linux and other open source operating systems.
The GP post claimed that because of DRM and TCPA, the Macintosh would be a better platform for open source operating systems.
I merely pointed out that that is wrong. Macintosh is a pain to support for systems like Linux, and some hardware on Macintosh is completely undocumented and unsupported. Furthermore, Apple forces you to buy their OS with their hardware, whether you want to or not.
OTOH, the presence of DRM and TCPA on the PC platform makes no difference to Linux, with a PC you have the choice of buying only documented and supported components, and you can get a PC without the hardware.
Macintosh is and remains an Apple-proprietary platform, and it remains a worse platform for open source operating systems than the PC platform.
Sorry if that doesn't fit into your ideology, but that's just the way it is.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be more logical for Apple to ship the Intel version of OS X as a Virtual PC image. That way, people could run it on both PPC Macintosh and Windows.
VMware had done the hard work of virtualizing a processor that wasn't designed to be virtualized. But upcoming chips from Intel and AMD will support virtualization directly. While you still need some additional code (device emulation, etc.) to get a full hypervisor or virtual machine environment, that code already exists. In different words, the virtualization features of the next generation of x86 chips basically erase VMware's competitive advantage. And that spells trouble for VMware, which is probably why they are trying desparately to tie other companies to themselves.
I disagree. 99% of the nessisary technology exists already, and the remaining percent consists of engineering problems not stuff where we need radical new scientific discoveries.
I see. So, you think we have the technology to lift millions of people into space, together with all the building materials, factories, and other stuff necessary to grow food and produce replacement parts? Because that's what it would take for a self-sustaining colony. Well, that's a neat trick. Do tell us more.
it's still the best plan for species survival.
In different words, you are saying that we are a doomed species.
I find it rather interesting that people who still complain about Earth being "overpopulated" fail to mention the declining growth rate,
Our current population size is already not sustainable; any non-negative population growth rate is therefore too high.
nor the fact that every single prediction they made from the '60's right up to the present has been dead wrong.
The predictions were generally of the form "if growth continues unchecked, then...". Fortunately, limiting growth and family planning have put a damper on that. Unfortunately, some populations are increasingly being limited through natural consequences of overpopulation (famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict), which was bound to happen sooner or later.
As far as the resource argument goes, this only applies if you assume that technological advancement freezes at its current level
Over the last century, technology has primarily allowed us to increase population size by increasing the rate at which we extract non-renewable resources; it has not appreciably increased the sustainable population size.
You'll never get a majority of Americans - or anything other than a tiny, tiny minority, I suspect - to agree with your assessment.
It's either family planning or environmental disaster or war or disease; take your pick.
No, the best plan is to work to produce self sustaining off planet / underwater / deep-antarctic colonies. That way when the climate changes it'll just be expensive rather than fatal to the species.
Just think it through what a "self-sustaining off-world colony" would actually mean; it is utterly implausible using current or foreseeable technologies.
Have you been asleep for the last couple of decades? We are doing great things with space exploration: probes going to the outer reaches of the solar system, solar sails, new propulsion methods, hibernation, you name it, it's being worked on.
However, sending human astronauts to Mars or even the moon at this point will just take funding away from important space related programs and delay meaningful manned space travel by decades.
Continued human activity isnt a good cause, tho; it doesnt require totalitarian style central control of, well, pretty much everything. Odd how the solution to "global cooling" "global warming", "nuclear winter", etc etc is always an unelected, unaccountable ruling clique of "enlightened ones", isnt it.
Take of your tinfoil hat.
The solution to pollution and greenhouse gas emissions is simple economics: stop subsidizing inefficient technologies, and impose taxes that correspond to the true cost of an activity. Then, let the market work it out.
It's been known for a long time that the oxygen in earth's atmosphere first arose as the result of microbial action. It's pretty self-evident that that must have gone along with major climatic changes. What appears to be new about this story is that they link a particular glaciation event to this change in the planet's atmosphere.
