Anything that hurts Microsoft and weakens their monopoly influences, leads to a better market for Apple to compete in.
Apple made a deal with Microsoft and they have Microsoft Office on their platform. That's something that helps them a lot in competing with open source desktop operating systems. Why would they want to lose that advantage by supporting ODF?
They can also qualify as a vendor for purchases in the future that require ODF (as some government agencies are now moving towards)
They can do that with NeoOffice.
If Apple as a company was trying to be incompatible with OpenOffice they would not have added ODF support to TextEdit.
Makes perfect sense: they want people to be able to read the occasional ODF file, but they don't want people to strengthen ODF by fully supporting it.
I disagree with this. Rather, I suspect Apple has not prioritized ODF and created their iWork applications based upon their own format for convenience.
Well, you can "disagree" all you want, but it isn't born out by the facts. Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing two different XML formats for iWork when they could have just adopted the ODF format.
If you RTFA, you'll find that they use "dark lighting". Obviously, that's just like regular lighting, except that it makes anything it shines on dark instead of bright. That's the scientific breakthrough that allows them to pack a 60" projector into a box the size of a pack of cards and power it with a single AAA battery. Dark lighting, I tell you, it's the future.
Why isn't a consortium forming between Google, Apple, and OpenOffice.org to give all three office suites the capability to edit each others' documents with 100% formatting and content compatibility,
Google Docs is constrained by what browsers can do. They do attempt to support ODF as much as they can, but there are limits. Hopefully, things will get better with Firefox 3.
Apple appears to have made a deliberate corporate decision to be incompatible with OpenOffice. If you submit a feature request for support for ODF to their developer issue tracking system, they mark it "company internal" and it disappears. There is really nothing to be gained by Apple for helping open standards; they'll probably just license OOXML and tout their Windows compatibility.
If your definition of 'patent troll company' is purely every-IP company,
No, it isn't "every IP company", it's every IP company that abuses the patent system, which Rambus appears to have done.
instead of actually creating some new technology, which Rambus has done. Or have you forgotten products like PS3, which use RDRAM?
RDRAM was a failure, both commercially and in terms of performance.
Sorry, I don't see any ground breaking innovation from Rambus, just tinkering with fairly straightforward design tradeoffs, patenting, marketing, and lawyering.
A Nokia N95 (other Nokias to consider are the E90, the E61i, the N82, and the E51).
Nokia's Mac support is excellent, by the way: you get iCal and Address Book sync, and also bidirectional iTunes and iPhoto synchronization, over USB or Bluetooth.
But remember, those are your priorities, and it's entirely possible for someone with different ones to be significantly unhappy with the product that you're quite pleased with.
I'd say there is no set of technical or functional priorities you might have that makes the iPhone the best choice.
False.
Pretor compares the iPhone against the E90, not against the totality of all other phones. Indeed: some people might reasonably prefer the iPhone to the E90. But for those people, the Danger Hiptop is probably a better choice than the iPhone. Alternatively, one of the Samsung touch phones is a great choice, too.
If you disagree, try to come up with a scenario in which the iPhone is the better choice; I can't think of one.
If I were working for one of those companies, the first thing I'd do is declare bankruptcy.
You can't declare bankruptcy unless you're actually bankrupt.
As for me, I will never, as long as I live, purchase any product manufactured by Rambus or any of its subsidiaries,
You won't, since Rambus is just a patent troll company; they don't make products.
All it would take would be the wrath of geeks burying a single company to ensure that other companies think twice before adopting such sleazy, deplorable tactics.
Well, if you figure out how to destroy Rambus as a business, lots of people would like to know. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
Ray tracing has been around for decades, and it's been steadily getting faster. Even in the 1980's, it was clear that eventually it would be doable in real-time. And there have been real-time ray tracing demonstrations around for several years now.
So, there is nothing "forward thinking" about this, Microsoft is simply following industry trends.
I already have a 3.5G phone with a full WebKit-based browser, multi-tasking, and full programmability. It has a standard USB modem, GPS, a full Bluetooth stack, and tons of software. I can use as a tethered modem, via Bluetooth, and even use it as a WiFi access point using 3.5G for Internet access.
