"I don't think you understood his argument. He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process. This is in contrast to Linux, where all kinds of stuff are included on the disk but are separate programs using well-defined interfaces."
Interesting, you'll be completely right if you swap Windows and Linux in the statements above.
Linux has no concept of drivers or kernel modules. It's all slapped inside one monolithin kernel, so if you need it to support something else you need to put it in the kernel and recompile it.
As a difference Windows is more of a microkernel architecture (it's in fact a hybrid), where you have many standalone, manageable kernel pieces that communicate in a well defined interface.
No, because people buy the brand, not the device. Or well not in this generation. XBox1 didn't unseat playstation2, but I won't be surprised if it wins this time around.
iPod has the same "aura" as playstation, it being THE mp3 player to have and show off.
I personally hope we have a 50%/50% picture for zune/ipod (not counting the rest of the market, which I hope is still there of course), because Apple desparately needs a reality check.
I've been a hot fan of this project. But they keep changing it and delivering nothing in "real world" (i.e. actual production and selling it) and I'm getting tired of all the hype that proves wrong in the aftermath.
will have crank to power it up! ok now it won't have crank will look like a normal laptop! ok now it'll look like a laptop-cross-lolipop. it'll be $100! ok now it won't be.
I expect this to progress in future until it ends up as a perfect clone feature/price-wise of a Dell laptop. They should've discussed and tested all this stuff in private before thew blew the horns, again and again and again and again.
They have decided that everyone must upgrade their computers to watch HD content. (It's time to purchase shares in Intel, the top PC component suppliers, and the top 10 PC makers -- they'll all be selling more stuff as a result of this.)
I wouldn't be too quick. As someone who saw some HD content: it sucks. It may never pick up.
In some instances DVD were showing already signs of noisy transfers that can't be repaired unless details are blurred significantly by filtering.
All but 100% digitally shot movies will suck on HD, the noise is unbeliavable.
I will pay less and watch a better quality DVD on my 32-bit Vista versus paying more and watching highly detailed noise, thank you.
He's not right. Windows fans want Windows to be everywhere: on the server, on the desktop, on the phone, on the laptop, on the PDA.
Linux fans want the same for Linux.
But the truth is this. Windows doesn't make a very affordable and flexible server. It has a lot of dead weight GUI and modules you can't get rid of to perform nice on a server. It's however perfect on a desktop as a mass solution that just works.
Linux is perfect on a server. It's lean and mean, and it doesn't need to support the latest fancy 3D cards and cameras since a server doesn't need this. It can not work as a casual desktop with it's multitude of distros, competing frameworks and compiling from source code.
Linux is also an idea and phylosophy, and this *matters*. Do we not have enough OS out there trying the "commercial way"? What if one day it turns out this way is majorly corrupt and we'll have noone to turn to since we turned Linux into a Windows clone?
Let's use the right tool for the right job, and keep our options open. I'm not giving up my XP workstation nor my Linux server, as they are right now.
"The new management could take the axe to Microsoft's $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure."
The management could just axe absolutely everything and get some short term cache by:
- charging extra for support, - make patches paid, - bump up the price of XP to "it's true value of $1000" - sue the hell of everyone using its collection of patents (previously obtained for protective purposes)
"Right, but they could always start elsewhere. Totally scrap IE and bundle some sort of rebadged firefox with Vista."
You're underestimating Microsoft. IE7 is already better than Firefox.
But wait... wait... what the HELL am I talking about? Flame me to death. It doesn't support XUL, XHTML, and doesn't handle CSS as well as Firefox.
But also improves on security with phishing sites 'detection', better architecture and supports limited privileges mode (vista only), fixes all major CSS/rendering bugs from IE6, adds all of the most requested CSS support and rendering features inside (PNG transparency, CSS2 selectors, hover on all, fixed positioning on all etc etc). And it has the damn tabs you made so much fun of. And RSS support.
What does a user want? Do you think a user really gives a flying f*** about Acid 2? Even most developers are not dying for Acid2 in their day-to-day webdev activies.
Furthermore: it's a lot faster to start (save me the stuff about "but it's preloaded" since I have a Firefox preloader here and it helps with nothing) and a lot faster to render.
As a matter of fact, Opera / Safari / IE6/7 have pretty comparable rendering speeds and they are all in the "acceptable to fast" range. Firefox is slow to start and hella slow to render, esp. with some bigger and more complicated pages.
I use it every day, it's my default browser and I know.
So take it for what it is: Microsoft wants to look good and make sure Windows software runs in Vista. No way they'll give up on the better (at that point) IE7 for it.
1. Creative gets awarded silly patent. 2. Apple uses something that falls under the patent. 3. Creative sues Apple. 4. Apple fights back. 5. Apple fights back. 6. Apple fights back. 7. Microsoft announces Zune, which uses something that falls under the same patent. 8. Apple settles for $100 million and sets a precedent. 9. Creative uses the precedent to sue Microsoft.
