Kind of OT: Have you tried Opera's Dragonfly dev tools?
I have tried them. It's a very welcome (and quite overdue) addition to Opera for sure.
Right now I find the features and UI of Dragonfly kinda flaky and obscure, but it's eventually going to get "there". For now Firebug + Webdev toolbar in Firefox are far more stable and mature tools to dev in.
I wouldn't mind Opera copying more closely Firebug, we're already used to it anyway.
Please... VP candidate.. She's not been elected VP... And with any luck, she won't be, and she can just go back to Alaska.
I learned something this election season: set your expectations low, so that you're not underwhelmed with the outcome. Guess that leaked a bit into my post there:)
The agents described in TFA aren't "Markov chains", although I doubt you even know what that means.
Well, interviewpalin.com is programmed a Markov chain, the rest was just sarcasm. Something which computers and certain people have problem detecting.
As soon as someone comes up with decent classification algorithms for images, you hook it up to a chat agent, get a semi-decent description, you'll ask a different question.
Hey you make it sound so easy: as soon as someone comes up with it, it's done!
Naturally, the photo test was just a single example from thousands of quick tests you can use to test various areas of the agent you converse with. Each of those problems could be solved with sufficiently advanced algorithm, as soon as "someone comes up with it", but the sum of it all and it all working in concert is after all where the difficulty lies.
Or maybe we can just heed your advice and wait for someone to just "come up with it" magically, like mad scientists do on a summer action movie.
The problem with AI isn't that it's necessarily hard, it's that the bar keeps getting raised. We already have computers more intelligent that most vertebrates, and some mentally challenged humans. But to say that sounds insulting, so it's not mentioned.
I'd say you underestimate most vertebrates. But you're right: AI isn't hard. It's not easy either. The problem is we don't even have a decent definition of what "AI" is, so naturally we won't know it's AI even if it hit us in the face.
The Turing test isn't really an AI test, it's a thought experiment about how well can a machine fake human-like behavior when funneled though a narrow communication channel (text only chat). And frankly that's just useless.
But the Turing test is one of those phrases that gets so often repeated in popular media, that no one questions even the validity of its claims. And for something invented nearly 60 years ago, I think it's about time someone does.
It seems to me that the pool of users that Chrome is seeking to draw from has already been taken by the likes of Firefox and Opera. And, unfortunately for Chrome, fans of Firefox and Opera are violently loyal customers. Even if Chrome supported addons I would have a hard time giving up my Firefox.
I use Opera for browsing and Firefox for web dev, and I don't understand why you assume the presence of Firefox/Opera freaks means all their users are such.
I'm looking forward to Chrome maturing, and frankly I do consider replacing Firefox with Chrome on the computers of my friends when it comes out of beta.
Turing explicitly restricted the communication for the test to text. So what you describe would, albeit interesting, not actually be the Turing test.
Or is it maybe time to start following the spirit, and not the letter. The Turing test was described 58 years ago. One'd thing that the technology advancements in that span would also improve out testing methods.
Not that there aren't a million ways to "catch" an AI even without the images.
The political side of this site aside, the answers are just prewritten answers (by a human) mixed together randomly as a Markov chain.
Does it sound convincingly? Well, at least as convincingly as some interviews a certain VP made recently. Is it AI? Hell no, a kid could write such a generator in a day.
If the bar will be as low as to try to lead casual conversations with the "AI" and expect "quirky" answers, that doesn't mean anything at all, we need to AI for this. Hell, this is what an average conversation with a teenager is most of the time. Doesn't mean it's the best they can do.
"We're clock cycle away from AI"? Please. I want my turing test to be done over an actual instant messenger program. Let's see how your Markov chain reacts, when I send a photo and ask a dead simple question such as "describe what you see in the photo".
Fooling people is easy online. Scammers do it every day, it's not AI my friends.
I'm getting a bit frustrated waiting for the industry to realize they need to make those applications a little more interactive.
For example, from the article, the tool suggested a number of IE fixes when the primary browser used on the system is Firefox. The tool detecting the default browser is easy, but IE may still be used while not being default.
The solution: just damn ask the user, does he use IE despite it's not the default browser. Just make the process more like a dialog, let the user add some input to the process.
