And I'm glad you did post something; this is one of the best responses I've gotten so far. I should probably tell you now that I'm prone to understatement.
For Understatement #1, yes, I think the SNES is awesome. Maybe not as awesome as the NES was, but still very cool.
For Understatement #2, no, I couldn't justify buying a Console system for just a few games. Even for four or five. Maybe that's why the last one I owned (and still own; I got another one!:) is the original NES.
Believe me, if Nintendo still had games like that on their system, I'd own an N64. As it is, I really don't feel like I'm missing that much. But that's just my opinion.:)
And no, the fact that they make money does not mean that suddenly I like their games, or that their games are somehow better. I guess someone is buying them, namely Pokemon for the Gameboy; that still doesn't say much for the N64.
I wasn't talking about sales, and neither are you; I'm talking about gameplay. I was expecting more, especially after the sheer amount of time Nintendo expected everyone to wait.
And yes, gameplay is much more important than graphics. That's why it made no sense for Nintendo to piss Square off. Incidentally, there's no way Square could have made the Final Fantasy games as cool as they are without a CD-ROM drive, and they've done some really impressive stuff with the Playstation! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Don't get me wrong; I know they make money. I don't like Microsoft either, and they make even more money. But yes, I don't like their games. I'm not complaining that *they* don't have money; I'm complaining that *we* don't get quality. Also, Nintendo was *so* paranoid about this stuff that they released a cartridge system and further crippled their games and their development--and people still dumped the ROMs...
And could you guys cut it out with the PSX2 statistics? It was stupid the first time. The PSX2 will sell a lot once there is a really popular game released for it, just like the N64 did when Zelda was released. Which, BTW, was *years* after the original release of the N64. Just wait for the next Square game...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, I'm complaining that there haven't been any good remakes of Mario, and the planned remake of Metroid doesn't look anything like Metroid, either.
What I heard about the two Zelda games were that if you played the original Zelda game, you didn't miss much, but that they were too short. Zelda on the SNES, however, didn't have either of those problems. I only played the first Zelda for N64 once, mind you, so this is just what I've heard.
Also, it took Nintendo *way* too long to even release that.
Nintendo *has* made a ton of money on the Gameboy, but I think they've stopped producing the quality games that they used to. Granted, I haven't messed with N64 for a bit, but when it came out, they had only crappy games on the system for *years*, with the possible exception of Mario 64.
The next decent game was Zelda 64, which many people bought the entire system for, because they hadn't seen a *reason* to buy it earlier. That alone should tell you something.
After that, I have no idea what they've done. Mario Kart 64 looked amusing, but that's about it. The other games I haven't seen, because I already gave up on the N64 as an aging console platform with a lot of crappy games that I'm not about to pay for...
But the Mega Man games do rule, although the later ones get pretty hard. It's sad that they have to be backported now, though. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Pole Position, Food Fight, or Crystal Castles on the Atari? (I had a 7800)
I already listed the plethora of great NES games, including the original Zelda. I liked Contra and the Ninja Gaiden series too.
I also listed a lot of good SNES games; Ogre Battle is great, as is Mario All-Stars.
Dreamcast has some fun games, too. For racing game fans MSR is very cool. Samba De Amigo! is just whacky.:)
The Playstation had some cool games. I liked Alundra, for example. The Final Fantasy games are a must, like the anthology of 5&6. And I still need to play Tactics. And for fans of fighting games, they have a lot of those.
So, on any of the other systems that I've played around with, I can name at least two or three great games, and sometimes many more. The PlayStation 2 is very new, and I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but there also aren't that many games released for it yet. However, compared to the Game Cube, it looks pretty good at the moment.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I loved the 8-bit NES. And even the SNES had some really cool games on it.
Metroid, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 1-3 (american), Mario 1-3, at least some of the Zelda games, Castlevania, Mega Man...
And look at where they've gone. Nintendo dropped the ball on Metroid and Mario; in the meantime, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and Mega Man are on Playstation.
And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.
Why buy a game system that has like two or three decent games?
No, I think Nintendo has a LOT of catching up to do before they can start talking about how other people don't know how to write games, or function in the gaming industry. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, that's why Linus released the kernel under the GPL in the first place: to thank RMS for gcc. Just for gcc, actually.
