How can you tax something that is an open standard? If I write an app using core C# (which is an ECMA standard) and possibly some of Mono's extensions, how can Microsoft tax that? And given that I could have written it in Linux to work on Linux to do exactly what I want, how is adding a new app that does something new "turning computing into a vending machine"?
And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy? How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?
I'm doing some work at the moment on a personal project. The back-end is core C# only, and eventually I'll add in Mono.Addins, which can be redistributed and used on MS's.Net and are part of Mono. There's a System.Windows.Forms front-end made through Visual Studio (because it's the only way to get a decent GUI editor for it). There's a GTK# front-end made through MonoDevelop (because S.W.F on Linux is ugly). Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).
At which point Mono does the simple open-source thing of implementing just the ECMA spec (plus its own extensions in its own namespace) and all is good again and RMS is back to the "nothing to complain about in C#/.Net" position:)
It sounds promising, and it may end up meaning Stallman was wrong all along and that it was safe to implement.Net/C# (which GNU have done anyway). It's be useful to have somewhere slightly more authoritative to hear it from (like Microsoft themselves) but at least people don't need to worry about "arrrghh, it's a patent trap" and can get on with "hurrah! I can focus on coding for the desktop in a decent language rather than having low-level memory concerns etc".
Not that I ever cared anyway. Stick to the registered standard definition of C# and Microsoft couldn't exactly kill off Mono anyway, as they'd probably have ended up breaching the "fair and non-discriminatory" part of the patent licensing or been forced to give Mono a free license anyway.
That's all well and good, but what about those of us who don't want to rent our retro games through some "must be connected to the Net" DRM system and want a real copy? My brother managed to find a copy of Monkey Island 3 for me a year or two back, but most of the Monkey Island games are difficult to get hold of (or severely over-priced) in the UK.
As your last wish has been granted, I'll gladly take them off your hands for the princely sum of 1/100th of a penny per unique game (rounding prices down):)
So basically, you don't consider HTML5 or AJAX a separate app, even though the limitations are quickly narrowing? Got it.
HTML5 isn't a separate app, it is content rendered by an app, i.e. your browser. What you can do with it is approaching what you can do with an app, but that doesn't change the fact that it is content. Flash can run on its own and acts as a plugin. Try doing the same with a HTML5 page - running it without a browser. Ditto for AJAX. They tend not to work so well without the browser converting the content in to a rendered page.
If I try to X out of gmail while it's busy, it pops up a warning. (blocks the close) It's easy to override.
Surely that's just a simple "on document close" hook? Window gets closed, window notifies document, document goes "hang on, I'm still busy", document pops up alert or similar. I'm fairly sure that's been possible for somewhere near a decade.
Hell, most new forum software is built with that technology. All of slashdot is.
Invision Power Board doesn't do anything too flashy like that that I've noticed (about the only thing is the inline editing), neither does phpBB, and I'm still lucky enough to be on the usable old version of Slashdot.
But isn't HTML5 all about improving the site experience? Not so long ago webpages couldn't be viewed fullscreen, but now they all have a special minimal-UI mode in almost every browser.
Fullscreen in a browser (a browser function to increase the amount of content shown with no care for whether the page wants it or not) and having keys captured/remapped are two completely different things.
Being able to map the F5 key to a task or event in a webpage make sense.
Not really. The F keys are special function keys. Those special functions almost always apply to the app or fall back to being picked up by the OS. By all means have "quick access" keys or use scripting to capture (for example) normal keys pressed to move in a game while the game is focussed, but special keys are special.
If you want more examples of where blocking F5 would be handy (aside from gmail) check out this blog.
So basically the places it would be handy is "silly little Javascript games" and "places that insist on using AJAX/Javascript for just about everything, getting you in to the usability mess of a pure Flash site where you can't bookmark any sub-area"?
Not having an override key doesn't.
That depends on the context. F5 has almost universally become "the refresh key". The browser has a refresh function, so remapping that key to be something else seems like a really bad idea.
