Java is essentially NeWS "the next generation". Java has the same display-side programmability, stack architecture, and PostScript imaging model.
Where Java improves over NeWS is that the language part of it is actually pretty usable and mainstream, that its multithreading works a lot better, and that it manages to isolate code from each other much better. Java also, so far, has been delivered to run on top of existing window systems, but Java can run standalone.
You can already use Java as a display server for Java itself using RMI (IBM has put together a package; see alphaworks.ibm.com). And, of course, it's used as a GUI server for many web applications.
What is really missing is a set of C/C++/OC widgets that work analogously to the NeWS or NeXTStep widgets. I sense a good open source project here:-)
More and more sites are beginning to serve real content through services like Akamai. With that, a simple "block any images from a site different than the HTML page" is not going to work too well.
However, being able to right-click on an image and select "no more images from this site" is convenient. I hope that feature will survive.
I would hope that one way or another, Mozilla will actually become as customizable as Emacs, with user-definable hooks for most actions. Then, you could define URL-PRELOAD-HOOK, URL-POSTLOAD-HOOK, FORM-PRESUBMISSION-HOOK, and all those things yourself to implement the privacy and advertising policies you like yourself.
And where would the "disgruntled submitter" come from? Presumably, they submitted their code with a GPL license on it, otherwise the FSF wouldn't have taken it in the first place.
So, why does the FSF feel they need extra protection? Why isn't the same mechanism that everybody who uses FSF software needs to trust sufficient for the FSF itself? Anybody who uses software from the FSF has to make do with the "COPYING" notices that are included on-line; if you ask the FSF for a separate written license for GNU software that put the GPL in writing, they refuse (or at least have done so in the past).
I'm not attacking the FSF over this. They have contributed a lot. But I still see some kind of contradiction here: it seems to me either we can trust electronically affixed copyright notices and licenses or we can't. If there is some argument why the FSF needs written notices and copyright assignment while the rest of us are safe with on-line notices and the FSF holding copyright, I'd like to understand it.
I don't think there is a conflict: pixel accurate rendering and "photographic" rendering (color models, antialiasing, etc.) are two different imaging models. X11 with the proposed extensions will support both, and that's good.
There is a successor to NeWS, and it's called "Java": same PostScript imaging model, same stack oriented architecture, developed by the same person.
I used NeWS for a while and found it has some serious problems when it came to reliability, isolation of different applications from one another, etc. Java addresses these issues.
The only thing that is really missing is network transparent C++ bindings to the Java toolkit. With SOAP, XML-RPC, or CORBA, that wouldn't be too hard.
The FSF's policy rasies some troubling questions to me. If the FSF does not feel protected from copyright claims by the GPL, why should anybody else feel protected from copyright claims when the FSF releases software under the GPL? I trust that the FSF wouldn't make such claims capriciously, but they might be imposed as part of a legal judgement against them or by others. And if the argument is that assigning copyright makes it easier to defend against liability claims, if the explicit declaimer of liability in the GPL doesn't protect me against that when I release it myself, why should it protect me when I assign copyright? What would happen if the FSF really did get sued and the only assets they had were the large number of copyrights assigned to them?
I understand the motivation for the FSF to cross all their t's and dot all their i's. That was probably crucially important when they were still the only open source organization around. But today, lots of companies and universities release lots of open source software. Most don't bother assigning anything to nonprofits. And I don't know of any legal case where an assignment would have helped.
The FSF asks users of free software to trust the GPL. The impression that the requirement for assignment creates is that they themselves feel that the GPL has some risks. If that is the FSF's position, I would like to see this clarified more and understand what it means for users of GPL'ed and FSF software.
Using a common English phrase for a trademark is simply stupid in the age of the Internet: people will use it in their writing, and search engines will give lots of bad hits. So, just use the phrase "for dummies" frequently in your web pages and IDG will perhaps see the error of their ways, as in
Performing cosmetic surgery on yourself at home is not something for dummies (or maybe it is).
