You are wrong, they specifically say that this is a privacy measure to anyone who whines that they want a "superbar" like Chrome's.
Using Google is a privacy risk but at least you can control it with Firefox, when typing URLs that need privacy. Who the hell can verify what Google (and the NSA listening to their pipes) does with your visited URLs? If you use another search engine, Google can see that, and it's one more piece of information.
I think it depends on the tone of the Allahu Akbar. There's is a "this is breathtaking" tone (much like Oh my God) and a "Fellows, let's praise God" tone. I would say that chanting or shouting that phrase corresponds to the latter case.
foss is a nerd thing. The general consumer has no idea what source code is in the first place, they often don't know what an application or OS is, they just click the thing on the screen to make facebook appear.
So it loses search percentage because it isn't becoming a mainstream concept, which is sad. People should care more about their software freedom but they don't even know what software is.
The number of people, globally, using the internet, is still on that same near exponential growth curve that the first world nations were seeing in the late 90s. It really hasn't subsided; only gone to lower income brackets.
Heck, half of the US didn't have reliable access to the web until I think 2002?
And these late adopters, they are both non-english speakers and non-technical people.
Additionally, the early adopters, let's take my parents, who had Prodigy in about 1990, are now using the web more for things like shopping and content consumption, then they did in 1998.
If they wanted to watch the latest TV show, they can do that now online, AND they know this. Compare that to 2004. That will be reflected in the search terms.
Also, there are internet phenomenons that are at the order of that which we have not seen. Psy's videos on youtube for instance; 1 ba-ba-billion+? That's insane.
So yeah, Linux is left in the dust. Also, it's much easier than it used to be - take that from someone who's been using it since 1996 (?)
I need to do a write-up some time soon of how good we have it now - for my own memory.
It isn't really left in the dust, the growth rate of tech adoption is just greater than the exposure rate of FOSS and related technologies. Which is sad, but since Microsoft is the primary conduit of traditional computing systems (and today it is Google) it is against both their interests to introduce users to open compute platforms.
I imagine what will happen is that foss and linux will pick back up in popularity over time when technology hits global saturation and the only difference is old people dying and new people entering the market. The younger crowd is more likely to inquisitively understand computers better and realize they aren't just a dumb tool to be used to view facebook.
"The younger crowd is more likely to inquisitively understand computers better and realize they aren't just a dumb tool to be used to view facebook."
Why would the younger crowd of the future be any more likely to want to understand the underlying workings of a computer than today's younger crowd who uses a computer to view Facebook? I would argue that, young or old, those who want to know how their appliances work will always be a small minority.
Todays facebook crowd didn't grow up engrossed in consumer computers and the Internet from infancy, but from their preteens. I imagine the millenials will, having grown up entirely exposed to pervasive international information sharing, be more inquisitive as to how the devices that dictate their social lives work.
I mean, it is just my impression, but my 10 year old half brother can sit down at a Linux box and install games he wants to play in wine without having any idea what he is doing. That is more praise of wine than my brother, though =P
My argument is that when you grow engrossed in this technology it is much more influential on your life and thus most inquisitive minds would find it much more relevant to learn what they actually are, versus the older generations who only recently adopted these technologies as an accentuation of old habits. For one it is a tool, the other it is a way of life.
Do you know how your refrigerator works? automobile? What about the mechanization of the lock on your front door? could you construct a radio from base components?
Alas, no. I think we will have a generation of computer programmers just as likely as we would have a future one of plumbers, electricians, home-builders, or even exercise and health specialists.
I think it may be the opposite. Yes, fewer programmers by 2050 than today.
Agreed, this is exactly why I said "predictable". The dilution of techies among the more casual crowd on the Internet was supposed to happen (or we'd be out of jobs), but I wish they had been taught some important concepts of software before learning how to use a browser.
...which would be detrimental to Microsoft. Limiting our options to theirs is precisely their goal by giving us a great IDE that only works on Windows.
They're never gonna go it. They stand to win nothing from that.
Even on a modern, high-powered laptop, Visual Studio still runs slowly for me. Some actions inexplicably cause the UI to hang for a few seconds. I really appreciate how OSX seems to prioritize UI responsiveness, which doesn't seem to be the case in Windows.
Do you have specific examples? This is an area of interest for me. VS architecturally has a lot of things tied to the UI thread due to COM STA requirements (well, that and the fact that historically people created their STA objects on the UI thread, thus tying them to the UI thread).
Another possible cause can be extensions. Not that VS doesn't have its own problems of 'doing too much work on the UI thread', but there are TONS of callback points that third parties can hook into, and lots of times people do very ill-advised things on the UI thread, leading to poor responsiveness.
