The same argument you made can be made against windows desktop apps, in that there is no infrastructure for distribution and payment of applications on desktop. Yet there is an overabundance of windows desktop apps. Which leads one to believe the troubles of WinMo is elsewhere.
It's cute for a little while. But your body's not evolved to stare at your hands for eight hours, or touch the object of your gaze for the same.
You do realize that while reading books or writing, you are essentially looking at your hands and touching the object of your gaze ? And people have been doing this for over 2000 years, for far longer than 8 hours a day ?
Tablet PCs have been here for a long time, but 2 things have changed since earlier. First is the introduction of low cost tablet netbooks like Gigabyte T1028 and Asus T91. Next is really Windows 7 - with its much improved support for handwriting and brand new support for touchscreens. You no longer need to buy a 2000 USD Dell tablet.
So units are being sold, and most manufacturers plan to improve their models after Win 7 comes out in October. For example, Gigabyte is planning to upgrade T1028 to handle multitouch, and Asus will release T101 with Win 7. So the market is definitely being ignited, but whether it will cath fire or not remains to be seen.
Templates are what makes programming in C++ a joy compared to other languages. And concepts would have completed the generic programming framework in C++. Concepts are like typechecking for templates. With templates + concepts, programming in C++ would have been almost as elegant as Haskell, except 10 times faster.
Without generic programming you not have typesafe containers, no smart pointers, no typesafe variadic functions. In fact templates have almost replaced OOP in C++ - libraries like ATL use templates for compile time polymorphism, instead of runtime polymorphism using virtual functions.
I suggest you read Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Desing before commenting on generic programming. Modern C++ is not the C++ of 1990s.
Well the new standard has threading support which is also very important. But I am completely in agreement with you - removal of concepts is a major setback for generic programming. Concepts put templates on a solid theoritical ground, which will now be sorely lacking. This is now the *3rd* big feature which was dropped from the standard citing lack of time, other 2 being modules and GC.
Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:
F# - Finally a functional programming language with a real chance of becoming mainstream. I personally would have liked Haskell though:(
Parallel Patterns Library - An STL like library for doing parallel computation. For example, instead of the STL for_each you can use the PPL parallel_for_each. Combine this with lambda functions for best results.
I wonder the same. But I hope with the introduction of F# on VS 2010, functional programming will finally catch on. If anybody has the muscle to push a new language, its MS.
And still no support for typographic features like ligatures, old style numbers or true small caps:(. This is one thing Word doesn't support, and IMO will help Writer against Word.
Right now on Vista Notepad produces better looking text than either Word or Writer!!
Its a myth that Office 2007 takes up more UI space than Office 97 or 2003. Office 2007 UI takes up slightly less vertical space than Office 97 out of the box. If the user displays a few toolbars, as most users do, Office 97 consumes far more space than 2007. Here is a post which goes into the detail measurements: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
These firms derive their characteristic competitive advantage from their ability to exploit their workforce in ways that would not be legal in the United States, and this is what most people object to with outsourcing. Nobody's "inherently superior".
May I know what are the ways these companies expliot their workers? For all I know, they pay their workers well, and people are happy to work in these companies.
To you, these companies may look as if they are paying their workers low wages, but the wages converted into Indian Rupee is a lot of money for someone in India. Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not explioting anybody.
No. There is absolutely no difference between free fall in a gravitational field and absence of a gravitational field. This is the famous Equivalence Principle of General Relativitiy. This link gives more detail: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/gener al_relativity.html
So there exists no difference at all between free fall and zero gravity. As for your second point, no experiment can distinguish between the two cases. So no observation can differentiate between the two.
There is no difference between zero gravity and free fall in a gravitational field. None whatsoever. That is, there is no experiment which will be able to distinguish between these to different cases. So, yes, the term "zero g" is perfectly valid.
Everytime I see stories about cellphones on/. I wonder why US customers put with all the crap that the cellular providers throw their way ? As a person outside of USA, it is really hard for me to imagine this. All I have to do to use cellphones is to buy a phone, buy a SIM card from one of the (completely separate) carriers, put it into my phone and use. Paying for talktime is done through prepaid vouchers. There are no contracts, no locking of phones, no restrictions, etc. I can switch carriers whenever I like, use whatever applications I like on my phone.