Also, the value of "X for Dummies" is that it identifies books that require no prior knowledge and little effort to get a job done. Well, there are lots of books like that, many of them much better than "X for Dummies". So, let people know about good alternatives and recommend them on your web pages. As in
I read 'Home Cosmetic Surgery for Dummies (R)' by R. Hacker from IDG, but I thought it didn't do the subject much justice. Instead, get a copy of 'Practical Cosmetic Surgery at Home' by A. Cutswell. Not only is it written by someone who has actually performed some, it also has color illustrations.
That's both a very useful and a perfectly legal use of a trademark. Of course, if the "for Dummies" book is actually the best, give it credit.
You are not alone, and there are several efforts building new window systems for Linux from the ground up, including Berlin.
I think that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A lot of the stuff that makes X11 complex (pixel accurate rendering, pixel value manipulation, network transparency, properties, security, etc.) is intrinsically complex. Most other systems don't even bother offering a similarly complete package. BeOS, MS Windows, MacOS, and NeXT Step all address some aspects of it, but they also cut a lot of corners so that they can be targetted well to their market niche. That makes them a lot simpler and easier to deal with, but it also means they are not as general. I like X11 because it covers so much ground.
As I understand the proposal, it would not replace the old imaging model. In fact, I think it shouldn't. Pixel accurate rendering and bitwise blit operations are still important today. The requirement for the new, additional imaging model has come about because of new uses, and the logical way is to address it with an X11 protocol extension.
I think this is a great idea, and SuSE is to be commended for supporting this effort. X11 has a lot going for it in the areas of network transparency, pixel-accurate rendering, and integration of disparate applications into a single desktop. It's complex, but no other system has ever even come close to providing that level of functionality as robustly as X11. X11 has fallen behind when it comes to high quality, scalable, and anti-aliased graphics, and such an extension would address that.
One thing I'm wondering about is whether this X11 extension could not be based very directly on a 2D OpenGL subset--it's an API that a lot of people have experience with, that is well documented, and that's already part of many X servers. It's just a suggestion, and it might end up being somewhat of a compromise, but it might also help with the widespread acceptance of such an extension, because it would be really easy for many toolkits and applications to start supporting much of it immediately.
Noncommercial use doesn't "infringe", so IDG is under no obligation to "police" the use of that phrase. And trademark protection for common English phrases (like "for dummies" is) is limited anyway.
It's only trademark infringement when it identifies a product. Otherwise, anybody can title whatever they want to "X for Dummies".
Since a web discussion forum doesn't usually constitute a product, it isn't covered and IDG doesn't have a leg to stand on (other than by intimidation).
Furthermore, it's questionable whether companies ought to be able to protect parts of trademarks or whether there is any basis for that in trademark law. They don't have trademark on "SMART_HOSTS for Dummies", so it is questionable whether they can claim that trademark at all, even if this were a trademark issue.
X10.com makes remote controls for controlling a computer as an MP3 jukebox. There are Linux and Windows drivers. There are also several other companies that make remote controls for PCs, many of them for presentations.
I would guess that their licensing would explicitly prohibit such uses. The announcement said "for developers of Windows applications" or something like that.
I think it's pretty clear what this proposal comes down to. You'd get additional parts of code from the MFC and a few other libraries on request, or perhaps bundled with your MSDN subscription. The license would prohibit you from doing anything with that code other than use it to write Windows applications. Contamination clauses would likely explicitly prohibit you from working on projects like Wine if you as much as opened it. And the code you got would not be compilable into anything like a replacement of system DLLs, something the license would prohibit you from anyway. And, of course, there really isn't any way for anybody to verify that they are complying.
Any proposal to open Windows source code, even one that would be much more significant than Microsoft's, would ultimately only help Microsoft by making their APIs and software even more entrenched. Their proposal is by far the sweetest deal for them. In fact, it doesn't even represent a big change from existing practice: almost any Windows software company can get lots of Windows source code anyway if they ask.
The only way I can see to get Microsoft to document their APIs and to ensure that they aren't holding back is to break them into multiple OS and multiple application companies and to limit the ability of those companies to establish exclusive contracts with one another.
