(Personally, I believe that modern GUI kits should have an HTML control, but that it should be as tied down as possible - no JavaScript, image loading only via the app, etc. so as to make it that much more "secure.")
Make it so there's a single standard html-rendering function throughout the entire system, but that the software component that provides the html services is hot-swappable. Therefore microsoft can ship some boxes with MSIE built in at the system level like you describe they just have, but if Compaq wants their machines to come with Opera or Mozilla or some kind of minimal no-frills browser (like you want) serving as the html component in place of MSIE, they can do that, and the system will be MSIE free despite the login screen and everything still behing html. (I'm not sure how easy this would be with the Windows XP architecture. I know that if apple's management hadn't completely fallen apart in the mid-90s, the mac os would have had this capability for years. I also know that in the current mac os x architecture, the same thing can be easily done using the Services component API.)
That aside, unless i'm wrong (and i usually am) if the courts have decided that the commingling of MSIE and Windows is illegal, and tells MS that the two has to be seperated, then Microsoft's "But look! It's impossible to remove MSIE from windows!" will be greeted with "That's your problem." It isn't the government's business to determine how microsoft fixes the messes they've made; it's only the government's business to determine which messes and which fixes are illegal anticompetitive actions.
I hope i'm right about this. It would be so wonderful to see microsoft's attempt to intertwine Windows with IE in random inextricable ways in an attempt to thwart government attempts to seperate the two backfire.. and result in instead of the government giving up and letting the two be one executable, Microsoft having to delay the XP launch for two months while they either build in an architecture for a Cyberdog-style plug-in-html-component (and convert MSIE into one) or remove MSIE, thus resulting in a lower-quality product..
take patching/updating out of the sysadmins hands and into XP, where it will be handled automatically?
Isn't this the basic argument for the use of debian? (apt-get)
Personally, i think that having windows update or apt-get or Apple Software Update handle all security patches is a *good* thing. Keeping track of tiny constant security patches the instant they come out is something that should not really be a requirement of running a web server.
However, the thing is that the Code Red incident is not an argument for automatic patch installs in microsoft products. It is a very, very strong argument against it. Why?
About ten or twenty people in earlier slashdot threads alleged that they personally signed onto the Windows Update website the morning before the code red worm hit the White House to see the hacked by chinese worm message. Some even got screenshots.
In other words, THE MICROSOFT UPDATE SERVER HAD NOT BEEN PATCHED FOR THE DEFAULT.IDA BUFFER OVERFLOW. You could argue that there is no single server anywhere on the internet where security is more important than windows update, and yet an automated worm was actually able to execute arbitrary code on their server remotely.
Meaning that had an alert black-hat gotten there before Code Red had, they could have done some REALLY SCARY STUFF. For example, they could have taken the default.ida patch that everyone was downloading to defeat code red, and inserted some kind of backorifice-like trojan into every sixteenth download of it, or something, and if they were careful it's possible no one would have ever noticed. No? Is there any reason i'm overreacting, or wrong? Can anyone at this point justify EVER trusting Microsoft as a customer on ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN, after seeing *windows update taken infected* by a worm that could be protected against by an already-old patch??
I see three lessons to be learned from the whole code red thing:
Operating systems like RedHat and NT need to have services off by DEFAULT, and the interface by which users turn those services on and off needs to be clear and simple so that A) "Off by default" doesn't mean "the users don't benefit and B) Users know what they're enabling, and don't enable things they don't need. (The default.ida thingy that Code Red exploits DID NOT need to be on by default. It is as far as i can gather only useful for people hosting sites with search engines, which i would suspect an absolutely minimal number of the infected sites did. If default.ida had remained non-web-accessable until such time as the sysadmin actually knew they wanted it installed and switched it on, Code Red would not have been even a MINOR problem, because few sites would be using it, and most of those few sites would have capable sysadpeople.) However, more relevantly to this thread:
Services like apt-get and Windows Update are absolutely necessary, because without them worms like Code Red can always thrive on the few inexperienced sysadmins left out there-- potentially causing harm to many others besides just the unpatched servers.
Microsoft does not place the kind of priority it NEEDS to on the security of its central Windows Update servers, and Microsoft Windows Update is not a completely trustable entity. Therefore if you are a small company that cannot afford a top-of-the-line sysadmin, and you want an OS with automatic patching mechanisms that you can set-and-forget and actually trust with the security of your server (as you suggest microsoft would like people to do), Windows XP is not an acceptable choice.
Is ANYTHING i have said above that is at all inaccurate or unreasonable?
Only after we sued NuSphere for GPL violation did they post the source for Gemini on a website. Please also note that the GPL licence requires you to ACCOMPANY the software with the source code or a written offer to supply the source code. To date NuSphere has not to our knowledge even admitted the GPL violation.
This sounds entirely reasonable on MySQL AB's part. So, were NuSphere to begin accompanying their GPLed code release with such a written offer and do whatever other steps are necessary to bring their software into line with the requirements of the GPL, would the GPL violation portion of the MySQL AB case be dropped?
Any HS mathematics department which allows graphical calculators but does not require either semiregular "check" tests in which the student is given problems that a calculator should not be necessary for and barred from using calculators on those tests, or require students to show their work in a methodical, step by step fashion, showing everything they do (to ensure that even if they did use the calculator, they can at least list the steps needed to perform the calculation without it..), has serious problems.
There are some problems that arise with allowing the use of the calculator as a tool, and they have not all been ironed out (especially the questions that arise when some students have calculators that are significantly more powerful than those of other students) but in general having the calculator there enables math classes to take place at a higher level, with the students only having to work only with (and being tested solely on) the individual steps they take to reach the goal, not the exact number they regurgitate at the end.. and at least the calculator *FORCES* the teacher to shift their testing methods to make *absolutely sure* that every student knows exactly what they're doing..
This isn't very relevant. I'm sorry i brought it up. Sorry:) and to top it all off i accidentally used the +1 bonus on the original post.. how embarrassing.
Actually, classes in computer programming go hand in hand with mathematics. Both subjects develop problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Our high school last year had a math class that was taught entirely in the computer lab so that the students could use mathematica. Between the ability to deal with high-level concepts quickly that using the computer gave them and a couple of extra periods a week, the students in this class-- despite being juniors-- were able to speed through both the junior and senior years of math to the point where they were all able to capably take the Calculus BC exam at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the TI-83 calculators that were *REQUIRED* for my 9-12 math classes were as far as i can gather more powerful machines than the Apple IIcs at my elementary school (if you discount the lack of external hardware add-ons like a color monitor, sound, a floppy drive..). Where do you draw the line on "computers are not beneficial to students", when students are carrying around literal computers to help them in math? Where does "follow the steps in your calculus book to find the areas between these two curves" end and "translate the steps in your calculus book into TI-BASIC and use the program to find the areas between these two curves" begin?
