Then what do Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM, Apple, Palm, Sony/Ericcson, Nokia, and all the other companies who aren't carriers but whose logos still appear on the handsets/batteries/chargers, contribute to the cell phone market?
Proponents say they are key to promoting innovation
I laugh every time I read this absurd argument. Patents are not about promoting innovation, they are about protecting intellectual property, even if that term is far younger than the patent concept. They are about creating a limited time micro-monopoly in order to stifle competition.
Patents aren't bad, but they have been allowed to get out of hand (Bezos, I'm looking at you). Business method, software, and DNA patents are abuses of the patent concept. Furthermore, the pace of technological advancement is faster now than it ever has been, and will only get faster; patent duration must be shortened appropriately.
The author mentions that the varying dog breeds would be thought of as separate species if found in the fossil record, and that's probably true. There are paleontologists who argue about whether a certain small T. Rex fossil is a dwarf species or a juvenile. The hairs to be split can be quite thin.
Given that, would the morphological differences between human populations constitute splitting Home Sapiens into separate species? I think not.
The only thing this proposal will do is give the creationist/ID idiots another straw man argument: "scientists change things to justify their point of view!" The truth is, those morons are going to cling to their dogma not matter how much evidence piles up against it. We've seen it before: the Earth is flat; the Sun revolves around the Earth; Earth is 6000 years old; et cetera.
Speciation is such a slow process that we can only see it in the simplest of organisms, such as algae or bacteria. But that's not good enough for them. They apparently want to see two chimps mate and produce a human (which is absurd), and proves that they refuse to understand the subject matter.
Agreed, the browser wars are over. MS cheated and won.
Now IE has real competition for the first time in about a decade, and MS knows they can't actually compete on quality or features. They've given up on IE and forcing people to use it as a way to control the web... now they've shifted focus to control how the web itself works. IMO, Chris Wilson, as the chair of the HTML working group, is a mole.
The entire antivirus industry exists because Microsoft can't effectively design and implement a security model.
You've already paid $x for the operating system (whether retail box, MS tax, or service contract), you should expect that product to be secure. But it isn't. A simpler, more direct, and more effective approach would be to penalize the OS makers for producing insecure products.
As an analogy, automakers could never get away with putting a lock on only one door.
From what I've heard since IE7 was in development (and I'm no MS hanger-on), Trident is a mess of spaghetti code and patches. If they are creating a new engine, it will be their first one built from scratch, and someone inside Redmond realized what a nightmare Trident is.
More likely Gazelle is a ruse, as is interest in WebKit. I wouldn't be surprised if MS attempted a hostile takeover of Opera. Opera doesn't have that much usage share among desktops/laptops, but its share on cell phones and other mobile devices is huge.
For too long, too many self-described "web designers" have relied on Dreamweaver and its ilk to do their jobs for them. These people are not "web designers", they are graphic designers who think web documents are a blank canvas to be painted on, such as when they open a new file in Photoshop or Illustrator. The web is not a 3-panel brochure.
This delusion is fostered by their uninformed clients and bosses who only consider what looks good and how fast (cheap) it is produced. Little explicit attention is paid to usability, readability, or accessibility.
Good riddance, I say. The day these monkeys no longer have a crutch can not come soon enough.
Microsoft's stance that fixing IE will break the web is counter intuitive propaganda. They broke the web when they failed to keep IE's standards compliance up to date, and since they strong-armed themselves to the top of the browser share pile, much of the web is built to satisfy their flawed implementation.
MS is giving that chunk of the web an incentive to fix itself... it's already broken.
If MS would approach this with some humility and logic, more people would understand that it's not the sites that are broken, it's the blue E.
Let's face it, MS realized they missed a market (the internet) and leveraged Windows to take it over by bundling IE, destroying the non-free browser market. IE won the browser wars because users associated it with the internet, and since they already "had the internet", they had no reason to look for another one. Whether IE was better than Netscape is debatable, in my opinion.
Firefox has made inroads because tech savvy people finally had something they could evangelize, backed by an organization that realized it had to market their browser to users, and brought with it real innovation that was relevant to the users: addons.
IE is now clearly inferior to every other browser, but its share won't wane as quickly as it waxed. Should MS give up on IE? I think so... they've shown they have little incentive or ability to make significant improvements to what a browser is supposed to do: correctly implement web standards. Will they? Doubtful, until MS decides that playing in the browser market is a drain. Which they've already hinted at.
Exercises like this might be fun, but they have no practical purpose.
