I once worked for a Flight Simulator company, who came up with a rather innovative solution to the problem of displaying lights, especially at simulated night-time. The simulators cockpits are basically surrounded by a big curved mirror, onto which the final rasterised image is projected, to give a wraparound view. The projectors were called SPX projectors.
They found that if they just put the lights into the rasterised image that was displayed on the mirror, it looked a bit rubbish - pixelated, aliased etc. So someone came up with the idea of plotting point lights during the flyback period - they could control the beam on the way back to show up to N points of light (by flicking the beam on momentarily). I forget what N was. It looked significantly better, which is important when you're training to fly at night, as pretty much all you can see are landing lights, so you notice if it looks bad.
Anyway, they came up with the term 'calligraphic' to describe this technique - something to with it the beam being used in a more analogue, continuous way, I guess.
The real reason was, of course, so they could give the product this name:
And then you have the Free Unixes with a combined total of something like 2% of the desktop PC market. But wait, the hardware these guys support is generally supported very well. What gives?
What gives is that these drivers are usually written and maintained by people who actually use that hardware, and are not trying to get the driver done for some arbitrary deadline. So they want it to work, and will fix bugs. Blame capitalism if you like.
And the significant part of your sentence is:
the hardware these guys support
If Microsoft were able to choose which hardware they wanted to support (as opposed to virtually everything because that's what people expect), then I expect the quality would go up. That's what Apple get to do (certainly in terms of core components), and they have a correspondingly lower incidence of driver issues with their software.
It's my understanding that in general, Linux supports significantly less hardware than Windows does. Some of this is down to dumb copyright issues (those h/w companies who believe their firmware is like some sort of magic pixie dust and beyond any normal earthly measurements of value), but a lot of it is because there's a lot of stuff out there.
I've never understood why this is technically a difficult or impractical solution.
This is not a technical issue. I'll repeat that - it is not a technical issue.
Microsoft could indeed do that, but then, say, when you upgraded to XP, half your hardware would stop working*. Add-on hardware/peripherals are highly commoditised, which means they don't spend a whole bunch of time achieving quality bars for drivers. If it runs, they ship it (and sometimes if it doesn't).
Compatibility is one of the reasons Windows is so successful - just read a few of Raymond Chen's posts on the subject, for example. I mean, here's one where he's talking about supporting undocumented behaviour, and gives reasons why MS does this. And you want them to drop documented, correct behaviour? The Microsoft conspiracists would go mad, for starters.
Here's a choice quote from Raymond from that post:
"I recall a survey taken a few years ago by our Setup/Upgrade team of corporations using Windows. Pretty much every single one has at least one "deal-breaker" program, a program which Windows absolutely must support or they won't upgrade."
Of course, there are other people who believe that this pursuit of compatibility is wholly wrong. I'm not totally in either camp, but I do like it when I upgrade Windows and most stuff still works, so I'm more closely aligned with Raymond's views.
In lieue of a technical explanation, I've assumed that this could be considered good for microsoft: making hardware compatiability an expensive task is good for the market giant, I guess (as the present discussion indicates).
Given that MS want as much hardware as possible to work with their OS, why would this be a good thing? Are you saying they engineered this situation purely so that Apple wouldn't be able to enter the commodity PC OS market?
Like Napoleon, I prefer the explanation of incompetence. Most driver writers suck at their jobs (this is a generalisation of the fact that most people suck at their jobs). They have people shouting at them to finish the software so their employer can ship the hardware, and if they're one of the few who do bring up the subject of quality people look at them funny.
Why do we need a hundred modem drivers? Is there really no other way?
Modem drivers are possibly a bad example, because most modem drivers use the Windows 'Unimodem' driver, which is a standard modem driver that can be tweaked by a text/setup file to indicate which features they support, and where they deviate from the norm. So a lot of modem 'drivers' are really just a short text file. (That doesn't mean modem drivers can't be a pain - I once spent about a day trying to find a driver for the Diamond USB modem I wanted to give someone in my family to use for dial-up internet access - unfortunately, Diamond had sold their modem business off to someone else, who didn't care if you could get the drivers for old modems or not. It was quicker to throw the POS away in the end.)
