No, the patent covers any sort of browser plugin technology, including the Netscape variety (used in nearly every non-IE browser), and Firefox Extentions.
No, it's not like Flashblock. The article indicates that flash movies will play as they normally do. Only that if you want to click the "Stop" button, you will actually have to click it twice - once to activate the control and a second time to click the button. Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb.
Furthermore, the webdev can bypass this stupidity using some simple javascript to write out the tags.
Note also that Firefox and other browsers will need to implement a similar change.
> If you don't want to distribute the code, then don't publicly exhibit stuff based on other people's GPL'ed works.
There's nothing in case law to support this interpretation, so this is an academic debating point at best, and not a concept that any sane person would build a licence on.
So, in effect, it looks like what people are trying to do is to bring the original intentions of the GPL to the era of web applications.
The GPL was originally developed in the Host-Terminal days, where software was used in a very similar manner to web applications today. Nobody ever though that the GPL needed to be extended to solve the "telnet problem", so this "problem" of web applications has nothing to do with Original Intent and everything to do with limiting Section 0 and moving away from the "copy-left" ideal.
In other words, both Apple and Microsoft were faced with the same problem (trying to figure out what services and applications to restart during upgrades), and both came to the same solution (it is easier to tell the user to reboot). Maybe by 2010, Apple will innovate it's own version of the "restart manager":)
Back in ye olden days, IBM made a super-expensive 2.88MB floppy that actually supported this. Even under MSDOS.
OTOH Apple had the genius revelation that it would piss less people off if they simply got rid of the floppy drive altogether rather shipping a $10 shitass model.
Metro seems to have been renamed and repositioned. It now seems to be described as a sortof "WMF" internal format for nextgen win32 drawing an not a full-fledged portable-document format like PDF. Obviously MS could build it up in the future, but for now it seems like that won't happen.
Also, Johnee makes the correct point that Acrobat is just the tip of the iceburg for Adobe -- their enterprise document management stuff is huge and makes them at least as much money as Photoshop does. MS can't compete with just a simple viewer app.
Adobe buying out Macromedia is actually very good news for Microsoft.
Macromedia had been slowly repositioning themselves as a development tool vendor. Flash was moving from animation to a "RAD" tool. Dreamweaver was becoming a competitor to VisualStudio for web development. ColdFusion was reinvented into a J2EE tag framework. This is all compeititon directly aimed at Microsoft's bread-n-butter tools.
Meanwhile Adobe has always been very good at focusing on the design and "epaper" markets and staying the hell out of the way from Microsoft. I think under Adobe, things like Flash and Dreamweaver will be kept in the designer market and away from the development users. Which will make MS happy enough to not make any serious attempt to move into the design markets.
There's a definite argument that the BluRay Java menuing system is too complicated, too bloated, and more expensive to develop for, when compared to a Javascript-based UI. I can't comment on HP's actual motives tho.
You know, while I'm still facinated with the storyline aspects of Marathon, I tried the download and found that the gameplay didn't really stand the test of time. Running around in tiny, ugly mazes shooting immobile enemies doesn't do it for me anymore. Funny thing is I still love to play Quake I, and that only came out a year later.
I understand what you are saying about the full screen applications. The Mac philosophy is "See The Window You Want to Switch To" (spacial navigation), while the Windows philosophy is "Use The Taskbar". (Although I don't know why iTunes gets a pass, as it is NOT a tradtional multiwindow Mac app.) My feeling is the Windows approach scales better to many windows, but as always YMMV.
The funny thing is I can take Visual Studio or Word 2003, drag all the toolbars and panes to my "palette monitor" and pretty much use it just like a Mac if I wanted to. So it might just be a case of Window programs' defaults pandering to the unwashed masses who bought the cheapest monitor they could.
As a final thought on the menubar -- Mattintosh had it right. The fixed Mac menubar was a replacement for Xerox's context menus. On a Windows system, the power-user mode is to right-click on things (Fitts Law blahblah) and use toolbars, and only very rarely use the menu bar for trips to the Prefs dialog. The Menubar is much more "primary" on Macs than Windows.
We tend to prefer austere document windows because we work with many windows open at once. Editing lots of source files, for instance, we may easily have 20-60 source windows open, arranged all neat-like.
Well, I don't doubt that you do this, but I don't believe the Mac UI was designed around a lot of open windows, especially pre-Expose. The Dock doesn't manage a lot of window state very well, and it's predecessor, the app menu, was even worse. The window management keyboard shortcuts were copped right from MS Windows, and newer Mac apps even are starting to have MDI modes. It seems like OS X wants to make it easier to hide windows than to manage them.
single window portal dashboard look of Windows
Single window portal is an actual mode in OS X, not Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Mac UI -- But I belive that its firmly designed for the KISS crowd and traditional "multifinder" Mac users with a handful of windows, not the 60 window power user crowd.
Thanks for the defense, but it was more of a point about the open source gift culture being treated as an entitlement on every other Ask Slashdot.
