Come on, give the guys a break. They're extracting the nanoceramic material on the assembly line right next to the one harvesting nano setae from gecko feet for their famous Gecko Glue.
"The whole point of HTTP" was meant within the context of the discussion of different RPC transports, not as a qualifier of HTTP in general. IOW, the reason to choose HTTP over plain sockets would be because of the higher firewall tolerance, because there's little else speaking for it otherwise. Of course you'd still want to filter HTTP at a higher level in that case, even though exploits become harder to discover and more application specific the more you move up the protocol stack. Double sigh.
> Maybe one of you non-"artsy" developers can mod it to spit out XUL?
That would be nice, but in most enterprises the bottom line is still the underlying technology: are you generating ASP or not? If not, it really doesn't matter how good and productive the tools. Heck, it's not like the world has been wanting for productive distributed app tools and frameworks. In many shops, the question is only which Microsoft-provided technologies are the most productive.
> And ditch HTTP for communications. Try Jabber.
Can't argue with that. How about plain sockets if we're ditching HTTP anyway? The point of HTTP though is that it's firewall friendlier, so together with XML-RPC, SOAP, or a roll-your-own marshalling mechanism, it provides a viable RPC alternative.
> You're right, the browser is a crap interface. If you actually > understood the technology being described, you would realise > that it is an improvement to the interface to make all those > things happen.
No, a real improvement to the interface would be to move away from any technologies that mix (D)HTML and executable code. It's a recipe for unmaintainability and for driving self-respecting desktop developers to despair. True advances in distributed apps are approaches such as Mozilla's XUL. Alas, they're a step away from the quasi-declarative "programming" of (D)HTML back to the procedural programming of C and its descendants, not something artsy web "developers" like to hear.
> Fraunhoffer would be sitting on a worthless patent, > there would be no iPod-killer markets, there would > be no portable player market.
Ummm, portable players weren't even remotely thought of when mp3 was developed. Its purpose was to be the audio layer for mpeg video streams, which it addressed very successfully. Whatever came later was a bonus. In fact, Fraunhofer probably didn't say anything for a long time because this music-only application came out of nowhere and was so remote from their target application that they didn't see it as a threat.
> Why is it you have concluded that the mere observation > of a difference between men and women automatically > results in the limiting of women's opportunities?
Because high visibility public figures RARELY ever make public statements like these WITHOUT an agenda. It wouldn't be worth their breath. Now, their agenda may be politically motivated, or merely biologically--airing innate views on the order of things, or the order things SHOULD be in. But you will very rarely find someone merely stating a fact or statistic for the purpose of being on the record of having said so. In the same vein, you will rarely hear the pres of Harvard making pronouncements on the week's weather.
While he's out spouting statistics, why not keep on going with stats on probabilities of academic achievement by blacks, whites and Asians? I'm sure he could come up with some very juicy numbers there, too. But while talking about women may merely create some welcome and attention-getting "controversy", the latter would be certain professional suicide.
There are viable alternatives to TiVo nowadays. I think TiVo and Replay did the really hard work of proving that the concept really works and creating mindshare for time shifting, and I thank them for that. At the time it pretty much required hardware for real-time encoding, so the entry point for open source or free projects was pretty high. But now that the concept has been proven, and CPU power is high enough to encode purely in software, alternatives are mushrooming. MythTV seems to work quite well, and even though installing it can be quite a pain (that they will have to address sooner or later if they want to get a lot more popular), that's a one-time thing.
> Yes, it does work crappy even replay sucks on the digital channels, > no box on/off detection and you are never sure of channel changes
Hang on now, the TiVo box works very well with my ancient serially controlled RCA DirecTV box. None of that IR blaster nonsense, of course, but channel control is rock solid via serial. You don't need on/off detection because there's no need to turn the sat box off, ever. Mine has been on non-stop since 1998 and is still going strong. And since I never see the sat box front-end because of TiVo, I don't care about its 1998 GUI and such.
> something that works perfectly with your digital box, can record > a digital channel WHILE you watch another digital channel? > something that is also 100% impossible with Tivo and Replay?
You mean like the DirevTV TiVo box (a.k.a. DirecTiVo)? Works very well re what you're saying, and since it's still a pre-series 2 box, it's also very hackable. Plus you can pick them up dirt cheap nowadays. Of course, no analog cable support at all, but hey!
