Wow, sounds like this AC got bitten by a browser as a child. I'm only replying to this to correct misinformation.
Almost any cross-platform solution is vulnerable to bugs and variations from one platform to another, especially when you have to support both Windows and Unix (and Mac, as in the original question). The problems with DHTML may be different, but aren't worse than those that exist in other cross-platform environments. As I mentioned, the only significant drawback we've found is the lack of comprehensive RAD tools tailored to this sort of application, but for our purposes, the benefits of this approach outweigh that.
Browser differences can be quite well managed using things like browser-specific stylesheet selection on the server side, and Javascript objects which are parameterized for the browser they're running under. We're doing this now, in systems that have been in operation for some time. If a particular browser version doesn't support a specific feature, too bad, but we haven't found this to be a big problem.
As for the suggestion re Perl under Unix on the server side, the whole point of my original post was to describe what can be done to increase interactivity and "richness" of the browser interface on the client side, in cases where you don't get to choose the browser or OS.
I'm talking about database-oriented apps that require more sophistication than typical public web apps, to support complex and/or dense data presentation requirements, high-speed data entry, etc.
Client-side file I/O is not an issue in this kind of application. What is needed is communication behind the scenes between the browser and the server, controlled by scripting in the browser. Otherwise, almost any user action results in a delay while the user waits for a server roundtrip and a page to load.
As a simple example of what I'm talking about, think of adding rows to a table that's being displayed. Using DHTML and script, when the user asks to save a row, the data that's just been entered is immediately added to the table at the client side, and an asynchronous request is sent to the server to add the record. The user can immediately carry on and add another record. If the asynchronous add fails, then a message will be displayed and the table will be updated accordingly. Without DHTML, the user has to wait for an entire page load between each record, which isn't acceptable in the kind of scenarios I'm talking about.
Taking this kind of approach throughout an application results in a system that's qualitatively quite different from an "ordinary" web app, and in many ways is richer and more usable than a traditional GUI database app with its rigid grid controls and inflexible formatting.
Yes, DOM is cross-platform. At present, its implementations do vary somewhat between the major browsers, but unless you're trying to do some very fancy tricks, this is quite manageable.
For more info, see the W3C Document Object Model page. As it says, "The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents."
Also, Javascript is very portable across all the major and not-so-major browsers, including Netscape, Mozilla, IE, and Opera. The point is not Javascript vs. PERL, but rather the availability of client-side scripting in a standard browser. For that, Javascript is literally the only choice right now.
What it comes down to is that you want to build for the future. In that respect, I think Mozilla is the only route to go. You can't argue against W3C standards...
We're in complete agreement about the usefulness of W3C standards, but what I'm saying is that one of the benefits those standards provide is to allow developers to reduce their dependency on any single browser product. Unless and until Mozilla becomes the most popular browser, there'll be a benefit, in many cases, to not requiring it, or any other specific browser, for an application to work. Of course, as you say, it all depends on what you are doing.
I agree Mozilla is very promising, but we have live apps running now, and Mozilla isn't quite ready for prime time.
Also, the idea of requiring a particular browser negates one of the benefits of this approach. For us, a big factor in the decision to go in this direction was the underlying standards. In many cases, there's a significant benefit in being able to say "our app will run on any browser that supports the relevant W3C standards", rather than requiring that users install a browser which may be different than the one they're already using.
The application in question states that it is a fairly rich GUI front end. This may be too complex for a browser-based app.
See my post entitled "(D)HTML + XML" somewhere in this topic. If you think rich GUIs aren't viable with a browser-based app, you've either been misled by the lowest-common-demoninator apps you see on public web sites, or you're unfamiliar with the current state of browser technology and related standards, or both.
This probably doesn't meet all the criteria right now - due to lack of toolkits - but DHTML (i.e. HTML + DOM + Javascript), combined with XML and XSL, makes for a very viable, powerful, cross-platform, "rich GUI front end". Not only that, but it's standards-based, which is more than you can say for almost any other cross-platform GUI solution.
In places where browsers don't provide sophisticated enough widgets, e.g. combo/select boxes, you can use Java alternatives. For example, on the intranet systems I'm currently working on, we use a home-grown, XML-bound Java combo box which works just like the combos provided by typical GUI development tools.
DHTML-based apps can easily be made much more interactive than typical web apps, by using script to obtain (XML) data from the server and updating portions of pages rather than the standard browser model of reloading an entire page.
The following isn't very well organized, written on the fly, but benefits of a DHTML approach include:
Natural client/server model enforced by browsers supports and encourages development of a well-separated layered model. Can be used to implement simple two-tier systems which talk directly to a database, or more sophisticated, flexible three+ tier systems with an object-based middle layer (developed in Java for portability.)