Side-Note: Flash blocks every key, but people don't seem to complain about that?:P
Flash is effectively a separate app, and it captures keys as well as mouse interaction (e.g. the scroll wheel). It's annoying as hell when you view a video on somewhere like "I Can Haz Cheezburger" and have to click outside it again to scroll down the page, but the chances of Adobe caring are somewhere in the region of "slim to none".
I'd find a page disabling my refresh button the bigger annoyance. The refresh button is outside the scope of a page - it's the UI of an app and shouldn't be told what to do by some randomly downloaded and viewed bit of data!
They spent about 40M GBP building the system, and it's only been used for two years. It was (entirely?) outsourced to Accenture.
We've got a contract with Accenture at work. Apparently they manage our computer systems. Having seen some of the prices they charge for things like "putting a usable amount of memory in a laptop" I'm assuming that breaks down somewhere in the region of £38M for Accenture fees and £2M for the actual application!
That depends on how Microsoft do in going back on their licensing offer in the standardisation process (making them available royalty-free without discrimination), which I think IBM and at least one other company also did. Either that or the problem will be in parts of System.Windows.Forms, at which point it is a two minute "patch" to delete the source tree and leave Mono just implementing the core and standardised part.
I've been playing the original Grand Theft Auto in VirtualBox recently. GTA2 couldn't recognise a suitable graphics card in 2.2.4 with WinXP, but I still got some old-school car theft and carnage on my Linux box:)
But the CCTV cameras just see the criminals and let the police track them through the city centre (rather than losing them after the first corner, or never having sight of them because they just get a crime reported). They don't tell you who they are (beyond just being an unknown face on a grainy camera image);)
I think half of that depends on your age group. I'm 25 and in the past few years I've needed photo ID for buying alcohol (which they're now raising to "if you look under 25 then prove you're over 18") as well as getting on to some works sites (although that's a more specialist case).
As for debit/credit, I don't have trust issues with plastic and rarely have cash on me. Supermarkets (even small Co-op stores) and most high street chains will take plastic for any value, but some shops have a £5 minimum spend. I've bought a 50p loaf of bread on plastic before because all I had in my pocket was a few coppers.
The stink wasn't about "ID Cards" so much as the pathetically poor method of introduction: Hey, you. I want you to carry a card around for the rest of your life for no reason, and I'm going to "invent" excuses to make you need to have it on you. And now you owe me £100 and a day filling out forms in order for me to give you that card. Cough up.
And not just that, but they were doing it for passports as well with biometric details. If you want a new passport now it costs extra because of the extra details. No-one has proved any use for those either, and it all seems a little excessive.
I think most people were complaining because the "red tops" (cheap and sensationalist newspapers, like The Sun) told them to rather than because they understood the excess of data being collected, the implications of carrying an ID card everywhere, the likely down-hill slope of what the government would push for next, and the problems with the inevitable loss of data.
It wouldn't bee that big a complex, really, retaining two days of shows for a channel is what, about 50 Gig at "best quality"?
That depends. With half of the channels we get on Sky in the UK (satellite) then you're probably talking more like a quarter of that amount by the time you remove the incessant repeats!
The other difference is who the money goes to, surely?
For TV, you pay the cable/satellite TV supplier, they pay the 3rd party channels (I presume), you watch the content, the content has adverts, the advert money goes to the channel, the content creator just sees the purchase price of the show by the channel.
For the Internet you pay the provider of the pipes (or at least your account on the pipes), they pay sod all to the website owners, you view the content, the content sometimes has adverts, the money goes to the content creator (assuming it is self-hosted or most magazine-type websites).
The only place it starts to get similar is places like YouTube, where YouTube changes from "content" to "channel" and the content creators see the purchase price (which used to be "sod all"), although that may be changing with some of the "ad sharing" ideas I've seen mentioned.
...another step away from the original vision of the game.
Is it? Surely it'll keep people playing if they can switch and join friends rather than starting from scratch. I'm fairly sure that the "original vision" was closer to "get lots of people addicted and bringing in monthly subscriptions to make us lots of teh moneyz" than "get lots of people playing, but then lose them because we're too dogmatic in our rules and won't change anything to make it more enjoyable for the masses".
