I've owned dozens of PC's over the years. Depending on how you count, I have seven to ten working machines now.
The only 1980's era machine I have that still works is my PCjr. By today's standards its a dinosaur, but its still one of very machines ever made that you could spell coke on without shorting out the keyboard. I didn't get it for me. I got for my kids. My oldest, now a successful programmer, was around 12 at the time, and it was a great machine for him. It had a nice selection of computer games, a working programming environment that worked well for kids, and a five and a quarter inch disk drive (the only one I have that still works) that you could run programs from and load and save files from.
Journalists labeled the PCjr a flop the first day they saw it, and the label stuck, but it was still one of the best selling machines, in unit volumes, of the 1980s. The machine was an obvious flop for journalists because it wasn't designed for them. They wanted a cheap machine they could write on, but the PCjr was designed for that. It was intended to be a cross between a computer and a video game console that would be attractive to children and families, and by that standard (it sold well into that marketplace) it was very successful.
Sadly, the flop label is probably indelible at this point. But the flop label is mere perception. The reality is that it was a good machine for its intended market that sold extremely well, especially given the poor reviews it was given from day one.
I do some things that are quite similar to that in all my classes (even the ones where there is no term paper). Most classes involve a "think" assignment in which you have to think about something relevant to the subject matter we are looking at and answer a question or set of questions on one side of a 3x5 index card. Think assignments are frequently used in class discussions and often represent steps taken towards completing other class assignments. Every class that has a reading entails submitting two questions based on the readings. I usually provide brief answers to all of those questions and discuss a subset in class. I use other kinds of developmental assignments as well and continue to look for ways to improve my pedagogy.
Many of my students, including almost all who do well in the classes, tell me that that my classes are tough but fair. Many also tell me that they learned a lot. Alas, not every student feels that way. Some feel that they deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of their work (these students are often unhappy with my classes). Some feel that they deserve a good grade because they can regurgitate words (a sign, perhaps, of a photographic memory), regardless of their inability to show that they understand those words (they tend to be unhappy as well). Other students lack other normal constraints on behavior and apparently feel that not doing the work in class is something that can be bypassed by complaining to a department chair. Sadly, in today's evaluation focused world, one complaint can outweigh a hundred excellent evaluations.
Six years ago I left the software development world for the world of University teaching. I encountered a fair amount of plagiarism in the first year, but very little since. Catch a few and the word gets around.
The biggest problem, by the way, hasn't been the Internet. It has been copying directly out of the textbook on take home and open book exams. The real world me says that such exams are a good thing because we almost always have the ability to look things up when our boss asks us to research something, but the pragmatic professor in me has come to the conclusion that open book tests, in any of their forms, are simply an invitation to copy things out of the book rather than put it in your own words.
The best way to fight plagiarism, in my experience, is to give them papers that will be difficult to copy and paste into. Every semester and every class that I assign term paper projects with distinctive features tied, in general, to my research program. The general research question under the papers makes it unlikely that they'll be able to find a paper to copy from, as I almost always pick under-researched topics or push them to engage content that is too new to have attracted scholarship. Students occasionally try, but it is humorous to read a paper bought from a term paper site that plagiarizes one of my own papers. It is not fun to confront them over it (there is nothing like having a student deny to your face that they plagiarized when you have them dead to rights), but it has to be done.
The second best way is to make the term paper a semester long development project that involves lots of little assignments that have to be accomplished along the way. I do a lot of that too. By the time my students get to actually assembling the term paper, they've already turned most of it in in pieces. Its a good approach, I think, because it draws the student into the task. I usually get strong indicators of the possibility of plagiarism as the due date approaches, moreover, as students start to approach me about changing the topic they've been working on all semester. I don't let them do that, but I have been warned.
Actually, the biggest problem with term papers I encounter is people who simply never turn them in, which is unfortunate, because the research and thinking process associated with writing a term paper is one of the best ways to get students to learn by applying class concepts on their own.
One could go nuts on all the reasons why this should be patentable. One could argue that they are patenting project management. One can argue (quite convincingly, I think), that they are patenting software that is little different than has been used on help desks for nearly twenty years (I built some of it, so I have a pretty good idea).
Most disturbing, however, is the notion that they are patenting "piecework", which has long been regarded as one of the most problematic forms of employment. This notion is only reinforced when you visit the tasks that are available on the Mechanical Turk site and the extraordinarily small payments that are offered. One individual is offering 50 cents for unique three to four paragraph blog entries. Several state agencies are offering a dime to verify fields in a contract (and one city is offering 3 cents). Its hard to imagine how anyone could earn anything close to the U.S. minimum wage at these prices.
I doubt the patent will stand up to scrutiny. What I wonder is if the payment system will also fail the test of reasonableness. Amazon needs to get their act together on that. Some of the payments offered clearly fail any test of reasonableness.
The idea is simple. Extend the number of daylight hours during which people are awake. Extend the number of darkness hours during which people are asleep. If you can do this without changing the business cycle (when people go to and finish school and work), they wind up with more free time during daylight hours, which can only be healthy for you (more vitamin D, more exercise, etc).
Expecting it to make a huge difference in energy expenditures, one way or the other, was a pipe dream, but I, for one, prefer the geometry of the day when DST is in force, and wish it was year round.
Those who observe that the record industry is the big problem here have it absolutely right. The magic that allowed the iPod to succeed was one part marketing and three parts contract writing. The only way they could succeed was to sell downloadable music for a little as possible while avoiding lawsuits from the record industry. They succeeded in this brilliantly, but in order to do so they had to accept contract terms, including DRM and other things, that they would have preferred to avoid.
In the fundamentals of the lawsuit, Apple appears to be stuck between the rock of the record industry contracts and the hard place of EU policy, but the EU has the ability to do something that Apple can't do, which is to declare specific provisions of Apple's contracts with the record companies to be illegal such that Apple can ignore them. Apple can't ignore them on its own. To do so would simply make them liable to the record companies. It needs a judge to tell them they can do so on legal grounds. If Apple wants to run a single store in Europe, the only way it can do so is to have the European courts clear the way.
So if I'm Apple, I want to be sued by the EU over this one; I want to be cooperative; I want the EU to understand exactly what I need it to do to satisfy their requests.
To bad a similar suit can't apply Apple to back out of its DRM contract provisions.
If one considers this as the "Top Fifty PC Products of the PC era", one can argue what should or shouldn't be on the list, but that's about it. Everything there meets the test of being among the most important PC Products of the PC era. I'd put different things on the list. So, I gather, would a lot of other people, but that's it.