Linux desktops aren't marketed, they are judged by their users based on useful metrics: configuration options, stability, tools, etc.
In Windows world, 95, XP, and Vista were all marketed to the public primarily by showing static screens illustrating how pretty they were. Windows' classic interface looks bland today, but it was hip in the 90's. XP's fisher price interface was a hackish step further. Aero is a half-hearted catchup maneuver to Linux and OSX, delivered in a business-minded blandness that only Microsoft thinks is "innovative". Each of those versions were marketed the same, but received differently based on almost everything except their appearance. No one has ever said UAC prompts are pretty, they're too busy being annoyed by them.
Which desktop is more visually attractive has little to do with how much can be done with it, and how efficiently.
Windows will be little safer without IE. They'll remove the iexplore.exe stub and the six DLL's that make IE appear to be a separate application, but mshtml.dll and the other Windows files that IE leverages will still be there.
I have a beardie also, and have tried to get a small colony started but haven't managed to get past the third generation. For long space missions, I don't think raising silks onboard is feasible. 100 silkworms can eat a pound of food during their larval stage (6 weeks), and many more would be required to sustain the flight crew. They have to be kept in rather strict conditions, and feeding lots of them is a constant chore.
Packing freeze dried pupae prior to takeoff is probably the more efficient option.
Over the past decade or more, cable fees have increased at 6 times the rate of inflation. Clearly the cable companies are greedy.
Perhaps TimeWarner could reduce their costs by shutting down their OnDemand shopping channels which I'm sure no one uses. This would also free up a lot of commercial time for real advertisers. Has TW said whether their rates will be lowered accordingly when these channels become unavailable?
That said, all of Viacom's channels have no interest for me other than Comedy Central (Daily Show, Colbert Report, and occasionally South Park), and Spike (for the original CSI).
The Wiimote and nunchuck (as well as the other Wii controller accessories) are the biggest innovation in console user interface since 1985, when the NES introduced the horizontal controller form factor that has dominated consoles since then. Nintendo would be making a huge mistake if they went backwards on controller design.
Does anyone else feel like Nintendo dropped the ball with the Virtual Console? There aren't that many channels, Wii Ware selection is still sparse and uncompelling, and the titles released from old console systems don't interest me, partly because what they have put out is crap that didn't sell in the first place.
I've had 2500 Wii points sitting unspent waiting for the Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior titles from the NES and SNES. The only reason I can think of preventing this is some licensing issue with Square Enix or possibly Sony. Any insight on that?
Either Ballmer is throwing out a red herring, or future versions of IE (presumably after 8) will finally be decoupled from Windows.
But, what open source browser engines are there other than Gecko and Webkit? Both are developed by MS' sworn mortal enemies. Browsers are complex, time consuming beasts to develop.
As a long time, hard core tabletop RPG player, online "*RPG" games so far do not interest me. In my view, an RPG is more than a wide range of character races and classes set in an environment which is essentially a first person shooter/slasher with some largely static and repetitive quests thrown in. Eye candy isn't a selling point for me; playing in an environment which more closely resembles the fully interactive, freeform environment of tabletop games is what I've been waiting for.
What are the issues (hardware, AI, network, players) which prevent this from being achieved in online games whose genre lays claim to the RPG moniker?
I saw this ad last night, and my first reaction was to wish that someone spliced in a clip saying "I'm a PC, and I run Linux!".
Obviously Apple can't say "Windows" for legal reasons, but do both companies have to conflate hardware architecture with operating system, especially since Macs have had all PC components for a few years now?
Then I noticed the new slogan for Windows: Life Without Walls. Did anyone in Redmond think about this? It's absurd:
Walls provide security and privacy. In meatspace, we have cubicle walls, castle walls, dressing room walls, etc. In computing, we have firewalls.
Without walls, there is no need for Windows. Or Gates.
Either MS has finally admitted to Windows' continual flaws and are trying to sell them as advantages, or they have no idea what the possible negative meanings of that slogan are.
IE has had the same rendering engine, Trident, since IE4 (1997). MS may claim significant improvements in standards support, but in reality, they seem to only pick the bugs that have names. After five publicly available iterations (up to IE7), why is their overall standards support at least 25% below, on a feature by feature basis, nearly every other rendering engine?
Plus, I have yet to hear anything to rebut the rumors that MS simply can't fix Trident because the code is such a mess, and they "don't want to break websites", which is one of the most backwards arguments for anything on any topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Video was a piece of bait for forcing HTML5 down everyone's throats. Now can we move on to dropping the whole spec?
