Last I looked, the US defense budget is about 45% of the entire world. So we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined, and about as much as the next 14 or so countries, combined. And that list of 14 countries includes all of the biggies: Russia, China, Germany, England, etc. Maybe with Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals included, we have crossed the 50% mark, but I haven't seen any numbers to say so.
I don't have the math on me, but I have worked it out, and, yeah, Iraq and Afghanistan push us over. Or at least did in 2006, when I did the math.
And it's not just those two. Veterans Affairs is not included either, along with the nuclear weapon maintenance. Those should be added in.
Once you add in everything that is actually military spending, we're slightly over 50% of the world.
And that isn't including black projects, some of which are hiding the military budget so already counted, but some are hidden elsewhere.
Wikipedia has more info. Including the fact we spent almost 9 billion the totally unworkable missile defense system. That's 30 dollars a person. OTOH, some 'military spending' is not...they're spending money on a reusable space launch vessel, and money to destroy chemical weapon stockpiles.
OTOH, of course, not all military spending other countries do is in their 'military budget' either. So we're probably really around 45% in actual fact.
But it is still amazingly absurdly high. It's eight times China's!
I think the first thing Obama should do in office is pardon Libby. And the first thing Congress should do in office is haul Libby in front of them to testify.
Meanwhile, Obama should be standing there with plea bargains for everyone else.
'His term in office expires at noon tomorrow. Air Force 1 is broken down. He's only got 36 hours to visit 12 states, including Alaska, and issue pardons...
ROAD TRIP!'
No, but seriously, he can't pardon Stevens, that wasn't a federal violation.
Technically, the Senate probably can't kick Stevens out for something he did that was known about when he was reelected.
However, while they can't kick him out of the Senate per se, they could vote to totally ignore him and remove him from all committees.
And if they were pissed enough, they could have removed him from the current Senate in the lame duck session they're about to have.
In fact, they might still do that just to make a point. This will be, IIRC, the first time a convicted felon has shown up on the Senate floor as a Senator. Although if they were going to do that they'd probably have done it yesterday.
Congress's approval rating is low, ironically, because they don't stand up to Bush.
It's rather easy to tell based on the statistics. Republican voters disapprove of Democrats in Congress, whereas Democratic voters disapprove of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
I.e., the low approval rating in Congress is due to Democratic being dissatisfied with the Democrats they just voted in. Which is probably because they didn't do any of the damn things they promised, like stop the Iraq war or investigate warrantless wiretapping or stop the torture, etc etc etc.
I've started calling them 'borrow and spend' Republicans.
Look, I'm a progressive guy, and things like some sort of national health care make sense to me. But I can see how reasonable people would disagree.
It's my job to get people in that would demonstrate that those people are incorrect, and it's other people's job to stop me, and we can behave rationally as we disagree.
Meanwhile, I think our 'larger than the entire rest of the world combined' military budget is perhaps slighty to large unless there's some alien menace we don't know about, and I'll disagree there.
But there is a place the Republican have not been behaving rationally: Taxes.
Incoming must match outgo, period. This isn't debatable, this isn't some reasonable disagreement, we must take in as much as we spend, on average. (Year to year we can fiddle with that, overtaxing in a boom and undertaxing in the recession, but whatever.)
And yet Republicans constantly pretend the amount of tax is government policy that they disagree on. That we're having some sort of fucking rational debate whether or not we should tax people enough to run the damn government!
They do this because they, if you can't see my signature, want to 'drown the government in the bath tub'. They are attempting to cripple the government so badly that it can't actually run social services.
You know what 'crippling the government' is, in my book? Treason
That's basically what John Steward said. The analogy sounds damn stupid, but it's not the dumbest one ever made. We even call the damn thing 'pipes' and refer to how much data 'flows' through them.
Considering the myth he was trying to dismiss was that it was some magical fairyland where you could put stuff 'on' it and it was all just floating around, it wasn't that bad.
A better analogy would have actually been a highway system, where everyone, let's say, gets deliveries to their front door and there is no communication besides bicycle messengers. And people don't actually venture on the highway system themselves, although they can 'teleport' to another building, aka, another connection at the library or whatever.
