IMHO, it's kind of the typical overreach common in IT where rather than evolving a protocol they mostly completely redesigned it, tossing out a lot of accumulated knowledge, adding a lot of complexity and lack of interoperability. A few propellerheads then stand around wondering why nobody's adopting it.
I think there is a good argument to be made that if network space exhaustion was the principal problem with IPv4, IPv4 should have just been extended with a couple more prefix octets. The entire existing IPv4 address space could have been just arbitrarily prepended 1.1. The stack would still have needed an overhaul to accommodate this, but less so than IPv6.
To be fair, IPv6 fixes a lot of deeper issues with IPv4, but I think it's debatable whether those problems were worse or more pressing than IPv4 exhaustion.
It wouldn't change for virtual machines at all, and there's nothing that says you couldn't use a static MAC address. A single block of manual/private MAC addresses could be used globally, since it's not necessary that a MAC address be unique except within a given network range.
I sometimes wonder if the change in notation in IPv6 is as big a problem as any specific technical issue.
I think a lot of people have a cognitive model of how IPv4 works based on the notation it uses. When they look at IPv6 notation, it's so different that it doesn't make sense visually. The IPv6 designers didn't make this easier to understand with the various summation schemes and drops of leading zeros, collapsing of fields and so on.
Oh, and hex numbering, too, which I think is also an issue. I'm an old fart and I learned hexadecimal in my various Apple ][ assembly language hackery, but I think there are a lot of people in IT jobs who have had almost no reason to use hex numbers at all unless they are following some how-to that specifies entering a hex value (a fair number of Windows registry values are hex, for example).
If IPv6 had kept a similar notation as IPv4 (with more octets, obviously) I think it might be seen as less daunting and more understandable. I think people could look at 10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17 and "Ok, same kind of address, just more addresses."
And it also makes me wonder if maybe the IPv6 change was just too ambitions, changing both addressing schemes and many protocol and operational internals, and if maybe had they simply extended the address space, possibly by just adding a hex network prefix but without all the protocol changes it might have made it simpler to adopt and also seem less daunting.
None of this to say the design of IPv6 is bad or not beneficial in many ways beyond mere address space size.
Personally, I wonder if maybe IPv4 should have used the numbering scheme (NOT the protocol) used by IPX/SPX -- 32 bytes of network and the host's MAC address. It solves a lot of problems like client address assignment and would seem to have made address exhaustion unlikely, at least in reasonable timelines.
I use the dead bolt contraption on my door when I go out of town (and unplug the opener). I don't know how strong it is against a really big pry bar or someone using a hydraulic jack, but presumably it would frustrate the average dipshit with a small prybar.
Really, most residential garage doors are more about keeping the weather out and a psychological barrier than a real physical barrier. I would bet you could just knock them in pretty easily unless they are made of a stronger material.
I'd love one of those steel, high-security rollup doors in its place but it's not worth the cost, at least where I live.
They figured out they could jack up prices with impunity. Then their content providers figured out all the cash they were bringing in, and jacked up their money (and carriage) demands, too. Cable largely didn't care because they knew they could just pass on these costs to their customers.
Now that they've bled the pig, it's squealing and getting its feed elsewhere.
If a Canadian drives to the US to buy products in a US store, don't they have to declare them to customs? I think they mostly don't care about the bottle of Coca-Cola in your cup holder, but if you buy something expensive they might charge you some kind of import duty and/or taxes on it.
I think this is the kind of argument the Bell Media person was more or less trying to make. She owns the exclusive rights to a basket of content in Canada. If someone is going overseas to acquire this content, they are doing basically the same thing that a physical shopper is doing when they go to the US to buy a product that some Canadian store also wants to sell.
I think the purpose of tarrifs and duties is to specifically hinder this kind of ad-hoc cross-border arbitrage. Of course it's well nigh impossible to do for intellectual content.
There are good arguments to be made that Bell Media is just greedy and using monopoly position to extract rent from Canadians.
But there may be other arguments -- Bell's costs may be higher for reasons outside their control (ie, higher taxes, weak exchange rate, etc).
You seem like you know what you're talking about, but I didn't find the mens rea cartoons illuminating on the obstruction of justice.
Wikipedia provides a brief description which says:
Generally, obstruction charges are laid when it is discovered that a person questioned in an investigation, other than a suspect, has lied to the investigating officers.