Other than that, I agree with you. Replay have definitely been pushing the edge, but they've also been sued to oblivion. I guess TiVo wanted to avoid that fate by keeping their heads low, but you only get so far by dancing with the devil. If they haven't pushed new features for fear of being sued by Hollywood, I guess this is how far you get with that policy.
I tell you what: you stop posting as AC and we'll see who's the moron then. While I haven't been the earliest of adopters, my HDR312 box is pushing up there in age, and I've certainly paid my dues all along (what exactly would the point be w/o the "service"?)
All the new features you're talking about are little compared to the base functionality offered by the original product. They are also features offered by their competitor well ahead. But TiVo must be surely glad for all the unquestioning cheerleaders such as yourself, who have made their long nap possible.
Incidentally, judging by your language, I think there's little doubt who the college kid is.
It's got less to do with others than with themselves. They worked hard to get the first product out, and then thought that the hard work was over. They haven't done anything truly innovative since v1.0, and never had a really good concept on how to make money beyond gouging customers $10 a month (later $13) for yet another TV guide. I've said it for a long time, they should have accessorized the TiVo like video game companies do, that's where the real money is. There's really not much of a "service" aspect to what TiVo does, and trying to artificially create one by selling the guide as such only angers those customers that see what's going on. They should have released their own branded external expansion hard drives (using 1394 over a proprietary connector if they wanted, to lower competition), they should have brought out external branded DVD or CD recorders and let the consumers burn shows (CD burners along with SVCD creation three years ago would have been the cat's meow, when DVD-Rs were still expensive), they should have offered unit-to-unit networking and cooperative recording and scheduling years ago, using their own branded Ethernet adapters, etc, etc, etc... Instead they took a good long nap and let the rest of the world pass them by. Oh well, I got my money's worth out of my TiVo, I won't be shedding a single tear when they pass.
I have a Sony Ericsson T610, and it's very easy to push java apps to the phone straight from the desktop via Bluetooth. Several of the build-in games are Java, and while no speed deamons, some are quite elaborate and functional. Plus you can call web services (via HTTP), though most phones don't provide direct socket support.
> But I guess there is no debate with someone like you.
You want to know a funny thing? I'm just echoing the view of quite a few industry analysts in this respect, it's hardly my very own, original and out-of-the-mainstream thought. It just puzzles me why you'd take the whole thing so personally, as if Oracle were your very own company that I just defamed.
> Do you remember the last time a programmer was involved in making any such decision?
Who said anything about programmers?! Purchasing decision makers are responsible to someone for the decisions they make, and justifying the selection of a dying product with a fistful of Grease On Ice tickets won't get too many out of the hot seat.
I'm just having a hard time seeing how exactly this is going to increase their market share. Existing PeopleSoft customers would have followed the whole Oracle/PeopleSoft ballet with great interest and many would probably have developed the same attitude towards Oracle as witnessed here. So when it comes time to switch--since we pretty much know that Oracle will kill PeopleSoft's products--why not simply move to the market leader? What exactly would be the incentive for picking Oracle over SAP? Incentive pricing can't be it, because this is not a terribly price-driven industry anyway. In the end it would come down to product strength and public image. I don't see Oracle shining in either area.
> heh, newb - FED displays have been vaporware > for a lot longer than that
I think Byte did one or two of those technology "exposé" article with two-page glossies on FD, so I guess it was more than 8 years ago then. When did Byte die anyway, and I mean the print edition?
Yeah, after I posted that I went over to Borland to check what's going on with Kylix nowadays. Not much, apparently. Still at v3. Oh well, and to think of the breathless anticipation before they released the first version. Borland are awesome at killing their own markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, give the guys a break. They're extracting the nanoceramic material on the assembly line right next to the one harvesting nano setae from gecko feet for their famous Gecko Glue.
> The New York Times says talks are fluid and sensitive.
IOW, there's a lot of spitting and cursing.
It's hard to untrain graduates of the Donald Rumsfeld Academy Of Rhetorical Reasoning.