When a collection of solutions is formed, don't just spit them to the user, but ask him what problems he has, what apps he uses, and dynamically trim/modify the proposed solutions according to that. It's still faster than waiting for an actual person to show up and fix the problems, and that person would still ask the user a lot of those questions.
They're probably doomed. It's very very hard to make a visual programming language not suck (the closest I ever got involved having large gobs of text inside the visual blobs, which isn't very visual!) because handling scaling of complexity is hard visually.
You're missing the point: the visual components isn't a generic purpose programming language. It's a domain specific language tailored to a specific task.
Whether it's visual, or it's just a bunch of XML markup is up the implementers. Sometimes some paradigms are much simpler to present visually, and then visual editing can be used.
Think of it that way: the DSL and the models they represent don't explain *how* things work, but *what* the major agents in a system are there and their interaction.
They are evolved metadata, an evolved "settings" file, that lets you set more things in the system than normally you're able to.
Oslo and M appear to be taking a page out of the research Charles Simonyi has been doing at Microsoft, before leading to develop and advanced form of the technology at his own company Intentional Software.
The basic idea here is that any bigger project can be made more maintainable and flexible at the same time, if the deveopers create a domain specific model for the given task, and let the end-users (for example accountants, drug store chemists, biologists, business owners) model the concrete behaviour of the application by manipulating that simplified and specialized language, often visually, the way an UML diagram or a spreadsheet works.
Unfortunately the linked article offers a little more than the usual "LOL, Microsoft sucks!" rant, which is somewhat expected from a blog where the iMac keyboard and iPhone are used as "design elements".
Anyway, I'd say this should be watched as it can mean model languages will finally enter mainstream, something that's been years in the making.
"By mentioning model-driven programming, you will see a general modeling platform to be unveiled at PDC: Oslo. As Doug said, Oslo contains three simple things: a visual tool helps building models, a new textual DSL language helps defining models, and a relational repository that stores models. XAML represented workflows and services are special models in this domain. Check for more details in the postings from Doug and Don."
"'Schemas in the repository can be defined using this language, but they dont have to be,' Chappell said. Developers can still use any other tools with which theyd be comfortable to create schemas instead. Because the new language will generate SQL, and the repository can be accessed using standard SQL, no special languages will be required."
What new product has MS announced that was not met with criticism and derision?
That's one of the problems of reading Slashdot and related sites a lot. But I don't blame you. You can see a similar "imaginary world" skewed perspectives from people watching FOX News alot.
As for the rest of us, developer tools, language design, is one of the areas where Microsoft unquestionable excels. And this article is incidentally about release in that area.
That won't stop the Apple fanbois from drooling and going "OMG STEVE'S SUCH A GENIUS!" and acting like Apple invented it, though.
You're missing the point. Not inventing something for the first time, never stopped Apple from dominating the market with their own version.
The key asset here is iTunes. iTunes is the first store of its kind to enjoy simplicity, availability and mass support by content providers and consumers alike.
When other companies add networking, WMV playback and photos slideshows to their TV-s, you have a set of possible uses for that, especially if you're a geek, but you need to figure it out on your own.
When Apple puts iTunes in a TV, you have a complete product your entire family can sit back and use out-of-the-box.
To permit a greater number of items to reside in the userbar, a magnification function can be provided which magnifies items within the userbar when they are proximate the cursor associated with the graphical user interface.
Ah, yes, there we go. The patent is for rollover magnification of the items in the dock.
This concept is also old as the world. You can find a myriad of, for example, Flash UI-s and experiments on the web as early as 1996-8 that offer all kinds of navigation via "lens zoom" when you hover.
But I guess the irony comes from the fact that kind of zoom is a usability disaster, and Apple themselves have disabled it by default on Leopard.
> Because Design without Fab worked so well for Transmeta? I see your sarcasm, but it works for ARM and MIPS.
What ARM and MIPS have in common is they are RISC architectures with their own specification and market.
What Transmeta and AMD have in common is that they produce x86 compatible chips and thus compete directly with Intel.