Before that, Linux was under a much more restrictive license. Therefore, either RMS hasn't done his research, or he's an ungrateful bastard, or still just pissed that HURD wasn't finished sooner. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Too bad I can't read Japanese, but the movie player looks nifty.
It's a shame that so much cool technology never makes it over here from Japan. I remember, at least 8 years ago, I met a Taiwanese student that had a device that was probably about the size of a TI-92. It had a built-in dictionary with a few languages crossreferenced to English, a currency calculator, a TI-81, and probably a few other things, built-in. I have yet to see anything like that in the US.
Of course, by now we have PDAs like the Palm Pilot, but I have to wonder how many great ideas never make it over here. After all, my favorite Final Fantasy game was Final Fantasy 5, and that's still hard to find in America, and was only officially released a year or two ago here... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My favorite was Final Fantasy V, but I must admit that I liked Barret in FF7; he was entertaining.
FF7 has a lot of full motion video, but it still managed to pack in a fair amount of gameplay. That was over 3 or 4 CD's, though. I think, in the future, they'll actually be able to cut this down by doing more rendering of the FMV sequences. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My school, North Carolina State University, eventually saw the light as well.
When we had Consultants running the show, they suggested using Windows NT 4.0, and we have a lot of machines running that. However, they are slow and unstable, especially with third-party add-ons for Kerberos and AFS, and they also leak memory like a sieve.
However, some students working for the University (friends of mine) worked on Linux for the realm. It has its share of problems too, because it hasn't been worked on as much as Solaris, and we don't have a lot of apps compiled in the lockers for it, but it's *far* more stable than NT ever was, and has better support for AFS and Kerberos.
Incidentally, the original reason for switching to NT was so we could have apps like Word and Excel and Powerpoint. But now we have a cluster running Citrix Metaframe that does that. And for us engineers, it's much more important that we have other apps where we *already* have licenses on the Unix side of things, or sometimes don't need licenses...
Anyhow, I hope they keep improving the Linux side of things; it's come along decently, and we owe it all to the students. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hear they'll have to make the ship out of Adamantium, and use some Vibranium in the engine room.
What is this with Science imitating Comic Books, these days; I kept looking for the "It's Funny, Laugh!" section on this one! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Netscape 1.0 was the first version of UNIX, and it started out on UNIX as well; he wasn't "porting" anything. Later on, he ends up architecting as well as coding. This makes him an authority on Netscape and its development, at least IMO.
Also, I took a look at your homepage URL.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, JWZ didn't write the bad parts of Mail & News (i.e., 4.0), and he wrote a lot of the core browser; check his page. He also RAN the Mozilla project, as well as having written xscreensaver, xdaliclock, dadadodo, and lots of other cool stuff.
Lots of UNIX systems have Netscape installed; they might also have lynx, and around here possibly a few file browsers that double as web browsers, IE for Solaris or HP/UX, Amaya, and a host of other forgotten browsers.
And, AFAIK, Stallman wouldn't be terribly happy with Mozilla, because it isn't GPL'ed. The MPL ain't bad, but I'm sure he'd find something to object to in there. Now *that* would be somewhat amusing.
In short, reply to someone who knows less about the subject next time, Matt.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Perhaps you misunderstood the intent of that comment.
I don't want to know how I can turn off whichever preferences in a particular version of netscape; I want to know when browsers like netscape will let a user create my own buttons and customize their actions.
OF COURSE I can go to my preferences, but I can't just have one button that does a frequent task. Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they had in IE; in Netscape, that might make up for the lack of a "Zoom" feature (Opera and Galeon did this well).
Also, that code you posted is pretty long and ugly; not only would a link have sufficed, but couldn't someone have neatened up their error handling code? I wrote a function in C just for that, and it has greatly reduced the amount of pointless 'if' statements I have had to write, and improved debugging.
...and while I'm being pedantic, why the hell did you put my user name in quotes, "pjrc"? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think browsers should be more customizable with what they allow the users to do.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs, cookies, and JavaScript? Microsoft considered making a similar button in IE, but stopped when people started calling it "The Porn Button". But if that's what users want, they should be able to do it.
