I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR)
We know you love the CLR... unfortunately, it's not an open system like the UNIX programming environment and so it's not really well liked in the open source world. We're not happy with the limitations of the Windows programming environment, and we find the large and complex APIs beloved of the Windows developers a throwback to the old pre-UNIX mainframe era, so we expect Silverlight to be the same kind of Windows wart on the side of UNIX. If we're mistaken, if Mono can be integrated well into the UNIX world, we'd love to see you prove us wrong by doing it.
But you don't seem to like the UNIX environment, so I guess you won't be doing anything along those lines...
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
ActiveX has failed to make Dot-NET take off in the web application world. Why do you think that Silverlight will do any better?
But Javascript is actually a pretty nice scripting language. It's got a better object model than C++ or Java, better than Objective C, and in some ways it's even better than Smalltalk's. The libraries in the browser world is somewhat messed up, but that's due to the fact that it's had to build on and remain compatible a set of experimental and mutually antagonistic libraries... and it's survived that pretty damn well.
Dot NET, on the other hand, is built on an OS specific design that's got a huge semantic gap with anything but Windows.
Slamming Mono for implementing Silverlight
Don't worry, we're not slamming Mono for implementing Silverlight. We're slamming Mono for implementing Dot NET. Silverlight is just another symptom of the same problem.
microsoft came a long and actually made a really usefull piece of technology that ties alot of features together in one package
It's only a useful piece of technology if you want to abandon the UNIX programming environment and switch to one that's based on the Windows API and isolates you from all the rest of the UNIX tools you're used to.
Just because something is free, that doesn't mean it's worth less than you paid for it. Microsoft apologists have been pointing this out for years, as if it was somehow news... well, the shoe's on the other foot now.
You don't have to switch to Linux to be able to test it or develop for it.
You don't need to switch to Linux to test and develop Lunix-compatible code Windows *already*.
You have a choice of at least three UNIX-compatible APIs for Windows, one is even provided by Microsoft. There's at least two cross-platform GUI toolkits you can use. And you avoid the.NET patent minefield.
Or you can use Java.
All Mono or Silverlight give you is an API that doesn't work well on UNIX, so you can create applications that don't interact well with UNIX applications and have weird hidden interactions with each other because of the way they get run from a user daemon.
It sure looks like there are walls in these pictures. Don't forget that Halo is 53 kilometers across, so fairly high walls would be hard to make out from the surface unless they were had a high contrast color scheme... if they were blackbody on the inside you'd only be able to tell they were there from any distance if they occluded an object in orbit.
If the field of view is 20 degrees, the haze in the distance subtends an angle of two degrees. If that shot is across the entire ring even a brightly colored wall a couple of kilometers tall would be lost in the haze. If the view is at an oblique angle even higher walls would be invisible.
Carbon is not justthe path of least resistance... it's the *only* option for cross-platform stuff unless Apple releases OpenStep again or endorses GNUstep... and that still won't help existing applications.
Safari is a wrapper around Webkit. Webkit is a port of KHTML, written in C++, and is the majority of the code in Safari: any Cocoa code is in the "shell" or in what are effectively Cocoa plug-ins. Camino is a similar wrapper, though somewhat simpler, around the Gecko HTML component from Mozilla/Firefox. This is the approach that I mentioned when I talked about using the original application as a support library.
The reason Finder sucks is not simply that it's Carbon, but that it's a mutant crossbreed of the NeXT file browser and the original Classic Finder. Apple really messed up there, the basic approaches to file management in NeXTstep and in Finder are vastly different, and the result of this blending of the two approaches has pleased nobody. Even rewriting it in Cocoa wouldn't help unless they abandoned all the original Finder behaviour (which would really piss off the old-school Mac fans) or abandoned the file-browser behaviour (which would piss off everyone else).
I really think they'd be better off starting fresh with the NeXT file browser, updating the NeXTstep code and making it pretty and Aquafied, and ripping all the Browser behaviour out of Finder completely and making it purely a "classic Finder" implementation.
Earth isn't being ignored. It is the untouched control in the Culture's experiment.
Yeh, bastards... why the hell did they have to pick us as the control? It's the opposite of the anthropic principle, anyone would think it was a cosmic plot device to explain why we haven't been...
Or is Carbon especially appropriate for legendary code cruft?
Finder is Carbon. Safari is Carbon. Any application not written specifically for Cocoa (or next/Open/GNUstep), or where the application can't be basically treated as a support library for a completely new user interface, pretty much has to be Carbon.
I have to admit that the "genius" I've spoken to at the local Apple store was completely on top of things, and I didn't get any backtalk when I said I was in a hurry, and they didn't need to install the OS because I was goingto re-image it anyway... they just asked me when I picked it up to confirm that's what I wanted.
I'm still not happy that I had to actually haul the thing down to the Apple store rather than having them advance-replace my drive, but that's Apple's design team at fault for making such an impractical laptop, there's nothing the genius could do about that.