What would you say if asked to justify the idea that creating two different.NET implementations is a more valid use of manpower/volunteer time than devoting that same time to the Linux and Windows versions of GNUStep, with the goal of getting them to the point where GNUStep can be presented to corporations as something to develop for one platform & compile for three OSes? The head start given by the work already done on the Foundation would be enough that if the Community was to try to help GNUStep, they would probably have the time to add support for the java and python programming languages. (Cocoa supports java already.)
Is the c#/.net framework really any better than gnustep would be with a slightly updated objective c or java?*
Why accept Microsoft's conception of the universe and bring it to linux when you can bring your own conception of the universe to Windows with about as much work?
And do you think that Sun will recognize the two or three tiny valid threats in.NET -- a VM that is designed to be compiled to from any programming language, things being seen as slightly more "open", a thought-out system for meshing different object-oriented programming languages-- and move to fix these things?
What would it take to push apple into making NeXTStep a truly cross-platform development environment again? If they did so, would anyone actually use it? (i.e. which is greater: the dirty feeling coming from using an MS platform, or the dirty feeling coming from using an apple (NeXT) platform.) Or is.NET better than *Step/Cocoa anyway?
Will apple or sun actually move to ensure that they remain with products that are better than microsofts', or will they just assume.NET is vapourware and will fail, and pretend it isn't there?
In the upcoming war, which product is X and which is NeWS? Is that an appropriate anology? Are there any third alternatives outside of java/.NET?
What would it take to get the universe to a point where the API and VM for the next generation of operating systems (as well as a system, such as c# offers, where objects can be inherhited across operating systems-- CORBA generation 2, maybe, except actually usable?) is determined by a truly open, inclusive board of experts representing the entire industry, along the lines of an idealized version of the w3c or opengl?
What would the software industry be like *right now* if at the time that Sun began to release Java, they had had the money, resources and ability to get products installed on consumers computers' "by default" that microsoft has right now? I.E., how much better would java be if Sun had been able to rapidly mature it the way Microsoft will be able to rapidly mature.NET? Or is java just inherently doomed because it was the first product of its type, and microsoft is able to learn from Sun's mistakes with 20/20 hindsight?
Is microsoft doomed because rather than attempting foresight, they're just trying to replicate java, slap on an authentication mechanism, with little attempt to do more than fix sun's mistakes?
What the hell is going on? I'm going to go curl up now.
(please do not respond to the following. i am just trying to explain where i am coming from in wondering these things:) *(I would honestly like to know the answer to that one. I have used Cocoa and love it to the point i would make my OS choice based on it solely. I haven't looked at C#/.NET because i don't trust MS and believe that if they are given power, any kind of power, they will abuse it. This is nothing more than internal bias and i am not attempting to justify it as "true", or start a discussion on that subject. I just want answers to the questions above. And i am secure, because after programming some Cocoa i know that NeXT will never die the way that the Amiga will never die.).. here goes nothing.. *submit*
There once was a program called "Third Voice". Third voice was a browser plugin that basically turned the entire internet into a discussion page. You could place little post-it-note-like thingies onto any website you liked, and any Third Voice user later viewing that URL would see your post it note sitting where you placed it. It did this by storing the post it notes in a central database; third voice would send its home server the url being viewed, and the home server would send back any notes that third voice users had left about this url.
That's a bit funky, but i think it's a nifty idea.
People went berzerk. A bunch of people went and sued third voice, claiming 3rdvoice was violating their copyrights, defacing their websites, a billion other things. This despite the fact that the added 3rdvoice content was clearly marked. Armed with misinformation and the thousand stinging nettles of draining litigation, they attacked third voice, upset anyone could "alter the content of" their web page.
This scares the crap out of me; it serverely bothers me that practically nobody seemed to see 3rdvoice commenting on webpages as 3rdvoice exersizing their constitutional rights to free speech. (OK, maybe i am overreacting. But apathy for free speech issues scares me. Bite me.) I see only two important things here:
I have a right to install software on my computer that alters the content i access and view in any way i want, as long as i have permission to view that content in some form.
Third Voice has a right to maintain a database where people can comment on various URLs for purposes of commentary or critisism. The fact they display the comments on top of the webpages being commented on makes no difference*, as long as the customers are either clearly aware of what is original content and what is 3rdvoice content or have consented to having the content altered for them. (Yes, of course, the fact KaZaA customers were not fully aware of what it meant that TopText was being installed, or informed during the installation process what the yellow links would mean in future makes everything different, and makes the inclusion of TopText with the KaZaA program, whether legal or no, definitely immoral on the part of KaZaA.)
* (Offtopic side-rant: at the least, they have more right to do this than bess has to maintain a database of "objectionable" websites and distribute software which blocks those websites-- the crucial difference being that Third Voice presents their content as opinion, which it is, while Bess presents its content as pure, cold fact despite the fact it may be innacurate. The only objection with Bess would be a) that they misrepresent their product and content to consumers and b) that some school districts and libraries have been forced to install it, against the wishes of the users of those schools and libraries.)
Actually, perl is a fully functional language in a pure sense; functions are values, and the language features anonymous functions and closures. Arguments are passed as a list, meaning you can curry if you feel like it.
You just very rarely see perl being used functionally because despite the fact it has functional features, its functional features are really quite clumsy to use, and anyone prone to functional programming would probably prefer another language anyway.. in other words, you can be as functional as you like in perl. It just isn't worth the bother.
I will not buy any compact discs that i know to have the macrovision technology, and if i buy any discs that i later discover to have the macrovision technology i will demand a refund. I am currently writing a letter to the FTC to protest that the discs with this technology are (by all media accounts i have heard thus far; let me know if i have been incorrectly informed) not clearly labelled.
I do not care if this is "defeatable" or not. I do not care if i can rip it. I do not own a cd burner. The extent to which this does or does not affect the digital reading of audio cds i have bought is not relevant to me*. I simply refuse to patronise the services of a record company which would intentionally degrade the quality of their products.
I find it unacceptable that any music company would dare to sell me a cd in which the error recognition information is incomplete or damaged. I do not care about their motives, and i refuse to accept "copy protection" as a valid motive. As far as i am concerned-- and, in my belief, as far as the FTC is concerned-- the messing up of the error correction bits has been done so that the products they are selling will degrade faster, with the added bonus that customers are hindered from easily creating backup copies of the music. Oh, i do honestly believe that they are doing this for the purpose of reducing piracy, but the amount of piracy that will be stopped by this is so minimal that "piracy" is not a valid excuse to me as a customer and so i am disregarding it..
I move my cd collection around a lot. i will frequently grab some of my numerous purchased cds to take with me in someone's car. i can not always treat my cds with the utmost care. I need that error correction, and as a heavy customer of the RIAA, i believe i have the right to demand that they sell me the highest quality merchandise they feasibly can. I believe i have the absolute right to demand that if they are going to intentionally degrade the quality of their merchandise, to any extent, then they must alert the customers which discs they have done this on-- and if they fail to alert us, the customers, then they are committing some form of deceptive business practices by passing off damaged merchandise as a new cd that correctly follows the red book standard.