I'll substitute "destroyed evidence" for lying, but it doesn't change the parent's (and mine) question as to whether the person charged with obstruction has to reasonably know there is an investigation ongoing.
A made up example to explain my question:
Sam and Joe are friends and like to smoke pot but dislike buying it from shady characters. They start to discuss growing it, and during several visits to Sam's house use his computer to research the growing of pot. They download tutorials, bookmark a few web sites and view many more web sites.
Joe decides he's going to go ahead and grow some pot. He tells Sam about it and without any involvement with Sam, Joe buys the equipment and supplies and sets up a grow operation in his basement. After Joe tells Sam about his new growing operation, Sam hears about how serious of a crime growing pot is and how the government uses high tech tools to find pot growers.
Sam becomes worried about the gravity and risks of growing pot. Worried that the police will link him to Joe as friends, he decides to delete the tutorials, bookmarks and and browsing history on his computer that could implicate him in the growing operation.
Is Sam obstructing justice by deleting this information?
He has no specific information that Joe is under investigation, only a generally informed belief that the police are actively searching for pot growers. The information he deleted is only general information about pot growing, it doesn't contain anything specific about Joe growing pot. My instinct is that this isn't obstruction, principally because there is no specific investigation involving Joe.
Now, if we change the situation a little and say that after visiting Joe, the police follow Sam home and say to him "We're investigating Joe as a pot grower, what you can tell us about that?" Sam says nothing to the police (let's say literally nothing, he says he doesn't want to talk them and closes the door, so there's no lying involved) and immediately deletes the information. Obstruction here? He knows about an investigation involving Joe and growing pot, but the downloads and browser information isn't specific to Joe or even incriminating of Joe per se, because there's no way to know Joe actually even saw it.
I'd use all 20A circuits for all electrical outlets. Circuits would not cross rooms. Some rooms would get more than one if they have more than ten outlets.
This for sure. Can't stand the lazy-ass residential electricians who think because there are outlets on opposite sides of a wall or some j-box is easy to get to that it makes sense to have different rooms on the same breaker.
I'd go even further:
Separate sub panel for all permanent lighting, separate panel for outlets and a separate panel for high wattage appliances with breakers allocated per room or per outlet for the high wattage appliances.
This should make it easier to patch in alternative energy sources, especially those unable to carry the whole house by making it simpler to just switch off the main breaker for high wattage appliances/outlets. I might even be tempted to hardwire a 3-5kVA UPS into the lighting panel. With all LED lighting, you should be able to turn all the lights on and still be under 600 watts.
One, for all desktops 100Mbit is STILL "good enough". When I look at performance graphs for even mid-sized companies, it's really unusual for a gig switch stack's uplink LAG to show much more than 40-50 mbits/sec, and even when it does those are weird peaks, the average is far lower. Even servers are usually lower, outside of backup windows or unusual activity.
Two, the amount of time between GigE availability and the availability of fairly cheap switches and NICs was pretty short, certainly shorter than the gap between GigE and 10 GigE.
The whole thing seems suspicious. I don't think someone as politically powerful and well connected as the House Speaker is someone you try to shake down for any reason.
It's also nice for administering Microsoft stuff like Exchange, both as a shell and scripting engine.
It's not just nice, it's become mandatory as Microsoft strips development resources from the Exchange GUI, either to just save money or to force SMBs into Office365 because they've made basic Exchange management/configuration onerous to novice admins.
I'm sure I'll take a beating for this, but I wonder if Cook's being gay -- and not being completely "out" until relatively recently -- have some influence on this thinking about privacy?
If you think about it, someone who is gay and had been less than publicly out about it has had a period of their life where they were pretty intense about guarding their personal privacy, especially someone in a high profile corporate job where there are plenty of people inside and outside of the company who would want to take you down.
And not to say that his homosexuality is the only explanation, he's obviously intelligent and presents the case for privacy and encryption in principled, intellectual terms.
Sure, it doesn't explain everything. Straight CEOs also support encryption and not always because they have secret drug/hooker/mistress/etc issued to hide, too.
But it's also works as a counter-explanation, CEOs who may not have had a deep interest in their personal privacy may have less personal association with privacy and may fall for the trap of "I have nothing to hide" and "It only helps criminals" or other deferential logic where they see granting government access as reasonable.
