My first reaction is.. wow.. that's a lot of.. stuff. I was expecting this keynote to be just hot air. This definitely eases the pain of Nintendo's "megaton" announcement having nothing to do with Gamecube games ^_^ But, onto my question for all you linux-at-home users out there:
Has anyone know why they chose to make Safari based on kHTML instead of Gecko? What is the reasoning here? I think i kind of just wish they'd commandeered Chimera instead, and added all those browser-ish features it was missing. If it's still missing them. I guess I'll download that again and check. Um, ANYWAY..
Why kHTML? Is it faster than Gecko, or easier to hook into, or something? I cannot really comment on this, as I'm not a big KDE fan and so haven't been following Konqueror, and I can't really comment on the speed of Gecko sans Mozilla since i haven't checked out Chimera since v0.1, and can't get Galeon to work*. What's up with this? It seems it would make more sense for Apple to throw their weight into Mozilla, but i can't really come up with any good justification why I'm saying that.
Whatever. Might as well check this Safari thing out and see if it's any more fully-featured than Chimera and any better at rendering standard webpages than Omniweb, or if i'll still be using MSIE tomorrow..
* P.S., if anyone out there can give me any tips as to how the heck to get Galeon up and running under Solaris when one is not Root, let me know. Last time i attempted i got as far as GDK/GTK+ all working and installed in my home directory and stuff, and never quite managed to get the GNOME libraries set up. Eh.. ^_^
What I don't understand about Lessig's proposal is how would he enforce the bounty part of the law against off-shore spammers.
The only sane thing to do would be to make it just as illegal for a U.S. company to hire said offshore spammers as it would be for that U.S. company to send the spam themselves. Spammers can never completely be eradicated becuase they follow supply and demand; however, the people hiring the spammers don't. That is to say, if you take out a spammer, another one will appear and fill its place. If you make someone stop hiring spammers, it isn't like someone is going to take that place..
But that said: does it really matter? I mean, what lessig proposes would still substantially help against spam. Look at it this way: both the black-list and smart-filtering methods of stopping spam become exponentially easier to do once you can assume spam comes from outside the U.S. Look at it as just isolating the spam to a known area.
At the least, it means that the "collateral damage" from blackhole lists no longer effects americans. Which is a good thing, and also means that people in europe, etc, will become bothered by the fact that they still sometimes get put on the RBL, but americans don't-- making it possible they, too, will then petition their governmental representatives for a required-labeling spam law. So yeah, they'd go off-shore. But over time, only the
I for one don't agree with lessig that this is a good thing to do in place of blackholing, but as part of a Larger Spam Strategy i'm certain it would indeed lead to a massive decrease in spam. Especially if it was illegal for americans to hire offshore spammers that don't follow the labelling protocol.
I find the part about using an RSA-style collaborative project to crack the X-box permission-to-run keys interesing, in particular becuase it's good practice-- eventually, barring a sudden backlash of informed consumerism against microsoft or some other kind of miracle, we're going to be needing to do this with the Palladium keys. I particularly wonder about a couple things:
How many bits are in the x-box "trusted software" permission-to-run keys? What about in Palladium? For these N-bit keys, what is the approximate difficulty of brute-forcing it as compared to, say, brute-forcing RSA?
Distributed clients like this one, as far as i am aware, just get parcelled out random blocks of the "possible key" space, and send back which numbers they checked, right? Is there any way to PROVE those numbers were, in fact, correctly checked, besides asking multiple clients to check each individual block and hoping that at least one of the clients tells the truth? Like, is there anything to prevent Microsoft from just randomly calling up the project with a bunch of dummy clients that submit the REAL x-box key a couple times to the "i've checked this and it's not the key" list? ((Well.. okay.. I can think of a way to do that.. but it would require actually USING Palladium, to ensure everyone submitting blocks to the crack-Palladium project is using an unaltered, approved, digitally-signed Palladium-cracking client. So, uh, that's right out.) I know previous distributed projects have had issues with clients lying about their results in order to boost statistics, but this is the first time i'm aware of there has been a massively distributed computational work in which there is a specific party with a vested, active interest in the project being actually sabotaged.
Were the Palladium keys to be cracked, is there anything MS could do at that point? Is there any way they could just Windows Update all the Palladium installs out there to suddenly use some new backup key, and invalidate the old one? It would seem the answer is no, becuase it seems that would automatically mean all of the existing palladium software in the entire world would suddenly become "untrusted" and have to be re-compiled at the vendor with the new keys, or something, but maybe there's something i'm missing. Is there something i'm missing? And anyway, aren't the palladium keys going to be stored in hardware, in some special Intel chip? Or something? How is a Palladium app marked as "Trusted By The MS Signing Authority", exactly, anyway? I haven't been following this as closely as i should have been.
I'm confused and ignorant. Please explain things to me.
Windows is not a generic term now. If someone says Linux, you know what they are talking about (the specific OS). By the same terms, if someone says that a program they wrote "runs on Windows" you know, with 100% certainty, that they are referring to the specificMS OS called Windows.
But if someone says their program "runs on X windows" we will also know what it means, that their program folllows the X11 Windowing System Protocol and probably runs on UNIX. This suggests to me that while the word Windows alone, used as if it were a software platform, is very not generic, "it sounds like Windows" is certainly a generic at this point. "Lindows" seems about as close to "Windows" as "X Windows", and it has X11 *in* it, so..
I'm not sure they could win this case even were the trademark a valid one when it was filed. According to this X-windows was developed and in use in MIT student labs in 1984 (although W, the precursor to X, existed before that) and was being commercially deployed by 1988. According to this MSWindows was announced in 1983 and was being commercially deployed by 1985. As far as i'm concerned, if Microsoft has problems with things that sound like 'cheap knock-offs' of their Windows trademark.. well, if Windows is a microsoft trademark, then 'X Windows' certainly sounds like a cheap knock-off to me (X-Windows isn't the product's name, but a lot of people call it that.). Microsoft didn't do anything about this in 1988, their trademark is now diluted, and they can't complain about this now.
Beyond this, it seems to me any arguments you could use to claim Windows is a non-generic could be equally applied to Office: If you say "this is an Office document" people know exactly what you mean. Microsoft has spent ungodly amounts of money on marketing the name Office. But yesterday in CompUSA, i quite definitely saw a box for sale clearly marked "Hancom Office".. with "Hancom" in little tiny letters, and the visual design of the box very similar to that of the MSOffice v.X packaging. That seems more to me to be profiteering off of a trademark MS has built up than "Lindows".
Here's the thing.. everything i've said above makes perfect sense to me. However, I'm not sure it means a damn thing from a legal standpoint. Is the whole "X Windowing System therefore MSWindows can't trademark-collide with similar-sounding products" a valid legal argument? Is there some SPECIFIC legal reason that it's okay for people to stomp all over the Office trademark but not the Windows one?
For example, when you say "hand me a Kleenex" you probably don't give a hoot if I give you Kleenex brand tissues, Puffs brand, or Wal-Mart brand. But if I say I want a Windows program, you know that I don't want some program written for Linux.
So what would you assume if i told you "Hand me some Leenex"? ^_^
I hate EA already. I can't remember the last time they've produced a game i liked, but i can give you multiple recent instances where they bought a company that made games i really liked-- and then ran that company into the ground, preventing them from making more games i like.
I think the key here is rather than trying to put this guy away, DVD manufacturers should work with the DeCSS technology to find a happy medium.
This is what you're missing. The DVD Forum people don't want a "happy medium". They want three things:
They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc. I.e. the Sixth Sense 'you cannot access the menu until you watch this trailer for another movie, every time you insert the dvd', or the thing on certain dvds that won't let you pause, or framestep, or whatever.
They want to retain an unchallenged sense of control over their ordered little world.
Which one of these three is the focus varies, but in general #2 is the biggie here, at least because of a perception that content producers flocked to DVD solely becuase they had that level of control. At some point, it seemed that DVD peoples fear that if content producers lost that control, they'd stop putting so much stuff on dvds, switch to another format, or try to take legal action of some kind.
