Apple invented the file format at the core of MPEG-4, and got it accepted as a standard. I'd say they were thinking about how to get their technology inside everyone's DVD player.
In fact, reading between the lines of Microsoft's press release, I'd speculate that what MS is really saying is, "Most future DVD players will support MPEG-4. Windows Media Player supports MPEG-4. Therefore, most future DVD players will support Windows Media format."
Make sure you have a suite of tests that produce known output for your old code, so that you can ensure that the new code works in exactly the same way. Don't add anything new until you are proven conformant with what you had before.
Tried FF V. Didn't like it much. Watched someone play FF VII. Wasn't super impressed. In no hurry to try again. Don't feel obligated to play because of the hype. Play Summoner instead.
Loved the movie. Very nice, for anime. Then again, Summoner Geeks was more memorable.
IIRC, Xerox originally came up with the concepts of the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, and several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science.
Xerox did invent at PARC in the 1970s and beyond: several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science, such as Ethernet and Object-oriented programming.
Actually, it's the GIMP I haven't used much. But for my image editing needs, the two are approximately equal. My reply was aimed primarily at StarOffice.
Your point is well taken. But have you used StarOffice or the GIMP? These applications are about as close to a feature-for-feature clone of the original as they can legally be. As an experienced user of Office 95, I felt right at home in StarOffice 5.1 the first time I tried it. I can't wait to try v6. It took me a bit to learn to use the GIMP, but again the fit is very good. I didn't feel like I was in a foreign country.
I would go beyond your statement and say that what Linux really needs to be accepted is not clones, but *the real thing*. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
But you said we don't have any functional clones of the leading productivity apps. In the cases discussed above, I say we do.
I don't know that I'd call myself an addict of online computer games, but certainly a heavy user. If anything, I'm addicted to online topical discussion forums (fora, for the overeducated) like Slashdot.:-) Still, in the last ten years I've spent more than a few hours at online roleplaying games.
We all know of the negative consequences of online games, but I haven't seen much discussion of the positive ones.
First, they motivate players to become better typists.:-) Okay, that one's pretty cheezy. They also can lead players to learn how to min-max and hack the client software.;-)
Second, roleplaying helps players to exercise their imagination -- and learn to express it (especially games that allow players to build and decorate their environment). It also can teach players to reflect upon their own personality.
Third, online RPGs can be very social. In the games I play, I spend as much or more time chatting and cracking jokes with my friends as I do "playing the game". Nearly all of my "real life" friends are people I met first in online games -- and we get together pretty often. I have met over 60 of my 'net gaming friends more than three times.
Fourth, online games can be broadening. I have gaming friends on five continents, and learn new things all the time about how people live elsewhere. Plus, somebody I know is bound to be online pretty much around the clock.:-)
Finally, for all that these games can be destructive to real-life marriages, they can also help build them. I know of a (very small) number of real-life marriages that arose out of gaming relationships.
Online games are what we make of them... in short, society in miniature. For good or for ill.
While other groundbreaking software has faded into irrelevance -- anybody remember VisiCalc? Mosaic? -- QuickTime has shown remarkable adaptability and staying power.
Mosaic lives on in Internet Explorer and Netscape, and all modern spreadsheets derive conspicuously from VisiCalc. Ms. Chmielewski's opus, in addition to being poorly researched, is as irrelevant as a losing ticket for yesterday's lottery. Let us hope that someday she either learns to do her homework, or at least take kickbacks from the companies whose press releases she regurgitates.
Man wakes up in the future, and finds that his life savings have grown to $500,000. He thinks he's rich; everyone else thinks he's quaint. Everyone is tied to a mobile data communication device, whose rental and service fees are ruinous. People expect to be paid for everything they do (they have to be, to afford those fees). Anyone not in the government's database is a non-person, unable to receive services or protection from the state.
I agree that this memo looks like nothing more than ordinary motivational rah-rah blather. What I absolutely adore is the sense of entitlement.
