Just because Microsoft doesn't include this disclaimer on their website doesn't make MS Office any less buggy. This guy's students have been using buggy software their whole lives, from MS and others. Welcome to the information age. At least NeoOffice is being upfront about it.
We, in "information age" don't like fact bending and random discarding of information.
Have you actually used the latest versions of Office and NeoOffice extensively to be able to tell how bad the bugs in each of those are.
There's no complex software out there without bugs, but there are all kinds of bugs, like minor bugs, big bugs, and missions critical catastrophic bugs. I'm not sure with what "being upfront about it" is helping the students at all.
If Microsoft is "upfront about it" and says "yea, Office has some bugs", should the school turn 180 degrees and pay for Office? I mean, they at least are upfront about it!
If GNU/Linux was the only operating system that had applications like Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC, and so on, I think it would be a much more attractive option than Windows is. Yet, we've ported some of our best applications to the proprietary Windows platform, and as a consequence of this there is less incentive for Windows users to become users of Free Software operating systems.
"We've ported to Windows"? Who the heck are ya?
Firefox, based on the XUL platform, which from the very beginning was designed to be multi-platform. It has evolved from the proprietary Netscape before were also inherently multi-platform from the very start.
OpenOffice, evolved from the proprietary StarOffice, inherently multiplatform.
As for VLC, why exactly not having this one on Windows makes Linux any better. Can't Windows play Windows Media files? Does it lack a hundred of other players?
And I have another question for you: who do you think make products like Firefox popular. It's Windows users. The majority of people out there run Windows. It's when people started installing Firefox on their Windows machines, that the stats went up, and Firefox started to matter.
If Firefox never existed on Windows, do you think anyone but geeks would care for it? If you're thinking what answer might be, look no further from Konqueror: who the hell (but geeks) cared about this one browser which was only available on Linux, BEFORE Apple took their code and turned it in WebKit/Safari?
One more: transactional programming. The loss of performance is expected to be around 30% in most cases, but what it allows is that you can program away without worrying about thread conflicts.
The function will not edit the memory directly, but behind the scenes create a map of the changes it wants to apply to the memory, which are collected completely transparently to the programmer, who just writes normal serial thread code.
If there's a conflict, the data is discarded and the thread is re-run. If there's no conflict, the changes are aplpied like a normal transaction.
It's not just that, but some tasks can't be computed in parallel. Microsoft and Intel are working on lots of additions to their compilers/frameworks that make parallel programming transparent to the programmer. Functional programming.
Until then, people are splitting in threads what seems to make sense to. In a game, for example, you can logically split the engine into 6-8 threads without throwing away all your serial programming skills away. You got input/input feedback, core logic (script), sound processing, physics, 3D transform and processing, AI and some more like these.
They can run independently and only sync to the core in specified intervals/events.
But this one more reason the next XBOX or PS won't have the same architecture, but hundred cores: there's a boundary where the extra cores simply aren't useful for anything, and the way you program needs to shift, and the evolution of the languages is a huge thing here.
And as you said, the tool providers aren't surprised by this, they've been working hard on R&D in the area for the past 3-4 years at least, and there are actual products emerging out of it (like the parallel processing library in.NET which helps you compute things using multiple cores or your GPU without managing all the plumbing of this under the hoods).
Competition is important, and while it's difficult to find in the US and perhaps even moreso in the UK, alternatives should be encouraged. Just remember that you can't get something for nothing. That bandwidth does cost money.
I agree it costs, but the customers shouldn't care about that. If we'll be encouraging competition, then the customers should go straight to the best offer, never mind if they thing in their mind it's fair or not. This is how competition works (because you never know if there's no innovation around the corner to make said bandwidth waste with videos cheaper, for ex. hub deal with Joost would help tremendously, if this where the bandwidth goes).
So: let them whine, cry about shaping, cry about prices, cry like little babies. This is how competition works, it's not pretty, but takes the best out of the competitors.
If a small player has only 10% of the market and a compelling product, it's a sign of change. If a major player has only 10% of the market and a product with no compelling features, it's a sign of failure.
Except Microsoft wont fail, they'll gain a foothold and then flood the retail channel with their second-rate take on an existing product. With one or two exceptions, that's how they've done things for the past 20 years.
