While you're waiting you could try using multimap.com which has been able to blend maps and aerial photography for years. Of course it doesn't have the nice smooth scrolling that google maps does so...
Well I'm prepared for the term to have positive and negative meanings and have the reader/listener infer the meaning from the context like they have to for many other words.
Like the poster that started this debate, I get annoyed with people going on and on about "hacker" not meaning computer criminal although my main objection is with them trying to tell us that the *proper* name for such people is "crackers". People that crack encryption or copy-protection schemes are called crackers, but hackers - sorry, people who break into computer systems - have never been called crackers by anyone except people who are trying to reclaim the word hacker.
Now before this post gets tagged as redundant I'll get to my point which is that ESR may have been well intentioned in getting the media to understand that 'hacker' can be a good thing, but HE PICKED SUCH A STUPID ALTERNATIVE LABEL FOR THE BAD GUYS THAT NO REASONABLE PERSON COULD USE IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE. Just listen to yourself!
A while ago (on a different board) I was explaining to someone how I regarded this hacker/cracker thing as revisionism as I'd always known hacker to be used for bad guys and only since I learned to program as being a good thing. He got very annoyed and insisted I was wrong. I just blew it off at the time but them I decided to do a little research and looked at Google Groups USENET archive. The earliest reference I could find was from the early '80s and it was - wait for it - someone complaining about the media misusing the term "hacker". Given that 20 years have elapsed since and the term probably only dates from the '60s, it shows that people have been 'misusing' the term for at least half its life.
I read an article on here some time ago where somebody declared that a future depicted full of hydrogen powered vehicles was a "cruel hoax" and that hybrid cars were the best hope for the short to medium term. I can't comment of whether we'll ever be able to manufacture hydrogen in large enough quantites viably, but if you examine the facts, hybrid cars are the cruelest hoax that presents the car buyer today. Hybrid performance is awful in current models - that may improve with better battery technology (the electric motor is the easy part). However the gas mileage these things get is a joke. The Prius gets about 45mpg in realistic useage (based on the independent reviews I've read). That's worse than most european diesel cars get - diesel cars that have decent performance and aren't made of plastic in an attempt to compensate for the weight of lugging two complete power sources about all the time. Oh yes, and they're a helluva lot cheaper to make for the same reason.
That's not to say I'm a big fan of diesels before anyone starts laying into them and me for all the problems they have. My point is that the hybrid cars claim of being an enviromentally friendly choice is a joke when it gets worse mileage than cars Peugot were making 10 years ago. Still, if it lets the rich people who can afford them feel better that's OK, as long as everyone else realises they are just a PR effort on the part of car manufacturers to make it appear like they give a damn.
"open standard" are a waste of time
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
POSIX really represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry. No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers. That's why standards implementation has always been quite poor.
POSIX itself has been made largely irrelevant by the sucess of Linux. Standards orgainisations should learn from this - the world doesn't want standards that vendors can implement more or less correctly to provide a veneer of compatability. What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
If vendors want to waste money funding organisations like the Open Group that's their problem, but organisations like the Open Group shouldn't expect anyone to really care about the useless documents they create.
Yeh, it's kind of like that "my enemy's enemy is my friend" thing. It shouldn't work like that. People should realise that companies like Oracle and Sun are just as evil as Microsoft and would easily stoop to any of the tactics that MS have employed over the years to get ahead.
Wow, this story brings back a few memories. That HERO robot was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when I was a kid. I remember there was an episode of that "whiz kids" show where they built one. Of course I've never seen one in real life so don't anyone shatter my dreams!
It is regretable that Macromedia haven't either supported alternative OSs or even released an OSS flash player. However, if you wanted to produce multimedia content for the web, what other options are available? The only thing currently available thats even comparable is Shockwave and most Flash users wouldn't consider touching that.
Even when browser developers start supporting the open SVG standard the questioner will still find himself with the same problem because SVG just specifies a vector format to display static images. Animation can be achieved my means of Javascript (yeh, I know you probably don't like that either) manipulating the DOM. Even so, few multimedia authors want to write Javascript.
If you look at the huge number of projects listed on SourceForge or Freshmeat you will see very few that involve rich graphical user interfaces like the Flash developer environment. We all agree that free software developers are as smart as commercial developers (many of them are the same people just working in their spare time). The lack of multimedia development tools in the 'free' arena is really down to the fact that they are a bitch to write and people that are developing software for fun would rather write something that is useful to *them*.
I have to admit that I hadn't heard of this device before, but according to the specs it uses standard 2.5G technology (GPRS/HSCSD) in which case its claims of 56k transfer rates are highly optimistic.
Also, I don't which mobile networks they are expecting you to use this on, but unless they have been opened up recently, they didn't have a general GPRS->Internet bridge available that would let you use the Pogo to browse web pages via GPRS.
