Basically you're saying, "MS has a monopoly, interoperability will damage that monopoly, therefore there will never be interoperability." The first two statement are perfectly true, but the third statement doesn't necessarilly follow. The fact is that they do sometimes attempt to improve interoperability. Sometimes because the relevant technology appeals to them (as with their increasing emphasis on XML file formats). Sometimes they just need to open up a little to hold off the people who want to break them up.
Which is why Bill Gates actually came out and said that his products are going to be more interoperable in the future. OK, maybe he's a baldfaced liar. But there's no reason we shouldn't try to hold him to his word.
Re:Still no word from the pr0n industry
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I bet that the porn industry goes for the HD-DVD because of it's backwards compatability....
We're talking about an someone who can carry a big movie. Not somebody you happen to have indecent fantasies about. CC does the catty high school diva very well -- but not as well as some other actresses I can think of. And I've never seen her do anything else.
Thank God! I thought I was the only person in the universe who noticed that Jessica Alba has the screen presence of a bagel.
Judging from past experience, Whedon will want to cast a relative unknown in the part, which will allow him to impose his own vision on the character. Except that the studios will definitely insist on a Big Name, for all the usual reasons. And they probably won't want the same kind of actor that Whedon will want. Which sets the stage for some nasty conflicts. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what has happened with every project Whedon has been involved with -- with the possible exception of the TV version of Buffy. Truth is, if I were a movie studio, I'd be very wary of the dude.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy and admire a lot of Whedon's work. But he's never seemed to be able to deal with making TV or movies as a truly collaborative process. At least, that's my explanation for why he's no longer friendly with a lot of the people he helped to success. And why Buffy became unwatchable as soon as Whedon started delegating its production.
Really, what you want, and works better than anything else, is a network of people who know you.
And in a perfect world, that would be the only way people would hire each other. The kind of networking you describe certainly helps. But the sad fact is that you need paper credentials just to get past the HR gatekeepers.
I think maybe we're stuck on the assumption that Microsoft is out to force its own technology on us, when they don't actually have that much control over events. The last time we talked about IE7, I made the assertion that CSS2 support was technically trivial. One guy came back with an interesting and thoughtful post pointing out the problems with IEs rendering engines and how proper CSS support would break a lot of web pages.
People tend to assume that every Microsoft action is part of some evil master plan. The truth is that they're stumbling around in the dark a lot. The software development effort is conspicuously out of control, and many of their projects are a total mess.
I imagine the Windows L&F uses native Windows components...
No, it doen't. They tried that approach early on in the AWT libraries, whose Java components relied on "peer components" from the native OS for actual functionality. This led to too many problems with inconsistencies, bugs, and undocumented behaviors. So the Swing library, of which the Pluggable L&F is a part, implements all components without reference to native components.
(At least, that's the Sun party line. I gather that Eclipse's SWT components do rely on native components. So it's not basically unfeasible.)
I have to admit that I can't explain why Microsoft has never gone after CodeWeavers for emulating the Windows L&F. Or have they?
There may not be any proof -- but if Apple wasn't prepared to get nasty, it was only because they hadn't noticed the web page yet. Apple is noriously intolerant of this kind of copying.
No joke. Ever notice that Java's pluggable L&Fs include a Windows L&F that only works on Windows? No technical reason it can't work with any Java runtime -- but if it did, Microsoft's lawyers would be on Sun in a heartbeat.
Google X was one of those ad-hoc projects that Google encourages its employees to get into. Which results in cool stuff, but also stuff that should have been run by the lawyers first.
...all this does is shift the pollution elsewhere.
That's a glib, superficial analysis. A power plant might support 1 million electric cars without burning as much oil as a million cars. Plus it's a lot easier to control pollution from a single point source than it is from a million individually-owned vehicles. Plus you have a lot more options in terms of fuel, some of which don't have the political, financial, and ecological issues of oil.