As for Open Office, I wonder if any of it was written in people's spare time. Everything I've read indicates a cathedral project that's 90% Sun, 10% Other corporations.
Actually, I disabled mouse acceleration so long ago on my Mac, I forgot it was on. However I don't think that invalidates the point that the Mac menubar is annoying when it is really far way. (And this is a conclusion I came to about 10 years ago, so its not like I haven't tried it.)
Except a lot of those Mac gamers made their way into the broader game community, and have been telling everyone within earshot how great Marathon was for the last 10 years -- "I WAS AN ELITE MAC GAMER HUR HUR". (Regardless, it was a great game in the day.)
A better argument is that Marathon was underrated because Marathon 2/Infinity for PC generally received mediocre reviews and didn't sell all that well.
Dear Slashdot, I am looking for an open source versions of some obscure expensive niche software that is only of interest to a tiny audience. Why can't I find it? I don't have much money, so it would be great if you guys could hurry up and write something which meets my needs.
(Meanwhile back in reality, open source users are overjoyed that they finally have a wordprocessor that arguably equals MS Word.)
The universal menubar provides a context menu that never moves.
Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.
Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.
Could it be said that it was really Windows imitating X/Motif/Open look?
No -- Microsoft wrote the Motif UI specs, with the specific, stated, goal of making it work in a similar manner to Windows and OS/2.
wasn't Windows trying to be more like the workstations than like the Mac?
Just the opposite. With Apple threatning to control the GUI with Look and Feel lawsuits, everyone else in the industry wanted to coalesce around a common, non-Apple, UI standard -- which happened to be the MS/IBM one.
Me: If KDE and Gnome would have cooperated, neither would have had to get the axe, and everyone would be better off.
You: KDE didn't cooperate, so they deserved to get the axe, and once we recover, everyone will be better off.
The difference in what we are arguing is not big enough to persue, except for me to point out how many hundreds of man-years of code which is going to get flushed by this whole stupid thing.
The classic MacOS wasn't inherently more secure. And it had almost no virues. And for most of it's life it had a higher marketshare than Apple currently does. QED.
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No, the patent covers any sort of browser plugin technology, including the Netscape variety (used in nearly every non-IE browser), and Firefox Extentions.
> Additionally, it will be difficult for other browser vendors to change their software as quickly
?? Almost every browser vendor has been changing their software much more quickly than MS has been changing IE.
No, it's not like Flashblock. The article indicates that flash movies will play as they normally do. Only that if you want to click the "Stop" button, you will actually have to click it twice - once to activate the control and a second time to click the button. Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb.
Furthermore, the webdev can bypass this stupidity using some simple javascript to write out the tags.
Note also that Firefox and other browsers will need to implement a similar change.
> If you don't want to distribute the code, then don't publicly exhibit stuff based on other people's GPL'ed works.
There's nothing in case law to support this interpretation, so this is an academic debating point at best, and not a concept that any sane person would build a licence on.
So, in effect, it looks like what people are trying to do is to bring the original intentions of the GPL to the era of web applications.
The GPL was originally developed in the Host-Terminal days, where software was used in a very similar manner to web applications today. Nobody ever though that the GPL needed to be extended to solve the "telnet problem", so this "problem" of web applications has nothing to do with Original Intent and everything to do with limiting Section 0 and moving away from the "copy-left" ideal.
In other words, both Apple and Microsoft were faced with the same problem (trying to figure out what services and applications to restart during upgrades), and both came to the same solution (it is easier to tell the user to reboot). Maybe by 2010, Apple will innovate it's own version of the "restart manager" :)
Back in ye olden days, IBM made a super-expensive 2.88MB floppy that actually supported this. Even under MSDOS.
OTOH Apple had the genius revelation that it would piss less people off if they simply got rid of the floppy drive altogether rather shipping a $10 shitass model.
Metro seems to have been renamed and repositioned. It now seems to be described as a sortof "WMF" internal format for nextgen win32 drawing an not a full-fledged portable-document format like PDF. Obviously MS could build it up in the future, but for now it seems like that won't happen.
Also, Johnee makes the correct point that Acrobat is just the tip of the iceburg for Adobe -- their enterprise document management stuff is huge and makes them at least as much money as Photoshop does. MS can't compete with just a simple viewer app.
Adobe buying out Macromedia is actually very good news for Microsoft.
Macromedia had been slowly repositioning themselves as a development tool vendor. Flash was moving from animation to a "RAD" tool. Dreamweaver was becoming a competitor to VisualStudio for web development. ColdFusion was reinvented into a J2EE tag framework. This is all compeititon directly aimed at Microsoft's bread-n-butter tools.
Meanwhile Adobe has always been very good at focusing on the design and "epaper" markets and staying the hell out of the way from Microsoft. I think under Adobe, things like Flash and Dreamweaver will be kept in the designer market and away from the development users. Which will make MS happy enough to not make any serious attempt to move into the design markets.
No, even with OWA, you are still on the hook for Exchange seats and ActiveDirectory seats.
Novell used the OWA interface because that's the documented, supported way for third parties to get data in Exchange.
