Where do you get the idea that Java is a RAD language? It's as fucking rapid as C++ development (for the intelligent reader's knowlege you CAN use a decent IDE to create an interface and then just write in some cheap and easy methods to the widgets and make a weenie app, I know this but don't consider it because it isn't often done, well at least by me). Java is all about fitting the code to the application. If you only need x number of functions then you only need to include x number of functions in your JVM or hardware decoder. If you've got a limited expansion device (i.e. PDA) you can make the OS just a JVM and have people write Java apps for it. Unless you REALLY need to you always load class libraries dynamically so they can be stored on the machine with the runtime rather than toted along with your app code. Besides Java being designed specifically for low resource applications (i.e. smart toasters) it's also super portable. You compile it one time and it runs on a bunch of different ISAs and operating systems. Ever write a Win CE app? You have to compile it for all the different processors Win CE devices run on. Your comment about graphics just proves you're a jackball who's never written an iota of Java code. Java apps do NOT require any graphical elements what so ever. (char)System.in.read works pretty well as a command line interface. So does adding argument handling to main(). If you want to go hardecore you can use EJBs to communicate at a binary input level. Java chips are contrary to your belief pretty cheap and run bytecode pretty damn fast. Java chips unlike general purpose CPUs only need to include the functional units that the JVM is going to use, like a super RISC chip that knows beforehand all the operations it will need so has them all in hardware. If you "chainsaw" things out, using only required libraries or a limited JVM, you've still got Java. It was designed from the beginning to do this.
CDE has been fully functional for years and is quite the widely used desktop environment with professional Unicies. Qt and Gtk have just begun to get the stable functionality CDE and Motif have already had. Not to mention they are like he said Open Systems, the source code only helps you if you want to extend on something someone else has done (copy their work to save time).
AmigaDE is meant to run on top of the API layers so most likely it'll be using DirectDraw in Windows and X on Unix machines. However the API inside of the runtime environment will have its own set of graphical toolkits and whatnot so apps will look the same across systems.
Just because there is a lack of a command line doesn't mean there has to be a GUI. Command lines apps lack binary component interfaces. So if I want to two apps to talk I have to translate everything to ASCII (plaintext) and send it through the shell. That is horribly inefficient when you want to create networked components. Administration is NOT what most people do with their fucking computers. If i want to make an app that fucking around with the file system i shouldn't have to send text commands through the shell in order to communicate with functions like ls or fsck. Unification and standardization are the keys to keeping development cost effective. I want to develop with as many pre-built tools as possible, not reinvent the fucking wheel all the time.
A lack of games is the fucking least of Linux's worries. Linux is facing even more of a problem than Apple in the marketplace. There is a serious lack of hardware and software support. Linux needs alot of things before it is even close to ready for prime time. So the fuck what if it has StarOffice and KDE2. Those don't mean shit when you don't have a unified set of graphics libraries or unified component support. Mac and Windows have these and as it turns out they can be fairly easy to develop complex applications for. Command lines are a throwback to computing of the 1970's and Linux keeps with that tradition; one that in a low level way inhibits what sort of things you're going to be able to do with the system. Because your friends ask for help with Linux just means it needs alot of fucking work before you're going to get work done on it regularly.
Can x86 emulation handle real-time processing better than the chips themselves do? As in running processes in real-time through emulation which don't suffer the penalties normally incurred when running them in real-time. Is it even possible to sidestep these limitations the x86 has with real-time processing?
Is this REALLY Shell deciding Linux is the end all be all of high powered computing? Or is it just cost effectiveness? Think about it a fucking second, this bad boy is being provided by IBM, IBM also has a little product they like to call AIX. AIX as opposed to Linux has quite the pricetag. IBM has a pretty cheap charge attached to sticking Linux on their big iron. If you want a new big iron box do you really want to shell (teehee) out the big bucks for hardware and high priced OS licenses? No fucking way. I really doubt this has anything to really do with Linux being the best thing since sliced bread and has more to do with it being cheap and working well enough to get the job done.
Ok, please learn to use the concept of numbers. Microsoft has an enormous share of the desktop/workstation computers in the country. Linux is lucky if it gets a single percentile. Linux in its current form is not fucking viable for consumers or in some cases even for professionals. Professional need to get work done, non-professional users want to get stuff done. Neither of these wants to spend hours fucking with the maze of often cryptic and obfuscated commands. Fuck the command line and fuck piping. If you want to bring Unix to the world of home-office computing follow Apple's lead. Candy coat the fucking thing; be adventuresome and go the next step by replacing non-intuitive shell commands with something that people might think of to use to open a file or move something. Distrobutions repackage the same Unix commands that have been in use for centuries. KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF! Cars have power steering because the rack and pinion shit was giving people problems. When everyone can interface with a Unix system with relative ease and as little training as possible, Unix will become popular in people's home. Microsoft doesn't have a single worry about Linux because Windows' interface is pretty recognized and worry free for the most part; installing programs and getting hardware working is easy enough that most people now do it themselves rather than paying someone to. Linux has a long fucking way to go.