Hybrid cars push the problem back a bit, since they use maybe (maybe!) 1/2 the fuel. But that's an expensive solution that doesn't completely address the problem of our overdependence on oil, and the fact that our cities of full of millions of pollution machines.
So they're not really abandoning passwords -- they're just requiring an additional authentication. Yeah, I know, a password doesn't have to be one of the two authentications. But you know almost everybody will use it.
Basically, this story is about Microsoft announcing vague plans to improve login authentication. If we had specifics (smartcard support? biometrics?), then there'd be a story.
That says, "We don't want you using our shop as a study hall, period." If they were going to do that, they might as well not provide any network access. They're obviously trying to be more student-friendly than that.
I'm sure they've thought of that. Students monopolizing table space was an issue for coffee shops long before there were wireless access points. Having store employees play table proctor is not a good way to build a reputation as a student-friendly zone.
... she had any evidence, however ambiguous, that Google is planning this. But all she has is her own opinion that Google has the ability and that it'd be a good idea. Not totally inconceivable, but it does ignore the paradigm shift that a massive switch to NCs would require. This was what doomed efforts by Sun, Oracle, and IBM to move us all to NCs.
(I refer to NCs, or Network Computers, instead of Thin Clients, because Thin Clients are now usually taken to mean simple graphic terminals that display a desktop on a remote system, such as SunRay or Citrix. The worst of both worlds, and obviously not what she meant.)
The only actual evidence of anything is the fact that Google has gotten really good at creating JavaScript apps, such as Google Maps. Which actually is a kind of NC technology, but not really the basis for a new kind of NC.
Aside from her broad speculation, her notion that Microsoft will ever do an NC is totally lame. Microsoft just doesn't think that way. The article she points to talks about hosted services, such as Outlook Live. Not the same thing. It isn't even new technology -- it's just a new model for selling what they already do.
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate
on
IE7 Details Emerge
·
· Score: 1
If Firefox had 50% marketshare, lots more people would use XUL than do now. (Java is another issue, not worth going into.) But even if that weren't true, Microsoft would lose a lot of control over the way the Web works if most people were using other browsers!
Sadly, you are quite correct. The MS attitude was neatly summarized by Petzold in Programming Windows, when he insisted that having to write 50 lines just for a simple "hello world" program was an indication of how powerful Windows is! I hope I never meet the dude.
With a big ISP (big IP pool) and a user averaging more than one connection per day you could get >>100 IPs per bot over a few months.
Whereas a bot on DSL or a LAN could get that in a few minutes.
Re:Microsoft has finally been forced to innovate
on
IE7 Details Emerge
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I had previously noticed that Firefox seems to be gaining a little less than a percentage point a month. But unless and until it sustains this growth long enough to climb out of the single digits, I don't think anybody in Redmond is going to shit their pants.
They bugged her car with a 20G laptop harddrive?
I smell bullshit.
Why? A bug has to store its recordings somewhere. Despite what you see on The Sopranos, radio links are unreliable and do not produce quality recordings. There are alternatives for storage such as Flash ROM, but none of them have any really compelling advantages. A notebook drive is small enough to conceal easily amongst all the hardware under the hood of a car. 20 GB is probably overkill, but nowadays it's hard to buy hard drives smaller than that.
If you were designing a car bug, what would you use for storage?
Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.
We have got to find a way to make MS fully support CSS2. Hold Bill and Melinda's cat hostage or something. It's a trivial amount of effort on their part, that would make life a lot easier for web developers.
Slashdot Mirror
...we have the MTT Superbike. Powered by a gas turbine originally designed for helicopters. Exaust hot enough to melt the bumpers of tailgaters!
Starving!
Which is why Bill Gates actually came out and said that his products are going to be more interoperable in the future. OK, maybe he's a baldfaced liar. But there's no reason we shouldn't try to hold him to his word.
I'm sorry, a superheroine has to be able to stand up without a walker.
