Yeah, one look at that web site is enough to convince me that this is another amateur effort, not worth my time. I wonder how they managed to get Business Week to give them a blurb?
The sad thing is that I didn't even notice when SGI spun off Alias 20 months ago. And I used to work there! Shows how far SGI has slipped below everybody's relevence radar.
And according to some interpretations, that's what happened to China: it was taken over by the Communist International. That was the POV not just of the Chinese Nationalists, but also of most Western governments. (And indeed the Soviets did give Mao and his bunch a lot of support.) Which is why nobody outside the Communist Bloc recognized the PRC for years, and why Taiwan/ROC represented China in the U.N. (including their permanent seat on the Security Council) for two decades after they lost the mainland. Of course, in reality, the Chinese civil war was a lot more complicated than that. But so was the Occupation of France.
... and the government set up by Germany was never accepted by the people of France.
That's the Hollywood version of the Occupation. In actual history, Petain's government wasn't set up by the Germans. It came to power just before the French forces fell apart, and sued for peace shortly thereafter. This decision wasn't universally popular, but it did have widespread support — aside from people who thought that Germany's invasion of Poland had nothing to do with them, there were a lot of French who were as Fascist as anybody in the Fascist countries. The same people remained in power throughout the war, and remained neutral throughout, despite German pressure to rejoin the war on the Axis side. Of course, this neutrality was pretty phony — Petain did a lot to help the German war effort, and had no compunction about handing over France's Jews, or letting the Germans draft Frenchmen for slave labor. But he did so with widespread French support. And, not incidentally, his government retained the recognition of the U.S., even after we went to war with Germany! This recognition was only rescinded 5 minutes before the first invasion of French territory in Africa.
It's extremely easy to see how the french governement in exhile had a perfectly valid claim on being the legitimate government during WWII.
Easy to see now. Wasn't that easy to see at the time. The "government in exile" was a motley collection of bozos who had simply refused their orders to surrender. Many French people considered them traitors, and there was no clear leader until pretty late in the game.
There's no such similar situation in China at all right now. Taiwan claiming to be the legitimate government of China is about as valid as me claiming to be the king of Spain.
And if the government in Taiwan had been set up last week, you'd have a point. But it wasn't. It was actaully set up on the mainland almost a century ago, after the Empire was overthrown. When they lost the civil war, they moved they moved the entire government to Taipei. (For years, legislators went through the motions of representing their old districts on the mainland.) A pretty straightforward government in exile. The fact that 50 years later that government in exile has turned into an empty charade is beside the point.
The US not recognizing China was a purely political move because we had to "fight communism"...
Once again, a simplistic version of history. I never bought into the Evil Communist Conspiracy theory of the cold war. Nevertheless, the cold war was not "just politics". There were serious social and moral issues at stake. And that especially true for the part of the war that determined the fate of China.
Did you miss the part where they don't have a lot of money? Even if they steal (urk!) Win2K, they'd probably have to buy more memory to support it. Ideological issues aside, Linux is the only viable upgrade path when you don't have funds for new hardware or software.
The problem is that the PRC has made it clear they're more happy with Taiwan remaining the ROC than claiming independence. My guess is that they like the patently ridiculous claim that Taiwan is the legitimate government of China a lot more than a very tenable claim that Taiwan is independent.
Sure, that's a no-brainer. As long as Taiwan is officially the "Republic of China", their international status is on a par with the Confederate States of America. Other countries can't recognize them, because that would mean denying the legitimacy of the PRC. But if the ROC ever becomes the ROT, that's all out the window. And international recognition of a separate Taiwan would be the first step to China giving up Taiwan forever.
However, there's nothing ridiculous about Taiwan being the base for a Chinese government in exile, any more than it was for France's African colonies being a similar base for the Free French during World War II. And indeed, the ROC's sovereignty over all of China was recognized by many nations for years &mdash in the case of the U.S., until 1971, twenty years after they lost control of the mainland!
Of course it's now 50 years since the Nationalists lost the civil war fled to Taiwan. And since 2000, they don't even control Taiwan. So, yeah, the "Republic of China" is a dead letter, and sounds really silly. But that little fiction is the only thing standing between Taiwan and invasion by the Chinese. So it's one we're stuck with, for now. A little political silliness is small price to pay for not having a major war.
There's also the fact that the officially Taiwan is known as the Republic of China. (God knows where the Register got that "Republic of Taiwan" nonsense.) This is a hangover from when Taiwan was ruled by the losing side in the Chinese civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. The Nationalists, like the Communists, consider Taiwan part of China. Ironically, since losing power to the Democratic Progressives, the Nationalists have found common cause with their former adversaries in Beijing in opposing a formal declaration of Taiwanese indpendence.
And note that even though Taiwan is ruled by a pro-independence party, they still haven't declared formal independence or changed the official name of the country.
Is it any wonder that Google wants to punt?
Re:Finally, Google expands into animals
on
Google Ant
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· Score: 1
...everyone provides "input" into the process, and the end result all too often is a least-common-denominator mess.... The studio's really need to step back from the process, and trust the director and writer's vision.
