Posted by Hemos (36% noise) View tbray writes “Dave Edmondson wanted to play MP3’s in his car; his solution was perhaps a bit over the top. But then, why wouldn’t you want an E450 in your trunk? Check the pix.”
Do it better in 2 words. - by CRC'99 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Mini ITX.
Nuff said. I have one sitting under the seat in my car. 7” touchscreen in the dash, GPS and navigation software. All in a mini-case and runs off the 13.8v straight from the car battery.
Yes, that looks geeky, but touchscreen works better :)
Slashdot got trolled. - by jared_hanson (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I think slashdot just got trolled. An excerpt from his page as reasons for doing this:
-multiple processors to ensure that mp3 decode is not interrupted by other process activity,
-good internal storage capacity, including the ability to take advantage of software RAID for reliability,
-large memory for good caching of tunes being played,
-easily expandable to allow for future projects,
-excellent support for Solaris 10, so that I can test bug-fixes, etc. while on the road if necessary. This also means that there is wide application availability (Oracle, great Java tools, etc.)
Does anyone who knows anything about MP3s think you need large or multiple processors to handle the task? Do you need massive memory to cache the songs? No on both counts.
Plus, the pictures on the site look like he just set his Sun server in the back of his SUV and snapped a couple photographs. No details on the hookup to the sound system at all.
If any story ever showed the ineptitude of Slashdot editors, this would be it.
Borrowed from the guy’s forum - by jeffkjo1 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Oh, I can just see it now…
“Dad, I’m sick of this song”
“Ok, son, just use your terminal to telnet into the e450 and modify the rc script to exclude that song”
“Can’t we just get one of those dvd players like Jimmy has?”
“No. Use the supercomputer. You need to learn solaris.”
Site comes up for me - by JohnnyComeLately (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I’ve shaken my head at PCs in a car, and some other oddities. This car, though, takes the cake. I’m not sure I’d really want to do this, even if I could. Enterprise servers aren’t made for that vibration, and I’ve seen what a smoked power supply goes for (right after corporate decided to “save money” by dropping the warranties). Even with WiFi, Bluetooth, or wi-flavor of the month, you’re just wasting resources. You might as well be in a Lambroghini Diablo, parked in traffic on the 5 in LA.
MiniPC - by Saint Stephen (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
It sounds like all he has is an 80GB HD, and it serves up files.
I would have NEVER thought of this one... We have 3 of them in our offices and they work perfectly as database server. If SUN is looking for a new niche, maybe this could be a cool one... ;-)
Posted by timothy (39% noise) View
AceMarkE writes “Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has posted an article entitled “How Microsoft Lost the API War”. He covers why the Win32 API is important to Microsoft, what they’ve done to keep it working, why Microsoft’s switch to the .Net platform is both a good and bad idea, and why he feels the browser will be the real future of application development. Definitely worth a read no matter what your opinion of Microsoft is.”
Reason #78,048,234 to dump Windows - by humankind (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.
Great. All our worst fears have been confirmed. The latest version of windows is exactly the hacked-up piece of shit operating system that it acts like that we’ve all secretly hoped wasn’t really the case…
Who in their right mind would want to develop for a platform like this? Now we know why the OS is so bloated and slow. There’s probably a zillion special little mods to the OS to make select, Microsoft-approved legacy apps run properly.
I respect Joel, but.. - by NullProg (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
From a cross-platform C/C++ programmer who is probably not as good as Joel, a couple of issues.
1) It’s not ANSI VB or ANSI Win32. If you settle on a programming environment controlled by one vendor, then they can change the language specifications at will. I wrote my System/UI specific wrapper functions over a decade ago. Why didn’t Joel?
2) Joel compares C/C++ memory management to automatic vs manual transmissions. I would associate memory management in C/C++ to doctors who know once they make an incision, they have to close it back up when done. Either you know the procedure (or launguage) or you don’t. The article seems to want to apologize for all the Comp Sci grads who don’t have a clue when it concerns system level programming (I found one in my office this week).
3) VB is a layer on top of Win32. So is MFC. From the object dumps I’ve run on MSIL applications, so is .net. It still calls down to the Win32 layer. Why would I not still call the Win32 API directly? Apps still work under 9x and Ntx based systems. I really don’t see MS scrapping kernel32 or user32 in the near future.
4) The Win32 API is feature rich. Give credit where it is due. The Win32 API evolved from the OS/2 API developed in the late 80’s in conjuction with IBM.