"EVERY propritary Unix server out there is a Microsoft sale waiting to happen, gosh darn it! Every time one of those faithless IT people swaps in a Free Unix to replace a proprietary Unix... they're STEALING our sale! That's money taken from OUR pocket! Linux is to blame for the tattoos on my ass! EVERY TIME ONE OF YOU BEARDED, TEE-SHIRT-WEARING HIPPIE SCUM BOOTS Linux, MICROSOFT CHILDREN GO HUNGRY!!!!!"
Aging musicians who can't tour anymore should do what ditch diggers and automobile assembly workers and engineers and pretty much everone else does: Save up for their retirement during their working years!
Why should artists (and the corporate scum who exploit them) be the only people who continue to get paid for years and years, for work they did once? If I stopped producing new intellectual creative works (of engineering) today, my gravy train would be cut off tomorrow. No residuals, no speaking engagements, no MTV retrospectives. Why the hell should artists be different?
"...you never get more energy from hydrogen than you put in."
That's not the issue. The issue is transport: having energy where you need it, when you need it. Although it may be wasteful, as a purely pragmatic measure, most people don't care if it takes 10x the energy to create the fuel as they get from it, as long as the fuel is available in adequate supply to move their vehicle (or warm their coffee, or whatever). If you could produce SuperFuel that would let cars run for 1500 miles (2500 km for non-USians) between fills and was as easy and inexpensive to use as gasoline, they'd be all over it, even if producing and distributing it required 100J of energy input for every J utilized by the car (SUV, excuse me). They'd happily drive their SuperFuel cars until global warming melted the polar ice caps and forced them to buy SuperFuel boats.
All of your employees know how to use Windows coming in, not so for Unix. Retraining people costs money.
All your people do not know Windows coming in. Even if they do, they need to be retrained every time the company upgrades its Office suite because the apps don't work quite the same. That has been my experience at companies ranging from 8 to 80,000 employees; your mileage may vary for companies falling outside that range.
In the college scenario, the article takes no account that many colleges make these decisions based on what the students use. Usually, that's Windows. Sometimes Mac. Almost never *nix.
You make me feel old and out of touch. When I was in college, (a) students used what universities told them to use, not vice-versa, and (b) nearly nobody used Windows. In a lab with 200 Macs, 50 Unix stations, and 20 PCs, often the PCs were the only machines with any free seats. Only the business school used primarily PCs (running DOS, WordPerfect, and Lotus 123).
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way. Besides, how are any pitches going to be made without PowerPoint?:)
Right you are. This is called Lock-In, and it's the primary reason that the Office monopoly is in no danger of dissolving any time soon. I've been using Star Office lately, and it's nearly as good as MS Office. Nearly is a deadly word.
I recently wrote an app that is basically a simple database, in 7300 bytes. Is this a tiny app, or not?
The source is 7300 bytes.
The compiler (Perl) is over 1/2 MB.
The runtime is over 1 MB (but is not actually stored on disk).
The memory footprint of the running app is probably a few MB.
The libraries supporting the app are many MB.
What's the app, and how small does it have to be, to be tiny? Is my script a tightly-coded app that does a lot, or a piece of a large system that does surprisingly little?
You just have to ask some fundamental questions to see why.
Q: Who benefits from Free software?
A: Absolutely everybody who uses a computer, except those who make money by selling competing software -- and even they benefit, because they can use Free software, too.
Q: If nobody's paying for software, who's going to write it?
A: Free software will be supported by companies whose main business is not selling software, but who do need to have software. IBM, Apple, Sun, and HP all benefit when they develop software and give it away for free, because they sell hardware. Systems integrators can afford to give software away because they sell configured systems. Large web sites can afford to give software away because they sell advertising. AOL can afford to give software away because they sell content. Contracting shops want to have a free infrastructure because they sell vertical-market applications. There are more than enough businesses with solid, nuts-and-bolts financial incentives to keep Free software going indefinitely. Companies whose sole product is Free software may be funded by industry consortia that wish to have the benefit of continued support of the product, or that wish to forge an industry-wide standard.