My problem with this article is its incredibly overreaching statements, starting with the headline. Others here have addressed the problem with leaving the wheel and other fundamentals out of the "Top Fifty Tech Products of All Time", but what of getting dates wrong. CompuServe predates 1982. I was writing a newsletter on CompuServe then and it had already been around for several years (1979 is probably a better date). There is depth of invention under CompuServe that goes back to the 1830's and the first digital communication network, the telegraph, but the telegraph is hardly PC era, so its profound inflence as a tech product can be safely ignored. Heck, the writer probably wasn't around to have seen the telegraph in practical use (or even CompuServe in early operation), which explains most of it.
A deeper problem, and one that prevents me from taking the article at all seriously, is its depiction of the demise of Netscape as not being able to "keep up with the times", a statement the author immediately contradicts by referencing Mozilla. Netscape was doing just fine keeping up with the times. Netscape, the companies, only problem (its only real problem) is that its cash flow was choked off by predatory marketing practices on the part of Microsoft, which bundled a just good enough browser with its operating system and invoked license terms that prevented PC makers from bundling any other browser with its machines without paying a huge penalty to Microsoft.
Once you get past that, its easy to understand why they would have left off so many of the top 50 Electronic Tech Products of all time, including the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb, radios, the amplifier, hifi, telex (the true beginning of e-mail), and televisions (which still outsell PC's by a huge margin). Once you get past that, its easy to understand why they would have left off so many of the top 50 Computing Products of all time, including the IBM 360, the Mouse (Doug Englebart in the 1960's), Computer Conferencing Software (Murray Turoff, 1971).
Its not that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it. Its that they are bound to be myopic, and this article certainly is.
Its clear that SFX took out all the stops in making sure that this was a representative poll.
Its equally obvious that the Slashdot headline writers knew a good headline when they saw one.
I'm sure that Serenity has a loyal fan base. Gosh, there must be at least 2000 loyal fans. I'm equally sure that there are lots of people who feel that Star Wars was a overhyped B movie. Based, however, on my continuing discussions with students in my Media Criticism classes, where Star Wars comes up as a favorite movie series for at least a sixth of my students every semester and Serenity never gets mentioned at all (Firefly did make the cut for two semesters a few years ago), I think I can safely dismiss this survey as meaningless.
The preferred term is a matter of perspective. In the end, programs written in JavaScript are interpreted, much as programs that have been compiled to p-code are interpreted by the p-code machine. In the interests of making this as clear as possible, consider the following statement of the relevant process:
If I write a program in Java
and use a Java compiler/JavaScript "generator"
to generate p-code/JavaScript,
it remains that the p-code/JavaScript generated
will be interpreted by a Java/JavaScript interpreter
in the browser.
This patent claims to have done something new, but it seems clear it claims nothing even marginally innovative. All they are doing is translating code to an intermediate form that resides on a server and is then interpreted in a client browser. Substitute any language you prefer for Java. Substitute any language you like for JavaScript. Substitute any intermediate form you like for p-code. The result is the same. There is absolutely nothing in this patent that is not derivative of prior art. They are attempting to patent a design pattern for a restricted set of languages, but that design pattern has been used many times before and in many different computer languages, including all of the languages they make specific claims for.
I read through the whole thing, that this is just a very bad patent. Not bad for people in general. It can't possibly stand up to scrutiny. Its just a bad patent at every level I can think of up to and including "badly written".
Its a bad patent because it is so "obvious". All they've done is to define JavaScript as as a p-code machine and created a (set of) compiler(s) for translating arbitrary programming languages into JavaScript "p-code". They have, in effect, attempted to patent compilers, albeit in a very limited way. Doing this was extrordinarily obvious, so much so that it wouldn't surprise me if there were hundreds of instances of prior art.
This may be one reason why the patent is so badly written. A truly general patent would make claims against all possible programming languages, but this one explicitly does not. Almost every claim is tacked down to a specific list of languages, and that list varies from claim to claim. Worse, none of the claims address some of the most widely used web programming langauges, including Perl, RUBY, Python, and PHP. My guess is that either (1) the patent was written by an amateur or (2) that these list variations reflect what they were able to find in their search of prior art. The mere existence of variations in the claims is probably evidence of the obviousness of this patent.
As for prior art, we've already seen claims of prior art in IBM (1996) and Microsoft (1998) products. That doesn't surprise me at all. I can recall discussing use of a JavaScript translator for an Ajax-like project I was in involved with (at IBM Research) in 1996. We didn't actually do it while I was on the project, but it was an option, and certainly not one that anyone would have believed was in any sense patentable. Appearance of such code in VisualAge during that same time frame would be anything but surprising. That is, for instance, the same time frame in which Mike Cowleshaw is translating REXX into Java p-code while retaining the interpretability of the REXX.
There are so many other examples of this kind of machine code translation, going all the way back to the original Fortran. I don't see a chance that this patent will hold up to scrutiny.
Actually, the big thing that emerged in discovery is that they hadn't done any real police work.
All they had was one expert witness who wrote three statements, all of them questionable on a number of grounds, based on a ten minute examination of a hard drive and additional examination of IP records generated by software that has dubious reliability and a statement from Verizon about an IP address that could easily have been wrong in several different ways.
That's one of the big reasons this case is crumbling and, from all appearances, taking a lot of RIAA cases with it.
The truth is that this was never about good "police" work. It was about intimidation; about identifying people who could be easily intimidated and railroading them with a blizzard of impressive looking paperwork; about using their settlements to intimidate others into not accessing online audio files, even when it was perfectly legal to do so. The intimidation worked (and continues to work to some extent) because the legal costs of fighting this RIAA paperwork were much higher than the price of a settlement.
> This isn't some sort of ideological blow that cuts to the core of the RIAAs actions.
I don't know how ideology applies to this unless you believe that unrestricted fishing expeditions without any real probably cause make good law. If you believe that, then is is a major blow to your ideology, because the judge just said no, I'm not going to allow you to examine computer unless you can directly link that computer to the alleged violation of intellectual property law.
> It's a mundane legal decision in one of their many cases. Why, exactly, is this newsworthy?
Its not mundane at all. Its a major blow to the RIAA's current policies and it sets up a much larger blow that I suspect we'll see ordered shortly. The RIAA had it easy when they were bullying college students into handing them their savings in order to avoid a costly litigation. All too often these students hadn't done anything wrong. Now that people are fighting back, decisions like this will start to cost the RIAA something, and that may cause them to rethink their strategy.
