So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
While that is true, I don't know how relevant your example is. In that case, Next was contemplating de-coupling parts of GCC, but database applications are already very loosely coupled with the RDBMS through generic driver layers. (absent any proprietary SQL statements)
MySQL's position also created all kinds of weird quandaries. For example, if you had a pre-existing proprietary ODBC application, you supposedly could not simply reconfigure it to use MySQL's GPLed driver. That creates a restriction on running the software and seems to violate Section 0 of the GPL.
And how much code is there that is IE6 specific that IE7/8 isnt compatible with?
There used to be entire sites full of IE6 "hacks" which exploited bugs in the CSS engine to workaround other bugs. Pretty much all of these blow up in in IE7/8. Between the bugs and the workarounds, one can almost be certain that a moderately complex CSS2 site targeting IE6 will not run unmodified on 7/8.
IE6 also does not "gracefully degrade" - huge chunks of layout will simply disappear under certain conditions.
Focus-follows-mouse made no sense back in the old days with Solaris work stations. It still makes no sense.
It made sense for the stereotypical bearded Unix guy with nothing but 8 different XTerms open on his gigantic Sun monitor. None of his software used a mouse for input, so why not use it as an enhanced 2-dimensional task switcher?
They should have shown the Google home page on a monitor while the backdrop changes after each search, and provide some indicator of how much time has past in between in each search
Good point. For example, they could have had the Google logo change, which it actually does on a regular basis.
I was looking for an old page called something like "Ten reasons VB is a terrible programming language" (I can probably only remember 3 or 4 off the top of my head -- Arrays, no logical shortcuts, no bulit-in hashs, True = -1). Couldn't find it, but did find an interesting quote:
For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example.
I also think its important to remember that Lucas is one of the few owners of a popular franchise that didnt turn it into crappy licensed videogames. A lot of my Star Wars nostalgia has to do with the excellent games put out by Lucasarts as much as the original movies.
Actually he did. The contemporary Parker Brothers Star Wars games for Atari era systems ranged from terrible to mediocre. (I remember a friend's disappointment when he got this light saber game that made Pong look complicated.)
The Atari Star Wars arcade cabinet was one of the best though.
In all honesty, I expected Ep I to have been comprised of all three movies edited together to produce a less than 2 hour introduction to Ep II and III. (The part where he turns into Vader would have been in Ep II, leaving Ep III to showcase Vader's destruction of the Jedi and entire worlds that stood in his way, showing the beginning of Ep IV (such as the scene where Leia creates the video in R2D2).
I agree that would have made more sense.
The root problem I think was that Lucas simply didn't have the plot material to fill three prequel films. Rather than making one movie with a strong story that culminated in the birth of Darth Vader, he threw in all sorts of random battles with irrelevant characters that served no other purpose than to pad-out the films and introduce new action figures. One review I recall called it "video game filmmaking" - just random action sequences strung together one after another with hardly any plot logic.
In the original trilogy, there wasn't a light saber battle until the end of ESB. In the prequels, there were so much light sabering I could barely bring myself to care when they came to the ultimate battle between Obi Wan and Anikan.
Visual Basic the language was rightfully hated for some terrible design decisions that made it awkward to program with.
Most informed people recognized the power of VB the GUI RAD environment though - hatred towards all things VB is usually driven by elitism (or grumpy ex-Delphi programmers). Its very similar to how PHP is looked down upon by Python/Ruby types - the environment is considered too accessible to newbies and many of the results aren't pretty.
GM destroyed Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Saturn, and almost destroyed Opel, Buick, and Hummer. They obviously were completely inept at brand-management, I don't see any reason to find excuses for them on Saab.
Plus, even if your argument is correct, they should have sold the brand long before the global economy cratered.
True. I'm bullish on Ford because they've finally adopted a business strategy of selling higher-margin, higher-quality products worthy of their first world cost structure. It might take a decade for people to catch on, but IMO there's a good chance Ford will become the American VW, if not the American Honda.
GM... I'm not sure if they've divorced themselves from the idea of "sell the most cars, make the most profits", despite the fact that "sell at a loss, make it up on volume" put them in bankruptcy court.
They didn't even bother to SELL their 3rd most profitable brand, they just terminated it.
Pontiac was their third best selling US brand, but if you look at the figures, that was mostly on the back of rental fleet sales.