If it's an international standard and the creators of the standard (a few companies, including MS) have said that any patents that cover it will be available royalty free, then where is the risk in implementing the standardised core? And if MS do push the.Net in to patented territory, why does Mono have to follow, why can't it just be based on the international standard? If Mono is written to the standard and only to the standard then how can it be taken away?
As for the GPL/LGPL and comments on Mono, if you think that's a troll then you're looking way too hard for something that isn't there. RMS has said that you should use the GPL rather than the LGPL where there isn't an existing library so that people have to make their code GPL if they want to use it. His comment was something about not being swayed by the promise of more users. Implementing.Net's S.W.F is, to my mind, doing the opposite. They are implementing a potentially patented, non-international standardised part of the.Net framework. That on its own seems like a risky decision if Mono/.Net is so bad, and the only reason I can see for going in to potential patent territory is to basically do what he says not to do by chosing the LGPL - picking an option to improve up-take with a wider range of non-OSS apps.
Also... use our C# implementation "DotGNU Portable.NET" instead. We are immune to everything I just said in the article and I won't bother you with why.
In otherwords, I'm confused. Does he like C# or not? If he doesn't, why does the FSF have their own.NET implementation? What makes theirs so special?
Not just that, but they even implement the "not set as a standard" part - System.Windows.Forms! Of all the bits that's most likely to have patent issues, you'd have thought it'd have been that. They'd have had a marginally better argument if they'd just implemented the standardised part so that they could at least say "there's dangers implementing/using the non-standard parts, but stick to the standard and you might not be compatible with the latest MS changes, but at least you've got a great framework to work with"!
Given that Stallman recommends using the GPL rather than the LGPL to force people to open source their code rather than make use of a good library, that doesn't make much sense.
It's fine to take a standard, make an open source implementation and then use it to run existing (generally proprietary if he had his way) apps in Linux (or GNU/Linux, or whatever), but writing open source apps that will run on that open source implementation is bad? What kind of logic is that?
Being a 25 year old software developer/coder, I agree with the "why Mono isn't bad" post. Most people's concerns could be worked around, and as long as you stick to the standardised stuff and treat it first and foremost as "an implementation of a language" rather than "a port of Microsoft's technologies" then you should be fine. I use Mono because it's flexible, powerful, easy to distribute, easy to work cross-platform, and I can concentrate on the important things (functionality and design rather than malloc() calls). The fact that my app will generally work in MS's.Net framework and not just the Mono one is a bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you tax something that is an open standard? If I write an app using core C# (which is an ECMA standard) and possibly some of Mono's extensions, how can Microsoft tax that? And given that I could have written it in Linux to work on Linux to do exactly what I want, how is adding a new app that does something new "turning computing into a vending machine"?
And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy? How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?
I'm doing some work at the moment on a personal project. The back-end is core C# only, and eventually I'll add in Mono.Addins, which can be redistributed and used on MS's .Net and are part of Mono. There's a System.Windows.Forms front-end made through Visual Studio (because it's the only way to get a decent GUI editor for it). There's a GTK# front-end made through MonoDevelop (because S.W.F on Linux is ugly). Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).
At which point Mono does the simple open-source thing of implementing just the ECMA spec (plus its own extensions in its own namespace) and all is good again and RMS is back to the "nothing to complain about in C#/.Net" position :)
It sounds promising, and it may end up meaning Stallman was wrong all along and that it was safe to implement .Net/C# (which GNU have done anyway). It's be useful to have somewhere slightly more authoritative to hear it from (like Microsoft themselves) but at least people don't need to worry about "arrrghh, it's a patent trap" and can get on with "hurrah! I can focus on coding for the desktop in a decent language rather than having low-level memory concerns etc".
Not that I ever cared anyway. Stick to the registered standard definition of C# and Microsoft couldn't exactly kill off Mono anyway, as they'd probably have ended up breaching the "fair and non-discriminatory" part of the patent licensing or been forced to give Mono a free license anyway.