Better support and better community? What the holy fuck have you been smoking? Linux being open means you get patches constantly but these patches can and sometimes tend to break other things. Unix in general has shit support in the hardware industry, unless of course you mean a proprietary Unix platform. The Linux community is all about thinking they're too fucking good for anyone else. When you log onto a newsgroup asking for help you don't want to be told to RTFM or have someone respond in more technodribble than the manuals are written in. Linux is not technically better than anything, anything you compare it to is different enough to make the comparison meaningless. You can only compare one variant of Linux to another. The comparison comes down to the difference between libc6 or glibc2.x or whether you've got the latest patch/hack to Apache. Here's a nice blanket statement, Solaris is better than Linux because it supports more processors and has a better Java runtime. Not very fair is it?
Half of our problem is the fucking greenies and the other half of the problem is deregulation. We haven't had a new power plant built in the past ten years or so yet our population has grown enormously. The plants that DO exist are owned for the most part by companies that want to jam you up the ass for electricity. Why is it an issue with people in the Bay Area with computers and not with all the fuckers who turned their Christmas lights on at the same time last night.
As an aside, why do people who run server farms and the like rely heavily on utilities? Get creative with your electricity needs. You can save alot of money if you supply a portion of your power. I know a manager for P&G (Protor and Gamble) who was running one of their factories in Texas IIRC. They bought a pair of jet engines and attached them to the factory for heating and power generation. It saved them a ton of money in the long run because they ended up producing more energy than they used. Invest some of your startup capital into making your building(s) more efficient (creative server farm cooling) so you're less of a hassle on everyone else.
Re:The problem with ever-changing Linux kernels
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id On Linux: Bad News
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You could stick with a single kernel for a long time if one kernel worked equally with every system with all your components. I've found 2.2.14 to be pretty damn good on my machine while 2.0.something worked pretty shabbily. You've also got to take into account alot of people recompile their kernel to their specifications. You can drop alot of modules you don't ever use but once you do any software that wants to interface with those modules isn't going to work.
The key problem here is support. If I write a game using the DirectX API I am going to have a hell of a time rewriting that program to use the myriad of different media systems in Linux. If Linux had a unified media architecture that everyone used it wouldn't be a problem. That is totaly besides the fact that Windows users outnumber Linux users by several orders of ten.
You must be 15 or fresh out of high school, you've never started a company or tried to do something to make you money. You don't make your company profitable by making a business contract that looks like the American Constitution. Being "just a company" doesn't mean you're the great white devil to have a Jihad thrown against you. Don't think for a minute the internet has anything to do with individuals. You've been reading far too many papers written by Karl Marx. The internet was originally a military project (government) and then when major communication companies were allowed to use it it became quite the big business. It was AT&T and the like that researched high speed optical circuits. Do you fucking think there would be OC-48's if there wasn't money to be made with them? Everything you own or see was most likely made by a company. The internet is all about business, providing access to it is a business. Don't think you've got any sort of right to use the internet, you're just paying someone to access something they own.
Here's a tip for those interested in really keeping your shit secret. Secure communications are a start but don't counteract things that are purely physics problems. Computers are noisy little RF emitters and with the right equipment you can pick up these RF emanations and translate them into data. To keep the FBI and others away from your computer use a laptop and keep the fucking thing with you all the fucking time. Encrypt all the data on it and keep the keys with your lawyer (have him keep them as part of attourney-client privilages). Besides keeping everything encrypted, keep everything encoded. Speak in code and write in code, codes that are indistinguishible from noise. Once you turn your computer on, do so inside of a shielded room and connect things together with shielded cabling. Monitor all lines coming into your house and keep records of attenuation. A quick search of google about TEMPEST, Van Eck phreaking, or electronic surveilance can provide you with lots of info to defeat eavsdropping. Tell the J. Edgar's to go fuck themselves.
I wasn't confusing TeX and LaTeX, I was using both in terms of their object model. HTML is a good markup language as it only references or classifies information i.e.
designates a paragraph which will probably contain data. There is no markup saying that paragraph must do anything else. Exactly how to display a paragraph is left up to the rendering engine. LaTeX doesn't leave this option open by default, it designates the information but then ties that to a set of display instructions.