I really wish Apple hadn't come up with such a twee name for them, though.:)
Apple has been in business longer than Dell, and while its sales as a percentage of the TOTAL industry are low, they're higher than most individual PC manufacturers and even Dell didn't start out making more than Apple... so put those numbers back where they came from and dig some real ones up.
its certainly a future I can relate to and would be very happy living in - without it being too shiny happy optimistic about the way things will turn out
You quite sure it's a future you'd be happy living in? Have you read State of the Art?:)
Not to mention they could fire whoever it was responsible for Adobe's long history of passive-aggressive footdragging over Rhapsody/OSX. That would be as good at TWO new product releases for Jobs.:)
Lots of things. DEC was bought by Compaq, who appeared to consider the Alpha as a side issue... they were after DEC's support arm. Compaq choked Alpha development, and killed the 8-core (none of this messing around with dual- and quad- core processors) EV8 (while telling customers it was the way forward) then killed Alpha (while telling customers they had a roadmap) right before HP (who was making a competing processor) bought them. I don't know whether going fabless was part of the problem, but I doubt it: DEC had already licensed Samsung to produce the chips before Compaq bought them.
No, it couldn't be reasonably read that way. "Including a copy of a license" doesn't mean "placing your code under a license".
No, but "If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license" does.
What do they mean by "a license that complies with this license"? An equivalent license? Or a less-restrictive one?
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I loved the Silverlight announcement, it is a way of bringing my favorite platform to the web (the CLR and now the DLR)
We know you love the CLR... unfortunately, it's not an open system like the UNIX programming environment and so it's not really well liked in the open source world. We're not happy with the limitations of the Windows programming environment, and we find the large and complex APIs beloved of the Windows developers a throwback to the old pre-UNIX mainframe era, so we expect Silverlight to be the same kind of Windows wart on the side of UNIX. If we're mistaken, if Mono can be integrated well into the UNIX world, we'd love to see you prove us wrong by doing it.
But you don't seem to like the UNIX environment, so I guess you won't be doing anything along those lines...
Well, because I believe that Siverlight will become an important component in future applications. The majority of people will probably be happy to spice up their web applications with a little silverlight as it will run on Windows and MacOS.
ActiveX has failed to make Dot-NET take off in the web application world. Why do you think that Silverlight will do any better?
But Javascript is actually a pretty nice scripting language. It's got a better object model than C++ or Java, better than Objective C, and in some ways it's even better than Smalltalk's. The libraries in the browser world is somewhat messed up, but that's due to the fact that it's had to build on and remain compatible a set of experimental and mutually antagonistic libraries... and it's survived that pretty damn well.
Dot NET, on the other hand, is built on an OS specific design that's got a huge semantic gap with anything but Windows.
Slamming Mono for implementing Silverlight
Don't worry, we're not slamming Mono for implementing Silverlight. We're slamming Mono for implementing Dot NET. Silverlight is just another symptom of the same problem.
microsoft came a long and actually made a really usefull piece of technology that ties alot of features together in one package
It's only a useful piece of technology if you want to abandon the UNIX programming environment and switch to one that's based on the Windows API and isolates you from all the rest of the UNIX tools you're used to.
Just because something is free, that doesn't mean it's worth less than you paid for it. Microsoft apologists have been pointing this out for years, as if it was somehow news... well, the shoe's on the other foot now.
You don't have to switch to Linux to be able to test it or develop for it.
.NET patent minefield.
You don't need to switch to Linux to test and develop Lunix-compatible code Windows *already*.
You have a choice of at least three UNIX-compatible APIs for Windows, one is even provided by Microsoft. There's at least two cross-platform GUI toolkits you can use. And you avoid the
Or you can use Java.
All Mono or Silverlight give you is an API that doesn't work well on UNIX, so you can create applications that don't interact well with UNIX applications and have weird hidden interactions with each other because of the way they get run from a user daemon.
It brings a Windows-specific API that's a really really bad fit for the UNIX programming environment! Two hits for the price of one!
The first game presents the ringworld quite clearly on the title screen and there is no evidence of there being any high walls.
s /halo/halo-016.jpgs /halo/halo-017.jpgs /halo/halo-024.jpgs /halo/halo-027.jpg
s /halo/halo-009.jpg
s /halo/halo-006.jpgs /halo/halo-028.jpg
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
It sure looks like there are walls in these pictures. Don't forget that Halo is 53 kilometers across, so fairly high walls would be hard to make out from the surface unless they were had a high contrast color scheme... if they were blackbody on the inside you'd only be able to tell they were there from any distance if they occluded an object in orbit.
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
If the field of view is 20 degrees, the haze in the distance subtends an angle of two degrees. If that shot is across the entire ring even a brightly colored wall a couple of kilometers tall would be lost in the haze. If the view is at an oblique angle even higher walls would be invisible.
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
http://games.monstersatplay.com/assets/screenshot
The cloud decks in these pictures would cover a wall tens of kilometers tall.