The latest HTML, stylesheet (CSS) and XML/XSL standards support clear separation between "document" structure, presentation, and content. Reuse in software development is all about separating out functionality as much as possible - a blob that does 10 different things can't be reused as well as a focused entity which does one thing. CSS stylesheets allow you to reuse presentation definitions in different contexts, XML allows you to reuse data and queries, XSL (which applies a template to XML data) allows you to reuse "structure", i.e. implement the same layout for data in different contexts.
Although HTML is often thought of as inferior to traditional programmed GUI solutions, when it comes to DHTML and the associated technologies, this is a misperception. In some respects, such as the widgets mentioned above, it is lacking, but as mentioned, this can be addressed using judiciously applied Java objects. In other respects, such as its handling of multimedia content (images, sound, movies), its hypertext capabilities, and its free-format layout, it is far superior. Applications can be developed which allow a user to navigate freely between entities far more easily than they ever could with traditional GUI database applications.
Declarative rather than procedural model used by all these technologies (HTML, CSS, XML, XSL), lends itself to automation via toolkits.
Prediction about the future: this technology is moving fast, and is likely to catch and outstrip existing GUI application development models quite quickly, at least when it comes to traditional database-oriented applications. Developing a system like this now is a bet on the future direction of such systems, and will avoid you having to retool and relearn in a few years time when the limitations of your non-browser-based cross-platform application become problematic.
The problems I see with this approach at the moment are:
Do-everything toolkits for this kind of application are not yet available. Although there are toolkits which work for particular layers of such an application (especially a middle object-based layer), there's nothing I know of that's oriented towards creating cross-platform "rich GUI" systems in a browser. The user-interface aspects of web application development toolkits tend to be oriented towards the simple, "list products, order product" type of application required by business-to-consumer web sites. On the positive side, you can still use products for web page design and so on, you just have to live with working quite a bit in a non-visual code mode to add your custom widgets, Javascript, etc.
You'll be something of a pioneer developing an application like this now. All the old sayings like "pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs" exist for good reasons. No one ever got fired for churning out another application with the same old reliable-but-limited existing technology.
Bottom line, you should at least consider a browser-based application in a case like this.
Sure, anonymous banking raises a bunch of concerns, but banking isn't really the issue. I can walk into a record store right now, wearing a trenchcoat and dark sunglasses (apologies to Keanu), and buy a CD with cash, achieving a reasonable degree of anonymity. By Bronfman's argument, this shouldn't be allowed.
These entreched media-biz execs sabotage their own arguments when they try to impose unreasonable limitations on all paying customers in order to protect themselves from a minority of abusers. They deserve to lose money to "pirates", because they're trying to fight fire with fire, forgetting that they still have to convince customers to buy their stuff. If their customers become innocent victims in the piracy wars, the media companies will suffer the consequences, one way or another.
I don't think you're insane, although I'm not sure that full-time piracy is the answer.
I moved to the United States from a country with oppressive laws, because I saw the U.S. as emphasizing individual freedoms (sometimes at great cost to the society, e.g. gun ownership rights.) But the U.S. now seems to be moving from being a country which emphasizes the freedom of the individual, to one which emphasizes the freedom of corporations to exploit the individual.
I do hold out some hope that in the long run, bad laws like the DMCA and the incipient UCITA will be overturned or weakened, just as the CDA was. In the meantime, millions of people will have been turned into lawbreakers. When a law is bad, in some cases our moral duty is to break it. If we go along with it, we become collaborators in a greater crime, and are as much at fault for the situation as those who lobbied for the laws in the first place.
In this case, fair use is one of the issues, but full-blown piracy (selling or giving away copyrighted content to others) goes way beyond fair use. I'm not sure that this sends the right message - it may only lead to more of an arms race, as corporations try harder to protect their content. Wide-scale piracy will only bolster their case within the legal system, and may encourage stricter laws.
That said, I don't know what the answer is, other than supporting people and organizations that are against these laws, supporting software which allows fair use of content (open source and otherwise), educating people on the subject, and so on.
It's not Linux, but if your goal is just a reasonably stable machine that can run most Windows-y things including most of the consumer devices out there, either NT4 or Win2000 will do a much better job than Win98. Neither are quite as well supported, driver-wise, as Win98, but you can get most things working with them, and once they work, it's pretty stable.
I have a media PC that was running NT4 with a Creative Encore 8x (with Dxr3) and a Hauppauge WinTV card. That machine also has a SCSI HP scanner, a Smartmedia (digital film) reader, and an Ethernet connection to the Internet. It never crashes.
Over the past few days, I've upgraded this machine to Win2000, mainly to be able to start connecting USB devices to it, since NT4 has no USB support. So far, everything's working fine under Win2000, although I had to switch from the Creative Dxr3 drivers to the Hollywood Plus drivers directly from Sigma Designs, since Creative doesn't seem to support W2K yet.
The bland marketing-speak of the interview responses are necessary because SCO can't come out and admit what it's really trying to do.