That's all well and good, but what about those of us who don't want to rent our retro games through some "must be connected to the Net" DRM system and want a real copy? My brother managed to find a copy of Monkey Island 3 for me a year or two back, but most of the Monkey Island games are difficult to get hold of (or severely over-priced) in the UK.
As your last wish has been granted, I'll gladly take them off your hands for the princely sum of 1/100th of a penny per unique game (rounding prices down) :)
HTML5 isn't a separate app, it is content rendered by an app, i.e. your browser. What you can do with it is approaching what you can do with an app, but that doesn't change the fact that it is content. Flash can run on its own and acts as a plugin. Try doing the same with a HTML5 page - running it without a browser. Ditto for AJAX. They tend not to work so well without the browser converting the content in to a rendered page.
Surely that's just a simple "on document close" hook? Window gets closed, window notifies document, document goes "hang on, I'm still busy", document pops up alert or similar. I'm fairly sure that's been possible for somewhere near a decade.
Invision Power Board doesn't do anything too flashy like that that I've noticed (about the only thing is the inline editing), neither does phpBB, and I'm still lucky enough to be on the usable old version of Slashdot.
Unfortunately there aren't enough requests for the dead ones, so they're all still alive :\
Fullscreen in a browser (a browser function to increase the amount of content shown with no care for whether the page wants it or not) and having keys captured/remapped are two completely different things.
Not really. The F keys are special function keys. Those special functions almost always apply to the app or fall back to being picked up by the OS. By all means have "quick access" keys or use scripting to capture (for example) normal keys pressed to move in a game while the game is focussed, but special keys are special.
So basically the places it would be handy is "silly little Javascript games" and "places that insist on using AJAX/Javascript for just about everything, getting you in to the usability mess of a pure Flash site where you can't bookmark any sub-area"?
That depends on the context. F5 has almost universally become "the refresh key". The browser has a refresh function, so remapping that key to be something else seems like a really bad idea.
Flash is effectively a separate app, and it captures keys as well as mouse interaction (e.g. the scroll wheel). It's annoying as hell when you view a video on somewhere like "I Can Haz Cheezburger" and have to click outside it again to scroll down the page, but the chances of Adobe caring are somewhere in the region of "slim to none".
I'd find a page disabling my refresh button the bigger annoyance. The refresh button is outside the scope of a page - it's the UI of an app and shouldn't be told what to do by some randomly downloaded and viewed bit of data!
A java applet container like a web page in a browser, perhaps? That's what they're seemingly aiming for ;)
We've got a contract with Accenture at work. Apparently they manage our computer systems. Having seen some of the prices they charge for things like "putting a usable amount of memory in a laptop" I'm assuming that breaks down somewhere in the region of £38M for Accenture fees and £2M for the actual application!
Just what you want - an even easier way to lose data from your VM. Why rely on bugs and crashes when an accidental refresh can reboot your machine?!
That depends on how Microsoft do in going back on their licensing offer in the standardisation process (making them available royalty-free without discrimination), which I think IBM and at least one other company also did. Either that or the problem will be in parts of System.Windows.Forms, at which point it is a two minute "patch" to delete the source tree and leave Mono just implementing the core and standardised part.
Hurrah for the plan that'll eventually result in us requiring the creation of a "nuclear winter" scenario (or the sky blackening in Animatrix)!
I've been playing the original Grand Theft Auto in VirtualBox recently. GTA2 couldn't recognise a suitable graphics card in 2.2.4 with WinXP, but I still got some old-school car theft and carnage on my Linux box :)
You can even stay in Linux and run Minesweeper through Wine ;)
But the CCTV cameras just see the criminals and let the police track them through the city centre (rather than losing them after the first corner, or never having sight of them because they just get a crime reported). They don't tell you who they are (beyond just being an unknown face on a grainy camera image) ;)
I think half of that depends on your age group. I'm 25 and in the past few years I've needed photo ID for buying alcohol (which they're now raising to "if you look under 25 then prove you're over 18") as well as getting on to some works sites (although that's a more specialist case).