You can keep building stores that deliver all sorts of stuff, but you also have to build roads for this stuff or you get gridlock. Which is the point Stevens are trying to make.
A 'series of tubes' sounds stupid to us, but it would help, for example, my grandmother understand the internet. She knows I work on stuff 'on the internet', but has no idea how web pages get out there or anything like that.
That defense of Stevens aside, he is a convicted felon and it would be pretty dumb to reelect him. And the telecommunications committees really do need some young people on them.
As opposed to 2004, where only 88% of black voters went for the Democrat. Or 2000, where only 90% of them did.
Curse those 5% extra racist black voters! I'm sure 5% of 11% of the voters swung the race...that's 1.1% of the vote! I'm sure that vastly outnumbered the amount of racist white voters who voted against Obama because of his skin color.
Of course, since 2004, the Republicans let a majorly-black American city drown, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with the 5% of blacks that switched sides. (Surely if that had pissed people off, the 2006 election would have been a landslide for Democrats, and that didn't happen. Wait, I've been informed that did happen, silly me.)
Now to explain the huge percent shift in the under 30 vote. Perhaps many of them are secretly black. Or perhaps they're just sick and fucking tired of Republicans ruining their future.
Um, no. That doesn't just 'look' unreliable. How would that even work, anyway? It just 'looks' like those people are wrongly accused?
Your example shows how a system with what sounds like a high success rate actually isn't that successful when it's looking for people who barely exist.
If the population of terrorists is low enough, any statistics about the accuracy of the system are misleading. Something that is 99.9999% accurate at picking out terrorists will wrongly select someone 90% of the time if only one out of a million of the population under scrutiny are terrorists.
As, statistically speaking, it appears that 19 of the several billion people walking past of the sensors (Many of them, of course, doing it more than once) are terrorists, it's probably more like 99.999% of the people selected are going to be selected incorrectly even in a magical world of fairies where detection is anywhere near that accurate.
As behavior selection is only 1% accurate at picking out people who actually are hiding something, that means it's 99% accurate, which means that if one out a hundred people were terrorists, and no one was hiding anything else, we'd pick an innocent guy as often as not. In the real world, where it's more like one out a billion (per person per flight, that is.), we'll end up getting one hundred million innocent people for each terrorist
Just ones that already exist, and are incredibly cheap at this point, instead of spending hundreds of thousands to design ones that format text.
You're talking about the equivalent of a 35 dollar mp3 player, with a nice ASIC in it that has a menu system and can record audio and lets you sort by genre. This, indeed, started out about 70 dollars and are now 35.
I'm talking about the equivalent of a 7 dollar mp3 player. They're 7 bucks because everyone uses the same damn ASIC that simply reads flash memory files, in order, and relays the first file when asked, and moves forwards and backwards in the list when asked. Meanwhile, another ASIC decodes mp3 data, using a DAC, to sound. And that's it. Wire up the MP3 chip to trigger a 'next' command in the first chip when out of data, wire up the backwards and forwards button to the first chip, make a pause and power button, and you're done. (Well, and the mp3 chip decodes the metadata, and sends that to yet another chip that controls a display, but that's not important here.)
Replace the second ASIC with a GIF/JPEG decoder, and hook that to whatever drives the epaper, and you have a damn ebook control system for a buck. You can argue about what chips should exist cheaply, but the reality is what is there.
If you want to save computational power, you are not going to do it with GIFs as these are compressed.
I'm not trying to save 'computational power', I've trying to pick behaviors that I know single-purpose integrated circuits already exist to do. 'Electronic picture frames' already handle GIFs.
Now, there probably is a 'look up bitmapped image and print it on screen' type chip that's descended from dumb terminals.
However, I think I can state confidentially there's no 'font selection' chip, or 'word wrap' chip, or 'read 500k of data, pick a block in the middle, and format a page from it' chip, and thus a device like you are describing would require a general purpose processor, and even the cheapest one of those is going to add 10 bucks to the price.
Whereas 'FAT/SD card reader, with forward and backward file buttons' chips are about a dollar. Same with 'FAT/USB/builtin flash memory'. One of those is in every single cheap MP3 player, the price has really been driven down.