Previous speed bumps in Ethernet always had a price premium, but it didn't last that long and the high speed quickly became bog standard on anything. Sure, there was/is still a quality factor involved (gak, RealTek) but for the most part everything worked pretty well and was at least faster than the previous speed even if limitations kept it from being capable of sustained wire speed.
10G Ethernet has been commercially available now for what seems like a long time, yet pretty much anything that can do it STILL costs a fortune. Why?
Vendor conspiracy? Vendors knowing that 1 GB works "real good" for pretty much every application you can throw at it, the silicon designs are long paid for and cash cows, lack of consumer/prosumer/endpoint adoption means there's no incentive to mass produce chipsets that might take precious 0.001% off already non-viable PC margins, "enterprise" consumers are willing to pay huge premiums for anything 10G capable (or trying to keep milking 8G FC)?
Is it the technology? There's some gotchas with 10G over copper relative to cable quality, etc, but is the silicon that much more expensive/complex that the usual mass production economies of scale doesn't basically fix?
In a way this is right, trolling and astroturfing are done on the mass media via PR mouthpieces, press releases and advertising.
I think the difference is that it's so professional and done with such public transparency (ie, you can call the PR office and get mailed a press kit, nobody pretends they're not doing it) that it lacks the kind of nefarious, ministry of propaganda kind of dishonesty that a state-sponsored organized astroturfing campaign has.
I just don't think those tactics would work all that well within the US. It seems like whenever an organization DOES try an astroturfing campaign ("Citizens for Enhanced Comcast Monopoly") it gets spotted so quickly for what it is that it seems to achieve negative results.
Typo actually made an effort to defeat the patent in court, but what seems telling is that they weren't attempting to redesign their product to avoid the patents.
It doesn't seem likely that BB has enough patents to remove all keyboarded phones from the market. There have been too many released by other vendors which weren't challenged.
I wonder if Typo just figured that:
* The vast majority of smartphone owners at this point in time have adapted to the idea of touchscreen keyboards, shrinking the potential market for an add-on device
* Redesigning the device to avoid patents would be hard, especially for a small company like Typo that may not have the resources for a thorough patent/design review, not to mention paying to retool the manufacturing of this device.
Given the small market and costs, better to just give up both the legal fight and the headaches.
From publicized "tests" of the TSA to real world situations where people sneak onto a flight without a ticket, I question whether the TSA process is even really about stopping threats or whether it's really about conditioning people to accept a heavy-handed, intrusive "security" as a normal party of daily life.
I would wager that none of these guys are pathologically short-sighted rubes falling for false promises of more money. They more than likely made sure that the money was real, the freedom to develop their work was real, etc.
Every time I hear these "Foo poached all the talent from bar" stories I just automatically reverse the message to "Bar wasn't paying their talent enough."
Some of this seem to be blameable on hardware makers who once made firmware updates hard -- you had to set a jumper on the motherboard. Then they got rid of that part, but you couldn't flash it from the dominant GUI operating system and had to boot from a DOS disk. Then you didn't even have to do that and could flash any firmware on the system from the GUI.
Now it's too easy. It would seem to make more sense to require the system to be booted to a firmware update mode, simple and reliable enough to be placed in ROM where it could always be trusted but sophisticated enough to have both enough user interface to choose a storage device for firmware and enough intelligence to recognize which files were firmware for which devices so that there wasn't any real risk of bricking the device by flashing the wrong firmware.
Server makers could sort of bypass some of this via remote management capabilities most servers have built in so they wouldn't need to do it via GUI or special boot modes.
I didn't RTFA (hey, this is Slashdot) but I could see where recent tablet iterations have such high DPI that it might be most useful for multi-window mode to split the screen and scale the app windows to fit more than one app at a time on the screen.
It seems like a lot of apps have a kind of defined layout and not much if any layout intelligence built into them, so changing their window size to less than screen size would seem to require many apps to be rewritten to support other windows sizes than full screen.
Scaling the entire app display to fit the window size would seem to solve much of this, with the caveat that apps with a fine degree of detail in their controls and small text to begin with might be less than useful. But for many, monitoring the content changes might be enough even if 100% of the controls or detail isn't legible.
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IMHO, it's kind of the typical overreach common in IT where rather than evolving a protocol they mostly completely redesigned it, tossing out a lot of accumulated knowledge, adding a lot of complexity and lack of interoperability. A few propellerheads then stand around wondering why nobody's adopting it.