I hope deeply that the FTC agrees with me.
If not, i will personally attempt to create some form of community watch system attempting to identify which cds have been tainted with this latest affront in the false and rediculous war being fought in the name of 'copy protection', so that customers like me can be fully informed and vote with their dollars. Customers should not be reduced to having to handle this kind of information themselves.
* (although i do frequently partake in the practice of opening audio cd tracks as AIFFs in apple movieplayer, then playing the track backward by pressing command-leftarrow. i enjoy this a great deal, and will be saddened if i lose the ability to do this-- and it seems that if the macrovision technology works, it will defeat apple movieplayer's attempts to open tracks as AIFFs quite nicely.)
What nobody seems to realise about the "public source" or "open source" (choose your term. i don't care.) release of darwin is that apple essentially gave up control over what hardware you run os x on.
Think: the darwin being distributed is the same darwin running underneath the user parts of os x, and darwin does *all* the talking to the hardware. And from what i've heard, darwin/os x (because of mach, and because of some other design decisions) is designed to be as easy as possible to port. So while there's no way you could get out-of-the-box mac os working with these machines, you could just rewrite darwin to support them, slap that under os x, and as far as my understanding of the APSL is there is nothing apple can do to stop you.
> Yes, the depression did come an go, and companies like the "huge Carnegie steel conglomerate" took a hit...but kept on trucking. And, big surprise, we are still Americans living in the *ahem* same system.
Umm.
Well, i'm not sure i agree with the conclusions of the person you're replying to, but i will say this: to state that we are still living in the same system as we did pre-depression is pure nonsense. The system is RADICALLY different, and it is different *because* of fallout from the depression (and because of a nationwide desire to make sure these problems never happened again..). Have you ever heard of the "New Deal"? The depression, and FDR's presidency, replaced the near-holy status of lasseiz-faire capitalism with a realization that certain types of businesses need to have oversight by law enforcement and by the public to ensure that they act in a responsible manner consistent with the safety of the public; this is why we have things like the Securities and Exchange Commision now. The horrible exploitation of the desperate during the depression has led to things like the federal minimum wage, and the transmogrification of trade unions from illegal entities into a recognized, respected part of capitalism's power balance. The trusts and corporate powerbrokers of the gilded age eventually exhausted the ability of the system to absorb their abuses, and as a result they destroyed themselves.
The intellectual property trusts (the RIAA, the MPAA, etc) and corporate powerbrokers of the information age probably have less to fear. The fact is, it takes a personal disaster for a person to realize that the system needs changing, and it takes a VERY wide-scale disaster to personally touch enough members of the voting public to actually change the system. Selfish behavior on the part of banking systems and industry-wide manager's associations can, if unchecked, cause massive economic turns and deaths; selfish behavior on the part of Microsoft and Adobe will if unchecked cause the degradation of individuals' constitutional liberties, but probably can't directly hurt enough people for anacron's predictions to be correct. Remember, Computers and DVDs and TV programs all live WHOLLY in the realm of disposable income. The corporations who try to control these things can abuse their power all they want, and the worst they can do (assuming your rights aren't worth anything) is hamstring computer users with bad software (like windows) and draconian regulations on computer usage (like the dmca) to the point where it hurts worker productivity a bit..
So if you're expecting a depression-sized wake-up call to come fix the current corporate abuses, it probably won't happen. If you want a model for effecting change, you'd be better off looking to Martin Luther King Jr. (or Malcom X...) than FDR..
Or seen a rap single with an acapella version that is there for the sole purpose of allowing DJs to work the vocals seamlessly into their live mix.
Well, ok, this *may* still be a step forward because a website for remixes is actually being hosted by the artist themselves.. and, of course, either way it is still incredibly incredibly cool for the sole reason that, hey, this is Public Enemy.
I was going to make some comments on what is the liscensing on reuse/redistribution of this stuff? But the faq doesn't say anything, and i haven't been able to navigate to the clickthrough liscense for the mp3 itself. So i'll leave that for someone else's post..
Other than that my only comment is that why are they only giving out the vocal tracks? Don't they think that people would come up with something interesting if they had the music to mess with as well? That would, of course, lead to people being unduly influenced by the original music-- as they tend to be on the BRW-- but still. I've always thought instrumental remixes tended to be the most interesting ones anyway..
If you will go back to the original article and read the comments, you will notice that it appears that some of those demands were not in there. I.e. the 'stop distribution' meant 'stop distribution in its current form' and the 'destroy the product' was actually 'destroy all *packaging* in stock'. There was some unfortunate mistranslation followed by misinterpretation, and 'destroy all packaging' turned into 'destroy all copies of the package'..
at least as far as i can tell.
That being said, you are correct in saying that sending lawyers after killustrator was indefensable.
No. Malbolge is nothing but marketing hype! Nothing! The Media has this tendency to latch on to any shiny object that comes along and hype it as the Next Big Thing until the suits begin to start asking for it ("to keep up with jonescorp") and academics (who are hopelessly out of touch with reality) start recommending it be added to curriculums so they can appear cutting-edge, and before long the shiny object in question has been implanted firmly as an established part of the programming field without ANYONE having stopped to ask "is this really suitible?". No, they just assume that if everyone else is saying it's good, then it MUST be good, not realizing they are taking part in a self-fufilling prophesy. This is EXACTLY what has happened with Malbolge, and were it not for a few highly slanted magazine articles when the language was in development, Malbolge would have immediately sunk into complete obscurity next to.NET, BCPL, the sun NC, and "andrej the giant has a posse" stickers-- WHERE IT BELONGS.
Malborge should not even be considered in the current context. It isn't turing complete, and even worse it doesn't have call/cc! How dare you suggest using such a thing. Now get lost.
Fools, fools, all fools! Just because you can write self-modifying code and then pretend the executed code is an anonymous subroutine does NOT mean that the language is functional, or that what you do in it is functional programming! BRAINFUCK IS NOT FUNCTIONAL PROGAMMING. NEITHER IS BEFUNGE. You can argue them as such, but the languages do not address the concepts of functional programming in a PURE enough manner for them to be agreeable to the truly unreasonable!
Clearly, Unlambda is the only reasonable representative for this competition from the field of performance art programming. I hope to see at least one submission to this ICFP thing written in Unlambda, and i am certain that if any Unlambda programs are submitted they will trounce any competition written in Brainfuck, Befunge, INTERCAL, or perl.
Onwards, my brethren! Let us crush all who espouse the false paths of named variables and iterative memory usage! CHURCH NUMERALS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO FIND ENLIGHTENMENT! THE ONLY!
US trademark (and patent) law is based on a "use it or lose it" principle -- if, today, you fail to defend your property, you may lose the right to do so tomorrow.