Carbon is not justthe path of least resistance... it's the *only* option for cross-platform stuff unless Apple releases OpenStep again or endorses GNUstep... and that still won't help existing applications.
Safari is a wrapper around Webkit. Webkit is a port of KHTML, written in C++, and is the majority of the code in Safari: any Cocoa code is in the "shell" or in what are effectively Cocoa plug-ins. Camino is a similar wrapper, though somewhat simpler, around the Gecko HTML component from Mozilla/Firefox. This is the approach that I mentioned when I talked about using the original application as a support library.
The reason Finder sucks is not simply that it's Carbon, but that it's a mutant crossbreed of the NeXT file browser and the original Classic Finder. Apple really messed up there, the basic approaches to file management in NeXTstep and in Finder are vastly different, and the result of this blending of the two approaches has pleased nobody. Even rewriting it in Cocoa wouldn't help unless they abandoned all the original Finder behaviour (which would really piss off the old-school Mac fans) or abandoned the file-browser behaviour (which would piss off everyone else).
I really think they'd be better off starting fresh with the NeXT file browser, updating the NeXTstep code and making it pretty and Aquafied, and ripping all the Browser behaviour out of Finder completely and making it purely a "classic Finder" implementation.
Earth isn't being ignored. It is the untouched control in the Culture's experiment.
:)
Yeh, bastards... why the hell did they have to pick us as the control? It's the opposite of the anthropic principle, anyone would think it was a cosmic plot device to explain why we haven't been...
Oh, yeh...
Or is Carbon especially appropriate for legendary code cruft?
Finder is Carbon. Safari is Carbon. Any application not written specifically for Cocoa (or next/Open/GNUstep), or where the application can't be basically treated as a support library for a completely new user interface, pretty much has to be Carbon.
I have to admit that the "genius" I've spoken to at the local Apple store was completely on top of things, and I didn't get any backtalk when I said I was in a hurry, and they didn't need to install the OS because I was goingto re-image it anyway... they just asked me when I picked it up to confirm that's what I wanted.
:)
I'm still not happy that I had to actually haul the thing down to the Apple store rather than having them advance-replace my drive, but that's Apple's design team at fault for making such an impractical laptop, there's nothing the genius could do about that.
I really wish Apple hadn't come up with such a twee name for them, though.
Yep - its a completely fucked up universe but I think it would suit me.
Ah, you haven't read The State of the Art then.
The Culture novels are not set in the future.
Apple has been in business longer than Dell, and while its sales as a percentage of the TOTAL industry are low, they're higher than most individual PC manufacturers and even Dell didn't start out making more than Apple... so put those numbers back where they came from and dig some real ones up.
Ballmer: "they make make a lot of money, but..."
Different goals.
Microsoft wants to control the world.
Apple wants to make a lot of money.
It is a hog at best, and at worst when you are using it semi-heavily it can easily chew up 1GB of memory.
1GB for a command interpreter?
Christ.
I mean, just...
No, I can't come up with words that are strong enough.
Holy mother of Moore, they've got good crack in Redmond.
Oooh, VERY interesting.
The Halo ships seem a bit boring compared to the Culture ones, though.
its certainly a future I can relate to and would be very happy living in - without it being too shiny happy optimistic about the way things will turn out
:)
You quite sure it's a future you'd be happy living in? Have you read State of the Art?
Not to mention they could fire whoever it was responsible for Adobe's long history of passive-aggressive footdragging over Rhapsody/OSX. That would be as good at TWO new product releases for Jobs. :)
There's a reason it's called "the net of a million lies".
Well, it should be, anyway.
There are walls all along the rim, high enough to keep the atmosphere in.
Halo is more like Iain Banks "Orbitals" than Niven's Ringworld.
I haven't played Halo, but from what I've seen on the net I suspect the GCU Grey Area might be poking around there some time...
Well, my point wasn't that the buy would be wrong, but more that things were way more complex than "making your own chips is a bad idea".
What happened to the Alpha?
Lots of things. DEC was bought by Compaq, who appeared to consider the Alpha as a side issue... they were after DEC's support arm. Compaq choked Alpha development, and killed the 8-core (none of this messing around with dual- and quad- core processors) EV8 (while telling customers it was the way forward) then killed Alpha (while telling customers they had a roadmap) right before HP (who was making a competing processor) bought them. I don't know whether going fabless was part of the problem, but I doubt it: DEC had already licensed Samsung to produce the chips before Compaq bought them.
Ah, snap!
So the same Linux community that lambasted Microsoft for the agreement with Novell is now begging them to support them?
If by "begging them to support them" is some kind of weird way of saying "pointing out the limits in what Microsoft is actually doing", I suppose so.
No, it couldn't be reasonably read that way. "Including a copy of a license" doesn't mean "placing your code under a license".
No, but "If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license" does.
What do they mean by "a license that complies with this license"? An equivalent license? Or a less-restrictive one?