For years, there's been this little protocol called IMAP. It's really good. Yet most people, or rather most companies, insist on using the hopelessly-outdated POP3 standard. And these two standards are compatible - I can use IMAP without forcing everyone else to make the transition.
How about, sucks to be him not because he's going to lose $11 million in potential earnings, but because he has back problems, and loses an opportunity to do what he likes best? He already got paid a shitload of money for the first movie. Spider-Man 2 or not, he's still one of the richest people in the country. And as soon as his back heals, he'll be right back on the silver screen, doing stunts and earning money galore.
God. I feel bad for him because as an actor, he undoubtedly loves his work, and it's unfair that he loses such a great opportunity to use his talent. I don't feel bad for him because he's only a multi-millionaire instead of a multi-multi-millionaire.
However, my basic point remains. Why should it even be a remote possibility that SBC buys DirecTV? Government-granted monopolies over essential services are even easier to leverage than market-generated ones. If SBC buys DirecTV, Dish Network is over, and though prices might go down for a couple years, in the long run, satellite customers should prepare for a huge increase in prices.
First, to clarify the present situation: GE owns Hughes Electronics/DirecTV. It is not considered a "core asset", so they desperately want to get rid of it. First, Rupert Murdoch bid on DirecTV, and planned on spinning off all of his global satellite TV assets into a new company, Sky Global, upon completion of the sale. Then EchoStar, owners of Dish Network, made an unsolicited bid that was higher than Murdoch's, and he decided not to match it. Eventually, the EchoStar-DirecTV combination was rejected on monopoly grounds, because the government (rightly so) recognized that if satellite TV assets are privately owned, there needs to be more than one owner; ideally three or more, but even two is better than one.
The SBC deal brings up a new set of problems. There is no more fear about rural consumers losing the benefits of competition, because SBC does not currently own satellite assets. However, due to having a government-approved monopoly over local telephone service, SBC has a unique advantage in that it can never die; it has a core business that practically everyone living in its target market needs, and that no competitor is allowed to offer. Thus, it can leverage its telephone monopoly to offer satellite service at a loss if its needs to, until other competitors are driven out of the market, and then drive prices back up.
There's a larger problem here that needs to be addressed, that of natural monopolies. Some services, most notably utilities that involve physical wires or pipes (water, oil, TV, phone, internet), are such that it would be absurd for two companies to compete in an open market. There is absolutely no reason why we should spend limited resources on building two sets of water pipes, or two sets of cable wires. Also, some of these services, especially oil, electricity, and water, are essential to life (modern or otherwise).
It takes the most die-hard corporate libertarian to argue that someone should be allowed to profit off basic human needs. And they'd be wrong. Municipal power companies have been enormously successful, if for no other reason than they have no profit motive; they only need to provide people with a useful service. All natural monopolies should be redesigned on that model. Whether city, county, or even state-owned, I want to see some (relatively local) level of government controlling electricity, energy, water, and telecommunications distribution.
Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. Their sole motive is to make a profit. Government is accountable to the people. Its motive is to provide for all citizens' basic needs, and (in our case) to ensure that corporations do not abuse their power. Which one would you rather control your wires?
Lessig has proposed an impeccable scheme. In essence, the term of copyright for almost all works is automatically shortened to 50 years, and any works that remain copyrighted beyond that date (up until the maximum of 95 years) are placed in a central registry. If you find a work that may be copyrighted, but that work is over 50 years old, and doesn't have an entry in the registry, then it's public. The small number of works that will remain on the registry, for example Mickey Mouse, are so pathetically uncreative that it is desirable to avoid seeing them.
And the best part? Because Lessig proposes to allow individuals or corporations to take a tax credit from their income taxes equivalent to the amount they pay in copyright taxes, corporations probably won't care. They already know what all of their commercially-exploitable copyrighted works are, and simply listing them on their tax filings will be no problem. The main accomplishment of this law, if passed, will be to free from copyright works that are so obscure and unprofitable that their authors don't know what they are, and don't want to bother putting in the work to form a complete list. By Breyer's count, 98% of all copyrighted works over 50 years old fit that definition... I hope he's right.
The 15" iMac is alive and well. Tis only the 15" standalone LCD display that has been discontinued.
If this story is at all true, it simply means that 17" iMacs are impinging on the sales of G4 towers, and the iMac will remain 15" only for the time being.
MacOS Rumors recently noted that certain stores were unable to order more CRT-based iMacs and eMacs. This is what Apple does when they are about to update a model. And now this?
