I wish MS would step in and stop them from ruining otherwise decent laptops.
Microsoft wishes it could step in as well. The reason they don't, is in the past this has been treated as Microsoft "abusing their monopoly", with everyone jumping in to sue them, hence today they must allow OEM to tweak the Windows setup any way they wish before deploying it in their laptops.
The fact we have a book on front-end CMS design is irony in itself.
The problem with popular CMS systems today stems from the tight coupling of back-end architecture and front-end architecture.
Remove the coupling, and the need for a book on Front End Drupal vanishes, leaving us with a simple API which we can integrate with our own custom or third party front-end.
"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other."
Remaining questions:
1. Why didn't they test first, then announce launch date?
2. Why are they building excitement towards a specific release day, hour and minute (which will surely cause availability issues even if they launched), instead of releasing it gradually with gmail-style invitation system?
That said, the project seems definitely worthwhile, I hope the internet community cuts them some slack so they can fix this in peace. Hopefully we see the project online soon.
It was during MySQL AB's time that MySQL began a stange play with the community by first dropping official community binary builds, and then severely delaying source code releases as well (while supplying commercial clients with more stable and up to date releases).
It was again during MySQL AB's time when the announcement came that MySQL's source code base will start to "close down", by releasing many new features only commercially, and with no open source code. When Sun bought MySQL AB, they reversed those policies and stood behind MySQL being open, without exceptions.
Now Mr. Monty Widenius has taken the money Sun paid for MySQL AB, and used it to open a new company and an "Open" alliance which is "designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other".
If even Mr. Widenius has noble intentions regarding MySQL, his past in MySQL AB and his current interaction with Sun/Oracle seem to leave another impression.
You'll be waiting for a long time. It's impossible to index a database for matching via regex, therefore searches on such an engine would be inordinately expensive to process.
If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois.
Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.
Did I pull my gun? Yea.
Did I shoot? Yepp.
Did I shoot second time. Sure!
Did I kill him? No!
I mean, come on, average life expectancy is 66 years, and he was over 70, that's waaay long before I bought this gun.
In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft
Calling Slashdot a game, even on April 1st, is somewhat disengaging for those of us coming here in an attempt to have an intellectually honest discussion, while flooded by meme trolls and fanboys posting for sport.
Smart way to clamp negative feedback by posting today, though. You can test random stuff on us and call it a joke if the feedback is negative.
You can make it a tradition. April 1st, the "Try to Make Slashdot Worse" day.
Microsoft isn't doing this: it's just another patent.
The 1.15/h and 1.25/h prices aren't actual prices, they are just example numbers in the patent, which don't mean anything.
Let me tell you why Microsoft won't implement this. Because it'll skew the usage of their software and force people to get "smart" about alternatives.
Right now, to use Word, you either pay the full license (which is affordable to students today), or use alternatives.
If you had the option of going legal with metered usage, you'd just write and edit your papers in Notepad, WordPad or OpenOffice (say 10 hours), and then import the content in your metered MS Office just for formatting and saving a.docx (1 hour).
The end result of this is, 1) you produced an MS Office file 2) you paid almost nothing 3) you're legal, so MS can't complain.
So in essence that will be Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot.
OurDelta isn't a fork of MySQL. It's builds for the regular MySQL with optionally some third party patches.
Drizzle isn't a fork of MySQL. It's a complete restart and reengeneering of the database core of MySQL and will likely become a base for the future releases of Sun's MySQL and other database products. Drizzle is to MySQL like MinWin is to Windows, though maybe bad analogy, MinWin is just as porly understood by most people.
Sun doesn't have a propriatary fork of MySQL. Former MySQL AB wanted to put some proprietary services and applications on top of the existing open-source product, but the community reacted and since Sun never approved of this direction, those plans were immediately dropped.
For business and other work, they need to write a brand new kernel and everything and start over learning from all previous mistakes and discarding backward compatibility... natively.