Thanks for the galore of cliches. Now to talk facts. No one was excited about iPod when it came out. The first version didn't even have real click wheel, it had separate play/pause/stop buttons, and the clickwheel was just for scrolling.
You talk about major and minor players: Zune was released just few months ago, it's currently GAINING market share. Your heuristic don't make sense. What's important is not how big is the company that releases the product, but if it gains or loses market share.
Apple has 3% of desktops. Is this a sign of failure? At some point, it was, but now they're gaining share, so they're definitely not failing.
The Zune has done very well so far, and like the first XBOX, it's an experiment, trying the market, trying new features, learning. If the leap from Zune 1 to 2 is as big as XBOX to XBOX360, Apple's in for a trouble.
They really show Google ads on these pointless pages? If I did that my adsense account would be terminated.
Thing is, if you have one domain and host ads like that, it may be terminated. But if you have thousands of domains, Google will offer you Domain Parking services with AdWords on them. Yes, Google will spam the domains themselve.
I suppose the reason don't allow you to use this service if you got 5-10 domains is that it keeps the word of mouth down. It's not something Google wants everyone to talk about.
Google is aware of scams because so many attempts are made [..] MS has a long history of poor security and will almost certainly miss what Google has done with this.
I'm not sure how you imagine the workflow in Microsoft regarding this, maybe something like this:
Jo: Hey, spammers are attacking Live.com successfully! Bob: Yup, I see that. Jo: Ok, I'll analyze why this is happening and propose a fix... Bob: NO! WAIT! Don't forget: we have a long history of poor security. Jo: Oh yea, what the hell was I thinking. We don't want to bring inconsistencies in our history of security.
The security problems of Windows per se, are for legacy reasons, and the need to support legacy applications/API-s You can't abruptly alter an OS overnight. Initially Windows was never even intended to run in a wide untrusted network (the concept of a browser didn't even exist back then).
Poor insight, sure, but I think they know now, what Internet is. As such Live.com, as a website, has zero of these problems.
As long as it outputs HTML/CSS/JS, they can rearchitect the whole thing and you won't even notice.
I doubt that Google would de-list you because you sue them. That would invite a looksy by the feds.
They may not so blatantly do it, but tell me: if your business may disappear in a blink of an eye if Google turns you back, would you be quick to go against them? They have thousands of ways to hurt you, and to make it look neutral. You may never know what hit you.
Google is already extremely innovative.
You know, they were extremely innovative in 1998, when they came up with the search engine concepts, pagerank and so on. Now they have a good business model, but there's tons of obvious stuff they could do to improve the search experience which they don't seem interested in.
This actually offers an interesting question: Can you dare to sue google if you depend on page visits? Can you actually survive it when Google decides to "zero" you, to make you nonexistant in their searches?
This is the reason why I do believe it'll be nice to see Yahoo and Microsoft work (or merge?) together better, so they can compete better against Google.
I do use Google today, it has the best search results, undeniably. But it also has a huge market share, which makes content producers very nervous, for a good reason.
Google may delist you overnight, after an algorithm tweak, for something completely innocent, and not SEO related at all, that you did on your site. It's unavoidable, even if Google was run by shiny white angels with halo above their heads, an algorithm for a search engine isn't an exact science, and so anybody in any moment can end up as an edge case that Google doesn't handle properly.
If we have 2-3 major search engines with equal market share, we gain the following benefits:
1. Spammers will have hard time scamming all engines at once, as they use wildly different backend processing, and as a result receive less traffic (i.e. if half the traffic comes from Live, and half from Google, cheating one of them gets you half the possible traffic, not all of it).
2. If you happen to be an edge case on either search engine after an algorithm tweak, it's much less likely both engines did the same tweak at the same time, so while your traffic will decrease, the other search engines on the market will still provide enough traffic for you until this is sorted.
3. When either search engine does something inappropriate, or questionable (ok, for the simple folk out there: "evil"), people will have easier time going to court to defend their rights, because if the search engine provider becomes abusive and threatens blacklisting, that'll have much smaller effect if the engine isn't a monopolist (in this case they'll mostly hurt themselves).
4. Innovation, innovation, innovation. Just imagine the kind of innovation we'll see from both Yahoo/Microsoft and Google if they had equal market share. Microsoft would have much bigger revenue and thus much bigger incentive to support their position on the market. Google, likewise.