An executive who did that might help create a better movie — but he'd also establish that he's superfluous to the movie making process. All those brainless suits don't meddle because they're convinced they know more than the directors or the writers. They do it to justify their 7-figure salaries.
It's obvious enough that the right way to make good movies is to just hire good talent and let them do their thing. What's less obviou is how Hollywood is going to change to allow that.
... they're now willing to produce movies their customers will want to see.
Say what? You honestly believe that studio execs have been telling each other, "we don't need to make movies that people want to see?" That makes no sense.
They've always been trying to make popular movies — they're just not any good at it. They're part of a system that is thoroughly dysfunctional. It discourages risk taking and creativity. Most of all, the idea of actually telling a story is completely overlooked.
Anybody who tries to point these problems out tends to lose their job. So everybody plays it safe and puts up with all the bullshit until they can't ignore it any longer. (Rather like most big companies I've worked for!) That's why they've been in denial. Not because they're too dumb to understand concept of selling stuff people want.
Knowing "how music works" is essential for singing it
Nonsense. There was music long before there were books about it. Music is hard-wired into the mammalian brain. The skills you learn from a music teacher is extremely helpful and useful, but music itself is something you're born knowing how to do.
Irving Berlin is a case in point. Despite being a gifted songwriter (literally hundreds of hits), he never learned to read music at all, and only learned to play the piano in one key. Solution: hire somebody to build a special piano that could transpose with the pull of a lever, and somebody else to transcribe the music and songs he created.
OK, not a solution for everybody. And besides, the musical skills you mention are certainly work acquiring. But there are passable technological substitutes. Berlin had no trouble finding them 80 years ago. He'd have even less now.
I'm told that Danny Elfman also resorts to technological substitutes for musical training. But I find his work predictable and repetitive, so never mind.
Re:Finally, Google expands into animals
on
Google Ant
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not funny! 5 years ago, when "Intelligent Agents" were all the rage, lots of people were envisioning little animated creatures on your computer screens that would "fetch" information for you. (Naturally a AT&T commercial featured an talking dog.) The reality never progressed beyond lame little projects like that company (its name escapes me) that soaked up huge amounts of venture capital, and whose only real product was a particularly limited PDA. And of course, there's Microsoft's agent technology, which is known mainly for its irritating avatars such as clippy and Bob.
I now view all pseudo-biological software with extreme suspicion. Especially after playing with Seaman
You make some good points. Maybe a little too good. I notice you're making this post in the context of the Mono people getting locked out of a Microsoft conference. It's obvious that Microsoft does not want its developers or users playing with Linux. So if you intend to port any of your.NET apps to Linux, you do so without their support — and probably with their active hinderance!
Of course science isn't bad just because it's old. But even old science that's good is mostly useless now, because it's based on premises that modern scientists just can't work with.
Leonardo's contributions to science and technology are mostly in the form of meticulous observation and clever design. That sort of thing doesn't get invalidated by the passage of time. If he had been more of a theoretician, modern scientists would sneer at him, they way they do at Aristotle — whose theories were the basis of most western science for centuries.
Fucking line-item mentality. Your high salary made you a target, never mind the fact that you earned it — or that your company probably hurt its bottom line by getting rid of you.
But that kind of bureaucratic stupidity doesn't mean "there are no friends out there". It just limits what your friends can do for you.
Much beloved? I've never heard of it. I wonder what's so special about it?
It had a shitload of features. I found it a few years back when I was googling for email clients with IMAP support. This was the middle of the Open Source boom, and everybody and his uncle was working on an email client — but almost all of them only supported POP3. I downloaded a trial, found it much too difficult to use, and lost interest.
In hindsight, it seems obvious the developers threw in IMAP support not because they thought it was important, but because they just didn't leave out any feature they could think of. So when somebody says the app is "beloved", they must mean "by feature geeks".
More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable.
You're correct, but off-target. Mulberry was anything but small. That was its biggest problem: you could go crazy figure out all the different things it did.
A smaller app would have been much more popular. Most people just want to send and receive email, and aren't interested in all the bells and whistles. But, as you point out, such an app probably wouldn't have been profitable.
Your comment is factually correct, but pretty off-topic. Mulberry bore little resmeblance to a typical Linux app. It was a commercial/closed-source, multi-platform app. There was a Linux port, but they didn't particularly focus on Linux. Or any other platform for that matter — they supported a lot of different platforms. Which certainly helped drive them into bankruptcy.
... doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program...
Which is also why nobody adopted this program. Lots of great features, but they didn't fit together in a useful way. The developers threw in every feature they could acquire or develop — but they never thought through the product as a whole.
I've said it before: an app is more than a collection of features.
Re:Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
The comment you replied to is pretty dumb. But hypocrisy is not one of its flaws. You can't hold one Linux advocate responsible for everything every other Linux advocate says.