Using TeX for typesetting is a pretty good idea, printable media can be easily broken down into sets of mathematical relations. Plain white paper has specific metrics and so does glossy paper and so on. Digital media however is subject to a fuckload of different potentialities. This is one of the reasons HTML came about in the first place. It originally didn't give a shit about the display of the information it just provided the information for display which is translated and rendered by the browser. This is exactly why HTML can be viewed with both Lynx and Netscape if you don't bother with styling shit. Markup languages are really good for this purpose; they are designed to convey information and let something else decide how its going to look. LaTeX and PostScript and the like take the opposite appraoch and relate the information to display elements. This is a shitty document model and a pretty intensive way to display information. Besides the fact you'd lock content and style into the same code you end up losing all of the functionality of the Hyper- prefix. Not only does HTML leave the displaying of content up to an external element it VERY easily connects bits of information. People don't like typing/copying URLs often. Is is much more time efficent to type out the URL's one time (at page creation) then it is to type them out every single fucking time the page is accessed.
The closest Saturn's mean orbit ever gets to our mean orbit is ~790 million miles. Without hopping onboard Cassini you're not going to get very close to them very soon.
It is nice to have one ported framework you can write your cross-platform application for. However Netscape released a less than perfectly working framework with their browser. Not only is it still in the dev stage but it is needless overkill for a single application. The scope of their API is way too large for a single application, which is what spurned my gripe. I think a good component framework and layout engine that worked over multiple platforms would be cool (a la KDE and GNOME) but not for a single application. Its way too much overhead and the added complexity makes it harder to find problems in specific elements of the system. They've put a lot of effort into the GUI and whatnot but then Navigator is up to its old habits of sucking. They make a browser that barely browses.
Sega and Nintendo have two things that Sony and Microsoft don't have. Icons. Microsoft technically has Icons but they are typically 32x32@8-bit. When I was a kid Mario was the biggest thing since picking your nose. To my younger brother Sonic has more of a pervading presence. The SNES and Genesis popped out more iterations of their mainline characters than crackwhores in the projects. Walkt Disney did the same fucking thing in the fifties, he made a bunch of icons kids wet their pants over with an encircled R on the bottom meaning someone somewhere got a dollar for every penny it costs to make the product. Also, console makers do not sell their fucking hardware at a fucking loss. They don't build these things one at a time, they order tens of thousands of them (in Sony's case a million). The cost of a million of these is much less per console than a small handful of them. Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft aren't going to take a loss on their consoles, the profit is almost entirely flat. The consoles are needed in order to sell the real cash cow, the games. Good console games will sell heavily (sometimes 1 per console) which means the licensing fees for those games is stupendous; the console makers shoot their wad of NRE into developing the boxes but then the sales of extremely popular games like Zelda or Gran Tourismo make all of that back and more.
On the technical side, Nintendo has gone back to their unique innards architecture that served them well with the NES and SNES. The N64 was impressive for its time but didn't really stand head and shoulders of the technology for long enough. Up until a year or two ago the PSX still had better graphics than your average PC and it came out before the N64. The Gamecube might get a lukewarm acceptance from the media unlike the PS2 but I think customers will really eat it up. Icons are what sell shit to little kids and parents. Nintendo's got Mario and Donkey Kong and can easily market the shit out of them to prepubescents.
Netscape's browser has gone downhill since they started calling it Communicator. It theoretically allowed you to communicate but only if you could do so in the 20 minute time span between it launching and crashing. I loved Netscape 3 although it supported the fucking blink tag. When Compared to IE3 Netscape whomped all ass in a pretty hands down sort of way. Both companies splooged out a 4.0 release of their respective products and use folks in userland were left looking for a good browser. Communicator took the decent backbone of Navigator and stuck way too much barely-out-of-beta shit onto it which horribly reduced its stability. Then along comes Mozilla, Netscape had already decided not to use system APIs for their browser because they were just too damn cool. Then Mozilla tries to come up with an entirely new component framework? It is fairly cool from a technical aspect, separating the display almost entirely from the application's real work. This however should NOT be the component system used in a production level product which Netscape has done with their 6.0 release. Wow, I can rescript the interface entirely displaying neat pictures and putting the buttons in different places. Thats just genital mutilation when the underlying code of the system can't render HTML properly and when it does takes up 4+ GB of RAM. NS6 loads up an entire component framework and layout engine just to run. That is fucking overkill for a signle application. Netscape should have put some arrogance aside and just used native APIs. Loading a whole new API to run a single app is like making your dialog boxes system modal.