The last time I looked at GPRS in the UK you could only use it to connect to the networks own WAP and messaging gateways and the authorised WAP servers operated a "walled garden" policy.
Display Postscript.. Even Next (or the Next engineers that got absorbed into Apple anyway) realised that was a bad idea. Its a great idea in theory I'll grant you - you get resolution independence, intelligent remote widget representation in a remote terminal environment and relatively easy programming for the app developer.
The problem with it is it's extremely resource intensive (think about it: Postscript is a fully-fledged programming language and you want to put an interpreter for it in your terminal?) plus Adobe patented it and charge a licence fee for its use.
The display engine in Mac OS X is based on the PDF standard instead. You still get the resoltion independence but because PDF is a page description language (declarative) rather than a (functional) programming language you get a less complex and less resource intensive display engine. You lose the intelligent remote widgets but then percentage-wise how many users access GUIs remotely even with a lower-grade solution such as X or (god forbid) VNC compared to those that sit infront of the machine they run all their software on? Very few. Oh, and although Adobe invented PDF, it doesn't charge a licence fee for its use.
You could always access Excel's object model from Java (well at least since Microsoft's "evil" version of Java was available). Microsoft wanted people to write Java that would only run on Windows so they coded up a Java->COM bridge. Since all Excel's object model is available as COM objects to all-comers (VBA is just a free-be crippled copy of VB) you could easily automate Excel from Java.
You can bet that if grad students had access to such hardware the very first thing they would use it for would be to get the highest team score on Genome@Home.
If you are a big enough customer you can get the source to almost anything. Many VAX customers had the source of VMS back in the day (not that you would want to read it as it was mostly written in Pascal and Macro-11 but still, if having the source gives you that warm fuzzy feeling all's the good). The same was true for large Solaris installations even before Sun 'opened' their source.
Bearing in mind that this machine was built by Compaq under contract I would find it inexplicable if the systems programmers on site did not have the source to tweak as required.
OK, this might be news because of the selection of Athlon itself, but Cobalt have been using AMD devices in their RaQ range for years now. In fact all but the first itteration (which were MIPS based) have run on K6 CPUs. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites happily running on AMD at this very moment!:) --
Mainsoft has had a windows source licence for years. For those who've never heard of them before they produce a kit and supply consultancy services for ISVs wanting to port windows apps to UNIX/X. Their kit (unlike the old Willows Twin) contains portions of the windows source in order to emulate stuff like common controls and at least the top layers of the gdi and user modules.
Because MS doesn't want people using its software to drive people onto unix it charges a high premium. If you use Mainsoft to port your app you will have to pay a per-copy royalty that pretty much equals the price of a windows licence! As such it is generally only used to port very expensive, low volume products normally. --
I don't think Sony and Sega are making the same mistake as 3DO. The difference is that 3DO started off with the intention of licencing hardware manufacture and sales to multiple companies - their whole business model relied on these other companies to make their hardware design and sell it in quantity.
Sony and Sega by contrast have already made a success of their respective consoles to the extent that the software developers are happy enough to support the platform. Any extra licencing they can pull in now is icing on the cake. --
Good point. QNX costs big bucks and no mistake. I just hope noone tries to get X on there. There are some nice and tiny little GUIs available for linux now. The only advantage to porting X is you get the apps for free, but lets face it, most X apps are dogs, the good ones are based on either KDE (Qt) or Gnome (GDK) platforms and getting them to work on a new GUI is a question of changing the toolkit, not the app. --
If the price is right you can bank on it. I seen several times claims that Intel expects to make a bigger margin on its mobile pentium chips to make up for the thin margins on the more competition-driven desktop chip market. If Transmeta can get the devices made in large volumes and they really do have the advantage of low power consumption then they will pick up the minor players quickly. People like Dell are just too in-bed with Intel though. --
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is impossible to do anything about cable monopolies. Competition is non-existant because it costs way too much to lay cable for any one area to be covered by more than one company. When cable first came here in the '80s the various companies carved up the towns into areas. Since then all the smaller companies were absorbed until there were only 3: Telewest, NTL and Cable and Wireless. A while back NTL bought C-and-W's domestic business, so now there are effectively only 2. --
This reminds me of a comment I once read in the source of a TCP/IP stack (KA9Q probably) to the effect that IP would be no good for communication in space as the round trip time to Mars would cause standard IP to time out every packet. Damnit, why didn't they see this coming back in the seventies?:-) --
Please don't let this thread become another excuse to slag off Mozilla. I know the story poster hasn't so much, but I know there are a lot of slashdotters who love to. A couple of points.
This isn't trying to be cross platform in the same was as Mozilla is and this has a head start in terms of simplicity.