Maybe Apple is finally taking everyone's advice, and realizing that consumers would far rather have a small, integrated box, like the Cube, that can interface with VGA and DVI as well as ADC monitors, and that is price-competitive with the cheapest x86 boxes. The revival of something like the Cube, but sans monitor and starting at $600, would actually get price-conscious consumers to consider getting a Mac instead.
Did it ever occur to the author of this story that, quite possibly, vegetarians would not want to eat an artificial turkey?
Most vegetarians, in my experience, have more than one reason for making their choice. Sure, there's the obvious, that "animal life is sacred" and that animals should not be killed under any condition. But what about health? Obviously, synthetic turkey would be just as unhealthy and cholesterol-packed as real turkey. (You could bioengineer a cholesterol-free turkey, but I'm not sure if it could still be properly called turkey.)
What about the organic principle? You often find many 'vegetarians' who stay away from red meat for health reasons, but would sooner eat hunted poultry or fished salmon than bioengineered tomatoes; they realize that for humans to live, we must by necessity kill other lifeforms (whether animal or plant), but that we should not interfere with nature until the end.
What about taste? Some vegetarians, believe it or not, just don't like the taste of red meat, poultry, or even fish, because they were brought up not to eat those products and never developed the taste.
There are a certain number of people who would be overjoyed by the development of a bioengineered turkey. However, I believe that those people would mostly be lifelong omnivores living in the suburbs, who have pangs of conscience every time they take their children to tour the local farms. This turkey would make it possible for them to pretend they were actually making a moral judgment. Vegeterians, meanwhile, won't care.
Back in the day, AMD was a chipfab. Intel made processors, but most of them were contracted out to independent companies, who could do a better job. Then one day, AMD realized that with their efficient factories, they could make a pretty good 486 clone. Intel sued, and in the end, AMD was forced to [a] stop directly copying Intel, and [b] use a different name.
The rest of the story's history. AMD started making the K5 and K6; then they made the K7, their first processor to not be compatible with Intel-standard mobos (remember when every processor used Socket 7?) And their custom architecture, in the end, almost netted them 25% of the chip market.
Then, for whatever reason, AMD started doing badly. And they said to themselves, maybe competing with Intel isn't such a good idea after all.
I expect AMD to release Barton and the like, simply because they're already developed. I expect them to release Opteron and future x86-64 processors, but only with cache/speed/price configurations designed for servers, because there's still money in people switching from proprietary Unix to Linux. I expect Apple to soon make an announcement that AMD is its new supplier; whether that means AMD buys Motorola's desktop PPC chip business, or whether it simply becomes a fab for Apple/IBM-produced designs, I have no idea. But I don't expect AMD to announce any new desktop x86 processors from now on. If this article means anything, it's that Barton's it.
The best interface ever created is the Palm OS. There are familiar-looking icons on the "desktop", to choose applications, but that's it. Documents, accessed from inside programs, are in simple list form. No hierarchy, no navigation, just a list.
The reason Nautilus is still necessary is because ext2/3 is the standard Linux filesystem. Why not use something like XFS or Reiser, that supports live queries/database-type actions? With live queries, there's no need for user-created hierarchies; everything just sorts itself. And thus a single list, instead of the huge complicated interface Nautilus gives you, will suffice.
I want to see the GNOME guys use a window manager that bypasses window size controls for Ratpoison-style always maximized windows, but *tabbed* (dialogs should come up as Mac OSX-style panels, or better yet not at all - documents should be saving automatically, getting rid of the primary purpose for dialogs nowadays). I want to see the location of the mouse pointer made as irrelevant as possible, and thus context menus should be all but eliminated; cursor-based applications (text editing) can keep them, but everything else should use standard menus. I want to see lots of stuff... but GNOME wants to duplicate Windows; a noble goal perhaps, but not one that suits my needs, and that's why I don't use it.
(Maybe the X Window System isn't all that bad after all...)
Chess is not a good example for AI. People have thought it is for years, but really it isn't. Chess is really nothing more than a puzzle - an *insanely* difficult one, but one still. There is a solution to chess.
However computers do it, eventually a computer will be designed that can play a perfect game of chess. Against an amazingly talented human it might draw, but it would never lose. And when that happens, who cares? The great minds that currently try to solve the puzzle of chess will instead have to apply their intellect to other things - like creating quantum cryptography.
It's irrelevant what they would do. The point is, there's no need to get worked up that the computer is winning. Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving. The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.