If you know Pontiac's actual profitability, you are ahead of 99.9% of people who don't work for GM accounting. Frankly most of their lineup has been junk for years and its totally believable the brand was structurally unprofitable and a total write-off.
(I'm aware Pontiac has had some exceptional reviews recently, but the general consensus was they were selling cars like the G8 and Solstice at a loss in order to try to bring back some 'excitement' to the brand.;)
Go ahead. Tell me what so special about it. Something more than the superficial key hole in the middle aisle and the like.
Rather than explaining it to you, I'll just point out that you seem qualified for a marketing job at GM.
"Oldsmobile? They're just like Chevys, except with a superficial split grille. (10 years later) Holy crap! What happened to Oldsmobile sales?!?! We gotta shut it down!"
Cars, being the most expensive mass-produced purchase that people make, create a lot of emotional values among their customer base. You can't just boil them down to a rationalized list of superficial features, because customers will figure out you're just going through the motions and move to a brand that appears to have 'faith' in some greater ideals.
GM never understood the appeal of Saab, so they kept them in suspended animation circa mid-1980s, continually recycling the same gimmicks. Compare them to a Volvo or Audi, which have advanced considerably since that era (and the sticker prices prove it).
There's really only one company in the world that would have attempted to pass off a Blazer SUV with a floor-mounted key as a European sport-luxury car. Unfortunately that was the company that bought Saab.
Or he could live in one of the 11 states (including the most populace, California) that have implied-in-law provisions covering employment. In fact over 20% of the US workforce is covered by such laws which require just cause for termination.
As a practical matter this only means you will be "laid-off" rather than fired, no matter how badly you fuck up. (And are therefore eligible for unemployment.) It does not mean you can debate your way into keeping your job.
Toyota and VW were making huge profits before the financial collapse -- they will probably be joined by Ford and possibly GM when the global economy recovers.
It wasn't a bailout, it was a loan, which they are already paying back. Go back to your fox/cnn/nbc news network and leave the intelligent people alone.
For an intelligent person, your claims are factually incorrect. It was partially a loan, mostly a cash for equity deal in which the government essentially bought General Motors for ~$40B.
The government won't be paid back until new shares are sold to private investors.
The problem with your argument is that Motif was explicitly designed to have Windows-like UI conventions --- it's right in the manual and everything..
I think one could make a strong argument for the benefits of conformity in the early GUI market. But the real reasoning was probably an informal corporate alliance of MS and workstation manufacturers against Apple, who was suing every other GUI maker in sight.
You're right about FVWM95 being ass, but at the same time the *nix world really didn't have much of an independent GUI tradition.
You are overlooking that Safari considers certain filetypes "safe" (including MP4, not sure about TIFF or DNG) and opens them by default. Its quite possible these vulnerabilities could be rigged to "drive by" a casual web surfer with no user interaction.
Furthermore Finder has a preview function which is activated by simply single-clicking on a file, which could be another vector to attack an 'innocent' user.
Actually, IMO you completely misread the result of the GIF battle. The upshot was nobody cared about the IP issues, except the GNU/Free software types. Everyone else's software worked with GIFs just fine, and they just waited until the patents expired. The only thing PNG had going for it adoption-wise was superior features like transparency.
Final score: 1 IP Overlords, 0 GNU/Hippies
So yes, you can go through the same drama with video formats. The question is, do you have the stomach to wait it out 15 years before declaring victory? Meanwhile the average goatporn.com video viewer is looking for.. um instant gratification.
IMO, access to streaming video is a lot more important for this class of device - and as of right now, everything from Hulu to your favorite goatporn site runs on Flash.
A device that only lets you access iTunes and Youtube will be about as popular as the AppleTV.
Slashdot Mirror
So the lesson here is one should not put too much stock on arguments about static vs. dynamic linking, linking vs. network protocols, or other such technical details, because judges will most likely find that none of those details are really the essential issue.
While that is true, I don't know how relevant your example is. In that case, Next was contemplating de-coupling parts of GCC, but database applications are already very loosely coupled with the RDBMS through generic driver layers. (absent any proprietary SQL statements)
MySQL's position also created all kinds of weird quandaries. For example, if you had a pre-existing proprietary ODBC application, you supposedly could not simply reconfigure it to use MySQL's GPLed driver. That creates a restriction on running the software and seems to violate Section 0 of the GPL.