There's a law: the less important a problem is, the more people discuss it. Hence the droves of people chiming in and spreading wisdom about Vista's kernel and DRM issues. Neither of which are actually issues at all.
The kernel of Windows is in fact a great piece of work. There's no reason to rewrite the kernel in the least. And Windows 7 is improving the kernel.
The problem is tuning the stacks above the kernel. Knowing which services to run by default, and when. Tuning ReadyBoost and SuperFetch to not fetch files you don't need, and fetch those you do. Making system cache not choke the application RAM availability. Making more features of Aero run on hardware (did you know the glass blue effect in Vista is software? Windows 7 fixes that).
And they're getting there, as you'll see yourself soon enough.
The current release isn't a release candidate. It's not a beta. It's a PRE-beta. Microsoft have about at least 10 more months until they call Windows 7 done.
Steven Sinofsky specifically said in his PDC 2008 keynote: "please don't consider this build suitable for benchmarks", but does anyone listen? Nah, let's run the benchmarks!:)
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
The process is completely different this time. The beta of Windows 7 is in fact Vista. Windows 7 retains largely the absolutely same driver architecture, but includes some new interface features (such as the display driver settings UI), and adds more device support for sensors, Device Stage and more.
If you do have a Vista driver for your hardware, chances are it'll work just fine as-is in Windows 7 already.
So take this current claim in such a light and you'll know "believe it when you know you have it and are using it, not even a split second before".
It's in the builds handed out at PDC.
Windows could not support 256 cores before as processes could pick to be bound to a core with a bitmask, and that mask didn't have 256 bits in it.
The solution Microsoft chose is to maintain backcompat by making each bit respond to a pool of cores instead of one core. This is augmented with also smarter thread/resource management on the kernel level.
Another work related to enabling Windows to scale to many cores is removing many hard locks in the kernel and user code, and replacing with more granular locks or no locks at all (only where there's a safe alternative), which is essence means more stuff runs at once than just waiting for something else to be marked available.
You can't watch a computer counting. Well you can, but then the one reason why officials are pushing voting machines -- a speedy count -- is gone.
It boils down to the question: Can you trust a computer? That you have no control over?
With a visible, inspectable paper trail, I can. It's not worse than full ballots, but saves resources.
Electronic counting can be used to assist early preliminary results, with OCR software producing the final official results from the paper trails. The motivation to cheat on the electronics side disappears when the verified paper trails need to match the electronic counts.
Another way to do this is have each party have voting servers. Open source software submits authenticated votes (using public key cryptography with certificates signed by the government). Then each party gets to do their very own electronic voting, and with multiple agents in the system, falsification becomes unfeasible if not impossible.
Plenty of ways you know, there's just too much greed and not enough will to do it.
I can't see how anybody could create it using Photoshop or Illustrator. The coin designer probably spent more time coding than sketching (like the book Snow Crash).
A lesson to learn here is that if you can't see how, doesn't mean someone else doesn't as well:)
Photoshop/Illustrator are fully scriptable environments. By JS/VBScript on Windows, and JS/AppleScript on OSX. Every single option, action, brush stroke, whatever you can think of, is automatable, and Adobe software comes with a little IDE-like tool for writing and testing your Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash IDE/etc. scripts in.
But the truth is, it's even simpler to achieve the guts of this effect in Photoshop, with no script at all.
A simple text-on-a-path layer, a little blending mode play, and a levels adjustment layer.
This is not to put down his effort, if he wants to design with Python, by all means, he should do so.
If the guy with his pilot's license says that his Cessna can't fly a tank, listen to him. If the majority of computer professionals say using a computer to replace paper ballots is a stupid idea, listen to them.
I find it sad we can produce pocket calculators with 100% accuracy for 50 cents the piece, but hundreds of millions of dollars are not enough to produce simple machine with visible, human and machine readable paper trail, that lets you pick one of about 20 options and count them.