Q: How stupid do you have to be to fail to see that most people and companies stand to benefit if they can get (some of) their software for free?
A: Very stupid. Stupider than the people who make mony selling software.
Q: So what could possibly stop Free software?
A: Plenty of obstacles can slow or even stop the spread of Free software. Ignorance is now pretty much out of the running; millions of people know about Free software. Lies will slow the adoption of Free software by scaring away potential users. Greed may prevent some companies from realizing that giving software away as an incentive to buy their other products and services may do more for their business than selling it. Betrayal, e.g., persuading governments to outlaw Free software, can easily kill it. Disorganization is probably the biggest threat. Free software projects need strong leaders to hold them together and assimilate all the contributions to improve the project for everyone, and discourage forking.
Q: What's wrong with charging money for software?
A: There's absolutely nothing wrong with charging money for software. It is difficult to sell something that's freely available, but it can be done. People pay for bottled water, even though they can slurp it straight from the tap. People will voluntarily pay for anything -- even software -- if they perceive some added value.
Q: Does this mean the long-term dominance of Free software is assured?
A: Not at all. The opposition is extremely dedicated, and has vast resources. Free software has gotten off to a good start, but it is by no means too strong to be smothered.
If enough people with real business interests come to realize how they will benefit from writing and distributing Free software, then it stands a good chance of surviving.
Re:Why prefer GNU Emacs over XEmacs?
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Your points are good ones, and I did laugh at the thought that I should be able to remove staples by rubbing at them with an eraser. However, the basis of my objection is that the XEmacs application itself lacks an internally consistent UI: Some commands bring up dialog boxes in the native widget set, while others trigger queries on the mode line. I'd prefer something more like an all-or-nothing approach.
When I expect all my commands to appear at the bottom of the window in a Courier-12 font, I get annoyed when instead a dialog pops up halfway across the screen in (heaven help us) Helvetica-10. Of course, it also annoys me when Emacs implements clunky-but-consistent interfaces. As Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Maybe I'm just getting old.
Re:Why prefer GNU Emacs over XEmacs?
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I don't particularly like the dialog boxes in XEmacs.
I find the visual discontinuity between the Emacs look-and-feel and native GUI widgets disturbing. It requires a mental refocus, which is a distraction.
I don't like having to move the mouse to wherever the dialog box has popped up. I particularly don't like having the dialog box open up over something I was reading. And I'm not willing to let the window manager jump my mouse to a new window.
Maybe it's just a matter of what I'm used to; or, maybe it isn't. I've gladly embraced numerous new features in Emacs over the years: Frames, faces, etc. Maybe the extra features in XEmacs haven't seemed enough better to justify unlearning the Emacs commands that I've grown accustomed to.
EMACS regular expressions
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To do regexes in EMACS, just add Meta to the regular string commands. I.e., search-string is Ctrl-s, and query-replace-string is Ctrl-%; for regexes, use M-C-s and M-C-%, respectively.
I don't know how to make EMACS convert upper case to lower in a regex match -- but I don't know how to make VIM do multiline regex matches, either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why didn't Real or Apple think about this?"
Apple invented the file format at the core of MPEG-4, and got it accepted as a standard. I'd say they were thinking about how to get their technology inside everyone's DVD player.
In fact, reading between the lines of Microsoft's press release, I'd speculate that what MS is really saying is, "Most future DVD players will support MPEG-4. Windows Media Player supports MPEG-4. Therefore, most future DVD players will support Windows Media format."
Make sure you have a suite of tests that produce known output for your old code, so that you can ensure that the new code works in exactly the same way. Don't add anything new until you are proven conformant with what you had before.