Microsoft hates that because it would finally bring up their costs to everybody else's: their current approach has allowed them to cut corners on interoperability and documentation, which saved them money and cut time to market, while at the same time excluding competitors. It's been a sweet deal for them, and it is precisely this conduct that needs to be addressed. A breakup with operating restrictions would create the economic necessity for Microsoft to do this. Any other remedy will just let them weasel out and involve endless debates among regulators and Microsoft about the intricacies of software design. In fact, we tried that before and it didn't work.
Re:transactional != reliable
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
This particular person has implemented dynamic web applications on stores without explicit transaction support. It's a good skill to have, among many others. Maybe you should look into it.
with that attitude, you're dead :-)
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
Transactions are about making multiple updates atomic. A database can be perfectly reliable and robust without supporting supporting that feature.
Transactions also don't come in a single flavor, they come in different levels with different guarantees.
And while "if the transaction didn't complete, immediately undo everything" is nice, it's often unnecessary. Many applications can be implemented by adding information into the database and activating it with an update to a single row in a single table (which is atomic in most databases even without transactions). The main area where that doesn't work is if you do global operations on tables, like taking a financial total; but that need doesn't usually arise in systems like ACS.
The transactional problems most web based sites have to solve are much simpler than the transactional problems that an enterprise level financial database has to solve. OTOH, performance and cost matter a lot more for the web site.
As for the Western movie analogy, it's a good one. If you aren't quick enough against a good opponent, you're dead. It's better to take your chances and draw quickly even if you can't hit as accurately. The same is true for a lot of business decisions.
I think this is actually quite analogous. Oracle is a huge, complex piece of software. If you manage to figure out how to administer it properly, you may get both good performance and reliability out of it. MySQL has many limitations and clearly isn't suitable for all applications, but it does what it does pretty well.
I think the database situation is far from good, either in the commercial world or in the open source world. I suspect SQL itself is in part to blame for this state of affairs. Ultimately, relief will likely come from a paradigm shift, perhaps to more API-centric approaches (like MetaKit) or to persistent object stores.
transactional != reliable
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
Whether a database supports transactions or not has nothing to do with how reliable it is. Data loss and crashes occur because of bugs in the database code, misconfigurations, disk crashes, and bugs in the application code.
Transactions are a specific feature to ensure consistency when multiple updates need to happen atomically. The requirement for transactions is driven by the task you are trying to solve. If your task doesn't need multiple updates to happen atomically, you don't need transactional support. Even if your task does require transactions, having them built into your database is only one of many options for implementing them. The transactional needs of most web applications are very simple and can often be much more efficiently implemented in the application code on top of a database that does not have transactional support.
I suspect most web sites actually get more reliability out of MySQL than they would out of Oracle (and better performance to boot). MySQL is much easier to configure, it's a much smaller and simpler software system, and it has very straightforward logging facilities that you can use for replication and recovery. All of those properties remove a lot of the risks that really cause data loss.
That isn't to say that Oracle or some other transactional database is never the right choice. For the applications those databases are designed for, business and financial data, their feature set are appropriate and their poor bang-for-the-buck is less important. On the other hand, for really high performance web applications, even MySQL is way too slow, and developers have to roll their own.
This is not at all a consequence of building a Gnutella-like system, it's a consequence of the somewhat naive design of Gnutella.
The ATT Crowds system shows how to build these kinds of distributed systems without traceability.
Of course, ZeroPaid's approach is also socially questionable and rather naive from a social point of view. The assumption that most people who download their files are "guilty" is a bad one. Many of them may be other people on the same mission as they are. Others may be automated programs or just promiscuous downloaders. Concretely, wouldn't you assume that the FBI is searching for and downloading just those files?
I used to use Motif. It had an enormous number of bugs, which took vendors forever to fix. Even many years into its supposedly "stable" releases, it required turning off Purify error reporting because it simply had too many runtime errors and leaks. Motif was also complex, but the complexity wasn't justified by the limited functionality it had out of the box.
The one advantage Motif could have had, a thriving component market didn't really work out. For any big project, licensing commercial software components for redistribution is a major hassle and expense. And any additional third party component that gets incorporated into a C/C++ program is a major risk because in C/C++ errors in any such component can show up in completely unrelated program parts. Generally, it's easier just to dedicate a programmer to building something equivalent in-house.