I mean, what's the best we saw of Google as of late? A week ago they changed the layout of their home page which made it JavaScript dependent and harder to work with. That's not innovation, that's regression. As for the rest of their new offerings, they mostly come from companies they bought recently.
Yahoo's holding on to their "portal" strategy since this is where the most of their income comes from so their search acceptable but certainly not good enough or innovative. They can't risk spending too much money on search R&D alone.
As for Microsoft Live, they're apparently trying to come up with interesting interfaces for search, but they are quite young on that one market, their search results aren't really good, and need the experience of Yahoo to give them a boost and incentive to spend more research in the area.
So, bottom line: monopoly is never good, even when it's supposedly "not evil".
Look, like most I just don't have time to visit a couple of hundred sites to keep up on things. I want headlines and leads with enough information to let me know whether or not it is worth the effort to visit the news source. They should be thanking Google for providing the opportunity to garner more readers and subsequently increase their ad revenue.
You're biased. They should be paying Google just as much as Google should pay them.
Google isn't a charity organisation, there's no need for anyone to thank them. They are in this business to profit from other people's content. If there's no content, there's no Google. If there aren't search engines, the content can't be found.
The balance in this relationship is closer to the middle than strongly going on either side.
Google has done no evil, where MS has been nothing but.
Hm, what a black-white stance. Oh wait, I get it, it's because of the slogan, right? Heh. Kids. When will you grow up.
Google is so huge right now, you'll find people with all sorts of agenda inside. And the funny things is, many of them, at all levels, worked at Microsoft at some point. Some of them worked in Apple. Some of the people in Apple worked in Google. Some of the people in Microsoft worked in Apple or Google.
A corporation has no face. But, if it makes you feel better, you can keep putting faces on it. It makes it all so much simpler...
The thing about their story that got me was the fact that they decided they absolutely had to do this *right now* at 2am just to satisfy their own curiosity and were so self-absorbed that they killed the work a grad student had done in that particular lab in order to cannibalize his experiments so they didn't have to build everything themselves.
I don't get it: Fermilabs has published this story themselves, without any mention of how this student was compensated for having his work lost.
Is this what they really want to send as a message across: "come here to have your hard work randomly cannibalized by 'smart scientists' passing by"?
Even worse, the guy's a former director of Fermilab.
Yes, the function naming in php is crap. Show us a scripting language where it isn't.
Well, the list is too long. First, not scriping languages, but just as fast and robust to develop in :.NET and Java. Then ECMAScript, Ruby, Python etc.
But I can give you very quickly the list of scripts that have as bad or worse function/feature consistency than php:
Compiling isnt hard, and someone will always provide precompiled binaries for any system you'd care to mention anyway. The problem is that, proprietary developers dont like giving out their source code, because they feel it would be easier to hack the original source than to disassemble the binaries.
So in essence, LINA is about proprietary apps on Linux, where the proprietors don't want to compile the app for Cygwin/Windows for some reason, although compiling isn't hard...
Java speeds still lag far behind native code speeds.
You need to do your benchmarks again as it's not the case anymore.
we've got.NET / Mono.
For whatever reasons, these api's haven't spread far beyond Windows boxes.
And LINA isn't widespread anywhere... So what's your point? If you want to do it, Mono's there and people use it. Linden Labs is porting Second Life to Mono, for example. Some quite big sites run on Mono.
More and more Linux distros start shipping with Mono apps in them by default.
And we got Cygwin, which allows you to use the Linux API on Windows.
The difference here would be that Cygwin requires a recompilation... while the new offering does not require compilation.
Honestly people on Linux compile stuff every day, why is compilation so hard all of a sudden? And to save you from a few second/minutes of compilation, we instead need to live with the performance penalty of running in a VM? As if Cygwin isn't slow enough WITH the recompilation!
People should realize that this is impossible to do. This sounds like look&feel was something like a skin you can change at will, but it is not. Different systems have different requirements that cannot be changed programmatically, like keyboard shortcuts, icons, file placement, GUI metaphors and so on. If you want an application to feel native, simply design the GUI according to local customs, there is no other way.
That's one thing (and you're totally right). And second:
As with Java, Lina users will first install a VM specific to their platform, after which they can run binaries compiled not for their particular OS, but for the VM, which aims to hide OS-specific characteristics from the application.
Which left me thinking... "and unlike Java.. it does what?".