M$'s.NET is about thinning down the client as much as possible, not fattening it. The first iteration of Java (I do mean first, not 1.02) let you download applets or executables and run them locally making basically a thin client structure..NET can be be exemplified I suppose with the MSN Explorer. Half of its features are stored on your system locally but to really do anything you need to be plugged into the internet. MSN Explorer just looks like a distributed app though, it connects to the net mostly through HTTP and lets ASP do most oh the work. In any case.NET is about thin clients with a runtime on them that interperates P-code into something that resembled applications.
This is a theoretical breakdown of the internet assuming that every node on the network has a physical link to more than one node. In practical terms this is bullshit. The internet is a collection of everyone on the network (including us folk dialing into a server hooked into a a larger portion of the network). If someone EMP's the local dialup and you don't have any backups, you've lost a bunch of nodes. If you EMP a MAE you've just disconnected another shitload of nodes off the network proper and for the most part split that severed part of the network into a bunch of small networks. Over the distribution of the internet there comes a series of physical locations a good portion of your data is routed through. Turn even a handful of these puppied off and you fragment the internet into a bunch of littlenets. So technically this still counts as "internet" theoretically but in practical terms you're shit out of luck. Speaking practically, all you need to do is cut a bunch of trunks or fibre lines and suddenly a bunch of networks die, not to disconnection but the fact that for many reasons they set their packet TTL really low. When these packets end up routing through a couple of bottlenets they will end up dying. If you want to demonstrate this go to your company's network room. Start yanking plugs out of the sockets. If you can yank the ones out that belong to the file and print servers or just dump a can of coke on the router/switch/hub itself. About 30 seconds before you're fired after an intense bout of screaming by your boss, explain to him you were testing out a theory. You just created an experiment sample, and disconnected 99% of your network. That one plug you didn't unplug is still going strong though! Your pr0n download will finish and you can pack you Zip disk with the rest of your stuff. At least the theory applied well to the real world.
You can make pretty cool robots/remote sensors/positronic brains with BASIC stamps gotten from radio shack. You can write a little diddy that takes the sensor data and streams it to an I/O port. Modulating the data collected for tansmission can be done in lots of ways. You can modulate the data and then just transmit it. The PC on the other end demods the signals and captures the datastream. Plug the stamp's I/O pins into a little AM or FM transmitter. Don't bother about duplex communication unless you ABSOLUTELY need it. BASIC stamps have pretty limited memory which means interactive programs aren't going to be very easy to make if at all. I've never heard of any major protocol ported to a microcontroller. I suppose the best method would be to build a mini-RF modem and modulate the data on the controller then stream it to the transmitter.
Digital movies/theaters are a pretty good idea whos time is coming. They are not however to be forced on people any time soon. I wish 100% digital editing had been mainstream when I was doing some production video editing. Now you can grab a DV camcorder and a PC and do 100% digital video transfers and edit them as you filmed them. I had to fight with taking VHS video (if I was lucky Hi-8) and making it look pretty. You can render and edit shit at radical qualities on your computer but when you have to transfer it to another medium you've got difficulty so keeping the same medium through the entire process of production, post-production, and distrobution makes for some pretty good quality video.
There are very serious problems with this, ones that many people completely disregard. In order to make a 100% digital movie, you need complete vertical integration. This means your cameras need to be digital your editing is all digital and then your distrobution and display is all digital. This is prohibitivly expensive! Digital cameras are getting cheaper indeed and maybe we'll see some 6 megapixel cameras that can deliver 25fps and 36-bit colour (12 bits per colour channel for oversampling). Digital editing is already in place and in some cases can be considered a comodity if you think that even low budget movies can have non-linear digital editing or CGI effects in them. The biggest and most serious barrier is distrobution and display. Do you ship some hude RAID box to theaters like Lucas did with the digital viewings of Episode I? Or do you try to download the literally terabytes worth of video? After you figure out how to get the movie to theaters there is the problem of showing it. The TI DLP projectors in use now are of pretty low resolution and won't scale past 24fps; not only are they pretty locked down in that regard but they are twice and a half more expensive than a single good film projector. DLP projectors can't use the lighting that film cameras use and those things are fucking expensive. Film is high resolution which makes it easier on the eye to watch on a large screen. You can of course really oversample digital video to emulate the analog-ness of film. That in turn adds another layer of complexity to the digital video because the projectors become that much more expensive and the video is that much larger due to the extraneous data. Theaters are already fucked because a good number of them are on the border of bankrupsy. How can these companies that can't afford shit afford to revamp all of their theaters with really expensive new projectors? Small theaters are going to be completely left out because they exist on even smaller margins than big chains and new projectors would be way too much for them. You've also got to take into consideration that studios probably won't be making digital copies of their old movies any time soon so the theater by your college isn't going to have a Kevin Smith festival or be able to have that money making Rocky Horror late-night screening if they replace all of their projectors with new fangled ones. No infrastructure == slow transition.
