Are you so sure? Alienating customers won't help publishers any, since they're where the money comes from.
Works for anybody with a monopoly. Since they will have exclusive rights to a lot of content, they'll be able to screw anybody who really wants access to that content.
What if Skiff ends up a lot like Kindle, but with a lower price for professionally written and edited content?
What if all men just united in brotherly love, lost their selfish instincts, and peace reigned on earth?
On a modern disk, every block already has ECC. Furthermore, there are APIs to query disks about disk failures. There is no reason to reimplement block-level ECC at the file system level. If people aren't checking for hardware failures, what's the point of giving them another set of ECC errors to check?
This truly is the filesystem every other one is playing catchup with.
God, I hope not. I wouldn't want to use anything as poorly designed as ZFS.
Go look up the word "hyperbole" in a dictionary. And while you're at it, look up the word "coy" as well, since you seem to have trouble with the English language.
Nevertheless, how much effort Microsoft has put in under the covers really doesn't matter, what matters is how much Windows has improved for users. And for most users, Windows really is still just a Start menu, Explorer, IE, and Office, plus the occasional crash, virus, and incomprehensible dialog box.
What really changes these businesses is that distribution on-line is dirt cheap and has virtually no cost of entry. Furthermore, production costs are also falling rapidly. The movie business is as much subject to that as the music business.
There are several levels of error correction at the disk level, plus at the RAID level, plus possibly at the file system level. And the whole thing has been wrapped up so well that users don't have to worry about. If users are still getting bit errors, someone hasn't been paying attention to their SMART, RAID, and file system logs.
No amount of error correction will protect you from that; sooner or later, disks go bad, and you have to replace them before there are too many errors for the system to recover.
Do you think slave holders were not offended by being called murderers and inhuman? Do you think Catholics were not deeply disturbed by Protestants calling the Catholic hierarchy illegitimate and corrupt? The right to offend is an essential part of free speech rights.
In a democracy, you have a right to be protected form libel and criminal blackmail. You don't have a right to be protected from "mental harm" resulting from speech you find disturbing.
European free speech and whistle-blower protections are too limited, and the UK has been trying to impose its rules on other countries for a while. Fortunately, they don't have jurisdiction over Wikipedia.
For Microsoft, their income mostly unrelated to what their tech employees are doing. Just look at what's been happening from Windows NT to Windows 7--mostly theming. Microsoft's success comes mostly from marketing and business "strategy" (aka questionable practices).
More features and more expressiveness don't automatically make a language better; they may make software harder to maintainn and they may cost performance.
And Joel doesn't know what he is talking about anyway. In the same article, he says:
"The very fact that Google invented MapReduce"
Google didn't invent MapReduce. Map-reduce has been around as a technique for massively parallel programming since the 1980's.
Scripting languages are not interchangeable. While JavaScript hackers may hate me for this and while JavaScript has some nice features, I think prototype-based OOP and JavaScript scoping have turned out to be bad ideas. There are worse languages than JavaScript out there, but I won't be switching if I can help it.
There is no need for a special Gizmo5 client. Unlike Skype, Gizmo5 is standards compliant; you can use it with any Linux SIP client. Both Gnome and KDE have several.
US military spending is frankly stupendous and trying to match it broke the USSR.
Quite so. And aren't you glad it did. Aren't you? And we'd like to stop now, we just can't because you aren't filling the vacuum.
Maybe learning a little diplomacy
You mean learn some of that wonderful European diplomacy that brought us WWI, Versailles, and WWII?
Or like the modern European diplomacy of loudly complaining about US actions while secretly supporting it, simultaneously shipping weapons, and gladly receiving the financial and economic benefits of US actions?
Or like traditional British diplomacy: getting the Chinese addicted to drugs, bleeding India dry, and playing The Great Game in Afghanistan?
Do tell, which kind of diplomacy should we learn?
and avoiding unnecessary wars would help you cut the costs a little.
As percentage of GNP or GDP, US military spending was pretty close to the UK's until 2001, then ramped up again, but only to the levels the US and UK had in the early 90's.
That's why the other major powers don't need to spend as much.
Europe isn't forced to spend as much on defense because the US is guaranteeing its safety, from each other and from the outside. It's as simple as that.
Hell, look at China. Reprehensible record on human rights, but they just don't bother to play games on other continents, so they're completely militarily secure for around a tenth of the US budget.
Yes: that's easy and cheap. Americans would have loved to do that in the 20th century. But people looked at a map and realized that if they didn't get involved, the US would be a lone democracy and market economy in world of fascist and communists. And you'd be speaking either German or Russian.