This is a big decision, because it finally sets some limits on the scope of RIAA's fishing expeditions. Its not a surprising decision, given the outcomes of your discovery process with RIAA's witness, and one can only presume that the other shoe, dismissal with prejudice and a court ordered payment of Ms Lindor's legal expenses by the RIAA will soon follow. It will, unfortunately, take a lot more than this to deter the RIAA from this scorched audience policy, but its a step in the right direction. Well done.
Much of this discussion has been predicated on a faulty premise. The problem with Blackboard isn't Vista. Its IE7.
I've been making extensive use of Blackboard this year in teaching two classes. I've been using it as a supplement to readings, in class discussions, and material on my web site. I'm not going to say that Blackboard is the world's greatest software, but it has proved functional enough for the limited purposes I've used it for.
Students have reported a variety of problems using Blackboard, but most students have had no trouble with the system. The biggest source of problems appears to be IE7, which breaks in a variety of different ways. Blackboard doesn't appear to be doing anything fancy in the places where IE7 fails. As best I can tell, this is the direct result of another round of Microsoft not implementing well accepted web standards in web markup. There are actually two levels to the problem. One level is their past incompatibilty with web standards, which caused many web sites to have to identify browsers to know what code to run for Javascript and other purposes. For what its worth, many of the recently reported problems with blackboard and IE7 can be fixed by changing the blackboard code to treat IE7 like Firefox. It doesn't solve all the problems, however.
In the end, the fundamental problem is that Microsoft continues to treat the web as a place where it can do anything it wants. The result are dozens of markup features, from iframes to location attributes in JavaScript, that should be easy to use, but aren't.
I have no great love for Blackboard, but I don't think Blackboard is responsible for this problem. They'll have to fix it, of course, and the sooner they do so the better, but they would be well advised, in the short term, to add a check for IE7 that directs users to other browsers under a banner along the lines of "IE7 engineered not to work with this product (and many others). We suggest you try Firefox or Opera instead."
Its hard to imagine the smoke and mirrors that will be needed to get this "new concept" in cellphones to provide the kinds of convergent interfaces associated with today's cell phones. I mean, its great that I can point and click with my jaw, but how am I gonna watch a youtube video on my molar.
What an old tech April Fools story... so out of touch with where things are really going.
Next year you need a new angle. How about tattooing cellphones on the backs of pets.
I see maybe a dozen DHCP answers already, so I'll just pick on this one. If he's asking for that large a block, DHCP almost certainly isn't an answer. Fixed IP addresses on a per server basis is important in some environments, especially managed server environments in which security is tied to specific addresses.
I think you overstate this somewhat.
First, professional certification is a red herring in this instance. You will find few certified engineers on any computer science faculty, or for that matter, among the working software engineers at any company. I suspect, whether you like or not, documentation of the courses he teaches will more than do for establishing requisite professional credentials. Let me put it this way. Does Bill Gates have a professional certification or, for that matter, an undergraduate degree? Would that in any way undermine his professional credentials? Be careful here.
Second, while his method is poor science (e.g. he clearly wasn't looking for truth, wherever it might lay), it is not poor investigation, per se. He was asked to answer specific questions and he investigated just enough to answer those specific questions and not much beyond those questions. If I was to criticize anything, it would be the idea that he could fully investigate hard disks in an average of 45 minutes each (which presumably includes some setup time, boot time, etc. Given that constraint, his investigation of the hard disk is probably reasonably good work (especially for you), insofar as he establishes that it could not have been the disk used with Kazaa and doesn't pretend otherwise. This result was an obvious signal to RIAA to back off. The fact that they didn't is a problem for RIAA and their lawyers rather than the expert witness.
The association of the IP is much more problematic. He is much too trusting of the evidence chain and seems to willfully ignore his own knowledge of IP addresses. He does, on the other hand, couch his language carefully here, repeatedly refusing to tie the ip address to a specific person or machine other than to say it was assigned to the defendant at the time. This is the key outcome of your discovery. The evidence chain that ties the defendent to the IP address and file sharing in general is broken. Nowhere is that clearer than in the answer that starts at p. 114, line 13.
The statement on wireless is, of course, bogus. Wireless routers use DHCP just like practically everything else. If a machine wouldn't show evidence of a DHCP address for one set of circumstances, it won't show evidence for any others. The status of a device as wireless is all but invisible downstream on the internet. That statement should never have been made. What troubles me is that it was even asked for. The question should have been whether there was any evidence that the IP address was shared with any other machines. The answer to that still might (probably would) have been no, but it was something that could have been investigated through the registry. Machines do sometimes notice and make a record of other machines in their network neighborhood.
In other words, some aspects of his investigation (those related to IP addresses) are suspect, but others (those related to the hard disk) are not, at least from the perspective of what he was paid to do.
Davis
This report and the study underneath it are useless. Publicizing it at all means there are still people trying to justify ignoring realities that everyone else understands.
Three years of data does not even begin to make a long term trend. Polar bears threatened with extinction because ice that has been in place practically forever is disappearing makes a much more compelling long term trend.
There has been a lot of debate over global warming in the wake of this article. There shouldn't be. This has nothing to say about it that we didn't already know based on historical sun cycles for which we have a lot more data. Mars should be warming a bit. The sun is near the peak of a cycle. The earth should be warming a bit too, just not nearly as much as it is.
My optimism about iPhone as a tablet just reduced substantially. If I can't program it its of no interest to me. Heck, I imagined a minor bit of programming that I'd like to have on an iPhone as I was driving back from a Chorus rehearsal tonight. Unless Apple has already thought of it, I'd be out of luck.
I'll be interested again when they repackage it as a Mac mini-tablet computer.
Everything I saw in the videos was great, especially the part about many Mac apps working with it. As it stands now, I'm sure I can do more with a Nokia 770 or 800.
There will still be a large market for this phone. Most people cannot program and would not be interested in doing so on their cell phone. But with this decision Apple has given up a secondary market that might have kickstarted their sales.
All joking aside, the success of any new communication technology depends on it being useful for a variety (preferably a broad variety) of different purposes. This isn't a particularly new observation, but I've documented evidence for it elsewhere. For better or worse, one purpose that is often seen as desirable is education. One that is frequently seen as undesirable is pornography. I understand the reasons for the the widely shared bias that leads to these judgments. I'm a fan of education and haven't much use for most of the things that are currently regarded as pornography.