> Currently the US, shuts down some "Islamic Extremist" websites
Do they shut them down by getting ICANN and NetSol to remove their DNS records? No? Then it's not a relevant point.
There's a definite argument that the BluRay Java menuing system is too complicated, too bloated, and more expensive to develop for, when compared to a Javascript-based UI. I can't comment on HP's actual motives tho.
AFAIK, Hollywood movies were never distributed on SVHS. Since that was the only use of VCRS by 90% of customers, SVHS was a non-feature.
Why Hollywood never supported SVHS probably had a lot more to do with LD and DVD than paranoia over copyprotection.
You know, while I'm still facinated with the storyline aspects of Marathon, I tried the download and found that the gameplay didn't really stand the test of time. Running around in tiny, ugly mazes shooting immobile enemies doesn't do it for me anymore. Funny thing is I still love to play Quake I, and that only came out a year later.
I understand what you are saying about the full screen applications. The Mac philosophy is "See The Window You Want to Switch To" (spacial navigation), while the Windows philosophy is "Use The Taskbar". (Although I don't know why iTunes gets a pass, as it is NOT a tradtional multiwindow Mac app.) My feeling is the Windows approach scales better to many windows, but as always YMMV.
The funny thing is I can take Visual Studio or Word 2003, drag all the toolbars and panes to my "palette monitor" and pretty much use it just like a Mac if I wanted to. So it might just be a case of Window programs' defaults pandering to the unwashed masses who bought the cheapest monitor they could.
As a final thought on the menubar -- Mattintosh had it right. The fixed Mac menubar was a replacement for Xerox's context menus. On a Windows system, the power-user mode is to right-click on things (Fitts Law blahblah) and use toolbars, and only very rarely use the menu bar for trips to the Prefs dialog. The Menubar is much more "primary" on Macs than Windows.
We tend to prefer austere document windows because we work with many windows open at once. Editing lots of source files, for instance, we may easily have 20-60 source windows open, arranged all neat-like.
Well, I don't doubt that you do this, but I don't believe the Mac UI was designed around a lot of open windows, especially pre-Expose. The Dock doesn't manage a lot of window state very well, and it's predecessor, the app menu, was even worse. The window management keyboard shortcuts were copped right from MS Windows, and newer Mac apps even are starting to have MDI modes. It seems like OS X wants to make it easier to hide windows than to manage them.
single window portal dashboard look of Windows
Single window portal is an actual mode in OS X, not Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Mac UI -- But I belive that its firmly designed for the KISS crowd and traditional "multifinder" Mac users with a handful of windows, not the 60 window power user crowd.
Thanks for the defense, but it was more of a point about the open source gift culture being treated as an entitlement on every other Ask Slashdot.
As for Open Office, I wonder if any of it was written in people's spare time. Everything I've read indicates a cathedral project that's 90% Sun, 10% Other corporations.
Actually, I disabled mouse acceleration so long ago on my Mac, I forgot it was on. However I don't think that invalidates the point that the Mac menubar is annoying when it is really far way. (And this is a conclusion I came to about 10 years ago, so its not like I haven't tried it.)
Except a lot of those Mac gamers made their way into the broader game community, and have been telling everyone within earshot how great Marathon was for the last 10 years -- "I WAS AN ELITE MAC GAMER HUR HUR". (Regardless, it was a great game in the day.)
A better argument is that Marathon was underrated because Marathon 2/Infinity for PC generally received mediocre reviews and didn't sell all that well.
Dear Slashdot, I am looking for an open source versions of some obscure expensive niche software that is only of interest to a tiny audience. Why can't I find it? I don't have much money, so it would be great if you guys could hurry up and write something which meets my needs.
(Meanwhile back in reality, open source users are overjoyed that they finally have a wordprocessor that arguably equals MS Word.)
The universal menubar provides a context menu that never moves.
Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.
Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.
Could it be said that it was really Windows imitating X/Motif/Open look?
No -- Microsoft wrote the Motif UI specs, with the specific, stated, goal of making it work in a similar manner to Windows and OS/2.
wasn't Windows trying to be more like the workstations than like the Mac?
Just the opposite. With Apple threatning to control the GUI with Look and Feel lawsuits, everyone else in the industry wanted to coalesce around a common, non-Apple, UI standard -- which happened to be the MS/IBM one.
> How exactly does this same complaint not apply to GNOME as well?
It does. In fact that's my whole point in this thread. Glad you could catch up.
> Did you understand my last post?
Yes, you are trying to stick words in my mouth in order to make a strawman argument.
Me: If KDE and Gnome would have cooperated, neither would have had to get the axe, and everyone would be better off.
You: KDE didn't cooperate, so they deserved to get the axe, and once we recover, everyone will be better off.
The difference in what we are arguing is not big enough to persue, except for me to point out how many hundreds of man-years of code which is going to get flushed by this whole stupid thing.
The classic MacOS wasn't inherently more secure. And it had almost no virues. And for most of it's life it had a higher marketshare than Apple currently does. QED.