Incidentally, you don't like my answer to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Trust me on that one. It involves letting Iran go nuclear.
If that worked, it would only work because Iran would fear US retaliation for a first strike against Israel. A lot of European diplomacy and foreign policy only works because the US backs it up implicitly with its nuclear and conventional arsenals.
many people highlighted this as an irony at the time our Government were trying to justify invading Iraq because Saddam allegedly had poison gas of his own. Sorry, remind me, who sold that to him?
Gladly: in order of decreasing quantities delivered, Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, India, and West Germany.
On the whole, every year, total European arms exports far exceed US arms exports. In 2007, the UK was the biggest arms dealer in the world, bigger than the US, many of them to undemocratic and repressive regimes.
Describing the UK and France as second rate nations demonstrates ignorance.
No, it's just a fact. The UK used to be a world power, now it isn't anymore. Same with France. Both nations have left behind crumbling empires and a lot of animosity against the entire western world.
Iran was doing fine until the US helped remove the democratic government.
Yes, and you know why the US did that? Because the British government begged for help with British Petrol. Truman sent Churchill packing, but Eisenhower gave in, mostly because the Churchill was arguing based on a growing Soviet threat.
The US didn't need this; it was energy independent into the 1980's. It did this because the UK wanted it and the UK was incapable of doing it itself.
Afghanistan was never under British control
Yeah, but not for lack of trying. Britain fought three wars in Afghanistan and completely fucked up the country. Look under The Great Game and the sleazy and evil things the British empire did back then.
Iraq was propped up and encouraged by the US
Iraq's impossible borders were drafted up by the French and British. Churchill himself even advocated using poison gas on the Kurds. Nice guy, eh?
And why do you think the US was meddling there at all? The US didn't need the oil, Europe did, in particular after WWII. Even today, Europe gets more oil from the Middle East than the US.
The whole middle east region would be significantly happier if Israel wasn't getting such encouragement from the US.
Well, geez, let's see, how did we get to this point... Oh, right, Britain controlled Palestine and let Jews settle there until it became politically inconvenient. Then Britain just told most Jews to get lost altogether, even those fleeing the Nazi death machinery.
But, smart guy, what's your solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?
So I think general concensus is that European nations
Well, the "consensus" among people like you doesn't matter. If you want the US to get out of European and world affairs, you need to match US military expenditures, it's that simple.
The US may continue to do it its own way, but that'll just lead to more radicalism more attacks on the US and more dead Europeans as we try and deal with it on your behalf. See also the last 40 years.
That is exactly what is going to happen. And no amount of European whining is going to change it because the US doesn't have an alternative. The only thing that will is if Europe rolls up its sleeves and does more than liberate the occasional sheep.
Unless you count the economic blackmail (threats of trade restrictions) of countries around the world to force them to adopt equivalent laws to US laws on topics such as drug enforcement, copyright, rights of unfettered operation of US companies etc.
A lot of that bullshit is as much the doing of Europeans as it is of Americans.
Unless you count active covert ops and financial support for the overthrow/assassination of disagreeable governments... occupation... invasion...
It's just another case of USA forcing their laws, ideas and politics to other countries.
The US isn't forcing anything on any other nation. The US can do this because the US branch of SWIFT (a Belgian company) is operating in the US, and hence is subject to US laws.
SWIFT is free to end its US operations any time it wants to. And European governments are free to pass laws that prevent companies like SWIFT from shipping data to the US. But as long as neither of those happens, the US is within its rights to demand that the US branch of SWIFT conducts business according to US law.
If the answer to these questions is "yes", then the tool did its job. And, in my experience, a "dumbed down" language often works better than other languages. C/C++ software often fails because of (2) and (3).
Sadly, Hypercard, Applescript, and Revolutions aren't "dumbed down", they are simply "dumb": they are just as complex as many other programming languages, they just use a syntax that gives the false appearance of being "easy". It seems easy because people looking at it think "hey, this is just like natural language, I can figure out what this does". That's a good hook to get people programming, but it gets them stuck with an inferior tool.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, Gnome has had this for several years now (as part of Compiz and its precursors).
Now, KDE finally has them too.
That leaves only Windows and Macintosh, right?
Are you so sure? Alienating customers won't help publishers any, since they're where the money comes from.
Works for anybody with a monopoly. Since they will have exclusive rights to a lot of content, they'll be able to screw anybody who really wants access to that content.
What if Skiff ends up a lot like Kindle, but with a lower price for professionally written and edited content?
What if all men just united in brotherly love, lost their selfish instincts, and peace reigned on earth?