The scientific details aside, this story is an important reminder: our global climate is not necessarily stable. Earth could become a frozen snowball again, or it could become like Venus. Furthermore, we don't know what would trigger either transition (it's possible, for example, that short term global warming leads to long-term freezing).
The best way of preventing that for the time being is to drastically reduce our changes to the planet's atmosphere because we know that, without human intervention, the global climate has at least supported higher life forms for hundreds of millions of years.
The moment there is a way to reserve an area for GL use, all that is drawn in it will be provided by the GL drivers for the specific card. Hence, GL performance is not dropping for NVidia or ATI users. It will drop for all those that use generic MS drivers.
I'm sorry, but that's total BS. If Microsoft wants to restrict OpenGL in Vista to only their own, outdated generic OpenGL implementation, they most certainly can.
Why would they do that? If they just dropped support for OpenGL, OpenGL vendors would set their own standards. This way, they both provide backwards compatibility and interfere with the future use of OpenGL.
And even if Microsoft doesn't actively prevent native OpenGL implementations from running, the fact that their generic implementation is stuck at an old level pretty much achieves the same thing.
With the addition of SVG to browsers, AJAX should become even more powerful.
However, while what one can do with the platform now is great, the amount of complexity and crap in the underlying standards (in particular, Javascript, DOM, CSS) is mind boggling, as is the fact that it takes something as bloated as IE or Firefox to display it.
Atlas, Microsoft's AJAX equivalent,
.NET toolkit for building AJAX applications; the applications themselves will be AJAX applicatiosn.
As far as I can tell, Atlas isn't Microsoft's "AJAX equivalent", it's a
Basically, they are saying that by probing ports in particular patterns, and then looking for mention of their probes in published summary reports, they can determine the identity of systems contributing to the reports. (If a trivial idea like that manages to get the USENIX best paper award, then it's no wonder computer security is so bad.)
I, for one, hope that these kinds of techniques will be widely adopted by worm writers. Why? Because it sets up an incentive system to have systems monitored and contribute to public interenet statistics: you contribute monitoring and statistics information, and worms won't attack you.
The reason Linus is using a G5 is to test the PPC side of things and because he got it free, not because he thinks it's "better".
The G5 is probably the best of Apple's machines for running Linux (but also the least interesting); iBook, Powerbook, and iMac lose significant functionality.
That graphics card/chipset manufacturers provided their own implementations of OpenGL through their drivers anyway. (That's definitely the case for NVidia-based cards at least) Therefore, this would only apply to the system default drivers, which almost no-one will be using anyway.
Permitting vendor-installable OpenGL drivers requires an infrastructure and standards from Microsoft. If Microsoft drops that infrastructure, that would make it much harder to support OpenGL on Windows.
This is going to be a non-issue for the vast majority of people, and certainly for anyone who cares about 3D performance. Don't let that deny you an opportunity to bash "M$" though.
For the "vast majority of people", the fact that Microsoft has cheated them out of a couple of decades of potential innovation and thousands of dollars is not an issue--they just don't know about it. That doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist.
I think having people with (successful) field experience in the decision structure is tremendously important.
People with field experience should be consulted when the situation warrants it, but making the "part of the decision structure" is probably not a good idea. Astronauts have already demonstrated by their participation in the program that they are willing to make irrational sacrifices for a ride into space. Participation of people with that kind of psychological profile only risks wasting more money on unnecessary space flights.
Decisions about the shuttle program should be made by impartial and disinterested scientists and engineers, in a broadly-based peer review process, based on the scientific and technological merits alone.
Note that Aldrin doesn't seem to question the merit of manned space travel, only the vehicle.
as someone that deals with canon repair regularly, 100% of warrenty rejections are because of customer abuse. Water damage is the #1 attempt at a warrenty repair on canon cameras.