5) The reason Raymond Chen had to make the effort to be backwards compatible was that some published API calls were always different than the implementation (say API bug). Remember the DOS bug/feature that allowed TSR’s? Remember when DDE turned into netDDE which turned into COM? This brain-dead logic has carried MS through until modern day XP. As an API/Library developer for my companies products, I’ve had to tell third parties I made a bad design decision (2) and you need to re-compile with the new library/API header. All of them appreciate and understand my mistake. Why can’t Microsoft do this?
Great article, just some food for thought from a old time beer drinking hippie programmer. Gotta go, playing network freecraft with my ten year old.
Enjoy,
HTML’s lack of features? No. - by Mufasa3245 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Create a fast drawing program
Build a real-time spell checker with wavy red underlines
Warn users that they are going to lose their work if they hit the close box of the browser
Update a small part of the display based on a change that the user makes without a full roundtrip to the server
Create a fast keyboard-driven interface that doesn’t require the mouse
Let people continue working when they are not connected to the Internet
Anyone else see this list? I scoffed at most of it instantly. Sure, the author apoligizes for a few of them but very poorly and with no explanation.
The author says that some of these can be solved by JavaScipt. No; all of them can be easily solved with Javascript. And if you don’t like Javascript, try using ActiveX, DHTML/CSS, Java, Flash, ColdFusion, or any of the other many options out there.
It is true that these solutions take a little more work, but everyone knows that. The author admitted that much.
My question is this: If the author doesn’t even say this list is accurate, why did he even put it in the article?
If he must make a point about the web versus Microsoft, make it about the fact that Microsoft refuses to update their web browser even though everyone knows that it was not even standard compliant when it was last released so very long ago. There are much better browsers that are still under constant development including Opera, Panther, and Mozilla to name some excellent examples.
Key quotation regarding IE… - by GPLDAN (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it’s certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.
Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.
It’s not that Microsoft didn’t notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: “Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client.” You’ll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that “Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft’s stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We’re investing on the desktop, we think it’s a good place to be, and we hope we’re going to start a wave of excitement…”
The trouble is: it’s too late.
So, when Slashdot goes on and on about how great Mozilla is (and it is good, I’m not saying it isn’t - I really like FireFox 0.9) and laments how Microsoft hasn’t done a damn thing with IE since 2001, and how you need the Google toolbar and this and that - remember that quote.
Microsoft wants to slow DOWN the rate of advancement in the browser. If you buy that, and buy Joel’s premise on that, you now should conclude something VERY VERY IMPORTANT.
Mozilla for Windows may be the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT OSS project there is. In many ways, it is just as important as developments in Gnome and the linux kernel, disk systems, network protocols, what have you. It’s advancements in being able to push rich applications is vital. It’s replacement for Active Scripting needs to be secure. Every step it makes pushes another developer that may have gone to use the Windows API or .NET towards building a open web application, and making that application portable. You start stealing from the edges of Window developers. You start picking away at the hordes. That’s how you win, you take Microsoft’s strongest weapon away - the masses of developers. Where the devs go, users will follow.
Win32 API will live forever - by Orion Blastar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Already there are still people using DOS and Windows 3.X and refuse to upgrade. There will be people using 32 bit Windows for a long time as well.
Eventually the WINE development team will crack most of the undocumented Win32 API calls and make WINE better with each release. When that happens, Microsoft will have abandoned the Windows 32 bit platform for Longhorn. Then Linux + WINE will be very valuable for people with new machines who can only run Longhorn or Linux.
My only request is that WINE and other programs than run softare using the Win32 APIs, create a sandbox to prevent viruses and worms from spreading.
The bets are on as to how soon those Longhorn viruses and worms come out after Longhorn is released.
If I was Micro$oft, I would choose the road of breaking the backward compatibility. Window$ is unstable, it's a fact. And one of the reason is the legacy burden (architectural choice is the other). They should drop it and push a new API (like the "MSDN camp", as refered in the article, wants). They have nothing to loose as Linux is coming and proved itself much more stable. If it's a flop, no problem: they have 56,000,000,000 US$ in bank, plenty to finance another round of R&D and marketing for "Window$ 2010".
However they should pay attention to two details. It shouldn't require too state-of-the-art hardware (not everybody wants/can afford to upgrade. Unless they conspire with hardware vendor to prop demand.) and they should be extremely open with the developpers: no hidden function calls, no tricks "for Micro$oft-made software only".
And that's all I have to say about that.