#2 is the biggie insofar as linux goes first off becuase "the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user. In the end, the user is in control of everything on the OS. This scares the DVD forum. Remember: In order for Apple to get the DVD forum to let them license their dvd player, Apple was forced to write the dvd player in such a way that it refuses to run if MacsBug, the system-level debugger is running, because MacsBug lets you do things like branch to unscheduled subroutines at random moments, and such would have allowed people to take screenshots while the DVD is running! This is a fairly big thing, MacsBug is a versatile tool that LOTS of people run for various reasons, and it is the best/only way to debug many pieces of software. Because there were potential uses of MacsBug that allowed the user to evade the control the DVD forum wants, macsbug users have to switch the thing off and restart anytime they want to watch a DVD.Given this, why on earth do you think the dvd forum would be okay with allowing any DVD player, even a propeitary one, on an OS where everything in the OS including the device drivers can be re-coded by the user?
Of course, the macsbug thing is a sham: a simple machine-code hack patch thing which is very readily available will allow anyone to alter the dvd player app so that it doesn't notice macsbug. But despite this, Apple still has to leave the "no macsbug" code in the OS 9 version of the DVD player, lest they offend the DVD consortium's illusion of complete control, which they must for some reason maintain to themselves at all costs.
If the DVD people were interested in a happy medium, i'm almost certain one would have been reached. Remember, the mathematical flaws in CSS remained uncracked for *years* while CSS was just being used for satellite TV; CSS was only knocked over after millions of linux users were left with the alternatives of either someone hacking CSS, or not being able to use products they paid good money for without booting into windows. The "hackers" can sometimes compromise.. but the DVD forum people cared more about control than compromise, and so the LiViD people went around the DVD forum... and we now have DeCSS.
Hey, "The First One Always Blows Up" isn't really that bad of a record to have, comparitively speaking. I mean, look at microsoft: the first *two* versions of each of their products always waste millions of dollars and explode messily when you try to use them, and most people's reactions is to just kind of excuse them for it and wait for version 3..!
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.. 2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.. 3. Install distributed computing client on third PC..
All i have to say is that with 7,800 identical computers all set up for a united purpose, if Gateway doesn't already have some kind of system set up whereby they could install arbitrary software on all 7,800 computers at once with a couple of mouse clicks on one single computer at Gateway Central, they are incredibly stupid.
Especially because i think such a thing could be done just by using a unified Windows Update Server for the floorroom PCs. And if not, there are lots of products designed for the exact purpose of keeping consistent disk images across large quantities of computers with a single point of administration. Probably, Gateway Country even sells some of them.
Most digital stretching filters i've heard-- even the ones in professional music programs like ProTools and Logic Audio-- cause the output to be exceedingly gravelly and robotized, like they're being played through a digital cell phone that's slowly giving out. The resulting sound is possible to be used in a musically interesting manner, but it definitely doesn't sound like something a classical music fan would find pleasant to listen to, in my experience.
How did the stretch turn out in this thing? Is it relatively smooth, or is it just like listening to a rotor slowly changing pitch to form something similar to beethoven's 9th? No, of course i'm not going to listen to it myself, especially not when there are X number of slashdotters pounding on their poor realaudio server. Though i may check out this "Herb Levys Mappings" page they link to, if i ever find the correct link. (Theirs is busted. Actually, pretty much everything linked from that first page seems to be slashdotted at this point. Ah well.)
And if it did turn out smoothly, will someone please tell me what software they used for the time expansion, because i want a copy:)
Hrm. The article describes what the billboards do, but they completely avoid the question of how these mystical "sensors" work. I thought I understood how a radio reciever works, but I don't understand how you could remotely determine the location of a radio *reciever*, much less *what* frequency said reciever is (um) recieving.
I'm thinking of cases in totalitarian governments during the last 100 years where people huddled around banned radios trying to get the BBC, or of the case of the BBC roaming around trying to find people who have working televisions but don't pay their television tax. Could sensors like this be used by govt.s to determine from outside a house whether there was a functioning radio/television reciever? Could similar tech be used to locate illegal cell/police scanners or radar detectors (in areas where such things are illegal)? Would it be possible for me to build such a scanner and then legally walk around seeing what passing cars are listening to and what people are watching on tv, just out of curiousity?
There was this great article i remember reading on theobvious.com around like five years ago or something. It's, um, here.
It basically suggested Microsoft started this whole "my"-in-computing craze for the same reason that products for very small children often contain "my" in the product title, as in "My First Sony". They want their products to appear hyper-ultra-unthreatening, so they encroach things in vocabulary that would make a small child feel comfortable. Apparently hoping to make windows-users feel like they are in some sort of comforting, embryonic state while using it.
Actually, now that i think of it, Windows XP/Longhorn's interface really, really has the motif of small child's toys. You know? The kind of colorful, rounded, chewable look you get becuase the toy manufacturers want to make the baby notice it, and becuase they want everything large and rounded and plastic so the baby can't swallow it. Maybe Microsoft's idea of "user friendly" is "it treats the user like a four year old"..
Moreover, as it is, the playstation adapter has one game available that makes me drool violently (Tribes Arial Assault.. especially since, as a mac user who loves Tribes, i spent two years waiting for the mac port of Tribes 2 and never actually got it) and one game available that i would consider buying (Frequency), and i haven't looked at all the PS2 games currently available. The gamecube adapter, i'm not really certain if any games are available for it yet (are they?) but the one game that is at the least *coming* (Phantasy Star Online) makes me drool violently. The x-box adapter, meanwhile, has one game that i would consider buying (Ghost recon) and i've looked at everything available. So i can see where yeah, the x-box adapter would be a really good deal if you are the kind of person who likes Mechwarrior and Sports games.. but this does not apply to me.
I don't have to put away my anti-microsoft bias to get this. I can get about this exact same thing from non-microsoft sources, and i like what the non-microsoft sources are offering better, (although i do consider the telephony feature of the x-box extremely extremely neat and the only real microsoft innovation i can think of in recent memory.. i'd rather type to communicate).
Anyway, i'm getting a gamecube for christmas, and perhaps i can convince my brother to buy the internet adapter and Tribes for his PS2 when i visit my parents over christmas.. i can't think of anything in the x-box world that i'm missing that's worth having. i'm happy:)
Sony took huge losses on the PS1, and that was during a better economy and a less heated console war.
Yes, but let's just remember that this was just because prior to about the time Final Fantasy 7 was released, all the games for the PS1 sucked.:)
Actually, i do have a point here. Yes, Sony took huge losses, but during the time in which they took those losses, the super nintendo and such were all still "good enough" and some fantastic games were being released for those platforms. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence from the genesis and SNES, we had the Jaguar and the 3D0 and sega's mess of SegaCD+32X+Saturn..
In the end, when people started tiring of SNES and looking for something better, atari and sega had abandoned the market, and only PS1 was left. So of course the moral here is that if you want to get anywhere in the console market, you have to have tenacity, and not just bail out if it isnt' working like sega did with the Dreamcast.
But then you also have to keep in mind that things aren't going to change unless there's a reason to.
The playstation 1 was competing with two products which were technically inferior but had rock-solid market presence, and about like six products (three from Sega) which were about technically equal or better but had absolutely no market presence whatsoever. In this case, waiting out made sense; in the end, the technically equal products died off from not having as much funding as Sony could provide, and when people finally tired of the techncially inferior products, Sony was waiting. FF7 was released, and people started to jump ship, the PS1 looked extremely attractive suddenly to both developers and consumers. Suddenly, the PS1 had more than just this "rayman" crap going for it, and there were games worth playing on it.
Meanwhile, look at the Xbox's situation. It's competing with two products, both of which are EQUAL OR BETTER technically to the x-box, and both of which have *better* market penetration than the x-box. The X-box's games, in my opinion (and apparently the opinion of a lot of other people, judging from the thing's sub-optimal sales), all suck, with the exception of about four games that came out for all three platforms simultaneously. Quite similar to the PS1. Microsoft can wait this out and hope to find their killer app eventually, but again nothing's going to change without a reason.