In an attempt to avoid total obsolescence as the Unix market shakes out in response to open source systems, SCO wants to be closely associated with Linux so that it becomes a choice that people will consider when looking for a commercial Unix to supplement or replace Linux systems.
I've seen clients "upgrade" servers that have become important from FreeBSD to BSDI, or from Linux to Solaris, for example, for reasons mainly relating to management perception - they feel more comfortable using a commercial product, basically.
If SCO has ties to Linux users through the products and services it provides, it is better able to position itself as being a logical upgrade for users looking for a commercial alternative.
Theoretically that's what the market is supposed to do. In the case of microsoft if the market had paid attention they wouldn't have gotten away with all they did.
But the market didn't do that in this case and others, which is the whole point.
In practical matters more regulation is still a bad thing because it makes private companies more difficult to run and doesn't do anything for the conscious consumer.
Regulation absolutely does do something for the conscious consumer! Regulation can level the playing field, allowing competition, especially from smaller companies, to succeed in the face of much larger competitors, so that those smaller companies can provide services to meet the needs of those conscious consumers. How many companies have avoided getting into a particular software category because they knew that if they were successful, chances were that Microsoft would just add the functionality to their OS for free?
In addition, you may consider yourself a conscious consumer when it comes to software, for example, but how are you when it comes to medical, financial or airline services, for example? When you go to a doctor, do you check out her credentials and success record? When you fly, do you check the accident rate of the airline and type of aircraft you fly on? When you put money in a bank, do you check the financial stability of that bank? Many people who are conscious consumers in many ways don't actually do these things, but they can be reasonably sure they aren't going to be killed on the operating table, plunge 40,000 feet into the Montana mud, or lose all the money in their savings account, because, in large part, of regulation and oversight by (gasp!) the government.
If you think that we could live in a civilized society without any regulation, you either have too much faith in human nature, or you haven't yet realized how regulation affects nearly every aspect of our modern lives. In a broader sense, laws themselves are a form of regulation. They're intended to stop people or companies from doing bad things to each other. The question is not whether or not we should have regulations at all, it's what kind of regulation is good and what is bad.
I believe this is Lessig's point: regulations that allow competitive access to large national communications networks have the potential to benefit everybody, and won't negatively affect smaller businesses or individuals in any way. The only parties who could claim to be negatively affected are the large network owners, but in fact in the end such regulations may be in their own interest too.
ESR is right to say that regulations wouldn't be necessary if everyone behaved in their enlightened self-interest. But large companies are notoriously bad at figuring out what their enlightened self-interest is.
One of the kinds of regulation that Lessig is in favor of is that of requiring large communication network owners, like Time Warner/AOL, to allow smaller service providers to have access to their network in order to (re)sell services.
Until someone can explain to me why it's a good idea for these mega-corporations to be allowed to leverage their size and ownership of key resources to dictate how and what we can connect to, and to squeeze smaller competitors out, I agree with Lessig: this kind of regulation is important.
I haven't seen many posts addressing this specific issue. I wonder how many actually realize what's being discussed?
Nah, that level of control - using electrodes which measure some aspect of the electrical variations of the brain or nervous system - has been done by many people, including researchers, commercial organizations, and the military, in the US, UK, and Israel to name a few that I'm aware of. It's still in the very early stages in terms of practicality, though. All the demos I've seen of it involve very simple control mechanisms which are often biased in such a way is to make it appear more impressive than it really is.
For example, there was an off-the-shelf "mind mouse" available in computer stores in the US a few years ago. It worked off a finger sensor, and the store demos used a skiing game in which you could move a character left or right by thinking. However, the demo was such that it was difficult to tell when you were actually making a difference. It appeared to sort of work sometimes, but for all I know it could have been a total scam.
But the hypothesis behind this patent is rather different, since it not only implies a way to perform such control without wires at some distance, but if valid (which I seriously doubt) would have some interesting implications for physics and our understanding of the universe.
Even if their hypothesis *is* valid, though, it's even less likely that it would ever result in usable control devices, given the demonstrated unreliability of direct electrical hookups.
The ball analogy is not only imperfect, it glosses over one of the central philosophical questions raised by quantum physics. It's not just that we don't know what state the particles are in, it's that the state of the particles is not decided until they are observed in some fashion, and exactly what does and doesn't constitute an observation is still a subject of debate and research. And you can't just get out of this by saying "how do we know that the particle's state isn't pre-decided, but we just don't know what it is yet", because tests have been done to rule this out.
This bugged the heck out of Einstein ("spooky action at a distance"), and I suspect if the answer was as simple as the balls and socks analogy, someone would have pointed that out to him if he didn't figure it out himself!
Davies is a good author, but...
on
The Mind of God
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· Score: 2
...like most other authors, Davies wants his books to sell.
When Stephen Hawking published his "Brief History of Time", he was fond of recounting how his publishers warned him against using mathematical formulae in the book - that each formula would result in the corresponding loss of x-thousand sales. As a result, the only formula published in the final book, IIRC, was E=mc^2.
