Remember the "network computer" thing 5 years ago? Sun bought a whole string of software companies so they could have a head start on the necessary Java applications, only to shut them down when the NC market didn't materialize. In some cases, these companies went away only a few months after being acquired.
Scott M. keeps making expensive blunders like this, but nobody seems to hold him accountable. Very disturbing.
Well, anybody who produces tools for a technology contributes to the acceptance of that technology. But Microsoft hardly played a leadership role.
It's true that the famous IBM/Microsoft partnership gave us cheap commodity computers. But that was not by design -- in fact, IBM made every effort to prevent competitors from cloning its product. Luckily, their main safeguard (copyright and trade secret protection of the ROM BIOS) turned out to be totally ineffective.
Microsoft's the #1 player in Internet software now, but they were practically the last major player to recognize the explosive acceptance of the Internet. Remember Windows 95? It was originally distributed with no Internet support at all, despite the extreme Internet buzz in the media. Instead, it had a lot of hooks to the MSN online service. Even as the AOL and CompuServe online services were converting themselves into ISPs, Microsoft was expending a huge effort on this obsolete concept. When it became painfully obvious that the Internet wasn't a passing fad, they had to dip into their pockets for catch-up development and licensing of the necessary tech. Of course, their pockets are very, very deep, so they soon dominated the marketplace. But it's hardly an impressive example of contributing to acceptance.
Creating an intermediate language seems to couple the worst inefficiencies of high-level programming and assembly micromanagement
You're assuming that the IL is something people would actually program in. My reading of the article says that IL is just another kind of bytecode, like those in current Java class files, but designed specifically for HPC.
The great white hope of the Java community is a VM implementation that's as fast as simple native code -- if not faster. That might seem like a Quixotic goal, but the VM wonks at Sun have always insisted that it's possible. So far, they haven't deliverd, but maybe they could if their VM was better designed for HPC.
Well, one of the advantages of only music distribution is that there's an infinite amount of shelf space. So there's sure to be stuff that's got a really tiny audience. Which is a good thing, unless the marginal stuff is all they have.
That's why I let my emusic.com subscription expire. Everything available was stuff that record publishers had given up on. Like they had every Enrico Morricone soundtrack album that's ever been published -- except for the ones for movies people actually went to. But of course I downloaded their collection of Star Trek sound effects before I quit!
Apple doesn't kow tow to M$ by using wma. They use their own format, with decent DRM policies.
Said format being Quicktime, which has been around in some form since the early Macintosh days. It doesn't exist because Apple doesn't want to kow tow. It exists because Apple, like Microsoft, has a cultural aversion to standard technology. At one time, they were worse than anybody this way -- even their disk controllers used proprietary technology.
Quicktime may have better DRM than WMA. It's certainly better in other ways. But it's still a proprietary technology controlled by the whims of a single company. Which is not a good thing!
Innovation is good. But sometimes when Microsoft and Apple say "innovation", they really mean "we're smarter than everybody else, so we're going to do things our way, and so stop bothering us about 'interoperability' and 'standards' and all that crap."
It's a point, but not the point. It's true that nobody had much hope of competing with Internet Explorer once Bill started giving it away. But even if the playing field had been level, Netscape still would have lost the game. They screwed up again and again.
Let me give a personal example: I used to work in the most un-Microsoft-friendly place on the planet. I refer, of course, to Sun Microsystems. Now, a lot of our informal workflow system consisted of passing around HTML files, much as more Microsoft-friendly shops pass around Word and Excel files. Which makes a reliable web browser kind of important. Unfortunately, what we had was Netscape 4.7 for Solaris, the shortcomings of which boggle the mind. Constant crashes, sloppy X palette usage, so other apps couldn't display correct. Locking up when you tried to display a complicated table. It didn't even put headers and footers on printouts! So I risked breaking the famous Sun "Big Rules" and installed Internet Explorer for Solaris. Big improvement.
If I got my facts wrong, I apologize. My source for facts about the Blaster from the link in the article. Perhaps I missed something.
Tech writers do sometimes get their facts wrong. That's why we have technical reviews -- if you can get the engineers to do them. But that's another issue!
I was going by the descripion of Blaster on the link. Perhaps I misunderstand. If you're right, then yeah, a firewall is one way to keep Blaster from spreading. Not a good way, in my opinion.