Could Killustrator use this as a *defense* (if it's worth it)-- saying that because Adobe failed ot speak up when Killustrator appeared, Adobe forfeited that right? OK, so the couple of years Killustrator has been in creation is not long in the "real" business world, but in the computer world it's enough for entire empires to rise and fall.
Either way, this SHOULD be a wakeup call to the people in the free software community that trying to mimic the names of equivilent software programs helps NOBODY. Yes, what you're trying to do is replicate the functionality of an existing windows program. True. However, you shouldn't be doing this with the mindset of rebuilding the windows program-- you should go after it with the mindset of creating something *unique* and *new*. Go after your job with no goal more lofty than approximating what already exists, and you wind up with... well, you wind up with KDE. (Caveat: I am a mac user. I do not like Windows. I like KDE even less. I rather like GNOME. This is my opinion and it is not relevant to the discussion. Let's not have a flamewar.) And even if the name doesn't have the subliminal suggestion to the developers "this software is nothing special or new", it will probably make that suggestion to the *users*. (Yes, i realize "it's just like windows!" is a lucrative selling point. However i would like to suggest that "it's like windows, only better!" is an even *better* selling point.)
OK, so if you had the money to challenge Adobe in court, you could have gotten away with Killustrator. (Not that i'm sure why you'd want to.) But if the free software community gets too firmly in the habit of using this naming scheme, eventually someone will release something that IS true copyright infringement, and they WILL get clobbered for it. Isn't it easier just to make sure this isn't a problem? Being forced to be creative to insure product differentiation isn't exactly a form of repression.
IBM *has* commented on Altivec, and they don't like it. Here, look. The POWER4 does not have Altivec. Apple is not going to use anything that doesn't have Altivec, and IBM is not going to use anything that does. Any IBM-manufactured chips containing Altivecs are going to be made solely because Apple ordered them. Which could happen. IBM has, in the past, manufactured g4s for motorola and manufactured k7s for AMD when motorola and AMD were unable to meet demand.
I think.
Multiple-core technology is fantastic and i can't imagine why motorola isn't using it yet.
Is the apple/PPC line going to be getting some of this new-IBM-technology goodness?
I'm really still incredibly confused by what's going on in the wierd little apple-ibm-motorola triumverate that is the PPC platform, but nearest i can gather Apple has been mostly having Motorola manufacture its chips exclusively for some reason, possibly (but probably not) that IBM doesn't like altivec and apple really needs altivec (because if you are going to be rendering the entire screen in PDF then having a powerful SIMD vector processing unit becomes really really helpful..). And according to some rather shady sources, Motorola has been having horrible problems with manufacturing-- which, if these shady sources are to be believed, can explain why the Mhz levels of the chips Apple has been using have stayed constant for a really long time now, and why there aren't enough 733 Mhz chips around to make dual 733 machines possible. So apple and motorola are just kind of wandering off to the side and getting lost while IBM sits alone in the corner and does really cool things with the POWER4 chips.
But, umm, this is just my interpretation of things based on the scant material i have read. I wish i knew how accurate i was.
Umm, but anyway, My question is this: What happens in the little PPC world from here? Does IBM just kind of keep doing its thing with the POWER line and toss Apple/Motorola some patent liscenses from time to time while Apple/Motorola stay alone and try to get their shit together, or are IBM's new metal technologies going to convince apple to start moving toward them? Or.. umm.. i don't even know what i'm saying anymore. OK, just, either way, will we be seeing improvements in apple's PPC line anytime soon, and does this new IBM announcement mean anything to apple customers? Or is this all irrelivant, because this is just one of these things where the technology not ready to move outside the lab, and implementation of this technology in production chips is five years away at best or something?
Oh dear.. Uhhh.. i'm pretty sure just about everything i've said in this incoherent post has been wrong, but i'm posting it anyway in hopes that someone who is actually informed could step in and explain what is happening. That would be really cool:)
All i know is, i drool at IBM's chip technologies.. all of them, pretty much.
Your post contains the following implicit assumption:
In a state of things where industries based on the sale of intellectual property are fundamentally unable to prevent person-to-person piracy of their works, it automatically follows that no consumers will buy any intellectual property legitimately (or, at least, so few consumers will buy intellectual property legitimately that given the current cost of production it will be impossible for any such industries to turn a profit).
This does not follow. Please provide some form of justification for this assumption, or i will be forced to completely ignore the last paragraph of your post.
I *could* make some comment on the way your post seems to assume that the recording industry and the RIAA are all the same thing and that is good for one is good for the others, but it isn't worth the bother.
2) Dinotopia: The World Beneath has a very similar plotline: Scientist searching for a lost civilization, explores underwater for an entrance, then a cavern crawl, to the remnants (though uninhabited in this case) of a lost civilization they find a crystalin power source and then leave, upon which point the crystal brings out the worst in party members and a struggle ensues for the crystal.
You do realize you just described the exact plot of Michael Crichton's 1987 novel Sphere?
The Houston Chronicle this morning had an article on Apple's CRT drop. According to this article, iMacs will continue to use CRTs.
If apple reworked their iMac to use an LCD it would be absolutely amazing-- they could take their desk footprint down to a fraction of what it is now-- this would be problematic considering the iMac is a low-end machine, and LCDs are expensive.
What i think would be cool is if apple made an imac with a cinema-proportioned widescreen, then included an HDTV tuner. That way they could justify the higher price.:)
The command line model does not dictate *anything* about the way a program parses its elements. The things that you type after the program's name are passed to the program as an array of strings, and may be parsed by the program in *literally* any way it wants. Moreover the program may choose to ignore its command line elements and take over the screen, if it so chooses using the curses library or something to create an entire kind of text-based gui.
Moreover the syntax of - flags is not anywhere NEAR standard. I could give you at least 12 ways the program could choose to parse the way the - flags are passed, which is impressive when you consider how simple the damn thing is, and frustrating if upon using a certain program you realize that only one of those 12 ways and you don't know which.
The unix CLI is at least as flexible as X; it just isn't as poorly designed or ugly ^_^ but there are NO constants.
Because GPLed games actually have a tiny chance in hell of being ported to the macintosh.
Seriously. I really kind of honestly believe the bit about gpled games will never quite reach the quality level of commercial software, (although i have seen some damn good shareware/freeware games) but i will say this: poorly ported gpled games are much better than *nothing*.. which, as a mac os x user, is exactly what i am getting right now.
Well.. all i have to say is thank god that it's so much easier to write emulators that run on the PPC than it is the x86:P Lolo, i will always have you..
Umm, but anyway. Yeh. I am pretty sure i will never see a Worms Armaggeddon for mac os x, much less Worms World Party, but although i can't play OpenQuartz either, i at least have the *option* of porting the damn thing myself. Which just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. So.. well.. THANK YOU, TEAM OPENQUARTZ!