I think there is a good argument to be made that if network space exhaustion was the principal problem with IPv4, IPv4 should have just been extended with a couple more prefix octets. The entire existing IPv4 address space could have been just arbitrarily prepended 1.1. The stack would still have needed an overhaul to accommodate this, but less so than IPv6.
To be fair, IPv6 fixes a lot of deeper issues with IPv4, but I think it's debatable whether those problems were worse or more pressing than IPv4 exhaustion.
It wouldn't change for virtual machines at all, and there's nothing that says you couldn't use a static MAC address. A single block of manual/private MAC addresses could be used globally, since it's not necessary that a MAC address be unique except within a given network range.
I sometimes wonder if the change in notation in IPv6 is as big a problem as any specific technical issue.
I think a lot of people have a cognitive model of how IPv4 works based on the notation it uses. When they look at IPv6 notation, it's so different that it doesn't make sense visually. The IPv6 designers didn't make this easier to understand with the various summation schemes and drops of leading zeros, collapsing of fields and so on.
Oh, and hex numbering, too, which I think is also an issue. I'm an old fart and I learned hexadecimal in my various Apple ][ assembly language hackery, but I think there are a lot of people in IT jobs who have had almost no reason to use hex numbers at all unless they are following some how-to that specifies entering a hex value (a fair number of Windows registry values are hex, for example).
If IPv6 had kept a similar notation as IPv4 (with more octets, obviously) I think it might be seen as less daunting and more understandable. I think people could look at 10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17 and "Ok, same kind of address, just more addresses."
And it also makes me wonder if maybe the IPv6 change was just too ambitions, changing both addressing schemes and many protocol and operational internals, and if maybe had they simply extended the address space, possibly by just adding a hex network prefix but without all the protocol changes it might have made it simpler to adopt and also seem less daunting.
None of this to say the design of IPv6 is bad or not beneficial in many ways beyond mere address space size.
Personally, I wonder if maybe IPv4 should have used the numbering scheme (NOT the protocol) used by IPX/SPX -- 32 bytes of network and the host's MAC address. It solves a lot of problems like client address assignment and would seem to have made address exhaustion unlikely, at least in reasonable timelines.
I don't know if they have the authority, but the FCC should mandate carrier level interoperability.
I use the dead bolt contraption on my door when I go out of town (and unplug the opener). I don't know how strong it is against a really big pry bar or someone using a hydraulic jack, but presumably it would frustrate the average dipshit with a small prybar.
Really, most residential garage doors are more about keeping the weather out and a psychological barrier than a real physical barrier. I would bet you could just knock them in pretty easily unless they are made of a stronger material.
I'd love one of those steel, high-security rollup doors in its place but it's not worth the cost, at least where I live.
Doesn't improved density and lower cost also mean that they can just add more spare cells to make up for any reliability issues?
Obviously the math has to work out in terms of the reliability decline being smaller than the increases in density and cost/GB.
Cable did it to themselves.
They figured out they could jack up prices with impunity. Then their content providers figured out all the cash they were bringing in, and jacked up their money (and carriage) demands, too. Cable largely didn't care because they knew they could just pass on these costs to their customers.
Now that they've bled the pig, it's squealing and getting its feed elsewhere.
If a Canadian drives to the US to buy products in a US store, don't they have to declare them to customs? I think they mostly don't care about the bottle of Coca-Cola in your cup holder, but if you buy something expensive they might charge you some kind of import duty and/or taxes on it.
I think this is the kind of argument the Bell Media person was more or less trying to make. She owns the exclusive rights to a basket of content in Canada. If someone is going overseas to acquire this content, they are doing basically the same thing that a physical shopper is doing when they go to the US to buy a product that some Canadian store also wants to sell.
I think the purpose of tarrifs and duties is to specifically hinder this kind of ad-hoc cross-border arbitrage. Of course it's well nigh impossible to do for intellectual content.
There are good arguments to be made that Bell Media is just greedy and using monopoly position to extract rent from Canadians.
But there may be other arguments -- Bell's costs may be higher for reasons outside their control (ie, higher taxes, weak exchange rate, etc).
You seem like you know what you're talking about, but I didn't find the mens rea cartoons illuminating on the obstruction of justice.
Wikipedia provides a brief description which says:
Generally, obstruction charges are laid when it is discovered that a person questioned in an investigation, other than a suspect, has lied to the investigating officers.