Each block uses ECC
On a modern disk, every block already has ECC. Furthermore, there are APIs to query disks about disk failures. There is no reason to reimplement block-level ECC at the file system level. If people aren't checking for hardware failures, what's the point of giving them another set of ECC errors to check?
This truly is the filesystem every other one is playing catchup with.
God, I hope not. I wouldn't want to use anything as poorly designed as ZFS.
Go look up the word "hyperbole" in a dictionary. And while you're at it, look up the word "coy" as well, since you seem to have trouble with the English language.
Nevertheless, how much effort Microsoft has put in under the covers really doesn't matter, what matters is how much Windows has improved for users. And for most users, Windows really is still just a Start menu, Explorer, IE, and Office, plus the occasional crash, virus, and incomprehensible dialog box.
What really changes these businesses is that distribution on-line is dirt cheap and has virtually no cost of entry. Furthermore, production costs are also falling rapidly. The movie business is as much subject to that as the music business.
There are several levels of error correction at the disk level, plus at the RAID level, plus possibly at the file system level. And the whole thing has been wrapped up so well that users don't have to worry about. If users are still getting bit errors, someone hasn't been paying attention to their SMART, RAID, and file system logs.
No amount of error correction will protect you from that; sooner or later, disks go bad, and you have to replace them before there are too many errors for the system to recover.
Newspapers like the NYT and WSJ deserve to go out of business as far as I'm concerned.
Do you think slave holders were not offended by being called murderers and inhuman? Do you think Catholics were not deeply disturbed by Protestants calling the Catholic hierarchy illegitimate and corrupt? The right to offend is an essential part of free speech rights.
In a democracy, you have a right to be protected form libel and criminal blackmail. You don't have a right to be protected from "mental harm" resulting from speech you find disturbing.
European free speech and whistle-blower protections are too limited, and the UK has been trying to impose its rules on other countries for a while. Fortunately, they don't have jurisdiction over Wikipedia.
with which protocol do you think RSS is obtained? ESP?
You apparently don't understand the meaning of "scraping".
In this case they were so kind to cache, but the principle stays.
Which principle would that be? RSS feeds can't possibly be a big drain on their site.
So, they must have some other reason to lock the data in. What is it?
For Microsoft, their income mostly unrelated to what their tech employees are doing. Just look at what's been happening from Windows NT to Windows 7--mostly theming. Microsoft's success comes mostly from marketing and business "strategy" (aka questionable practices).
Unlike Madoff's schemes, this one actually makes money for its investors.
small, local communities basically unconnected to one another
You make it sound so wholesome. But it's really small, local communities of hookers, real-estate agents, and those looking for unusual, risky sex.
Who would have known? You can be more evil than US cell phone carriers.
More features and more expressiveness don't automatically make a language better; they may make software harder to maintainn and they may cost performance.
And Joel doesn't know what he is talking about anyway. In the same article, he says:
"The very fact that Google invented MapReduce"
Google didn't invent MapReduce. Map-reduce has been around as a technique for massively parallel programming since the 1980's.
Scripting languages are not interchangeable. While JavaScript hackers may hate me for this and while JavaScript has some nice features, I think prototype-based OOP and JavaScript scoping have turned out to be bad ideas. There are worse languages than JavaScript out there, but I won't be switching if I can help it.
There is no need for a special Gizmo5 client. Unlike Skype, Gizmo5 is standards compliant; you can use it with any Linux SIP client. Both Gnome and KDE have several.
US military spending is frankly stupendous and trying to match it broke the USSR.
Quite so. And aren't you glad it did. Aren't you? And we'd like to stop now, we just can't because you aren't filling the vacuum.
Maybe learning a little diplomacy
You mean learn some of that wonderful European diplomacy that brought us WWI, Versailles, and WWII?
Or like the modern European diplomacy of loudly complaining about US actions while secretly supporting it, simultaneously shipping weapons, and gladly receiving the financial and economic benefits of US actions?
Or like traditional British diplomacy: getting the Chinese addicted to drugs, bleeding India dry, and playing The Great Game in Afghanistan?
Do tell, which kind of diplomacy should we learn?
and avoiding unnecessary wars would help you cut the costs a little.
As percentage of GNP or GDP, US military spending was pretty close to the UK's until 2001, then ramped up again, but only to the levels the US and UK had in the early 90's.
That's why the other major powers don't need to spend as much.
Europe isn't forced to spend as much on defense because the US is guaranteeing its safety, from each other and from the outside. It's as simple as that.
Hell, look at China. Reprehensible record on human rights, but they just don't bother to play games on other continents, so they're completely militarily secure for around a tenth of the US budget.
