The ISPs made their own bed but we all have to sleep in it now.
The ISPs fought tooth and nail against even modest municipal wifi limited to public areas like libraries and shopping districts, because they wanted to make money from it. So rather than municipally funded projects they promoted these ad-hoc "partnerships" that didn't, in the end, make money.
Related to this is the PCs crowd incessant will to bash the lack of PC-like features on a Mac, such as "real" delete keys on the laptops.
You spelled "right mouse button on laptops" in a really strange way there.
And no, the passive-aggressive multi-touch hacks that Apple has come up with are so far from being replacements that dismissing them as "non-issues" is exactly the kind of defensiveness that brings out the Mac bashers baying for blood, and the real advantages of the current Mac OS get lost in the feeding frenzy that follows. Quit being so defensive about the very real shortcomings of Apple's hardware, acknowledge the cost you have to pay to get an OS that doesn't suck as much and applications that don't suck as badly, and move on.
There's a goodly dose of mindless religion in your post there.
Try suggesting to a Windows user that their security problems are self-inflicted some time, or that Microsoft really did create the flood of viruses... I better not go on, I don't want to be struck down by Lightning from Redmond (at least that's what a good many Windows users seem to expect, even now).
Amiga users got taught rabidity by the Mac crowd. Mac users were already mindlessly rabid about the Mac even before the Amiga ever shipped.
The biggest attacks on the Amiga came from Mac users, because Mac users were convinced that the Amiga was just a "wannabe Mac". They didn't want to know about multitasking (something every OS does now, and that nobody would dream of trying to get by without), or a uniform hierarchical file system (until HFS came along, then they started using the same arguments that they'd been belittling). The Amiga API had a sophisticated threading and message system, while Mac programs had to be built around an event loop... and many Mac programmers argued for years that writing software to take advantage of multitasking was just locking you into the Amiga (until OS X came along, and suddenly the Mac nuts were all behind it). Amiga's memory management was never all that hot (anyone else remember "an operating system without virtual memory is an operating system without virtue"?), but at least Amiga programs weren't locked in to fixed size partitions, and the Mac advocates would even argue that making end-users fiddle with memory partitions was *good* (until that became unnecessary with OS X).
With that kind of mindless attack coming from the left, and DOS users on the right telling Amiga users that they were wasting their time with a Mac wannabe, what do you expect to happen?
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities
There were no platform similarities between the Amiga and the Mac for Amiga users to take advantage of. Many of them tried to make a go of it with BeOS, but that had doom baked into its very kernel. If anything, the Amiga users have had to find their home in Linux and Windows NT... the Mac OS before OS X was utterly appalling, and the death of the Amiga had already played out and become ancient history well before OS X showed up.
Tell me when Microsoft releases Windows system software under an open source license.
Apple and Microsoft both pulled in BSD components. Apple's updated versions are available online from http://www.opensource.apple.com/. Microsoft's are where?
A smart, cheap move by Apple would have been to not build Safari in the first place and throw a few bucks and their weight into the Mozilla project.
KDE
Safari is based on KHTML, not Gecko.
Ten years of IE and Outlook exploits haven't taught you the value of a diverse software ecosystem yet?
Javascript has a plethora of flaws, many of which (like the procedural syntax) are faithfully preserved in Javascript 2. That doesn't mean that it should inherit bad designs from other languages in the process of fixing its flaws.
Apologies, but you've clearly never worked with high-quality raytracing.
If by that you mean "I don't care about getting that last 20% that makes me go 'ooh, aah'", well, you're right. I don't care about that last 20%, because if raytracing gets you an 80% solution with 20% of the effort then the same budget will deliver five competitive games instead of one blowaway one... or else a company that can't afford ten artists can get into the market with two. Sure, you're still going to have top of the line houses that are doing blowaway work instead of merely being "realistic"... but maybe they can put their energy into doing things that are better than "real" like Wind Walker or Okami instead of wasting artist's time creating 3d photographs.
From the perspective of document format users, OOXML is better than what MS customers had before.
How do you figure that? Anyone implementing OOXML readers or writers still has to reverse-engineer Microsoft's applications. It doesn't make a lot of difference whether the undocumented proprietary code looks like "xmlns..." instead of "{\rtf..." or binary gibberish.