I'm using this configuration on my desktop right now; desktop background set to In-The-Shade-2, transparent gnome-terminal, ratpoison, ogg123 playing Soma Tribute on Peercast, links and galeon for webbrowsing.
But even better, in the long-term, is to use the framebuffer. Ever used links-graphical? Yes; believe it or not, some versions of links come compiled with framebuffer/svgalib support, and can display very well-drawn web pages graphically, with keyboard and mouse support, yet with no X and no bloat. Type "links -g www.google.com", and see it in action. mpg321/ogg123 can play media, and especially well with streaming; there's other players that work great with music file libraries. There's a console Python jabber program that someone made, and the author suggested a console proprietary-IM network. And the combination of mutt/joe, or any other editor for that matter, is a better mail client than you'll find anywhere.
There's only one thing that I still need X for - a desktop background. My computerusing experience is made that much more pleasant by being able to stare at tiled Propaganda (the Bowie J, Poag kind) all day. My console is already using the framebuffer... so isn't there a way that I can put a background on, and be free of the GUI forever?
CDMA is better than TDMA. Fair enough. But among the higher levels, GSM is better than whatever's on top of CDMA and TDMA. So why not use the technically better standard, WCDMA/UMTS, that is also emerging as the market winner - as every US carrier but Sprint, even Verizon, has announced an eventual switchover to WCDMA?
Quote: "but it may consider W-CDMA to please stakeholder Vodafone, which has chosen W-CDMA and threaten to put out of the company unless Verizon choice WCDMA."
This guy's thesis is obviously bullshit; too bad he couldn't at least get his facts straight.
WCDMA is the future. Everyone recognizes that technically, UMTS/WCDMA is a much better standard than Qualcomm-patented CDMA2000. And to further bury Qualcomm's last futile attempt to extract royalties from the cellular world, Nokia recently demonstrated a dual-band GSM/WCDMA phone; this phone was able to cross over from a WCDMA network to a GSM one, and continue on the same call, without a blink.
Verizon, the largest company in the US which is controlled by Vodafone, is switching to WCDMA. So is T-Mobile, Cingular, ATTWS, and probably Nextel if they're still around by then. Only Sprint has committed itself to CDMA2000 - and Sprint, at #4, is rapidly becoming as insignificant as Nextel.
The author is right that CDMA-based technologies are better than TDMA. But supporting CMDA2000, doomed from the start, shows him to be nothing more than someone who's really jealous that Europe actually knows what they're doing in regards to cellular, and that they'll have WCDMA networks well before the US. To which I say: too bad.
My two favorite open source projects are Mozilla and AbiWord. Both use cross-platform graphics libraries. The difference is in how they're executed.
AbiWord uses wrappers to compile its XP libraries into native widgets, for platforms as diverse as Win32, GTK/GNOME, QNX, and BeOS. Mozilla, instead, uses those same libraries, but uses XUL widgets; they look the same on any platform, but completely inconsistent with the platform they're on.
Moz should follow Abi's example. Eschew in-browser themes, and just use a wrapper to convert at compile-time to native widgets.
Two differences. First, it's not just Python; also Perl, ML, Scheme, Haskell, and various other languages support these kinds of features. It's just that, out of all the languages available, Perl and Python are by far the most widely-known and used, and Python happens to have a wider feature set (namely functional programming features) than Perl.
It's today's daily Slashvertisement! And to think I thought they were joking...
I still don't get what Moto has that other languages don't. If it's performance you're talking about, then why not just write a Python compiler? Honestly, it's not *that* hard, especially compared to writing a new language. And more importantly, Python is the most flexible language ever created. You can eschew brackets and semicolons, or you can use them (yes, the new Python supports semis). You can program in traditional imperative style, or more powerful functional style; most useful functional features are already built into Python, and the Xoltar toolkit provides the rest. And Python Server Pages, well, rule.
Moto could theoretically become a niche language, a la Ruby. But it's not going to overtake Perl and Python - good.
Slashdot Mirror
For years, there's been this little protocol called IMAP. It's really good. Yet most people, or rather most companies, insist on using the hopelessly-outdated POP3 standard. And these two standards are compatible - I can use IMAP without forcing everyone else to make the transition.
You want to obsolete SMTP entirely? Get real.
A Beowulf cluster of SARS... now that's a scary thought...
rampant mac writes "An article over at the New York Post
Silly mac user, use a more reputable news source like the National Enquirer.