The iPhone has crippled software, crippled hardware, and crippled contracts. There is no reason on earth to buy one.
Adobe doesn't know how to make a good UI; just look at Adobe Acrobat Reader or Photoshop. Historically, their Linux versions are even worse than their Windows and Mac software.
In order to get a decent version of AIR for Linux, we'll have to write an open source version ourselves.
The difference between C++ and most OOP languages is that C++ is basically a procedural programming language which has support for classes and objects integrated into it.
Alan Kay didn't criticize C++ for being multi-paradigm or for being low-level. Alan Kay criticized C++ because C++ classes and the C++ type system are so mind-numbingly limited and poorly designed. No duck typing. No "become". No reflection. No meta-programming. Instead, you get a tar pit of source code dependency management, potential memory management errors, and other traps.
Can we please learn from this?
Well, you certainly could stand to learn a lot, but I suspect that you won't bother.
Privacy need not include how much money you have in the bank, how much money you earn, how much money you inherit, and/or how much money you spend. Personally, I think all those pieces of information should not just be available to the government, but to the public, by name. An efficient, free market really requires that information to be public anyway.
I would have, given Europe's left leaning bent, expected Europeans to go the opposite route and promote civil liberties, but it seems that in country after country Europeans going the opposite route.
Tracking people has a long tradition in Europe. In countries like France and Germany, the government knows where every citizen lives. In Germany, the government even knows each person's religion (this is a country that slaughtered millions because they had the wrong religion!). Warrantless wiretapping connections to the Eastern Bloc used to be commonplace.
Europe has never been libertarian, it's always been about big government. Left vs. right has only been about which kind of big government Europeans wanted, not about wanting less of it.
The CCC is one of the things I like about Germany. It highlights a major element of german-style citizen-culture. It's clearly opposed to uncontrolled gouverment and any notion of a police-state.
That's nice, but it's a tiny minority. The average German has much more blind trust in his government than the average American.
Germany had a lively political scene in the 1920's and 1930's as well, but that didn't matter when the voters put Hitler in power.
This particular public official is a paranoid asshole anyway. Antagonizing him won't make any difference, but publicly embarrassing him will make him less effective.
The Apple Computers versus Apple Records battle shows how trademarks can stifle innovation. Apple Computers had to fight long and hard to expand its offerings.
That's not entirely fair -- arrays are still useful on their own, and they can do things dictionaries can't. They are a different animal.
Arrays are just dictionary with integer keys. But what does that matter anyway?
Certainly, any garbage collection system is ultimately going to be built on top of malloc and free, at a low level
Good garbage collection is almost never built on top of malloc/free.
Where's my view narrow?
All you can think of is threads and locks, which only applies to shared memory and multicore systems. That's probably the least scalable and least interesting kind of parallel computing; others are SIMD, data parallel programming, FPGA programming, networks of workstations, hypercubes, parallel super computers, vector processors, array processors, data flow machines, etc., all of which are different kinds of parallel hardware to which "threads and locks" don't even apply.
And I see entirely too many real-world libraries being thread-unsafe.
You don't get parallel programming by making libraries thread safe. In fact, thread safety is largely useless.
this sort of model has been tried before and it tends not to work all that well. Usually, you end up with a company that may nominally use some open source licenses, but they might as well be proprietary. In particular, companies like this tend to use their power to prevent forking, and without forking being realistic, a project isnt really open source.
Patents for open source only really works if the patents are held by a separate non profit.
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Anything that hurts Microsoft and weakens their monopoly influences, leads to a better market for Apple to compete in.
Apple made a deal with Microsoft and they have Microsoft Office on their platform. That's something that helps them a lot in competing with open source desktop operating systems. Why would they want to lose that advantage by supporting ODF?
They can also qualify as a vendor for purchases in the future that require ODF (as some government agencies are now moving towards)
They can do that with NeoOffice.
If Apple as a company was trying to be incompatible with OpenOffice they would not have added ODF support to TextEdit.