I think the original premise of the article is in error. We don't have to automatically download and install software when it's offered. Automatic software installs have a long history of breaking working systems... I mean, rendering them non-working, not just installing an extra component you might or might not want. If there's any trust being undermined, then it's trust that should be undermined. If there's a relationship that's being broken, it's a relationship that was only ever illusionary.
The relationship I have with other software developers is a tentative one. I don't automatically update my software. I don't update software behind people's backs. I turn off Windows Update, and Firefox automatic updates, and Apple's software update, automatically. I don't even think about it, any more, it's just automatic. I'll trust them, sure, but on my terms, as far as they can show they're trustworthy.
And, look, at least Apple asks. It doesn't just download a new update in the background and then ask you to restart Firefox to activate it. If there's a problem with an update, Firefox doesn't even have an option to say "no, I don't want this update, I'll catch up when they fix it", you have to refuse it over and over again.
I think this is a great lesson for people. It doesn't matter if you love Apple or hate Apple, if you love Firefox or hate Firefox. The point is that you never can tell what's going to happen when they update your ass. Don't just blithely let them do it, wait until you're ready and you know it's safe.
The universe is held together by Duct Tape. Except air conditioning ducts, because of the enormous quantities of Schrodinger particles emitted by shed cat hair. You need to use metallized tape to hold those together. Heavy-metallized if you have more than two cats.
I'd argue it's because every object you stick behind the tavern needs thousands of polygons and high-res textures to look good
It needs unique high res textures because they're using textures to cover up for the lack of a decent optical model and faking it with prebaked shading.
It needs thousands of polygons because rasterization wants polygons. Raytracing actually works better with procedural objects. The earliest raytracers didn't have anything *but* procedural objects.
And so, what you see, is one of the reasons that games that have 40 million dollar budgets and that too close to 80 percent of the cost of the game is art now, is that art replaces, or fakes, the absence of good 3D or realistic 3D and physics. Because instead of having a realistic interaction with the [game] world, what I do instead is create a lot more animations. For every possible scenario in the game....
This is why we need real-time raytracing and real-time physics.
Getting great graphics from the next generation of raster engines is going to cost even more. Sure, you can sit there and micromanage every goddamn thing on the screen and get graphics that look good enough that you can't tell them from optically correct rendering at a glance. But that costs you five times as much as building a model and telling the graphics engine to render it, and letting the software figure out where you need shadows and hilights and bloom.
The other side of this is the Myst problem. Remember Myst? Remember how you could only go where they're rendered the scenes? Now in many modern games, guess what, you can only go where they've prepared the scenes. You can't even walk across a flowerbed and around the back of the tavern, because they haven't prepared the back of the tavern. you get puzzles that involve figuring out what rope to grab to climb up a 45 degree slope, and if they haven't decided that you're going to be able to climb that slope you can't... even if you've got elf boots and a magic rope.
Why? Because it's so damned expensive to get them looking good.
Let the computer do the stuff that we know how to make a computer do... simulation... and let the humans worry about making the simulation fun.
I'm talking about the labels. That is, the ones who are contracting with Apple. What artists and customers want to go with doesn't really matter, since they're not direct parties to the contract.
I for one sometimes *like* playing single-player, non-online games.
So do I. There's a big market for offline games. It's huge. I didn't mean to imply that companies shouldn't develop for the offline market. I entirely agree with the original article: companies that develop for the offline market are wasting their time with copy protection, because they can't get effective control over their product without abandoning that market.
Science fiction: 2001, Star Trek, Lost in Space,...
Science: space probes, lunar landings,...
Engineering: solar power satellites, industrial microgravity,...
Industry: weather satellites, communication satellites, GPS,...
Science leads to spinoffs in multiple directions. Science fiction is one of them. New industries are another. We're in a Red Queen's Race here, and stopping all the science won't speed us up much, but it'll sure make it harder to keep running.
If you're worried about wasted money, don't look to Cape Canaveral, look to Baghdad.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that Netscape was already doomed as a browser company well before that rewrite started.
The ISPs made their own bed but we all have to sleep in it now.
The ISPs fought tooth and nail against even modest municipal wifi limited to public areas like libraries and shopping districts, because they wanted to make money from it. So rather than municipally funded projects they promoted these ad-hoc "partnerships" that didn't, in the end, make money.