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So all I need for my free marketing campaign is something catchy so people click my ads and see my site, and action that just will never happen, like selling empty Windows folders for $100.
Though, I maybe should never say never, could turn out a profitable business.
I wonder why the companies didn't do a bit of research before coming up with HD.
Besides actors look either like plastic dolls from all the make up on HD, or making skin flaws too obvious, any shooting with analog cameras becomes obsolete.
See the HD trailers on apple.com -> there are two types:
a) noisy ones, that surprisingly look a lot better in EDTV or regular DVD resolution (EDTV on Apple = the lowest "HD" option, it's really not HD, it's EDTV)
b) filtered ones, that look pretty bad, and seemingly have less fine detail that EDTV/DVD ones, despite having sharper edges due to the extra resolution.
To solve this, the movie industry will have to start shooting exclusively with digital cameras and develop complex software filters to improve actor's skin/make-up problems.
Having crisp, noiseless transfers of existing old analog movies: you can forget about it.
The computer effects will also have to be processed in full HDTV resolution. Right now they frequently get away with rendering the original frames in less than 1080p, and then adding fake "movie noise" to match the quality of the movies. This is close to the actual quality of an analog film, which is basically kinda blurry with noise when looked too close.
With HDTV if they wanna shoot crisp digital picture this will be no more.
In the movie (and I think the book) few years from now, powerful explosions from the Moon's mining colony cause the Moon to split in two pieces which fall in Earth.
Civilisation is gone and what's left after a million or so years is monkey-like people that eat other people who live in houses attached on the side of cliffs. The cliff people are extremely dumb so they don't mind beating eaten too.
When a company admits the competition is a threat, wake me up.
In most cases confessing a threat means your competition has just as good or better product. If the company can't claim some other detail like monopoly abuse or control over distribution channels or whatever, they will just publically "dismiss" the threat, but you know they are working frantically to fight it, and having really bad nightmares every night about it.
The most ridiculous example of this "strategy" recently was the public mocking of the $100 laptop initiative of MIT's Negroponte by Intel and Microsoft top figures.
A single site that broke the Internet. Several times.
Oh I see. Interesting curiosity. But you probably realize I didn't mean that at all when I said a single site that broke the Internet. You don't have to download anything critical from YouTube that would otherwise wreck the net I hope:D
I know some guys that hate it: the clueless article writers who only want to proclaim "the end" of something every 3-4 days or so, and thus get more page hits.
I'm sick of cliched sensationalist articles with the sensationalist titles, how about you?
As always this is a non-existant problem hyped up by people that don't have a clue.
First, the performance hit of managed code is not "negligible". For tasks that rely on raw math power it can be significant, like 3D engines, data processing and so on.
But if you're doing, say, a rich client, your code will most likely just call existing multimedia, communication and input API-s. Then managed code's performance hit is next to nothing since most of the time is spent processing the commands from the API-s, not your own code anyway.
Thing is: can we drop the raw power of native code and go all managed: hell no. And we never will. While plenty of consumer applications have good performance on managed code, there will always be a class of professional software where 20% better performance means potentially tens of hundred of dollars saved for a middle-sized company.
But the big miss in the article is that managed and non-managed code can coexist. In.NET this is pretty easy: "unsafe" sections and "managed" sections can originate in the same project and even the same source code, so you can optimize those critical 10% of your code where 90% of the time is spent (you prolly know the cliche), and use managed to take benefits of the advancements in the platform.
With the XBox 360 out and doing well and Nintendo realeasing soon with a great prices... will Sony recover from this? I just don't see any excitement around the next Playstation... all I hear is bad news.
If you've seen political elections develop you recognize it's too early to call. The big branding and advertising campaign of PS3 has not yet began.
They might have lost some geeks, but the hardcore gamers that will see the hyper-cool PS3:
- ads on TV - posters in the city - banners in Internet - promos and demos in shops - reviews in magazines
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think you understood his argument. He was saying that Windows is screwed up because Microsoft is (more or less) trying to integrate everything into the same huge process. This is in contrast to Linux, where all kinds of stuff are included on the disk but are separate programs using well-defined interfaces."
Interesting, you'll be completely right if you swap Windows and Linux in the statements above.
Linux has no concept of drivers or kernel modules. It's all slapped inside one monolithin kernel, so if you need it to support something else you need to put it in the kernel and recompile it.
As a difference Windows is more of a microkernel architecture (it's in fact a hybrid), where you have many standalone, manageable kernel pieces that communicate in a well defined interface.
We have to decide whether to keep the cable spaghetti so we can watch movies with highly detailed film noise.
Or we can dump the cables and watch cleaner, cheaper transfer.
I'll take my time on this one.
Is this finally enough to unseat Apple?