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Where do you get the idea that Java is a RAD language? It's as fucking rapid as C++ development (for the intelligent reader's knowlege you CAN use a decent IDE to create an interface and then just write in some cheap and easy methods to the widgets and make a weenie app, I know this but don't consider it because it isn't often done, well at least by me). Java is all about fitting the code to the application. If you only need x number of functions then you only need to include x number of functions in your JVM or hardware decoder. If you've got a limited expansion device (i.e. PDA) you can make the OS just a JVM and have people write Java apps for it. Unless you REALLY need to you always load class libraries dynamically so they can be stored on the machine with the runtime rather than toted along with your app code. Besides Java being designed specifically for low resource applications (i.e. smart toasters) it's also super portable. You compile it one time and it runs on a bunch of different ISAs and operating systems. Ever write a Win CE app? You have to compile it for all the different processors Win CE devices run on. Your comment about graphics just proves you're a jackball who's never written an iota of Java code. Java apps do NOT require any graphical elements what so ever. (char)System.in.read works pretty well as a command line interface. So does adding argument handling to main(). If you want to go hardecore you can use EJBs to communicate at a binary input level. Java chips are contrary to your belief pretty cheap and run bytecode pretty damn fast. Java chips unlike general purpose CPUs only need to include the functional units that the JVM is going to use, like a super RISC chip that knows beforehand all the operations it will need so has them all in hardware. If you "chainsaw" things out, using only required libraries or a limited JVM, you've still got Java. It was designed from the beginning to do this.
CDE has been fully functional for years and is quite the widely used desktop environment with professional Unicies. Qt and Gtk have just begun to get the stable functionality CDE and Motif have already had. Not to mention they are like he said Open Systems, the source code only helps you if you want to extend on something someone else has done (copy their work to save time).
AmigaDE is meant to run on top of the API layers so most likely it'll be using DirectDraw in Windows and X on Unix machines. However the API inside of the runtime environment will have its own set of graphical toolkits and whatnot so apps will look the same across systems.
Just because there is a lack of a command line doesn't mean there has to be a GUI. Command lines apps lack binary component interfaces. So if I want to two apps to talk I have to translate everything to ASCII (plaintext) and send it through the shell. That is horribly inefficient when you want to create networked components. Administration is NOT what most people do with their fucking computers. If i want to make an app that fucking around with the file system i shouldn't have to send text commands through the shell in order to communicate with functions like ls or fsck. Unification and standardization are the keys to keeping development cost effective. I want to develop with as many pre-built tools as possible, not reinvent the fucking wheel all the time.
A lack of games is the fucking least of Linux's worries. Linux is facing even more of a problem than Apple in the marketplace. There is a serious lack of hardware and software support. Linux needs alot of things before it is even close to ready for prime time. So the fuck what if it has StarOffice and KDE2. Those don't mean shit when you don't have a unified set of graphics libraries or unified component support. Mac and Windows have these and as it turns out they can be fairly easy to develop complex applications for. Command lines are a throwback to computing of the 1970's and Linux keeps with that tradition; one that in a low level way inhibits what sort of things you're going to be able to do with the system. Because your friends ask for help with Linux just means it needs alot of fucking work before you're going to get work done on it regularly.
Can x86 emulation handle real-time processing better than the chips themselves do? As in running processes in real-time through emulation which don't suffer the penalties normally incurred when running them in real-time. Is it even possible to sidestep these limitations the x86 has with real-time processing?
Of course this glaring omission will be overlooked, these are Linux zealots you're asking.
Is this REALLY Shell deciding Linux is the end all be all of high powered computing? Or is it just cost effectiveness? Think about it a fucking second, this bad boy is being provided by IBM, IBM also has a little product they like to call AIX. AIX as opposed to Linux has quite the pricetag. IBM has a pretty cheap charge attached to sticking Linux on their big iron. If you want a new big iron box do you really want to shell (teehee) out the big bucks for hardware and high priced OS licenses? No fucking way. I really doubt this has anything to really do with Linux being the best thing since sliced bread and has more to do with it being cheap and working well enough to get the job done.