We've got Java, which has matured over the years, we've got.NET / Mono. And we got Cygwin, which allows you to use the Linux API on Windows.
Looks like that startup has agenda to brings more of the Linux API to Windows, and thus help Linux become more mainstream as a development platform. But agenda does not business or money make. They've entered a crowded market, offering little new except impossible promises for native look and feel.
Only I won't be doing as poorly as Windows users, because it will take a long time for Mac or Linux exploits to catch up to Windows exploits numerically.
The total count, however doesn't matter. When you download the next Windows Update, you automatically lock out the exploits it fixes.
A well configured Windows computer, and always up to date is secure enough to remain unharmed my malware. The problem is this: do you have OS to look at it and enjoy at it all day long how it's more secure than another OS, or to work on it.
I use Windows to work on it. the software I use is predominantly Windows-only. While you're waiting for OSX exploits to catch up with Windows, I'm just working and being fine on Windows.
I think OSX is a great OS too, and I do have a Max next to my PC-s (mostly testing), but your reasoning seemed faulty.
So, as a Mac user I'd see this as a sign of my computer gaining ground in the market.
So, you'll have to admit then all Jobs said about Windows being an insecure piece of garbage was wrong. It's, you see, just because they have so great market share.
You Mac users can't have it both ways. When hackers didn't pay attention to OSX and people said "this is because noone cares to attack you yet", you said "bs, it's because OSX is such a great OS, it's unhackable, it's secure *nix baby!".
Now you the community turns 180 degrees and claim the opposite.
For me, it *does* have to do with market share, and I believe OSX is an OS as any, and the only thing that pisses me off is the conformist opinion Mac users are ready to adapt at any given point, just to put OSX in a good (or less bad) light.
Perhaps the "free" part of it is to blame, maybe its more that people that make good videos don't like Heinz enough for make an ad for them? I mean would you really spend your free time making a video for a ketchup company?
Indeed. I'm sure if Apple got that contest out, they'd get amazing submissions. But there's only so much inspiration and affection you may have for a bottle of ketchup.
The guys who thought up this contest didn't see that far I guess. Well, there's always a way out: hire one or more ad agencies incognito, produce 5 amateur-looking (but good) ads, submit them to the contest.. let those win and tadaaa!
Drink Water or at worst carbonated water. Maybe a little tea or iced tea made from decent leaves (not the garbage leaves in lipton surrounded by bleached paper to dunk in water), or even a little expresso.
Leave out the soda pop, leave out most of the milk (thought to contribute to kidney stones), leave out the juice, etcetera. And for god's sake leave out anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - poison. Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
Oh, a little tea from decent leaves, not paper, paper's bad. Oh, I see, I see. You know, how bad for your life is when you die in a car crash, or a truck runs over you, or someone in a club beats you up and shoots you outside, or you fall from a bridge or whatever.
Never go outside, man! NEVER! It's dangerous. Maybe, you know, open your window a little, so air comes inside, but not too much, since air in the city is bad.
Or how about, instead of going all the way to the other extreme, just do things sensibly. I can guarantee you Pepsi MAX won't have profound effect on your health if you wouldn't drink ten gallons of it each day. I, for example, enjoy soft drinks in small quantities during weekends sometimes, or on a vacation, on the beach, or on a birthday party.
Here's the truth: even water will "fuck up with your [whatever] levels" if used in excess. Did you know you could die from water poisoning? Should we eventually stop drinking water and maybe just absorb moisture from the air, like some small mammals do?
So, yeah, go eat your organic non-GMO veggies and "free range" chicken. But not all of us can afford to pay 5x as much for our food. This is what gets me about GMO opponents - they fail to understand that there is a significant proportion of the world that would kill for ANY semblence of nutrition. It's GMO crops and "factory farms" that are feeding most the world.
But... dude... Check it out:
And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA -- Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of aging.
See? If I never had Pepsi MAX, I'd never age dude! I think we gotta sue 'em or something. That's all I could think of, I'll see later. I'll go buy some Pepsi MAX now.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because Microsoft doesn't include this disclaimer on their website doesn't make MS Office any less buggy. This guy's students have been using buggy software their whole lives, from MS and others. Welcome to the information age. At least NeoOffice is being upfront about it.
We, in "information age" don't like fact bending and random discarding of information.
Have you actually used the latest versions of Office and NeoOffice extensively to be able to tell how bad the bugs in each of those are.