It remains, however, that pornography is an important benchmark in the success of new media. I frequently summarize the nature of this benchmark (see, for example http://evolutionarymedia.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?WhyN ewMediaMatter) as three "laws of new media":
You know a medium is young and relatively unused when people talk about its potential value in education
You know a medium is promising and likely to succeed when people complain about its use for "pornography" and/or other "indecent" or "proscribed" behavior
You know a medium is well established when people complain about the fact that it isn't used for education
This pattern holds for a huge number of new media going back over 100 years. The nature of what has been deemed pornographic has changed along the way. Jazz, for instance, was once frequently described as pornographic. It was the porn of early records and broadcast radio. It remains that porn users are often one of the first mainstream sets of users to widely adopt new media, that their opinions and equipment purchases often drive other uses of the medium, and that the publicity generated by the anti-porn movement often raises awareness of the communication technology and its potentially useful applications.
I can understand SONY not wanting to invoke the wrath of the considerable anti-porn movement (religious, feminist, and otherwise), but history suggests that SONY is reducing BLU-Rays chances of success by taking a hard line on it.
All the comments I see here miss the big point.
It doesn't matter whether the iPhone is a better telephone or a more expensive telephone.
What matters is that it is a MacIntosh tablet computer that also happens to be a telephone.
As a Mac tablet, its cheap (only a third more than the Nokia N800 tablet, but at least a third more powerful. The phone, from where I sit, is just a bonus, even if it is the point of the exercise and its initial marketing focus. Its almost worth switching to Cingular to have the computer.
Indeed, if it fails as a phone, they'll just move it to 802.11g and rebrand it as an iTablet. Indeed, I'll be surprised if they don't do this eventually anyway.
Invoking the term "Craplets" is, at best, a new MicroSoft strategy to acquire by word of mouth that which they are no longer allowed to acquire through licensing terms. At worst, its setting up an excuse for Vista's failure.
Its hard to believe that so many people don't see this as yet another Microsoft strategy to shore up their "monopoly" position. I assume that at least some of the people responding are Microsoft trolls (e.g. paid advocates for their software).
Yes, OEM's often add a lot of non-Microsoft content to their machines, and yes, some of it is badly written (the same can be said for a lot of the Microsoft content), and yes, OEM's often get paid to put some portion of the non-MS content there. PC's are competitively priced commodities and it can be very difficult to turn a profit on a machine without resorting to this kind of product advertising. But a lot of useful software usually gets included as well, especially since Microsoft consent decrees have put a stop to the old Microsoft practice of banning the addition of some competitive products to the machine.
OEM's can put Firefox, Opera, Netscape or some other non-MS browser on the desktop today. One wishes that more did. There was a time when OEM's couldn't ship Netscape or other competitive browsers on new Windows shipments because they'd have to pay a penalty to Microsoft if they did. That's why Netscape is no longer a company.
There was a time when Lotus 123 was the leading spreadsheet, Wordperfect was the leading word processor, and so on. Microsoft wrote licenses that penalized OEMs for shipping the competitors and, for a year or so, made Word and Excel available to OEM's as a part of the Windows bundle. Just who couldn't sell a copy of their software for over a year (Lotus and Novell). Guess who leveraged an operating system monopoly into a monopoly in Word Processing and Spreadsheets (Microsoft). Guess which spreadsheet is still better (123). Its sad. It really is.
Yes, AOL, Earthlink, and others frequently litter the new desktops, and that's one of the reasons why MSN hasn't become yet another Microsoft monopoly. Overall a very good thing.
Yes, Quicken is frequently shipped on new machines, and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft Money hasn't become yet another Microsoft monopoly. Again, a very good thing.
The same is true for other software.
I don't plan to move to Vista. Heck, the only reason I own XP licenses is that I contracted to do some programming on the platform. MS software never improves. It just acquires more sources of failure. I've been systematically moving to Linux and MacIntosh. Nothing I've seen about Vista so far has done anything but increase my determination to move Microsoft off my machines.
In fairness, the development of PC's starts in 1974 too; earlier if you accept the arguments of some in IBM. The Altair kit appears in early 1975; Bill Gates' Basic implementation follows fairly quickly. Apple starts shipping fully built machines a year later.
I don't want to make a big deal out of that... and it certainly isn't my attempt to make light of your work, which is the beginning of a long series of efforts aimed at delivering graphics to, depending on how you want to view it, home machines and pixilated (rather than vector) screens. The fact is that microprocessors made many things possible that weren't possible without them. The 6502's and Z80's that powered your early Videotex powered early PC's as well.
Videotex was the logical extension of the prevailing model of computing in the mid-1970's, that of a central host delivering content to dumb terminals. Personal Computers, starting with the Altair, was the beginning of new model, one of personal computers interacting with servers/services. The corporations and other institutions that bet big on Videotex were making a sensible bet given the prevailing model, and the work they financed has paid dividends in PC content standards, software, services, and programmers. The small startups that made PC's happen were making much less sensible bets, but their bets panned out.
My comments were made from a very 1979 plus perspective. While I saw a lot of e-mail, bulletin boards, network services, and nascent PC's going into that period, I didn't really encounter Videotex in any serious way until I was finishing grad school. I am aware that planning and preparing for Videotex long preceded its exploitation, but the same can be said, to at least some extent, for PC's as well.
Nonresizable web pages with fixed fonts drive me crazy too. I was never a fan of flash until recently. The web desktop programs, most of which are done with flash (and several of which appear to be resizable) are converting me. My son, who programs UI's in meta-languages that produce flash UI's based on XML and code, has been a big fan for a while, but there are lots of badly done web pages whose worst feature is their flash requirements. That's particularly true for people with slow connections.
My personal dislike is PDF's, which seem to serve no other purpose beyond translating paper to the computer. I use them when I have to (and clearly prefer them to distributing word or powerpoint files, but so long as you aren't insistent on preserving dead tree metaphors, generic HTML (no fixed fonts) is the way to go. Well done (as in Dreamweaver), moreover, HTML is usually much less expensive in bytes than NAPLPS was, which makes it a better choice for low speed connections.
I still design all my pages with the presumption that someone will try to access them using a low speed connection and a screen with unpredictable resolution and font sizes. A good practice, I think.
I don't think it is an unfair criticism. Videotex rolls out more or less in parallel with the arrival of Personal Computers, a number of which featured graphics that were better than Videotex without any of the contortions that Videotex standards used. I will give credit. They were trying to make the best of very slow dial-up connections (often as slow as 110 bps back them; sometimes a third that speed) and to leverage already ubiquitous televisions. From that perspective they probably succeeded in making a silk purse of a sows ear. But anyone with any significant experience using Apple, Commodore, or (especially) Exidy machines knew that the effort was likely to prove a waste of time. I was fortunate. At the time I was editing "EMMS" (Electronic Mail and Message Systems) rather than its sister publication "Videotext" (both $250 a year newsletters). I never had to pretend that Videotex was a good long term investment.