To be precise, they would only need to partner with one hardware manufacturer - say Sony, who would then be responsible for writing and supporting any OSX drivers
I realise it was probably just an example, but you want to pick a manufacturer who will produce good PC hardware, with rock solid drivers, and you choose Sony?
I may have to go and lie down for about half an hour to stop laughing.
memory stick reader and whatever else is non-standard.
Although to be fair, you're bang on with your choice of a 'non-standard' device.
This way, people get to run OSX on OQO tablets, multimedia thingies and so on.
OQO? I thought this was a way for Apple to go after a larger slice of the pie, not some crumbs underneath the table. Is OQO even shipping/working yet?
I'm not sure what a 'multimedia thingy' is, but it sounds like something Apple might want to develop themselves, so they would get first go at OS X for such devices (assuming it was an appropriate OS).
And anyway, what is the point of partnering with one manufacturer to do all this? They already do this - as I pointed out, you can already buy an approved Windows PC that can run OS X - it's called a Mac.
Seriously. I want OSX on my Dell laptop. This isn't rocket science, people.
You're right - it's not rocket science. It's much harder.
To do what you request, all Apple would need to do is to get all the hardware manufacturers to write OS X drivers for their hardware, or do it themselves. And then test a representative combination of hardware systems. That's the hard part. Ever seen the MS hardware test labs? They have lots of hardware. (As a side note, apparently eBay has been a boon for the hardware labs when they want to pick up an item of some esoteric discontinued equipment, which amused me.)
And if Apple don't do this, then the support would be a nightmare, and the user experience would just be a lottery. It's that latter thing that doesn't even come close to how Apple want people to perceive their products.
I mean, Windows drivers are often a lottery, and that's when they have 95% share of the market (or whatever it is), so it's in the manufacturer's interests to make sure their drivers don't suck. In view of the actual quality of many drivers, I'm sure the manufacturers would spend up to several days getting their OS X drivers working.
By the way, this does seem like one of those things that won't happen. I know many of the Apple faithful refused to believe that Apple would switch to Intel, or that Apple would allow Windows to run on their Intel hardware, for no sane reasons I can discern. Before the fact, both things seemed to me likely or reasonable (but not inevitable). So I was pleasantly surprised by the Intel switch, and Bootcamp - but it was 90% pleasure, 10% surprise.
Running OS X on commodity PC hardware seems much less likely than either of these - precisely because one of Apple's major advantages is their closed hardware system; they only have to make their stuff run on computers that they make themselves. That's why hardware/driver issues on Macs are much less common than PCs.
Apple may be willing to sacrifice that advantage, but I doubt it. You just have to look at the insufferably smug copy on their website whenever they mention PCs. (Of course, they used to talk about Intel CPUs like that, so nothing's certain in this world.)
Apple's view is most likely that if you want a Windows laptop that runs OS X, then that's fine with them, because they sell those, too.
I agree sometimes it's hard to get Word to agree with itself on formatting, but I tried ajaxWrite and loaded a document into it from my PC. It was a simple document - half a page of text, with some indented lines. It rendered the entire document with double line spacing and every line was centred horizontally. I think it lost the bold attribute of some of the text, too. In summary, it made AbiWord's doc support look exemplary.
Not hugely impressed. If his breathless blog entry about his disruptive new technology and business model wasn't such a load of Web 2.0 bollocks I'd probably give it another chance.
I expect it's a beta or something, so it's ok to be crap.
If I want to have any chance of actually *hearing* the music in an urban setting, I need to crank the volume up to max. The environmental noise of busses, people chatting on their cell phones, (heck, even an office environment,) means that I need to have that music set at max-1 or max (depending on the track) to have any chance of actually hearing it.
Hyperbole much?
Alternatively, if you're serious, then your hearing's probably already fucked, so go for it!
Old Man Murray used to have this great feature on their short review pages - on each short review there were flags at the side of the page, which you could click on, signifying major languages. So you'd click on the flag of Spain to see the review translated into Spanish via BabelFish.
Or at least, that would be your first guess.
Of course, as it was Old Man Murray, what actually happened was that if you clicked on a flag, you would see the review again in English, but after it had been translated from English into that language (e.g. Spanish) and back again, all via BabelFish.
Anyway, those resultant mangled reviews are mostly what this headphone review reminds me of. I half expected to read that the headphones were disrespectful to dirt. Very poor.