P.S. : Sierra : Where the fuck is tribes 2?? You were promising us a simultaneous cross-platform release for awhile there!! What happened?? GRRRR!!
^_^
P.P.S. You think we could go hunt down the original creator of Scorched Earth and convince them to go GPL?
P.P.P.S. Crossfire is damn ugly. Couldn't you at least have the quality of Taskmaker? Sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
(Personally, I believe that modern GUI kits should have an HTML control, but that it should be as tied down as possible - no JavaScript, image loading only via the app, etc. so as to make it that much more "secure.")
Here's a better idea:
Opendoc/Cyberdog.
Make it so there's a single standard html-rendering function throughout the entire system, but that the software component that provides the html services is hot-swappable. Therefore microsoft can ship some boxes with MSIE built in at the system level like you describe they just have, but if Compaq wants their machines to come with Opera or Mozilla or some kind of minimal no-frills browser (like you want) serving as the html component in place of MSIE, they can do that, and the system will be MSIE free despite the login screen and everything still behing html. (I'm not sure how easy this would be with the Windows XP architecture. I know that if apple's management hadn't completely fallen apart in the mid-90s, the mac os would have had this capability for years. I also know that in the current mac os x architecture, the same thing can be easily done using the Services component API.)
That aside, unless i'm wrong (and i usually am) if the courts have decided that the commingling of MSIE and Windows is illegal, and tells MS that the two has to be seperated, then Microsoft's "But look! It's impossible to remove MSIE from windows!" will be greeted with "That's your problem." It isn't the government's business to determine how microsoft fixes the messes they've made; it's only the government's business to determine which messes and which fixes are illegal anticompetitive actions.
I hope i'm right about this. It would be so wonderful to see microsoft's attempt to intertwine Windows with IE in random inextricable ways in an attempt to thwart government attempts to seperate the two backfire.. and result in instead of the government giving up and letting the two be one executable, Microsoft having to delay the XP launch for two months while they either build in an architecture for a Cyberdog-style plug-in-html-component (and convert MSIE into one) or remove MSIE, thus resulting in a lower-quality product..
-mcc, master of the run-on sentence.
Isn't this the basic argument for the use of debian? (apt-get)
Personally, i think that having windows update or apt-get or Apple Software Update handle all security patches is a *good* thing. Keeping track of tiny constant security patches the instant they come out is something that should not really be a requirement of running a web server.
However, the thing is that the Code Red incident is not an argument for automatic patch installs in microsoft products. It is a very, very strong argument against it. Why?
About ten or twenty people in earlier slashdot threads alleged that they personally signed onto the Windows Update website the morning before the code red worm hit the White House to see the hacked by chinese worm message. Some even got screenshots.
In other words, THE MICROSOFT UPDATE SERVER HAD NOT BEEN PATCHED FOR THE DEFAULT.IDA BUFFER OVERFLOW. You could argue that there is no single server anywhere on the internet where security is more important than windows update, and yet an automated worm was actually able to execute arbitrary code on their server remotely.
Meaning that had an alert black-hat gotten there before Code Red had, they could have done some REALLY SCARY STUFF. For example, they could have taken the default.ida patch that everyone was downloading to defeat code red, and inserted some kind of backorifice-like trojan into every sixteenth download of it, or something, and if they were careful it's possible no one would have ever noticed. No? Is there any reason i'm overreacting, or wrong? Can anyone at this point justify EVER trusting Microsoft as a customer on ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN, after seeing *windows update taken infected* by a worm that could be protected against by an already-old patch??
I see three lessons to be learned from the whole code red thing:
- Operating systems like RedHat and NT need to have services off by DEFAULT, and the interface by which users turn those services on and off needs to be clear and simple so that A) "Off by default" doesn't mean "the users don't benefit and B) Users know what they're enabling, and don't enable things they don't need. (The default.ida thingy that Code Red exploits DID NOT need to be on by default. It is as far as i can gather only useful for people hosting sites with search engines, which i would suspect an absolutely minimal number of the infected sites did. If default.ida had remained non-web-accessable until such time as the sysadmin actually knew they wanted it installed and switched it on, Code Red would not have been even a MINOR problem, because few sites would be using it, and most of those few sites would have capable sysadpeople.) However, more relevantly to this thread:
- Services like apt-get and Windows Update are absolutely necessary, because without them worms like Code Red can always thrive on the few inexperienced sysadmins left out there-- potentially causing harm to many others besides just the unpatched servers.
- Microsoft does not place the kind of priority it NEEDS to on the security of its central Windows Update servers, and Microsoft Windows Update is not a completely trustable entity. Therefore if you are a small company that cannot afford a top-of-the-line sysadmin, and you want an OS with automatic patching mechanisms that you can set-and-forget and actually trust with the security of your server (as you suggest microsoft would like people to do), Windows XP is not an acceptable choice.
Is ANYTHING i have said above that is at all inaccurate or unreasonable?Only after we sued NuSphere for GPL violation did they post the source for Gemini on a website. Please also note that the GPL licence requires you to ACCOMPANY the software with the source code or a written offer to supply the source code. To date NuSphere has not to our knowledge even admitted the GPL violation.
This sounds entirely reasonable on MySQL AB's part. So, were NuSphere to begin accompanying their GPLed code release with such a written offer and do whatever other steps are necessary to bring their software into line with the requirements of the GPL, would the GPL violation portion of the MySQL AB case be dropped?
Any HS mathematics department which allows graphical calculators but does not require either semiregular "check" tests in which the student is given problems that a calculator should not be necessary for and barred from using calculators on those tests, or require students to show their work in a methodical, step by step fashion, showing everything they do (to ensure that even if they did use the calculator, they can at least list the steps needed to perform the calculation without it..), has serious problems.
:) and to top it all off i accidentally used the +1 bonus on the original post.. how embarrassing.
There are some problems that arise with allowing the use of the calculator as a tool, and they have not all been ironed out (especially the questions that arise when some students have calculators that are significantly more powerful than those of other students) but in general having the calculator there enables math classes to take place at a higher level, with the students only having to work only with (and being tested solely on) the individual steps they take to reach the goal, not the exact number they regurgitate at the end.. and at least the calculator *FORCES* the teacher to shift their testing methods to make *absolutely sure* that every student knows exactly what they're doing..
This isn't very relevant. I'm sorry i brought it up. Sorry
Actually, classes in computer programming go hand in hand with mathematics. Both subjects develop problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Our high school last year had a math class that was taught entirely in the computer lab so that the students could use mathematica. Between the ability to deal with high-level concepts quickly that using the computer gave them and a couple of extra periods a week, the students in this class-- despite being juniors-- were able to speed through both the junior and senior years of math to the point where they were all able to capably take the Calculus BC exam at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the TI-83 calculators that were *REQUIRED* for my 9-12 math classes were as far as i can gather more powerful machines than the Apple IIcs at my elementary school (if you discount the lack of external hardware add-ons like a color monitor, sound, a floppy drive..). Where do you draw the line on "computers are not beneficial to students", when students are carrying around literal computers to help them in math? Where does "follow the steps in your calculus book to find the areas between these two curves" end and "translate the steps in your calculus book into TI-BASIC and use the program to find the areas between these two curves" begin?