Microsoft's one hope, as i see it, is the Xbox Live thing. The Xbox Live setup isn't considerably better than the PS2 or the GC setups, but MS does seem at least on the surface more committed to online gaming than sony or nintendo. If MS convinces, like, everybody who makes an MS game to do xbox-live, and Nintendo and Sony screw stuff up and don't get more than a handful of developers to go internet, maybe that'll be a chance for MS to gain a bunch of ground with both consumers and developers, as the xbox gets a name as the platform for the gamer who wants 'net connectivity.. but that won't be enough for MS to win, just enough for them to put them on equal footing, or possibly in the situation of being the market leader. At that point Nintendo and Sony will probably realize MS's one-big-central-server model is better, and switch to that (if nintendo can afford to). At that point MS will have reached its goal of being seriously part of the console market, and absolutely anything could happen from there.. but unless MS plays its cards exactly right and Nintendo and Sony play theirs exactly wrong, MS will remain an outsider who has to struggle just to appear as more than a joke.
In other words, i think MS has one more chance for Nintendo and Sony to flub everything, and then past that there just isn't going to be any benefit from 'waiting it out' anymore. (Yeah, there's the Xbox 2, but the Xbox 2 is going to be competing against a technically equal product-- the PS3. If people don't make good xbox games prior to the xbox 2, they probably aren't going to after either.) Good game developers are everything. And to my mind, even in terms of third-party developers the GC has the best offering right now. Guess what i'm getting for Christmas.. ^_^
"Lord Macdonald of Macdonald, premier clan chief of Clan Donald, has appointed Ronald W McDonald to be Sergeant-Major at Arms of the Guardians of Clan Donald: the linear descendant of the chief's bodyguard....
One specific aim is to offer moral support to Mary Blair, proprietor of McMunchies, a small sandwich bar in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, who is being threatened with legal action by McDonald's Restaurants, the fast food chain, for daring to use the prefix "Mc" in the name of her shop.
When interviewed in BBC2's "The Money Programme" a top trademark lawyer made it clear that McDonald's have not a legal leg to stand on. Instead they rely on their unlimited financial resources to bully small businesses who cannot afford to fight back."
Really.. read the entire press release, it just gets better and better. This is coming from a long extended thing that happened around 1996, when McDonalds decided they were going to start trying to crack down on anyone doing anything vaguely resembling their trademarks. I'm not sure if they ever got McMunchie's to change their name, but whatever happened they did manage to piss off, in the process, Scotland. The best bit about the whole thing was that, according to an absolutely fantastic 60 Minutes report on this and the McLibel case, Lord MacDonald of MacDonald was so enraged by the whole thing that he decided to open a restaurant in the traditional family estate of the MacDonald clan, and name it "MacDonald's". The restaurant serves things like duck, and whatever else is the U.K. equivilent of "gourmet" food. Thus far McDonald's Inc. of America has yet to challenge him over the name.
As my more-or-less universal online handle is an abbreviation of my last name, McClure (it's a degradation of MacLeod), i have to say this case holds a small bit of interest for me.. it is a discomforting thought to know that a corporation may possibly want to claim ownership to the first two letters of my slashdot logon:)
Great post-- it's always interesting to see in action the bizarre split in the "right wing" that everyone (especially the right wing itself) always just kind of seems to pretend doesn't exist.. you know, the split between the lasseiz-faire right-wingers and the ones who actually believe in a free market..
Anyway just curious, though, where did you get these quotes from?
Uhh, but that's not important. What i meant to ask about is this:
The net result is that until this decision is overturned on appeal, as I believe it will be, competition will not be restored.
I have been trying to figure this out. Can the current decision be appealed, who by (the dissenting states?), who to (the supreme court?) and if an appeal occurs does Microsoft have to abide by the terms of this settlement while that appeal is in the courts?
I'm also slightly confused by the judgement's language in one respect: when Microsoft doesn't obey the terms of this settlement, what will the result be? Does kotelly drag them back in and whap them with big contempt-of-court judgements until they comply, or do we get to start another six-year court case?
I've been wondering the same thing for a really long time. It seems like GNUStep could be fantastic for The GNU World, but they seem continuously resource-strapped and unable to get public attention. I really don't know what gives, but i think the best possible answer, you've already said:
I believe the biggest problem for GNUStep is that few people use Objective C. That is a big speedbump to people adapting their legacy code.
You really probably have hit on about 90% of the problem right there. We will just have to see what happens with this and projects like it-- i mean, it looks very promising, but then you have to compare it with Cocoa, where objects written in Objective C and Java (and now, due to third-party efforts, i think even Perl and Python are 100% supported) can interact with each other and the OS APIs seamlessly and without any fuss.
Come to think of it, ProjectBuilder, the thing that links all those Java and Objective C thingies together when you're coding for Cocoa, supposedly is just a front-end to the GCC. Supposedly all the backend stuff is open-source utilities that are part of Darwin. Hm. Is Apple's Objc-java bridge open-source or no? If it's part of the closed-source Cocoa stuff, how does that work out? (And won't even cocoa services run in Darwin as long as you stay in the Foundation and don't touch the AppKit where all the GUI stuff lives? What about if wrote that service in Java?) If it's open-source, then why hasn't GNUStep integrated it yet? Why haven't they integrated the Perl/Python bridges to Objc? Is this just the whole continous GNUStep-limited-resources problem, or what? Isn't there some thing going on where GNUStep doesn't use objc_msgsend(), it just pretends to? Is that a problem here?
I dunno. I really think if more people could get over their intense fear of the [square brackets]; they would fall in love with NeXTStep:) The ability to write in multiple languages would at least make people feel more secure about the thing..
I keep meaning to try to port a couple of the open-source Mac OS X apps, probably one of the excellent GPLed AIM clients, to Linux using GNUStep as a proof-of-concept, or something, but i keep not getting around to this. Hopefully i'll be able to give it a try in a couple weeks, after the mononucleosis gets a little better:(
Does anyone know if the InterfaceBuilder analogue in GNUStep is anywhere near as good as Apple's? The whole nib-file concept is i think the most brilliant and useful thing about Cocoa.. eh.
I'm not going to address the question of whether Apple should be open-sourcing more than they already have-- i don't feel like arguing right now-- but let me try to clear a couple things up.
it would be really nice if **Carbon** was a platform independant library
I don't think Carbon is what you mean.
Mac OS X natively supports three APIs:
Cocoa, OS X's "standard" API. Cocoa is basically a newer version of NeXTStep with a new name. It consists of an extremely elegant object-oriented GUI application API sitting on top of POSIX. This is what Apple wants people to program new applications in.
Carbon. Carbon is a "transitional" API, that basically consists of an updated version of the old Classic Mac OS Toolbox, with anything related to unprotected memory, cooperative multitasking, or such things removed, and a lot of API cruft in general cleaned up. Apple estimates that about 20% of an average classic mac os program will have to be changed in order for it to work under Carbon. The recommended use for this is that if you have an existing codebase written for the Classic Mac OS Toolbox, you won't have to rewrite from scratch-- you can just carbonize it. Writing new applications in Carbon makes Apple sad, and it isn't as pleasant as writing in Cocoa, but people do it anyway becuase unlike Cocoa programs, Carbon programs can run under both OS 9 and OS X.
Java 1.4.
A program can have different components from each of the three groups above. Anyway, while i am not altogether certain abotu this next bit, it's been implied that due to some slightly legacy code, Carbon will NOT be supported away from the PPC or even if apple releases an x86 OS X. At any rate, unlike NeXTStep, Carbon was not designed as a platform-independent API, it's full of a LOT of macintosh-specific idiosyncracities, a small number of incorrectly-constructed Carbon apps will actually break if you put them on a non-forking filesystem, and it just wouldn't work very well on other OSes, i don't think. And besides this, it just isn't as good an API as Cocoa. You don't want it.
That said, Cocoa actually is available as a GPLed, cross-platform API!GNUStep is a third-party reimplementation of NextStep/Cocoa that follows Cocoa closely enough that porting between the two is somewhat trivial. There is no reason why you cannot use this right now.
Apple keeps complaining when OSS programmers emulate the look and feel of a Carbon application instead of calling the real thing.