Ok, please learn to use the concept of numbers. Microsoft has an enormous share of the desktop/workstation computers in the country. Linux is lucky if it gets a single percentile. Linux in its current form is not fucking viable for consumers or in some cases even for professionals. Professional need to get work done, non-professional users want to get stuff done. Neither of these wants to spend hours fucking with the maze of often cryptic and obfuscated commands. Fuck the command line and fuck piping. If you want to bring Unix to the world of home-office computing follow Apple's lead. Candy coat the fucking thing; be adventuresome and go the next step by replacing non-intuitive shell commands with something that people might think of to use to open a file or move something. Distrobutions repackage the same Unix commands that have been in use for centuries. KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF! Cars have power steering because the rack and pinion shit was giving people problems. When everyone can interface with a Unix system with relative ease and as little training as possible, Unix will become popular in people's home. Microsoft doesn't have a single worry about Linux because Windows' interface is pretty recognized and worry free for the most part; installing programs and getting hardware working is easy enough that most people now do it themselves rather than paying someone to. Linux has a long fucking way to go.
Better support and better community? What the holy fuck have you been smoking? Linux being open means you get patches constantly but these patches can and sometimes tend to break other things. Unix in general has shit support in the hardware industry, unless of course you mean a proprietary Unix platform. The Linux community is all about thinking they're too fucking good for anyone else. When you log onto a newsgroup asking for help you don't want to be told to RTFM or have someone respond in more technodribble than the manuals are written in. Linux is not technically better than anything, anything you compare it to is different enough to make the comparison meaningless. You can only compare one variant of Linux to another. The comparison comes down to the difference between libc6 or glibc2.x or whether you've got the latest patch/hack to Apache. Here's a nice blanket statement, Solaris is better than Linux because it supports more processors and has a better Java runtime. Not very fair is it?
Half of our problem is the fucking greenies and the other half of the problem is deregulation. We haven't had a new power plant built in the past ten years or so yet our population has grown enormously. The plants that DO exist are owned for the most part by companies that want to jam you up the ass for electricity. Why is it an issue with people in the Bay Area with computers and not with all the fuckers who turned their Christmas lights on at the same time last night.
As an aside, why do people who run server farms and the like rely heavily on utilities? Get creative with your electricity needs. You can save alot of money if you supply a portion of your power. I know a manager for P&G (Protor and Gamble) who was running one of their factories in Texas IIRC. They bought a pair of jet engines and attached them to the factory for heating and power generation. It saved them a ton of money in the long run because they ended up producing more energy than they used. Invest some of your startup capital into making your building(s) more efficient (creative server farm cooling) so you're less of a hassle on everyone else.
You could stick with a single kernel for a long time if one kernel worked equally with every system with all your components. I've found 2.2.14 to be pretty damn good on my machine while 2.0.something worked pretty shabbily. You've also got to take into account alot of people recompile their kernel to their specifications. You can drop alot of modules you don't ever use but once you do any software that wants to interface with those modules isn't going to work.
The key problem here is support. If I write a game using the DirectX API I am going to have a hell of a time rewriting that program to use the myriad of different media systems in Linux. If Linux had a unified media architecture that everyone used it wouldn't be a problem. That is totaly besides the fact that Windows users outnumber Linux users by several orders of ten.
You must be 15 or fresh out of high school, you've never started a company or tried to do something to make you money. You don't make your company profitable by making a business contract that looks like the American Constitution. Being "just a company" doesn't mean you're the great white devil to have a Jihad thrown against you. Don't think for a minute the internet has anything to do with individuals. You've been reading far too many papers written by Karl Marx. The internet was originally a military project (government) and then when major communication companies were allowed to use it it became quite the big business. It was AT&T and the like that researched high speed optical circuits. Do you fucking think there would be OC-48's if there wasn't money to be made with them? Everything you own or see was most likely made by a company. The internet is all about business, providing access to it is a business. Don't think you've got any sort of right to use the internet, you're just paying someone to access something they own.
Here's a tip for those interested in really keeping your shit secret. Secure communications are a start but don't counteract things that are purely physics problems. Computers are noisy little RF emitters and with the right equipment you can pick up these RF emanations and translate them into data. To keep the FBI and others away from your computer use a laptop and keep the fucking thing with you all the fucking time. Encrypt all the data on it and keep the keys with your lawyer (have him keep them as part of attourney-client privilages). Besides keeping everything encrypted, keep everything encoded. Speak in code and write in code, codes that are indistinguishible from noise. Once you turn your computer on, do so inside of a shielded room and connect things together with shielded cabling. Monitor all lines coming into your house and keep records of attenuation. A quick search of google about TEMPEST, Van Eck phreaking, or electronic surveilance can provide you with lots of info to defeat eavsdropping. Tell the J. Edgar's to go fuck themselves.
designates a paragraph which will probably contain data. There is no markup saying that paragraph must do anything else. Exactly how to display a paragraph is left up to the rendering engine. LaTeX doesn't leave this option open by default, it designates the information but then ties that to a set of display instructions.