What would you say if asked to justify the idea that creating two different .NET implementations is a more valid use of manpower/volunteer time than devoting that same time to the Linux and Windows versions of GNUStep, with the goal of getting them to the point where GNUStep can be presented to corporations as something to develop for one platform & compile for three OSes? The head start given by the work already done on the Foundation would be enough that if the Community was to try to help GNUStep, they would probably have the time to add support for the java and python programming languages. (Cocoa supports java already.)
.NET -- a VM that is designed to be compiled to from any programming language, things being seen as slightly more "open", a thought-out system for meshing different object-oriented programming languages-- and move to fix these things?
.NET better than *Step/Cocoa anyway?
.NET is vapourware and will fail, and pretend it isn't there?
.NET? Or is java just inherently doomed because it was the first product of its type, and microsoft is able to learn from Sun's mistakes with 20/20 hindsight?
.. here goes nothing.. *submit*
Is the c#/.net framework really any better than gnustep would be with a slightly updated objective c or java?*
Why accept Microsoft's conception of the universe and bring it to linux when you can bring your own conception of the universe to Windows with about as much work?
And do you think that Sun will recognize the two or three tiny valid threats in
What would it take to push apple into making NeXTStep a truly cross-platform development environment again? If they did so, would anyone actually use it? (i.e. which is greater: the dirty feeling coming from using an MS platform, or the dirty feeling coming from using an apple (NeXT) platform.) Or is
Will apple or sun actually move to ensure that they remain with products that are better than microsofts', or will they just assume
In the upcoming war, which product is X and which is NeWS? Is that an appropriate anology? Are there any third alternatives outside of java/.NET?
What would it take to get the universe to a point where the API and VM for the next generation of operating systems (as well as a system, such as c# offers, where objects can be inherhited across operating systems-- CORBA generation 2, maybe, except actually usable?) is determined by a truly open, inclusive board of experts representing the entire industry, along the lines of an idealized version of the w3c or opengl?
What would the software industry be like *right now* if at the time that Sun began to release Java, they had had the money, resources and ability to get products installed on consumers computers' "by default" that microsoft has right now? I.E., how much better would java be if Sun had been able to rapidly mature it the way Microsoft will be able to rapidly mature
Is microsoft doomed because rather than attempting foresight, they're just trying to replicate java, slap on an authentication mechanism, with little attempt to do more than fix sun's mistakes?
What the hell is going on?
I'm going to go curl up now.
(please do not respond to the following. i am just trying to explain where i am coming from in wondering these things:)
*(I would honestly like to know the answer to that one. I have used Cocoa and love it to the point i would make my OS choice based on it solely. I haven't looked at C#/.NET because i don't trust MS and believe that if they are given power, any kind of power, they will abuse it. This is nothing more than internal bias and i am not attempting to justify it as "true", or start a discussion on that subject. I just want answers to the questions above. And i am secure, because after programming some Cocoa i know that NeXT will never die the way that the Amiga will never die.)
There once was a program called "Third Voice". Third voice was a browser plugin that basically turned the entire internet into a discussion page. You could place little post-it-note-like thingies onto any website you liked, and any Third Voice user later viewing that URL would see your post it note sitting where you placed it. It did this by storing the post it notes in a central database; third voice would send its home server the url being viewed, and the home server would send back any notes that third voice users had left about this url.
That's a bit funky, but i think it's a nifty idea.
People went berzerk. A bunch of people went and sued third voice, claiming 3rdvoice was violating their copyrights, defacing their websites, a billion other things. This despite the fact that the added 3rdvoice content was clearly marked. Armed with misinformation and the thousand stinging nettles of draining litigation, they attacked third voice, upset anyone could "alter the content of" their web page.
This scares the crap out of me; it serverely bothers me that practically nobody seemed to see 3rdvoice commenting on webpages as 3rdvoice exersizing their constitutional rights to free speech. (OK, maybe i am overreacting. But apathy for free speech issues scares me. Bite me.) I see only two important things here:
- I have a right to install software on my computer that alters the content i access and view in any way i want, as long as i have permission to view that content in some form.
- Third Voice has a right to maintain a database where people can comment on various URLs for purposes of commentary or critisism. The fact they display the comments on top of the webpages being commented on makes no difference*, as long as the customers are either clearly aware of what is original content and what is 3rdvoice content or have consented to having the content altered for them. (Yes, of course, the fact KaZaA customers were not fully aware of what it meant that TopText was being installed, or informed during the installation process what the yellow links would mean in future makes everything different, and makes the inclusion of TopText with the KaZaA program, whether legal or no, definitely immoral on the part of KaZaA.)
Third voice no longer exists. I have not been able to find any hard data on what the conclusions of the lawsuits filed against thirdvoice were. Either way, it is not important; Wired says that 3rdvoice went down for the sole reason that the web advertising market is shit, and legal harrassment was not involved. Sad; it was a nifty idea. Maybe someday we will see a GPLed equivilent?-mcc
Keep in mind that the same people that would keep you from listening to Boards of Canada may be back next year to complain about a book, or even a television program.
* (Offtopic side-rant: at the least, they have more right to do this than bess has to maintain a database of "objectionable" websites and distribute software which blocks those websites-- the crucial difference being that Third Voice presents their content as opinion, which it is, while Bess presents its content as pure, cold fact despite the fact it may be innacurate. The only objection with Bess would be a) that they misrepresent their product and content to consumers and b) that some school districts and libraries have been forced to install it, against the wishes of the users of those schools and libraries.)
Actually, perl is a fully functional language in a pure sense; functions are values, and the language features anonymous functions and closures. Arguments are passed as a list, meaning you can curry if you feel like it.
You just very rarely see perl being used functionally because despite the fact it has functional features, its functional features are really quite clumsy to use, and anyone prone to functional programming would probably prefer another language anyway.. in other words, you can be as functional as you like in perl. It just isn't worth the bother.
Larry Wall likes LISP, though.
I will not buy any compact discs that i know to have the macrovision technology, and if i buy any discs that i later discover to have the macrovision technology i will demand a refund. I am currently writing a letter to the FTC to protest that the discs with this technology are (by all media accounts i have heard thus far; let me know if i have been incorrectly informed) not clearly labelled.
I do not care if this is "defeatable" or not. I do not care if i can rip it. I do not own a cd burner. The extent to which this does or does not affect the digital reading of audio cds i have bought is not relevant to me*. I simply refuse to patronise the services of a record company which would intentionally degrade the quality of their products.