Then what do Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM, Apple, Palm, Sony/Ericcson, Nokia, and all the other companies who aren't carriers but whose logos still appear on the handsets/batteries/chargers, contribute to the cell phone market?
I laugh every time I read this absurd argument. Patents are not about promoting innovation, they are about protecting intellectual property, even if that term is far younger than the patent concept. They are about creating a limited time micro-monopoly in order to stifle competition.
Patents aren't bad, but they have been allowed to get out of hand (Bezos, I'm looking at you). Business method, software, and DNA patents are abuses of the patent concept. Furthermore, the pace of technological advancement is faster now than it ever has been, and will only get faster; patent duration must be shortened appropriately.
The author mentions that the varying dog breeds would be thought of as separate species if found in the fossil record, and that's probably true. There are paleontologists who argue about whether a certain small T. Rex fossil is a dwarf species or a juvenile. The hairs to be split can be quite thin.
Given that, would the morphological differences between human populations constitute splitting Home Sapiens into separate species? I think not.
The only thing this proposal will do is give the creationist/ID idiots another straw man argument: "scientists change things to justify their point of view!" The truth is, those morons are going to cling to their dogma not matter how much evidence piles up against it. We've seen it before: the Earth is flat; the Sun revolves around the Earth; Earth is 6000 years old; et cetera.
Speciation is such a slow process that we can only see it in the simplest of organisms, such as algae or bacteria. But that's not good enough for them. They apparently want to see two chimps mate and produce a human (which is absurd), and proves that they refuse to understand the subject matter.
Agreed, the browser wars are over. MS cheated and won.
Now IE has real competition for the first time in about a decade, and MS knows they can't actually compete on quality or features. They've given up on IE and forcing people to use it as a way to control the web... now they've shifted focus to control how the web itself works. IMO, Chris Wilson, as the chair of the HTML working group, is a mole.
The standards wars are upon us. Long live XHTML2.
The entire antivirus industry exists because Microsoft can't effectively design and implement a security model.
You've already paid $x for the operating system (whether retail box, MS tax, or service contract), you should expect that product to be secure. But it isn't. A simpler, more direct, and more effective approach would be to penalize the OS makers for producing insecure products.
As an analogy, automakers could never get away with putting a lock on only one door.
Why do software makers accrue so many apologists?
From what I've heard since IE7 was in development (and I'm no MS hanger-on), Trident is a mess of spaghetti code and patches. If they are creating a new engine, it will be their first one built from scratch, and someone inside Redmond realized what a nightmare Trident is.
More likely Gazelle is a ruse, as is interest in WebKit. I wouldn't be surprised if MS attempted a hostile takeover of Opera. Opera doesn't have that much usage share among desktops/laptops, but its share on cell phones and other mobile devices is huge.
... so I can neglect to send flowers.
For too long, too many self-described "web designers" have relied on Dreamweaver and its ilk to do their jobs for them. These people are not "web designers", they are graphic designers who think web documents are a blank canvas to be painted on, such as when they open a new file in Photoshop or Illustrator. The web is not a 3-panel brochure.
This delusion is fostered by their uninformed clients and bosses who only consider what looks good and how fast (cheap) it is produced. Little explicit attention is paid to usability, readability, or accessibility.
Good riddance, I say. The day these monkeys no longer have a crutch can not come soon enough.
RTFM is no substitute for a self-documenting and discoverable UI.
My sentiments exactly.
Microsoft's stance that fixing IE will break the web is counter intuitive propaganda. They broke the web when they failed to keep IE's standards compliance up to date, and since they strong-armed themselves to the top of the browser share pile, much of the web is built to satisfy their flawed implementation.
MS is giving that chunk of the web an incentive to fix itself... it's already broken.
If MS would approach this with some humility and logic, more people would understand that it's not the sites that are broken, it's the blue E.
TM?
Let's face it, MS realized they missed a market (the internet) and leveraged Windows to take it over by bundling IE, destroying the non-free browser market. IE won the browser wars because users associated it with the internet, and since they already "had the internet", they had no reason to look for another one. Whether IE was better than Netscape is debatable, in my opinion.
Firefox has made inroads because tech savvy people finally had something they could evangelize, backed by an organization that realized it had to market their browser to users, and brought with it real innovation that was relevant to the users: addons.
IE is now clearly inferior to every other browser, but its share won't wane as quickly as it waxed. Should MS give up on IE? I think so... they've shown they have little incentive or ability to make significant improvements to what a browser is supposed to do: correctly implement web standards. Will they? Doubtful, until MS decides that playing in the browser market is a drain. Which they've already hinted at.