That said, I was a big supporter of Prodigy when came out, mostly because of its interactive conferencing and e-mail capabilities, but I always found the NAPLPS screens painful because you couldn't cut and paste text.
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I've owned dozens of PC's over the years. Depending on how you count, I have seven to ten working machines now. The only 1980's era machine I have that still works is my PCjr. By today's standards its a dinosaur, but its still one of very machines ever made that you could spell coke on without shorting out the keyboard. I didn't get it for me. I got for my kids. My oldest, now a successful programmer, was around 12 at the time, and it was a great machine for him. It had a nice selection of computer games, a working programming environment that worked well for kids, and a five and a quarter inch disk drive (the only one I have that still works) that you could run programs from and load and save files from. Journalists labeled the PCjr a flop the first day they saw it, and the label stuck, but it was still one of the best selling machines, in unit volumes, of the 1980s. The machine was an obvious flop for journalists because it wasn't designed for them. They wanted a cheap machine they could write on, but the PCjr was designed for that. It was intended to be a cross between a computer and a video game console that would be attractive to children and families, and by that standard (it sold well into that marketplace) it was very successful. Sadly, the flop label is probably indelible at this point. But the flop label is mere perception. The reality is that it was a good machine for its intended market that sold extremely well, especially given the poor reviews it was given from day one.
I do some things that are quite similar to that in all my classes (even the ones where there is no term paper). Most classes involve a "think" assignment in which you have to think about something relevant to the subject matter we are looking at and answer a question or set of questions on one side of a 3x5 index card. Think assignments are frequently used in class discussions and often represent steps taken towards completing other class assignments. Every class that has a reading entails submitting two questions based on the readings. I usually provide brief answers to all of those questions and discuss a subset in class. I use other kinds of developmental assignments as well and continue to look for ways to improve my pedagogy. Many of my students, including almost all who do well in the classes, tell me that that my classes are tough but fair. Many also tell me that they learned a lot. Alas, not every student feels that way. Some feel that they deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of their work (these students are often unhappy with my classes). Some feel that they deserve a good grade because they can regurgitate words (a sign, perhaps, of a photographic memory), regardless of their inability to show that they understand those words (they tend to be unhappy as well). Other students lack other normal constraints on behavior and apparently feel that not doing the work in class is something that can be bypassed by complaining to a department chair. Sadly, in today's evaluation focused world, one complaint can outweigh a hundred excellent evaluations.
Six years ago I left the software development world for the world of University teaching. I encountered a fair amount of plagiarism in the first year, but very little since. Catch a few and the word gets around.
The biggest problem, by the way, hasn't been the Internet. It has been copying directly out of the textbook on take home and open book exams. The real world me says that such exams are a good thing because we almost always have the ability to look things up when our boss asks us to research something, but the pragmatic professor in me has come to the conclusion that open book tests, in any of their forms, are simply an invitation to copy things out of the book rather than put it in your own words.
The best way to fight plagiarism, in my experience, is to give them papers that will be difficult to copy and paste into. Every semester and every class that I assign term paper projects with distinctive features tied, in general, to my research program. The general research question under the papers makes it unlikely that they'll be able to find a paper to copy from, as I almost always pick under-researched topics or push them to engage content that is too new to have attracted scholarship. Students occasionally try, but it is humorous to read a paper bought from a term paper site that plagiarizes one of my own papers. It is not fun to confront them over it (there is nothing like having a student deny to your face that they plagiarized when you have them dead to rights), but it has to be done.
The second best way is to make the term paper a semester long development project that involves lots of little assignments that have to be accomplished along the way. I do a lot of that too. By the time my students get to actually assembling the term paper, they've already turned most of it in in pieces. Its a good approach, I think, because it draws the student into the task. I usually get strong indicators of the possibility of plagiarism as the due date approaches, moreover, as students start to approach me about changing the topic they've been working on all semester. I don't let them do that, but I have been warned.
Actually, the biggest problem with term papers I encounter is people who simply never turn them in, which is unfortunate, because the research and thinking process associated with writing a term paper is one of the best ways to get students to learn by applying class concepts on their own.
One could go nuts on all the reasons why this should be patentable. One could argue that they are patenting project management. One can argue (quite convincingly, I think), that they are patenting software that is little different than has been used on help desks for nearly twenty years (I built some of it, so I have a pretty good idea). Most disturbing, however, is the notion that they are patenting "piecework", which has long been regarded as one of the most problematic forms of employment. This notion is only reinforced when you visit the tasks that are available on the Mechanical Turk site and the extraordinarily small payments that are offered. One individual is offering 50 cents for unique three to four paragraph blog entries. Several state agencies are offering a dime to verify fields in a contract (and one city is offering 3 cents). Its hard to imagine how anyone could earn anything close to the U.S. minimum wage at these prices. I doubt the patent will stand up to scrutiny. What I wonder is if the payment system will also fail the test of reasonableness. Amazon needs to get their act together on that. Some of the payments offered clearly fail any test of reasonableness.
The idea is simple. Extend the number of daylight hours during which people are awake. Extend the number of darkness hours during which people are asleep. If you can do this without changing the business cycle (when people go to and finish school and work), they wind up with more free time during daylight hours, which can only be healthy for you (more vitamin D, more exercise, etc).
Expecting it to make a huge difference in energy expenditures, one way or the other, was a pipe dream, but I, for one, prefer the geometry of the day when DST is in force, and wish it was year round.
Those who observe that the record industry is the big problem here have it absolutely right. The magic that allowed the iPod to succeed was one part marketing and three parts contract writing. The only way they could succeed was to sell downloadable music for a little as possible while avoiding lawsuits from the record industry. They succeeded in this brilliantly, but in order to do so they had to accept contract terms, including DRM and other things, that they would have preferred to avoid.
In the fundamentals of the lawsuit, Apple appears to be stuck between the rock of the record industry contracts and the hard place of EU policy, but the EU has the ability to do something that Apple can't do, which is to declare specific provisions of Apple's contracts with the record companies to be illegal such that Apple can ignore them. Apple can't ignore them on its own. To do so would simply make them liable to the record companies. It needs a judge to tell them they can do so on legal grounds. If Apple wants to run a single store in Europe, the only way it can do so is to have the European courts clear the way.
So if I'm Apple, I want to be sued by the EU over this one; I want to be cooperative; I want the EU to understand exactly what I need it to do to satisfy their requests.
To bad a similar suit can't apply Apple to back out of its DRM contract provisions.