Let's not get picky about about what's a worm and what's a virus. Nobody uses these terms with any consistency.
Have you read anything about Blaster? It's spread via email attachments posing as Microsoft patches. A firewire isn't going to do a damn thing to keep it out.
This is the mistake people make over and over: there has to be some big fancy fix that will simply make the problem go away. There isn't, and there never will be. Security is a process. You educate your users, you install appropriate isolation and filtering technology, and you work hard to keep it all up to date.
I have two really big issues with firewalls: they are too complex to reliably provide any serious level of isolation; and they meddle with all your network traffic, causing no end of headaches. "Personal" firewalls tend to screw up anything you attach to your computer, even USB devices. Campus firewalls limit the services you can access on the public internet (one place I worked allowed http and telnet, and nothing else) and every change in these limitations involve endless hassles with your IT people, plus the risk of creating a security hole. They're a constant temptation to Murphy's law. And yet somehow people find them appealing -- they sound magic. Give me a simple NAT isolation node any day. They disable most P2P software, but most of us don't use that stuff anyway.
Not to mention that MDI is the stupidest GUI concept since Bob. Why does anybody need a window inside another window?????!!!!! Navigating MDI applications is a pain, unless the developer took the trouble to provide a set of tabs or icons or something -- which they have to program themselves, since MS forgot to provide anything.
Maybe you don't find them usable or convenient. I find it very handy to have a bunch of ebooks on my PDA that I can read whenever I'm waiting in line, have a free moment, or whatever. And while physical books do have their advantages, none have the searching and bookmarking ability you can get with good ebook software.
I do agree that the format issue is bogus. I don't know of any format that isn't widely supported. The only market this might affect is the one for dedicated ebook devices. Which probably never will compete with general-purpose computers and PDAs.
I blame the failure of ebooks on the pricing structure. You usually have to pay the full cover price for an ebook, which is usually the same as for the hard copy version. Since books are always available at discount, you're paying a hefty premium for getting an electronic version -- and one which you can't sell, loan or donate when you're done with it. The advantages of ebooks are real, but not worth the expense.
"The same plot"? From what I hear, it's pretty rare to find any plot at all. Censorship is also an issue. I mean, no kissing? But maybe with a wider audience, Bollywood will broaden its scope.
Bruce Stering has a beautiful take on Bollywood production methods in his story "Sacred Cow", collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future.
Are you kidding? Who would vote for the other side? If anybody actually thinks that the entertainment industry has anything but loathing for file downloads, they've either been living under a rock, or they're a shill for Jack Valenti!
That doesn't make any sense. Sims have a lot of autonomous behavior -- it just isn't very well thought out. I mean, going ballistic whenever you see your partner hugging somebody else? And if the Sims are stupid by design, what's the point of all those personality parameters?
I simply don't believe that anybody would design a social simulation and deliberately leave out any AI for the characters. And indeed, Sims often have to act autonmously, such as when they're visiting somebody else's house. The real story would seem to be that the AI is there, it just isn't very good.
The inability of of The Sims to do anything reasonable when two sims content for the same resource (both go through the same door, or even the same spot in a room; both want to grab a plate from the same counter, etc) is pretty dumb. Which makes me wonder if the programmers really understand real-time programming -- resource contention is a fundamental issue for real-time work, after all. Judging from how often the game locks up, or accidentally generate objects with non-unique IDs (try killing off all the Sims in a house, then moving a new family in) makes me suspect that they don't.
I also can't believe that it didn't occur to anybody that bathroom doors need locks!
But the biggest disappointment of the game is that autonmous Sim behavior is a joke. In order to have any real progress in your Sims' lives, you have to micromanage them like a dysfunctional parent. Which makes the whole concept of personality parameters more or less pointless.
If I hear that The Sims 2 deals with some of these issues and that they've opened up their object creation API so we don't have to make do with the few lame objects they provide, then I'll give the game a look. Without this stuff, it's not a game, or a simulation. It's just a dollhouse for grownups.
Nobody actually uses ASCII any more. It's not adquate for internationalizable applications. It only contains a simple non-accented Latin alphabet, arabic numerals, space, and 33 other characters. Oh, and 33 non-graphic control characters, only 2 of which are relatively safe to use in text files and streams. That's just not enough for any application that isn't specific to the U.S.