I don't know about the 'GIF display' chip, but they, like I said, are in those picture frames. (Along with one of the FAT chips.) Just like a cheap MP3 player is a FAT chip glued to an MP3 decoder chip, a picture frame is a FAT chip glued to a GIF/JPG decoder chip. I want exactly that, with slightly different behavior (Forward and backwards buttons instead of random skipping.), hooked to epaper.
True, but Qt4 looks almost equivalent to any native interface (by default) on Windows and Mac OS X. Out of the two I would go with Qt4. Also, the Mac port is complete unlike Gtk.
I'm just used to Qt being non-LGPL, although I am aware it is now.
Although it's still only C++, IIRC, and there are plenty of C programmers out there.
Microsoft also implemented WinSxS/manifests to fix the DLL hell problem. I am not sure how it works (Wine implements it too), but basically an app requests a certain revision (exact version number) for a DLL and inside %WINDIR%\WinSxS is all these DLL versions, and the correct DLL is loaded.
Yeah, but that's to fix past broken DLLs in a backwards compatible way. I don't have any problem with that, it was the best solution they could come up with, and a good deal better than many people thought they could come up with.
Microsoft offered.Net as a way to never have to deal with that in the future, when, like I said, they also wouldn't have to deal with in the future if they'd just version the damn names of future DLLs.
And even current DLLs could be copied to a versioned name for new applications to link against. In fact, they probably could have done their WinSxS trick by having Windows relink executables to these new versioned names, although I can see why they wouldn't want to do that. But anyway.
The idea that they'd create a huge system library and multiple new languages to use this library to stop DLL hell is literally crazy talk.:)
Look, I thought Java was dumb when it first came out. I thought 'Hey, why not make some sort of professional-looking cross-platform C/C++ GUI library instead? We could just all write to that + POSIX. Hell, throw in more modern standard libary functions while you're at it, and shims so that multiple OSes don't require any changes to do, for example, multi-threading.'
I note that, as of now, I am essentially just described glib and gtk, although as those were not designed to operate on non-Unix systems, their Windows versions are not as nice as could be.
And, if you're really clever, invent a new 'fat' binary format so that combined Windows/Mac/Linux/whatever can be distributed, and passed it to a shim loader that grabs the right thing and loads it.
The VM idea was horrible bad for anything but web pages, and, face it, the applets were always a toy. Loading a VM with security is insanely stupid vs. using a pre-designed VM that starts out in the crippled form that embedded browser applets need, like Flash.
But Java is a frickin miracle compared to.Net.
.Net isn't a solution in search of a problem like Java was, it's a problem in search of a problem.
It has no fucking redeeming qualities at all. And before someone points out some language nicity, I have no problem with the.Net languages. (Although breaking backwards compatibility with VB was spectacularly stupid on their part in that it really pissed off VB developers.) I have no problem with new shared libraries, as I said before.
What is spectacularly offensive, though, is presenting this as some sort of magic bullet for problems that don't exist at all, when in actuality it appears to be a way to break Wine.
And, Microsoft, we already had a way around 'DLL hell'. It's called named versioning. Release damn DLLs named newlibrary100.dll. When there's a new version, name it newlibrary101.dll. Duh.
Yeah, it won't fix your old DLLs...but, then again,.Net is even less of a help there.
The reason I suggested GIFs is that the device shouldn't have to deal with fonts or formatting.
And what you can fit in 1MB isn't incredibly relevant. The question is what you can fit on the 1GB SD.
The point of this device would be that it is a display, and requires a computer to load it. Anything that might require computational power is offloaded to the computer which generates pre-formatted pages the stupid device can throw on the screen.
The actual brains of the device needs:
1) Select folder, can be done with a simple SD/FAT reader chip.
2) Find image with name book0001.gif, done with same chip.
3) Display images, done with whatever 'display gif' chip that electronic photo frames use. (Actually, this chip is already too smart, in that it can resize and reduce color, whereas if a computer was generating the gifs it wouldn't need to do that.)
4) Have device that advances to next file, or previous file, and saves current file. My MP3 player does exactly that, there's probably a chip for that, or maybe it's built into the SD/FAT reader chip.