There's no complex software out there without bugs, but there are all kinds of bugs, like minor bugs, big bugs, and missions critical catastrophic bugs. I'm not sure with what "being upfront about it" is helping the students at all.
If Microsoft is "upfront about it" and says "yea, Office has some bugs", should the school turn 180 degrees and pay for Office? I mean, they at least are upfront about it!
If GNU/Linux was the only operating system that had applications like Firefox, OpenOffice, VLC, and so on, I think it would be a much more attractive option than Windows is. Yet, we've ported some of our best applications to the proprietary Windows platform, and as a consequence of this there is less incentive for Windows users to become users of Free Software operating systems.
"We've ported to Windows"? Who the heck are ya?
Firefox, based on the XUL platform, which from the very beginning was designed to be multi-platform.
It has evolved from the proprietary Netscape before were also inherently multi-platform from the very start.
OpenOffice, evolved from the proprietary StarOffice, inherently multiplatform.
As for VLC, why exactly not having this one on Windows makes Linux any better. Can't Windows play Windows Media files? Does it lack a hundred of other players?
And I have another question for you: who do you think make products like Firefox popular. It's Windows users. The majority of people out there run Windows. It's when people started installing Firefox on their Windows machines, that the stats went up, and Firefox started to matter.
If Firefox never existed on Windows, do you think anyone but geeks would care for it? If you're thinking what answer might be, look no further from Konqueror: who the hell (but geeks) cared about this one browser which was only available on Linux, BEFORE Apple took their code and turned it in WebKit/Safari?
One more: transactional programming. The loss of performance is expected to be around 30% in most cases, but what it allows is that you can program away without worrying about thread conflicts.
The function will not edit the memory directly, but behind the scenes create a map of the changes it wants to apply to the memory, which are collected completely transparently to the programmer, who just writes normal serial thread code.
If there's a conflict, the data is discarded and the thread is re-run. If there's no conflict, the changes are aplpied like a normal transaction.
It's not just that, but some tasks can't be computed in parallel. Microsoft and Intel are working on lots of additions to their compilers/frameworks that make parallel programming transparent to the programmer. Functional programming.
.NET which helps you compute things using multiple cores or your GPU without managing all the plumbing of this under the hoods).
Until then, people are splitting in threads what seems to make sense to. In a game, for example, you can logically split the engine into 6-8 threads without throwing away all your serial programming skills away. You got input/input feedback, core logic (script), sound processing, physics, 3D transform and processing, AI and some more like these.
They can run independently and only sync to the core in specified intervals/events.
But this one more reason the next XBOX or PS won't have the same architecture, but hundred cores: there's a boundary where the extra cores simply aren't useful for anything, and the way you program needs to shift, and the evolution of the languages is a huge thing here.
And as you said, the tool providers aren't surprised by this, they've been working hard on R&D in the area for the past 3-4 years at least, and there are actual products emerging out of it (like the parallel processing library in
Competition is important, and while it's difficult to find in the US and perhaps even moreso in the UK, alternatives should be encouraged. Just remember that you can't get something for nothing. That bandwidth does cost money.
I agree it costs, but the customers shouldn't care about that. If we'll be encouraging competition, then the customers should go straight to the best offer, never mind if they thing in their mind it's fair or not. This is how competition works (because you never know if there's no innovation around the corner to make said bandwidth waste with videos cheaper, for ex. hub deal with Joost would help tremendously, if this where the bandwidth goes).
So: let them whine, cry about shaping, cry about prices, cry like little babies. This is how competition works, it's not pretty, but takes the best out of the competitors.
If a small player has only 10% of the market and a compelling product, it's a sign of change. If a major player has only 10% of the market and a product with no compelling features, it's a sign of failure.
Except Microsoft wont fail, they'll gain a foothold and then flood the retail channel with their second-rate take on an existing product. With one or two exceptions, that's how they've done things for the past 20 years.
Thanks for the galore of cliches. Now to talk facts. No one was excited about iPod when it came out. The first version didn't even have real click wheel, it had separate play/pause/stop buttons, and the clickwheel was just for scrolling.
You talk about major and minor players: Zune was released just few months ago, it's currently GAINING market share. Your heuristic don't make sense. What's important is not how big is the company that releases the product, but if it gains or loses market share.