You say you use ASCII every day? No you don't. You probably use some variation of Latin 1 and/or UTF-8. Both have the same values as ASCII for their first 127 characters, so the difference is usually transparent. Not always.
Now you're saying, "All right, ASCII, Latin 1, whatever. What I mean is plain text. That's the universal format." No it's not. There isn't even a single Latin 1. Aside from ISO Latin 1 (which is supposed to be the default for web pages, but no widely-used browser makes that assumption), there's Microsoft Latin 1 and Macintosh Latin. Add in UTF-8 (which Slashdot supposedly uses, though most of their pages actually use ISO Latin1), and you have four different "plain text" encodings in wide use. The results when files are shared between these platforms are often pretty gross. And these are just the encodings used in the Americas and Western Europe!
Even if there was a text encoding that absolutely everybody used, you wouldn't want to store all your books in it. You're throwing away too much data! That's why I gave up on Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders. When I downloaded a Gutenberg text, things like italics and boldface all appeared at ALLCAPS. VERY VERY IRRITATING! And when I helped proof DP's text scans, I wasn't given any proper way to enter to record all the subtle typography that was in those old texts. One particular omission was the absence of any clear separation between encylopedia articles. I found this particularly frustrating, because I joined DP to help bring the classic Britannica 11th Edition online. What's the point if you can't browse individual articles easily, or the Greek words are a mess, etc., etc.
What's the solution? Not HTML -- it's not general enough. Somebody needs to sit down and design a markup (probably an XML document type) that expresses the stuff you find in various kinds of books. I doubt of if this "Open EBook" thing will do, because it will have very narrow objectives -- find a way to distribute the next Steven King with proper DRM support. Not interesting to those of us who want to share a lot of public domain and Creative Commons stuff, and are mainly concerned with preserving the original character of the text. Maybe when I know more about writing DTDs and Schemas, I'll take a stab.
But doesn't that create files that aren't accesible to a lot of people? No, because you don't distribute the XML version isn't for distribution (except to those who really want it). Mostly you transform the XML into formats suitable for distribution: HTML, WML, ebook formats, and yes, "plain text".
Largely because of the proprietary format wars, ebooks have flopped commercially...
Say what? Sure, there are too many formats, but I've never had any trouble finding software to read all the formats available. What has mostly kept me from buying ebooks is the price.
Typically, they cost more than the traditional hardcopy version! Obviously this isn't a publication or distribution cost issue, since these costs are very low for ebooks. One can only infer that publishers don't like ebooks, and are doing as little as possible to encourage their growth. I guess it's understandable, but the fact that they're able to do this speaks volumes about the absence of competition in the publishing world.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: 1
I'm told that a couple of appearances of Oliver Reed in Gladiator were CGI, the meatspace actor having died just before filming was completed. I couldn't tell you how believable the cyber standin was, since I've stayed away from this movie. Their main use of CGI (realistic depiction of mayhem in the arena) was not for me.
In my opinion, amazement is the last thing you should look for in animation. To quote Chuck Jones, great art is composed of lots of love and sweat; the audience should see all the love and none of the sweat. Too often it's the other way around.
I should have put in a smily. I was being sarcastic about the way the right stereotypes the typical NPR listener. The fact is, I've been an avid listener myself for about 20 years.
Most public radio stations around here (Northern California) have basically given up music in favor of news and interviews. Though I can't really complain, since that's what I listen to. A notable exception is KUSP, though I find their programming a bit folksy for my taste. But you might want to check out their audio stream.
NPR gets about 40% of its funding from programming fees. All the public radio stations I've looked at claim to get a majority of their funding from listener contributions and and other gifts and sponsorships. Dunno how much of the rest is from the feds, but let's say most of it, so it'd be around 40%. So 16% of NPR's budget comes from the taxpayer. Is that enough to keep your sense of grievance going, or will you switch to Affirmative Action?
Slashdot Mirror
Scott M. keeps making expensive blunders like this, but nobody seems to hold him accountable. Very disturbing.
It's true that the famous IBM/Microsoft partnership gave us cheap commodity computers. But that was not by design -- in fact, IBM made every effort to prevent competitors from cloning its product. Luckily, their main safeguard (copyright and trade secret protection of the ROM BIOS) turned out to be totally ineffective.