Intel as a company owning their fabs has become famous for their well synchronised "tick tock" process where they successively introduce new design, then introduce better fab for the same design, then a new design etc. Such accuracy and consistency is hard to expect from a design-only company that needs to contract a third party to produce their own product, and both parties are constantly looking for a way to skim some pennies in the process.
IC production facilities are expensive to build and maintain. Unless they can be kept at nearly full utilization, they will become a drain on the finances of the company that owns them. The foundry model uses two methods to avoid these costs: Fabless companies avoid costs by not owning such facilities. Merchant foundries, on the other hand, find work from the worldwide pool of fabless companies, and by careful scheduling, pricing, and contracting keep their plants at full utilization.
I don't see anything in here that requires two separate companies. AMD can stay a single company and still build chips for other companies to fully utilize their facilities.
It looks more like a decision appealing towards someone's fuzzy feelings: "look the fab is independent now, it's got nothing to do with AMD chips, you can hire it" and "look we're doing bad but we have a big plan to bail out out of the crysis". Ops how come I worded it this exact way:P?
Actually, sounds like Ulteo. I've played with Ulteo and it is pretty close, and technically MS should be able to throw enough people behind something like it.
Hell no. Unlike some people, Microsoft knows what "OS" means, and it's an OS: process management, drivers, the entire party.
If you want to get intot he right mindset about this project, consider it a spinoff of the Windows Server family (but will likely be a subset powered mostly or entirely by.NET).
The article uses very unclear wording in that part, so I thought I'd clarify.
Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update. The good news is it can render Flash and AJAX and so on because it's based on the rendering engine of the desktop Internet Explorer browser. The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.
So CUDA and OpenCL are the solution to the parallel programming crisis? Quick, go tell that to Microsoft and Intel because they're wasting tens of millions of parallel programming research dollars at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Illinois at UC and many other research labs around the world. I'm sure they'll be thrilled and reward you accordingly.
First of all, that "crisis" is in your head.
And yes, they are spending money on research dollars, because, unlike you, they realize there's no silver bullet for solving the parallel programming problems of today or tommorow. OpenCL, CUDA and Pixel Bender handle perfectly "emabarassingly parallel" problems, which applies well to graphics rendering, audio processing, filtering and other math problems.
Another class of problems is about to be handled with research into transactional memory than companies like Microsoft and Sun are working on.
You see, Microsoft and Intel work on real world solution, not on theoretical solutions, while you can write a fancy blog with a fancy silver bullet theory and zero practical application, and shout to everyone for being idiots.
Microsoft and Intel are led by aging baby boomers who have run out of good ideas simply because they are too old and set in their ways. They still think in 20th century mode. They have no clue as to how to solve the parallel programming crisis and they speak about the future as if a solution were a fait accompli. Whoever is the first to come out with the correct solution will rocket right past them and they won't know what happened until it's too late. Personally, I am tired of Windows and x86-based processors. But then again, Linux is just as old as Windows. Doesn't matter. Soon they will all go the way of the Dodo. Reply to This
I love how you come here to spam about the world doesn't "get" parallel programming all the time to push your articles.
But you're missing that we do use parallel programming extensively nowadays. Do you know what CUDA is? Do you know of Apple's OpenCL project?
Do you know that even the new Flash Player 10 includes language specifically designed to run "embarassingly parallely" on everything from stock CPU to stock GPU-s. You can use this language (called "Pixel Bender") to process and generate anything from graphics to audio, or other math tasks.
With your "all is nodes" programming model, I'm afraid you're the one stuck in the 20-th century.
Er... I guess you don't see it this way, Microsoft, but I sure as hell always thought that checking your e-mail was basic computer functionality in this day and age. But hey, what do I know?
Browsing and media playback are also basic computer functions today, but Microsoft was sued for including IE/WMP anyway, and paid very hefty fines for this.
If you want to bitch to someone, Microsoft is the wrong target.
I suppose I'd agree with most of what you said, but why did you have to go all out there and throw in outright lies to support your statements?
And before you know it all the people are clustered around the tiny tiny pastures of green in a desert of grey, saying 'wowser, check that colour scheme out'. Such a pity that they can't click to discover that the buttons don't do anything, but that's someone elses job and Bob is on an extended five year coffee break.