If one considers this as the "Top Fifty PC Products of the PC era", one can argue what should or shouldn't be on the list, but that's about it. Everything there meets the test of being among the most important PC Products of the PC era. I'd put different things on the list. So, I gather, would a lot of other people, but that's it.
My problem with this article is its incredibly overreaching statements, starting with the headline. Others here have addressed the problem with leaving the wheel and other fundamentals out of the "Top Fifty Tech Products of All Time", but what of getting dates wrong. CompuServe predates 1982. I was writing a newsletter on CompuServe then and it had already been around for several years (1979 is probably a better date). There is depth of invention under CompuServe that goes back to the 1830's and the first digital communication network, the telegraph, but the telegraph is hardly PC era, so its profound inflence as a tech product can be safely ignored. Heck, the writer probably wasn't around to have seen the telegraph in practical use (or even CompuServe in early operation), which explains most of it.
A deeper problem, and one that prevents me from taking the article at all seriously, is its depiction of the demise of Netscape as not being able to "keep up with the times", a statement the author immediately contradicts by referencing Mozilla. Netscape was doing just fine keeping up with the times. Netscape, the companies, only problem (its only real problem) is that its cash flow was choked off by predatory marketing practices on the part of Microsoft, which bundled a just good enough browser with its operating system and invoked license terms that prevented PC makers from bundling any other browser with its machines without paying a huge penalty to Microsoft.
Once you get past that, its easy to understand why they would have left off so many of the top 50 Electronic Tech Products of all time, including the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb, radios, the amplifier, hifi, telex (the true beginning of e-mail), and televisions (which still outsell PC's by a huge margin). Once you get past that, its easy to understand why they would have left off so many of the top 50 Computing Products of all time, including the IBM 360, the Mouse (Doug Englebart in the 1960's), Computer Conferencing Software (Murray Turoff, 1971).
Its not that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it. Its that they are bound to be myopic, and this article certainly is.
Its clear that SFX took out all the stops in making sure that this was a representative poll.
Its equally obvious that the Slashdot headline writers knew a good headline when they saw one.
I'm sure that Serenity has a loyal fan base. Gosh, there must be at least 2000 loyal fans. I'm equally sure that there are lots of people who feel that Star Wars was a overhyped B movie. Based, however, on my continuing discussions with students in my Media Criticism classes, where Star Wars comes up as a favorite movie series for at least a sixth of my students every semester and Serenity never gets mentioned at all (Firefly did make the cut for two semesters a few years ago), I think I can safely dismiss this survey as meaningless.
The preferred term is a matter of perspective. In the end, programs written in JavaScript are interpreted, much as programs that have been compiled to p-code are interpreted by the p-code machine. In the interests of making this as clear as possible, consider the following statement of the relevant process:
This patent claims to have done something new, but it seems clear it claims nothing even marginally innovative. All they are doing is translating code to an intermediate form that resides on a server and is then interpreted in a client browser. Substitute any language you prefer for Java. Substitute any language you like for JavaScript. Substitute any intermediate form you like for p-code. The result is the same. There is absolutely nothing in this patent that is not derivative of prior art. They are attempting to patent a design pattern for a restricted set of languages, but that design pattern has been used many times before and in many different computer languages, including all of the languages they make specific claims for.
I read through the whole thing, that this is just a very bad patent. Not bad for people in general. It can't possibly stand up to scrutiny. Its just a bad patent at every level I can think of up to and including "badly written".
Its a bad patent because it is so "obvious". All they've done is to define JavaScript as as a p-code machine and created a (set of) compiler(s) for translating arbitrary programming languages into JavaScript "p-code". They have, in effect, attempted to patent compilers, albeit in a very limited way. Doing this was extrordinarily obvious, so much so that it wouldn't surprise me if there were hundreds of instances of prior art.
This may be one reason why the patent is so badly written. A truly general patent would make claims against all possible programming languages, but this one explicitly does not. Almost every claim is tacked down to a specific list of languages, and that list varies from claim to claim. Worse, none of the claims address some of the most widely used web programming langauges, including Perl, RUBY, Python, and PHP. My guess is that either (1) the patent was written by an amateur or (2) that these list variations reflect what they were able to find in their search of prior art. The mere existence of variations in the claims is probably evidence of the obviousness of this patent.
As for prior art, we've already seen claims of prior art in IBM (1996) and Microsoft (1998) products. That doesn't surprise me at all. I can recall discussing use of a JavaScript translator for an Ajax-like project I was in involved with (at IBM Research) in 1996. We didn't actually do it while I was on the project, but it was an option, and certainly not one that anyone would have believed was in any sense patentable. Appearance of such code in VisualAge during that same time frame would be anything but surprising. That is, for instance, the same time frame in which Mike Cowleshaw is translating REXX into Java p-code while retaining the interpretability of the REXX.
There are so many other examples of this kind of machine code translation, going all the way back to the original Fortran. I don't see a chance that this patent will hold up to scrutiny.
Actually, the big thing that emerged in discovery is that they hadn't done any real police work.
All they had was one expert witness who wrote three statements, all of them questionable on a number of grounds, based on a ten minute examination of a hard drive and additional examination of IP records generated by software that has dubious reliability and a statement from Verizon about an IP address that could easily have been wrong in several different ways.
That's one of the big reasons this case is crumbling and, from all appearances, taking a lot of RIAA cases with it.
The truth is that this was never about good "police" work. It was about intimidation; about identifying people who could be easily intimidated and railroading them with a blizzard of impressive looking paperwork; about using their settlements to intimidate others into not accessing online audio files, even when it was perfectly legal to do so. The intimidation worked (and continues to work to some extent) because the legal costs of fighting this RIAA paperwork were much higher than the price of a settlement.
> This isn't some sort of ideological blow that cuts to the core of the RIAAs actions.
I don't know how ideology applies to this unless you believe that unrestricted fishing expeditions without any real probably cause make good law. If you believe that, then is is a major blow to your ideology, because the judge just said no, I'm not going to allow you to examine computer unless you can directly link that computer to the alleged violation of intellectual property law.
> It's a mundane legal decision in one of their many cases. Why, exactly, is this newsworthy?
Its not mundane at all. Its a major blow to the RIAA's current policies and it sets up a much larger blow that I suspect we'll see ordered shortly. The RIAA had it easy when they were bullying college students into handing them their savings in order to avoid a costly litigation. All too often these students hadn't done anything wrong. Now that people are fighting back, decisions like this will start to cost the RIAA something, and that may cause them to rethink their strategy.