No, apple keeps complaining when skin developers for other OSes copy the exact textures of the skins in Mac OS X. They also complain if people release applications whose interfaces are straight copies of iApps. I haven't seen them complaining about "Look and Feel" in a long time.
But if you want your application to not be tied specifically to MacOS X then your better off using winelib or wx for your widget set
Umm, why not use Java 1.4 and Swing? That's about as crossplatform as it gets. Wx would be ok too but Winelib doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
If Apple wants OSS programmers to use the real thing then they should provide the real thing to OSS programmers.
While it would be really cool if Cocoa were a cross-platform API like it once was, Apple really doesn't seem concerned with exploring that avenue right now. They seem to be of the opinion that if you want to write an OS X application and have it not tied down to OS X, that's what Java's for. Sorry.
Yup. The terror bombing in WWII, which all western parties engaged in (funnily enough i can't think of any japanese cases of terrorbombing, but then i don't know as much about that side of the war, and there were plenty of other japanese atrocities) were terrorism. There really isn't any other way to put it. It was the targeting of civilian targets with the intention of demoralizing the population.
The nagasaki and hiroshima bombings were slightly different becuase they were at some level meant to make the japanese leadership think this is not a fluke, we have a lot of these things, and we will continue until your entire country is destroyed, you cannot win. So they were targeted at the leadership of the country just as equally as the populace; the leadership clearly wasn't affected by firebombings even worse than the atomic bombs. But, of course, the atomic bomb drops, especially the nagasaki one, had a bunch of other ethical thingies attatched to it.
I actually originally meant to say something about civilian targets in WWII in my original post, but forgot to leave that line in. Oops:)
Rather like a rogue group of individuals that would destroy a large spherical spacestation (terminating thousands of 'innocent' lives) because the Empire that built it was hell-bent on assimilating all cultures under its anti-spiritual, homogenous rule?
Rather like the french resistance during World War II?
Let me elaborate on what i suspect to be Gropo's point: In the last year or so, the word "terrorist" seems to have lost almost all meaning. Let's please try to remember: The terms "terrorist", "saboteur", and "guerilla" all mean three different things. There's some overlap between the three groups, but the words themselves mean different things.
The word "terrorist" means that civilian targets and infrastructure are targeted specifically to manipulate the emotions of a larger civilian population. This is why we can make blanket statements like "all terrorists are bad"-- it doesn't matter what their goals are, becuase by definition they are using the unacceptable means of reaching those goals of targetting civilians to manufacture widespread fear.
The french resistence, the rebel alliance, and Barrett's group from FF7 don't fall under this definition. They attempted to sabotage military infrastructure in order to weaken a war machine while minimizing civilian damage. There's something of a difference. On the other hand, Al Qaeda doesn't see themselves as a future islamic empire fighting the U.S. government; they see themselves as fighting a war between Islamic and American culture. From their viewpoint, the people in the WTC towers weren't collateral damage, they were targets.
In fact, the interesting bit about Final Fantasy 7 is that while Barrett's group was decidedly "freedom fighters" or whatever, the media in the game, which was controlled by the totaltarian corporate state they lived under, constantly blackens your name with the populace by labelling you as a tarrorist group. There was one bit where the evil empire thingy destroys a big section of city and kills a huge number of poor people; you try to stop them, and fail; and after escaping the rubble, you see a news report on a television claiming that section of city was destroyed maliciously by the infamous terrorist group: Barrett's group. The one you are playing as. And of course everyone believes it; they saw it on television.
They would rather the Net go back to nice, static HTML pages that are simple and fast to route, than to administer an overhaul their systems to take advantage of these new applications of the Net.
This brings me to the most important point of my original post, the one that wasn't in the post because it was very late at night and i kind of forgot to put it in:
Absolutely everything would be better if the ISPs would get off their asses and implement some kind of functional multicast routing implementation. If we had the infrastructure and routers we had now, but the routers included IP multicast, the world's current infrastructure would probably be able to handle an order of magnitude more of the streaming video kind of stuff, at least.
But, of course, this brings us back to the original problem, which is the lack of financial incentives for the bandwidth companies to upgrade their systems.. ah well.
Why did you not mention that this is RealMedia/RealNetworks? (Whatever their name is this month.) That's a pretty big deal. This little paragraph here seems like an even bigger deal, if they actually mean it and aren't just engaging in demagogery to win our hearts over or something-- that seems like a complete 180 from RealNetworks' previous violently-propeitary stance:)
I was about to post a comment saying "Okay, this is interesting, there's some project that is going to try to make a cross-platform media player, that's a nice goal, and great for linux users, but Quicktime already does anything i want it to. What can this do Quicktime can't?"... and then I read the FAQ and realized, wait, this actually has an existing codebase that RealNetworks is going to put in. Hm. Wait, that potentially means that i could embed RealOne's decoder/display component into a Quicktime plugin, and never have to use that horrifically ugly RealOne program again:)
Anyway, i'm really curious how much they'll commit themselves to this. I can at least tell they are still going to keep their crown jewels-- the RealAudio/Realvideo codecs-- to themselves-- from the faq:
What parts of your platform are not being licensed?
Almost every part of our system is available for licensing. Some parts of the system, such as the RealAudio and RealVideo codecs, require commercial licenses that are different than community licensing. We are streamlining the licensing of our codecs to spread their ubiquity. Also, the Media Commerce Suite, the Broadcast Management System (BMS) and the subscription system leveraged by RealOne SuperPass are not part of our community source or open source initiatives at this time.
Meh. Still, though, even if the codecs are going to be black boxes in this Helix system, how close to them can you get? In the past, as far as i can tell, Real has always licensed its realmedia-embedding APIs such that anyone who gets to use them has to agree they will never use those APIs to create a program that will convert from Real into some other format. But if they're open-sourcing a media system that plugs into the realmedia codecs, then that would imply that it would be relatively easy to create something like a RealVideo streamripper, or a RealAudio-to-mp3 converter. Are they going to try to prevent this? How? Does the license give them the ability to do this? (I'm really sorry, but i haven't even attempted to read those licenses yet. As you can tell from my frightful spelling, i just woke up, and there's no way i will be able to parse legalese right now.) The FAQ says their license is "like" the GPL, but says it has different patent language (unsurprisingly) and says something confusing about "folding back" code that sounds vaguely NPLish.. I will be VERY interested to see what RMS' comments on it are.
Anyway, this should go somewhere interesting. It would be nice if MPEG4 over RTSP could become the worldwide streaming media standard, but RealVideo with an open-source media platform wrapped around it wouldn't be *too* bad. At the least y'all linux people might finally get a *REAL* generic media layer API:) And apple is probably going to just go frantic over this, which is always fun to watch. This will all be neat to watch unfold, really. Let's see what happens.
I will agree bandwidth advances are going to keep continuing for a long, long time, and i will agree that it's inevitable that yeah yeah someday we'll be able to watch DVD streaming video on a TV downloaded off of your average consumer-level broadband service.
However, i for one don't see any indication that the "someday" when this big leap occurs is going to be anytime even remotely soon.
I mean, the last i checked, all the big bandwidth-selling companies-- especially the DSL providers-- are having lots of financial difficulties. Also last i checked there's an absolutely huge glut of dark fiber just sitting there because doing the last mile to most places just isn't financially viable.
I wouldn't say the bandwidth market is dying, but it really honestly looks like it isn't going anywhere at the moment, and a lot of changes are going to have to happen before we start seeing big leaps of any sort.
Am i wrong?
P.S. If by "afoot" you meant "sometime in like five to fifteen years", then yeah you're probably right and i apologize for wasting your time:)
$10 for the month's subscription, plus $12 for 12 songs.. $22 for a 12-track mix tape, seems to me like not a *great* deal, but that's really not bad either since i get to pick what the 12 songs are. I'd almost be inclined to say they "get" it. In fact, i'd be inclined to say, "yeah, i'll pay for that."
Except, oops, it looks like you have to have windows in order to do any of this stuff. I don't own windows, just this macintosh. My college does have some WindowsXP labs with CD-Rs drives, but the since the user-permissions policies here are currently in the process of changing i'm not sure if i'll actually be able to use their client there. And i do not feel like badgering one of my friends to let me take over their computer for a few hours each month so that i can compose and make for myself mix cds.