Tried FF V. Didn't like it much. Watched someone play FF VII. Wasn't super impressed. In no hurry to try again. Don't feel obligated to play because of the hype. Play Summoner instead.
Loved the movie. Very nice, for anime. Then again, Summoner Geeks was more memorable.
IIRC, Xerox originally came up with the concepts of the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the mouse, and several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science.
According to this page, the personal computer was invented in 1949. Xerox was a chemical company called Haloid at the time, and was just getting into the photocopy business.
This very good primer describes how various pieces of the GUI were invented throughout the 50s and 60s by people such as Ivan Sutherland and Alan Kay.
The mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart in the mid-1960s.
Xerox did invent at PARC in the 1970s and beyond: several other substantial breakthroughs in computer science, such as Ethernet and Object-oriented programming.
For all the reasons that you state, I:
"You've clearly never used Photoshop."
Actually, it's the GIMP I haven't used much. But for my image editing needs, the two are approximately equal. My reply was aimed primarily at StarOffice.
Your point is well taken. But have you used StarOffice or the GIMP? These applications are about as close to a feature-for-feature clone of the original as they can legally be. As an experienced user of Office 95, I felt right at home in StarOffice 5.1 the first time I tried it. I can't wait to try v6. It took me a bit to learn to use the GIMP, but again the fit is very good. I didn't feel like I was in a foreign country.
I would go beyond your statement and say that what Linux really needs to be accepted is not clones, but *the real thing*. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
But you said we don't have any functional clones of the leading productivity apps. In the cases discussed above, I say we do.
I don't know that I'd call myself an addict of online computer games, but certainly a heavy user. If anything, I'm addicted to online topical discussion forums (fora, for the overeducated) like Slashdot. :-) Still, in the last ten years I've spent more than a few hours at online roleplaying games.
:-) Okay, that one's pretty cheezy. They also can lead players to learn how to min-max and hack the client software. ;-)
:-)
We all know of the negative consequences of online games, but I haven't seen much discussion of the positive ones.
First, they motivate players to become better typists.
Second, roleplaying helps players to exercise their imagination -- and learn to express it (especially games that allow players to build and decorate their environment). It also can teach players to reflect upon their own personality.
Third, online RPGs can be very social. In the games I play, I spend as much or more time chatting and cracking jokes with my friends as I do "playing the game". Nearly all of my "real life" friends are people I met first in online games -- and we get together pretty often. I have met over 60 of my 'net gaming friends more than three times.
Fourth, online games can be broadening. I have gaming friends on five continents, and learn new things all the time about how people live elsewhere. Plus, somebody I know is bound to be online pretty much around the clock.
Finally, for all that these games can be destructive to real-life marriages, they can also help build them. I know of a (very small) number of real-life marriages that arose out of gaming relationships.
Online games are what we make of them... in short, society in miniature. For good or for ill.
While other groundbreaking software has faded into irrelevance -- anybody remember VisiCalc? Mosaic? -- QuickTime has shown remarkable adaptability and staying power.
Mosaic lives on in Internet Explorer and Netscape, and all modern spreadsheets derive conspicuously from VisiCalc. Ms. Chmielewski's opus, in addition to being poorly researched, is as irrelevant as a losing ticket for yesterday's lottery. Let us hope that someday she either learns to do her homework, or at least take kickbacks from the companies whose press releases she regurgitates.
Doggone, you are correct. Guess I'm getting senile.
Man wakes up in the future, and finds that his life savings have grown to $500,000. He thinks he's rich; everyone else thinks he's quaint. Everyone is tied to a mobile data communication device, whose rental and service fees are ruinous. People expect to be paid for everything they do (they have to be, to afford those fees). Anyone not in the government's database is a non-person, unable to receive services or protection from the state.
The "Plug-in lifestyle" in this book also fairly well describes the job-hopping high-tech culture of today.