This is a big decision, because it finally sets some limits on the scope of RIAA's fishing expeditions. Its not a surprising decision, given the outcomes of your discovery process with RIAA's witness, and one can only presume that the other shoe, dismissal with prejudice and a court ordered payment of Ms Lindor's legal expenses by the RIAA will soon follow. It will, unfortunately, take a lot more than this to deter the RIAA from this scorched audience policy, but its a step in the right direction. Well done.
Much of this discussion has been predicated on a faulty premise. The problem with Blackboard isn't Vista. Its IE7.
I've been making extensive use of Blackboard this year in teaching two classes. I've been using it as a supplement to readings, in class discussions, and material on my web site. I'm not going to say that Blackboard is the world's greatest software, but it has proved functional enough for the limited purposes I've used it for.
Students have reported a variety of problems using Blackboard, but most students have had no trouble with the system. The biggest source of problems appears to be IE7, which breaks in a variety of different ways. Blackboard doesn't appear to be doing anything fancy in the places where IE7 fails. As best I can tell, this is the direct result of another round of Microsoft not implementing well accepted web standards in web markup. There are actually two levels to the problem. One level is their past incompatibilty with web standards, which caused many web sites to have to identify browsers to know what code to run for Javascript and other purposes. For what its worth, many of the recently reported problems with blackboard and IE7 can be fixed by changing the blackboard code to treat IE7 like Firefox. It doesn't solve all the problems, however.
In the end, the fundamental problem is that Microsoft continues to treat the web as a place where it can do anything it wants. The result are dozens of markup features, from iframes to location attributes in JavaScript, that should be easy to use, but aren't.
I have no great love for Blackboard, but I don't think Blackboard is responsible for this problem. They'll have to fix it, of course, and the sooner they do so the better, but they would be well advised, in the short term, to add a check for IE7 that directs users to other browsers under a banner along the lines of "IE7 engineered not to work with this product (and many others). We suggest you try Firefox or Opera instead."
Its hard to imagine the smoke and mirrors that will be needed to get this "new concept" in cellphones to provide the kinds of convergent interfaces associated with today's cell phones. I mean, its great that I can point and click with my jaw, but how am I gonna watch a youtube video on my molar.
... so out of touch with where things are really going.
What an old tech April Fools story
Next year you need a new angle. How about tattooing cellphones on the backs of pets.
I see maybe a dozen DHCP answers already, so I'll just pick on this one. If he's asking for that large a block, DHCP almost certainly isn't an answer. Fixed IP addresses on a per server basis is important in some environments, especially managed server environments in which security is tied to specific addresses.
I think you overstate this somewhat. First, professional certification is a red herring in this instance. You will find few certified engineers on any computer science faculty, or for that matter, among the working software engineers at any company. I suspect, whether you like or not, documentation of the courses he teaches will more than do for establishing requisite professional credentials. Let me put it this way. Does Bill Gates have a professional certification or, for that matter, an undergraduate degree? Would that in any way undermine his professional credentials? Be careful here. Second, while his method is poor science (e.g. he clearly wasn't looking for truth, wherever it might lay), it is not poor investigation, per se. He was asked to answer specific questions and he investigated just enough to answer those specific questions and not much beyond those questions. If I was to criticize anything, it would be the idea that he could fully investigate hard disks in an average of 45 minutes each (which presumably includes some setup time, boot time, etc. Given that constraint, his investigation of the hard disk is probably reasonably good work (especially for you), insofar as he establishes that it could not have been the disk used with Kazaa and doesn't pretend otherwise. This result was an obvious signal to RIAA to back off. The fact that they didn't is a problem for RIAA and their lawyers rather than the expert witness. The association of the IP is much more problematic. He is much too trusting of the evidence chain and seems to willfully ignore his own knowledge of IP addresses. He does, on the other hand, couch his language carefully here, repeatedly refusing to tie the ip address to a specific person or machine other than to say it was assigned to the defendant at the time. This is the key outcome of your discovery. The evidence chain that ties the defendent to the IP address and file sharing in general is broken. Nowhere is that clearer than in the answer that starts at p. 114, line 13. The statement on wireless is, of course, bogus. Wireless routers use DHCP just like practically everything else. If a machine wouldn't show evidence of a DHCP address for one set of circumstances, it won't show evidence for any others. The status of a device as wireless is all but invisible downstream on the internet. That statement should never have been made. What troubles me is that it was even asked for. The question should have been whether there was any evidence that the IP address was shared with any other machines. The answer to that still might (probably would) have been no, but it was something that could have been investigated through the registry. Machines do sometimes notice and make a record of other machines in their network neighborhood. In other words, some aspects of his investigation (those related to IP addresses) are suspect, but others (those related to the hard disk) are not, at least from the perspective of what he was paid to do. Davis
This report and the study underneath it are useless. Publicizing it at all means there are still people trying to justify ignoring realities that everyone else understands.
Three years of data does not even begin to make a long term trend. Polar bears threatened with extinction because ice that has been in place practically forever is disappearing makes a much more compelling long term trend.
There has been a lot of debate over global warming in the wake of this article. There shouldn't be. This has nothing to say about it that we didn't already know based on historical sun cycles for which we have a lot more data. Mars should be warming a bit. The sun is near the peak of a cycle. The earth should be warming a bit too, just not nearly as much as it is.
Davis
My optimism about iPhone as a tablet just reduced substantially. If I can't program it its of no interest to me. Heck, I imagined a minor bit of programming that I'd like to have on an iPhone as I was driving back from a Chorus rehearsal tonight. Unless Apple has already thought of it, I'd be out of luck.
I'll be interested again when they repackage it as a Mac mini-tablet computer.
Everything I saw in the videos was great, especially the part about many Mac apps working with it. As it stands now, I'm sure I can do more with a Nokia 770 or 800.
There will still be a large market for this phone. Most people cannot program and would not be interested in doing so on their cell phone. But with this decision Apple has given up a secondary market that might have kickstarted their sales.
All joking aside, the success of any new communication technology depends on it being useful for a variety (preferably a broad variety) of different purposes. This isn't a particularly new observation, but I've documented evidence for it elsewhere. For better or worse, one purpose that is often seen as desirable is education. One that is frequently seen as undesirable is pornography. I understand the reasons for the the widely shared bias that leads to these judgments. I'm a fan of education and haven't much use for most of the things that are currently regarded as pornography.