How about, sucks to be him not because he's going to lose $11 million in potential earnings, but because he has back problems, and loses an opportunity to do what he likes best? He already got paid a shitload of money for the first movie. Spider-Man 2 or not, he's still one of the richest people in the country. And as soon as his back heals, he'll be right back on the silver screen, doing stunts and earning money galore.
God. I feel bad for him because as an actor, he undoubtedly loves his work, and it's unfair that he loses such a great opportunity to use his talent. I don't feel bad for him because he's only a multi-millionaire instead of a multi-multi-millionaire.
In Soviet Russia, e-mail uses YOU!
In soviet russia, your taxes do you!
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
ICE AGE
LILO & STITCH
SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON
SPIRITED AWAY
TREASURE PLANET
So if Spirited Away wins, it will have beat Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit, and Treasure Planet.
What an honor.
Okay, I'm an idiot - GM indeed owns Hughes. Duh. *slaps head*
However, my basic point remains. Why should it even be a remote possibility that SBC buys DirecTV? Government-granted monopolies over essential services are even easier to leverage than market-generated ones. If SBC buys DirecTV, Dish Network is over, and though prices might go down for a couple years, in the long run, satellite customers should prepare for a huge increase in prices.
First, to clarify the present situation: GE owns Hughes Electronics/DirecTV. It is not considered a "core asset", so they desperately want to get rid of it. First, Rupert Murdoch bid on DirecTV, and planned on spinning off all of his global satellite TV assets into a new company, Sky Global, upon completion of the sale. Then EchoStar, owners of Dish Network, made an unsolicited bid that was higher than Murdoch's, and he decided not to match it. Eventually, the EchoStar-DirecTV combination was rejected on monopoly grounds, because the government (rightly so) recognized that if satellite TV assets are privately owned, there needs to be more than one owner; ideally three or more, but even two is better than one.
The SBC deal brings up a new set of problems. There is no more fear about rural consumers losing the benefits of competition, because SBC does not currently own satellite assets. However, due to having a government-approved monopoly over local telephone service, SBC has a unique advantage in that it can never die; it has a core business that practically everyone living in its target market needs, and that no competitor is allowed to offer. Thus, it can leverage its telephone monopoly to offer satellite service at a loss if its needs to, until other competitors are driven out of the market, and then drive prices back up.
There's a larger problem here that needs to be addressed, that of natural monopolies. Some services, most notably utilities that involve physical wires or pipes (water, oil, TV, phone, internet), are such that it would be absurd for two companies to compete in an open market. There is absolutely no reason why we should spend limited resources on building two sets of water pipes, or two sets of cable wires. Also, some of these services, especially oil, electricity, and water, are essential to life (modern or otherwise).
It takes the most die-hard corporate libertarian to argue that someone should be allowed to profit off basic human needs. And they'd be wrong. Municipal power companies have been enormously successful, if for no other reason than they have no profit motive; they only need to provide people with a useful service. All natural monopolies should be redesigned on that model. Whether city, county, or even state-owned, I want to see some (relatively local) level of government controlling electricity, energy, water, and telecommunications distribution.
Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. Their sole motive is to make a profit. Government is accountable to the people. Its motive is to provide for all citizens' basic needs, and (in our case) to ensure that corporations do not abuse their power. Which one would you rather control your wires?
Lessig has proposed an impeccable scheme. In essence, the term of copyright for almost all works is automatically shortened to 50 years, and any works that remain copyrighted beyond that date (up until the maximum of 95 years) are placed in a central registry. If you find a work that may be copyrighted, but that work is over 50 years old, and doesn't have an entry in the registry, then it's public. The small number of works that will remain on the registry, for example Mickey Mouse, are so pathetically uncreative that it is desirable to avoid seeing them.
And the best part? Because Lessig proposes to allow individuals or corporations to take a tax credit from their income taxes equivalent to the amount they pay in copyright taxes, corporations probably won't care. They already know what all of their commercially-exploitable copyrighted works are, and simply listing them on their tax filings will be no problem. The main accomplishment of this law, if passed, will be to free from copyright works that are so obscure and unprofitable that their authors don't know what they are, and don't want to bother putting in the work to form a complete list. By Breyer's count, 98% of all copyrighted works over 50 years old fit that definition... I hope he's right.
As a resident of Massachusetts, I will now take this moment to laugh in your collective faces.
*laughs*
That is all.
The 15" iMac is alive and well. Tis only the 15" standalone LCD display that has been discontinued.
If this story is at all true, it simply means that 17" iMacs are impinging on the sales of G4 towers, and the iMac will remain 15" only for the time being.