"The whole point of HTTP" was meant within the context of the discussion of different RPC transports, not as a qualifier of HTTP in general. IOW, the reason to choose HTTP over plain sockets would be because of the higher firewall tolerance, because there's little else speaking for it otherwise. Of course you'd still want to filter HTTP at a higher level in that case, even though exploits become harder to discover and more application specific the more you move up the protocol stack. Double sigh.
> Maybe one of you non-"artsy" developers can mod it to spit out XUL?
That would be nice, but in most enterprises the bottom line is still the underlying technology: are you generating ASP or not? If not, it really doesn't matter how good and productive the tools. Heck, it's not like the world has been wanting for productive distributed app tools and frameworks. In many shops, the question is only which Microsoft-provided technologies are the most productive.
> And ditch HTTP for communications. Try Jabber.
Can't argue with that. How about plain sockets if we're ditching HTTP anyway? The point of HTTP though is that it's firewall friendlier, so together with XML-RPC, SOAP, or a roll-your-own marshalling mechanism, it provides a viable RPC alternative.
You could also steal...
Actually, no. How can you do something AFTER you have informed someone that you HAVE ALREADY done it?
> You're right, the browser is a crap interface. If you actually
> understood the technology being described, you would realise
> that it is an improvement to the interface to make all those
> things happen.
No, a real improvement to the interface would be to move away from any technologies that mix (D)HTML and executable code. It's a recipe for unmaintainability and for driving self-respecting desktop developers to despair. True advances in distributed apps are approaches such as Mozilla's XUL. Alas, they're a step away from the quasi-declarative "programming" of (D)HTML back to the procedural programming of C and its descendants, not something artsy web "developers" like to hear.
Actually, it's called a temporal anomaly.
> Fraunhoffer would be sitting on a worthless patent,
> there would be no iPod-killer markets, there would
> be no portable player market.
Ummm, portable players weren't even remotely thought of when mp3 was developed. Its purpose was to be the audio layer for mpeg video streams, which it addressed very successfully. Whatever came later was a bonus. In fact, Fraunhofer probably didn't say anything for a long time because this music-only application came out of nowhere and was so remote from their target application that they didn't see it as a threat.
- it is not on an invention
- didn't take time and effort
- there's probably prior art
Dude, you know not whereof you speak. You really know nothing about the origins and history of mp3, do you?
> and only break them after informing interested parties
> (e.g.: Thomson) that you have broken them
?!
> Why is it you have concluded that the mere observation
> of a difference between men and women automatically
> results in the limiting of women's opportunities?
Because high visibility public figures RARELY ever make public statements like these WITHOUT an agenda. It wouldn't be worth their breath. Now, their agenda may be politically motivated, or merely biologically--airing innate views on the order of things, or the order things SHOULD be in. But you will very rarely find someone merely stating a fact or statistic for the purpose of being on the record of having said so. In the same vein, you will rarely hear the pres of Harvard making pronouncements on the week's weather.
While he's out spouting statistics, why not keep on going with stats on probabilities of academic achievement by blacks, whites and Asians? I'm sure he could come up with some very juicy numbers there, too. But while talking about women may merely create some welcome and attention-getting "controversy", the latter would be certain professional suicide.
There are viable alternatives to TiVo nowadays. I think TiVo and Replay did the really hard work of proving that the concept really works and creating mindshare for time shifting, and I thank them for that. At the time it pretty much required hardware for real-time encoding, so the entry point for open source or free projects was pretty high. But now that the concept has been proven, and CPU power is high enough to encode purely in software, alternatives are mushrooming. MythTV seems to work quite well, and even though installing it can be quite a pain (that they will have to address sooner or later if they want to get a lot more popular), that's a one-time thing.
> Yes, it does work crappy even replay sucks on the digital channels,
> no box on/off detection and you are never sure of channel changes
Hang on now, the TiVo box works very well with my ancient serially controlled RCA DirecTV box. None of that IR blaster nonsense, of course, but channel control is rock solid via serial. You don't need on/off detection because there's no need to turn the sat box off, ever. Mine has been on non-stop since 1998 and is still going strong. And since I never see the sat box front-end because of TiVo, I don't care about its 1998 GUI and such.
> something that works perfectly with your digital box, can record
> a digital channel WHILE you watch another digital channel?