Related to this is the PCs crowd incessant will to bash the lack of PC-like features on a Mac, such as "real" delete keys on the laptops.
You spelled "right mouse button on laptops" in a really strange way there.
And no, the passive-aggressive multi-touch hacks that Apple has come up with are so far from being replacements that dismissing them as "non-issues" is exactly the kind of defensiveness that brings out the Mac bashers baying for blood, and the real advantages of the current Mac OS get lost in the feeding frenzy that follows. Quit being so defensive about the very real shortcomings of Apple's hardware, acknowledge the cost you have to pay to get an OS that doesn't suck as much and applications that don't suck as badly, and move on.
There's a goodly dose of mindless religion in your post there.
Try suggesting to a Windows user that their security problems are self-inflicted some time, or that Microsoft really did create the flood of viruses... I better not go on, I don't want to be struck down by Lightning from Redmond (at least that's what a good many Windows users seem to expect, even now).
Amiga users got taught rabidity by the Mac crowd. Mac users were already mindlessly rabid about the Mac even before the Amiga ever shipped.
The biggest attacks on the Amiga came from Mac users, because Mac users were convinced that the Amiga was just a "wannabe Mac". They didn't want to know about multitasking (something every OS does now, and that nobody would dream of trying to get by without), or a uniform hierarchical file system (until HFS came along, then they started using the same arguments that they'd been belittling). The Amiga API had a sophisticated threading and message system, while Mac programs had to be built around an event loop... and many Mac programmers argued for years that writing software to take advantage of multitasking was just locking you into the Amiga (until OS X came along, and suddenly the Mac nuts were all behind it). Amiga's memory management was never all that hot (anyone else remember "an operating system without virtual memory is an operating system without virtue"?), but at least Amiga programs weren't locked in to fixed size partitions, and the Mac advocates would even argue that making end-users fiddle with memory partitions was *good* (until that became unnecessary with OS X).
With that kind of mindless attack coming from the left, and DOS users on the right telling Amiga users that they were wasting their time with a Mac wannabe, what do you expect to happen?
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities
There were no platform similarities between the Amiga and the Mac for Amiga users to take advantage of. Many of them tried to make a go of it with BeOS, but that had doom baked into its very kernel. If anything, the Amiga users have had to find their home in Linux and Windows NT... the Mac OS before OS X was utterly appalling, and the death of the Amiga had already played out and become ancient history well before OS X showed up.
Tell me when Microsoft releases Windows system software under an open source license.
Apple and Microsoft both pulled in BSD components. Apple's updated versions are available online from http://www.opensource.apple.com/. Microsoft's are where?
A smart, cheap move by Apple would have been to not build Safari in the first place and throw a few bucks and their weight into the Mozilla project.
KDE
Safari is based on KHTML, not Gecko.
Ten years of IE and Outlook exploits haven't taught you the value of a diverse software ecosystem yet?
Javascript has a plethora of flaws, many of which (like the procedural syntax) are faithfully preserved in Javascript 2. That doesn't mean that it should inherit bad designs from other languages in the process of fixing its flaws.
Apologies, but you've clearly never worked with high-quality raytracing.
If by that you mean "I don't care about getting that last 20% that makes me go 'ooh, aah'", well, you're right. I don't care about that last 20%, because if raytracing gets you an 80% solution with 20% of the effort then the same budget will deliver five competitive games instead of one blowaway one... or else a company that can't afford ten artists can get into the market with two. Sure, you're still going to have top of the line houses that are doing blowaway work instead of merely being "realistic"... but maybe they can put their energy into doing things that are better than "real" like Wind Walker or Okami instead of wasting artist's time creating 3d photographs.
From the perspective of document format users, OOXML is better than what MS customers had before.
How do you figure that? Anyone implementing OOXML readers or writers still has to reverse-engineer Microsoft's applications. It doesn't make a lot of difference whether the undocumented proprietary code looks like "xmlns..." instead of "{\rtf..." or binary gibberish.
The 6000 degrees is the peak temperature of the plasma in the center of the bulb, not the temperature of any solid component.
I think the original premise of the article is in error. We don't have to automatically download and install software when it's offered. Automatic software installs have a long history of breaking working systems... I mean, rendering them non-working, not just installing an extra component you might or might not want. If there's any trust being undermined, then it's trust that should be undermined. If there's a relationship that's being broken, it's a relationship that was only ever illusionary.