I agree that this memo looks like nothing more than ordinary motivational rah-rah blather. What I absolutely adore is the sense of entitlement.
"EVERY propritary Unix server out there is a Microsoft sale waiting to happen, gosh darn it! Every time one of those faithless IT people swaps in a Free Unix to replace a proprietary Unix... they're STEALING our sale! That's money taken from OUR pocket! Linux is to blame for the tattoos on my ass! EVERY TIME ONE OF YOU BEARDED, TEE-SHIRT-WEARING HIPPIE SCUM BOOTS Linux, MICROSOFT CHILDREN GO HUNGRY!!!!!"
"Which exerts more force an elephant with a foot that has a 6" radius or a 100lbs female in high heel shoes (down, boy) with a 1/4" wide heel?"
The elephant foot exerts a lot more force. The heel exerts more pressure (even when you account for the fraction of the weight resting on the toe).
Interestingly, if you work it out, the elephant's foot places about the same pressure on the ground as an automobile tire.
Aging musicians who can't tour anymore should do what ditch diggers and automobile assembly workers and engineers and pretty much everone else does: Save up for their retirement during their working years!
Why should artists (and the corporate scum who exploit them) be the only people who continue to get paid for years and years, for work they did once? If I stopped producing new intellectual creative works (of engineering) today, my gravy train would be cut off tomorrow. No residuals, no speaking engagements, no MTV retrospectives. Why the hell should artists be different?
"...you never get more energy from hydrogen than you put in."
That's not the issue. The issue is transport: having energy where you need it, when you need it. Although it may be wasteful, as a purely pragmatic measure, most people don't care if it takes 10x the energy to create the fuel as they get from it, as long as the fuel is available in adequate supply to move their vehicle (or warm their coffee, or whatever). If you could produce SuperFuel that would let cars run for 1500 miles (2500 km for non-USians) between fills and was as easy and inexpensive to use as gasoline, they'd be all over it, even if producing and distributing it required 100J of energy input for every J utilized by the car (SUV, excuse me). They'd happily drive their SuperFuel cars until global warming melted the polar ice caps and forced them to buy SuperFuel boats.
Even if you don't sign the petition, the "Mix, Rip, Burn, Jail" cartoon is worth the visit.
All of your employees know how to use Windows coming in, not so for Unix. Retraining people costs money.
All your people do not know Windows coming in. Even if they do, they need to be retrained every time the company upgrades its Office suite because the apps don't work quite the same. That has been my experience at companies ranging from 8 to 80,000 employees; your mileage may vary for companies falling outside that range.
In the college scenario, the article takes no account that many colleges make these decisions based on what the students use. Usually, that's Windows. Sometimes Mac. Almost never *nix.
You make me feel old and out of touch. When I was in college, (a) students used what universities told them to use, not vice-versa, and (b) nearly nobody used Windows. In a lab with 200 Macs, 50 Unix stations, and 20 PCs, often the PCs were the only machines with any free seats. Only the business school used primarily PCs (running DOS, WordPerfect, and Lotus 123).
In the corporate scenario, no mention is made of the need to share files with other companies. This requires Windows. No corporation really cares about the evils of closed file formats until they get in the way. Besides, how are any pitches going to be made without PowerPoint? :)
Right you are. This is called Lock-In, and it's the primary reason that the Office monopoly is in no danger of dissolving any time soon. I've been using Star Office lately, and it's nearly as good as MS Office. Nearly is a deadly word.
I recently wrote an app that is basically a simple database, in 7300 bytes. Is this a tiny app, or not?
The source is 7300 bytes.
The compiler (Perl) is over 1/2 MB.
The runtime is over 1 MB (but is not actually stored on disk).
The memory footprint of the running app is probably a few MB.
The libraries supporting the app are many MB.
What's the app, and how small does it have to be, to be tiny? Is my script a tightly-coded app that does a lot, or a piece of a large system that does surprisingly little?
Easily!