Microsoft's the #1 player in Internet software now, but they were practically the last major player to recognize the explosive acceptance of the Internet. Remember Windows 95? It was originally distributed with no Internet support at all, despite the extreme Internet buzz in the media. Instead, it had a lot of hooks to the MSN online service. Even as the AOL and CompuServe online services were converting themselves into ISPs, Microsoft was expending a huge effort on this obsolete concept. When it became painfully obvious that the Internet wasn't a passing fad, they had to dip into their pockets for catch-up development and licensing of the necessary tech. Of course, their pockets are very, very deep, so they soon dominated the marketplace. But it's hardly an impressive example of contributing to acceptance.
The great white hope of the Java community is a VM implementation that's as fast as simple native code -- if not faster. That might seem like a Quixotic goal, but the VM wonks at Sun have always insisted that it's possible. So far, they haven't deliverd, but maybe they could if their VM was better designed for HPC.
Need anything else? Your laundry done? Answer your mail? we're here to help!
That's why I let my emusic.com subscription expire. Everything available was stuff that record publishers had given up on. Like they had every Enrico Morricone soundtrack album that's ever been published -- except for the ones for movies people actually went to. But of course I downloaded their collection of Star Trek sound effects before I quit!
Quicktime may have better DRM than WMA. It's certainly better in other ways. But it's still a proprietary technology controlled by the whims of a single company. Which is not a good thing!
Innovation is good. But sometimes when Microsoft and Apple say "innovation", they really mean "we're smarter than everybody else, so we're going to do things our way, and so stop bothering us about 'interoperability' and 'standards' and all that crap."
Let me give a personal example: I used to work in the most un-Microsoft-friendly place on the planet. I refer, of course, to Sun Microsystems. Now, a lot of our informal workflow system consisted of passing around HTML files, much as more Microsoft-friendly shops pass around Word and Excel files. Which makes a reliable web browser kind of important. Unfortunately, what we had was Netscape 4.7 for Solaris, the shortcomings of which boggle the mind. Constant crashes, sloppy X palette usage, so other apps couldn't display correct. Locking up when you tried to display a complicated table. It didn't even put headers and footers on printouts! So I risked breaking the famous Sun "Big Rules" and installed Internet Explorer for Solaris. Big improvement.
Tech writers do sometimes get their facts wrong. That's why we have technical reviews -- if you can get the engineers to do them. But that's another issue!
Let's not get picky about about what's a worm and what's a virus. Nobody uses these terms with any consistency.
This is the mistake people make over and over: there has to be some big fancy fix that will simply make the problem go away. There isn't, and there never will be. Security is a process. You educate your users, you install appropriate isolation and filtering technology, and you work hard to keep it all up to date.
I have two really big issues with firewalls: they are too complex to reliably provide any serious level of isolation; and they meddle with all your network traffic, causing no end of headaches. "Personal" firewalls tend to screw up anything you attach to your computer, even USB devices. Campus firewalls limit the services you can access on the public internet (one place I worked allowed http and telnet, and nothing else) and every change in these limitations involve endless hassles with your IT people, plus the risk of creating a security hole. They're a constant temptation to Murphy's law. And yet somehow people find them appealing -- they sound magic. Give me a simple NAT isolation node any day. They disable most P2P software, but most of us don't use that stuff anyway.
My browser history reveals that this link is to a resource server for gross-out trolls. I guess that shouldn't suprise me.
Not to mention that MDI is the stupidest GUI concept since Bob. Why does anybody need a window inside another window?????!!!!! Navigating MDI applications is a pain, unless the developer took the trouble to provide a set of tabs or icons or something -- which they have to program themselves, since MS forgot to provide anything.
I do agree that the format issue is bogus. I don't know of any format that isn't widely supported. The only market this might affect is the one for dedicated ebook devices. Which probably never will compete with general-purpose computers and PDAs.
I blame the failure of ebooks on the pricing structure. You usually have to pay the full cover price for an ebook, which is usually the same as for the hard copy version. Since books are always available at discount, you're paying a hefty premium for getting an electronic version -- and one which you can't sell, loan or donate when you're done with it. The advantages of ebooks are real, but not worth the expense.
Bruce Stering has a beautiful take on Bollywood production methods in his story "Sacred Cow", collected in A Good Old-Fashioned Future .