And how much code is there that is IE6 specific that IE7/8 isnt compatible with?
There used to be entire sites full of IE6 "hacks" which exploited bugs in the CSS engine to workaround other bugs. Pretty much all of these blow up in in IE7/8. Between the bugs and the workarounds, one can almost be certain that a moderately complex CSS2 site targeting IE6 will not run unmodified on 7/8.
IE6 also does not "gracefully degrade" - huge chunks of layout will simply disappear under certain conditions.
Focus-follows-mouse made no sense back in the old days with Solaris work stations. It still makes no sense.
It made sense for the stereotypical bearded Unix guy with nothing but 8 different XTerms open on his gigantic Sun monitor. None of his software used a mouse for input, so why not use it as an enhanced 2-dimensional task switcher?
People have been worrying about MySQL. They have been right to worry.
Its funny. With all the hubbub surrounding MySQL, hardly anyone has even bothered asking what's going to happen to OpenOffice.org.
They should have shown the Google home page on a monitor while the backdrop changes after each search, and provide some indicator of how much time has past in between in each search
Good point. For example, they could have had the Google logo change, which it actually does on a regular basis.
I was looking for an old page called something like "Ten reasons VB is a terrible programming language" (I can probably only remember 3 or 4 off the top of my head -- Arrays, no logical shortcuts, no bulit-in hashs, True = -1). Couldn't find it, but did find an interesting quote:
For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than Object-Oriented Languages did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for decades.
And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy database interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example.
-- Linus Torvalds
I also think its important to remember that Lucas is one of the few owners of a popular franchise that didnt turn it into crappy licensed videogames. A lot of my Star Wars nostalgia has to do with the excellent games put out by Lucasarts as much as the original movies.
Actually he did. The contemporary Parker Brothers Star Wars games for Atari era systems ranged from terrible to mediocre. (I remember a friend's disappointment when he got this light saber game that made Pong look complicated.)
The Atari Star Wars arcade cabinet was one of the best though.
In all honesty, I expected Ep I to have been comprised of all three movies edited together to produce a less than 2 hour introduction to Ep II and III. (The part where he turns into Vader would have been in Ep II, leaving Ep III to showcase Vader's destruction of the Jedi and entire worlds that stood in his way, showing the beginning of Ep IV (such as the scene where Leia creates the video in R2D2).
I agree that would have made more sense.
The root problem I think was that Lucas simply didn't have the plot material to fill three prequel films. Rather than making one movie with a strong story that culminated in the birth of Darth Vader, he threw in all sorts of random battles with irrelevant characters that served no other purpose than to pad-out the films and introduce new action figures. One review I recall called it "video game filmmaking" - just random action sequences strung together one after another with hardly any plot logic.
In the original trilogy, there wasn't a light saber battle until the end of ESB. In the prequels, there were so much light sabering I could barely bring myself to care when they came to the ultimate battle between Obi Wan and Anikan.
Visual Basic the language was rightfully hated for some terrible design decisions that made it awkward to program with.
Most informed people recognized the power of VB the GUI RAD environment though - hatred towards all things VB is usually driven by elitism (or grumpy ex-Delphi programmers). Its very similar to how PHP is looked down upon by Python/Ruby types - the environment is considered too accessible to newbies and many of the results aren't pretty.
GM destroyed Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Saturn, and almost destroyed Opel, Buick, and Hummer. They obviously were completely inept at brand-management, I don't see any reason to find excuses for them on Saab.
Plus, even if your argument is correct, they should have sold the brand long before the global economy cratered.
True. I'm bullish on Ford because they've finally adopted a business strategy of selling higher-margin, higher-quality products worthy of their first world cost structure. It might take a decade for people to catch on, but IMO there's a good chance Ford will become the American VW, if not the American Honda.
GM ... I'm not sure if they've divorced themselves from the idea of "sell the most cars, make the most profits", despite the fact that "sell at a loss, make it up on volume" put them in bankruptcy court.
They didn't even bother to SELL their 3rd most profitable brand, they just terminated it.
Pontiac was their third best selling US brand, but if you look at the figures, that was mostly on the back of rental fleet sales.
If you know Pontiac's actual profitability, you are ahead of 99.9% of people who don't work for GM accounting. Frankly most of their lineup has been junk for years and its totally believable the brand was structurally unprofitable and a total write-off.