Honestly how complex it is: the machine has a big fixed board with candidates. Below each candidate is a big button. When you press the button, that piece of the board lights up with couple of cheap LEDs. So do two buttons: CONFIRM, and CANCEL. When you press CONFIRM, a little glass protected hole to the paper trail shows you the paper trail advancing and displaying your choice: MCCAIN, OBAMA, BARR or whatever.
The fault isn't with the technology but the people, and the process of selecting the companies to produce those machines, and their motivation and qualification to do a good job.
Apps written expressly for the iphone run faster than the java apps on the G1.
Where's your benchmark to prove it? The truth is Java runs "on hardware" in most mobile devices. There's a chip which translates the Java opcodes to native ARM intructions without any delay or slowdown whatsoever. Naturally nothing less could be expected on a device so strained for power and speed.
How did they figure the china firewall is the cause for slow browsing? Or maybe it's the fact you and all people using this plugin are funnelling their traffic through a single proxy accross the globe...
Many of you? With all due respect there are not a huge number of things that really honestly require a Mac these days. I've done desktop publishing, graphics work, sound recording and design, video editing all on Windows. It works quite well with the right software these days. Granted, if you _have_ to have some particular OS X only software a Mac is the only option. But that's a clear minority these days.
That's the theory. And the practice is that:
1) I get iWork documents I can't open in anything on Windows. 2) I get Mac fonts, where in a fast paced workflows and shared source repositories, it becomes infeasible to convert it all the time with mixed results. 3) Apps on Windows won't recognize the exact font style required in say a PSD file, since it's been subtly renamed or handled differently on Windows. 4) Adobe's Creative Suite has a number of bugs where opening and compiling a, say, FLA file from OSX on Windows will yield wrong textfield positions and, again, wrong fonts. 5) Communicating color is harder since what Mac users see is not the gamma I see.
So there's enough lock-in here where I'd need a Mac, even though in an isolated fashion, Windows does work fine for doing all those tasks. We don't leave in an isolated world.
Macs are design items. Some people don't mind paying a higher price for something which appeals to them.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you subjectively feel that the value of the product matches the price paid then an objective comparison is not significant.
For those of us (many of us) who need Mac/OSX for their work, opinions that the premius is worth it because of the fancy design is frankly insulting.
In a situation where Apple is the only official and legal seller of OSX compatible computers, claiming that all buyers buy it since they love the design (as if they have a choice) sounds as if all people who bought a Windows PC in the last year or so, do it because they love Vista.
Microsoft is begging to differ with you. Again. They're going to call the successor to Vista, "Windows 7." Not "Windows 2009", not "Windows AB", not even "Windows VII".
I'm quite surprised by this about-face. I thought the whole "Windows Server 2000" or "Office 2003" was a great marketing move. Look at the typical reaction: "Here I am in 2008, and I'm still using Visual Studio 2005 -- why haven't we upgraded to VS 2008 yet?"
The reason for this is that Windows 7 is the last major release of Windows. XP was planned for this too but Longhorn (now Vista) messed their earlier plans.
After Windows 7 we'll see more frequent (yearly?) releases of Windows, somewhat similar to how OSX is released. We'll also see easy upgrade from one release to the other, while right now upgrading one version of Windows inline to another is a big no-no.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish MS would step in and stop them from ruining otherwise decent laptops.
Microsoft wishes it could step in as well. The reason they don't, is in the past this has been treated as Microsoft "abusing their monopoly", with everyone jumping in to sue them, hence today they must allow OEM to tweak the Windows setup any way they wish before deploying it in their laptops.
On PHP, in the current 5.2.9 build for Windows, NaN === NaN, for example:
// true
sqrt(-1) === fmod(1, 0);
The fact we have a book on front-end CMS design is irony in itself.
The problem with popular CMS systems today stems from the tight coupling of back-end architecture and front-end architecture.