I'll substitute "destroyed evidence" for lying, but it doesn't change the parent's (and mine) question as to whether the person charged with obstruction has to reasonably know there is an investigation ongoing.
A made up example to explain my question:
Sam and Joe are friends and like to smoke pot but dislike buying it from shady characters. They start to discuss growing it, and during several visits to Sam's house use his computer to research the growing of pot. They download tutorials, bookmark a few web sites and view many more web sites.
Joe decides he's going to go ahead and grow some pot. He tells Sam about it and without any involvement with Sam, Joe buys the equipment and supplies and sets up a grow operation in his basement. After Joe tells Sam about his new growing operation, Sam hears about how serious of a crime growing pot is and how the government uses high tech tools to find pot growers.
Sam becomes worried about the gravity and risks of growing pot. Worried that the police will link him to Joe as friends, he decides to delete the tutorials, bookmarks and and browsing history on his computer that could implicate him in the growing operation.
Is Sam obstructing justice by deleting this information?
He has no specific information that Joe is under investigation, only a generally informed belief that the police are actively searching for pot growers. The information he deleted is only general information about pot growing, it doesn't contain anything specific about Joe growing pot. My instinct is that this isn't obstruction, principally because there is no specific investigation involving Joe.
Now, if we change the situation a little and say that after visiting Joe, the police follow Sam home and say to him "We're investigating Joe as a pot grower, what you can tell us about that?" Sam says nothing to the police (let's say literally nothing, he says he doesn't want to talk them and closes the door, so there's no lying involved) and immediately deletes the information. Obstruction here? He knows about an investigation involving Joe and growing pot, but the downloads and browser information isn't specific to Joe or even incriminating of Joe per se, because there's no way to know Joe actually even saw it.
And that got them what? Bachman Turner Overdrive? Rush? Celine Dion?
Seattle isn't the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located.
I'd use all 20A circuits for all electrical outlets. Circuits would not cross rooms. Some rooms would get more than one if they have more than ten outlets.
This for sure. Can't stand the lazy-ass residential electricians who think because there are outlets on opposite sides of a wall or some j-box is easy to get to that it makes sense to have different rooms on the same breaker.
I'd go even further:
Separate sub panel for all permanent lighting, separate panel for outlets and a separate panel for high wattage appliances with breakers allocated per room or per outlet for the high wattage appliances.
This should make it easier to patch in alternative energy sources, especially those unable to carry the whole house by making it simpler to just switch off the main breaker for high wattage appliances/outlets. I might even be tempted to hardwire a 3-5kVA UPS into the lighting panel. With all LED lighting, you should be able to turn all the lights on and still be under 600 watts.
I'm not buying that.
One, for all desktops 100Mbit is STILL "good enough". When I look at performance graphs for even mid-sized companies, it's really unusual for a gig switch stack's uplink LAG to show much more than 40-50 mbits/sec, and even when it does those are weird peaks, the average is far lower. Even servers are usually lower, outside of backup windows or unusual activity.
Two, the amount of time between GigE availability and the availability of fairly cheap switches and NICs was pretty short, certainly shorter than the gap between GigE and 10 GigE.
The whole thing seems suspicious. I don't think someone as politically powerful and well connected as the House Speaker is someone you try to shake down for any reason.
It's also nice for administering Microsoft stuff like Exchange, both as a shell and scripting engine.
It's not just nice, it's become mandatory as Microsoft strips development resources from the Exchange GUI, either to just save money or to force SMBs into Office365 because they've made basic Exchange management/configuration onerous to novice admins.
I'm sure I'll take a beating for this, but I wonder if Cook's being gay -- and not being completely "out" until relatively recently -- have some influence on this thinking about privacy?
If you think about it, someone who is gay and had been less than publicly out about it has had a period of their life where they were pretty intense about guarding their personal privacy, especially someone in a high profile corporate job where there are plenty of people inside and outside of the company who would want to take you down.
And not to say that his homosexuality is the only explanation, he's obviously intelligent and presents the case for privacy and encryption in principled, intellectual terms.
Sure, it doesn't explain everything. Straight CEOs also support encryption and not always because they have secret drug/hooker/mistress/etc issued to hide, too.
But it's also works as a counter-explanation, CEOs who may not have had a deep interest in their personal privacy may have less personal association with privacy and may fall for the trap of "I have nothing to hide" and "It only helps criminals" or other deferential logic where they see granting government access as reasonable.