MacOS Rumors recently noted that certain stores were unable to order more CRT-based iMacs and eMacs. This is what Apple does when they are about to update a model. And now this?
Maybe Apple is finally taking everyone's advice, and realizing that consumers would far rather have a small, integrated box, like the Cube, that can interface with VGA and DVI as well as ADC monitors, and that is price-competitive with the cheapest x86 boxes. The revival of something like the Cube, but sans monitor and starting at $600, would actually get price-conscious consumers to consider getting a Mac instead.
Did it ever occur to the author of this story that, quite possibly, vegetarians would not want to eat an artificial turkey?
Most vegetarians, in my experience, have more than one reason for making their choice. Sure, there's the obvious, that "animal life is sacred" and that animals should not be killed under any condition. But what about health? Obviously, synthetic turkey would be just as unhealthy and cholesterol-packed as real turkey. (You could bioengineer a cholesterol-free turkey, but I'm not sure if it could still be properly called turkey.)
What about the organic principle? You often find many 'vegetarians' who stay away from red meat for health reasons, but would sooner eat hunted poultry or fished salmon than bioengineered tomatoes; they realize that for humans to live, we must by necessity kill other lifeforms (whether animal or plant), but that we should not interfere with nature until the end.
What about taste? Some vegetarians, believe it or not, just don't like the taste of red meat, poultry, or even fish, because they were brought up not to eat those products and never developed the taste.
There are a certain number of people who would be overjoyed by the development of a bioengineered turkey. However, I believe that those people would mostly be lifelong omnivores living in the suburbs, who have pangs of conscience every time they take their children to tour the local farms. This turkey would make it possible for them to pretend they were actually making a moral judgment. Vegeterians, meanwhile, won't care.
# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 *.kids.us
#
Back in the day, AMD was a chipfab. Intel made processors, but most of them were contracted out to independent companies, who could do a better job. Then one day, AMD realized that with their efficient factories, they could make a pretty good 486 clone. Intel sued, and in the end, AMD was forced to [a] stop directly copying Intel, and [b] use a different name.
The rest of the story's history. AMD started making the K5 and K6; then they made the K7, their first processor to not be compatible with Intel-standard mobos (remember when every processor used Socket 7?) And their custom architecture, in the end, almost netted them 25% of the chip market.
Then, for whatever reason, AMD started doing badly. And they said to themselves, maybe competing with Intel isn't such a good idea after all.
I expect AMD to release Barton and the like, simply because they're already developed. I expect them to release Opteron and future x86-64 processors, but only with cache/speed/price configurations designed for servers, because there's still money in people switching from proprietary Unix to Linux. I expect Apple to soon make an announcement that AMD is its new supplier; whether that means AMD buys Motorola's desktop PPC chip business, or whether it simply becomes a fab for Apple/IBM-produced designs, I have no idea. But I don't expect AMD to announce any new desktop x86 processors from now on. If this article means anything, it's that Barton's it.
This is why I don't use GNOME.
The best interface ever created is the Palm OS. There are familiar-looking icons on the "desktop", to choose applications, but that's it. Documents, accessed from inside programs, are in simple list form. No hierarchy, no navigation, just a list.
The reason Nautilus is still necessary is because ext2/3 is the standard Linux filesystem. Why not use something like XFS or Reiser, that supports live queries/database-type actions? With live queries, there's no need for user-created hierarchies; everything just sorts itself. And thus a single list, instead of the huge complicated interface Nautilus gives you, will suffice.
I want to see the GNOME guys use a window manager that bypasses window size controls for Ratpoison-style always maximized windows, but *tabbed* (dialogs should come up as Mac OSX-style panels, or better yet not at all - documents should be saving automatically, getting rid of the primary purpose for dialogs nowadays). I want to see the location of the mouse pointer made as irrelevant as possible, and thus context menus should be all but eliminated; cursor-based applications (text editing) can keep them, but everything else should use standard menus. I want to see lots of stuff... but GNOME wants to duplicate Windows; a noble goal perhaps, but not one that suits my needs, and that's why I don't use it.
(Maybe the X Window System isn't all that bad after all...)
Why does anyone care if Kramnik wins or not?
Chess is not a good example for AI. People have thought it is for years, but really it isn't. Chess is really nothing more than a puzzle - an *insanely* difficult one, but one still. There is a solution to chess.