Looks like listen.com just lost a customer. Too bad they chose to tether their downloads to DRM technology.. then they wouldn't have to limit themselves to customers who use one software platform.
In the meantime, this emusic thingy that i found linked on this same slashdot forum looks *great*. Looks like i'll be taking my $9.99 over there instead..
Slashdot Mirror
My first reaction is.. wow.. that's a lot of.. stuff. I was expecting this keynote to be just hot air. This definitely eases the pain of Nintendo's "megaton" announcement having nothing to do with Gamecube games ^_^ But, onto my question for all you linux-at-home users out there:
Has anyone know why they chose to make Safari based on kHTML instead of Gecko? What is the reasoning here? I think i kind of just wish they'd commandeered Chimera instead, and added all those browser-ish features it was missing. If it's still missing them. I guess I'll download that again and check. Um, ANYWAY..
Why kHTML? Is it faster than Gecko, or easier to hook into, or something? I cannot really comment on this, as I'm not a big KDE fan and so haven't been following Konqueror, and I can't really comment on the speed of Gecko sans Mozilla since i haven't checked out Chimera since v0.1, and can't get Galeon to work*. What's up with this? It seems it would make more sense for Apple to throw their weight into Mozilla, but i can't really come up with any good justification why I'm saying that.
Whatever. Might as well check this Safari thing out and see if it's any more fully-featured than Chimera and any better at rendering standard webpages than Omniweb, or if i'll still be using MSIE tomorrow..
* P.S., if anyone out there can give me any tips as to how the heck to get Galeon up and running under Solaris when one is not Root, let me know. Last time i attempted i got as far as GDK/GTK+ all working and installed in my home directory and stuff, and never quite managed to get the GNOME libraries set up. Eh.. ^_^
What I don't understand about Lessig's proposal is how would he enforce the bounty part of the law against off-shore spammers.
The only sane thing to do would be to make it just as illegal for a U.S. company to hire said offshore spammers as it would be for that U.S. company to send the spam themselves. Spammers can never completely be eradicated becuase they follow supply and demand; however, the people hiring the spammers don't. That is to say, if you take out a spammer, another one will appear and fill its place. If you make someone stop hiring spammers, it isn't like someone is going to take that place..
But that said: does it really matter? I mean, what lessig proposes would still substantially help against spam. Look at it this way: both the black-list and smart-filtering methods of stopping spam become exponentially easier to do once you can assume spam comes from outside the U.S. Look at it as just isolating the spam to a known area.
At the least, it means that the "collateral damage" from blackhole lists no longer effects americans. Which is a good thing, and also means that people in europe, etc, will become bothered by the fact that they still sometimes get put on the RBL, but americans don't-- making it possible they, too, will then petition their governmental representatives for a required-labeling spam law. So yeah, they'd go off-shore. But over time, only the
I for one don't agree with lessig that this is a good thing to do in place of blackholing, but as part of a Larger Spam Strategy i'm certain it would indeed lead to a massive decrease in spam. Especially if it was illegal for americans to hire offshore spammers that don't follow the labelling protocol.
- How many bits are in the x-box "trusted software" permission-to-run keys? What about in Palladium? For these N-bit keys, what is the approximate difficulty of brute-forcing it as compared to, say, brute-forcing RSA?
- Distributed clients like this one, as far as i am aware, just get parcelled out random blocks of the "possible key" space, and send back which numbers they checked, right? Is there any way to PROVE those numbers were, in fact, correctly checked, besides asking multiple clients to check each individual block and hoping that at least one of the clients tells the truth? Like, is there anything to prevent Microsoft from just randomly calling up the project with a bunch of dummy clients that submit the REAL x-box key a couple times to the "i've checked this and it's not the key" list? ((Well.. okay.. I can think of a way to do that.. but it would require actually USING Palladium, to ensure everyone submitting blocks to the crack-Palladium project is using an unaltered, approved, digitally-signed Palladium-cracking client. So, uh, that's right out.) I know previous distributed projects have had issues with clients lying about their results in order to boost statistics, but this is the first time i'm aware of there has been a massively distributed computational work in which there is a specific party with a vested, active interest in the project being actually sabotaged.
- Were the Palladium keys to be cracked, is there anything MS could do at that point? Is there any way they could just Windows Update all the Palladium installs out there to suddenly use some new backup key, and invalidate the old one? It would seem the answer is no, becuase it seems that would automatically mean all of the existing palladium software in the entire world would suddenly become "untrusted" and have to be re-compiled at the vendor with the new keys, or something, but maybe there's something i'm missing. Is there something i'm missing? And anyway, aren't the palladium keys going to be stored in hardware, in some special Intel chip? Or something? How is a Palladium app marked as "Trusted By The MS Signing Authority", exactly, anyway? I haven't been following this as closely as i should have been.
I'm confused and ignorant. Please explain things to me.Windows is not a generic term now. If someone says Linux, you know what they are talking about (the specific OS). By the same terms, if someone says that a program they wrote "runs on Windows" you know, with 100% certainty, that they are referring to the specificMS OS called Windows.
But if someone says their program "runs on X windows" we will also know what it means, that their program folllows the X11 Windowing System Protocol and probably runs on UNIX. This suggests to me that while the word Windows alone, used as if it were a software platform, is very not generic, "it sounds like Windows" is certainly a generic at this point. "Lindows" seems about as close to "Windows" as "X Windows", and it has X11 *in* it, so..
I'm not sure they could win this case even were the trademark a valid one when it was filed. According to this X-windows was developed and in use in MIT student labs in 1984 (although W, the precursor to X, existed before that) and was being commercially deployed by 1988. According to this MSWindows was announced in 1983 and was being commercially deployed by 1985. As far as i'm concerned, if Microsoft has problems with things that sound like 'cheap knock-offs' of their Windows trademark.. well, if Windows is a microsoft trademark, then 'X Windows' certainly sounds like a cheap knock-off to me (X-Windows isn't the product's name, but a lot of people call it that.). Microsoft didn't do anything about this in 1988, their trademark is now diluted, and they can't complain about this now.
Beyond this, it seems to me any arguments you could use to claim Windows is a non-generic could be equally applied to Office: If you say "this is an Office document" people know exactly what you mean. Microsoft has spent ungodly amounts of money on marketing the name Office. But yesterday in CompUSA, i quite definitely saw a box for sale clearly marked "Hancom Office".. with "Hancom" in little tiny letters, and the visual design of the box very similar to that of the MSOffice v.X packaging. That seems more to me to be profiteering off of a trademark MS has built up than "Lindows".
Here's the thing.. everything i've said above makes perfect sense to me. However, I'm not sure it means a damn thing from a legal standpoint. Is the whole "X Windowing System therefore MSWindows can't trademark-collide with similar-sounding products" a valid legal argument? Is there some SPECIFIC legal reason that it's okay for people to stomp all over the Office trademark but not the Windows one?
For example, when you say "hand me a Kleenex" you probably don't give a hoot if I give you Kleenex brand tissues, Puffs brand, or Wal-Mart brand. But if I say I want a Windows program, you know that I don't want some program written for Linux.
So what would you assume if i told you "Hand me some Leenex"? ^_^
I hate EA already. I can't remember the last time they've produced a game i liked, but i can give you multiple recent instances where they bought a company that made games i really liked-- and then ran that company into the ground, preventing them from making more games i like.
This is what you're missing. The DVD Forum people don't want a "happy medium". They want three things:
- They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
- They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc. I.e. the Sixth Sense 'you cannot access the menu until you watch this trailer for another movie, every time you insert the dvd', or the thing on certain dvds that won't let you pause, or framestep, or whatever.
- They want to retain an unchallenged sense of control over their ordered little world.