The theoretical power of php is really low. It's more its practical power that made it popular.
So the fact that its theoretical power (whatever that is supposed to mean) is low is no reason to complain about lots of PHP stories on slashdot, because as you say, PHP is popular.
And although it is a pretty huge niche where php fits it stays a niche by definition.
The OP was obviously using the niche description to make PHP seem unpopular and insignificant, which is far from the truth.
It was a laugh because the OP was clearly claiming that PHP was useless and nobody used it, so could people please stop talking about it?
I didn't try to divert the discussion to Christianity. Christianity was just a religion that happened to fit the point I was making. It's not about Christianity. Read my lips. I was making the point that the original poster was an idiot.
It's got nothing to do with Christianity.
Here's an example: say someone was singling out America for massive consumption of oil because of cars, lifestyle etc. and implied this made them evil. So I might point out that other countries in Europe, say France or the UK consume quite a lot of oil too, so does that make them evil?
It does not mean I am criticising France or the UK. I am refuting the idea that the original argument was a sound basis on which to make a judgement.
Jesus, is this really so hard to understand? Apparently so.
including applying for permission with the government prior to firing the person.
The UK govt. doesn't get involved (and I doubt any other European govts do either) with people being fired on an everyday basis - I mean, how would they ever get any work done?*
In the UK, there are such things as industrial tribunals, where you can go and argue that you were unfairly dismissed - i.e. there was no good reason to dismiss you (to the poster who worried that they wouldn't be able to fire someone for poor performance or bad decision making - of course these are grounds for dismissal in the UK - but some guy putting sugar in the boss's coffee by mistake when the boss is having a bad day is not).
What you might have been told about is that when a company makes people redundant (downsizing), if they let go more than a certain number of people, they have to warn the govt. in advance. If you let go of more than 25-30 people, you have to give a month's warning, and there's another threshold for 3 month's warning. I'm guessing similar arrangements may exist elsewhere in Europe.
This is the second-most common tactic used in Muslim apologetics. When someone criticizes Islam, change the subject to Christianity! I've seen this done by Muslims and Leftist defenders of Islam many, many times
Er...ok. My point actually had nothing to do with criticising Christianity. Nothing at all.
My point was that you could just as reasonably* claim that Christians hate the things you listed as you could Muslims (homosexuality is an abomination, female priests are bad, the Jews killed Jesus, etc). So the attempt to align Muslims with Nazis on this basis was flawed. My point was, as I believe I hinted at, that such terms describe such a vast number of people that it would be arrogant to assume you knew what all those people believed on various subjects.
* And when I say 'just as reasonably', I mean not reasonably at all, since many Muslims/Christians don't actually hate jews, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to take a quick peek at the posting I was replying to.
I once worked for a Flight Simulator company, who came up with a rather innovative solution to the problem of displaying lights, especially at simulated night-time. The simulators cockpits are basically surrounded by a big curved mirror, onto which the final rasterised image is projected, to give a wraparound view. The projectors were called SPX projectors.
They found that if they just put the lights into the rasterised image that was displayed on the mirror, it looked a bit rubbish - pixelated, aliased etc. So someone came up with the idea of plotting point lights during the flyback period - they could control the beam on the way back to show up to N points of light (by flicking the beam on momentarily). I forget what N was. It looked significantly better, which is important when you're training to fly at night, as pretty much all you can see are landing lights, so you notice if it looks bad.
Anyway, they came up with the term 'calligraphic' to describe this technique - something to with it the beam being used in a more analogue, continuous way, I guess.
The real reason was, of course, so they could give the product this name:
I apologise on their behalf.
Well, puns may be bad, but poems are verse.
What gives is that these drivers are usually written and maintained by people who actually use that hardware, and are not trying to get the driver done for some arbitrary deadline. So they want it to work, and will fix bugs. Blame capitalism if you like.
And the significant part of your sentence is:
If Microsoft were able to choose which hardware they wanted to support (as opposed to virtually everything because that's what people expect), then I expect the quality would go up. That's what Apple get to do (certainly in terms of core components), and they have a correspondingly lower incidence of driver issues with their software.