Davies' expression of faith in the meaningfulness of humanity's existence is similarly oriented towards mass appeal. Regardless of whether Davies believes this or not, he probably would have been forced to say something along these lines, or risk reviews describing his book as "painting a bleak picture of man's ultimate insignificance", which would turn off the masses of people who are looking for people with fuzzy beards to tell them what their life means.
Nobody ever lost money telling people what they want to hear...
...which is that by rolling your own solution, you potentially get more power and capability than the consumer device will give you. That's not as true if you build your own dishwasher.
For example, a home-built digital TV recorder gives you MPEG files which you could easily save out to DVD-RAM, something the Tivo won't let you do. Or, you can email the files to your friends (gotta love those cable modems!) Or, as someone else suggested, you can telnet in from somewhere else and set it to record a show you just heard about. The list goes on...
The point is that gaining greater control over digital devices has enormous potential for integration and synergy, which doesn't apply to dishwashers (dishwashers that don't have CPUs, that is...)
So your economic comparison, in this case, is ignoring (placing no value on) a major benefit of the alternative. A system with features like I've just described probably can't be had for even $10,000 off the shelf right now, so it comes down to what it's worth to you.
Heck, I've just convinced myself to buy a Hauppage card!
The problem is that this software is in use at schools and libraries. This means that large numbers of children and adults will be blocked from seeing sites for invalid reasons, without knowing what those reasons are. This is censorship being imposed on a wide scale, by a corporation, for its own benefit - an unprecedented situation, AFAIK, and one that must not be tolerated if we want to live in societies that even resembling free ones.
Further, the issue of censorship on the Internet is in its infancy. Australia has already "shown the way" with its legal requirement that all Internet users run filtering software. It is important to ensure that filtering software companies are accountable, before they start gaining the force of law behind some of their questionable behaviors.
It has already been proven that no formula can generate the Nth digit of PI
I'd be interested to see that proof, since a formula for calculating the nth digit of pi does exist. The only catch is, the formula calculates the nth digit of pi in hexadecimal.
If there really is a proof that it's impossible, then presumably that's for base 10 numbers? Do you have a reference?
Thanks for the explanation, I understand your point a bit better now."My whole point is I find a problem with placing the value of a product or service in something that isn't the function or ends of a product or service."
Brand marketing wouldn't be so successful if there weren't some reason for it. Brands can have value, when a company produces a good product, stands behind it with good service, and becomes well-known for that. That is the essence of a brand. That's why people might pay more for a product based on its brand. They're placing trust in a known manufacturer.
In some cases - although fewer than marketers would like to believe - the qualities that make for a good brand may spill over across product lines. For example, if I think that Sony make good TVs and CD players, I might also be inclined to plunk down $2500 for a robot dog made by Sony. I'd want to be a lot more careful about paying that kind of money for a robot dog made by an unknown corporation in another country.
By buying a particular company's products, you're supporting that company and in essence saying that you'd like that company to succeed in preference to its competitors. Your money will help to grow that company, and might allow it to expand into other product areas. When they do that, it's reasonable for them to come out and market their product to customers that have bought from them in the past - after all, those people are most likely to be receptive to the product. Often, expansion into other areas is driven by requests from the company's own customers.
In that sense, it seems reasonable that Scott Adams might want people who're familiar with Dilbert to be aware that he's producing a product which might appeal to them. The picture of Dilbert on the box tells us that this product was conceived and supported by someone who we have a prior relationship with, no matter how unrelated. It's then up to us, the customer, to decide how much value to place in that. We might decide that Adams knows nothing about the food industry and should be ignored. If the product really sucks, it's unlikely to succeed, Dilbert or no.
In fact, isn't Adams just doing exactly what Eric Raymond says is one of the reasons authors of open source software succeed - i.e. scratching a personal itch? Why on earth else would he choose to make frozen burritos, of all things? If that's the case, and if he succeeds at his (presumed) goal of producing nutritous, convenient, tasty frozen food, then Dilbert readers might actively benefit from the cross-promotion. If you found that you really liked them, would you still have a problem with how you heard about them?
I think that your objection really boils down to the fact that you don't expect that Adams' venture will produce very good burritos, and you dislike the "brand" having been used to promote something that isn't likely to have quality comparable to his main product, Dilbert.
But, assuming Adams' intentions were honorable, I think he should be given credit for trying. If his burritos don't succeed, hopefully he'll learn from that (e.g. there's a reason that mass-produced frozen foods suck) and go on to do something more worthwhile.
No, I don't see your point, but that's because you haven't made one yet. You object to all businesses larger than a certain size? To businesses that use brand names to market their products, or more specifically, to brand cross-marketing? To the fact that consumers accept and buy products that you don't approve of, or products that are marketed in ways that you don't approve of?
Aside from the particular brands you mentioned, are there other nationally or globally marketed products or services that you do find acceptable? Do you enjoy the fact that the mass-produced computer you're using was quite cheap?