Makes perfect sense: they want people to be able to read the occasional ODF file, but they don't want people to strengthen ODF by fully supporting it.
I disagree with this. Rather, I suspect Apple has not prioritized ODF and created their iWork applications based upon their own format for convenience.
Well, you can "disagree" all you want, but it isn't born out by the facts. Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing two different XML formats for iWork when they could have just adopted the ODF format.
If you RTFA, you'll find that they use "dark lighting". Obviously, that's just like regular lighting, except that it makes anything it shines on dark instead of bright. That's the scientific breakthrough that allows them to pack a 60" projector into a box the size of a pack of cards and power it with a single AAA battery. Dark lighting, I tell you, it's the future.
Why isn't a consortium forming between Google, Apple, and OpenOffice.org to give all three office suites the capability to edit each others' documents with 100% formatting and content compatibility,
Google Docs is constrained by what browsers can do. They do attempt to support ODF as much as they can, but there are limits. Hopefully, things will get better with Firefox 3.
Apple appears to have made a deliberate corporate decision to be incompatible with OpenOffice. If you submit a feature request for support for ODF to their developer issue tracking system, they mark it "company internal" and it disappears. There is really nothing to be gained by Apple for helping open standards; they'll probably just license OOXML and tout their Windows compatibility.
If your definition of 'patent troll company' is purely every-IP company,
No, it isn't "every IP company", it's every IP company that abuses the patent system, which Rambus appears to have done.
instead of actually creating some new technology, which Rambus has done. Or have you forgotten products like PS3, which use RDRAM?
RDRAM was a failure, both commercially and in terms of performance.
Sorry, I don't see any ground breaking innovation from Rambus, just tinkering with fairly straightforward design tradeoffs, patenting, marketing, and lawyering.
A Nokia N95 (other Nokias to consider are the E90, the E61i, the N82, and the E51).
Nokia's Mac support is excellent, by the way: you get iCal and Address Book sync, and also bidirectional iTunes and iPhoto synchronization, over USB or Bluetooth.
But remember, those are your priorities, and it's entirely possible for someone with different ones to be significantly unhappy with the product that you're quite pleased with.
I'd say there is no set of technical or functional priorities you might have that makes the iPhone the best choice.
False.
Pretor compares the iPhone against the E90, not against the totality of all other phones. Indeed: some people might reasonably prefer the iPhone to the E90. But for those people, the Danger Hiptop is probably a better choice than the iPhone. Alternatively, one of the Samsung touch phones is a great choice, too.
If you disagree, try to come up with a scenario in which the iPhone is the better choice; I can't think of one.
If I were working for one of those companies, the first thing I'd do is declare bankruptcy.
You can't declare bankruptcy unless you're actually bankrupt.
As for me, I will never, as long as I live, purchase any product manufactured by Rambus or any of its subsidiaries,
You won't, since Rambus is just a patent troll company; they don't make products.
All it would take would be the wrath of geeks burying a single company to ensure that other companies think twice before adopting such sleazy, deplorable tactics.
Well, if you figure out how to destroy Rambus as a business, lots of people would like to know. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
It's a runtime. There is no UI apart from the installer.
There are lots of design, interaction, desktop integration, and appearance issues. And as Java shows, runtimes can get them very, very wrong.
Ray tracing has been around for decades, and it's been steadily getting faster. Even in the 1980's, it was clear that eventually it would be doable in real-time. And there have been real-time ray tracing demonstrations around for several years now.
So, there is nothing "forward thinking" about this, Microsoft is simply following industry trends.
I already have a 3.5G phone with a full WebKit-based browser, multi-tasking, and full programmability. It has a standard USB modem, GPS, a full Bluetooth stack, and tons of software. I can use as a tethered modem, via Bluetooth, and even use it as a WiFi access point using 3.5G for Internet access.
The iPhone has crippled software, crippled hardware, and crippled contracts. There is no reason on earth to buy one.
Adobe doesn't know how to make a good UI; just look at Adobe Acrobat Reader or Photoshop. Historically, their Linux versions are even worse than their Windows and Mac software.