However computers do it, eventually a computer will be designed that can play a perfect game of chess. Against an amazingly talented human it might draw, but it would never lose. And when that happens, who cares? The great minds that currently try to solve the puzzle of chess will instead have to apply their intellect to other things - like creating quantum cryptography.
It's irrelevant what they would do. The point is, there's no need to get worked up that the computer is winning. Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving. The most powerful chess computer in the world would still fail the Turing test - and if that test was carried out with infinite accuracy, no computer could ever pass.
I'm using this configuration on my desktop right now; desktop background set to In-The-Shade-2, transparent gnome-terminal, ratpoison, ogg123 playing Soma Tribute on Peercast, links and galeon for webbrowsing.
But even better, in the long-term, is to use the framebuffer. Ever used links-graphical? Yes; believe it or not, some versions of links come compiled with framebuffer/svgalib support, and can display very well-drawn web pages graphically, with keyboard and mouse support, yet with no X and no bloat. Type "links -g www.google.com", and see it in action. mpg321/ogg123 can play media, and especially well with streaming; there's other players that work great with music file libraries. There's a console Python jabber program that someone made, and the author suggested a console proprietary-IM network. And the combination of mutt/joe, or any other editor for that matter, is a better mail client than you'll find anywhere.
There's only one thing that I still need X for - a desktop background. My computerusing experience is made that much more pleasant by being able to stare at tiled Propaganda (the Bowie J, Poag kind) all day. My console is already using the framebuffer... so isn't there a way that I can put a background on, and be free of the GUI forever?
CDMA is better than TDMA. Fair enough. But among the higher levels, GSM is better than whatever's on top of CDMA and TDMA. So why not use the technically better standard, WCDMA/UMTS, that is also emerging as the market winner - as every US carrier but Sprint, even Verizon, has announced an eventual switchover to WCDMA?
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-268198.html
7 41 .shtml
http://www.3gnewsroom.com/3g_news/jun_01/news_0
Quote: "but it may consider W-CDMA to please stakeholder Vodafone, which has chosen W-CDMA and threaten to put out of the company unless Verizon choice WCDMA."
This guy's thesis is obviously bullshit; too bad he couldn't at least get his facts straight.
WCDMA is the future. Everyone recognizes that technically, UMTS/WCDMA is a much better standard than Qualcomm-patented CDMA2000. And to further bury Qualcomm's last futile attempt to extract royalties from the cellular world, Nokia recently demonstrated a dual-band GSM/WCDMA phone; this phone was able to cross over from a WCDMA network to a GSM one, and continue on the same call, without a blink.
Verizon, the largest company in the US which is controlled by Vodafone, is switching to WCDMA. So is T-Mobile, Cingular, ATTWS, and probably Nextel if they're still around by then. Only Sprint has committed itself to CDMA2000 - and Sprint, at #4, is rapidly becoming as insignificant as Nextel.
The author is right that CDMA-based technologies are better than TDMA. But supporting CMDA2000, doomed from the start, shows him to be nothing more than someone who's really jealous that Europe actually knows what they're doing in regards to cellular, and that they'll have WCDMA networks well before the US. To which I say: too bad.
My two favorite open source projects are Mozilla and AbiWord. Both use cross-platform graphics libraries. The difference is in how they're executed.
AbiWord uses wrappers to compile its XP libraries into native widgets, for platforms as diverse as Win32, GTK/GNOME, QNX, and BeOS. Mozilla, instead, uses those same libraries, but uses XUL widgets; they look the same on any platform, but completely inconsistent with the platform they're on.
Moz should follow Abi's example. Eschew in-browser themes, and just use a wrapper to convert at compile-time to native widgets.
Two differences. First, it's not just Python; also Perl, ML, Scheme, Haskell, and various other languages support these kinds of features. It's just that, out of all the languages available, Perl and Python are by far the most widely-known and used, and Python happens to have a wider feature set (namely functional programming features) than Perl.
:D
Second, this is a comment. Yours is a story.
It's today's daily Slashvertisement! And to think I thought they were joking...
I still don't get what Moto has that other languages don't. If it's performance you're talking about, then why not just write a Python compiler? Honestly, it's not *that* hard, especially compared to writing a new language. And more importantly, Python is the most flexible language ever created. You can eschew brackets and semicolons, or you can use them (yes, the new Python supports semis). You can program in traditional imperative style, or more powerful functional style; most useful functional features are already built into Python, and the Xoltar toolkit provides the rest. And Python Server Pages, well, rule.
Moto could theoretically become a niche language, a la Ruby. But it's not going to overtake Perl and Python - good.