That's it. That much electronics should literally cost less than the plastic molding, both of which together should come in at under 5 dollars. There's a reason you can buy extremely lowend MP3 players for 7 dollars, and those have a cheap LCD screen that we do not need to count for these purposes.
I don't know how much epaper screens actually cost, it looks like they added 50 dollars to the cost of LCD readers, although I don't know how much the LCD cost in the first place. But they should literally be almost the entire price of the device.
Look, give me a black and white epaper device that can display things.
Forward, back, select, exit, it doesn't need more controls or intelligence than a cheap-ass MP3 player. You can probably steal the chip from those 'picture frame' things.
Don't give me one with a damn wifi connection, or a computer in it. A single USB connection, or a single SD card slot, would be fine. Rechargeable batteries would be a bonus, but not required. (From what I understand, those things use almost no batteries.)
Hell, it doesn't even have to display 'text'...if it can just display GIFs with consecutive filenames, and requires a conversion program to put books on there, I wouldn't mind one bit.
Something like that should actually cost 50 dollars, and 45 dollars of that should be the epaper.
Yeah, if it's trademarks, this is even more screwed up. Taking pictures of Toyota(TM) cars and labeling them as Toyota(TM) cars, is, you know, well within trademark law. In fact, it's sorta the point of trademark law.
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While we're at it, I bet TiVos use a lot more energy than game consoles. They're on 24/7, and use the hard drive a lot more.
Also, neither XBox or PS3 actually appear to have an idle setting. That might be a useful thing to add.
At least you have fucking mass transit.
Last I looked, the US defense budget is about 45% of the entire world. So we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined, and about as much as the next 14 or so countries, combined. And that list of 14 countries includes all of the biggies: Russia, China, Germany, England, etc. Maybe with Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals included, we have crossed the 50% mark, but I haven't seen any numbers to say so.
I don't have the math on me, but I have worked it out, and, yeah, Iraq and Afghanistan push us over. Or at least did in 2006, when I did the math.
And it's not just those two. Veterans Affairs is not included either, along with the nuclear weapon maintenance. Those should be added in.
Once you add in everything that is actually military spending, we're slightly over 50% of the world.
And that isn't including black projects, some of which are hiding the military budget so already counted, but some are hidden elsewhere.
Wikipedia has more info. Including the fact we spent almost 9 billion the totally unworkable missile defense system. That's 30 dollars a person. OTOH, some 'military spending' is not...they're spending money on a reusable space launch vessel, and money to destroy chemical weapon stockpiles.
OTOH, of course, not all military spending other countries do is in their 'military budget' either. So we're probably really around 45% in actual fact.
But it is still amazingly absurdly high. It's eight times China's!
I think the first thing Obama should do in office is pardon Libby. And the first thing Congress should do in office is haul Libby in front of them to testify.
Meanwhile, Obama should be standing there with plea bargains for everyone else.
I can see the trailer:
'His term in office expires at noon tomorrow. Air Force 1 is broken down. He's only got 36 hours to visit 12 states, including Alaska, and issue pardons...
ROAD TRIP!'
No, but seriously, he can't pardon Stevens, that wasn't a federal violation.
I, for one, want to see her run in 2012. If she is the primary, I will probably vote for her.
This is because I am Democrat, and want to see the Republican party become more a laughingstock, though.
This wasn't a recount in Alaska, and it's not a recount in WA either, ya moron. It's the count.
As for why they both headed Democratic, it's because they're counting absentee ballots and absentee ballots tend to lean Democratic.
Technically, the Senate probably can't kick Stevens out for something he did that was known about when he was reelected.
However, while they can't kick him out of the Senate per se, they could vote to totally ignore him and remove him from all committees.
And if they were pissed enough, they could have removed him from the current Senate in the lame duck session they're about to have.
In fact, they might still do that just to make a point. This will be, IIRC, the first time a convicted felon has shown up on the Senate floor as a Senator. Although if they were going to do that they'd probably have done it yesterday.
Yeah, the submitter is on crack. The fact this race took so long to count, and Stevens was ahead for so long, are the weird parts.