We're talking about an someone who can carry a big movie. Not somebody you happen to have indecent fantasies about. CC does the catty high school diva very well -- but not as well as some other actresses I can think of. And I've never seen her do anything else.
Judging from past experience, Whedon will want to cast a relative unknown in the part, which will allow him to impose his own vision on the character. Except that the studios will definitely insist on a Big Name, for all the usual reasons. And they probably won't want the same kind of actor that Whedon will want. Which sets the stage for some nasty conflicts. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what has happened with every project Whedon has been involved with -- with the possible exception of the TV version of Buffy. Truth is, if I were a movie studio, I'd be very wary of the dude.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy and admire a lot of Whedon's work. But he's never seemed to be able to deal with making TV or movies as a truly collaborative process. At least, that's my explanation for why he's no longer friendly with a lot of the people he helped to success. And why Buffy became unwatchable as soon as Whedon started delegating its production.
People tend to assume that every Microsoft action is part of some evil master plan. The truth is that they're stumbling around in the dark a lot. The software development effort is conspicuously out of control, and many of their projects are a total mess.
(At least, that's the Sun party line. I gather that Eclipse's SWT components do rely on native components. So it's not basically unfeasible.)
I have to admit that I can't explain why Microsoft has never gone after CodeWeavers for emulating the Windows L&F. Or have they?
There may not be any proof -- but if Apple wasn't prepared to get nasty, it was only because they hadn't noticed the web page yet. Apple is noriously intolerant of this kind of copying.
If anything, Apple is even more uptight about this sort of thing.
Google X was one of those ad-hoc projects that Google encourages its employees to get into. Which results in cool stuff, but also stuff that should have been run by the lawyers first.
Hybrid cars push the problem back a bit, since they use maybe (maybe!) 1/2 the fuel. But that's an expensive solution that doesn't completely address the problem of our overdependence on oil, and the fact that our cities of full of millions of pollution machines.
Basically, this story is about Microsoft announcing vague plans to improve login authentication. If we had specifics (smartcard support? biometrics?), then there'd be a story.
That says, "We don't want you using our shop as a study hall, period." If they were going to do that, they might as well not provide any network access. They're obviously trying to be more student-friendly than that.
I'm sure they've thought of that. Students monopolizing table space was an issue for coffee shops long before there were wireless access points. Having store employees play table proctor is not a good way to build a reputation as a student-friendly zone.
(I refer to NCs, or Network Computers, instead of Thin Clients, because Thin Clients are now usually taken to mean simple graphic terminals that display a desktop on a remote system, such as SunRay or Citrix. The worst of both worlds, and obviously not what she meant.)
The only actual evidence of anything is the fact that Google has gotten really good at creating JavaScript apps, such as Google Maps. Which actually is a kind of NC technology, but not really the basis for a new kind of NC.
Aside from her broad speculation, her notion that Microsoft will ever do an NC is totally lame. Microsoft just doesn't think that way. The article she points to talks about hosted services, such as Outlook Live. Not the same thing. It isn't even new technology -- it's just a new model for selling what they already do.
If Firefox had 50% marketshare, lots more people would use XUL than do now. (Java is another issue, not worth going into.) But even if that weren't true, Microsoft would lose a lot of control over the way the Web works if most people were using other browsers!
Sadly, you are quite correct. The MS attitude was neatly summarized by Petzold in Programming Windows, when he insisted that having to write 50 lines just for a simple "hello world" program was an indication of how powerful Windows is! I hope I never meet the dude.
Yeah, I had previously noticed that Firefox seems to be gaining a little less than a percentage point a month. But unless and until it sustains this growth long enough to climb out of the single digits, I don't think anybody in Redmond is going to shit their pants.
In this day and age, Fry's is as close as Slashdot. I mean, they both have web sites. I suppose expense might be an issue.
If you were designing a car bug, what would you use for storage?