To me, Motif represents everything that can go wrong with commercial software. Today, there are lots of excellent, high quality toolkits out there, many of them free. I can't imagine circumstances under which I would choose Motif ever again for either an open source or a new commercial project. In fact, I can't imagine choosing any toolkit that isn't covered under LGPL, BSD, or some other, similar license.
Selective availability only encouraged the development of other technologies for high accuracy positioning, so it was counterproductive to the goals of the military. By turning off selective availability, the military is doing what makes the most economic sense: getting people to rely on a resource that they control completely. In case of a conflict, SA can be turned on very quickly again.
Businesses figured this one out a long time ago: by giving away things for "free", they suppress the emergence of potential competition.
Turning off SA has another consequence: in conjuction with the upcoming requirement for putting GPS into cell phones, it means that any cell phone user can be pinpointed very accurately now. I strongly doubt that that kind of requirement was put it for the reason given, to be able to locate people in case they call 911.
While widespread availability of accurate GPS has many useful advantages, it's important also to think through the dependencies and privacy implications it creates.
Along those lines, people may find Nomic interesting, a game where the participants make up the rules as they go along. You can find information here and here.
Re:It's a single-use, non-transferrable license ..
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
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· Score: 2
If you look at your music CDs, you won't find a license, and it's doubtful that companies could put a license on there if they wanted to (shrink wrap does not yet apply to things other than software).
So, commercial music (CDs) isn't covered by "licenses", it's covered by copyright law. Copyright law is most definitely transferrable, and it isn't single use. You can time shift, space shift, and copy for personal use as much as you want. The question in this case is whether MyMP3 can cache the mp3 versions of songs on behalf of the users. Keep in mind that MP3.com presumably bought at least one copy of each CD.
This decision is troubling, and its implications are yet to be understood. We'll have to read the legal opinion and comentary.
A lot of Internet caching is doing something very similar: caching takes the original content, stores it once on a central server, and delivers it on request. It saves network bandwidth. ISPs, corporate gateways, and home users with multiple machines do that sort of thing.
If MyMP3.com is found to be infringing copyright because of this, the same argument can be made for caching without the copyright owner's explicit consent.
I think different user communities have very different needs and preferences. Here are some of the parameters along which UIs can vary:
simplicity vs. features
reliance on keyboard vs. mouse
command language, scripting, or "pure" UI
dense UI with lots of features visible vs. sequential screens with big fonts and limited information
UIs that are easy to learn vs. UIs that cater to the experienced user
UIs with lots of visual features (e.g., 3D buttons and textures) vs. very simple UIs
easy customizability vs. predictability of the UI across installations (for easier training)
easy prototyping (for developers)
There are probably many more. I find it regrettable how most of the current UIs just keep copying each other. They all seem roughly like clones of the original MacOS and Windows and somewhat related to Smalltalk.
What are some alternatives? Here is a list:
The free Squeak Smalltalk system has a UI called "Morphic", which looks fairly conventional on the surface but supports visual programming and scripting. Even the traditional Smalltalk UI (which it supports) is still rather different from the current Windows stuff.
The Oberon system (Wirth, ETHZ) is text oriented in a rather interesting way.
The Plan 9 window system (called 8 1/2; from Bell Labs) is also oriented towards consoles and commands and supports network transparency.
The Symbolics Lisp Machine UI (some of which lives on in CLIM) could be transcript oriented: you interact through something like an xterm, but the program output contains buttons, input fields, graphics, etc.
The Mathematica notebooks are also an interesting example of a new kind of UI (partly implemented transparently over the web in Schelter's netmath system).
Web browsers themselves do represent a kind of new UI paradigm: text oriented with input elements scattered throughout.
Scalable UIs (implemented in Pad++ and Jazz) represent another interesting new UI paradigm. (Scalable UIs are basically toolkits similar to 3D toolkits, but only allow 2D view transformations plus zooming.)
There has been some work on true 3D UIs with things resembling real-world "objects". (These may be particularly intuitive to get started with but somewhat cumbersome for expert use.)