It remains, however, that pornography is an important benchmark in the success of new media. I frequently summarize the nature of this benchmark (see, for example http://evolutionarymedia.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?WhyN ewMediaMatter) as three "laws of new media":
This pattern holds for a huge number of new media going back over 100 years. The nature of what has been deemed pornographic has changed along the way. Jazz, for instance, was once frequently described as pornographic. It was the porn of early records and broadcast radio. It remains that porn users are often one of the first mainstream sets of users to widely adopt new media, that their opinions and equipment purchases often drive other uses of the medium, and that the publicity generated by the anti-porn movement often raises awareness of the communication technology and its potentially useful applications.
I can understand SONY not wanting to invoke the wrath of the considerable anti-porn movement (religious, feminist, and otherwise), but history suggests that SONY is reducing BLU-Rays chances of success by taking a hard line on it.
All the comments I see here miss the big point. It doesn't matter whether the iPhone is a better telephone or a more expensive telephone. What matters is that it is a MacIntosh tablet computer that also happens to be a telephone. As a Mac tablet, its cheap (only a third more than the Nokia N800 tablet, but at least a third more powerful. The phone, from where I sit, is just a bonus, even if it is the point of the exercise and its initial marketing focus. Its almost worth switching to Cingular to have the computer. Indeed, if it fails as a phone, they'll just move it to 802.11g and rebrand it as an iTablet. Indeed, I'll be surprised if they don't do this eventually anyway.
Invoking the term "Craplets" is, at best, a new MicroSoft strategy to acquire by word of mouth that which they are no longer allowed to acquire through licensing terms. At worst, its setting up an excuse for Vista's failure.
Its hard to believe that so many people don't see this as yet another Microsoft strategy to shore up their "monopoly" position. I assume that at least some of the people responding are Microsoft trolls (e.g. paid advocates for their software).
Yes, OEM's often add a lot of non-Microsoft content to their machines, and yes, some of it is badly written (the same can be said for a lot of the Microsoft content), and yes, OEM's often get paid to put some portion of the non-MS content there. PC's are competitively priced commodities and it can be very difficult to turn a profit on a machine without resorting to this kind of product advertising. But a lot of useful software usually gets included as well, especially since Microsoft consent decrees have put a stop to the old Microsoft practice of banning the addition of some competitive products to the machine.
OEM's can put Firefox, Opera, Netscape or some other non-MS browser on the desktop today. One wishes that more did. There was a time when OEM's couldn't ship Netscape or other competitive browsers on new Windows shipments because they'd have to pay a penalty to Microsoft if they did. That's why Netscape is no longer a company.
There was a time when Lotus 123 was the leading spreadsheet, Wordperfect was the leading word processor, and so on. Microsoft wrote licenses that penalized OEMs for shipping the competitors and, for a year or so, made Word and Excel available to OEM's as a part of the Windows bundle. Just who couldn't sell a copy of their software for over a year (Lotus and Novell). Guess who leveraged an operating system monopoly into a monopoly in Word Processing and Spreadsheets (Microsoft). Guess which spreadsheet is still better (123). Its sad. It really is.
Yes, AOL, Earthlink, and others frequently litter the new desktops, and that's one of the reasons why MSN hasn't become yet another Microsoft monopoly. Overall a very good thing.
Yes, Quicken is frequently shipped on new machines, and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft Money hasn't become yet another Microsoft monopoly. Again, a very good thing.
The same is true for other software.
I don't plan to move to Vista. Heck, the only reason I own XP licenses is that I contracted to do some programming on the platform. MS software never improves. It just acquires more sources of failure. I've been systematically moving to Linux and MacIntosh. Nothing I've seen about Vista so far has done anything but increase my determination to move Microsoft off my machines.
In fairness, the development of PC's starts in 1974 too; earlier if you accept the arguments of some in IBM. The Altair kit appears in early 1975; Bill Gates' Basic implementation follows fairly quickly. Apple starts shipping fully built machines a year later. I don't want to make a big deal out of that ... and it certainly isn't my attempt to make light of your work, which is the beginning of a long series of efforts aimed at delivering graphics to, depending on how you want to view it, home machines and pixilated (rather than vector) screens. The fact is that microprocessors made many things possible that weren't possible without them. The 6502's and Z80's that powered your early Videotex powered early PC's as well.
Videotex was the logical extension of the prevailing model of computing in the mid-1970's, that of a central host delivering content to dumb terminals. Personal Computers, starting with the Altair, was the beginning of new model, one of personal computers interacting with servers/services. The corporations and other institutions that bet big on Videotex were making a sensible bet given the prevailing model, and the work they financed has paid dividends in PC content standards, software, services, and programmers. The small startups that made PC's happen were making much less sensible bets, but their bets panned out.
My comments were made from a very 1979 plus perspective. While I saw a lot of e-mail, bulletin boards, network services, and nascent PC's going into that period, I didn't really encounter Videotex in any serious way until I was finishing grad school. I am aware that planning and preparing for Videotex long preceded its exploitation, but the same can be said, to at least some extent, for PC's as well.
Nonresizable web pages with fixed fonts drive me crazy too. I was never a fan of flash until recently. The web desktop programs, most of which are done with flash (and several of which appear to be resizable) are converting me. My son, who programs UI's in meta-languages that produce flash UI's based on XML and code, has been a big fan for a while, but there are lots of badly done web pages whose worst feature is their flash requirements. That's particularly true for people with slow connections.
My personal dislike is PDF's, which seem to serve no other purpose beyond translating paper to the computer. I use them when I have to (and clearly prefer them to distributing word or powerpoint files, but so long as you aren't insistent on preserving dead tree metaphors, generic HTML (no fixed fonts) is the way to go. Well done (as in Dreamweaver), moreover, HTML is usually much less expensive in bytes than NAPLPS was, which makes it a better choice for low speed connections.
I still design all my pages with the presumption that someone will try to access them using a low speed connection and a screen with unpredictable resolution and font sizes. A good practice, I think.
I don't think it is an unfair criticism. Videotex rolls out more or less in parallel with the arrival of Personal Computers, a number of which featured graphics that were better than Videotex without any of the contortions that Videotex standards used. I will give credit. They were trying to make the best of very slow dial-up connections (often as slow as 110 bps back them; sometimes a third that speed) and to leverage already ubiquitous televisions. From that perspective they probably succeeded in making a silk purse of a sows ear. But anyone with any significant experience using Apple, Commodore, or (especially) Exidy machines knew that the effort was likely to prove a waste of time. I was fortunate. At the time I was editing "EMMS" (Electronic Mail and Message Systems) rather than its sister publication "Videotext" (both $250 a year newsletters). I never had to pretend that Videotex was a good long term investment. That said, I was a big supporter of Prodigy when came out, mostly because of its interactive conferencing and e-mail capabilities, but I always found the NAPLPS screens painful because you couldn't cut and paste text.