We monitor it actively (via PerfWatson[0], you should install it if you want your perf problems brought to the attention of Microsoft, it should have low overhead at runtime, only kicking in when the UI thread is already unresponsive), but of course with a product as large and complex as VS, and with said product being extensible, inevitably customers run into stuff we never see internally, so we rely on getting repros/data from them to understand what is going wrong.
I don't have a specific example at the moment, except that it's often unresponsive during builds. (I guess this should be expected? Other work I do is in interpreted languages, so there is no "build" step)
Well, I wouldn't say it should be expected during builds. In the past the build architecture was somewhat questionable, i.e. they ran builds synchronously on the UI thread, which works fine if your build takes like 50 ms :) I don't work on the project build team but I believe most languages now build off the UI thread, and any that have long sequences of activities they are doing on the UI thread should still be pumping to prevent UI lockup. That said, running your own pump in an app as complex as VS is...not something to be undertaken lightly, so it is possible their pumps are not correct or their 'in between pump' tasks are taking far longer than they thought/expected. If you can repro it even without repro steps I can give you some instructions on getting a perf trace I could take a look at, they generally point to the culprit pretty clearly.
Which version of VS, and what language? If you're using VS 2010 or earlier, then both C# and VB were running the build (MSBuild and compilers both) on UI thread, so responsiveness was as bad as you'd expect it to be with such architecture. From VS 2012 onwards, VB builds on a background thread, and C# builds out-of-process (which also makes it scale on multi-core systems).
I definitely notice the performance improvements in VS2012. I wonder how many people reporting performance issues are also running ReSharper. JetBrains do great work, but ReSharper (<=v7) is very resource-heavy.
I find that a little odd, as my mid-2008 macbook seems to run VS2012 pretty smoothly even through parallels. I have to wonder what else you might be running simultaneously.
Making Office on the Mac earns them money through direct sales and helps maintain the monopoly of Office and its file formats at the cost of slightly less incentive to choose Windows over Mac.
Making VS on Mac would earn them no money directly and would only encourage the creation of more Mac apps. At best, it might increase the takeup of .NET/Mono on Mac, which might mean more .NET apps, but no money since .NET runtime is free. I'm not seeing the incentive.
I don't care how beautiful they look. As a user, I just don't like them. For example, Mega or Blogspot's animations are very nice, but I just get annoyed when I see them. And I don't think I'm alone.
Oh come on, you know what he meant. The members of HN are passionate about startups, technology, money, somewhat politics. Gay marriage and other social issues spark little interest. It's understandable.
If Windows was FOSS and we could "swap ROMs" and extract their stuff easily as many of us do on Android, it would be much more acceptable. Forcing your users to use your other products when you have a monopoly is absolutely outrageous.
As it is, I'm staying on Windows 7 (I have only one laptop and need Word, otherwise I'd be using Linux instead of a Linux VM) and Paranaoid Android. No unwanted Micrsoft or Google products anywhere.
Yeah, it's completely wrong. Statistically, it is very unprobable that I have seen so many articles about books without searching for them and no one complaining about literature in the past few months on the Internet. This claim is ridiculous.
You could say the same about a lot of crimes. Prostitutes, hitmen, scammers, drug dealers, a lot of professions are inherently hurtful for the society. Heck, you could say the same about banking, insurances, real estate, utilities: a lot of people would be out of a job if theit companies were honest. Entire industries rely on some degree of scamming. And yet we still complain about dishonest banks, lack of competition, etc.
Stallman's views are pragmatic: some people would lose their job but that's the price to pay to get closer to an ideal society. That's not more extremist than socialism.
Yes but it's ludicrous to equate selling software without providing the source code to hitmen. Stallman's views are not pragmatic in the sense of them being realistic in a world people would really want to live in. I have actually never heard anyone refer to Stallman's views as "pragmatic;" that's a new one for me. I was a little taken aback. :) Also, I don't really understand your examples, beyond the fact that equating those things with proprietary software is a little cuckoo. Presumably technological progress is good, having software that solves our needs is presumably good, no one seriously thinks of having "CD burning software that works well" as being in the same league as "Rapists and murderers," well no one with half a brain anyway, so it's hard to see your point exactly in this way.
If you want to say "Stallman's ideology is morally right and consequences be damned" then fine but don't sit here and compare proprietary software developers to hitmen. Let's be serious.
Using Google is a privacy risk but at least you can control it with Firefox, when typing URLs that need privacy. Who the hell can verify what Google (and the NSA listening to their pipes) does with your visited URLs? If you use another search engine, Google can see that, and it's one more piece of information.