You just have to ask some fundamental questions to see why.
Q: Who benefits from Free software?
A: Absolutely everybody who uses a computer, except those who make money by selling competing software -- and even they benefit, because they can use Free software, too.
Q: If nobody's paying for software, who's going to write it?
A: Free software will be supported by companies whose main business is not selling software, but who do need to have software. IBM, Apple, Sun, and HP all benefit when they develop software and give it away for free, because they sell hardware. Systems integrators can afford to give software away because they sell configured systems. Large web sites can afford to give software away because they sell advertising. AOL can afford to give software away because they sell content. Contracting shops want to have a free infrastructure because they sell vertical-market applications. There are more than enough businesses with solid, nuts-and-bolts financial incentives to keep Free software going indefinitely. Companies whose sole product is Free software may be funded by industry consortia that wish to have the benefit of continued support of the product, or that wish to forge an industry-wide standard.
Q: How stupid do you have to be to fail to see that most people and companies stand to benefit if they can get (some of) their software for free?
A: Very stupid. Stupider than the people who make mony selling software.
Q: So what could possibly stop Free software?
A: Plenty of obstacles can slow or even stop the spread of Free software. Ignorance is now pretty much out of the running; millions of people know about Free software. Lies will slow the adoption of Free software by scaring away potential users. Greed may prevent some companies from realizing that giving software away as an incentive to buy their other products and services may do more for their business than selling it. Betrayal, e.g., persuading governments to outlaw Free software, can easily kill it. Disorganization is probably the biggest threat. Free software projects need strong leaders to hold them together and assimilate all the contributions to improve the project for everyone, and discourage forking.
Q: What's wrong with charging money for software?
A: There's absolutely nothing wrong with charging money for software. It is difficult to sell something that's freely available, but it can be done. People pay for bottled water, even though they can slurp it straight from the tap. People will voluntarily pay for anything -- even software -- if they perceive some added value.
Q: Does this mean the long-term dominance of Free software is assured?
A: Not at all. The opposition is extremely dedicated, and has vast resources. Free software has gotten off to a good start, but it is by no means too strong to be smothered.
If enough people with real business interests come to realize how they will benefit from writing and distributing Free software, then it stands a good chance of surviving.
Your points are good ones, and I did laugh at the thought that I should be able to remove staples by rubbing at them with an eraser. However, the basis of my objection is that the XEmacs application itself lacks an internally consistent UI: Some commands bring up dialog boxes in the native widget set, while others trigger queries on the mode line. I'd prefer something more like an all-or-nothing approach.
When I expect all my commands to appear at the bottom of the window in a Courier-12 font, I get annoyed when instead a dialog pops up halfway across the screen in (heaven help us) Helvetica-10. Of course, it also annoys me when Emacs implements clunky-but-consistent interfaces. As Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Maybe I'm just getting old.
I don't particularly like the dialog boxes in XEmacs.
I find the visual discontinuity between the Emacs look-and-feel and native GUI widgets disturbing. It requires a mental refocus, which is a distraction.
I don't like having to move the mouse to wherever the dialog box has popped up. I particularly don't like having the dialog box open up over something I was reading. And I'm not willing to let the window manager jump my mouse to a new window.
Maybe it's just a matter of what I'm used to; or, maybe it isn't. I've gladly embraced numerous new features in Emacs over the years: Frames, faces, etc. Maybe the extra features in XEmacs haven't seemed enough better to justify unlearning the Emacs commands that I've grown accustomed to.
To do regexes in EMACS, just add Meta to the regular string commands. I.e., search-string is Ctrl-s, and query-replace-string is Ctrl-%; for regexes, use M-C-s and M-C-%, respectively.
I don't know how to make EMACS convert upper case to lower in a regex match -- but I don't know how to make VIM do multiline regex matches, either.
... then it doesn't work.
None of my coworkers is quirky. That must mean... I'm the quirky one!