Exercises like this might be fun, but they have no practical purpose.
Linux desktops aren't marketed, they are judged by their users based on useful metrics: configuration options, stability, tools, etc.
In Windows world, 95, XP, and Vista were all marketed to the public primarily by showing static screens illustrating how pretty they were. Windows' classic interface looks bland today, but it was hip in the 90's. XP's fisher price interface was a hackish step further. Aero is a half-hearted catchup maneuver to Linux and OSX, delivered in a business-minded blandness that only Microsoft thinks is "innovative". Each of those versions were marketed the same, but received differently based on almost everything except their appearance. No one has ever said UAC prompts are pretty, they're too busy being annoyed by them.
Which desktop is more visually attractive has little to do with how much can be done with it, and how efficiently.
Windows will be little safer without IE. They'll remove the iexplore.exe stub and the six DLL's that make IE appear to be a separate application, but mshtml.dll and the other Windows files that IE leverages will still be there.
And, this is too little, too late.
I have a beardie also, and have tried to get a small colony started but haven't managed to get past the third generation. For long space missions, I don't think raising silks onboard is feasible. 100 silkworms can eat a pound of food during their larval stage (6 weeks), and many more would be required to sustain the flight crew. They have to be kept in rather strict conditions, and feeding lots of them is a constant chore.
Packing freeze dried pupae prior to takeoff is probably the more efficient option.
Over the past decade or more, cable fees have increased at 6 times the rate of inflation. Clearly the cable companies are greedy.
Perhaps TimeWarner could reduce their costs by shutting down their OnDemand shopping channels which I'm sure no one uses. This would also free up a lot of commercial time for real advertisers. Has TW said whether their rates will be lowered accordingly when these channels become unavailable?
That said, all of Viacom's channels have no interest for me other than Comedy Central (Daily Show, Colbert Report, and occasionally South Park), and Spike (for the original CSI).
The Wiimote and nunchuck (as well as the other Wii controller accessories) are the biggest innovation in console user interface since 1985, when the NES introduced the horizontal controller form factor that has dominated consoles since then. Nintendo would be making a huge mistake if they went backwards on controller design.
Does anyone else feel like Nintendo dropped the ball with the Virtual Console? There aren't that many channels, Wii Ware selection is still sparse and uncompelling, and the titles released from old console systems don't interest me, partly because what they have put out is crap that didn't sell in the first place.
I've had 2500 Wii points sitting unspent waiting for the Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior titles from the NES and SNES. The only reason I can think of preventing this is some licensing issue with Square Enix or possibly Sony. Any insight on that?
Either Ballmer is throwing out a red herring, or future versions of IE (presumably after 8) will finally be decoupled from Windows.
But, what open source browser engines are there other than Gecko and Webkit? Both are developed by MS' sworn mortal enemies. Browsers are complex, time consuming beasts to develop.
Roberts is W's appointment, and Scalia is insane.
As a long time, hard core tabletop RPG player, online "*RPG" games so far do not interest me. In my view, an RPG is more than a wide range of character races and classes set in an environment which is essentially a first person shooter/slasher with some largely static and repetitive quests thrown in. Eye candy isn't a selling point for me; playing in an environment which more closely resembles the fully interactive, freeform environment of tabletop games is what I've been waiting for.
What are the issues (hardware, AI, network, players) which prevent this from being achieved in online games whose genre lays claim to the RPG moniker?
I saw this ad last night, and my first reaction was to wish that someone spliced in a clip saying "I'm a PC, and I run Linux!".
Obviously Apple can't say "Windows" for legal reasons, but do both companies have to conflate hardware architecture with operating system, especially since Macs have had all PC components for a few years now?
Then I noticed the new slogan for Windows: Life Without Walls. Did anyone in Redmond think about this? It's absurd:
Either MS has finally admitted to Windows' continual flaws and are trying to sell them as advantages, or they have no idea what the possible negative meanings of that slogan are.
IE has had the same rendering engine, Trident, since IE4 (1997). MS may claim significant improvements in standards support, but in reality, they seem to only pick the bugs that have names. After five publicly available iterations (up to IE7), why is their overall standards support at least 25% below, on a feature by feature basis, nearly every other rendering engine?
Plus, I have yet to hear anything to rebut the rumors that MS simply can't fix Trident because the code is such a mess, and they "don't want to break websites", which is one of the most backwards arguments for anything on any topic.