These "operating system concepts" have been explored at length in systems like Plan 9, Inferno, Mach, various Java distributed toolkits, agent-based programming, and God knows how many more obscure operating systems and platforms.
As usual, Microsoft is late and non-innovative. If Microsoft had actually managed to deliver a commercial kernel based on those concepts, that might have been interesting. But just folding the stuff into.NET is the same kind of retreat everybody else who has tried this has made: they all started off dreaming of building the next gen OS, and they all ended up with a bunch of bloated libraries and frameworks that are barely used.
The tough part is not figuring out what the right thing to do is in this area, the tough part is figuring out how to build a real operating system around it that real developers and users will actually want to use.
It is doubtful that manned space exploration has anything to do with "industrial might, military might, or technological advancement" anymore. If you want to advance technology and improve industrial and military might, then you should invest in robotics and artificial intelligence; that is, unmanned exploration.
When we talk about going to distant places like Mars, the moon, [or] an asteroid, we will not be able to take someone off the street, train them for a few weeks and expect them to go off and do the types of missions we will demand of them,' said Bolden."
You need people who are reasonably stable, intelligent, and healthy. They should also have some medical training for emergencies. SCUBA diving may also help. What additional, lengthy training is needed, and what's the cost/benefit tradeoff supposed to be?
I fail to see why so many people using gnome hate anything that uses QT/kde libraries with such a passion.
Because when run from a Gnome environment, they take a long time to start up, print a lot of crap, don't respect all Gnome preferences, look and work different, and start up extra processes that may or may not hang around.
I think KDE is a decent desktop, but I want to use one or the other and not both. And I generally prefer Gnome.
Java has been trying to do this for 11 years, and it has failed, just like Flash/AIR is going to fail to deliver this. Without per-platform customization, Java applications don't respect key bindings, menu structure, and many other conventions. And it's the same with Flash/AIR.
The only way to do something cross-platform is if you come up with a sexy-enough interface that violates platform conventions with a vengeance but is so compelling that people want to use it anyway. That works for games and some media apps (music players, real-time social network), as long as they aren't too complex. It doesn't work for "boring" regular desktop apps.
It's easy to write multi-platform games because games don't have to conform to platform conventions and can get away with just about anything.
Regular applications are hard, applications where people expect standard menus, standard dialogs, and full desktop integration. And those features generally do require changes to the application logic and source code for each platform; nobody has figured out how to fully abstract them away in libraries.
For phones and even MobileMe, Apple can get away with that because they really don't need the volume. For delivering good search results, they need a huge search volume and an army of Ph.D.'s and search quality experts, and they have none of those.
Apple should worry more about bringing iPhone OS up to snuff, because it is already getting long in the tooth and falling more and more behind Android.
Makes no difference. Microsoft doesn't depend very much on patents or copyrights or even copy protection; they are rich because of tying, bundling, agreements with software developers, carefully planned upgrades and obsolescence, and messy install processes. The software install process alone means that most people go out and buy a new computer instead of figuring out how to upgrade the software on their existing machine, and because applications are so hard to move
Every year, Californians pay many billions more in federal income tax than California receives in benefits. In fact, a large part of the federal budget is financed by the liberal coastal states, while conservative and Republican states get more than they put in.
If California received its fair share of the federal budget, there would be no financial problems in the state.
You, my friend, can't have the "benefit of overseas tax operations". Although both you and the corporation are "persons" under the law, the corporation doesn't have to pay taxes on its worldwide income, while individuals do. So, it doesn't matter whether you move to Monaco or the Bermudas, you still need to pay taxes on everything you make.
The problem with Java wasn't that the concept was wrong, it was that Sun screwed up the language design, the implementation, and the stewardship. LLVM and CLR work considerably better than Java/JVM.
A common instruction set for a Java/C#-like language is hard to do because there are too many different tradeoffs involved in functionality like dynamic typing and garbage collection; people tried for years, and they never came up with a good design.