Using TeX for typesetting is a pretty good idea, printable media can be easily broken down into sets of mathematical relations. Plain white paper has specific metrics and so does glossy paper and so on. Digital media however is subject to a fuckload of different potentialities. This is one of the reasons HTML came about in the first place. It originally didn't give a shit about the display of the information it just provided the information for display which is translated and rendered by the browser. This is exactly why HTML can be viewed with both Lynx and Netscape if you don't bother with styling shit. Markup languages are really good for this purpose; they are designed to convey information and let something else decide how its going to look. LaTeX and PostScript and the like take the opposite appraoch and relate the information to display elements. This is a shitty document model and a pretty intensive way to display information. Besides the fact you'd lock content and style into the same code you end up losing all of the functionality of the Hyper- prefix. Not only does HTML leave the displaying of content up to an external element it VERY easily connects bits of information. People don't like typing/copying URLs often. Is is much more time efficent to type out the URL's one time (at page creation) then it is to type them out every single fucking time the page is accessed.
The closest Saturn's mean orbit ever gets to our mean orbit is ~790 million miles. Without hopping onboard Cassini you're not going to get very close to them very soon.
It is nice to have one ported framework you can write your cross-platform application for. However Netscape released a less than perfectly working framework with their browser. Not only is it still in the dev stage but it is needless overkill for a single application. The scope of their API is way too large for a single application, which is what spurned my gripe. I think a good component framework and layout engine that worked over multiple platforms would be cool (a la KDE and GNOME) but not for a single application. Its way too much overhead and the added complexity makes it harder to find problems in specific elements of the system. They've put a lot of effort into the GUI and whatnot but then Navigator is up to its old habits of sucking. They make a browser that barely browses.
Sega and Nintendo have two things that Sony and Microsoft don't have. Icons. Microsoft technically has Icons but they are typically 32x32@8-bit. When I was a kid Mario was the biggest thing since picking your nose. To my younger brother Sonic has more of a pervading presence. The SNES and Genesis popped out more iterations of their mainline characters than crackwhores in the projects. Walkt Disney did the same fucking thing in the fifties, he made a bunch of icons kids wet their pants over with an encircled R on the bottom meaning someone somewhere got a dollar for every penny it costs to make the product. Also, console makers do not sell their fucking hardware at a fucking loss. They don't build these things one at a time, they order tens of thousands of them (in Sony's case a million). The cost of a million of these is much less per console than a small handful of them. Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft aren't going to take a loss on their consoles, the profit is almost entirely flat. The consoles are needed in order to sell the real cash cow, the games. Good console games will sell heavily (sometimes 1 per console) which means the licensing fees for those games is stupendous; the console makers shoot their wad of NRE into developing the boxes but then the sales of extremely popular games like Zelda or Gran Tourismo make all of that back and more.
On the technical side, Nintendo has gone back to their unique innards architecture that served them well with the NES and SNES. The N64 was impressive for its time but didn't really stand head and shoulders of the technology for long enough. Up until a year or two ago the PSX still had better graphics than your average PC and it came out before the N64. The Gamecube might get a lukewarm acceptance from the media unlike the PS2 but I think customers will really eat it up. Icons are what sell shit to little kids and parents. Nintendo's got Mario and Donkey Kong and can easily market the shit out of them to prepubescents.
Netscape's browser has gone downhill since they started calling it Communicator. It theoretically allowed you to communicate but only if you could do so in the 20 minute time span between it launching and crashing. I loved Netscape 3 although it supported the fucking blink tag. When Compared to IE3 Netscape whomped all ass in a pretty hands down sort of way. Both companies splooged out a 4.0 release of their respective products and use folks in userland were left looking for a good browser. Communicator took the decent backbone of Navigator and stuck way too much barely-out-of-beta shit onto it which horribly reduced its stability. Then along comes Mozilla, Netscape had already decided not to use system APIs for their browser because they were just too damn cool. Then Mozilla tries to come up with an entirely new component framework? It is fairly cool from a technical aspect, separating the display almost entirely from the application's real work. This however should NOT be the component system used in a production level product which Netscape has done with their 6.0 release. Wow, I can rescript the interface entirely displaying neat pictures and putting the buttons in different places. Thats just genital mutilation when the underlying code of the system can't render HTML properly and when it does takes up 4+ GB of RAM. NS6 loads up an entire component framework and layout engine just to run. That is fucking overkill for a signle application. Netscape should have put some arrogance aside and just used native APIs. Loading a whole new API to run a single app is like making your dialog boxes system modal.
M$'s .NET is about thinning down the client as much as possible, not fattening it. The first iteration of Java (I do mean first, not 1.02) let you download applets or executables and run them locally making basically a thin client structure. .NET can be be exemplified I suppose with the MSN Explorer. Half of its features are stored on your system locally but to really do anything you need to be plugged into the internet. MSN Explorer just looks like a distributed app though, it connects to the net mostly through HTTP and lets ASP do most oh the work. In any case .NET is about thin clients with a runtime on them that interperates P-code into something that resembled applications.