Window management itself is also an area of variability.
Most window management right now requires explicit manipulation and placement.
There have been some tiling window managers (even for X11) that distribute screen space automatically among windows. Some may go as far as to switch windows for you (e.g., when opening a new Netscape window).
Zoomable UIs present the possibility of an interesting new approach to window management.
Emacs is another example of tiling window management, and Emacs has managed to support a useful set of keyboard based "window management" operations. Maybe someone can figure out how to capture X11 desktop windows and place them under Emacs management so that some eoplec can live completely in Emacs?
Altogether, I feel that there isn't enough experimentation with new UI styles, but I can see reasons for it. I hope this posting will encourage people to look around a bit more and think about alternatives (Google will quickly find pointers to the systems I mention). Most likely, in the near future, new UI styles will simply live within the current system, just like web browser and Mathematica notebooks exist within pretty sparse UI frames.
As far as UIs go, I think one size doesn't fit all. There are too many different applications and different cognitive styles. Let's hope that with Microsoft receding in significance, we'll see a new wave of experimentation and different systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Where Java improves over NeWS is that the language part of it is actually pretty usable and mainstream, that its multithreading works a lot better, and that it manages to isolate code from each other much better. Java also, so far, has been delivered to run on top of existing window systems, but Java can run standalone.
You can already use Java as a display server for Java itself using RMI (IBM has put together a package; see alphaworks.ibm.com). And, of course, it's used as a GUI server for many web applications.
What is really missing is a set of C/C++/OC widgets that work analogously to the NeWS or NeXTStep widgets. I sense a good open source project here :-)
However, being able to right-click on an image and select "no more images from this site" is convenient. I hope that feature will survive.
I would hope that one way or another, Mozilla will actually become as customizable as Emacs, with user-definable hooks for most actions. Then, you could define URL-PRELOAD-HOOK, URL-POSTLOAD-HOOK, FORM-PRESUBMISSION-HOOK, and all those things yourself to implement the privacy and advertising policies you like yourself.
So, why does the FSF feel they need extra protection? Why isn't the same mechanism that everybody who uses FSF software needs to trust sufficient for the FSF itself? Anybody who uses software from the FSF has to make do with the "COPYING" notices that are included on-line; if you ask the FSF for a separate written license for GNU software that put the GPL in writing, they refuse (or at least have done so in the past).
I'm not attacking the FSF over this. They have contributed a lot. But I still see some kind of contradiction here: it seems to me either we can trust electronically affixed copyright notices and licenses or we can't. If there is some argument why the FSF needs written notices and copyright assignment while the rest of us are safe with on-line notices and the FSF holding copyright, I'd like to understand it.
I don't think there is a conflict: pixel accurate rendering and "photographic" rendering (color models, antialiasing, etc.) are two different imaging models. X11 with the proposed extensions will support both, and that's good.
I used NeWS for a while and found it has some serious problems when it came to reliability, isolation of different applications from one another, etc. Java addresses these issues.
The only thing that is really missing is network transparent C++ bindings to the Java toolkit. With SOAP, XML-RPC, or CORBA, that wouldn't be too hard.
I understand the motivation for the FSF to cross all their t's and dot all their i's. That was probably crucially important when they were still the only open source organization around. But today, lots of companies and universities release lots of open source software. Most don't bother assigning anything to nonprofits. And I don't know of any legal case where an assignment would have helped.
The FSF asks users of free software to trust the GPL. The impression that the requirement for assignment creates is that they themselves feel that the GPL has some risks. If that is the FSF's position, I would like to see this clarified more and understand what it means for users of GPL'ed and FSF software.
Also, the value of "X for Dummies" is that it identifies books that require no prior knowledge and little effort to get a job done. Well, there are lots of books like that, many of them much better than "X for Dummies". So, let people know about good alternatives and recommend them on your web pages. As in
That's both a very useful and a perfectly legal use of a trademark. Of course, if the "for Dummies" book is actually the best, give it credit.I think that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A lot of the stuff that makes X11 complex (pixel accurate rendering, pixel value manipulation, network transparency, properties, security, etc.) is intrinsically complex. Most other systems don't even bother offering a similarly complete package. BeOS, MS Windows, MacOS, and NeXT Step all address some aspects of it, but they also cut a lot of corners so that they can be targetted well to their market niche. That makes them a lot simpler and easier to deal with, but it also means they are not as general. I like X11 because it covers so much ground.