As for debit/credit, I don't have trust issues with plastic and rarely have cash on me. Supermarkets (even small Co-op stores) and most high street chains will take plastic for any value, but some shops have a £5 minimum spend. I've bought a 50p loaf of bread on plastic before because all I had in my pocket was a few coppers.
And not just that, but they were doing it for passports as well with biometric details. If you want a new passport now it costs extra because of the extra details. No-one has proved any use for those either, and it all seems a little excessive.
I think most people were complaining because the "red tops" (cheap and sensationalist newspapers, like The Sun) told them to rather than because they understood the excess of data being collected, the implications of carrying an ID card everywhere, the likely down-hill slope of what the government would push for next, and the problems with the inevitable loss of data.
That depends. With half of the channels we get on Sky in the UK (satellite) then you're probably talking more like a quarter of that amount by the time you remove the incessant repeats!
The other difference is who the money goes to, surely?
For TV, you pay the cable/satellite TV supplier, they pay the 3rd party channels (I presume), you watch the content, the content has adverts, the advert money goes to the channel, the content creator just sees the purchase price of the show by the channel.
For the Internet you pay the provider of the pipes (or at least your account on the pipes), they pay sod all to the website owners, you view the content, the content sometimes has adverts, the money goes to the content creator (assuming it is self-hosted or most magazine-type websites).
The only place it starts to get similar is places like YouTube, where YouTube changes from "content" to "channel" and the content creators see the purchase price (which used to be "sod all"), although that may be changing with some of the "ad sharing" ideas I've seen mentioned.
Is it? Surely it'll keep people playing if they can switch and join friends rather than starting from scratch. I'm fairly sure that the "original vision" was closer to "get lots of people addicted and bringing in monthly subscriptions to make us lots of teh moneyz" than "get lots of people playing, but then lose them because we're too dogmatic in our rules and won't change anything to make it more enjoyable for the masses".
If it's an international standard and the creators of the standard (a few companies, including MS) have said that any patents that cover it will be available royalty free, then where is the risk in implementing the standardised core? And if MS do push the .Net in to patented territory, why does Mono have to follow, why can't it just be based on the international standard? If Mono is written to the standard and only to the standard then how can it be taken away?
As for the GPL/LGPL and comments on Mono, if you think that's a troll then you're looking way too hard for something that isn't there. RMS has said that you should use the GPL rather than the LGPL where there isn't an existing library so that people have to make their code GPL if they want to use it. His comment was something about not being swayed by the promise of more users. Implementing .Net's S.W.F is, to my mind, doing the opposite. They are implementing a potentially patented, non-international standardised part of the .Net framework. That on its own seems like a risky decision if Mono/.Net is so bad, and the only reason I can see for going in to potential patent territory is to basically do what he says not to do by chosing the LGPL - picking an option to improve up-take with a wider range of non-OSS apps.
Not just that, but they even implement the "not set as a standard" part - System.Windows.Forms! Of all the bits that's most likely to have patent issues, you'd have thought it'd have been that. They'd have had a marginally better argument if they'd just implemented the standardised part so that they could at least say "there's dangers implementing/using the non-standard parts, but stick to the standard and you might not be compatible with the latest MS changes, but at least you've got a great framework to work with"!
Given that Stallman recommends using the GPL rather than the LGPL to force people to open source their code rather than make use of a good library, that doesn't make much sense.
It's fine to take a standard, make an open source implementation and then use it to run existing (generally proprietary if he had his way) apps in Linux (or GNU/Linux, or whatever), but writing open source apps that will run on that open source implementation is bad? What kind of logic is that?
Being a 25 year old software developer/coder, I agree with the "why Mono isn't bad" post. Most people's concerns could be worked around, and as long as you stick to the standardised stuff and treat it first and foremost as "an implementation of a language" rather than "a port of Microsoft's technologies" then you should be fine. I use Mono because it's flexible, powerful, easy to distribute, easy to work cross-platform, and I can concentrate on the important things (functionality and design rather than malloc() calls). The fact that my app will generally work in MS's .Net framework and not just the Mono one is a bonus.