Remove the coupling, and the need for a book on Front End Drupal vanishes, leaving us with a simple API which we can integrate with our own custom or third party front-end.
Currently (a not very smoothly working) video stream with the WolframAlpha team is live at:
http://www.justin.tv/wolframalpha
The site itself is not up yet, there's a word they may need until Monday to "build up computing capacity".
Wolfram Alpha encounters 'snag,' launch could be delayed
"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other."
Remaining questions:
1. Why didn't they test first, then announce launch date?
2. Why are they building excitement towards a specific release day, hour and minute (which will surely cause availability issues even if they launched), instead of releasing it gradually with gmail-style invitation system?
That said, the project seems definitely worthwhile, I hope the internet community cuts them some slack so they can fix this in peace. Hopefully we see the project online soon.
It was during MySQL AB's time that MySQL began a stange play with the community by first dropping official community binary builds, and then severely delaying source code releases as well (while supplying commercial clients with more stable and up to date releases).
It was again during MySQL AB's time when the announcement came that MySQL's source code base will start to "close down", by releasing many new features only commercially, and with no open source code. When Sun bought MySQL AB, they reversed those policies and stood behind MySQL being open, without exceptions.
Now Mr. Monty Widenius has taken the money Sun paid for MySQL AB, and used it to open a new company and an "Open" alliance which is "designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other".
If even Mr. Widenius has noble intentions regarding MySQL, his past in MySQL AB and his current interaction with Sun/Oracle seem to leave another impression.
You'll be waiting for a long time. It's impossible to index a database for matching via regex, therefore searches on such an engine would be inordinately expensive to process.
Heh, check the Syntax and Examples here: http://www.google.com/codesearch
:).
I mean no offense, however if one can't do it in 5 mins with with an off-the-shelf SQL database, doesn't mean no one can do it
If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois.
Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.
Did I pull my gun? Yea.
Did I shoot? Yepp.
Did I shoot second time. Sure!
Did I kill him? No!
I mean, come on, average life expectancy is 66 years, and he was over 70, that's waaay long before I bought this gun.
So, am I free to go now?
It's so hard to tell which ones are too stupid to be true and so stupid they probably are true.
Sad reality is Conficker's authors were smart enough to rely on the stupidity of said news publishers.
Disinformation with zero effort, for nearly 48 hours, who wouldn't want to launch their malicious plan on this very day?
In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft
Calling Slashdot a game, even on April 1st, is somewhat disengaging for those of us coming here in an attempt to have an intellectually honest discussion, while flooded by meme trolls and fanboys posting for sport.
Smart way to clamp negative feedback by posting today, though. You can test random stuff on us and call it a joke if the feedback is negative.
You can make it a tradition. April 1st, the "Try to Make Slashdot Worse" day.
Hi, interesting post. I noticed you said Datapult PF was much easier to read/understand than ASP (at the time).
I tried to find back examples of the syntax and features of Datapult PF, but I couldn't come up with anything. It's even not on the webarchive.
I'd really like to see examples of its syntax and features, to get a basic feel for it, if you have any. Thanks!
Microsoft isn't doing this: it's just another patent. The 1.15/h and 1.25/h prices aren't actual prices, they are just example numbers in the patent, which don't mean anything. Let me tell you why Microsoft won't implement this. Because it'll skew the usage of their software and force people to get "smart" about alternatives.
.docx (1 hour).
Right now, to use Word, you either pay the full license (which is affordable to students today), or use alternatives.
If you had the option of going legal with metered usage, you'd just write and edit your papers in Notepad, WordPad or OpenOffice (say 10 hours), and then import the content in your metered MS Office just for formatting and saving a
The end result of this is, 1) you produced an MS Office file 2) you paid almost nothing 3) you're legal, so MS can't complain.
So in essence that will be Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot.
Lots of wrong things in this article.
OurDelta isn't a fork of MySQL. It's builds for the regular MySQL with optionally some third party patches.