Apple has 3% of desktops. Is this a sign of failure? At some point, it was, but now they're gaining share, so they're definitely not failing.
The Zune has done very well so far, and like the first XBOX, it's an experiment, trying the market, trying new features, learning. If the leap from Zune 1 to 2 is as big as XBOX to XBOX360, Apple's in for a trouble.
They really show Google ads on these pointless pages?
If I did that my adsense account would be terminated.
Thing is, if you have one domain and host ads like that, it may be terminated. But if you have thousands of domains, Google will offer you Domain Parking services with AdWords on them. Yes, Google will spam the domains themselve.
I suppose the reason don't allow you to use this service if you got 5-10 domains is that it keeps the word of mouth down. It's not something Google wants everyone to talk about.
Google
I think I speak of everyone, when I say: WTF
Where's the orange plastic blob at the barrel end?
If I put a blob for you, would you still hand a $1500 art piece to your kid to "shoot" around?
Google is aware of scams because so many attempts are made [..] MS has a long history of poor security and will almost certainly miss what Google has done with this.
I'm not sure how you imagine the workflow in Microsoft regarding this, maybe something like this:
Jo: Hey, spammers are attacking Live.com successfully!
Bob: Yup, I see that.
Jo: Ok, I'll analyze why this is happening and propose a fix...
Bob: NO! WAIT! Don't forget: we have a long history of poor security.
Jo: Oh yea, what the hell was I thinking. We don't want to bring inconsistencies in our history of security.
The security problems of Windows per se, are for legacy reasons, and the need to support legacy applications/API-s You can't abruptly alter an OS overnight. Initially Windows was never even intended to run in a wide untrusted network (the concept of a browser didn't even exist back then).
Poor insight, sure, but I think they know now, what Internet is. As such Live.com, as a website, has zero of these problems.
As long as it outputs HTML/CSS/JS, they can rearchitect the whole thing and you won't even notice.
I doubt that Google would de-list you because you sue them. That would invite a looksy by the feds.
They may not so blatantly do it, but tell me: if your business may disappear in a blink of an eye if Google turns you back, would you be quick to go against them? They have thousands of ways to hurt you, and to make it look neutral. You may never know what hit you.
Google is already extremely innovative.
You know, they were extremely innovative in 1998, when they came up with the search engine concepts, pagerank and so on. Now they have a good business model, but there's tons of obvious stuff they could do to improve the search experience which they don't seem interested in.
This actually offers an interesting question: Can you dare to sue google if you depend on page visits? Can you actually survive it when Google decides to "zero" you, to make you nonexistant in their searches?
This is the reason why I do believe it'll be nice to see Yahoo and Microsoft work (or merge?) together better, so they can compete better against Google.
I do use Google today, it has the best search results, undeniably. But it also has a huge market share, which makes content producers very nervous, for a good reason.
Google may delist you overnight, after an algorithm tweak, for something completely innocent, and not SEO related at all, that you did on your site. It's unavoidable, even if Google was run by shiny white angels with halo above their heads, an algorithm for a search engine isn't an exact science, and so anybody in any moment can end up as an edge case that Google doesn't handle properly.
If we have 2-3 major search engines with equal market share, we gain the following benefits:
1. Spammers will have hard time scamming all engines at once, as they use wildly different backend processing, and as a result receive less traffic (i.e. if half the traffic comes from Live, and half from Google, cheating one of them gets you half the possible traffic, not all of it).
2. If you happen to be an edge case on either search engine after an algorithm tweak, it's much less likely both engines did the same tweak at the same time, so while your traffic will decrease, the other search engines on the market will still provide enough traffic for you until this is sorted.
3. When either search engine does something inappropriate, or questionable (ok, for the simple folk out there: "evil"), people will have easier time going to court to defend their rights, because if the search engine provider becomes abusive and threatens blacklisting, that'll have much smaller effect if the engine isn't a monopolist (in this case they'll mostly hurt themselves).
4. Innovation, innovation, innovation. Just imagine the kind of innovation we'll see from both Yahoo/Microsoft and Google if they had equal market share. Microsoft would have much bigger revenue and thus much bigger incentive to support their position on the market. Google, likewise.
I mean, what's the best we saw of Google as of late? A week ago they changed the layout of their home page which made it JavaScript dependent and harder to work with. That's not innovation, that's regression. As for the rest of their new offerings, they mostly come from companies they bought recently.