Java was never "groundbreaking, revolutionary". It was a failed bytecode-based language for set top boxes that was adopted by developers in 1995 because they were scared: non-Microsoft platforms had almost no GUI toolkits and almost no reasonable programming language other than C. People knew that the language sucked, that AWT sucked, and that applets didn't work, but they foolishly believed Sun when Sun promised that they would fix all that. Sun also promised at the time that Java would become an ISO standard and that they would release an open source implementation soon (all lies as it turned out). And applets looked like a potentially good way of challenging Windows and Microsoft, going around Microsoft's established distribution channels.
People who bet on Java applets wanted the right idea; we see that now with Flash and AJAX.
But betting on Sun was the wrong move: Sun screwed up the language, screwed up the toolkits, screwed up the implementations, and made Java one of the most proprietary languages in existence.
In the end, all Sun managed to produce was the only thing they have ever been able to produce: bloated server side software.
I looked through Apple's patents that they are asserting against Nokia and have been following Apple patents in general.
My observation has been that many of Apple's patents are write-ups of well-known techniques or even small variations on other people's existing products. This is the way Apple operates.
I'm glad this patent illustrates that a bit more clearly than others, but it's basically standard operating procedure for Apple.
Wave really needed such notifications; even the Firefox plugin wasn't really all that good.
But... are these human Google Wave notifiers configurable and themable? If not, I think that's a feature that really needs to be added. And, no, I don't want to have to use a theme editor just to get the kind of Google Wave notifier I like.
There are three ways in which you can get a correlation: (1) A causes B, (2) B causes A, or (3) C causes A and B. In the case of ice cream and cancer, a little thought shows it's (3). In the case of texting and accidents, it's clear it's (1); there is no other possibility.
More to the point, it is obvious that talking on the phone while driving causes more accidents. Except that it doesn't
Your interpreting that data wrong. The law is ineffective because of lack of compliance, not because of lack of causation.
There is more than enough evidence that texting causes crashes and isn't just correlated with them. And the causal relationship is such that if you prohibit the texting and people comply, you'll see fewer crashes.
You can still argue that texting shouldn't be prohibited, but you can't argue it based on correlation/causation arguments; causation is clear in this case.
The patent has very little content; it's another one of those "hey, here is an application we want to patent, now everbody get to work and build the technology behind it for us". It's like patenting the idea of processing text on a computer or using a computer for performing addition. It's evil.
Well, that's a nice attitude, but it's not going to help. The two bodies that set the agenda right now are the US and the EU. Nations like Canada may be able to do something about ACTA through careful negotiation and international politics; "fuck 'em" isn't going to accomplish anything.
We're working hard toward getting rid of our dependence over the USA and China is now becoming one of our biggest trade partner.
Canada has a long way to go, since China is still in the single digits. And do you really think that China is going to treat Canada better than the US?
The European Commission has been one of the main driving forces behind ACTA. The fact that the European Parliament voted against it and nothing much happened shows you just how impotent the European Parliament is.
Canada is not in a position to tell anybody to "piss off", they are far too dependent on the US and the EU.
The place to get things changed is primarily in the US, because the US is both big enough to determine the global agenda and still has a far more functional democracy than the EU.
The EU in principle has the power to do good, but it is hopeless with its anti-democratic Commission, impotent parliament, squabbling national governments, and enormous bureaucracy. The EU make the US look like a shining beacon of a working democracy.
Seriously, as a Canadian this disgusts me. The EU, the US... What the hell gives these assholes the right to demand ANYTHING?
Canada wants to continue to trade with "these assholes" and Canadians want to travel to these "asshole" countries, no? But trade, travel, etc. only exist because these "asshole countries" sign agreements with Canada creating the legal basis for these activities. If Canada stops signing some agreements, then these "asshole countries" may stop signing other agreements that are more important to Canadians.
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These "operating system concepts" have been explored at length in systems like Plan 9, Inferno, Mach, various Java distributed toolkits, agent-based programming, and God knows how many more obscure operating systems and platforms.