Which one of these three is the focus varies, but in general #2 is the biggie here, at least because of a perception that content producers flocked to DVD solely becuase they had that level of control. At some point, it seemed that DVD peoples fear that if content producers lost that control, they'd stop putting so much stuff on dvds, switch to another format, or try to take legal action of some kind.#2 is the biggie insofar as linux goes first off becuase "the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user. In the end, the user is in control of everything on the OS. This scares the DVD forum. Remember: In order for Apple to get the DVD forum to let them license their dvd player, Apple was forced to write the dvd player in such a way that it refuses to run if MacsBug, the system-level debugger is running, because MacsBug lets you do things like branch to unscheduled subroutines at random moments, and such would have allowed people to take screenshots while the DVD is running! This is a fairly big thing, MacsBug is a versatile tool that LOTS of people run for various reasons, and it is the best/only way to debug many pieces of software. Because there were potential uses of MacsBug that allowed the user to evade the control the DVD forum wants, macsbug users have to switch the thing off and restart anytime they want to watch a DVD.Given this, why on earth do you think the dvd forum would be okay with allowing any DVD player, even a propeitary one, on an OS where everything in the OS including the device drivers can be re-coded by the user?
Of course, the macsbug thing is a sham: a simple machine-code hack patch thing which is very readily available will allow anyone to alter the dvd player app so that it doesn't notice macsbug. But despite this, Apple still has to leave the "no macsbug" code in the OS 9 version of the DVD player, lest they offend the DVD consortium's illusion of complete control, which they must for some reason maintain to themselves at all costs.
If the DVD people were interested in a happy medium, i'm almost certain one would have been reached. Remember, the mathematical flaws in CSS remained uncracked for *years* while CSS was just being used for satellite TV; CSS was only knocked over after millions of linux users were left with the alternatives of either someone hacking CSS, or not being able to use products they paid good money for without booting into windows. The "hackers" can sometimes compromise.. but the DVD forum people cared more about control than compromise, and so the LiViD people went around the DVD forum... and we now have DeCSS.
Hey, "The First One Always Blows Up" isn't really that bad of a record to have, comparitively speaking. I mean, look at microsoft: the first *two* versions of each of their products always waste millions of dollars and explode messily when you try to use them, and most people's reactions is to just kind of excuse them for it and wait for version 3..!
^_^
1. Install distributed computing client on first PC.. 2. Install distributed computing client on second PC.. 3. Install distributed computing client on third PC..
All i have to say is that with 7,800 identical computers all set up for a united purpose, if Gateway doesn't already have some kind of system set up whereby they could install arbitrary software on all 7,800 computers at once with a couple of mouse clicks on one single computer at Gateway Central, they are incredibly stupid.
Especially because i think such a thing could be done just by using a unified Windows Update Server
for the floorroom PCs. And if not, there are lots of products designed for the exact purpose of keeping consistent disk images across large quantities of computers with a single point of administration. Probably, Gateway Country even sells some of them.
Most digital stretching filters i've heard-- even the ones in professional music programs like ProTools and Logic Audio-- cause the output to be exceedingly gravelly and robotized, like they're being played through a digital cell phone that's slowly giving out. The resulting sound is possible to be used in a musically interesting manner, but it definitely doesn't sound like something a classical music fan would find pleasant to listen to, in my experience.
:)
How did the stretch turn out in this thing? Is it relatively smooth, or is it just like listening to a rotor slowly changing pitch to form something similar to beethoven's 9th? No, of course i'm not going to listen to it myself, especially not when there are X number of slashdotters pounding on their poor realaudio server. Though i may check out this "Herb Levys Mappings" page they link to, if i ever find the correct link. (Theirs is busted. Actually, pretty much everything linked from that first page seems to be slashdotted at this point. Ah well.)
And if it did turn out smoothly, will someone please tell me what software they used for the time expansion, because i want a copy
Hrm. The article describes what the billboards do, but they completely avoid the question of how these mystical "sensors" work. I thought I understood how a radio reciever works, but I don't understand how you could remotely determine the location of a radio *reciever*, much less *what* frequency said reciever is (um) recieving.
I'm thinking of cases in totalitarian governments during the last 100 years where people huddled around banned radios trying to get the BBC, or of the case of the BBC roaming around trying to find people who have working televisions but don't pay their television tax. Could sensors like this be used by govt.s to determine from outside a house whether there was a functioning radio/television reciever? Could similar tech be used to locate illegal cell/police scanners or radar detectors (in areas where such things are illegal)?
Would it be possible for me to build such a scanner and then legally walk around seeing what passing cars are listening to and what people are watching on tv, just out of curiousity?
Is there a physics major in the house?
There was this great article i remember reading on theobvious.com around like five years ago or something. It's, um, here.
It basically suggested Microsoft started this whole "my"-in-computing craze for the same reason that products for very small children often contain "my" in the product title, as in "My First Sony". They want their products to appear hyper-ultra-unthreatening, so they encroach things in vocabulary that would make a small child feel comfortable. Apparently hoping to make windows-users feel like they are in some sort of comforting, embryonic state while using it.
Actually, now that i think of it, Windows XP/Longhorn's interface really, really has the motif of small child's toys. You know? The kind of colorful, rounded, chewable look you get becuase the toy manufacturers want to make the baby notice it, and becuase they want everything large and rounded and plastic so the baby can't swallow it. Maybe Microsoft's idea of "user friendly" is "it treats the user like a four year old"..
I know it is hard to put away the anti-microsoft bias for just a few minutes, but really - think about what your getting here.
:)
I don't have to put away my anti-microsoft bias at all.
Online adapters for the gamecube and playstation are already available.
Moreover, as it is, the playstation adapter has one game available that makes me drool violently (Tribes Arial Assault.. especially since, as a mac user who loves Tribes, i spent two years waiting for the mac port of Tribes 2 and never actually got it) and one game available that i would consider buying (Frequency), and i haven't looked at all the PS2 games currently available. The gamecube adapter, i'm not really certain if any games are available for it yet (are they?) but the one game that is at the least *coming* (Phantasy Star Online) makes me drool violently.
The x-box adapter, meanwhile, has one game that i would consider buying (Ghost recon) and i've looked at everything available. So i can see where yeah, the x-box adapter would be a really good deal if you are the kind of person who likes Mechwarrior and Sports games.. but this does not apply to me.
I don't have to put away my anti-microsoft bias to get this. I can get about this exact same thing from non-microsoft sources, and i like what the non-microsoft sources are offering better, (although i do consider the telephony feature of the x-box extremely extremely neat and the only real microsoft innovation i can think of in recent memory.. i'd rather type to communicate).
Anyway, i'm getting a gamecube for christmas, and perhaps i can convince my brother to buy the internet adapter and Tribes for his PS2 when i visit my parents over christmas.. i can't think of anything in the x-box world that i'm missing that's worth having. i'm happy
Sony took huge losses on the PS1, and that was during a better economy and a less heated console war.
:)
Yes, but let's just remember that this was just because prior to about the time Final Fantasy 7 was released, all the games for the PS1 sucked.
Actually, i do have a point here. Yes, Sony took huge losses, but during the time in which they took those losses, the super nintendo and such were all still "good enough" and some fantastic games were being released for those platforms. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence from the genesis and SNES, we had the Jaguar and the 3D0 and sega's mess of SegaCD+32X+Saturn..
In the end, when people started tiring of SNES and looking for something better, atari and sega had abandoned the market, and only PS1 was left. So of course the moral here is that if you want to get anywhere in the console market, you have to have tenacity, and not just bail out if it isnt' working like sega did with the Dreamcast.
But then you also have to keep in mind that things aren't going to change unless there's a reason to.
The playstation 1 was competing with two products which were technically inferior but had rock-solid market presence, and about like six products (three from Sega) which were about technically equal or better but had absolutely no market presence whatsoever. In this case, waiting out made sense; in the end, the technically equal products died off from not having as much funding as Sony could provide, and when people finally tired of the techncially inferior products, Sony was waiting. FF7 was released, and people started to jump ship, the PS1 looked extremely attractive suddenly to both developers and consumers. Suddenly, the PS1 had more than just this "rayman" crap going for it, and there were games worth playing on it.