Yes: that's easy and cheap. Americans would have loved to do that in the 20th century. But people looked at a map and realized that if they didn't get involved, the US would be a lone democracy and market economy in world of fascist and communists. And you'd be speaking either German or Russian.
Incidentally, you don't like my answer to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Trust me on that one. It involves letting Iran go nuclear.
If that worked, it would only work because Iran would fear US retaliation for a first strike against Israel. A lot of European diplomacy and foreign policy only works because the US backs it up implicitly with its nuclear and conventional arsenals.
many people highlighted this as an irony at the time our Government were trying to justify invading Iraq because Saddam allegedly had poison gas of his own. Sorry, remind me, who sold that to him?
Gladly: in order of decreasing quantities delivered, Singapore, the Netherlands, Egypt, India, and West Germany.
On the whole, every year, total European arms exports far exceed US arms exports. In 2007, the UK was the biggest arms dealer in the world, bigger than the US, many of them to undemocratic and repressive regimes.
Describing the UK and France as second rate nations demonstrates ignorance.
No, it's just a fact. The UK used to be a world power, now it isn't anymore. Same with France. Both nations have left behind crumbling empires and a lot of animosity against the entire western world.
Iran was doing fine until the US helped remove the democratic government.
Yes, and you know why the US did that? Because the British government begged for help with British Petrol. Truman sent Churchill packing, but Eisenhower gave in, mostly because the Churchill was arguing based on a growing Soviet threat.
The US didn't need this; it was energy independent into the 1980's. It did this because the UK wanted it and the UK was incapable of doing it itself.
Afghanistan was never under British control
Yeah, but not for lack of trying. Britain fought three wars in Afghanistan and completely fucked up the country. Look under The Great Game and the sleazy and evil things the British empire did back then.
Iraq was propped up and encouraged by the US
Iraq's impossible borders were drafted up by the French and British. Churchill himself even advocated using poison gas on the Kurds. Nice guy, eh?
And why do you think the US was meddling there at all? The US didn't need the oil, Europe did, in particular after WWII. Even today, Europe gets more oil from the Middle East than the US.
The whole middle east region would be significantly happier if Israel wasn't getting such encouragement from the US.
Well, geez, let's see, how did we get to this point... Oh, right, Britain controlled Palestine and let Jews settle there until it became politically inconvenient. Then Britain just told most Jews to get lost altogether, even those fleeing the Nazi death machinery.
But, smart guy, what's your solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?
So I think general concensus is that European nations
Well, the "consensus" among people like you doesn't matter. If you want the US to get out of European and world affairs, you need to match US military expenditures, it's that simple.
The US may continue to do it its own way, but that'll just lead to more radicalism more attacks on the US and more dead Europeans as we try and deal with it on your behalf. See also the last 40 years.
That is exactly what is going to happen. And no amount of European whining is going to change it because the US doesn't have an alternative. The only thing that will is if Europe rolls up its sleeves and does more than liberate the occasional sheep.
Android or Nokia's N900 are pretty close to your requirements.
For less money, we can send hundreds of thousands of probes and get back much more data. And we can start doing that today, with today's technology.
EOM
Unless you count the economic blackmail (threats of trade restrictions) of countries around the world to force them to adopt equivalent laws to US laws on topics such as drug enforcement, copyright, rights of unfettered operation of US companies etc.
A lot of that bullshit is as much the doing of Europeans as it is of Americans.
Unless you count active covert ops and financial support for the overthrow/assassination of disagreeable governments ... occupation ... invasion ...
Sorry, but that's not the same.
It's just another case of USA forcing their laws, ideas and politics to other countries.
The US isn't forcing anything on any other nation. The US can do this because the US branch of SWIFT (a Belgian company) is operating in the US, and hence is subject to US laws.
SWIFT is free to end its US operations any time it wants to. And European governments are free to pass laws that prevent companies like SWIFT from shipping data to the US. But as long as neither of those happens, the US is within its rights to demand that the US branch of SWIFT conducts business according to US law.
(1) Does it get the job done?
(2) What it completed on time?
(3) Was it within budget?
If the answer to these questions is "yes", then the tool did its job. And, in my experience, a "dumbed down" language often works better than other languages. C/C++ software often fails because of (2) and (3).
Sadly, Hypercard, Applescript, and Revolutions aren't "dumbed down", they are simply "dumb": they are just as complex as many other programming languages, they just use a syntax that gives the false appearance of being "easy". It seems easy because people looking at it think "hey, this is just like natural language, I can figure out what this does". That's a good hook to get people programming, but it gets them stuck with an inferior tool.