As I understand the proposal, it would not replace the old imaging model. In fact, I think it shouldn't. Pixel accurate rendering and bitwise blit operations are still important today. The requirement for the new, additional imaging model has come about because of new uses, and the logical way is to address it with an X11 protocol extension.
One thing I'm wondering about is whether this X11 extension could not be based very directly on a 2D OpenGL subset--it's an API that a lot of people have experience with, that is well documented, and that's already part of many X servers. It's just a suggestion, and it might end up being somewhat of a compromise, but it might also help with the widespread acceptance of such an extension, because it would be really easy for many toolkits and applications to start supporting much of it immediately.
Noncommercial use doesn't "infringe", so IDG is under no obligation to "police" the use of that phrase. And trademark protection for common English phrases (like "for dummies" is) is limited anyway.
Since a web discussion forum doesn't usually constitute a product, it isn't covered and IDG doesn't have a leg to stand on (other than by intimidation).
Furthermore, it's questionable whether companies ought to be able to protect parts of trademarks or whether there is any basis for that in trademark law. They don't have trademark on "SMART_HOSTS for Dummies", so it is questionable whether they can claim that trademark at all, even if this were a trademark issue.
X10.com makes remote controls for controlling a computer as an MP3 jukebox. There are Linux and Windows drivers. There are also several other companies that make remote controls for PCs, many of them for presentations.
I would guess that their licensing would explicitly prohibit such uses. The announcement said "for developers of Windows applications" or something like that.
Any proposal to open Windows source code, even one that would be much more significant than Microsoft's, would ultimately only help Microsoft by making their APIs and software even more entrenched. Their proposal is by far the sweetest deal for them. In fact, it doesn't even represent a big change from existing practice: almost any Windows software company can get lots of Windows source code anyway if they ask.
The only way I can see to get Microsoft to document their APIs and to ensure that they aren't holding back is to break them into multiple OS and multiple application companies and to limit the ability of those companies to establish exclusive contracts with one another.
Microsoft hates that because it would finally bring up their costs to everybody else's: their current approach has allowed them to cut corners on interoperability and documentation, which saved them money and cut time to market, while at the same time excluding competitors. It's been a sweet deal for them, and it is precisely this conduct that needs to be addressed. A breakup with operating restrictions would create the economic necessity for Microsoft to do this. Any other remedy will just let them weasel out and involve endless debates among regulators and Microsoft about the intricacies of software design. In fact, we tried that before and it didn't work.
This particular person has implemented dynamic web applications on stores without explicit transaction support. It's a good skill to have, among many others. Maybe you should look into it.
Transactions also don't come in a single flavor, they come in different levels with different guarantees.
And while "if the transaction didn't complete, immediately undo everything" is nice, it's often unnecessary. Many applications can be implemented by adding information into the database and activating it with an update to a single row in a single table (which is atomic in most databases even without transactions). The main area where that doesn't work is if you do global operations on tables, like taking a financial total; but that need doesn't usually arise in systems like ACS.
The transactional problems most web based sites have to solve are much simpler than the transactional problems that an enterprise level financial database has to solve. OTOH, performance and cost matter a lot more for the web site.
As for the Western movie analogy, it's a good one. If you aren't quick enough against a good opponent, you're dead. It's better to take your chances and draw quickly even if you can't hit as accurately. The same is true for a lot of business decisions.
I think the database situation is far from good, either in the commercial world or in the open source world. I suspect SQL itself is in part to blame for this state of affairs. Ultimately, relief will likely come from a paradigm shift, perhaps to more API-centric approaches (like MetaKit) or to persistent object stores.
Transactions are a specific feature to ensure consistency when multiple updates need to happen atomically. The requirement for transactions is driven by the task you are trying to solve. If your task doesn't need multiple updates to happen atomically, you don't need transactional support. Even if your task does require transactions, having them built into your database is only one of many options for implementing them. The transactional needs of most web applications are very simple and can often be much more efficiently implemented in the application code on top of a database that does not have transactional support.