Everyone assumed at the start that Begich was going to win.
Congress's approval rating is low, ironically, because they don't stand up to Bush.
It's rather easy to tell based on the statistics. Republican voters disapprove of Democrats in Congress, whereas Democratic voters disapprove of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
I.e., the low approval rating in Congress is due to Democratic being dissatisfied with the Democrats they just voted in. Which is probably because they didn't do any of the damn things they promised, like stop the Iraq war or investigate warrantless wiretapping or stop the torture, etc etc etc.
Afuckingmen.
I've started calling them 'borrow and spend' Republicans.
Look, I'm a progressive guy, and things like some sort of national health care make sense to me. But I can see how reasonable people would disagree.
It's my job to get people in that would demonstrate that those people are incorrect, and it's other people's job to stop me, and we can behave rationally as we disagree.
Meanwhile, I think our 'larger than the entire rest of the world combined' military budget is perhaps slighty to large unless there's some alien menace we don't know about, and I'll disagree there.
But there is a place the Republican have not been behaving rationally: Taxes.
Incoming must match outgo, period. This isn't debatable, this isn't some reasonable disagreement, we must take in as much as we spend, on average. (Year to year we can fiddle with that, overtaxing in a boom and undertaxing in the recession, but whatever.)
And yet Republicans constantly pretend the amount of tax is government policy that they disagree on. That we're having some sort of fucking rational debate whether or not we should tax people enough to run the damn government!
They do this because they, if you can't see my signature, want to 'drown the government in the bath tub'. They are attempting to cripple the government so badly that it can't actually run social services.
You know what 'crippling the government' is, in my book? Treason
Only Alaskans have to put up with that. No one else gives a shit about the governor of Alaska.
That's basically what John Steward said. The analogy sounds damn stupid, but it's not the dumbest one ever made. We even call the damn thing 'pipes' and refer to how much data 'flows' through them.
Considering the myth he was trying to dismiss was that it was some magical fairyland where you could put stuff 'on' it and it was all just floating around, it wasn't that bad.
A better analogy would have actually been a highway system, where everyone, let's say, gets deliveries to their front door and there is no communication besides bicycle messengers. And people don't actually venture on the highway system themselves, although they can 'teleport' to another building, aka, another connection at the library or whatever.
You can keep building stores that deliver all sorts of stuff, but you also have to build roads for this stuff or you get gridlock. Which is the point Stevens are trying to make.
A 'series of tubes' sounds stupid to us, but it would help, for example, my grandmother understand the internet. She knows I work on stuff 'on the internet', but has no idea how web pages get out there or anything like that.
That defense of Stevens aside, he is a convicted felon and it would be pretty dumb to reelect him. And the telecommunications committees really do need some young people on them.
As opposed to 2004, where only 88% of black voters went for the Democrat. Or 2000, where only 90% of them did.
Curse those 5% extra racist black voters! I'm sure 5% of 11% of the voters swung the race...that's 1.1% of the vote! I'm sure that vastly outnumbered the amount of racist white voters who voted against Obama because of his skin color.
Of course, since 2004, the Republicans let a majorly-black American city drown, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with the 5% of blacks that switched sides. (Surely if that had pissed people off, the 2006 election would have been a landslide for Democrats, and that didn't happen. Wait, I've been informed that did happen, silly me.)
Now to explain the huge percent shift in the under 30 vote. Perhaps many of them are secretly black. Or perhaps they're just sick and fucking tired of Republicans ruining their future.
Um, no. That doesn't just 'look' unreliable. How would that even work, anyway? It just 'looks' like those people are wrongly accused?
Your example shows how a system with what sounds like a high success rate actually isn't that successful when it's looking for people who barely exist.
If the population of terrorists is low enough, any statistics about the accuracy of the system are misleading. Something that is 99.9999% accurate at picking out terrorists will wrongly select someone 90% of the time if only one out of a million of the population under scrutiny are terrorists.
As, statistically speaking, it appears that 19 of the several billion people walking past of the sensors (Many of them, of course, doing it more than once) are terrorists, it's probably more like 99.999% of the people selected are going to be selected incorrectly even in a magical world of fairies where detection is anywhere near that accurate.