One where there is no differentiation between "disk" and "RAM"?
Previous speed bumps in Ethernet always had a price premium, but it didn't last that long and the high speed quickly became bog standard on anything. Sure, there was/is still a quality factor involved (gak, RealTek) but for the most part everything worked pretty well and was at least faster than the previous speed even if limitations kept it from being capable of sustained wire speed.
10G Ethernet has been commercially available now for what seems like a long time, yet pretty much anything that can do it STILL costs a fortune. Why?
Vendor conspiracy? Vendors knowing that 1 GB works "real good" for pretty much every application you can throw at it, the silicon designs are long paid for and cash cows, lack of consumer/prosumer/endpoint adoption means there's no incentive to mass produce chipsets that might take precious 0.001% off already non-viable PC margins, "enterprise" consumers are willing to pay huge premiums for anything 10G capable (or trying to keep milking 8G FC)?
Is it the technology? There's some gotchas with 10G over copper relative to cable quality, etc, but is the silicon that much more expensive/complex that the usual mass production economies of scale doesn't basically fix?
In a way this is right, trolling and astroturfing are done on the mass media via PR mouthpieces, press releases and advertising.
I think the difference is that it's so professional and done with such public transparency (ie, you can call the PR office and get mailed a press kit, nobody pretends they're not doing it) that it lacks the kind of nefarious, ministry of propaganda kind of dishonesty that a state-sponsored organized astroturfing campaign has.
I just don't think those tactics would work all that well within the US. It seems like whenever an organization DOES try an astroturfing campaign ("Citizens for Enhanced Comcast Monopoly") it gets spotted so quickly for what it is that it seems to achieve negative results.
Typo actually made an effort to defeat the patent in court, but what seems telling is that they weren't attempting to redesign their product to avoid the patents.
It doesn't seem likely that BB has enough patents to remove all keyboarded phones from the market. There have been too many released by other vendors which weren't challenged.
I wonder if Typo just figured that:
* The vast majority of smartphone owners at this point in time have adapted to the idea of touchscreen keyboards, shrinking the potential market for an add-on device
* Redesigning the device to avoid patents would be hard, especially for a small company like Typo that may not have the resources for a thorough patent/design review, not to mention paying to retool the manufacturing of this device.
Given the small market and costs, better to just give up both the legal fight and the headaches.
From publicized "tests" of the TSA to real world situations where people sneak onto a flight without a ticket, I question whether the TSA process is even really about stopping threats or whether it's really about conditioning people to accept a heavy-handed, intrusive "security" as a normal party of daily life.
...is how the headline should read.
I would wager that none of these guys are pathologically short-sighted rubes falling for false promises of more money. They more than likely made sure that the money was real, the freedom to develop their work was real, etc.
Every time I hear these "Foo poached all the talent from bar" stories I just automatically reverse the message to "Bar wasn't paying their talent enough."
Some of this seem to be blameable on hardware makers who once made firmware updates hard -- you had to set a jumper on the motherboard. Then they got rid of that part, but you couldn't flash it from the dominant GUI operating system and had to boot from a DOS disk. Then you didn't even have to do that and could flash any firmware on the system from the GUI.
Now it's too easy. It would seem to make more sense to require the system to be booted to a firmware update mode, simple and reliable enough to be placed in ROM where it could always be trusted but sophisticated enough to have both enough user interface to choose a storage device for firmware and enough intelligence to recognize which files were firmware for which devices so that there wasn't any real risk of bricking the device by flashing the wrong firmware.
Server makers could sort of bypass some of this via remote management capabilities most servers have built in so they wouldn't need to do it via GUI or special boot modes.
I didn't RTFA (hey, this is Slashdot) but I could see where recent tablet iterations have such high DPI that it might be most useful for multi-window mode to split the screen and scale the app windows to fit more than one app at a time on the screen.
It seems like a lot of apps have a kind of defined layout and not much if any layout intelligence built into them, so changing their window size to less than screen size would seem to require many apps to be rewritten to support other windows sizes than full screen.
Scaling the entire app display to fit the window size would seem to solve much of this, with the caveat that apps with a fine degree of detail in their controls and small text to begin with might be less than useful. But for many, monitoring the content changes might be enough even if 100% of the controls or detail isn't legible.
And I'm sure the railroad barons felt the same way.