I suspect most web sites actually get more reliability out of MySQL than they would out of Oracle (and better performance to boot). MySQL is much easier to configure, it's a much smaller and simpler software system, and it has very straightforward logging facilities that you can use for replication and recovery. All of those properties remove a lot of the risks that really cause data loss.
That isn't to say that Oracle or some other transactional database is never the right choice. For the applications those databases are designed for, business and financial data, their feature set are appropriate and their poor bang-for-the-buck is less important. On the other hand, for really high performance web applications, even MySQL is way too slow, and developers have to roll their own.
The ATT Crowds system shows how to build these kinds of distributed systems without traceability.
Of course, ZeroPaid's approach is also socially questionable and rather naive from a social point of view. The assumption that most people who download their files are "guilty" is a bad one. Many of them may be other people on the same mission as they are. Others may be automated programs or just promiscuous downloaders. Concretely, wouldn't you assume that the FBI is searching for and downloading just those files?
The one advantage Motif could have had, a thriving component market didn't really work out. For any big project, licensing commercial software components for redistribution is a major hassle and expense. And any additional third party component that gets incorporated into a C/C++ program is a major risk because in C/C++ errors in any such component can show up in completely unrelated program parts. Generally, it's easier just to dedicate a programmer to building something equivalent in-house.
To me, Motif represents everything that can go wrong with commercial software. Today, there are lots of excellent, high quality toolkits out there, many of them free. I can't imagine circumstances under which I would choose Motif ever again for either an open source or a new commercial project. In fact, I can't imagine choosing any toolkit that isn't covered under LGPL, BSD, or some other, similar license.
Businesses figured this one out a long time ago: by giving away things for "free", they suppress the emergence of potential competition.
Turning off SA has another consequence: in conjuction with the upcoming requirement for putting GPS into cell phones, it means that any cell phone user can be pinpointed very accurately now. I strongly doubt that that kind of requirement was put it for the reason given, to be able to locate people in case they call 911.
While widespread availability of accurate GPS has many useful advantages, it's important also to think through the dependencies and privacy implications it creates.
Along those lines, people may find Nomic interesting, a game where the participants make up the rules as they go along. You can find information here and here.
So, commercial music (CDs) isn't covered by "licenses", it's covered by copyright law. Copyright law is most definitely transferrable, and it isn't single use. You can time shift, space shift, and copy for personal use as much as you want. The question in this case is whether MyMP3 can cache the mp3 versions of songs on behalf of the users. Keep in mind that MP3.com presumably bought at least one copy of each CD.
This decision is troubling, and its implications are yet to be understood. We'll have to read the legal opinion and comentary.
If MyMP3.com is found to be infringing copyright because of this, the same argument can be made for caching without the copyright owner's explicit consent.
- simplicity vs. features
- reliance on keyboard vs. mouse
- command language, scripting, or "pure" UI
- dense UI with lots of features visible vs. sequential screens with big fonts and limited information
- UIs that are easy to learn vs. UIs that cater to the experienced user
- UIs with lots of visual features (e.g., 3D buttons and textures) vs. very simple UIs
- easy customizability vs. predictability of the UI across installations (for easier training)
- easy prototyping (for developers)
There are probably many more. I find it regrettable how most of the current UIs just keep copying each other. They all seem roughly like clones of the original MacOS and Windows and somewhat related to Smalltalk.What are some alternatives? Here is a list:
Window management itself is also an area of variability.
Altogether, I feel that there isn't enough experimentation with new UI styles, but I can see reasons for it. I hope this posting will encourage people to look around a bit more and think about alternatives (Google will quickly find pointers to the systems I mention). Most likely, in the near future, new UI styles will simply live within the current system, just like web browser and Mathematica notebooks exist within pretty sparse UI frames.
As far as UIs go, I think one size doesn't fit all. There are too many different applications and different cognitive styles. Let's hope that with Microsoft receding in significance, we'll see a new wave of experimentation and different systems.