As behavior selection is only 1% accurate at picking out people who actually are hiding something, that means it's 99% accurate, which means that if one out a hundred people were terrorists, and no one was hiding anything else, we'd pick an innocent guy as often as not. In the real world, where it's more like one out a billion (per person per flight, that is.), we'll end up getting one hundred million innocent people for each terrorist
And that's where we should be spending the money...on DNA, or fingerprint, or some other, lock on the gun.
Yeah, that would be outrageously expensive, maybe even a million dollars a gun...but it would be cheap compared to what we're doing.
Erm, why would Congress suddenly decide to hand money to taxpayers, when a much more logical thing would be to just put it towards the debt?
Can we please stop this 'reduce taxes' idiocy? The government actually needs money.
Um, I believe I was talking about ASICs.
Just ones that already exist, and are incredibly cheap at this point, instead of spending hundreds of thousands to design ones that format text.
You're talking about the equivalent of a 35 dollar mp3 player, with a nice ASIC in it that has a menu system and can record audio and lets you sort by genre. This, indeed, started out about 70 dollars and are now 35.
I'm talking about the equivalent of a 7 dollar mp3 player. They're 7 bucks because everyone uses the same damn ASIC that simply reads flash memory files, in order, and relays the first file when asked, and moves forwards and backwards in the list when asked. Meanwhile, another ASIC decodes mp3 data, using a DAC, to sound. And that's it. Wire up the MP3 chip to trigger a 'next' command in the first chip when out of data, wire up the backwards and forwards button to the first chip, make a pause and power button, and you're done. (Well, and the mp3 chip decodes the metadata, and sends that to yet another chip that controls a display, but that's not important here.)
Replace the second ASIC with a GIF/JPEG decoder, and hook that to whatever drives the epaper, and you have a damn ebook control system for a buck. You can argue about what chips should exist cheaply, but the reality is what is there.
If you want to save computational power, you are not going to do it with GIFs as these are compressed.
I'm not trying to save 'computational power', I've trying to pick behaviors that I know single-purpose integrated circuits already exist to do. 'Electronic picture frames' already handle GIFs.
Now, there probably is a 'look up bitmapped image and print it on screen' type chip that's descended from dumb terminals.
However, I think I can state confidentially there's no 'font selection' chip, or 'word wrap' chip, or 'read 500k of data, pick a block in the middle, and format a page from it' chip, and thus a device like you are describing would require a general purpose processor, and even the cheapest one of those is going to add 10 bucks to the price.
Whereas 'FAT/SD card reader, with forward and backward file buttons' chips are about a dollar. Same with 'FAT/USB/builtin flash memory'. One of those is in every single cheap MP3 player, the price has really been driven down.
I don't know about the 'GIF display' chip, but they, like I said, are in those picture frames. (Along with one of the FAT chips.) Just like a cheap MP3 player is a FAT chip glued to an MP3 decoder chip, a picture frame is a FAT chip glued to a GIF/JPG decoder chip. I want exactly that, with slightly different behavior (Forward and backwards buttons instead of random skipping.), hooked to epaper.
True, but Qt4 looks almost equivalent to any native interface (by default) on Windows and Mac OS X. Out of the two I would go with Qt4. Also, the Mac port is complete unlike Gtk.
I'm just used to Qt being non-LGPL, although I am aware it is now.
Although it's still only C++, IIRC, and there are plenty of C programmers out there.
Microsoft also implemented WinSxS/manifests to fix the DLL hell problem. I am not sure how it works (Wine implements it too), but basically an app requests a certain revision (exact version number) for a DLL and inside %WINDIR%\WinSxS is all these DLL versions, and the correct DLL is loaded.
Yeah, but that's to fix past broken DLLs in a backwards compatible way. I don't have any problem with that, it was the best solution they could come up with, and a good deal better than many people thought they could come up with.
Microsoft offered .Net as a way to never have to deal with that in the future, when, like I said, they also wouldn't have to deal with in the future if they'd just version the damn names of future DLLs.
And even current DLLs could be copied to a versioned name for new applications to link against. In fact, they probably could have done their WinSxS trick by having Windows relink executables to these new versioned names, although I can see why they wouldn't want to do that. But anyway.