I find it unacceptable that any music company would dare to sell me a cd in which the error recognition information is incomplete or damaged. I do not care about their motives, and i refuse to accept "copy protection" as a valid motive. As far as i am concerned-- and, in my belief, as far as the FTC is concerned-- the messing up of the error correction bits has been done so that the products they are selling will degrade faster, with the added bonus that customers are hindered from easily creating backup copies of the music. Oh, i do honestly believe that they are doing this for the purpose of reducing piracy, but the amount of piracy that will be stopped by this is so minimal that "piracy" is not a valid excuse to me as a customer and so i am disregarding it..
I move my cd collection around a lot. i will frequently grab some of my numerous purchased cds to take with me in someone's car. i can not always treat my cds with the utmost care. I need that error correction, and as a heavy customer of the RIAA, i believe i have the right to demand that they sell me the highest quality merchandise they feasibly can. I believe i have the absolute right to demand that if they are going to intentionally degrade the quality of their merchandise, to any extent, then they must alert the customers which discs they have done this on-- and if they fail to alert us, the customers, then they are committing some form of deceptive business practices by passing off damaged merchandise as a new cd that correctly follows the red book standard.
I hope deeply that the FTC agrees with me.
If not, i will personally attempt to create some form of community watch system attempting to identify which cds have been tainted with this latest affront in the false and rediculous war being fought in the name of 'copy protection', so that customers like me can be fully informed and vote with their dollars. Customers should not be reduced to having to handle this kind of information themselves.
* (although i do frequently partake in the practice of opening audio cd tracks as AIFFs in apple movieplayer, then playing the track backward by pressing command-leftarrow. i enjoy this a great deal, and will be saddened if i lose the ability to do this-- and it seems that if the macrovision technology works, it will defeat apple movieplayer's attempts to open tracks as AIFFs quite nicely.)
Think: the darwin being distributed is the same darwin running underneath the user parts of os x, and darwin does *all* the talking to the hardware. And from what i've heard, darwin/os x (because of mach, and because of some other design decisions) is designed to be as easy as possible to port. So while there's no way you could get out-of-the-box mac os working with these machines, you could just rewrite darwin to support them, slap that under os x, and as far as my understanding of the APSL is there is nothing apple can do to stop you.
Some people seem to have done something like this to get os x to run on unsupported, old apple machines.
OK, so maybe darwin *doesn't* have much use as its own operating system compared to BSD. That doesn't mean it's not damn useful.
> Yes, the depression did come an go, and companies like the "huge Carnegie steel conglomerate" took a hit...but kept on trucking. And, big surprise, we are still Americans living in the *ahem* same system.
Umm.
Well, i'm not sure i agree with the conclusions of the person you're replying to, but i will say this: to state that we are still living in the same system as we did pre-depression is pure nonsense. The system is RADICALLY different, and it is different *because* of fallout from the depression (and because of a nationwide desire to make sure these problems never happened again..). Have you ever heard of the "New Deal"? The depression, and FDR's presidency, replaced the near-holy status of lasseiz-faire capitalism with a realization that certain types of businesses need to have oversight by law enforcement and by the public to ensure that they act in a responsible manner consistent with the safety of the public; this is why we have things like the Securities and Exchange Commision now. The horrible exploitation of the desperate during the depression has led to things like the federal minimum wage, and the transmogrification of trade unions from illegal entities into a recognized, respected part of capitalism's power balance. The trusts and corporate powerbrokers of the gilded age eventually exhausted the ability of the system to absorb their abuses, and as a result they destroyed themselves.
The intellectual property trusts (the RIAA, the MPAA, etc) and corporate powerbrokers of the information age probably have less to fear. The fact is, it takes a personal disaster for a person to realize that the system needs changing, and it takes a VERY wide-scale disaster to personally touch enough members of the voting public to actually change the system. Selfish behavior on the part of banking systems and industry-wide manager's associations can, if unchecked, cause massive economic turns and deaths; selfish behavior on the part of Microsoft and Adobe will if unchecked cause the degradation of individuals' constitutional liberties, but probably can't directly hurt enough people for anacron's predictions to be correct. Remember, Computers and DVDs and TV programs all live WHOLLY in the realm of disposable income. The corporations who try to control these things can abuse their power all they want, and the worst they can do (assuming your rights aren't worth anything) is hamstring computer users with bad software (like windows) and draconian regulations on computer usage (like the dmca) to the point where it hurts worker productivity a bit..
So if you're expecting a depression-sized wake-up call to come fix the current corporate abuses, it probably won't happen. If you want a model for effecting change, you'd be better off looking to Martin Luther King Jr. (or Malcom X...) than FDR..
What the hell did i just write?
...until you have visited the Bjork Remix web.
Or seen a rap single with an acapella version that is there for the sole purpose of allowing DJs to work the vocals seamlessly into their live mix.
Well, ok, this *may* still be a step forward because a website for remixes is actually being hosted by the artist themselves.. and, of course, either way it is still incredibly incredibly cool for the sole reason that, hey, this is Public Enemy.
I was going to make some comments on what is the liscensing on reuse/redistribution of this stuff? But the faq doesn't say anything, and i haven't been able to navigate to the clickthrough liscense for the mp3 itself. So i'll leave that for someone else's post..
Other than that my only comment is that why are they only giving out the vocal tracks? Don't they think that people would come up with something interesting if they had the music to mess with as well? That would, of course, lead to people being unduly influenced by the original music-- as they tend to be on the BRW-- but still. I've always thought instrumental remixes tended to be the most interesting ones anyway..
If you will go back to the original article and read the comments, you will notice that it appears that some of those demands were not in there. I.e. the 'stop distribution' meant 'stop distribution in its current form' and the 'destroy the product' was actually 'destroy all *packaging* in stock'. There was some unfortunate mistranslation followed by misinterpretation, and 'destroy all packaging' turned into 'destroy all copies of the package'..
at least as far as i can tell.
That being said, you are correct in saying that sending lawyers after killustrator was indefensable.
Who would want to use a piece of software that sounds like castrator?
UNIX, of course
No. Malbolge is nothing but marketing hype! Nothing! The Media has this tendency to latch on to any shiny object that comes along and hype it as the Next Big Thing until the suits begin to start asking for it ("to keep up with jonescorp") and academics (who are hopelessly out of touch with reality) start recommending it be added to curriculums so they can appear cutting-edge, and before long the shiny object in question has been implanted firmly as an established part of the programming field without ANYONE having stopped to ask "is this really suitible?". No, they just assume that if everyone else is saying it's good, then it MUST be good, not realizing they are taking part in a self-fufilling prophesy. This is EXACTLY what has happened with Malbolge, and were it not for a few highly slanted magazine articles when the language was in development, Malbolge would have immediately sunk into complete obscurity next to .NET, BCPL, the sun NC, and "andrej the giant has a posse" stickers-- WHERE IT BELONGS.