Surely there are carriers in USA who allow the use of unlocked phones without contracts ? If yes, why doesn't everybody those ? Or is there a side of the story that is not truly reflected via the comments on slashdot ?
If anybody should feel bitter by Microsoft's dealings during the beginning of the DOS era, its Tim Paterson, who actually wrote QDos, ported it to IBM PC, and from whom Microsoft concealed the entire IBM deal, buying the license to QDos for a mere $50,000. As for Gary Kildall, he shot himself in the foot, repeatedly.
Icebergs are natural, icebergs so far up north aren't. The chief reason why this indicates global warming is to sail this far up north, the sea surrounding the iceberg must have been cooler than usual. This can only happen if more and more ice is melting from the iceberg, which reduces the temperature of the ocean current, enabling the iceberg to move further north without melting.
This may sound counterintuitive, global warming reducing ocean temperature, but it actually isn't. Global warming means increase of the average temperature of the earth, not that of a particular region.
I am an Indian and I have no idea what the government is trying to achieve by this. India already has a tax on services, at 12%. How would changing the classification from goods to service help ? The tax revenue will be increasing by just 0.5%.
In any case, this is being done only by a state government, so its valid only within that particular state. It will have no effect on any other parts of the country. And I expect this to be struck down by the courts anyway.
His first objection reads: Firstly, it is impossible and contrived to put a dividing line between dwarf planets and planets. It's as if we declared people not people for some arbitrary reason, like they tend to live in groups. I don't find it contrived at all. Asteroids are not called planets because of exactly similar reasons - there are simply too many of them in the same space. We even have precedent - Ceres was demoted 150 years back for exactly the same reason. Why should it be any special for Trans-Neptunian objects like Pluto ?
Next he says that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not fully cleared their orbits. Earth has 10,000 near earth asteroids. Earth's diameter - 12,800 KM. Largest asteroids diameter is 20 km, most much lesser. Thats 0.1% of Earth's diameter - insignificant. Same thing goes for Jupiter - only Jupiter is nearly 12 times larger than earth and hence the percentage is even more insignificant. Also, Pluto is exactly not in the neighbourhood of Neptune. Its orbit is significantly tilted to the orbit of Neptune and hence outside Neptune's neighbourhood.
Believe it or not, borrowing money is often a good thing for a firm. A firm without any debt is a very bad idea, especially for a firm like Microsoft. Why this is so depends on a set of theorems in finance known as the Modigliani - Millar theorems.
Modigliani and Miller showed that in a world without taxes and any cost of bankrupcy, the amount of debt a firm has will have no effect on the value of the firm. However, in a world with taxes, the higher the debt, the more valuable the firm is. This is due to the tax shield on interest that a firm has to pay on its debt.
So, for a large firm like Microsoft, with stable cash flows and low operating risk, a high debt is desirable. What Microsoft should do in the least is to take a large amount of debt and use it to finance a buyback of shares.
Google's target markets are individuals and to some extent 3-4 man business operations. What Writely or Google Spreadsheets provide is usually sufficient for most individuals and small offices.
In fact, Google's office product is much more of a competitor to OpenOffice than to MSOffice. They both target the same market - individuals and small businesses - and have (or will soon, as Google catches up) more or less the same set of simplistic features. Catching up MSOffice in terms of functionality may never be possible for a browser based office suite.
OpenGL was traditionally aimed at enterprises and workstations. There you need a stable platform. So new features tend to get added slowly. On the other hand, DirectX is aimed towards the gaming market. Here the pace of development is hectic. The pace of development of DirectX also supports that. New features get added very fast. Microsoft being a single entity can also introduce changes much faster than a board controlled OpenGL can.
The problem with OpenGL is that it is now trying to do what DirectX does. But it was never intended to be an API for games, or to be changed frequently. It is becoming something in the middle, neither here nor there,evolving too slowly for games and too fast for workstations. Maybe the two just need to diverge, with OpenGL returning to what it was intended for - enterprise apps, while leaving DirectX to cater to the games market.
Slashdot Mirror
The same argument you made can be made against windows desktop apps, in that there is no infrastructure for distribution and payment of applications on desktop. Yet there is an overabundance of windows desktop apps. Which leads one to believe the troubles of WinMo is elsewhere.
It's cute for a little while. But your body's not evolved to stare at your hands for eight hours, or touch the object of your gaze for the same.