A lot of the features claimed in the article are targets, not where the package is right now
Knowing how good KDE hackers are, I'm sure this will turn out to be every bit as good as they claim it is and for KDE users, it will be a better fit to that environment because of the component technology it uses. But whatever sucess Konqueror scores, there is still a place for Mozilla. --
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot needs an button for stories like this (any story involving Google really).
While you're waiting you could try using multimap.com which has been able to blend maps and aerial photography for years. Of course it doesn't have the nice smooth scrolling that google maps does so...
Coincidentally I was just reading this article from Inc. magazine last night.
t ml
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050401/priority.h
The IRS prosecuted Menard for paying a large salary and no dividend because that arrangement results in paying less tax. See the article for details.
Well I'm prepared for the term to have positive and negative meanings and have the reader/listener infer the meaning from the context like they have to for many other words.
Like the poster that started this debate, I get annoyed with people going on and on about "hacker" not meaning computer criminal although my main objection is with them trying to tell us that the *proper* name for such people is "crackers". People that crack encryption or copy-protection schemes are called crackers, but hackers - sorry, people who break into computer systems - have never been called crackers by anyone except people who are trying to reclaim the word hacker.
Now before this post gets tagged as redundant I'll get to my point which is that ESR may have been well intentioned in getting the media to understand that 'hacker' can be a good thing, but HE PICKED SUCH A STUPID ALTERNATIVE LABEL FOR THE BAD GUYS THAT NO REASONABLE PERSON COULD USE IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE. Just listen to yourself!
A while ago (on a different board) I was explaining to someone how I regarded this hacker/cracker thing as revisionism as I'd always known hacker to be used for bad guys and only since I learned to program as being a good thing. He got very annoyed and insisted I was wrong. I just blew it off at the time but them I decided to do a little research and looked at Google Groups USENET archive. The earliest reference I could find was from the early '80s and it was - wait for it - someone complaining about the media misusing the term "hacker". Given that 20 years have elapsed since and the term probably only dates from the '60s, it shows that people have been 'misusing' the term for at least half its life.
Oh yeah, look it's a sailboat.
amen, somebody please mod the above post up.
I read an article on here some time ago where somebody declared that a future depicted full of hydrogen powered vehicles was a "cruel hoax" and that hybrid cars were the best hope for the short to medium term. I can't comment of whether we'll ever be able to manufacture hydrogen in large enough quantites viably, but if you examine the facts, hybrid cars are the cruelest hoax that presents the car buyer today. Hybrid performance is awful in current models - that may improve with better battery technology (the electric motor is the easy part). However the gas mileage these things get is a joke. The Prius gets about 45mpg in realistic useage (based on the independent reviews I've read). That's worse than most european diesel cars get - diesel cars that have decent performance and aren't made of plastic in an attempt to compensate for the weight of lugging two complete power sources about all the time. Oh yes, and they're a helluva lot cheaper to make for the same reason.
That's not to say I'm a big fan of diesels before anyone starts laying into them and me for all the problems they have. My point is that the hybrid cars claim of being an enviromentally friendly choice is a joke when it gets worse mileage than cars Peugot were making 10 years ago. Still, if it lets the rich people who can afford them feel better that's OK, as long as everyone else realises they are just a PR effort on the part of car manufacturers to make it appear like they give a damn.
POSIX really represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry. No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers. That's why standards implementation has always been quite poor.
POSIX itself has been made largely irrelevant by the sucess of Linux. Standards orgainisations should learn from this - the world doesn't want standards that vendors can implement more or less correctly to provide a veneer of compatability. What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
If vendors want to waste money funding organisations like the Open Group that's their problem, but organisations like the Open Group shouldn't expect anyone to really care about the useless documents they create.
Yeh, it's kind of like that "my enemy's enemy is my friend" thing. It shouldn't work like that. People should realise that companies like Oracle and Sun are just as evil as Microsoft and would easily stoop to any of the tactics that MS have employed over the years to get ahead.
Wow, this story brings back a few memories. That HERO robot was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when I was a kid. I remember there was an episode of that "whiz kids" show where they built one. Of course I've never seen one in real life so don't anyone shatter my dreams!
christ on a bike, what has Taco been smoking?
It is regretable that Macromedia haven't either supported alternative OSs or even released an OSS flash player. However, if you wanted to produce multimedia content for the web, what other options are available? The only thing currently available thats even comparable is Shockwave and most Flash users wouldn't consider touching that.
Even when browser developers start supporting the open SVG standard the questioner will still find himself with the same problem because SVG just specifies a vector format to display static images. Animation can be achieved my means of Javascript (yeh, I know you probably don't like that either) manipulating the DOM. Even so, few multimedia authors want to write Javascript.
If you look at the huge number of projects listed on SourceForge or Freshmeat you will see very few that involve rich graphical user interfaces like the Flash developer environment. We all agree that free software developers are as smart as commercial developers (many of them are the same people just working in their spare time). The lack of multimedia development tools in the 'free' arena is really down to the fact that they are a bitch to write and people that are developing software for fun would rather write something that is useful to *them*.