> something that is also 100% impossible with Tivo and Replay?
You mean like the DirevTV TiVo box (a.k.a. DirecTiVo)? Works very well re what you're saying, and since it's still a pre-series 2 box, it's also very hackable. Plus you can pick them up dirt cheap nowadays. Of course, no analog cable support at all, but hey!
Other than that, I agree with you. Replay have definitely been pushing the edge, but they've also been sued to oblivion. I guess TiVo wanted to avoid that fate by keeping their heads low, but you only get so far by dancing with the devil. If they haven't pushed new features for fear of being sued by Hollywood, I guess this is how far you get with that policy.
I tell you what: you stop posting as AC and we'll see who's the moron then. While I haven't been the earliest of adopters, my HDR312 box is pushing up there in age, and I've certainly paid my dues all along (what exactly would the point be w/o the "service"?)
All the new features you're talking about are little compared to the base functionality offered by the original product. They are also features offered by their competitor well ahead. But TiVo must be surely glad for all the unquestioning cheerleaders such as yourself, who have made their long nap possible.
Incidentally, judging by your language, I think there's little doubt who the college kid is.
It's got less to do with others than with themselves. They worked hard to get the first product out, and then thought that the hard work was over. They haven't done anything truly innovative since v1.0, and never had a really good concept on how to make money beyond gouging customers $10 a month (later $13) for yet another TV guide. I've said it for a long time, they should have accessorized the TiVo like video game companies do, that's where the real money is. There's really not much of a "service" aspect to what TiVo does, and trying to artificially create one by selling the guide as such only angers those customers that see what's going on. They should have released their own branded external expansion hard drives (using 1394 over a proprietary connector if they wanted, to lower competition), they should have brought out external branded DVD or CD recorders and let the consumers burn shows (CD burners along with SVCD creation three years ago would have been the cat's meow, when DVD-Rs were still expensive), they should have offered unit-to-unit networking and cooperative recording and scheduling years ago, using their own branded Ethernet adapters, etc, etc, etc... Instead they took a good long nap and let the rest of the world pass them by. Oh well, I got my money's worth out of my TiVo, I won't be shedding a single tear when they pass.
I have a Sony Ericsson T610, and it's very easy to push java apps to the phone straight from the desktop via Bluetooth. Several of the build-in games are Java, and while no speed deamons, some are quite elaborate and functional. Plus you can call web services (via HTTP), though most phones don't provide direct socket support.
> But I guess there is no debate with someone like you.
You want to know a funny thing? I'm just echoing the view of quite a few industry analysts in this respect, it's hardly my very own, original and out-of-the-mainstream thought. It just puzzles me why you'd take the whole thing so personally, as if Oracle were your very own company that I just defamed.
> Do you remember the last time a programmer was involved in making any such decision?
Who said anything about programmers?! Purchasing decision makers are responsible to someone for the decisions they make, and justifying the selection of a dying product with a fistful of Grease On Ice tickets won't get too many out of the hot seat.
> If anything, the products will become better and a central focus,
> just to prove PeopleSoft customers they are welcome.
Well, I guess that remains to be seen, won't it?
I'm just having a hard time seeing how exactly this is going to increase their market share. Existing PeopleSoft customers would have followed the whole Oracle/PeopleSoft ballet with great interest and many would probably have developed the same attitude towards Oracle as witnessed here. So when it comes time to switch--since we pretty much know that Oracle will kill PeopleSoft's products--why not simply move to the market leader? What exactly would be the incentive for picking Oracle over SAP? Incentive pricing can't be it, because this is not a terribly price-driven industry anyway. In the end it would come down to product strength and public image. I don't see Oracle shining in either area.
> heh, newb - FED displays have been vaporware
> for a lot longer than that
I think Byte did one or two of those technology "exposé" article with two-page glossies on FD, so I guess it was more than 8 years ago then. When did Byte die anyway, and I mean the print edition?
Jesus, I've been reading about FEDs for like 8 years now. I keep going to Wal-Mart every week to check, but they still don't carry them.
Yeah, after I posted that I went over to Borland to check what's going on with Kylix nowadays. Not much, apparently. Still at v3. Oh well, and to think of the breathless anticipation before they released the first version. Borland are awesome at killing their own markets.