Drizzle isn't a fork of MySQL. It's a complete restart and reengeneering of the database core of MySQL and will likely become a base for the future releases of Sun's MySQL and other database products. Drizzle is to MySQL like MinWin is to Windows, though maybe bad analogy, MinWin is just as porly understood by most people.
Sun doesn't have a propriatary fork of MySQL. Former MySQL AB wanted to put some proprietary services and applications on top of the existing open-source product, but the community reacted and since Sun never approved of this direction, those plans were immediately dropped.
For business and other work, they need to write a brand new kernel and everything and start over learning from all previous mistakes and discarding backward compatibility... natively.
There's a law: the less important a problem is, the more people discuss it. Hence the droves of people chiming in and spreading wisdom about Vista's kernel and DRM issues. Neither of which are actually issues at all.
The kernel of Windows is in fact a great piece of work. There's no reason to rewrite the kernel in the least. And Windows 7 is improving the kernel.
The problem is tuning the stacks above the kernel. Knowing which services to run by default, and when. Tuning ReadyBoost and SuperFetch to not fetch files you don't need, and fetch those you do. Making system cache not choke the application RAM availability. Making more features of Aero run on hardware (did you know the glass blue effect in Vista is software? Windows 7 fixes that).
And they're getting there, as you'll see yourself soon enough.
The current release isn't a release candidate. It's not a beta. It's a PRE-beta. Microsoft have about at least 10 more months until they call Windows 7 done.
Steven Sinofsky specifically said in his PDC 2008 keynote: "please don't consider this build suitable for benchmarks", but does anyone listen? Nah, let's run the benchmarks! :)
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
The process is completely different this time. The beta of Windows 7 is in fact Vista. Windows 7 retains largely the absolutely same driver architecture, but includes some new interface features (such as the display driver settings UI), and adds more device support for sensors, Device Stage and more.
If you do have a Vista driver for your hardware, chances are it'll work just fine as-is in Windows 7 already.
So take this current claim in such a light and you'll know "believe it when you know you have it and are using it, not even a split second before".
It's in the builds handed out at PDC.
Windows could not support 256 cores before as processes could pick to be bound to a core with a bitmask, and that mask didn't have 256 bits in it.
The solution Microsoft chose is to maintain backcompat by making each bit respond to a pool of cores instead of one core. This is augmented with also smarter thread/resource management on the kernel level.
Another work related to enabling Windows to scale to many cores is removing many hard locks in the kernel and user code, and replacing with more granular locks or no locks at all (only where there's a safe alternative), which is essence means more stuff runs at once than just waiting for something else to be marked available.
You can't watch a computer counting. Well you can, but then the one reason why officials are pushing voting machines -- a speedy count -- is gone.
It boils down to the question: Can you trust a computer? That you have no control over?
With a visible, inspectable paper trail, I can. It's not worse than full ballots, but saves resources.
Electronic counting can be used to assist early preliminary results, with OCR software producing the final official results from the paper trails. The motivation to cheat on the electronics side disappears when the verified paper trails need to match the electronic counts.
Another way to do this is have each party have voting servers. Open source software submits authenticated votes (using public key cryptography with certificates signed by the government). Then each party gets to do their very own electronic voting, and with multiple agents in the system, falsification becomes unfeasible if not impossible.
Plenty of ways you know, there's just too much greed and not enough will to do it.
I can't see how anybody could create it using Photoshop or Illustrator. The coin designer probably spent more time coding than sketching (like the book Snow Crash).
A lesson to learn here is that if you can't see how, doesn't mean someone else doesn't as well :)
Photoshop/Illustrator are fully scriptable environments. By JS/VBScript on Windows, and JS/AppleScript on OSX. Every single option, action, brush stroke, whatever you can think of, is automatable, and Adobe software comes with a little IDE-like tool for writing and testing your Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash IDE/etc. scripts in.