The web is becoming overrun with proprietary data formats and protocols, but at least the open ones do get more popular. Notice the popularity of mp3's, Shockwave Flash, DivX-encoded movies, and mpegs. That's because there are at least players out there for everyone, and the tools aren't too hard to find.
Pop-up windows and banners don't necessarily work; web advertising needs a different model that doesn't involve annoying the consumer. Maybe product placement would work somewhat better, or text ads like Google, or little "sponsored by" buttons.
Personally, I use junkbuster to get rid of ads; it's also cross-platform, and cross-browser compatible, and works rather well. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I had a great time using Mozilla 0.7; it has gotten a lot better, and so much better than the original Netscape code they were using. However, I don't think that's the issue anymore.
The real issue is, what will happen to Netscape? They aren't losing the browser war now because of Mozilla. Now it's because of AOL, who makes every stable Mozilla release into a horribly patched, rushed Netscape release with extra annoying commercial features and bundling that none of us want or need.
Also, despite the benefits Mozilla has seen due to Open Source development, I doubt it will do as well without Netscape, as gutted as it is. JWZ said that the benefits gained from opening a project like that is about 30%, which means that 70% of the work has to be done by AOL/Netscape/Time Warner, and if AOL loses this war to Microsoft, we might lose a lot of developers.
Also, it sucks seeing a great team of people turn into a large impersonal entity that no one really likes. As the Open Source community is already developing other browsers, it isn't clear how much work will be put into Mozilla, and how much will be spent reinventing the wheel.
I only hope that a truly impressive, usable browser comes out of all this: one that doesn't annoy me and show me ads, but rather lets me tell it what I want it to do. Being able to set a level of HTML compliance would be nice, as well. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Did it conflict with a Barnes & Noble one-click patent, or are the courts becoming rational?
</SARCASM>
The article is brief in the extreme, and just says that B&N raised some questions, and at the moment the court likes them.
Therefore, it doesn't do much to assuage my fears about rampant patent abuse. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Put a sin tax on ties; they can be used to strangle poeple.
Put one on paper; you can use it to burn down buildings.
Outlaw letters; you can use them to make death threats to the President.
Like all of these things, computers are a tool; they have many uses. There's no way to determine *how* someone is going to use it, and therefore there's no way you can turn this approach into a fair piece of legislation; it assumes many things that it can't know.
Do we need a damn Digital Bill of Rights? Was the first one just not enough for them? --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hopefully, the database wrappers won't be a problem; for instance, PHP has ADODB, which should let you keep your choice of databases fairly flexible, AFAICT...
Also, there are already a ton of webmail packages out there; I remember HOARD had something that looked promising for a while. I think a lot of the pieces are out there, so hopefully a project like this will be more about architecting a good solution, and the implementation will be more about putting it all together than making it from scratch. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think it could be done properly given a lot of work and good design, but I'm still not a big fan of Java. I guess it'll take a few years for the applications to get there; I suppose the performance will catch up for a word processor, but it'll still burn a lot of cycles.
However, using CORBA to tie it all together would be interesting. Then the Java could really be more of a glue language, and maybe we could re-implement parts of it natively for extra speed or efficiency. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I remember that Corel already did some work on this, and decided that Java wasn't the answer. PHP might be ok for the Server-side, but personally I'd just want to see more speed...
I hope we have a free alternative before the.NET initiative gets off the ground; I don't want to see how that gets licensed. One of the big things in the.NET project is the common language runtime they worked on; I'd love to see an open answer to that.
Why doesn't anyone make a JIT C Compiler, and maybe specify a small API with multiple platforms in mind; it seems to me that this would be much easier to implement efficiently than Java, and could probably support a lot of legacy applications with a little porting, if done correctly... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm glad you did post something; this is one of the best responses I've gotten so far. I should probably tell you now that I'm prone to understatement.
:) is the original NES.
:)
For Understatement #1, yes, I think the SNES is awesome. Maybe not as awesome as the NES was, but still very cool.
For Understatement #2, no, I couldn't justify buying a Console system for just a few games. Even for four or five. Maybe that's why the last one I owned (and still own; I got another one!