You do realize that while reading books or writing, you are essentially looking at your hands and touching the object of your gaze ? And people have been doing this for over 2000 years, for far longer than 8 hours a day ?
Tablet PCs have been here for a long time, but 2 things have changed since earlier. First is the introduction of low cost tablet netbooks like Gigabyte T1028 and Asus T91. Next is really Windows 7 - with its much improved support for handwriting and brand new support for touchscreens. You no longer need to buy a 2000 USD Dell tablet.
So units are being sold, and most manufacturers plan to improve their models after Win 7 comes out in October. For example, Gigabyte is planning to upgrade T1028 to handle multitouch, and Asus will release T101 with Win 7. So the market is definitely being ignited, but whether it will cath fire or not remains to be seen.
Templates are what makes programming in C++ a joy compared to other languages. And concepts would have completed the generic programming framework in C++. Concepts are like typechecking for templates. With templates + concepts, programming in C++ would have been almost as elegant as Haskell, except 10 times faster.
Without generic programming you not have typesafe containers, no smart pointers, no typesafe variadic functions. In fact templates have almost replaced OOP in C++ - libraries like ATL use templates for compile time polymorphism, instead of runtime polymorphism using virtual functions.
I suggest you read Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Desing before commenting on generic programming. Modern C++ is not the C++ of 1990s.
Well the new standard has threading support which is also very important. But I am completely in agreement with you - removal of concepts is a major setback for generic programming. Concepts put templates on a solid theoritical ground, which will now be sorely lacking. This is now the *3rd* big feature which was dropped from the standard citing lack of time, other 2 being modules and GC.
For those interested, this paper compares C++ concepts and templates with Haskell typeclasses: A comparison of c++ concepts and haskell type classes
Quite a bit actually. Personally for me, the top 3 features are:
Apart from the above it includes a completely new intellisense for C++, using the EDG frontend. All this in addition to the usual .Net stuff.
I wonder the same. But I hope with the introduction of F# on VS 2010, functional programming will finally catch on. If anybody has the muscle to push a new language, its MS.
And still no support for typographic features like ligatures, old style numbers or true small caps :(. This is one thing Word doesn't support, and IMO will help Writer against Word.
Right now on Vista Notepad produces better looking text than either Word or Writer!!
Uhh, but Office 2007 has exactly the same shortcuts as Office 2003. Here is a list for Word: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290938
And here is a list of the changes between the 2 versions: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926809/ I count a total of 6 items on the list. In fact MS added Keytips for better keyboard navigation of UI: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/13/480568.aspx
Its a myth that Office 2007 takes up more UI space than Office 97 or 2003. Office 2007 UI takes up slightly less vertical space than Office 97 out of the box. If the user displays a few toolbars, as most users do, Office 97 consumes far more space than 2007. Here is a post which goes into the detail measurements: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
Anyways, you can always minimize the ribbon.
These firms derive their characteristic competitive advantage from their ability to exploit their workforce in ways that would not be legal in the United States, and this is what most people object to with outsourcing. Nobody's "inherently superior".
May I know what are the ways these companies expliot their workers? For all I know, they pay their workers well, and people are happy to work in these companies.
To you, these companies may look as if they are paying their workers low wages, but the wages converted into Indian Rupee is a lot of money for someone in India. Somebody earning $1000 a month in India can maintain a standard of living above someone in US earning $4k-5k a month. So no, these companies are not explioting anybody.
They are almost the same.
log(2^50) = 50 log 2 = 15.0515
log (10^15) = 15 log 10 = 15
Approximately the same size, and definitely not "astronomically larger".
No. There is absolutely no difference between free fall in a gravitational field and absence of a gravitational field. This is the famous Equivalence Principle of General Relativitiy. This link gives more detail: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/gener al_relativity.html
So there exists no difference at all between free fall and zero gravity. As for your second point, no experiment can distinguish between the two cases. So no observation can differentiate between the two.
There is no difference between zero gravity and free fall in a gravitational field. None whatsoever. That is, there is no experiment which will be able to distinguish between these to different cases. So, yes, the term "zero g" is perfectly valid.
Everytime I see stories about cellphones on /. I wonder why US customers put with all the crap that the cellular providers throw their way ? As a person outside of USA, it is really hard for me to imagine this. All I have to do to use cellphones is to buy a phone, buy a SIM card from one of the (completely separate) carriers, put it into my phone and use. Paying for talktime is done through prepaid vouchers. There are no contracts, no locking of phones, no restrictions, etc. I can switch carriers whenever I like, use whatever applications I like on my phone.
