Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free 993
orthogonal writes "That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free:
according to Bill Gates, "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...." Gates expects this almost free hardware to support two of the longest awaited breakthroughs in computing: real speech and handwriting recognition. He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."
I dunno, he got some of it right... (Score:3, Informative)
He's just predicted Visual BASIC post factum. Whoopee. (-:
Re:Visual design (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another Quote (Score:5, Informative)
Too Cheap To Meter (Score:5, Informative)
Not "free": the exact phrase, from Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was:
"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." [bartleby.com]
-kgj
Re:Hrmmmm.... (Score:4, Informative)
Spare me the obligatory replies about how much cheaper you can do all this with white-box hardware and Linux -- I'm not talking about that, I'm trying to add context to BillG's pronunciamento.
C is dead once more? (Score:1, Informative)
I guess that means C is dead again.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I hope not (Score:3, Informative)
The difference between theory and practice is very small in theory, but rather large in practice.
Where laptop power goes ... (Score:4, Informative)
Right now, the display is the big power consumer in portable devices. The processors have been tuned to use minimal power.
The Scion 5Mx has a B/W LCD screen. How long do the batteries last when the backlight is on????
When OLED comes to laptops, that will significantly increase battery time.
They're doing it now. (Score:2, Informative)
e.g.
http://www.telelogic.com/products/tau/dev
It'd redefine the word bloat, that's for sure. Probably why Microsoft are interested. Bloat's what they do well.
Done already. :-) (Score:3, Informative)
(Wed Oct 20, '99 ) A researcher at the University of New Mexico has modified the Doom source to visualize processes and kill them! Finally you can really enjoy killing that Netscape process that just won't die!
Doing this years ago with JSP (Score:3, Informative)
Jackson Structured Programming was basically a design method for data processing type programs - things that took an input, did something to it, and emitted output. Think of many programs you'd pipe data through in Unix, and you have the typical type of thing JSP was aimed at. Except JSP was usually used by COBOL programmers for data processing type tasks.
With JSP, you drew the structure of your input, and the desired output which represented all the sequence, selection and iteration in the data. You'd then take these two structures, and merge them. This merging proccess brought you a program structure - another tree-like diagram. You would then recurse through the tree, turning the program structure into code. The idea was that all the work was done in the design - get the input and output structures right, and you'd have no logical errors in your code. For the kind of things JSP was aimed at, it actually worked very well.
There were programs available for VAX/VMS which could turn the program structure into compilable COBOL - completely automating the programming step. This was being done well over a decade ago.
Microsoft will now come up with its own version of JSP, and claim it as a great "innovation" of course
Re:Another Quote (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Visual design (Score:2, Informative)
Beginners frequently start with visual design but soon find that any non-trivial system becomes a mess of nested blocks and wiring. With standard textual design you can build a structured design as you would for a normal program.
Most importantly, with a textual language you can parameterize objects (think #define and #ifdef) so that you can, for example, change a single constant in a top-level design file and have all the objects relink themselves to take account of the change. This isn't possible in a visual design language.
Visual design is something that only seems good to non-technical types who have no knowledge of structured code design. I imagine Bill mentioned it to make Microsoft seem innovative to these non-technical readers, I doubt it will ever be seriously used for programming.
W3C (Score:2, Informative)
Not to mention their buggy css2 implementation. To hell with them!
There are plenty of valid uses for a tablet PC (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Precisely - we can't even get WYSIWYG HTML righ (Score:2, Informative)
*grin*
LabVIEW (Score:4, Informative)
If you are trying to do detailed logic rather than just bring already written libraries together, a visual language may not be worse than something like Java. It may also not be better. I do think it makes a nice programming model for bringing together existing modules of code though. (as in LabVIEW Express)
Of course, as in any other kind of choice between programming languages, it all depends on the specific problem domain.
Re:NOT free (Score:3, Informative)
This only works if... (Score:3, Informative)
2. Software companies pay the hardware manufacturers to lock down the boxes, which are either sold or rented at subsidized prices to the customer/victims. The whole concept is to quietly deploy DRM while loudly advertising the subsidized pricing.
3. Visually "designing" an app involves nothing more than choosing the location of toolbars and buttons on IE.
4. The new PCs are little more than launching platforms for an "MS Office appliance". A fair number of PCs out there exist for the sole purpose of running office. Office is the portion of the M$ empire that is hardest for OSS to elimintate.
So it all comes down to this: Bill wants to get people focused on saving money via cheap hardware, because he can subsidize that in the short run and lock out competitors in the long run.
The "Net PC" had this kind of business model. It failed. Those who fail to understand history are condemned to repeat it.
psDooM (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Visual design (Score:2, Informative)
I have done my share of C/C++ programming and it has it's merits, but I prefer LabVIEW. The last couple of projects I used it for at work didn't even involve hardware. I just used it like VB.
I think it would be a good learning tool for beginning programmers to learn about different data structures. You can run a VI in "highlight execution" mode which uses animation on the wiring diagram side to show the order of execution. Great for troubleshooting.
the debate textual and graphical programming will rage on, but I don't think it will really matter in the future - as long as it all compiles down to machine code.
NI has a great article [ni.com] about how the compiler works.