Believe me, if Nintendo still had games like that on their system, I'd own an N64. As it is, I really don't feel like I'm missing that much. But that's just my opinion.
And no, the fact that they make money does not mean that suddenly I like their games, or that their games are somehow better. I guess someone is buying them, namely Pokemon for the Gameboy; that still doesn't say much for the N64.
Cheers.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wasn't talking about sales, and neither are you; I'm talking about gameplay. I was expecting more, especially after the sheer amount of time Nintendo expected everyone to wait.
And yes, gameplay is much more important than graphics. That's why it made no sense for Nintendo to piss Square off. Incidentally, there's no way Square could have made the Final Fantasy games as cool as they are without a CD-ROM drive, and they've done some really impressive stuff with the Playstation!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Is there still a shortage?
:(
You can tell I don't own a console system anymore.
Awesome handle, by the way!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, and they owe it all to Pokemon.
:)
Don't get me wrong; I know they make money. I don't like Microsoft either, and they make even more money. But yes, I don't like their games. I'm not complaining that *they* don't have money; I'm complaining that *we* don't get quality. Also, Nintendo was *so* paranoid about this stuff that they released a cartridge system and further crippled their games and their development--and people still dumped the ROMs...
And could you guys cut it out with the PSX2 statistics? It was stupid the first time. The PSX2 will sell a lot once there is a really popular game released for it, just like the N64 did when Zelda was released. Which, BTW, was *years* after the original release of the N64. Just wait for the next Square game...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, I'm complaining that there haven't been any good remakes of Mario, and the planned remake of Metroid doesn't look anything like Metroid, either.
What I heard about the two Zelda games were that if you played the original Zelda game, you didn't miss much, but that they were too short. Zelda on the SNES, however, didn't have either of those problems. I only played the first Zelda for N64 once, mind you, so this is just what I've heard.
Also, it took Nintendo *way* too long to even release that.
Nintendo *has* made a ton of money on the Gameboy, but I think they've stopped producing the quality games that they used to. Granted, I haven't messed with N64 for a bit, but when it came out, they had only crappy games on the system for *years*, with the possible exception of Mario 64.
The next decent game was Zelda 64, which many people bought the entire system for, because they hadn't seen a *reason* to buy it earlier. That alone should tell you something.
After that, I have no idea what they've done. Mario Kart 64 looked amusing, but that's about it. The other games I haven't seen, because I already gave up on the N64 as an aging console platform with a lot of crappy games that I'm not about to pay for...
But the Mega Man games do rule, although the later ones get pretty hard. It's sad that they have to be backported now, though.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you did identify the two games for the N64.
:)
:)
However, have you played... oh, I don't know...
Pole Position, Food Fight, or Crystal Castles on the Atari? (I had a 7800)
I already listed the plethora of great NES games, including the original Zelda. I liked Contra and the Ninja Gaiden series too.
I also listed a lot of good SNES games; Ogre Battle is great, as is Mario All-Stars.
Dreamcast has some fun games, too. For racing game fans MSR is very cool. Samba De Amigo! is just whacky.
The Playstation had some cool games. I liked Alundra, for example. The Final Fantasy games are a must, like the anthology of 5&6. And I still need to play Tactics. And for fans of fighting games, they have a lot of those.
So, on any of the other systems that I've played around with, I can name at least two or three great games, and sometimes many more. The PlayStation 2 is very new, and I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but there also aren't that many games released for it yet. However, compared to the Game Cube, it looks pretty good at the moment.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The last thing I heard was that Nintendo told Square to stuff it.
I'm interested; could you post a link?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I loved the 8-bit NES. And even the SNES had some really cool games on it.
Metroid, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy 1-3 (american), Mario 1-3, at least some of the Zelda games, Castlevania, Mega Man...
And look at where they've gone. Nintendo dropped the ball on Metroid and Mario; in the meantime, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and Mega Man are on Playstation.
And Zelda? Well, I heard the new ones were decent 3D remakes of the original, but that's it.
Why buy a game system that has like two or three decent games?