It's my understanding that in general, Linux supports significantly less hardware than Windows does. Some of this is down to dumb copyright issues (those h/w companies who believe their firmware is like some sort of magic pixie dust and beyond any normal earthly measurements of value), but a lot of it is because there's a lot of stuff out there.
This is not a technical issue. I'll repeat that - it is not a technical issue.
Microsoft could indeed do that, but then, say, when you upgraded to XP, half your hardware would stop working*. Add-on hardware/peripherals are highly commoditised, which means they don't spend a whole bunch of time achieving quality bars for drivers. If it runs, they ship it (and sometimes if it doesn't).
Compatibility is one of the reasons Windows is so successful - just read a few of Raymond Chen's posts on the subject, for example. I mean, here's one where he's talking about supporting undocumented behaviour, and gives reasons why MS does this. And you want them to drop documented, correct behaviour? The Microsoft conspiracists would go mad, for starters.
Here's a choice quote from Raymond from that post:
Of course, there are other people who believe that this pursuit of compatibility is wholly wrong. I'm not totally in either camp, but I do like it when I upgrade Windows and most stuff still works, so I'm more closely aligned with Raymond's views.
Given that MS want as much hardware as possible to work with their OS, why would this be a good thing? Are you saying they engineered this situation purely so that Apple wouldn't be able to enter the commodity PC OS market?
Like Napoleon, I prefer the explanation of incompetence. Most driver writers suck at their jobs (this is a generalisation of the fact that most people suck at their jobs). They have people shouting at them to finish the software so their employer can ship the hardware, and if they're one of the few who do bring up the subject of quality people look at them funny.
Modem drivers are possibly a bad example, because most modem drivers use the Windows 'Unimodem' driver, which is a standard modem driver that can be tweaked by a text/setup file to indicate which features they support, and where they deviate from the norm. So a lot of modem 'drivers' are really just a short text file. (That doesn't mean modem drivers can't be a pain - I once spent about a day trying to find a driver for the Diamond USB modem I wanted to give someone in my family to use for dial-up internet access - unfortunately, Diamond had sold their modem business off to someone else, who didn't care if you could get the drivers for old modems or not. It was quicker to throw the POS away in the end.)
* Leave it.
I realise it was probably just an example, but you want to pick a manufacturer who will produce good PC hardware, with rock solid drivers, and you choose Sony?
I may have to go and lie down for about half an hour to stop laughing.
Although to be fair, you're bang on with your choice of a 'non-standard' device.
OQO? I thought this was a way for Apple to go after a larger slice of the pie, not some crumbs underneath the table. Is OQO even shipping/working yet?
I'm not sure what a 'multimedia thingy' is, but it sounds like something Apple might want to develop themselves, so they would get first go at OS X for such devices (assuming it was an appropriate OS).
And anyway, what is the point of partnering with one manufacturer to do all this? They already do this - as I pointed out, you can already buy an approved Windows PC that can run OS X - it's called a Mac.
You're right - it's not rocket science. It's much harder.
To do what you request, all Apple would need to do is to get all the hardware manufacturers to write OS X drivers for their hardware, or do it themselves. And then test a representative combination of hardware systems. That's the hard part. Ever seen the MS hardware test labs? They have lots of hardware. (As a side note, apparently eBay has been a boon for the hardware labs when they want to pick up an item of some esoteric discontinued equipment, which amused me.)
And if Apple don't do this, then the support would be a nightmare, and the user experience would just be a lottery. It's that latter thing that doesn't even come close to how Apple want people to perceive their products.
I mean, Windows drivers are often a lottery, and that's when they have 95% share of the market (or whatever it is), so it's in the manufacturer's interests to make sure their drivers don't suck. In view of the actual quality of many drivers, I'm sure the manufacturers would spend up to several days getting their OS X drivers working.
By the way, this does seem like one of those things that won't happen. I know many of the Apple faithful refused to believe that Apple would switch to Intel, or that Apple would allow Windows to run on their Intel hardware, for no sane reasons I can discern. Before the fact, both things seemed to me likely or reasonable (but not inevitable). So I was pleasantly surprised by the Intel switch, and Bootcamp - but it was 90% pleasure, 10% surprise.
Running OS X on commodity PC hardware seems much less likely than either of these - precisely because one of Apple's major advantages is their closed hardware system; they only have to make their stuff run on computers that they make themselves. That's why hardware/driver issues on Macs are much less common than PCs.