(I'm aware Pontiac has had some exceptional reviews recently, but the general consensus was they were selling cars like the G8 and Solstice at a loss in order to try to bring back some 'excitement' to the brand.;)
Go ahead. Tell me what so special about it. Something more than the superficial key hole in the middle aisle and the like.
Rather than explaining it to you, I'll just point out that you seem qualified for a marketing job at GM.
"Oldsmobile? They're just like Chevys, except with a superficial split grille. (10 years later) Holy crap! What happened to Oldsmobile sales?!?! We gotta shut it down!"
Cars, being the most expensive mass-produced purchase that people make, create a lot of emotional values among their customer base. You can't just boil them down to a rationalized list of superficial features, because customers will figure out you're just going through the motions and move to a brand that appears to have 'faith' in some greater ideals.
GM never understood the appeal of Saab, so they kept them in suspended animation circa mid-1980s, continually recycling the same gimmicks. Compare them to a Volvo or Audi, which have advanced considerably since that era (and the sticker prices prove it).
There's really only one company in the world that would have attempted to pass off a Blazer SUV with a floor-mounted key as a European sport-luxury car. Unfortunately that was the company that bought Saab.
Or he could live in one of the 11 states (including the most populace, California) that have implied-in-law provisions covering employment. In fact over 20% of the US workforce is covered by such laws which require just cause for termination.
As a practical matter this only means you will be "laid-off" rather than fired, no matter how badly you fuck up. (And are therefore eligible for unemployment.) It does not mean you can debate your way into keeping your job.
Not before 95% of the "look and feel" issues were legally settled in Microsoft's favor.
And if we're nitpicking, I believe the Apple-GEM case didn't even make it that far - GEM folded.
If European brands are so terrible, why did GM go through hell and high-water to hang on to Opel?
The truth is that a good chunk of GM's engineering is done in Europe; their modern american cars use the same platforms and engines.
There's more to the auto industry than Detroit.
Toyota and VW were making huge profits before the financial collapse -- they will probably be joined by Ford and possibly GM when the global economy recovers.
It wasn't a bailout, it was a loan, which they are already paying back. Go back to your fox/cnn/nbc news network and leave the intelligent people alone.
For an intelligent person, your claims are factually incorrect. It was partially a loan, mostly a cash for equity deal in which the government essentially bought General Motors for ~$40B.
The government won't be paid back until new shares are sold to private investors.
The problem with your argument is that Motif was explicitly designed to have Windows-like UI conventions --- it's right in the manual and everything..
I think one could make a strong argument for the benefits of conformity in the early GUI market. But the real reasoning was probably an informal corporate alliance of MS and workstation manufacturers against Apple, who was suing every other GUI maker in sight.
You're right about FVWM95 being ass, but at the same time the *nix world really didn't have much of an independent GUI tradition.
Apple actually sued Digital Research (and won) because it was such a blatant copy of the Mac's interface.
I don't know if Apple "won" as much as buried DR in legal fees. They lost the similar suit against Microsoft after all.
The warning only appears for applications and certain filetypes like HTML. I have never seen appear for anything that opens in iTunes or Preview.
You are overlooking that Safari considers certain filetypes "safe" (including MP4, not sure about TIFF or DNG) and opens them by default. Its quite possible these vulnerabilities could be rigged to "drive by" a casual web surfer with no user interaction.
Furthermore Finder has a preview function which is activated by simply single-clicking on a file, which could be another vector to attack an 'innocent' user.
IBM put out word to the IT press that OS/2 was done after v4 ... doesn't surprise the marketing effort was halfassed.
Actually, IMO you completely misread the result of the GIF battle. The upshot was nobody cared about the IP issues, except the GNU/Free software types. Everyone else's software worked with GIFs just fine, and they just waited until the patents expired. The only thing PNG had going for it adoption-wise was superior features like transparency.
Final score: 1 IP Overlords, 0 GNU/Hippies
So yes, you can go through the same drama with video formats. The question is, do you have the stomach to wait it out 15 years before declaring victory? Meanwhile the average goatporn.com video viewer is looking for .. um instant gratification.
IMO, access to streaming video is a lot more important for this class of device - and as of right now, everything from Hulu to your favorite goatporn site runs on Flash.
A device that only lets you access iTunes and Youtube will be about as popular as the AppleTV.