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cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

I think that we're all dismissing just how seriously game changing this might be.

whatever will be "game changing" in 2012, my guess is that it won't be a new version of windows, or any other desktop os

make a jump like the one that Apple made from OS 9 to OS X

yeah that was about the time apple nearly went under. how soon people forget

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming

time and the trends are on their side. google docs shows the possibility. once web systems evolve to better handle these type of apps, the advantage will play to them more and more

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

who needs virtualization anyway? salesforce is doing just fine...most of msft's bread and butter apps are moving to the web

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them.

i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

let me know when people stand in line for three hours to get a windows mobile phone. tell me the next time a wall street trading house does a re-architect and move to windows

cypress-hillon A Chat with a Google Street View Driver

wtf is there to talk about???

"do you drive all over the city taking pictures??"

"yes"

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

but what is the problem they are solving ?? the network stack of freebsd (for example) is perfectly adequate for saturating any modern outbound connection under heavy concurrent load. unless you grow the pipe bigger than the device can fill it, better networking software is just an academic exercise. and its not like freebsd is standing still.

if i were msft, i would just take freebsd7, graft a win32 managed runtime on to it, call it mibdori and ship it

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

why do you "hope they pull it off"? their time has passed. none of their own users at home or in business are even interested in products past xp. they don't represent a positive force in the market, they continue to cling to dead ideas like drm...i'm not sure at all why anyone other than employees or shareholders would be cheering for them.

cypress-hillon Microsoft's new legacy-free OS from scratch

music to my ears as a free software zealot. microsoft is going off to build an os "done right"...where have we heard that before??

wait for the concessions and half-baked reversals. they're obsessing with a whole new kernel, that will likely be the first decision to get dumped as they watch MSFT drift down to 18 with no new product on deck to rally sales.

then having ditched the "rewrite" plan, they will spend a year spinning their wheels trying to locate the best two or three ideas from midori to graft on to vista, people might just jump to mobile platforms full-time, or the console market might start seriously eating into pc sales, or everyday people start using ubuntu, etc etc etc.

the market just isn't going to stand still for five years while microsoft tries to relearn how to build big systems. microsoft is chasing google, they are chasing apple, they are chasing oracle, they are chasing nintendo, they are chasing linux....

its going to be fun watching this company feign relevance while going the way of DEC

cypress-hillon The single assignment cargo cult

he beats us over the head with the fact that gcc uses ssa yet seems to think that this fact makes general mutability desirable at the language level. the compiler is not a magic wand. hey why not make everything a string too? works for tcl!!!!

cypress-hillon What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

canada's immigrants tend to be more educated. this isn't much of a stretch, the people crossing the border at arizona in 110 degree heat tend to be some of the most disadvantaged from their own society

cypress-hillon First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

its amusing how harvard stanford and princeton with endowments of like forty quadrillion dollars shake and quiver in the face of a thirty person publishing firm.

the big schools could trivially "nationalize" textbooks with online material. it would be cheaper just to buy a new laptops for students who don't have the means to access the data

cypress-hillon First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

"The problem is that the average textbook sells a small run of copies, and doesn't benefit from economies of scale"

WHAT??? for example, stewart's calculus book has been used for twenty+ years all over the english speaking world. you find me a ny times bestseller that has had that kind of run

cypress-hillon The Smartest Advice I Ever Got: Personal Finance

there is blood in the streets now, more than you may see again in your life

cypress-hillon The Smartest Advice I Ever Got: Personal Finance

always have enough money in the bank to live your current lifestyle for six months. unexpected unemployment may be rough, but it need not be inhuman

cypress-hillon Google: We knew the web was big...

well allow me to modify my robots.txt so you can be at infinity-1. since you pricks decided to hijack your role as impartial algorithmic search to walled-garden with knol, i want nothing to do with you.

every major website that handles referrals seems to bite the poison fruit of capturing traffic...now google has to. oh well, maybe clusty search will have to do

cypress-hillon Net is a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages.

yahoo could never surrender all ads to google - the govt would never allow a cartel to control over 90% of web ads

most advertisers also are not interested in an ad cartel, which is why many continue to spend on yahoo and other ad networks

cypress-hillon Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

haskell without a doubt

haskell is on the edge of almost every interesting trend in programming tools.

parallelism? check STM? check closures? haskell is closures functional programming? better than any other lang continuation style? check type inference? check good library support? check (kinda) repl? check etc etc

cypress-hillon Ask HN: How do you read RSS feeds?

left to right

cypress-hillon Ask HN: Best books/source to learn about investing?

try investing with imaginary money. the only way to learn about the market is to be in it, even with imaginary investments. what was written about the market in the past is based on the market of the past. its not all bad or outdated, but a some of it is. for example, buy-and-hold only makes sense in a secular bull. in a secular bear, you need to learn a new strategy.

learn by doing. simulate real investing. you will learn a lot.