As someone who had a camera break because of "water damage", the manufacturer may be to blame as well. I had a new camera break during a hike; I never took it out of my backpack and there was no rain. The sweat condensing on the camera was enough to destroy it through "water damage". When I disassembled it, it turned out that the camera had no seals in it whatsoever. Needless to say, I'm not going to buy that brand again; that kind of design is not acceptable even for a low-end consumer camera.
the customer signs a paper that states that they will be charged up to 2X full retail value if they try to ship an item that they damaged in for warrenty repair. it usually stops 30% of the returns as he makes them read that line.
Hopefully, they also stop buying at your shop; your customer service sounds like it is rude and poor.
First, I should say that it is, of course, illegal and unethical to do this sort of thing.
However, this sounds like it would mostly affect businesses whose employees don't know their customers and don't know their products very well; that is, it affects mostly the large chains whose sales staff isn't very competent.
The overall effect of this kind of fraud may actually be to help small and high quality retailers become more competitive again. And maybe that's actually a good thing.
It is a matter of survival for an "information economy" - if you can't make money because someone is "sharing" it out from under you, there can't be an "information economy".
Good: let's get rid of the "information economy" then.
Well, one day (actually more likely a dark night) the police come. Not just your usual two officers assigned to the neighborhood patrol car, but tens or even hundreds of cops in vests carrying all kinds of heavy weapons.
Sounds like Nazi Germany or the USSR. Granted, for people like you, who enjoy that sort of thing, the opportunities are dwindling, but North Korea may still be willing to take you in.
Sure, Microsoft may not have invented many of those products you mentioned, but they certainly have taken each and turned them into major players in ways that their original inventors were not able to.
That's just not true. Almost everything Microsoft ships now was a successful product by another company long before Microsoft copied it.
The secret to Microsoft's success is that they not only let other people do the research, they also let other people develop the market and establish a customer base. Only then do they sweep in and take over that market, often by illegal monopolistic means.
Some guys love to get tied up, fscked, and flogged, and even pay for the privilege. We accept that, just like we accept Varun's love of Microsoft, which amounts pretty much to the same thing.
Overall I like it alot and wish I had a linux equivilent (monodevelop has SOOOOOOOO far to go).
You do: Eclipse.
Really? Can you link some? What language/toolkit? I'd love to see them.
Just look on eclipse.org and/or eclipseplugincentral.com; there are several (WindowBuilder, Jigloo, etc.).
but I would say that, even if you compare C++ or C# (or VB, but we won't mention that again) under VS 2005 to Java under Eclipse, the tables are pretty much even.
Just that would be amazing in and of itself. But I think Eclipse actually goes further because of the plugins. Eclipse is where all the research on software development environments is happening, and it's the tool many vendors build on these days.
Yes, VisualStudio and Eclipse are targetted at different languages. But we can also just ask the question: if you are free to choose your language, which is the better IDE? And I think it's pretty clear that Eclipse is. (Incidentally, there are GUI designer plug-ins for Eclipse.)
You can keep splitting hairs about "standards" and all that, but the fact remains that Linux does not fully work on Macintosh hardware because Macintosh hardware is not fully documented. In contrast, there are vendors of PC hardware where all functions are fully supported in Linux, and that won't change with DRM and TCPA. Overall, PC hardware remains a better platform for running Linux and other open source operating systems.
The GP post claimed that because of DRM and TCPA, the Macintosh would be a better platform for open source operating systems.
I merely pointed out that that is wrong. Macintosh is a pain to support for systems like Linux, and some hardware on Macintosh is completely undocumented and unsupported. Furthermore, Apple forces you to buy their OS with their hardware, whether you want to or not.
OTOH, the presence of DRM and TCPA on the PC platform makes no difference to Linux, with a PC you have the choice of buying only documented and supported components, and you can get a PC without the hardware.
Macintosh is and remains an Apple-proprietary platform, and it remains a worse platform for open source operating systems than the PC platform.
Sorry if that doesn't fit into your ideology, but that's just the way it is.