How does this correspond to the fact the screenshots don't show significant UI changes? Microsoft isn't trying to wow anyone with UI at this point. This was the Vista strategy and they botched it.
Windows 7 has completely different purpose, which is to take the Vista stack and make it mature, more efficient, lean, and modular.
And the buttons, if you click them they "work". Those are not concept screenshots, they're screenshots from the current M3 build, which will be in the hands of the entire world less than two months from now.
Don't get too excited people. Remember that Microsoft is incapable of shifting an OS in the timescales that we've seen casually prognosticated.
You've missed two things: the Office release deadlines were never missed. The guy who handles the Office releases (Sinofski) is managing Windows now, and he was extremely clear that Windows 7 will be out Q1 2010, no setbacks, no delays, no messy communication, end of story.
By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware, and the drivers will be mature. That would be the worst time of all to introduce Vista2. Look to about 2012 for the next version, once Vista has peaked.
For all practical purposes, Windows 7 is Vista SE, it uses the exact same driver model and has the exact same API-s, with the addition of some more (like multitouch) and eventual better support for virtualization.
If Vista's drivers will be mature in 2010, then Windows 7 drivers will be mature too, as they are the SAME drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of OT: Have you tried Opera's Dragonfly dev tools?
I have tried them. It's a very welcome (and quite overdue) addition to Opera for sure.
Right now I find the features and UI of Dragonfly kinda flaky and obscure, but it's eventually going to get "there". For now Firebug + Webdev toolbar in Firefox are far more stable and mature tools to dev in.
I wouldn't mind Opera copying more closely Firebug, we're already used to it anyway.
Please... VP candidate.. She's not been elected VP... And with any luck, she won't be, and she can just go back to Alaska.
I learned something this election season: set your expectations low, so that you're not underwhelmed with the outcome. :)
Guess that leaked a bit into my post there
The agents described in TFA aren't "Markov chains", although I doubt you even know what that means.
Well, interviewpalin.com is programmed a Markov chain, the rest was just sarcasm. Something which computers and certain people have problem detecting.
As soon as someone comes up with decent classification algorithms for images, you hook it up to a chat agent, get a semi-decent description, you'll ask a different question.
Hey you make it sound so easy: as soon as someone comes up with it, it's done!
Naturally, the photo test was just a single example from thousands of quick tests you can use to test various areas of the agent you converse with. Each of those problems could be solved with sufficiently advanced algorithm, as soon as "someone comes up with it", but the sum of it all and it all working in concert is after all where the difficulty lies.
Or maybe we can just heed your advice and wait for someone to just "come up with it" magically, like mad scientists do on a summer action movie.
The problem with AI isn't that it's necessarily hard, it's that the bar keeps getting raised. We already have computers more intelligent that most vertebrates, and some mentally challenged humans. But to say that sounds insulting, so it's not mentioned.
I'd say you underestimate most vertebrates. But you're right: AI isn't hard. It's not easy either. The problem is we don't even have a decent definition of what "AI" is, so naturally we won't know it's AI even if it hit us in the face.
The Turing test isn't really an AI test, it's a thought experiment about how well can a machine fake human-like behavior when funneled though a narrow communication channel (text only chat). And frankly that's just useless.
But the Turing test is one of those phrases that gets so often repeated in popular media, that no one questions even the validity of its claims. And for something invented nearly 60 years ago, I think it's about time someone does.
It seems to me that the pool of users that Chrome is seeking to draw from has already been taken by the likes of Firefox and Opera. And, unfortunately for Chrome, fans of Firefox and Opera are violently loyal customers. Even if Chrome supported addons I would have a hard time giving up my Firefox.
I use Opera for browsing and Firefox for web dev, and I don't understand why you assume the presence of Firefox/Opera freaks means all their users are such.
I'm looking forward to Chrome maturing, and frankly I do consider replacing Firefox with Chrome on the computers of my friends when it comes out of beta.
"Sorry, I'm blind."
"No problem, open this mp3 link: ... . What instruments do you hear?"
Turing explicitly restricted the communication for the test to text. So what you describe would, albeit interesting, not actually be the Turing test.
Or is it maybe time to start following the spirit, and not the letter. The Turing test was described 58 years ago. One'd thing that the technology advancements in that span would also improve out testing methods.