Apple may be willing to sacrifice that advantage, but I doubt it. You just have to look at the insufferably smug copy on their website whenever they mention PCs. (Of course, they used to talk about Intel CPUs like that, so nothing's certain in this world.)
Apple's view is most likely that if you want a Windows laptop that runs OS X, then that's fine with them, because they sell those, too.
I just wanted to say well done on the subject line of your post - I can't stop laughing :)
No, it makes it Chav Central.
(I kid! I have an Argos bookshelf - don't tell anyone!)
Reminds me of that Mark Twain quotation:
One day I hope to be as talentless as Paul McCartney.
Like this, for example.
* See if you can work out why :-)
Give him a break - he was just simulating what happens when you load a Word doc into ajaxWrite. :-)
Indeed. I know I am shocked to my very core. Shocked, I tell you!
Not hugely impressed. If his breathless blog entry about his disruptive new technology and business model wasn't such a load of Web 2.0 bollocks I'd probably give it another chance.
I expect it's a beta or something, so it's ok to be crap.
Ahem.
Or did you just mean not recently?
Hyperbole much?
Alternatively, if you're serious, then your hearing's probably already fucked, so go for it!
Or at least, that would be your first guess.
Of course, as it was Old Man Murray, what actually happened was that if you clicked on a flag, you would see the review again in English, but after it had been translated from English into that language (e.g. Spanish) and back again, all via BabelFish.
Anyway, those resultant mangled reviews are mostly what this headphone review reminds me of. I half expected to read that the headphones were disrespectful to dirt. Very poor.
Plus, there were no talking submarines.
So the fact that its theoretical power (whatever that is supposed to mean) is low is no reason to complain about lots of PHP stories on slashdot, because as you say, PHP is popular.
The OP was obviously using the niche description to make PHP seem unpopular and insignificant, which is far from the truth.
It was a laugh because the OP was clearly claiming that PHP was useless and nobody used it, so could people please stop talking about it?
I didn't try to divert the discussion to Christianity. Christianity was just a religion that happened to fit the point I was making. It's not about Christianity. Read my lips. I was making the point that the original poster was an idiot.
It's got nothing to do with Christianity.
Here's an example: say someone was singling out America for massive consumption of oil because of cars, lifestyle etc. and implied this made them evil. So I might point out that other countries in Europe, say France or the UK consume quite a lot of oil too, so does that make them evil?
It does not mean I am criticising France or the UK. I am refuting the idea that the original argument was a sound basis on which to make a judgement.
Jesus, is this really so hard to understand? Apparently so.
Good. So we agree that the point I made in reply to the original poster stands.
As for your other comments, to quote Scott Adams: you made excellent rebuttals to points I didn't make. I enjoyed this more than I expected.
Thanks - I've only just stopped laughing.
Are you here all week?
The UK govt. doesn't get involved (and I doubt any other European govts do either) with people being fired on an everyday basis - I mean, how would they ever get any work done?*
In the UK, there are such things as industrial tribunals, where you can go and argue that you were unfairly dismissed - i.e. there was no good reason to dismiss you (to the poster who worried that they wouldn't be able to fire someone for poor performance or bad decision making - of course these are grounds for dismissal in the UK - but some guy putting sugar in the boss's coffee by mistake when the boss is having a bad day is not).
What you might have been told about is that when a company makes people redundant (downsizing), if they let go more than a certain number of people, they have to warn the govt. in advance. If you let go of more than 25-30 people, you have to give a month's warning, and there's another threshold for 3 month's warning. I'm guessing similar arrangements may exist elsewhere in Europe.
* Leave it.
Er...ok. My point actually had nothing to do with criticising Christianity. Nothing at all.
My point was that you could just as reasonably* claim that Christians hate the things you listed as you could Muslims (homosexuality is an abomination, female priests are bad, the Jews killed Jesus, etc). So the attempt to align Muslims with Nazis on this basis was flawed. My point was, as I believe I hinted at, that such terms describe such a vast number of people that it would be arrogant to assume you knew what all those people believed on various subjects.
* And when I say 'just as reasonably', I mean not reasonably at all, since many Muslims/Christians don't actually hate jews, etc.
Exactly. Next question.