Malborge should not even be considered in the current context. It isn't turing complete, and even worse it doesn't have call/cc! How dare you suggest using such a thing. Now get lost.
Clearly, Unlambda is the only reasonable representative for this competition from the field of performance art programming. I hope to see at least one submission to this ICFP thing written in Unlambda, and i am certain that if any Unlambda programs are submitted they will trounce any competition written in Brainfuck, Befunge, INTERCAL, or perl.
Onwards, my brethren! Let us crush all who espouse the false paths of named variables and iterative memory usage! CHURCH NUMERALS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO FIND ENLIGHTENMENT! THE ONLY!
Sorry. I've got something of a headache.
Could Killustrator use this as a *defense* (if it's worth it)-- saying that because Adobe failed ot speak up when Killustrator appeared, Adobe forfeited that right? OK, so the couple of years Killustrator has been in creation is not long in the "real" business world, but in the computer world it's enough for entire empires to rise and fall.
Either way, this SHOULD be a wakeup call to the people in the free software community that trying to mimic the names of equivilent software programs helps NOBODY. Yes, what you're trying to do is replicate the functionality of an existing windows program. True. However, you shouldn't be doing this with the mindset of rebuilding the windows program-- you should go after it with the mindset of creating something *unique* and *new*. Go after your job with no goal more lofty than approximating what already exists, and you wind up with... well, you wind up with KDE. (Caveat: I am a mac user. I do not like Windows. I like KDE even less. I rather like GNOME. This is my opinion and it is not relevant to the discussion. Let's not have a flamewar.) And even if the name doesn't have the subliminal suggestion to the developers "this software is nothing special or new", it will probably make that suggestion to the *users*. (Yes, i realize "it's just like windows!" is a lucrative selling point. However i would like to suggest that "it's like windows, only better!" is an even *better* selling point.)
OK, so if you had the money to challenge Adobe in court, you could have gotten away with Killustrator. (Not that i'm sure why you'd want to.) But if the free software community gets too firmly in the habit of using this naming scheme, eventually someone will release something that IS true copyright infringement, and they WILL get clobbered for it. Isn't it easier just to make sure this isn't a problem? Being forced to be creative to insure product differentiation isn't exactly a form of repression.
I think.
Multiple-core technology is fantastic and i can't imagine why motorola isn't using it yet.
I'm really still incredibly confused by what's going on in the wierd little apple-ibm-motorola triumverate that is the PPC platform, but nearest i can gather Apple has been mostly having Motorola manufacture its chips exclusively for some reason, possibly (but probably not) that IBM doesn't like altivec and apple really needs altivec (because if you are going to be rendering the entire screen in PDF then having a powerful SIMD vector processing unit becomes really really helpful..). And according to some rather shady sources, Motorola has been having horrible problems with manufacturing-- which, if these shady sources are to be believed, can explain why the Mhz levels of the chips Apple has been using have stayed constant for a really long time now, and why there aren't enough 733 Mhz chips around to make dual 733 machines possible. So apple and motorola are just kind of wandering off to the side and getting lost while IBM sits alone in the corner and does really cool things with the POWER4 chips.
But, umm, this is just my interpretation of things based on the scant material i have read. I wish i knew how accurate i was.
Umm, but anyway, My question is this: What happens in the little PPC world from here? Does IBM just kind of keep doing its thing with the POWER line and toss Apple/Motorola some patent liscenses from time to time while Apple/Motorola stay alone and try to get their shit together, or are IBM's new metal technologies going to convince apple to start moving toward them? Or.. umm.. i don't even know what i'm saying anymore. OK, just, either way, will we be seeing improvements in apple's PPC line anytime soon, and does this new IBM announcement mean anything to apple customers? Or is this all irrelivant, because this is just one of these things where the technology not ready to move outside the lab, and implementation of this technology in production chips is five years away at best or something?
Oh dear.. Uhhh.. i'm pretty sure just about everything i've said in this incoherent post has been wrong, but i'm posting it anyway in hopes that someone who is actually informed could step in and explain what is happening. That would be really cool :)
All i know is, i drool at IBM's chip technologies.. all of them, pretty much.
Your post contains the following implicit assumption:
This does not follow. Please provide some form of justification for this assumption, or i will be forced to completely ignore the last paragraph of your post.I *could* make some comment on the way your post seems to assume that the recording industry and the RIAA are all the same thing and that is good for one is good for the others, but it isn't worth the bother.
You do realize you just described the exact plot of Michael Crichton's 1987 novel Sphere?
Just a thought.
If apple reworked their iMac to use an LCD it would be absolutely amazing-- they could take their desk footprint down to a fraction of what it is now-- this would be problematic considering the iMac is a low-end machine, and LCDs are expensive.
What i think would be cool is if apple made an imac with a cinema-proportioned widescreen, then included an HDTV tuner. That way they could justify the higher price. :)
What on earth are you talking about?
The command line model does not dictate *anything* about the way a program parses its elements. The things that you type after the program's name are passed to the program as an array of strings, and may be parsed by the program in *literally* any way it wants. Moreover the program may choose to ignore its command line elements and take over the screen, if it so chooses using the curses library or something to create an entire kind of text-based gui.
Moreover the syntax of - flags is not anywhere NEAR standard. I could give you at least 12 ways the program could choose to parse the way the - flags are passed, which is impressive when you consider how simple the damn thing is, and frustrating if upon using a certain program you realize that only one of those 12 ways and you don't know which.
The unix CLI is at least as flexible as X; it just isn't as poorly designed or ugly ^_^ but there are NO constants.
Amen to your last paragraph, however, very much.
/me bows
> So the Palm forces you to adapt to the machine while the Newton tried to adapt itself to you.
:)
That was the exact point of the quote. Mr. Levy did not like the idea of Graffiti.
Do you want to know why?
:P Lolo, i will always have you..
Because GPLed games actually have a tiny chance in hell of being ported to the macintosh.
Seriously. I really kind of honestly believe the bit about gpled games will never quite reach the quality level of commercial software, (although i have seen some damn good shareware/freeware games) but i will say this: poorly ported gpled games are much better than *nothing*.. which, as a mac os x user, is exactly what i am getting right now.
Well.. all i have to say is thank god that it's so much easier to write emulators that run on the PPC than it is the x86
Umm, but anyway. Yeh. I am pretty sure i will never see a Worms Armaggeddon for mac os x, much less Worms World Party, but although i can't play OpenQuartz either, i at least have the *option* of porting the damn thing myself. Which just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. So.. well.. THANK YOU, TEAM OPENQUARTZ!
P.S. : Sierra : Where the fuck is tribes 2?? You were promising us a simultaneous cross-platform release for awhile there!! What happened?? GRRRR!!
^_^
P.P.S. You think we could go hunt down the original creator of Scorched Earth and convince them to go GPL?
P.P.P.S. Crossfire is damn ugly. Couldn't you at least have the quality of Taskmaker? Sheesh.
...