Not that there aren't a million ways to "catch" an AI even without the images.
If our criterai for AI will be so low, here's your AI: http://www.interviewpalin.com/.
The political side of this site aside, the answers are just prewritten answers (by a human) mixed together randomly as a Markov chain.
Does it sound convincingly? Well, at least as convincingly as some interviews a certain VP made recently. Is it AI? Hell no, a kid could write such a generator in a day.
If the bar will be as low as to try to lead casual conversations with the "AI" and expect "quirky" answers, that doesn't mean anything at all, we need to AI for this. Hell, this is what an average conversation with a teenager is most of the time. Doesn't mean it's the best they can do.
"We're clock cycle away from AI"? Please. I want my turing test to be done over an actual instant messenger program. Let's see how your Markov chain reacts, when I send a photo and ask a dead simple question such as "describe what you see in the photo".
Fooling people is easy online. Scammers do it every day, it's not AI my friends.
I'm getting a bit frustrated waiting for the industry to realize they need to make those applications a little more interactive.
For example, from the article, the tool suggested a number of IE fixes when the primary browser used on the system is Firefox. The tool detecting the default browser is easy, but IE may still be used while not being default.
The solution: just damn ask the user, does he use IE despite it's not the default browser. Just make the process more like a dialog, let the user add some input to the process.
When a collection of solutions is formed, don't just spit them to the user, but ask him what problems he has, what apps he uses, and dynamically trim/modify the proposed solutions according to that. It's still faster than waiting for an actual person to show up and fix the problems, and that person would still ask the user a lot of those questions.
They're probably doomed. It's very very hard to make a visual programming language not suck (the closest I ever got involved having large gobs of text inside the visual blobs, which isn't very visual!) because handling scaling of complexity is hard visually.
You're missing the point: the visual components isn't a generic purpose programming language. It's a domain specific language tailored to a specific task.
Whether it's visual, or it's just a bunch of XML markup is up the implementers. Sometimes some paradigms are much simpler to present visually, and then visual editing can be used.
Think of it that way: the DSL and the models they represent don't explain *how* things work, but *what* the major agents in a system are there and their interaction.
They are evolved metadata, an evolved "settings" file, that lets you set more things in the system than normally you're able to.
Oslo and M appear to be taking a page out of the research Charles Simonyi has been doing at Microsoft, before leading to develop and advanced form of the technology at his own company Intentional Software.
The basic idea here is that any bigger project can be made more maintainable and flexible at the same time, if the deveopers create a domain specific model for the given task, and let the end-users (for example accountants, drug store chemists, biologists, business owners) model the concrete behaviour of the application by manipulating that simplified and specialized language, often visually, the way an UML diagram or a spreadsheet works.
Unfortunately the linked article offers a little more than the usual "LOL, Microsoft sucks!" rant, which is somewhat expected from a blog where the iMac keyboard and iPhone are used as "design elements".
Anyway, I'd say this should be watched as it can mean model languages will finally enter mainstream, something that's been years in the making.
Related articles:
http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2008/09/07/net-4-0-wf-wcf-and-oslo.aspx
"By mentioning model-driven programming, you will see a general modeling platform to be unveiled at PDC: Oslo. As Doug said, Oslo contains three simple things: a visual tool helps building models, a new textual DSL language helps defining models, and a relational repository that stores models. XAML represented workflows and services are special models in this domain. Check for more details in the postings from Doug and Don."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1430
"'Schemas in the repository can be defined using this language, but they dont have to be,' Chappell said. Developers can still use any other tools with which theyd be comfortable to create schemas instead. Because the new language will generate SQL, and the repository can be accessed using standard SQL, no special languages will be required."
What new product has MS announced that was not met with criticism and derision?
That's one of the problems of reading Slashdot and related sites a lot. But I don't blame you. You can see a similar "imaginary world" skewed perspectives from people watching FOX News alot.
As for the rest of us, developer tools, language design, is one of the areas where Microsoft unquestionable excels. And this article is incidentally about release in that area.
That won't stop the Apple fanbois from drooling and going "OMG STEVE'S SUCH A GENIUS!" and acting like Apple invented it, though.