Port it to linux :)
I have to admit that I hadn't heard of this device before, but according to the specs it uses standard 2.5G technology (GPRS/HSCSD) in which case its claims of 56k transfer rates are highly optimistic.
Also, I don't which mobile networks they are expecting you to use this on, but unless they have been opened up recently, they didn't have a general GPRS->Internet bridge available that would let you use the Pogo to browse web pages via GPRS.
The last time I looked at GPRS in the UK you could only use it to connect to the networks own WAP and messaging gateways and the authorised WAP servers operated a "walled garden" policy.
Display Postscript.. Even Next (or the Next engineers that got absorbed into Apple anyway) realised that was a bad idea. Its a great idea in theory I'll grant you - you get resolution independence, intelligent remote widget representation in a remote terminal environment and relatively easy programming for the app developer.
The problem with it is it's extremely resource intensive (think about it: Postscript is a fully-fledged programming language and you want to put an interpreter for it in your terminal?) plus Adobe patented it and charge a licence fee for its use.
The display engine in Mac OS X is based on the PDF standard instead. You still get the resoltion independence but because PDF is a page description language (declarative) rather than a (functional) programming language you get a less complex and less resource intensive display engine. You lose the intelligent remote widgets but then percentage-wise how many users access GUIs remotely even with a lower-grade solution such as X or (god forbid) VNC compared to those that sit infront of the machine they run all their software on? Very few. Oh, and although Adobe invented PDF, it doesn't charge a licence fee for its use.
You could always access Excel's object model from Java (well at least since Microsoft's "evil" version of Java was available). Microsoft wanted people to write Java that would only run on Windows so they coded up a Java->COM bridge. Since all Excel's object model is available as COM objects to all-comers (VBA is just a free-be crippled copy of VB) you could easily automate Excel from Java.
You can bet that if grad students had access to such hardware the very first thing they would use it for would be to get the highest team score on Genome@Home.
If you are a big enough customer you can get the source to almost anything. Many VAX customers had the source of VMS back in the day (not that you would want to read it as it was mostly written in Pascal and Macro-11 but still, if having the source gives you that warm fuzzy feeling all's the good). The same was true for large Solaris installations even before Sun 'opened' their source.
Bearing in mind that this machine was built by Compaq under contract I would find it inexplicable if the systems programmers on site did not have the source to tweak as required.
OK, this might be news because of the selection of Athlon itself, but Cobalt have been using AMD devices in their RaQ range for years now. In fact all but the first itteration (which were MIPS based) have run on K6 CPUs. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites happily running on AMD at this very moment! :)
--
Because MS doesn't want people using its software to drive people onto unix it charges a high premium. If you use Mainsoft to port your app you will have to pay a per-copy royalty that pretty much equals the price of a windows licence! As such it is generally only used to port very expensive, low volume products normally.
--
Sony and Sega by contrast have already made a success of their respective consoles to the extent that the software developers are happy enough to support the platform. Any extra licencing they can pull in now is icing on the cake.
--
Good point. QNX costs big bucks and no mistake. I just hope noone tries to get X on there. There are some nice and tiny little GUIs available for linux now. The only advantage to porting X is you get the apps for free, but lets face it, most X apps are dogs, the good ones are based on either KDE (Qt) or Gnome (GDK) platforms and getting them to work on a new GUI is a question of changing the toolkit, not the app.
--
If the price is right you can bank on it. I seen several times claims that Intel expects to make a bigger margin on its mobile pentium chips to make up for the thin margins on the more competition-driven desktop chip market. If Transmeta can get the devices made in large volumes and they really do have the advantage of low power consumption then they will pick up the minor players quickly. People like Dell are just too in-bed with Intel though.
--
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is impossible to do anything about cable monopolies. Competition is non-existant because it costs way too much to lay cable for any one area to be covered by more than one company. When cable first came here in the '80s the various companies carved up the towns into areas. Since then all the smaller companies were absorbed until there were only 3: Telewest, NTL and Cable and Wireless. A while back NTL bought C-and-W's domestic business, so now there are effectively only 2.
--
This reminds me of a comment I once read in the source of a TCP/IP stack (KA9Q probably) to the effect that IP would be no good for communication in space as the round trip time to Mars would cause standard IP to time out every packet. Damnit, why didn't they see this coming back in the seventies? :-)
--
- This isn't trying to be cross platform in the same was as Mozilla is and this has a head start in terms of simplicity.
- A lot of the features claimed in the article are targets, not where the package is right now
Knowing how good KDE hackers are, I'm sure this will turn out to be every bit as good as they claim it is and for KDE users, it will be a better fit to that environment because of the component technology it uses. But whatever sucess Konqueror scores, there is still a place for Mozilla.--