As usual, Microsoft is late and non-innovative. If Microsoft had actually managed to deliver a commercial kernel based on those concepts, that might have been interesting. But just folding the stuff into .NET is the same kind of retreat everybody else who has tried this has made: they all started off dreaming of building the next gen OS, and they all ended up with a bunch of bloated libraries and frameworks that are barely used.
The tough part is not figuring out what the right thing to do is in this area, the tough part is figuring out how to build a real operating system around it that real developers and users will actually want to use.
It is doubtful that manned space exploration has anything to do with "industrial might, military might, or technological advancement" anymore. If you want to advance technology and improve industrial and military might, then you should invest in robotics and artificial intelligence; that is, unmanned exploration.
When we talk about going to distant places like Mars, the moon, [or] an asteroid, we will not be able to take someone off the street, train them for a few weeks and expect them to go off and do the types of missions we will demand of them,' said Bolden."
You need people who are reasonably stable, intelligent, and healthy. They should also have some medical training for emergencies. SCUBA diving may also help. What additional, lengthy training is needed, and what's the cost/benefit tradeoff supposed to be?
I fail to see why so many people using gnome hate anything that uses QT/kde libraries with such a passion.
Because when run from a Gnome environment, they take a long time to start up, print a lot of crap, don't respect all Gnome preferences, look and work different, and start up extra processes that may or may not hang around.
I think KDE is a decent desktop, but I want to use one or the other and not both. And I generally prefer Gnome.
Java has been trying to do this for 11 years, and it has failed, just like Flash/AIR is going to fail to deliver this. Without per-platform customization, Java applications don't respect key bindings, menu structure, and many other conventions. And it's the same with Flash/AIR.
The only way to do something cross-platform is if you come up with a sexy-enough interface that violates platform conventions with a vengeance but is so compelling that people want to use it anyway. That works for games and some media apps (music players, real-time social network), as long as they aren't too complex. It doesn't work for "boring" regular desktop apps.
It's easy to write multi-platform games because games don't have to conform to platform conventions and can get away with just about anything.
Regular applications are hard, applications where people expect standard menus, standard dialogs, and full desktop integration. And those features generally do require changes to the application logic and source code for each platform; nobody has figured out how to fully abstract them away in libraries.
For phones and even MobileMe, Apple can get away with that because they really don't need the volume. For delivering good search results, they need a huge search volume and an army of Ph.D.'s and search quality experts, and they have none of those.
Apple should worry more about bringing iPhone OS up to snuff, because it is already getting long in the tooth and falling more and more behind Android.
Makes no difference. Microsoft doesn't depend very much on patents or copyrights or even copy protection; they are rich because of tying, bundling, agreements with software developers, carefully planned upgrades and obsolescence, and messy install processes. The software install process alone means that most people go out and buy a new computer instead of figuring out how to upgrade the software on their existing machine, and because applications are so hard to move
Every year, Californians pay many billions more in federal income tax than California receives in benefits. In fact, a large part of the federal budget is financed by the liberal coastal states, while conservative and Republican states get more than they put in.
If California received its fair share of the federal budget, there would be no financial problems in the state.
You, my friend, can't have the "benefit of overseas tax operations". Although both you and the corporation are "persons" under the law, the corporation doesn't have to pay taxes on its worldwide income, while individuals do. So, it doesn't matter whether you move to Monaco or the Bermudas, you still need to pay taxes on everything you make.
The problem with Java wasn't that the concept was wrong, it was that Sun screwed up the language design, the implementation, and the stewardship. LLVM and CLR work considerably better than Java/JVM.
A common instruction set for a Java/C#-like language is hard to do because there are too many different tradeoffs involved in functionality like dynamic typing and garbage collection; people tried for years, and they never came up with a good design.
Java was never "groundbreaking, revolutionary". It was a failed bytecode-based language for set top boxes that was adopted by developers in 1995 because they were scared: non-Microsoft platforms had almost no GUI toolkits and almost no reasonable programming language other than C. People knew that the language sucked, that AWT sucked, and that applets didn't work, but they foolishly believed Sun when Sun promised that they would fix all that. Sun also promised at the time that Java would become an ISO standard and that they would release an open source implementation soon (all lies as it turned out). And applets looked like a potentially good way of challenging Windows and Microsoft, going around Microsoft's established distribution channels.