Yahoo's holding on to their "portal" strategy since this is where the most of their income comes from so their search acceptable but certainly not good enough or innovative. They can't risk spending too much money on search R&D alone.
As for Microsoft Live, they're apparently trying to come up with interesting interfaces for search, but they are quite young on that one market, their search results aren't really good, and need the experience of Yahoo to give them a boost and incentive to spend more research in the area.
So, bottom line: monopoly is never good, even when it's supposedly "not evil".
[They should be paying Google]
Look, like most I just don't have time to visit a couple of hundred sites to keep up on things. I want headlines and leads with enough information to let me know whether or not it is worth the effort to visit the news source. They should be thanking Google for providing the opportunity to garner more readers and subsequently increase their ad revenue.
You're biased. They should be paying Google just as much as Google should pay them.
Google isn't a charity organisation, there's no need for anyone to thank them. They are in this business to profit from other people's content. If there's no content, there's no Google. If there aren't search engines, the content can't be found.
The balance in this relationship is closer to the middle than strongly going on either side.
Google has done no evil, where MS has been nothing but.
Hm, what a black-white stance. Oh wait, I get it, it's because of the slogan, right?
Heh. Kids. When will you grow up.
Google is so huge right now, you'll find people with all sorts of agenda inside. And the funny things is, many of them, at all levels, worked at Microsoft at some point. Some of them worked in Apple. Some of the people in Apple worked in Google. Some of the people in Microsoft worked in Apple or Google.
A corporation has no face. But, if it makes you feel better, you can keep putting faces on it. It makes it all so much simpler...
The thing about their story that got me was the fact that they decided they absolutely had to do this *right now* at 2am just to satisfy their own curiosity and were so self-absorbed that they killed the work a grad student had done in that particular lab in order to cannibalize his experiments so they didn't have to build everything themselves.
I don't get it: Fermilabs has published this story themselves, without any mention of how this student was compensated for having his work lost.
Is this what they really want to send as a message across: "come here to have your hard work randomly cannibalized by 'smart scientists' passing by"?
Even worse, the guy's a former director of Fermilab.
Yes, the function naming in php is crap. Show us a scripting language where it isn't.
.NET and Java. Then ECMAScript, Ruby, Python etc.
Well, the list is too long. First, not scriping languages, but just as fast and robust to develop in :
But I can give you very quickly the list of scripts that have as bad or worse function/feature consistency than php:
Compiling isnt hard, and someone will always provide precompiled binaries for any system you'd care to mention anyway.
The problem is that, proprietary developers dont like giving out their source code, because they feel it would be easier to hack the original source than to disassemble the binaries.
So in essence, LINA is about proprietary apps on Linux, where the proprietors don't want to compile the app for Cygwin/Windows for some reason, although compiling isn't hard...
I don't get it.
Java speeds still lag far behind native code speeds.
.NET / Mono.
You need to do your benchmarks again as it's not the case anymore.
we've got
For whatever reasons, these api's haven't spread far beyond Windows boxes.
And LINA isn't widespread anywhere... So what's your point? If you want to do it, Mono's there and people use it. Linden Labs is porting Second Life to Mono, for example. Some quite big sites run on Mono.
More and more Linux distros start shipping with Mono apps in them by default.
And we got Cygwin, which allows you to use the Linux API on Windows.
The difference here would be that Cygwin requires a recompilation... while the new offering does not require compilation.
Honestly people on Linux compile stuff every day, why is compilation so hard all of a sudden? And to save you from a few second/minutes of compilation, we instead need to live with the performance penalty of running in a VM? As if Cygwin isn't slow enough WITH the recompilation!
People should realize that this is impossible to do. This sounds like look&feel was something like a skin you can change at will, but it is not. Different systems have different requirements that cannot be changed programmatically, like keyboard shortcuts, icons, file placement, GUI metaphors and so on. If you want an application to feel native, simply design the GUI according to local customs, there is no other way.
.NET / Mono. And we got Cygwin, which allows you to use the Linux API on Windows.
That's one thing (and you're totally right). And second:
As with Java, Lina users will first install a VM specific to their platform, after which they can run binaries compiled not for their particular OS, but for the VM, which aims to hide OS-specific characteristics from the application.
Which left me thinking... "and unlike Java.. it does what?".