No, I think Nintendo has a LOT of catching up to do before they can start talking about how other people don't know how to write games, or function in the gaming industry.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually, that's why Linus released the kernel under the GPL in the first place: to thank RMS for gcc. Just for gcc, actually.
Before that, Linux was under a much more restrictive license. Therefore, either RMS hasn't done his research, or he's an ungrateful bastard, or still just pissed that HURD wasn't finished sooner.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Too bad I can't read Japanese, but the movie player looks nifty.
It's a shame that so much cool technology never makes it over here from Japan. I remember, at least 8 years ago, I met a Taiwanese student that had a device that was probably about the size of a TI-92. It had a built-in dictionary with a few languages crossreferenced to English, a currency calculator, a TI-81, and probably a few other things, built-in. I have yet to see anything like that in the US.
Of course, by now we have PDAs like the Palm Pilot, but I have to wonder how many great ideas never make it over here. After all, my favorite Final Fantasy game was Final Fantasy 5, and that's still hard to find in America, and was only officially released a year or two ago here...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My favorite was Final Fantasy V, but I must admit that I liked Barret in FF7; he was entertaining.
FF7 has a lot of full motion video, but it still managed to pack in a fair amount of gameplay. That was over 3 or 4 CD's, though. I think, in the future, they'll actually be able to cut this down by doing more rendering of the FMV sequences.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
My school, North Carolina State University, eventually saw the light as well.
When we had Consultants running the show, they suggested using Windows NT 4.0, and we have a lot of machines running that. However, they are slow and unstable, especially with third-party add-ons for Kerberos and AFS, and they also leak memory like a sieve.
However, some students working for the University (friends of mine) worked on Linux for the realm. It has its share of problems too, because it hasn't been worked on as much as Solaris, and we don't have a lot of apps compiled in the lockers for it, but it's *far* more stable than NT ever was, and has better support for AFS and Kerberos.
Incidentally, the original reason for switching to NT was so we could have apps like Word and Excel and Powerpoint. But now we have a cluster running Citrix Metaframe that does that. And for us engineers, it's much more important that we have other apps where we *already* have licenses on the Unix side of things, or sometimes don't need licenses...
Anyhow, I hope they keep improving the Linux side of things; it's come along decently, and we owe it all to the students.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Is this merely an expression of Slashdot's bizarre Penguin fetish? :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hear they'll have to make the ship out of Adamantium, and use some Vibranium in the engine room.
What is this with Science imitating Comic Books, these days; I kept looking for the "It's Funny, Laugh!" section on this one!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why can't one of you (or someone you trust) trademark it?
I'm not too familiar with the law, but I know I've seen trademarks for such projects.
"Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds"
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Netscape 1.0 was the first version of UNIX, and it started out on UNIX as well; he wasn't "porting" anything. Later on, he ends up architecting as well as coding. This makes him an authority on Netscape and its development, at least IMO.
:)
Also, I took a look at your homepage URL.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No, JWZ didn't write the bad parts of Mail & News (i.e., 4.0), and he wrote a lot of the core browser; check his page. He also RAN the Mozilla project, as well as having written xscreensaver, xdaliclock, dadadodo, and lots of other cool stuff.
:)
Lots of UNIX systems have Netscape installed; they might also have lynx, and around here possibly a few file browsers that double as web browsers, IE for Solaris or HP/UX, Amaya, and a host of other forgotten browsers.
And, AFAIK, Stallman wouldn't be terribly happy with Mozilla, because it isn't GPL'ed. The MPL ain't bad, but I'm sure he'd find something to object to in there. Now *that* would be somewhat amusing.
In short, reply to someone who knows less about the subject next time, Matt.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Perhaps you misunderstood the intent of that comment.
I don't want to know how I can turn off whichever preferences in a particular version of netscape; I want to know when browsers like netscape will let a user create my own buttons and customize their actions.
OF COURSE I can go to my preferences, but I can't just have one button that does a frequent task. Similarly, I liked the "Font Size" button they had in IE; in Netscape, that might make up for the lack of a "Zoom" feature (Opera and Galeon did this well).