I'm not saying there's absolutely nothing in the point you seem to be driving at, but you're not being very specific about what it is. If you can't even describe what you don't like, you have no hope of ever changing it, or even convincing other people not to like it. That makes you as much a part of the problem as every other consumer happily munching on their happy meal or Dilberito.
Um, could someone explain to me what the criteria are for being a whore, in this context? Is it that any commercial venture, i.e. investing a lot of time and money into creating a product that people might actually want to buy, automatically qualifies the person behind it as a whore? Were Steve Jobs and Wozniak whores when they started Apple? If you assume for a moment that Scott Adams honestly feels that available fast food options leave something to be desired, and is honestly attempting to provide an alternative, then what exactly is whore-like about this activity? Is it that he appears to have failed to reach is goal (i.e. they don't taste that good)? Or that he's exploiting his success in another area (comics) for marketing purposes? After all, it seems to me that if Adams really just wanted to make money, there are a lot better ways to do it than to start a food company with a small product range. I propose that the appelation "whore" in this context is just a knee-jerk reaction from people who have yet to do anything useful with their lives (and may never...)
I don't think anyone can accuse Katz's articles of having too much substance - too much BS, too much hype, too many unexamined assumptions, too many cliches, but not too much substance!
And we all get the privilege of witnessing Katz's excruciatingly slow education. Someone should pay for him to go do CS at MIT or something. The way he's going, he should discover LISP by 2021.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost any cross-platform solution is vulnerable to bugs and variations from one platform to another, especially when you have to support both Windows and Unix (and Mac, as in the original question). The problems with DHTML may be different, but aren't worse than those that exist in other cross-platform environments. As I mentioned, the only significant drawback we've found is the lack of comprehensive RAD tools tailored to this sort of application, but for our purposes, the benefits of this approach outweigh that.
Browser differences can be quite well managed using things like browser-specific stylesheet selection on the server side, and Javascript objects which are parameterized for the browser they're running under. We're doing this now, in systems that have been in operation for some time. If a particular browser version doesn't support a specific feature, too bad, but we haven't found this to be a big problem.
As for the suggestion re Perl under Unix on the server side, the whole point of my original post was to describe what can be done to increase interactivity and "richness" of the browser interface on the client side, in cases where you don't get to choose the browser or OS.
I'm talking about database-oriented apps that require more sophistication than typical public web apps, to support complex and/or dense data presentation requirements, high-speed data entry, etc.
Client-side file I/O is not an issue in this kind of application. What is needed is communication behind the scenes between the browser and the server, controlled by scripting in the browser. Otherwise, almost any user action results in a delay while the user waits for a server roundtrip and a page to load.
As a simple example of what I'm talking about, think of adding rows to a table that's being displayed. Using DHTML and script, when the user asks to save a row, the data that's just been entered is immediately added to the table at the client side, and an asynchronous request is sent to the server to add the record. The user can immediately carry on and add another record. If the asynchronous add fails, then a message will be displayed and the table will be updated accordingly. Without DHTML, the user has to wait for an entire page load between each record, which isn't acceptable in the kind of scenarios I'm talking about.
Taking this kind of approach throughout an application results in a system that's qualitatively quite different from an "ordinary" web app, and in many ways is richer and more usable than a traditional GUI database app with its rigid grid controls and inflexible formatting.
For more info, see the W3C Document Object Model page. As it says, "The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents."
Also, Javascript is very portable across all the major and not-so-major browsers, including Netscape, Mozilla, IE, and Opera. The point is not Javascript vs. PERL, but rather the availability of client-side scripting in a standard browser. For that, Javascript is literally the only choice right now.
We're in complete agreement about the usefulness of W3C standards, but what I'm saying is that one of the benefits those standards provide is to allow developers to reduce their dependency on any single browser product. Unless and until Mozilla becomes the most popular browser, there'll be a benefit, in many cases, to not requiring it, or any other specific browser, for an application to work. Of course, as you say, it all depends on what you are doing.
Also, the idea of requiring a particular browser negates one of the benefits of this approach. For us, a big factor in the decision to go in this direction was the underlying standards. In many cases, there's a significant benefit in being able to say "our app will run on any browser that supports the relevant W3C standards", rather than requiring that users install a browser which may be different than the one they're already using.
See my post entitled "(D)HTML + XML" somewhere in this topic. If you think rich GUIs aren't viable with a browser-based app, you've either been misled by the lowest-common-demoninator apps you see on public web sites, or you're unfamiliar with the current state of browser technology and related standards, or both.
In places where browsers don't provide sophisticated enough widgets, e.g. combo/select boxes, you can use Java alternatives. For example, on the intranet systems I'm currently working on, we use a home-grown, XML-bound Java combo box which works just like the combos provided by typical GUI development tools.