You're missing the point. Not inventing something for the first time, never stopped Apple from dominating the market with their own version.
The key asset here is iTunes. iTunes is the first store of its kind to enjoy simplicity, availability and mass support by content providers and consumers alike.
When other companies add networking, WMV playback and photos slideshows to their TV-s, you have a set of possible uses for that, especially if you're a geek, but you need to figure it out on your own.
When Apple puts iTunes in a TV, you have a complete product your entire family can sit back and use out-of-the-box.
Conversation two:
Subject: Hello, my name is Mike and I am a man.
KW: Are you happy being a human?
Subject: Judge, I'm a guy.
KW: Does that worry you?
Subject: Don't worry, we'll work everything through.
KW: Do you have worries then?
Subject: Let's move on from that basis.
KW: Why?
Subject: Why? I like this subject.
KW: What is the subject, do you think?
Subject: What is the subject I wonder if I think? I know that it's good to thonk about. Think deeplt about mysterious subjects.
KW: What mysterious subjects?
Subject: Think deeply about mysterious dubjects.
KW: What's a dubject?
Very cute that it fakes typos, but honestly I'd never believe this is a human, at least one with his psyche intact.
To permit a greater number of items to reside in the userbar, a magnification function can be provided which magnifies items within the userbar when they are proximate the cursor associated with the graphical user interface.
Ah, yes, there we go. The patent is for rollover magnification of the items in the dock.
This concept is also old as the world. You can find a myriad of, for example, Flash UI-s and experiments on the web as early as 1996-8 that offer all kinds of navigation via "lens zoom" when you hover.
But I guess the irony comes from the fact that kind of zoom is a usability disaster, and Apple themselves have disabled it by default on Leopard.
You know, that area on the windows tool bar that gives you quick access to applications? Been there since Windows95 I think..
Yup. First of all, the tray bar was there since the original launch of Windows 95, which often was used by apps to implement similar functionality.
A bit later, IE4 for Windows 95 (distributed later as Windows 95 OSR2.x) added also:
- the quick launch bar
- custom toolbars displaying folders and shortcuts of your choice
- address toolbar
There is no much to patent on the OSX toolbar, apart from the look-and-feel, and we know how well this went in the past.
> Because Design without Fab worked so well for Transmeta?
I see your sarcasm, but it works for ARM and MIPS.
What ARM and MIPS have in common is they are RISC architectures with their own specification and market.
What Transmeta and AMD have in common is that they produce x86 compatible chips and thus compete directly with Intel.
Intel as a company owning their fabs has become famous for their well synchronised "tick tock" process where they successively introduce new design, then introduce better fab for the same design, then a new design etc. Such accuracy and consistency is hard to expect from a design-only company that needs to contract a third party to produce their own product, and both parties are constantly looking for a way to skim some pennies in the process.
IC production facilities are expensive to build and maintain. Unless they can be kept at nearly full utilization, they will become a drain on the finances of the company that owns them. The foundry model uses two methods to avoid these costs: Fabless companies avoid costs by not owning such facilities. Merchant foundries, on the other hand, find work from the worldwide pool of fabless companies, and by careful scheduling, pricing, and contracting keep their plants at full utilization.
I don't see anything in here that requires two separate companies. AMD can stay a single company and still build chips for other companies to fully utilize their facilities.
It looks more like a decision appealing towards someone's fuzzy feelings: "look the fab is independent now, it's got nothing to do with AMD chips, you can hire it" and "look we're doing bad but we have a big plan to bail out out of the crysis". Ops how come I worded it this exact way :P?
Actually, sounds like Ulteo. I've played with Ulteo and it is pretty close, and technically MS should be able to throw enough people behind something like it.
Hell no. Unlike some people, Microsoft knows what "OS" means, and it's an OS: process management, drivers, the entire party.
If you want to get intot he right mindset about this project, consider it a spinoff of the Windows Server family (but will likely be a subset powered mostly or entirely by .NET).
Repeat after me boys and girls "GET requests shouldn't change anything on the server".
You can perform CSRF with POST just as easy as with GET.
The article uses very unclear wording in that part, so I thought I'd clarify.
Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update. The good news is it can render Flash and AJAX and so on because it's based on the rendering engine of the desktop Internet Explorer browser. The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.
So CUDA and OpenCL are the solution to the parallel programming crisis? Quick, go tell that to Microsoft and Intel because they're wasting tens of millions of parallel programming research dollars at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Illinois at UC and many other research labs around the world. I'm sure they'll be thrilled and reward you accordingly.
First of all, that "crisis" is in your head.
And yes, they are spending money on research dollars, because, unlike you, they realize there's no silver bullet for solving the parallel programming problems of today or tommorow. OpenCL, CUDA and Pixel Bender handle perfectly "emabarassingly parallel" problems, which applies well to graphics rendering, audio processing, filtering and other math problems.
Another class of problems is about to be handled with research into transactional memory than companies like Microsoft and Sun are working on.
You see, Microsoft and Intel work on real world solution, not on theoretical solutions, while you can write a fancy blog with a fancy silver bullet theory and zero practical application, and shout to everyone for being idiots.
Microsoft and Intel are led by aging baby boomers who have run out of good ideas simply because they are too old and set in their ways. They still think in 20th century mode. They have no clue as to how to solve the parallel programming crisis and they speak about the future as if a solution were a fait accompli. Whoever is the first to come out with the correct solution will rocket right past them and they won't know what happened until it's too late. Personally, I am tired of Windows and x86-based processors. But then again, Linux is just as old as Windows. Doesn't matter. Soon they will all go the way of the Dodo.
Reply to This
I love how you come here to spam about the world doesn't "get" parallel programming all the time to push your articles.
But you're missing that we do use parallel programming extensively nowadays. Do you know what CUDA is? Do you know of Apple's OpenCL project?
Do you know that even the new Flash Player 10 includes language specifically designed to run "embarassingly parallely" on everything from stock CPU to stock GPU-s. You can use this language (called "Pixel Bender") to process and generate anything from graphics to audio, or other math tasks.
With your "all is nodes" programming model, I'm afraid you're the one stuck in the 20-th century.
Er... I guess you don't see it this way, Microsoft, but I sure as hell always thought that checking your e-mail was basic computer functionality in this day and age. But hey, what do I know?
Browsing and media playback are also basic computer functions today, but Microsoft was sued for including IE/WMP anyway, and paid very hefty fines for this.
If you want to bitch to someone, Microsoft is the wrong target.
Why not spend $40bn on other stock.
Doesn't make sense to me, come on you stockmarket guys, explain the rationale.
Because they want to raise the price of the Microsoft stock, not someone else's.
I suppose I'd agree with most of what you said, but why did you have to go all out there and throw in outright lies to support your statements?
And before you know it all the people are clustered around the tiny tiny pastures of green in a desert of grey, saying 'wowser, check that colour scheme out'. Such a pity that they can't click to discover that the buttons don't do anything, but that's someone elses job and Bob is on an extended five year coffee break.
How does this correspond to the fact the screenshots don't show significant UI changes? Microsoft isn't trying to wow anyone with UI at this point. This was the Vista strategy and they botched it.
Windows 7 has completely different purpose, which is to take the Vista stack and make it mature, more efficient, lean, and modular.
And the buttons, if you click them they "work". Those are not concept screenshots, they're screenshots from the current M3 build, which will be in the hands of the entire world less than two months from now.
Don't get too excited people. Remember that Microsoft is incapable of shifting an OS in the timescales that we've seen casually prognosticated.
You've missed two things: the Office release deadlines were never missed. The guy who handles the Office releases (Sinofski) is managing Windows now, and he was extremely clear that Windows 7 will be out Q1 2010, no setbacks, no delays, no messy communication, end of story.
By the beginning of 2010 Vista will have hit its sweet spot in terms of hardware, and the drivers will be mature. That would be the worst time of all to introduce Vista2. Look to about 2012 for the next version, once Vista has peaked.
For all practical purposes, Windows 7 is Vista SE, it uses the exact same driver model and has the exact same API-s, with the addition of some more (like multitouch) and eventual better support for virtualization.
If Vista's drivers will be mature in 2010, then Windows 7 drivers will be mature too, as they are the SAME drivers.