We've got Java, which has matured over the years, we've got
Looks like that startup has agenda to brings more of the Linux API to Windows, and thus help Linux become more mainstream as a development platform. But agenda does not business or money make. They've entered a crowded market, offering little new except impossible promises for native look and feel.
the body thinks it's getting sugar, pumps you with insulin, and it turns out you aren't getting any.
Brain: To.. think? Think?!
Body: Sorry, boss... it was just close to sugar...
Brain: I'm not paying to effin think here, I'm the thinker, you're the doer! Morons.
Only I won't be doing as poorly as Windows users, because it will take a long time for Mac or Linux exploits to catch up to Windows exploits numerically.
The total count, however doesn't matter. When you download the next Windows Update, you automatically lock out the exploits it fixes.
A well configured Windows computer, and always up to date is secure enough to remain unharmed my malware. The problem is this: do you have OS to look at it and enjoy at it all day long how it's more secure than another OS, or to work on it.
I use Windows to work on it. the software I use is predominantly Windows-only. While you're waiting for OSX exploits to catch up with Windows, I'm just working and being fine on Windows.
I think OSX is a great OS too, and I do have a Max next to my PC-s (mostly testing), but your reasoning seemed faulty.
So, as a Mac user I'd see this as a sign of my computer gaining ground in the market.
So, you'll have to admit then all Jobs said about Windows being an insecure piece of garbage was wrong. It's, you see, just because they have so great market share.
You Mac users can't have it both ways. When hackers didn't pay attention to OSX and people said "this is because noone cares to attack you yet", you said "bs, it's because OSX is such a great OS, it's unhackable, it's secure *nix baby!".
Now you the community turns 180 degrees and claim the opposite.
For me, it *does* have to do with market share, and I believe OSX is an OS as any, and the only thing that pisses me off is the conformist opinion Mac users are ready to adapt at any given point, just to put OSX in a good (or less bad) light.
Perhaps the "free" part of it is to blame, maybe its more that people that make good videos don't like Heinz enough for make an ad for them?
I mean would you really spend your free time making a video for a ketchup company?
Indeed. I'm sure if Apple got that contest out, they'd get amazing submissions. But there's only so much inspiration and affection you may have for a bottle of ketchup.
The guys who thought up this contest didn't see that far I guess. Well, there's always a way out: hire one or more ad agencies incognito, produce 5 amateur-looking (but good) ads, submit them to the contest.. let those win and tadaaa!
Victory.
Drink Water or at worst carbonated water. Maybe a little tea or iced tea made from decent leaves (not the garbage leaves in lipton surrounded by bleached paper to dunk in water), or even a little expresso.
Leave out the soda pop, leave out most of the milk (thought to contribute to kidney stones), leave out the juice, etcetera. And for god's sake leave out anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - poison. Our ancestors were able to make due with water as a drink and so our bodies should be acclimated to it.
Oh, a little tea from decent leaves, not paper, paper's bad. Oh, I see, I see. You know, how bad for your life is when you die in a car crash, or a truck runs over you, or someone in a club beats you up and shoots you outside, or you fall from a bridge or whatever.
Never go outside, man! NEVER! It's dangerous. Maybe, you know, open your window a little, so air comes inside, but not too much, since air in the city is bad.
Or how about, instead of going all the way to the other extreme, just do things sensibly. I can guarantee you Pepsi MAX won't have profound effect on your health if you wouldn't drink ten gallons of it each day. I, for example, enjoy soft drinks in small quantities during weekends sometimes, or on a vacation, on the beach, or on a birthday party.
Here's the truth: even water will "fuck up with your [whatever] levels" if used in excess. Did you know you could die from water poisoning? Should we eventually stop drinking water and maybe just absorb moisture from the air, like some small mammals do?
USE EVERYTHING IN MODERATION.
So, yeah, go eat your organic non-GMO veggies and "free range" chicken. But not all of us can afford to pay 5x as much for our food. This is what gets me about GMO opponents - they fail to understand that there is a significant proportion of the world that would kill for ANY semblence of nutrition. It's GMO crops and "factory farms" that are feeding most the world.
But... dude... Check it out:
See? If I never had Pepsi MAX, I'd never age dude! I think we gotta sue 'em or something. That's all I could think of, I'll see later. I'll go buy some Pepsi MAX now.