DHTML-based apps can easily be made much more interactive than typical web apps, by using script to obtain (XML) data from the server and updating portions of pages rather than the standard browser model of reloading an entire page.
The following isn't very well organized, written on the fly, but benefits of a DHTML approach include:
- Natural client/server model enforced by browsers supports and encourages development of a well-separated layered model. Can be used to implement simple two-tier systems which talk directly to a database, or more sophisticated, flexible three+ tier systems with an object-based middle layer (developed in Java for portability.)
- The latest HTML, stylesheet (CSS) and XML/XSL standards support clear separation between "document" structure, presentation, and content. Reuse in software development is all about separating out functionality as much as possible - a blob that does 10 different things can't be reused as well as a focused entity which does one thing. CSS stylesheets allow you to reuse presentation definitions in different contexts, XML allows you to reuse data and queries, XSL (which applies a template to XML data) allows you to reuse "structure", i.e. implement the same layout for data in different contexts.
- Although HTML is often thought of as inferior to traditional programmed GUI solutions, when it comes to DHTML and the associated technologies, this is a misperception. In some respects, such as the widgets mentioned above, it is lacking, but as mentioned, this can be addressed using judiciously applied Java objects. In other respects, such as its handling of multimedia content (images, sound, movies), its hypertext capabilities, and its free-format layout, it is far superior. Applications can be developed which allow a user to navigate freely between entities far more easily than they ever could with traditional GUI database applications.
- Declarative rather than procedural model used by all these technologies (HTML, CSS, XML, XSL), lends itself to automation via toolkits.
- Prediction about the future: this technology is moving fast, and is likely to catch and outstrip existing GUI application development models quite quickly, at least when it comes to traditional database-oriented applications. Developing a system like this now is a bet on the future direction of such systems, and will avoid you having to retool and relearn in a few years time when the limitations of your non-browser-based cross-platform application become problematic.
The problems I see with this approach at the moment are:- Do-everything toolkits for this kind of application are not yet available. Although there are toolkits which work for particular layers of such an application (especially a middle object-based layer), there's nothing I know of that's oriented towards creating cross-platform "rich GUI" systems in a browser. The user-interface aspects of web application development toolkits tend to be oriented towards the simple, "list products, order product" type of application required by business-to-consumer web sites. On the positive side, you can still use products for web page design and so on, you just have to live with working quite a bit in a non-visual code mode to add your custom widgets, Javascript, etc.
- You'll be something of a pioneer developing an application like this now. All the old sayings like "pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs" exist for good reasons. No one ever got fired for churning out another application with the same old reliable-but-limited existing technology.
Bottom line, you should at least consider a browser-based application in a case like this.These entreched media-biz execs sabotage their own arguments when they try to impose unreasonable limitations on all paying customers in order to protect themselves from a minority of abusers. They deserve to lose money to "pirates", because they're trying to fight fire with fire, forgetting that they still have to convince customers to buy their stuff. If their customers become innocent victims in the piracy wars, the media companies will suffer the consequences, one way or another.
A real life example of karma in action...
I moved to the United States from a country with oppressive laws, because I saw the U.S. as emphasizing individual freedoms (sometimes at great cost to the society, e.g. gun ownership rights.) But the U.S. now seems to be moving from being a country which emphasizes the freedom of the individual, to one which emphasizes the freedom of corporations to exploit the individual.
I do hold out some hope that in the long run, bad laws like the DMCA and the incipient UCITA will be overturned or weakened, just as the CDA was. In the meantime, millions of people will have been turned into lawbreakers. When a law is bad, in some cases our moral duty is to break it. If we go along with it, we become collaborators in a greater crime, and are as much at fault for the situation as those who lobbied for the laws in the first place.
In this case, fair use is one of the issues, but full-blown piracy (selling or giving away copyrighted content to others) goes way beyond fair use. I'm not sure that this sends the right message - it may only lead to more of an arms race, as corporations try harder to protect their content. Wide-scale piracy will only bolster their case within the legal system, and may encourage stricter laws.
That said, I don't know what the answer is, other than supporting people and organizations that are against these laws, supporting software which allows fair use of content (open source and otherwise), educating people on the subject, and so on.
Eeewww, rogue drivers under NT4 - isn't life too short for that? OTOH, what is kernel32.dll but a big rogue driver???;-)
It's not Linux, but if your goal is just a reasonably stable machine that can run most Windows-y things including most of the consumer devices out there, either NT4 or Win2000 will do a much better job than Win98. Neither are quite as well supported, driver-wise, as Win98, but you can get most things working with them, and once they work, it's pretty stable.
I have a media PC that was running NT4 with a Creative Encore 8x (with Dxr3) and a Hauppauge WinTV card. That machine also has a SCSI HP scanner, a Smartmedia (digital film) reader, and an Ethernet connection to the Internet. It never crashes.