In order to get a decent version of AIR for Linux, we'll have to write an open source version ourselves.
Just for a laugh, check how often pages on completely neutral and uncontroversial subjects are vandalized.
Neutral? Uncontroversial? I'm being haunted by killer carrots from outer space, you insensitive clod! Aieeeee....
The difference between C++ and most OOP languages is that C++ is basically a procedural programming language which has support for classes and objects integrated into it.
Alan Kay didn't criticize C++ for being multi-paradigm or for being low-level. Alan Kay criticized C++ because C++ classes and the C++ type system are so mind-numbingly limited and poorly designed. No duck typing. No "become". No reflection. No meta-programming. Instead, you get a tar pit of source code dependency management, potential memory management errors, and other traps.
Can we please learn from this?
Well, you certainly could stand to learn a lot, but I suspect that you won't bother.
C++ is based on a concept known as Object Oriented Programming
That's actually a myth.
Or, as Alan Kay, the guy who invented object oriented programming, said: "When I invented OOP, I did not have C++ in mind."
(He was trying to be diplomatic.)
Privacy need not include how much money you have in the bank, how much money you earn, how much money you inherit, and/or how much money you spend. Personally, I think all those pieces of information should not just be available to the government, but to the public, by name. An efficient, free market really requires that information to be public anyway.
Since when was germany worse than china when it came to rights...
China is a pathetically low standard to compare to.
Wait, godwin is that you???
You're a moron.
I would have, given Europe's left leaning bent, expected Europeans to go the opposite route and promote civil liberties, but it seems that in country after country Europeans going the opposite route.
Tracking people has a long tradition in Europe. In countries like France and Germany, the government knows where every citizen lives. In Germany, the government even knows each person's religion (this is a country that slaughtered millions because they had the wrong religion!). Warrantless wiretapping connections to the Eastern Bloc used to be commonplace.
Europe has never been libertarian, it's always been about big government. Left vs. right has only been about which kind of big government Europeans wanted, not about wanting less of it.
The CCC is one of the things I like about Germany. It highlights a major element of german-style citizen-culture. It's clearly opposed to uncontrolled gouverment and any notion of a police-state.
That's nice, but it's a tiny minority. The average German has much more blind trust in his government than the average American.
Germany had a lively political scene in the 1920's and 1930's as well, but that didn't matter when the voters put Hitler in power.
People are trying to say that Germany can't be all that bad yet, given that it's still better than China. Sad but true.
I think people would do well to post images of the fingerprint to Flickr, Picasa, etc. so that it is widely archived as well.
This particular public official is a paranoid asshole anyway. Antagonizing him won't make any difference, but publicly embarrassing him will make him less effective.
What else do you want to know?
The Apple Computers versus Apple Records battle shows how trademarks can stifle innovation. Apple Computers had to fight long and hard to expand its offerings.
And how did that stifle innovation?
That's not entirely fair -- arrays are still useful on their own, and they can do things dictionaries can't. They are a different animal.
Arrays are just dictionary with integer keys. But what does that matter anyway?
Certainly, any garbage collection system is ultimately going to be built on top of malloc and free, at a low level
Good garbage collection is almost never built on top of malloc/free.
Where's my view narrow?
All you can think of is threads and locks, which only applies to shared memory and multicore systems. That's probably the least scalable and least interesting kind of parallel computing; others are SIMD, data parallel programming, FPGA programming, networks of workstations, hypercubes, parallel super computers, vector processors, array processors, data flow machines, etc., all of which are different kinds of parallel hardware to which "threads and locks" don't even apply.
And I see entirely too many real-world libraries being thread-unsafe.
You don't get parallel programming by making libraries thread safe. In fact, thread safety is largely useless.
this sort of model has been tried before and it tends not to work all that well. Usually, you end up with a company that may nominally use some open source licenses, but they might as well be proprietary. In particular, companies like this tend to use their power to prevent forking, and without forking being realistic, a project isnt really open source.
Patents for open source only really works if the patents are held by a separate non profit.