But the truth is, it's even simpler to achieve the guts of this effect in Photoshop, with no script at all.
A simple text-on-a-path layer, a little blending mode play, and a levels adjustment layer.
This is not to put down his effort, if he wants to design with Python, by all means, he should do so.
If the guy with his pilot's license says that his Cessna can't fly a tank, listen to him. If the majority of computer professionals say using a computer to replace paper ballots is a stupid idea, listen to them.
I find it sad we can produce pocket calculators with 100% accuracy for 50 cents the piece, but hundreds of millions of dollars are not enough to produce simple machine with visible, human and machine readable paper trail, that lets you pick one of about 20 options and count them.
Honestly how complex it is: the machine has a big fixed board with candidates. Below each candidate is a big button. When you press the button, that piece of the board lights up with couple of cheap LEDs. So do two buttons: CONFIRM, and CANCEL. When you press CONFIRM, a little glass protected hole to the paper trail shows you the paper trail advancing and displaying your choice: MCCAIN, OBAMA, BARR or whatever.
The fault isn't with the technology but the people, and the process of selecting the companies to produce those machines, and their motivation and qualification to do a good job.
Apps written expressly for the iphone run faster than the java apps on the G1.
Where's your benchmark to prove it? The truth is Java runs "on hardware" in most mobile devices. There's a chip which translates the Java opcodes to native ARM intructions without any delay or slowdown whatsoever. Naturally nothing less could be expected on a device so strained for power and speed.
How did they figure the china firewall is the cause for slow browsing? Or maybe it's the fact you and all people using this plugin are funnelling their traffic through a single proxy accross the globe...
Many of you? With all due respect there are not a huge number of things that really honestly require a Mac these days. I've done desktop publishing, graphics work, sound recording and design, video editing all on Windows. It works quite well with the right software these days. Granted, if you _have_ to have some particular OS X only software a Mac is the only option. But that's a clear minority these days.
That's the theory. And the practice is that:
1) I get iWork documents I can't open in anything on Windows.
2) I get Mac fonts, where in a fast paced workflows and shared source repositories, it becomes infeasible to convert it all the time with mixed results.
3) Apps on Windows won't recognize the exact font style required in say a PSD file, since it's been subtly renamed or handled differently on Windows.
4) Adobe's Creative Suite has a number of bugs where opening and compiling a, say, FLA file from OSX on Windows will yield wrong textfield positions and, again, wrong fonts.
5) Communicating color is harder since what Mac users see is not the gamma I see.
So there's enough lock-in here where I'd need a Mac, even though in an isolated fashion, Windows does work fine for doing all those tasks. We don't leave in an isolated world.
Macs are design items. Some people don't mind paying a higher price for something which appeals to them.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you subjectively feel that the value of the product matches the price paid then an objective comparison is not significant.
For those of us (many of us) who need Mac/OSX for their work, opinions that the premius is worth it because of the fancy design is frankly insulting.
In a situation where Apple is the only official and legal seller of OSX compatible computers, claiming that all buyers buy it since they love the design (as if they have a choice) sounds as if all people who bought a Windows PC in the last year or so, do it because they love Vista.
Microsoft is begging to differ with you. Again. They're going to call the successor to Vista, "Windows 7." Not "Windows 2009", not "Windows AB", not even "Windows VII".
I'm quite surprised by this about-face. I thought the whole "Windows Server 2000" or "Office 2003" was a great marketing move. Look at the typical reaction: "Here I am in 2008, and I'm still using Visual Studio 2005 -- why haven't we upgraded to VS 2008 yet?"
The reason for this is that Windows 7 is the last major release of Windows. XP was planned for this too but Longhorn (now Vista) messed their earlier plans.
After Windows 7 we'll see more frequent (yearly?) releases of Windows, somewhat similar to how OSX is released. We'll also see easy upgrade from one release to the other, while right now upgrading one version of Windows inline to another is a big no-no.