Over the past few days, I've upgraded this machine to Win2000, mainly to be able to start connecting USB devices to it, since NT4 has no USB support. So far, everything's working fine under Win2000, although I had to switch from the Creative Dxr3 drivers to the Hollywood Plus drivers directly from Sigma Designs, since Creative doesn't seem to support W2K yet.
In an attempt to avoid total obsolescence as the Unix market shakes out in response to open source systems, SCO wants to be closely associated with Linux so that it becomes a choice that people will consider when looking for a commercial Unix to supplement or replace Linux systems.
I've seen clients "upgrade" servers that have become important from FreeBSD to BSDI, or from Linux to Solaris, for example, for reasons mainly relating to management perception - they feel more comfortable using a commercial product, basically.
If SCO has ties to Linux users through the products and services it provides, it is better able to position itself as being a logical upgrade for users looking for a commercial alternative.
But the market didn't do that in this case and others, which is the whole point.
In practical matters more regulation is still a bad thing because it makes private companies more difficult to run and doesn't do anything for the conscious consumer.
Regulation absolutely does do something for the conscious consumer! Regulation can level the playing field, allowing competition, especially from smaller companies, to succeed in the face of much larger competitors, so that those smaller companies can provide services to meet the needs of those conscious consumers. How many companies have avoided getting into a particular software category because they knew that if they were successful, chances were that Microsoft would just add the functionality to their OS for free?
In addition, you may consider yourself a conscious consumer when it comes to software, for example, but how are you when it comes to medical, financial or airline services, for example? When you go to a doctor, do you check out her credentials and success record? When you fly, do you check the accident rate of the airline and type of aircraft you fly on? When you put money in a bank, do you check the financial stability of that bank? Many people who are conscious consumers in many ways don't actually do these things, but they can be reasonably sure they aren't going to be killed on the operating table, plunge 40,000 feet into the Montana mud, or lose all the money in their savings account, because, in large part, of regulation and oversight by (gasp!) the government.
If you think that we could live in a civilized society without any regulation, you either have too much faith in human nature, or you haven't yet realized how regulation affects nearly every aspect of our modern lives. In a broader sense, laws themselves are a form of regulation. They're intended to stop people or companies from doing bad things to each other. The question is not whether or not we should have regulations at all, it's what kind of regulation is good and what is bad.
I believe this is Lessig's point: regulations that allow competitive access to large national communications networks have the potential to benefit everybody, and won't negatively affect smaller businesses or individuals in any way. The only parties who could claim to be negatively affected are the large network owners, but in fact in the end such regulations may be in their own interest too.
ESR is right to say that regulations wouldn't be necessary if everyone behaved in their enlightened self-interest. But large companies are notoriously bad at figuring out what their enlightened self-interest is.
Until someone can explain to me why it's a good idea for these mega-corporations to be allowed to leverage their size and ownership of key resources to dictate how and what we can connect to, and to squeeze smaller competitors out, I agree with Lessig: this kind of regulation is important.
I haven't seen many posts addressing this specific issue. I wonder how many actually realize what's being discussed?
For example, there was an off-the-shelf "mind mouse" available in computer stores in the US a few years ago. It worked off a finger sensor, and the store demos used a skiing game in which you could move a character left or right by thinking. However, the demo was such that it was difficult to tell when you were actually making a difference. It appeared to sort of work sometimes, but for all I know it could have been a total scam.
But the hypothesis behind this patent is rather different, since it not only implies a way to perform such control without wires at some distance, but if valid (which I seriously doubt) would have some interesting implications for physics and our understanding of the universe.
Even if their hypothesis *is* valid, though, it's even less likely that it would ever result in usable control devices, given the demonstrated unreliability of direct electrical hookups.
This bugged the heck out of Einstein ("spooky action at a distance"), and I suspect if the answer was as simple as the balls and socks analogy, someone would have pointed that out to him if he didn't figure it out himself!
When Stephen Hawking published his "Brief History of Time", he was fond of recounting how his publishers warned him against using mathematical formulae in the book - that each formula would result in the corresponding loss of x-thousand sales. As a result, the only formula published in the final book, IIRC, was E=mc^2.
Davies' expression of faith in the meaningfulness of humanity's existence is similarly oriented towards mass appeal. Regardless of whether Davies believes this or not, he probably would have been forced to say something along these lines, or risk reviews describing his book as "painting a bleak picture of man's ultimate insignificance", which would turn off the masses of people who are looking for people with fuzzy beards to tell them what their life means.
Nobody ever lost money telling people what they want to hear...
For example, a home-built digital TV recorder gives you MPEG files which you could easily save out to DVD-RAM, something the Tivo won't let you do. Or, you can email the files to your friends (gotta love those cable modems!) Or, as someone else suggested, you can telnet in from somewhere else and set it to record a show you just heard about. The list goes on...
The point is that gaining greater control over digital devices has enormous potential for integration and synergy, which doesn't apply to dishwashers (dishwashers that don't have CPUs, that is...)