This is a theoretical breakdown of the internet assuming that every node on the network has a physical link to more than one node. In practical terms this is bullshit. The internet is a collection of everyone on the network (including us folk dialing into a server hooked into a a larger portion of the network). If someone EMP's the local dialup and you don't have any backups, you've lost a bunch of nodes. If you EMP a MAE you've just disconnected another shitload of nodes off the network proper and for the most part split that severed part of the network into a bunch of small networks. Over the distribution of the internet there comes a series of physical locations a good portion of your data is routed through. Turn even a handful of these puppied off and you fragment the internet into a bunch of littlenets. So technically this still counts as "internet" theoretically but in practical terms you're shit out of luck. Speaking practically, all you need to do is cut a bunch of trunks or fibre lines and suddenly a bunch of networks die, not to disconnection but the fact that for many reasons they set their packet TTL really low. When these packets end up routing through a couple of bottlenets they will end up dying. If you want to demonstrate this go to your company's network room. Start yanking plugs out of the sockets. If you can yank the ones out that belong to the file and print servers or just dump a can of coke on the router/switch/hub itself. About 30 seconds before you're fired after an intense bout of screaming by your boss, explain to him you were testing out a theory. You just created an experiment sample, and disconnected 99% of your network. That one plug you didn't unplug is still going strong though! Your pr0n download will finish and you can pack you Zip disk with the rest of your stuff. At least the theory applied well to the real world.
You can make pretty cool robots/remote sensors/positronic brains with BASIC stamps gotten from radio shack. You can write a little diddy that takes the sensor data and streams it to an I/O port. Modulating the data collected for tansmission can be done in lots of ways. You can modulate the data and then just transmit it. The PC on the other end demods the signals and captures the datastream. Plug the stamp's I/O pins into a little AM or FM transmitter. Don't bother about duplex communication unless you ABSOLUTELY need it. BASIC stamps have pretty limited memory which means interactive programs aren't going to be very easy to make if at all. I've never heard of any major protocol ported to a microcontroller. I suppose the best method would be to build a mini-RF modem and modulate the data on the controller then stream it to the transmitter.
Digital movies/theaters are a pretty good idea whos time is coming. They are not however to be forced on people any time soon. I wish 100% digital editing had been mainstream when I was doing some production video editing. Now you can grab a DV camcorder and a PC and do 100% digital video transfers and edit them as you filmed them. I had to fight with taking VHS video (if I was lucky Hi-8) and making it look pretty. You can render and edit shit at radical qualities on your computer but when you have to transfer it to another medium you've got difficulty so keeping the same medium through the entire process of production, post-production, and distrobution makes for some pretty good quality video.
There are very serious problems with this, ones that many people completely disregard. In order to make a 100% digital movie, you need complete vertical integration. This means your cameras need to be digital your editing is all digital and then your distrobution and display is all digital. This is prohibitivly expensive! Digital cameras are getting cheaper indeed and maybe we'll see some 6 megapixel cameras that can deliver 25fps and 36-bit colour (12 bits per colour channel for oversampling). Digital editing is already in place and in some cases can be considered a comodity if you think that even low budget movies can have non-linear digital editing or CGI effects in them. The biggest and most serious barrier is distrobution and display. Do you ship some hude RAID box to theaters like Lucas did with the digital viewings of Episode I? Or do you try to download the literally terabytes worth of video? After you figure out how to get the movie to theaters there is the problem of showing it. The TI DLP projectors in use now are of pretty low resolution and won't scale past 24fps; not only are they pretty locked down in that regard but they are twice and a half more expensive than a single good film projector. DLP projectors can't use the lighting that film cameras use and those things are fucking expensive. Film is high resolution which makes it easier on the eye to watch on a large screen. You can of course really oversample digital video to emulate the analog-ness of film. That in turn adds another layer of complexity to the digital video because the projectors become that much more expensive and the video is that much larger due to the extraneous data. Theaters are already fucked because a good number of them are on the border of bankrupsy. How can these companies that can't afford shit afford to revamp all of their theaters with really expensive new projectors? Small theaters are going to be completely left out because they exist on even smaller margins than big chains and new projectors would be way too much for them. You've also got to take into consideration that studios probably won't be making digital copies of their old movies any time soon so the theater by your college isn't going to have a Kevin Smith festival or be able to have that money making Rocky Horror late-night screening if they replace all of their projectors with new fangled ones. No infrastructure == slow transition.