People who bet on Java applets wanted the right idea; we see that now with Flash and AJAX.
But betting on Sun was the wrong move: Sun screwed up the language, screwed up the toolkits, screwed up the implementations, and made Java one of the most proprietary languages in existence.
In the end, all Sun managed to produce was the only thing they have ever been able to produce: bloated server side software.
Good riddance, Sun, you won't be missed.
I looked through Apple's patents that they are asserting against Nokia and have been following Apple patents in general.
My observation has been that many of Apple's patents are write-ups of well-known techniques or even small variations on other people's existing products. This is the way Apple operates.
I'm glad this patent illustrates that a bit more clearly than others, but it's basically standard operating procedure for Apple.
Just let Nokia do it and it will be legally OK.
If the US didn't have to bankroll Europe's defense, then perhaps the US could afford a more ambitious space program as well.
Wave really needed such notifications; even the Firefox plugin wasn't really all that good.
But... are these human Google Wave notifiers configurable and themable? If not, I think that's a feature that really needs to be added. And, no, I don't want to have to use a theme editor just to get the kind of Google Wave notifier I like.
There are three ways in which you can get a correlation: (1) A causes B, (2) B causes A, or (3) C causes A and B. In the case of ice cream and cancer, a little thought shows it's (3). In the case of texting and accidents, it's clear it's (1); there is no other possibility.
More to the point, it is obvious that talking on the phone while driving causes more accidents. Except that it doesn't
Your interpreting that data wrong. The law is ineffective because of lack of compliance, not because of lack of causation.
There is more than enough evidence that texting causes crashes and isn't just correlated with them. And the causal relationship is such that if you prohibit the texting and people comply, you'll see fewer crashes.
You can still argue that texting shouldn't be prohibited, but you can't argue it based on correlation/causation arguments; causation is clear in this case.
The patent has very little content; it's another one of those "hey, here is an application we want to patent, now everbody get to work and build the technology behind it for us". It's like patenting the idea of processing text on a computer or using a computer for performing addition. It's evil.
Well, that's a nice attitude, but it's not going to help. The two bodies that set the agenda right now are the US and the EU. Nations like Canada may be able to do something about ACTA through careful negotiation and international politics; "fuck 'em" isn't going to accomplish anything.
We're working hard toward getting rid of our dependence over the USA and China is now becoming one of our biggest trade partner.
Canada has a long way to go, since China is still in the single digits. And do you really think that China is going to treat Canada better than the US?
The European Commission has been one of the main driving forces behind ACTA. The fact that the European Parliament voted against it and nothing much happened shows you just how impotent the European Parliament is.
Religions teach abstinence until the person meets another person, and then makes a permanent commitment to that person.
Some religions teach that, others don't.
Sex is an addiction to anyone who has done it. Once you start, you don't stop.
Sex and the desire for it are not addictions, they are a normal part of human behavior.
Last time I checked, most people do want to get married someday, and do want a family someday.
Getting married and having a family does not require monogamy.
Canada is not in a position to tell anybody to "piss off", they are far too dependent on the US and the EU.
The place to get things changed is primarily in the US, because the US is both big enough to determine the global agenda and still has a far more functional democracy than the EU.
The EU in principle has the power to do good, but it is hopeless with its anti-democratic Commission, impotent parliament, squabbling national governments, and enormous bureaucracy. The EU make the US look like a shining beacon of a working democracy.
Seriously, as a Canadian this disgusts me. The EU, the US... What the hell gives these assholes the right to demand ANYTHING?
Canada wants to continue to trade with "these assholes" and Canadians want to travel to these "asshole" countries, no? But trade, travel, etc. only exist because these "asshole countries" sign agreements with Canada creating the legal basis for these activities. If Canada stops signing some agreements, then these "asshole countries" may stop signing other agreements that are more important to Canadians.