So your economic comparison, in this case, is ignoring (placing no value on) a major benefit of the alternative. A system with features like I've just described probably can't be had for even $10,000 off the shelf right now, so it comes down to what it's worth to you.
Heck, I've just convinced myself to buy a Hauppage card!
I figured it was probably possible - my previous message was just politely trying to find out whether the first poster knew what he was talking about.
Further, the issue of censorship on the Internet is in its infancy. Australia has already "shown the way" with its legal requirement that all Internet users run filtering software. It is important to ensure that filtering software companies are accountable, before they start gaining the force of law behind some of their questionable behaviors.
I'd be interested to see that proof, since a formula for calculating the nth digit of pi does exist. The only catch is, the formula calculates the nth digit of pi in hexadecimal.
If there really is a proof that it's impossible, then presumably that's for base 10 numbers? Do you have a reference?
Brand marketing wouldn't be so successful if there weren't some reason for it. Brands can have value, when a company produces a good product, stands behind it with good service, and becomes well-known for that. That is the essence of a brand. That's why people might pay more for a product based on its brand. They're placing trust in a known manufacturer.
In some cases - although fewer than marketers would like to believe - the qualities that make for a good brand may spill over across product lines. For example, if I think that Sony make good TVs and CD players, I might also be inclined to plunk down $2500 for a robot dog made by Sony. I'd want to be a lot more careful about paying that kind of money for a robot dog made by an unknown corporation in another country.
By buying a particular company's products, you're supporting that company and in essence saying that you'd like that company to succeed in preference to its competitors. Your money will help to grow that company, and might allow it to expand into other product areas. When they do that, it's reasonable for them to come out and market their product to customers that have bought from them in the past - after all, those people are most likely to be receptive to the product. Often, expansion into other areas is driven by requests from the company's own customers.
In that sense, it seems reasonable that Scott Adams might want people who're familiar with Dilbert to be aware that he's producing a product which might appeal to them. The picture of Dilbert on the box tells us that this product was conceived and supported by someone who we have a prior relationship with, no matter how unrelated. It's then up to us, the customer, to decide how much value to place in that. We might decide that Adams knows nothing about the food industry and should be ignored. If the product really sucks, it's unlikely to succeed, Dilbert or no.
In fact, isn't Adams just doing exactly what Eric Raymond says is one of the reasons authors of open source software succeed - i.e. scratching a personal itch? Why on earth else would he choose to make frozen burritos, of all things? If that's the case, and if he succeeds at his (presumed) goal of producing nutritous, convenient, tasty frozen food, then Dilbert readers might actively benefit from the cross-promotion. If you found that you really liked them, would you still have a problem with how you heard about them?
I think that your objection really boils down to the fact that you don't expect that Adams' venture will produce very good burritos, and you dislike the "brand" having been used to promote something that isn't likely to have quality comparable to his main product, Dilbert.
But, assuming Adams' intentions were honorable, I think he should be given credit for trying. If his burritos don't succeed, hopefully he'll learn from that (e.g. there's a reason that mass-produced frozen foods suck) and go on to do something more worthwhile.
No, I don't see your point, but that's because you haven't made one yet. You object to all businesses larger than a certain size? To businesses that use brand names to market their products, or more specifically, to brand cross-marketing? To the fact that consumers accept and buy products that you don't approve of, or products that are marketed in ways that you don't approve of?
Aside from the particular brands you mentioned, are there other nationally or globally marketed products or services that you do find acceptable? Do you enjoy the fact that the mass-produced computer you're using was quite cheap?
I'm not saying there's absolutely nothing in the point you seem to be driving at, but you're not being very specific about what it is. If you can't even describe what you don't like, you have no hope of ever changing it, or even convincing other people not to like it. That makes you as much a part of the problem as every other consumer happily munching on their happy meal or Dilberito.
Um, could someone explain to me what the criteria are for being a whore, in this context? Is it that any commercial venture, i.e. investing a lot of time and money into creating a product that people might actually want to buy, automatically qualifies the person behind it as a whore? Were Steve Jobs and Wozniak whores when they started Apple? If you assume for a moment that Scott Adams honestly feels that available fast food options leave something to be desired, and is honestly attempting to provide an alternative, then what exactly is whore-like about this activity? Is it that he appears to have failed to reach is goal (i.e. they don't taste that good)? Or that he's exploiting his success in another area (comics) for marketing purposes? After all, it seems to me that if Adams really just wanted to make money, there are a lot better ways to do it than to start a food company with a small product range. I propose that the appelation "whore" in this context is just a knee-jerk reaction from people who have yet to do anything useful with their lives (and may never...)
I don't think anyone can accuse Katz's articles of having too much substance - too much BS, too much hype, too many unexamined assumptions, too many cliches, but not too much substance!
And we all get the privilege of witnessing Katz's excruciatingly slow education. Someone should pay for him to go do CS at MIT or something. The way he's going, he should discover LISP by 2021.