Meanwhile, look at the Xbox's situation. It's competing with two products, both of which are EQUAL OR BETTER technically to the x-box, and both of which have *better* market penetration than the x-box. The X-box's games, in my opinion (and apparently the opinion of a lot of other people, judging from the thing's sub-optimal sales), all suck, with the exception of about four games that came out for all three platforms simultaneously. Quite similar to the PS1. Microsoft can wait this out and hope to find their killer app eventually, but again nothing's going to change without a reason.
Microsoft's one hope, as i see it, is the Xbox Live thing. The Xbox Live setup isn't considerably better than the PS2 or the GC setups, but MS does seem at least on the surface more committed to online gaming than sony or nintendo. If MS convinces, like, everybody who makes an MS game to do xbox-live, and Nintendo and Sony screw stuff up and don't get more than a handful of developers to go internet, maybe that'll be a chance for MS to gain a bunch of ground with both consumers and developers, as the xbox gets a name as the platform for the gamer who wants 'net connectivity.. but that won't be enough for MS to win, just enough for them to put them on equal footing, or possibly in the situation of being the market leader. At that point Nintendo and Sony will probably realize MS's one-big-central-server model is better, and switch to that (if nintendo can afford to). At that point MS will have reached its goal of being seriously part of the console market, and absolutely anything could happen from there.. but unless MS plays its cards exactly right and Nintendo and Sony play theirs exactly wrong, MS will remain an outsider who has to struggle just to appear as more than a joke.
In other words, i think MS has one more chance for Nintendo and Sony to flub everything, and then past that there just isn't going to be any benefit from 'waiting it out' anymore. (Yeah, there's the Xbox 2, but the Xbox 2 is going to be competing against a technically equal product-- the PS3. If people don't make good xbox games prior to the xbox 2, they probably aren't going to after either.) Good game developers are everything. And to my mind, even in terms of third-party developers the GC has the best offering right now. Guess what i'm getting for Christmas.. ^_^
Check this out.
...
:)
"Lord Macdonald of Macdonald, premier clan chief of Clan Donald, has appointed Ronald W McDonald to be Sergeant-Major at Arms of the Guardians of Clan Donald: the linear descendant of the chief's bodyguard.
One specific aim is to offer moral support to Mary Blair, proprietor of McMunchies, a small sandwich bar in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, who is being threatened with legal action by McDonald's Restaurants, the fast food chain, for daring to use the prefix "Mc" in the name of her shop.
When interviewed in BBC2's "The Money Programme" a top trademark lawyer made it clear that McDonald's have not a legal leg to stand on. Instead they rely on their unlimited financial resources to bully small businesses who cannot afford to fight back."
Really.. read the entire press release, it just gets better and better. This is coming from a long extended thing that happened around 1996, when McDonalds decided they were going to start trying to crack down on anyone doing anything vaguely resembling their trademarks. I'm not sure if they ever got McMunchie's to change their name, but whatever happened they did manage to piss off, in the process, Scotland. The best bit about the whole thing was that, according to an absolutely fantastic 60 Minutes report on this and the McLibel case, Lord MacDonald of MacDonald was so enraged by the whole thing that he decided to open a restaurant in the traditional family estate of the MacDonald clan, and name it "MacDonald's". The restaurant serves things like duck, and whatever else is the U.K. equivilent of "gourmet" food. Thus far McDonald's Inc. of America has yet to challenge him over the name.
As my more-or-less universal online handle is an abbreviation of my last name, McClure (it's a degradation of MacLeod), i have to say this case holds a small bit of interest for me.. it is a discomforting thought to know that a corporation may possibly want to claim ownership to the first two letters of my slashdot logon
Great post-- it's always interesting to see in action the bizarre split in the "right wing" that everyone (especially the right wing itself) always just kind of seems to pretend doesn't exist.. you know, the split between the lasseiz-faire right-wingers and the ones who actually believe in a free market..
Anyway just curious, though, where did you get these quotes from?
Uhh, but that's not important. What i meant to ask about is this:
The net result is that until this decision is overturned on appeal, as I believe it will be, competition will not be restored.
I have been trying to figure this out. Can the current decision be appealed, who by (the dissenting states?), who to (the supreme court?) and if an appeal occurs does Microsoft have to abide by the terms of this settlement while that appeal is in the courts?
I'm also slightly confused by the judgement's language in one respect: when Microsoft doesn't obey the terms of this settlement, what will the result be? Does kotelly drag them back in and whap them with big contempt-of-court judgements until they comply, or do we get to start another six-year court case?
What happens next?
why not post Linux vx. MacOS X and Emacs vs. vi stories while you are at it
oh, i'm sure not even slashdot is that stupid
Why bother having a GUI itself, when there's no display?
What exactly do you mean by "display"? Because if you mean "monitor", click this link.
I've been wondering the same thing for a really long time. It seems like GNUStep could be fantastic for The GNU World, but they seem continuously resource-strapped and unable to get public attention. I really don't know what gives, but i think the best possible answer, you've already said:
:) The ability to write in multiple languages would at least make people feel more secure about the thing..
:(
I believe the biggest problem for GNUStep is that few people use Objective C. That is a big speedbump to people adapting their legacy code.
You really probably have hit on about 90% of the problem right there. We will just have to see what happens with this and projects like it-- i mean, it looks very promising, but then you have to compare it with Cocoa, where objects written in Objective C and Java (and now, due to third-party efforts, i think even Perl and Python are 100% supported) can interact with each other and the OS APIs seamlessly and without any fuss.
Come to think of it, ProjectBuilder, the thing that links all those Java and Objective C thingies together when you're coding for Cocoa, supposedly is just a front-end to the GCC. Supposedly all the backend stuff is open-source utilities that are part of Darwin. Hm. Is Apple's Objc-java bridge open-source or no? If it's part of the closed-source Cocoa stuff, how does that work out? (And won't even cocoa services run in Darwin as long as you stay in the Foundation and don't touch the AppKit where all the GUI stuff lives? What about if wrote that service in Java?) If it's open-source, then why hasn't GNUStep integrated it yet? Why haven't they integrated the Perl/Python bridges to Objc? Is this just the whole continous GNUStep-limited-resources problem, or what? Isn't there some thing going on where GNUStep doesn't use objc_msgsend(), it just pretends to? Is that a problem here?
I dunno. I really think if more people could get over their intense fear of the [square brackets]; they would fall in love with NeXTStep
I keep meaning to try to port a couple of the open-source Mac OS X apps, probably one of the excellent GPLed AIM clients, to Linux using GNUStep as a proof-of-concept, or something, but i keep not getting around to this. Hopefully i'll be able to give it a try in a couple weeks, after the mononucleosis gets a little better
Does anyone know if the InterfaceBuilder analogue in GNUStep is anywhere near as good as Apple's? The whole nib-file concept is i think the most brilliant and useful thing about Cocoa.. eh.
it would be really nice if **Carbon** was a platform independant library
I don't think Carbon is what you mean.
Mac OS X natively supports three APIs:
- Cocoa, OS X's "standard" API. Cocoa is basically a newer version of NeXTStep with a new name. It consists of an extremely elegant object-oriented GUI application API sitting on top of POSIX. This is what Apple wants people to program new applications in.
- Carbon. Carbon is a "transitional" API, that basically consists of an updated version of the old Classic Mac OS Toolbox, with anything related to unprotected memory, cooperative multitasking, or such things removed, and a lot of API cruft in general cleaned up. Apple estimates that about 20% of an average classic mac os program will have to be changed in order for it to work under Carbon. The recommended use for this is that if you have an existing codebase written for the Classic Mac OS Toolbox, you won't have to rewrite from scratch-- you can just carbonize it. Writing new applications in Carbon makes Apple sad, and it isn't as pleasant as writing in Cocoa, but people do it anyway becuase unlike Cocoa programs, Carbon programs can run under both OS 9 and OS X.
- Java 1.4.