The idea that they'd create a huge system library and multiple new languages to use this library to stop DLL hell is literally crazy talk. :)
No shit.
Look, I thought Java was dumb when it first came out. I thought 'Hey, why not make some sort of professional-looking cross-platform C/C++ GUI library instead? We could just all write to that + POSIX. Hell, throw in more modern standard libary functions while you're at it, and shims so that multiple OSes don't require any changes to do, for example, multi-threading.'
I note that, as of now, I am essentially just described glib and gtk, although as those were not designed to operate on non-Unix systems, their Windows versions are not as nice as could be.
And, if you're really clever, invent a new 'fat' binary format so that combined Windows/Mac/Linux/whatever can be distributed, and passed it to a shim loader that grabs the right thing and loads it.
The VM idea was horrible bad for anything but web pages, and, face it, the applets were always a toy. Loading a VM with security is insanely stupid vs. using a pre-designed VM that starts out in the crippled form that embedded browser applets need, like Flash.
But Java is a frickin miracle compared to .Net.
It has no fucking redeeming qualities at all. And before someone points out some language nicity, I have no problem with the .Net languages. (Although breaking backwards compatibility with VB was spectacularly stupid on their part in that it really pissed off VB developers.) I have no problem with new shared libraries, as I said before.
What is spectacularly offensive, though, is presenting this as some sort of magic bullet for problems that don't exist at all, when in actuality it appears to be a way to break Wine.
And, Microsoft, we already had a way around 'DLL hell'. It's called named versioning. Release damn DLLs named newlibrary100.dll. When there's a new version, name it newlibrary101.dll. Duh.
Yeah, it won't fix your old DLLs...but, then again, .Net is even less of a help there.
Exactly. No one's going to end up in violation of MS patents by using MS products.
It's MS patents finding their way into Novell Linux distros, and, from them, into other distros, that people need to worry about.
The reason I suggested GIFs is that the device shouldn't have to deal with fonts or formatting.
And what you can fit in 1MB isn't incredibly relevant. The question is what you can fit on the 1GB SD.
The point of this device would be that it is a display, and requires a computer to load it. Anything that might require computational power is offloaded to the computer which generates pre-formatted pages the stupid device can throw on the screen.
The actual brains of the device needs:
1) Select folder, can be done with a simple SD/FAT reader chip.
2) Find image with name book0001.gif, done with same chip.
3) Display images, done with whatever 'display gif' chip that electronic photo frames use. (Actually, this chip is already too smart, in that it can resize and reduce color, whereas if a computer was generating the gifs it wouldn't need to do that.)
4) Have device that advances to next file, or previous file, and saves current file. My MP3 player does exactly that, there's probably a chip for that, or maybe it's built into the SD/FAT reader chip.
That's it. That much electronics should literally cost less than the plastic molding, both of which together should come in at under 5 dollars. There's a reason you can buy extremely lowend MP3 players for 7 dollars, and those have a cheap LCD screen that we do not need to count for these purposes.
I don't know how much epaper screens actually cost, it looks like they added 50 dollars to the cost of LCD readers, although I don't know how much the LCD cost in the first place. But they should literally be almost the entire price of the device.
No shit.
Look, give me a black and white epaper device that can display things.
Forward, back, select, exit, it doesn't need more controls or intelligence than a cheap-ass MP3 player. You can probably steal the chip from those 'picture frame' things.
Don't give me one with a damn wifi connection, or a computer in it. A single USB connection, or a single SD card slot, would be fine. Rechargeable batteries would be a bonus, but not required. (From what I understand, those things use almost no batteries.)
Hell, it doesn't even have to display 'text'...if it can just display GIFs with consecutive filenames, and requires a conversion program to put books on there, I wouldn't mind one bit.
Something like that should actually cost 50 dollars, and 45 dollars of that should be the epaper.
Yeah, if it's trademarks, this is even more screwed up. Taking pictures of Toyota(TM) cars and labeling them as Toyota(TM) cars, is, you know, well within trademark law. In fact, it's sorta the point of trademark law.