No, because people buy the brand, not the device. Or well not in this generation. XBox1 didn't unseat playstation2, but I won't be surprised if it wins this time around.
iPod has the same "aura" as playstation, it being THE mp3 player to have and show off.
I personally hope we have a 50%/50% picture for zune/ipod (not counting the rest of the market, which I hope is still there of course), because Apple desparately needs a reality check.
But then, so do most of their customers.
I've been a hot fan of this project. But they keep changing it and delivering nothing in "real world" (i.e. actual production and selling it) and I'm getting tired of all the hype that proves wrong in the aftermath.
will have crank to power it up!
ok now it won't have crank
will look like a normal laptop!
ok now it'll look like a laptop-cross-lolipop.
it'll be $100!
ok now it won't be.
I expect this to progress in future until it ends up as a perfect clone feature/price-wise of a Dell laptop.
They should've discussed and tested all this stuff in private before thew blew the horns, again and again and again and again.
They have decided that everyone must upgrade their computers to watch HD content. (It's time to purchase shares in Intel, the top PC component suppliers, and the top 10 PC makers -- they'll all be selling more stuff as a result of this.)
I wouldn't be too quick. As someone who saw some HD content: it sucks. It may never pick up.
In some instances DVD were showing already signs of noisy transfers that can't be repaired unless details are blurred significantly by filtering.
All but 100% digitally shot movies will suck on HD, the noise is unbeliavable.
I will pay less and watch a better quality DVD on my 32-bit Vista versus paying more and watching highly detailed noise, thank you.
He's not right. Windows fans want Windows to be everywhere: on the server, on the desktop, on the phone, on the laptop, on the PDA.
Linux fans want the same for Linux.
But the truth is this. Windows doesn't make a very affordable and flexible server. It has a lot of dead weight GUI and modules you can't get rid of to perform nice on a server. It's however perfect on a desktop as a mass solution that just works.
Linux is perfect on a server. It's lean and mean, and it doesn't need to support the latest fancy 3D cards and cameras since a server doesn't need this. It can not work as a casual desktop with it's multitude of distros, competing frameworks and compiling from source code.
Linux is also an idea and phylosophy, and this *matters*. Do we not have enough OS out there trying the "commercial way"? What if one day it turns out this way is majorly corrupt and we'll have noone to turn to since we turned Linux into a Windows clone?
Let's use the right tool for the right job, and keep our options open.
I'm not giving up my XP workstation nor my Linux server, as they are right now.
"The new management could take the axe to Microsoft's $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure."
The management could just axe absolutely everything and get some short term cache by:
- charging extra for support,
- make patches paid,
- bump up the price of XP to "it's true value of $1000"
- sue the hell of everyone using its collection of patents (previously obtained for protective purposes)
Ridiculous? So is calling R&D wasteful.
"Right, but they could always start elsewhere. Totally scrap IE and bundle some sort of rebadged firefox with Vista."
You're underestimating Microsoft. IE7 is already better than Firefox.
But wait... wait... what the HELL am I talking about? Flame me to death.
It doesn't support XUL, XHTML, and doesn't handle CSS as well as Firefox.
But also improves on security with phishing sites 'detection', better architecture and supports limited privileges mode (vista only), fixes all major CSS/rendering bugs from IE6, adds all of the most requested CSS support and rendering features inside (PNG transparency, CSS2 selectors, hover on all, fixed positioning on all etc etc). And it has the damn tabs you made so much fun of. And RSS support.
What does a user want? Do you think a user really gives a flying f*** about Acid 2? Even most developers are not dying for Acid2 in their day-to-day webdev activies.
Furthermore: it's a lot faster to start (save me the stuff about "but it's preloaded" since I have a Firefox preloader here and it helps with nothing) and a lot faster to render.
As a matter of fact, Opera / Safari / IE6/7 have pretty comparable rendering speeds and they are all in the "acceptable to fast" range. Firefox is slow to start and hella slow to render, esp. with some bigger and more complicated pages.
I use it every day, it's my default browser and I know.
So take it for what it is: Microsoft wants to look good and make sure Windows software runs in Vista. No way they'll give up on the better (at that point) IE7 for it.
"Media companies are ruining innovation"... by making people embrace 64-bit technology?
1. Creative gets awarded silly patent.
2. Apple uses something that falls under the patent.
3. Creative sues Apple.
4. Apple fights back.
5. Apple fights back.
6. Apple fights back.
7. Microsoft announces Zune, which uses something that falls under the same patent.
8. Apple settles for $100 million and sets a precedent.
9. Creative uses the precedent to sue Microsoft.
It's not the brain that works like an OS, apparently it's the OS that has a similar structure to a brain (already).
I guess we're on the right way to seeing higher intelligence emerge from machines in the next few decades.
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I didn't have success playing the video from NBC, but here it is on YouTube.