Surely there are carriers in USA who allow the use of unlocked phones without contracts ? If yes, why doesn't everybody those ? Or is there a side of the story that is not truly reflected via the comments on slashdot ?
If anybody should feel bitter by Microsoft's dealings during the beginning of the DOS era, its Tim Paterson, who actually wrote QDos, ported it to IBM PC, and from whom Microsoft concealed the entire IBM deal, buying the license to QDos for a mere $50,000. As for Gary Kildall, he shot himself in the foot, repeatedly.
Icebergs are natural, icebergs so far up north aren't. The chief reason why this indicates global warming is to sail this far up north, the sea surrounding the iceberg must have been cooler than usual. This can only happen if more and more ice is melting from the iceberg, which reduces the temperature of the ocean current, enabling the iceberg to move further north without melting.
This may sound counterintuitive, global warming reducing ocean temperature, but it actually isn't. Global warming means increase of the average temperature of the earth, not that of a particular region.
I am an Indian and I have no idea what the government is trying to achieve by this. India already has a tax on services, at 12%. How would changing the classification from goods to service help ? The tax revenue will be increasing by just 0.5%.
In any case, this is being done only by a state government, so its valid only within that particular state. It will have no effect on any other parts of the country. And I expect this to be struck down by the courts anyway.
His first objection reads: Firstly, it is impossible and contrived to put a dividing line between dwarf planets and planets. It's as if we declared people not people for some arbitrary reason, like they tend to live in groups. I don't find it contrived at all. Asteroids are not called planets because of exactly similar reasons - there are simply too many of them in the same space. We even have precedent - Ceres was demoted 150 years back for exactly the same reason. Why should it be any special for Trans-Neptunian objects like Pluto ?
Next he says that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not fully cleared their orbits. Earth has 10,000 near earth asteroids. Earth's diameter - 12,800 KM. Largest asteroids diameter is 20 km, most much lesser. Thats 0.1% of Earth's diameter - insignificant. Same thing goes for Jupiter - only Jupiter is nearly 12 times larger than earth and hence the percentage is even more insignificant. Also, Pluto is exactly not in the neighbourhood of Neptune. Its orbit is significantly tilted to the orbit of Neptune and hence outside Neptune's neighbourhood.
Believe it or not, borrowing money is often a good thing for a firm. A firm without any debt is a very bad idea, especially for a firm like Microsoft. Why this is so depends on a set of theorems in finance known as the Modigliani - Millar theorems.
Modigliani and Miller showed that in a world without taxes and any cost of bankrupcy, the amount of debt a firm has will have no effect on the value of the firm. However, in a world with taxes, the higher the debt, the more valuable the firm is. This is due to the tax shield on interest that a firm has to pay on its debt.
So, for a large firm like Microsoft, with stable cash flows and low operating risk, a high debt is desirable. What Microsoft should do in the least is to take a large amount of debt and use it to finance a buyback of shares.
Google's target markets are individuals and to some extent 3-4 man business operations. What Writely or Google Spreadsheets provide is usually sufficient for most individuals and small offices.
In fact, Google's office product is much more of a competitor to OpenOffice than to MSOffice. They both target the same market - individuals and small businesses - and have (or will soon, as Google catches up) more or less the same set of simplistic features. Catching up MSOffice in terms of functionality may never be possible for a browser based office suite.
They explain it here: http://www.google.com/support/writely/bin/answer.p y?answer=38914&topic=8616
The reason is poor design mode support in Safari.
OpenGL was traditionally aimed at enterprises and workstations. There you need a stable platform. So new features tend to get added slowly. On the other hand, DirectX is aimed towards the gaming market. Here the pace of development is hectic. The pace of development of DirectX also supports that. New features get added very fast. Microsoft being a single entity can also introduce changes much faster than a board controlled OpenGL can. The problem with OpenGL is that it is now trying to do what DirectX does. But it was never intended to be an API for games, or to be changed frequently. It is becoming something in the middle, neither here nor there,evolving too slowly for games and too fast for workstations. Maybe the two just need to diverge, with OpenGL returning to what it was intended for - enterprise apps, while leaving DirectX to cater to the games market.