Are you kidding? Who would vote for the other side? If anybody actually thinks that the entertainment industry has anything but loathing for file downloads, they've either been living under a rock, or they're a shill for Jack Valenti!
I simply don't believe that anybody would design a social simulation and deliberately leave out any AI for the characters. And indeed, Sims often have to act autonmously, such as when they're visiting somebody else's house. The real story would seem to be that the AI is there, it just isn't very good.
I also can't believe that it didn't occur to anybody that bathroom doors need locks!
But the biggest disappointment of the game is that autonmous Sim behavior is a joke. In order to have any real progress in your Sims' lives, you have to micromanage them like a dysfunctional parent. Which makes the whole concept of personality parameters more or less pointless.
If I hear that The Sims 2 deals with some of these issues and that they've opened up their object creation API so we don't have to make do with the few lame objects they provide, then I'll give the game a look. Without this stuff, it's not a game, or a simulation. It's just a dollhouse for grownups.
Nobody actually uses ASCII any more. It's not adquate for internationalizable applications. It only contains a simple non-accented Latin alphabet, arabic numerals, space, and 33 other characters. Oh, and 33 non-graphic control characters, only 2 of which are relatively safe to use in text files and streams. That's just not enough for any application that isn't specific to the U.S.
You say you use ASCII every day? No you don't. You probably use some variation of Latin 1 and/or UTF-8. Both have the same values as ASCII for their first 127 characters, so the difference is usually transparent. Not always.
Now you're saying, "All right, ASCII, Latin 1, whatever. What I mean is plain text. That's the universal format." No it's not. There isn't even a single Latin 1. Aside from ISO Latin 1 (which is supposed to be the default for web pages, but no widely-used browser makes that assumption), there's Microsoft Latin 1 and Macintosh Latin. Add in UTF-8 (which Slashdot supposedly uses, though most of their pages actually use ISO Latin1), and you have four different "plain text" encodings in wide use. The results when files are shared between these platforms are often pretty gross. And these are just the encodings used in the Americas and Western Europe!
Even if there was a text encoding that absolutely everybody used, you wouldn't want to store all your books in it. You're throwing away too much data! That's why I gave up on Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders. When I downloaded a Gutenberg text, things like italics and boldface all appeared at ALLCAPS. VERY VERY IRRITATING! And when I helped proof DP's text scans, I wasn't given any proper way to enter to record all the subtle typography that was in those old texts. One particular omission was the absence of any clear separation between encylopedia articles. I found this particularly frustrating, because I joined DP to help bring the classic Britannica 11th Edition online. What's the point if you can't browse individual articles easily, or the Greek words are a mess, etc., etc.
What's the solution? Not HTML -- it's not general enough. Somebody needs to sit down and design a markup (probably an XML document type) that expresses the stuff you find in various kinds of books. I doubt of if this "Open EBook" thing will do, because it will have very narrow objectives -- find a way to distribute the next Steven King with proper DRM support. Not interesting to those of us who want to share a lot of public domain and Creative Commons stuff, and are mainly concerned with preserving the original character of the text. Maybe when I know more about writing DTDs and Schemas, I'll take a stab.
But doesn't that create files that aren't accesible to a lot of people? No, because you don't distribute the XML version isn't for distribution (except to those who really want it). Mostly you transform the XML into formats suitable for distribution: HTML, WML, ebook formats, and yes, "plain text".
In my opinion, amazement is the last thing you should look for in animation. To quote Chuck Jones, great art is composed of lots of love and sweat; the audience should see all the love and none of the sweat. Too often it's the other way around.
Jobs is CEO of Pixar, has been for some time. I don't think he contributed much founding capital.
Most public radio stations around here (Northern California) have basically given up music in favor of news and interviews. Though I can't really complain, since that's what I listen to. A notable exception is KUSP, though I find their programming a bit folksy for my taste. But you might want to check out their audio stream.
Don't forget to join!
NPR gets about 40% of its funding from programming fees. All the public radio stations I've looked at claim to get a majority of their funding from listener contributions and and other gifts and sponsorships. Dunno how much of the rest is from the feds, but let's say most of it, so it'd be around 40%. So 16% of NPR's budget comes from the taxpayer. Is that enough to keep your sense of grievance going, or will you switch to Affirmative Action?