The phone rep is hilarious.
So all I need for my free marketing campaign is something catchy so people click my ads and see my site, and action that just will never happen, like selling empty Windows folders for $100.
Though, I maybe should never say never, could turn out a profitable business.
I wonder why the companies didn't do a bit of research before coming up with HD.
Besides actors look either like plastic dolls from all the make up on HD, or making skin flaws too obvious, any shooting with analog cameras becomes obsolete.
See the HD trailers on apple.com -> there are two types:
a) noisy ones, that surprisingly look a lot better in EDTV or regular DVD resolution (EDTV on Apple = the lowest "HD" option, it's really not HD, it's EDTV)
b) filtered ones, that look pretty bad, and seemingly have less fine detail that EDTV/DVD ones, despite having sharper edges due to the extra resolution.
To solve this, the movie industry will have to start shooting exclusively with digital cameras and develop complex software filters to improve actor's skin/make-up problems.
Having crisp, noiseless transfers of existing old analog movies: you can forget about it.
The computer effects will also have to be processed in full HDTV resolution. Right now they frequently get away with rendering the original frames in less than 1080p, and then adding fake "movie noise" to match the quality of the movies. This is close to the actual quality of an analog film, which is basically kinda blurry with noise when looked too close.
With HDTV if they wanna shoot crisp digital picture this will be no more.
In the movie (and I think the book) few years from now, powerful explosions from the Moon's mining colony cause the Moon to split in two pieces which fall in Earth.
Civilisation is gone and what's left after a million or so years is monkey-like people that eat other people who live in houses attached on the side of cliffs. The cliff people are extremely dumb so they don't mind beating eaten too.
But, to me anyway, here's why it may not work:
You can find reasons why ANYTHING might not work. Let's just do nothing.
rant rant rant rant... god damn it, don't you have better things to do?
When a company admits the competition is a threat, wake me up.
In most cases confessing a threat means your competition has just as good or better product. If the company can't claim some other detail like monopoly abuse or control over distribution channels or whatever, they will just publically "dismiss" the threat, but you know they are working frantically to fight it, and having really bad nightmares every night about it.
The most ridiculous example of this "strategy" recently was the public mocking of the $100 laptop initiative of MIT's Negroponte by Intel and Microsoft top figures.
A single site that broke the Internet. Several times.
:D
Oh I see. Interesting curiosity. But you probably realize I didn't mean that at all when I said a single site that broke the Internet. You don't have to download anything critical from YouTube that would otherwise wreck the net I hope
Well, yes and no ... Don't you hate that answer?
I know some guys that hate it: the clueless article writers who only want to proclaim "the end" of something every 3-4 days or so, and thus get more page hits.
I'm sick of cliched sensationalist articles with the sensationalist titles, how about you?
.NET this is pretty easy: "unsafe" sections and "managed" sections can originate in the same project and even the same source code, so you can optimize those critical 10% of your code where 90% of the time is spent (you prolly know the cliche), and use managed to take benefits of the advancements in the platform.
As always this is a non-existant problem hyped up by people that don't have a clue.
First, the performance hit of managed code is not "negligible". For tasks that rely on raw math power it can be significant, like 3D engines, data processing and so on.
But if you're doing, say, a rich client, your code will most likely just call existing multimedia, communication and input API-s. Then managed code's performance hit is next to nothing since most of the time is spent processing the commands from the API-s, not your own code anyway.
Thing is: can we drop the raw power of native code and go all managed: hell no. And we never will. While plenty of consumer applications have good performance on managed code, there will always be a class of professional software where 20% better performance means potentially tens of hundred of dollars saved for a middle-sized company.
But the big miss in the article is that managed and non-managed code can coexist. In
So wait, we were talking about end of what again?
Please post a link to said "moving skeleton movies."
I saw them in a documentary on TV, maybe they are somewhere on the net but not sure.
You're right!
Except for Laserdisc.
and VCD.
and digital tape.
Sorry I didn't know failed, obscure and/or highly specialized non-consumer media count.
But... wait... you do actually keep your favorite music on DAT tapes, don't you? omg..
With the XBox 360 out and doing well and Nintendo realeasing soon with a great prices... will Sony recover from this? I just don't see any excitement around the next Playstation... all I hear is bad news.
If you've seen political elections develop you recognize it's too early to call. The big branding and advertising campaign of PS3 has not yet began.
They might have lost some geeks, but the hardcore gamers that will see the hyper-cool PS3:
- ads on TV
- posters in the city
- banners in Internet
- promos and demos in shops
- reviews in magazines
might decide otherwise.
This is why console makers keep going into the markets of the next gen video media.
You probably mean next gen optical media, since DVD's was first gen digital video and I don't remember consoles running on VHS.
Also when you say they "keep doing it" it's worth noting that neither Wii nor XBOX360 actually did it.