Also, that code you posted is pretty long and ugly; not only would a link have sufficed, but couldn't someone have neatened up their error handling code? I wrote a function in C just for that, and it has greatly reduced the amount of pointless 'if' statements I have had to write, and improved debugging.
...and while I'm being pedantic, why the hell did you put my user name in quotes, "pjrc"?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think browsers should be more customizable with what they allow the users to do.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs, cookies, and JavaScript? Microsoft considered making a similar button in IE, but stopped when people started calling it "The Porn Button". But if that's what users want, they should be able to do it.
The web is becoming overrun with proprietary data formats and protocols, but at least the open ones do get more popular. Notice the popularity of mp3's, Shockwave Flash, DivX-encoded movies, and mpegs. That's because there are at least players out there for everyone, and the tools aren't too hard to find.
Pop-up windows and banners don't necessarily work; web advertising needs a different model that doesn't involve annoying the consumer. Maybe product placement would work somewhat better, or text ads like Google, or little "sponsored by" buttons.
Personally, I use junkbuster to get rid of ads; it's also cross-platform, and cross-browser compatible, and works rather well.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I had a great time using Mozilla 0.7; it has gotten a lot better, and so much better than the original Netscape code they were using. However, I don't think that's the issue anymore.
The real issue is, what will happen to Netscape? They aren't losing the browser war now because of Mozilla. Now it's because of AOL, who makes every stable Mozilla release into a horribly patched, rushed Netscape release with extra annoying commercial features and bundling that none of us want or need.
Also, despite the benefits Mozilla has seen due to Open Source development, I doubt it will do as well without Netscape, as gutted as it is. JWZ said that the benefits gained from opening a project like that is about 30%, which means that 70% of the work has to be done by AOL/Netscape/Time Warner, and if AOL loses this war to Microsoft, we might lose a lot of developers.
Also, it sucks seeing a great team of people turn into a large impersonal entity that no one really likes. As the Open Source community is already developing other browsers, it isn't clear how much work will be put into Mozilla, and how much will be spent reinventing the wheel.
I only hope that a truly impressive, usable browser comes out of all this: one that doesn't annoy me and show me ads, but rather lets me tell it what I want it to do. Being able to set a level of HTML compliance would be nice, as well.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Did it conflict with a Barnes & Noble one-click patent, or are the courts becoming rational?
</SARCASM>
The article is brief in the extreme, and just says that B&N raised some questions, and at the moment the court likes them.
Therefore, it doesn't do much to assuage my fears about rampant patent abuse.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Put a sin tax on ties; they can be used to strangle poeple.
Put one on paper; you can use it to burn down buildings.
Outlaw letters; you can use them to make death threats to the President.
Like all of these things, computers are a tool; they have many uses. There's no way to determine *how* someone is going to use it, and therefore there's no way you can turn this approach into a fair piece of legislation; it assumes many things that it can't know.
Do we need a damn Digital Bill of Rights? Was the first one just not enough for them?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hopefully, the database wrappers won't be a problem; for instance, PHP has ADODB, which should let you keep your choice of databases fairly flexible, AFAICT...
Also, there are already a ton of webmail packages out there; I remember HOARD had something that looked promising for a while. I think a lot of the pieces are out there, so hopefully a project like this will be more about architecting a good solution, and the implementation will be more about putting it all together than making it from scratch.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think it could be done properly given a lot of work and good design, but I'm still not a big fan of Java. I guess it'll take a few years for the applications to get there; I suppose the performance will catch up for a word processor, but it'll still burn a lot of cycles.
However, using CORBA to tie it all together would be interesting. Then the Java could really be more of a glue language, and maybe we could re-implement parts of it natively for extra speed or efficiency.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I remember that Corel already did some work on this, and decided that Java wasn't the answer. PHP might be ok for the Server-side, but personally I'd just want to see more speed...
.NET initiative gets off the ground; I don't want to see how that gets licensed. One of the big things in the .NET project is the common language runtime they worked on; I'd love to see an open answer to that.
I hope we have a free alternative before the
Why doesn't anyone make a JIT C Compiler, and maybe specify a small API with multiple platforms in mind; it seems to me that this would be much easier to implement efficiently than Java, and could probably support a lot of legacy applications with a little porting, if done correctly...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.