The relationship I have with other software developers is a tentative one. I don't automatically update my software. I don't update software behind people's backs. I turn off Windows Update, and Firefox automatic updates, and Apple's software update, automatically. I don't even think about it, any more, it's just automatic. I'll trust them, sure, but on my terms, as far as they can show they're trustworthy.
And, look, at least Apple asks. It doesn't just download a new update in the background and then ask you to restart Firefox to activate it. If there's a problem with an update, Firefox doesn't even have an option to say "no, I don't want this update, I'll catch up when they fix it", you have to refuse it over and over again.
I think this is a great lesson for people. It doesn't matter if you love Apple or hate Apple, if you love Firefox or hate Firefox. The point is that you never can tell what's going to happen when they update your ass. Don't just blithely let them do it, wait until you're ready and you know it's safe.
The universe is held together by flour?
The universe is held together by Duct Tape. Except air conditioning ducts, because of the enormous quantities of Schrodinger particles emitted by shed cat hair. You need to use metallized tape to hold those together. Heavy-metallized if you have more than two cats.
In a century the other cables will already have been buried by our cthonic robotic overlords.
A lot of people like the straightforward, game-tells-you-where-to-go style gameplay.
You don't have to have the characters running on rails to have a directed game.
I'd argue it's because every object you stick behind the tavern needs thousands of polygons and high-res textures to look good
It needs unique high res textures because they're using textures to cover up for the lack of a decent optical model and faking it with prebaked shading.
It needs thousands of polygons because rasterization wants polygons. Raytracing actually works better with procedural objects. The earliest raytracers didn't have anything *but* procedural objects.
I agree with Gosling. Classes are an unnecessary abstraction layer. Why shouldn't you be able to inherit from any object?
Getting great graphics from the next generation of raster engines is going to cost even more. Sure, you can sit there and micromanage every goddamn thing on the screen and get graphics that look good enough that you can't tell them from optically correct rendering at a glance. But that costs you five times as much as building a model and telling the graphics engine to render it, and letting the software figure out where you need shadows and hilights and bloom.
The other side of this is the Myst problem. Remember Myst? Remember how you could only go where they're rendered the scenes? Now in many modern games, guess what, you can only go where they've prepared the scenes. You can't even walk across a flowerbed and around the back of the tavern, because they haven't prepared the back of the tavern. you get puzzles that involve figuring out what rope to grab to climb up a 45 degree slope, and if they haven't decided that you're going to be able to climb that slope you can't... even if you've got elf boots and a magic rope.
Why? Because it's so damned expensive to get them looking good.
Let the computer do the stuff that we know how to make a computer do... simulation... and let the humans worry about making the simulation fun.
Except that advertising on broadcast TV doesn't make your TV crash.
example.com and the invalid tld are supposed to be used for these things.
To be honest, it's completely reasonable that Sony charge for the bloatware-removal service, given that it costs them money.
A missed opportunity is not a cost.
Are you talking about artists or customers here?
I'm talking about the labels. That is, the ones who are contracting with Apple. What artists and customers want to go with doesn't really matter, since they're not direct parties to the contract.
Good engineers will also do cost-benefit analysis.
So do good security professionals.
Not so with many security professionals (or rather, vulnerability hunters on BugTraq) though.
I think your parenthetical comment answers your point quite well.
That's because they don't have to compete against HD any more.
I for one sometimes *like* playing single-player, non-online games.
So do I. There's a big market for offline games. It's huge. I didn't mean to imply that companies shouldn't develop for the offline market. I entirely agree with the original article: companies that develop for the offline market are wasting their time with copy protection, because they can't get effective control over their product without abandoning that market.
Science fiction: 2001, Star Trek, Lost in Space, ...
...
...
...
Science: space probes, lunar landings,
Engineering: solar power satellites, industrial microgravity,
Industry: weather satellites, communication satellites, GPS,
Science leads to spinoffs in multiple directions. Science fiction is one of them. New industries are another. We're in a Red Queen's Race here, and stopping all the science won't speed us up much, but it'll sure make it harder to keep running.
If you're worried about wasted money, don't look to Cape Canaveral, look to Baghdad.