A program can have different components from each of the three groups above. Anyway, while i am not altogether certain abotu this next bit, it's been implied that due to some slightly legacy code, Carbon will NOT be supported away from the PPC or even if apple releases an x86 OS X. At any rate, unlike NeXTStep, Carbon was not designed as a platform-independent API, it's full of a LOT of macintosh-specific idiosyncracities, a small number of incorrectly-constructed Carbon apps will actually break if you put them on a non-forking filesystem, and it just wouldn't work very well on other OSes, i don't think. And besides this, it just isn't as good an API as Cocoa. You don't want it.That said, Cocoa actually is available as a GPLed, cross-platform API! GNUStep is a third-party reimplementation of NextStep/Cocoa that follows Cocoa closely enough that porting between the two is somewhat trivial. There is no reason why you cannot use this right now.
Apple keeps complaining when OSS programmers emulate the look and feel of a Carbon application instead of calling the real thing.
No, apple keeps complaining when skin developers for other OSes copy the exact textures of the skins in Mac OS X. They also complain if people release applications whose interfaces are straight copies of iApps. I haven't seen them complaining about "Look and Feel" in a long time.
But if you want your application to not be tied specifically to MacOS X then your better off using winelib or wx for your widget set
Umm, why not use Java 1.4 and Swing? That's about as crossplatform as it gets. Wx would be ok too but Winelib doesn't seem like a great idea to me.
If Apple wants OSS programmers to use the real thing then they should provide the real thing to OSS programmers.
While it would be really cool if Cocoa were a cross-platform API like it once was, Apple really doesn't seem concerned with exploring that avenue right now. They seem to be of the opinion that if you want to write an OS X application and have it not tied down to OS X, that's what Java's for. Sorry.
Yup. The terror bombing in WWII, which all western parties engaged in (funnily enough i can't think of any japanese cases of terrorbombing, but then i don't know as much about that side of the war, and there were plenty of other japanese atrocities) were terrorism. There really isn't any other way to put it. It was the targeting of civilian targets with the intention of demoralizing the population.
:)
The nagasaki and hiroshima bombings were slightly different becuase they were at some level meant to make the japanese leadership think this is not a fluke, we have a lot of these things, and we will continue until your entire country is destroyed, you cannot win. So they were targeted at the leadership of the country just as equally as the populace; the leadership clearly wasn't affected by firebombings even worse than the atomic bombs. But, of course, the atomic bomb drops, especially the nagasaki one, had a bunch of other ethical thingies attatched to it.
I actually originally meant to say something about civilian targets in WWII in my original post, but forgot to leave that line in. Oops
Rather like a rogue group of individuals that would destroy a large spherical spacestation (terminating thousands of 'innocent' lives) because the Empire that built it was hell-bent on assimilating all cultures under its anti-spiritual, homogenous rule?
Rather like the french resistance during World War II?
Let me elaborate on what i suspect to be Gropo's point: In the last year or so, the word "terrorist" seems to have lost almost all meaning. Let's please try to remember: The terms "terrorist", "saboteur", and "guerilla" all mean three different things. There's some overlap between the three groups, but the words themselves mean different things.
The word "terrorist" means that civilian targets and infrastructure are targeted specifically to manipulate the emotions of a larger civilian population. This is why we can make blanket statements like "all terrorists are bad"-- it doesn't matter what their goals are, becuase by definition they are using the unacceptable means of reaching those goals of targetting civilians to manufacture widespread fear.
The french resistence, the rebel alliance, and Barrett's group from FF7 don't fall under this definition. They attempted to sabotage military infrastructure in order to weaken a war machine while minimizing civilian damage. There's something of a difference. On the other hand, Al Qaeda doesn't see themselves as a future islamic empire fighting the U.S. government; they see themselves as fighting a war between Islamic and American culture. From their viewpoint, the people in the WTC towers weren't collateral damage, they were targets.
In fact, the interesting bit about Final Fantasy 7 is that while Barrett's group was decidedly "freedom fighters" or whatever, the media in the game, which was controlled by the totaltarian corporate state they lived under, constantly blackens your name with the populace by labelling you as a tarrorist group. There was one bit where the evil empire thingy destroys a big section of city and kills a huge number of poor people; you try to stop them, and fail; and after escaping the rubble, you see a news report on a television claiming that section of city was destroyed maliciously by the infamous terrorist group: Barrett's group. The one you are playing as. And of course everyone believes it; they saw it on television.
Heh, okay.
They would rather the Net go back to nice, static HTML pages that are simple and fast to route, than to administer an overhaul their systems to take advantage of these new applications of the Net.
This brings me to the most important point of my original post, the one that wasn't in the post because it was very late at night and i kind of forgot to put it in:
Absolutely everything would be better if the ISPs would get off their asses and implement some kind of functional multicast routing implementation. If we had the infrastructure and routers we had now, but the routers included IP multicast, the world's current infrastructure would probably be able to handle an order of magnitude more of the streaming video kind of stuff, at least.
But, of course, this brings us back to the original problem, which is the lack of financial incentives for the bandwidth companies to upgrade their systems.. ah well.
Seeya.
I was about to post a comment saying "Okay, this is interesting, there's some project that is going to try to make a cross-platform media player, that's a nice goal, and great for linux users, but Quicktime already does anything i want it to. What can this do Quicktime can't?"
Anyway, i'm really curious how much they'll commit themselves to this. I can at least tell they are still going to keep their crown jewels-- the RealAudio/Realvideo codecs-- to themselves-- from the faq:Meh. Still, though, even if the codecs are going to be black boxes in this Helix system, how close to them can you get? In the past, as far as i can tell, Real has always licensed its realmedia-embedding APIs such that anyone who gets to use them has to agree they will never use those APIs to create a program that will convert from Real into some other format. But if they're open-sourcing a media system that plugs into the realmedia codecs, then that would imply that it would be relatively easy to create something like a RealVideo streamripper, or a RealAudio-to-mp3 converter. Are they going to try to prevent this? How? Does the license give them the ability to do this? (I'm really sorry, but i haven't even attempted to read those licenses yet. As you can tell from my frightful spelling, i just woke up, and there's no way i will be able to parse legalese right now.) The FAQ says their license is "like" the GPL, but says it has different patent language (unsurprisingly) and says something confusing about "folding back" code that sounds vaguely NPLish.. I will be VERY interested to see what RMS' comments on it are.
Anyway, this should go somewhere interesting. It would be nice if MPEG4 over RTSP could become the worldwide streaming media standard, but RealVideo with an open-source media platform wrapped around it wouldn't be *too* bad. At the least y'all linux people might finally get a *REAL* generic media layer API
I will agree bandwidth advances are going to keep continuing for a long, long time, and i will agree that it's inevitable that yeah yeah someday we'll be able to watch DVD streaming video on a TV downloaded off of your average consumer-level broadband service.
:)
However, i for one don't see any indication that the "someday" when this big leap occurs is going to be anytime even remotely soon.
I mean, the last i checked, all the big bandwidth-selling companies-- especially the DSL providers-- are having lots of financial difficulties. Also last i checked there's an absolutely huge glut of dark fiber just sitting there because doing the last mile to most places just isn't financially viable.
I wouldn't say the bandwidth market is dying, but it really honestly looks like it isn't going anywhere at the moment, and a lot of changes are going to have to happen before we start seeing big leaps of any sort.
Am i wrong?
P.S. If by "afoot" you meant "sometime in like five to fifteen years", then yeah you're probably right and i apologize for wasting your time
$10 for the month's subscription, plus $12 for 12 songs.. $22 for a 12-track mix tape, seems to me like not a *great* deal, but that's really not bad either since i get to pick what the 12 songs are. I'd almost be inclined to say they "get" it. In fact, i'd be inclined to say, "yeah, i'll pay for that."
Except, oops, it looks like you have to have windows in order to do any of this stuff. I don't own windows, just this macintosh. My college does have some WindowsXP labs with CD-Rs drives, but the since the user-permissions policies here are currently in the process of changing i'm not sure if i'll actually be able to use their client there. And i do not feel like badgering one of my friends to let me take over their computer for a few hours each month so that i can compose and make for myself mix cds.
Looks like listen.com just lost a customer. Too bad they chose to tether their downloads to DRM technology.. then they wouldn't have to limit themselves to customers who use one software platform.
In the meantime, this emusic thingy that i found linked on this same slashdot forum looks *great*. Looks like i'll be taking my $9.99 over there instead..