The big flaw here is the assumption that the quality of Windows's default apps is important to anybody. I simply can't picture anybody saying "Windows Sucks" just because they had to pay extra for a fancy word processor or graphic program. The person is just making too much of the fact that Windows distros come with lots of free software. Which leaves one small factor out of the equation: very little of that software is any good.
When Mark Twain said, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated", it was funny. It was even funny the first gazillion times people worked it into other jokes. But now it's just a cliche. Let it rest.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, one look at that web site is enough to convince me that this is another amateur effort, not worth my time. I wonder how they managed to get Business Week to give them a blurb?
The need to recharge flashlights that people have accidentally swallowed is often overlooked.
The sad thing is that I didn't even notice when SGI spun off Alias 20 months ago. And I used to work there! Shows how far SGI has slipped below everybody's relevence radar.
Did you miss the part where they don't have a lot of money? Even if they steal (urk!) Win2K, they'd probably have to buy more memory to support it. Ideological issues aside, Linux is the only viable upgrade path when you don't have funds for new hardware or software.
However, there's nothing ridiculous about Taiwan being the base for a Chinese government in exile, any more than it was for France's African colonies being a similar base for the Free French during World War II. And indeed, the ROC's sovereignty over all of China was recognized by many nations for years &mdash in the case of the U.S., until 1971, twenty years after they lost control of the mainland!
Of course it's now 50 years since the Nationalists lost the civil war fled to Taiwan. And since 2000, they don't even control Taiwan. So, yeah, the "Republic of China" is a dead letter, and sounds really silly. But that little fiction is the only thing standing between Taiwan and invasion by the Chinese. So it's one we're stuck with, for now. A little political silliness is small price to pay for not having a major war.
And note that even though Taiwan is ruled by a pro-independence party, they still haven't declared formal independence or changed the official name of the country.
Is it any wonder that Google wants to punt?
Yes. Thank you for clearing that up.
It's obvious enough that the right way to make good movies is to just hire good talent and let them do their thing. What's less obviou is how Hollywood is going to change to allow that.
They've always been trying to make popular movies — they're just not any good at it. They're part of a system that is thoroughly dysfunctional. It discourages risk taking and creativity. Most of all, the idea of actually telling a story is completely overlooked.
Anybody who tries to point these problems out tends to lose their job. So everybody plays it safe and puts up with all the bullshit until they can't ignore it any longer. (Rather like most big companies I've worked for!) That's why they've been in denial. Not because they're too dumb to understand concept of selling stuff people want.
Irving Berlin is a case in point. Despite being a gifted songwriter (literally hundreds of hits), he never learned to read music at all, and only learned to play the piano in one key. Solution: hire somebody to build a special piano that could transpose with the pull of a lever, and somebody else to transcribe the music and songs he created.
OK, not a solution for everybody. And besides, the musical skills you mention are certainly work acquiring. But there are passable technological substitutes. Berlin had no trouble finding them 80 years ago. He'd have even less now.
I'm told that Danny Elfman also resorts to technological substitutes for musical training. But I find his work predictable and repetitive, so never mind.
I now view all pseudo-biological software with extreme suspicion. Especially after playing with Seaman
You make some good points. Maybe a little too good. I notice you're making this post in the context of the Mono people getting locked out of a Microsoft conference. It's obvious that Microsoft does not want its developers or users playing with Linux. So if you intend to port any of your .NET apps to Linux, you do so without their support — and probably with their active hinderance!
Leonardo's contributions to science and technology are mostly in the form of meticulous observation and clever design. That sort of thing doesn't get invalidated by the passage of time. If he had been more of a theoretician, modern scientists would sneer at him, they way they do at Aristotle — whose theories were the basis of most western science for centuries.
But that kind of bureaucratic stupidity doesn't mean "there are no friends out there". It just limits what your friends can do for you.
The specific mod would have been -10, assumes previous post was a pro-Linux flame, even though Linux was never mentioned.
In hindsight, it seems obvious the developers threw in IMAP support not because they thought it was important, but because they just didn't leave out any feature they could think of. So when somebody says the app is "beloved", they must mean "by feature geeks".
A smaller app would have been much more popular. Most people just want to send and receive email, and aren't interested in all the bells and whistles. But, as you point out, such an app probably wouldn't have been profitable.
Your comment is factually correct, but pretty off-topic. Mulberry bore little resmeblance to a typical Linux app. It was a commercial/closed-source, multi-platform app. There was a Linux port, but they didn't particularly focus on Linux. Or any other platform for that matter — they supported a lot of different platforms. Which certainly helped drive them into bankruptcy.
I've said it before: an app is more than a collection of features.
Remind me not to trust you with anything.
The big flaw here is the assumption that the quality of Windows's default apps is important to anybody. I simply can't picture anybody saying "Windows Sucks" just because they had to pay extra for a fancy word processor or graphic program. The person is just making too much of the fact that Windows distros come with lots of free software. Which leaves one small factor out of the equation: very little of that software is any good.
When Mark Twain said, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated", it was funny. It was even funny the first gazillion times people worked it into other jokes. But now it's just a cliche. Let it rest.