"Since this software is available on UNIX (which Mac OS X is built on) and also on Windows (Intel hardware), is the Apple switch to Intel-based hardware going to better my chances for a MacOS CAD workstation, or will it remain a pipedream?"
If the software is available on UNIX, and is not available on the Mac right now, then whatever is holding it back is unrelated to the processor the Mac is using. Either the vendor does not consider the Mac market large enough (which is odd, since by this time the majority of workstations capable of running UNIX software are Macs), or they consider even a port to another UNIX platform unreasonably difficult, or they don't realise that Mac OS X runs ordinary UNIX applications very well.
These are not problems that will be solved by switching to a new processor, case design, color scheme, mouse, keyboard, monitor, or pizza topping.
Therein lies the rub. Microsoft cannot fix the code--that's the point. It apparently cannot be done. Get over it. And when the spyware epidemic appeared, the company had to throw in the towel. Spyware exploits the basic architecture of the operating system, and no amount of patches will change that. A barrier has to be erected that changes the way the computer works, by monitoring things more aggressively.
Microsoft CAN fix the code, but there is no way they can get the political will to do it. They have too much time, face, and capital tied up in their internet-oriented OS to ever back away from it. Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows Update,... instead of having individual applications that build extensions of appropriate security around a set of resources (HTML rendering, HTTP access, CIFS access, scripting, the registry, and so on) they have committed to applications (Windows Update, Windows Explorer to an ever-increasing degree, Outlook,...) built out of components running under the web browser.
The security problems inherent in such a design were obvious to me in 1997, and when I banned the use of the "outside-facing" members of this family of tools at the local office we were able to easily ride out every one of the worm/virus outbreaks that slammed the rest of the company on a regular basis. I don't claim any great insight in this... virtually everyone else I knew in the security business came to more or less the same conclusion... but unfortunately few of them had the luxury of working for a company willing to give them the support for such an obvious step, and equally unfortunately I wasn't able to expand the policy beyond our building
Microsoft could redesign their system to once again be application-centered, with the HTML control a display-only module that requires the application to install internet access, trusted scripting, and other potentially dangerous components only when needed. But they're moving the other direction, and so while they COULD fix their basic problems it's ever less likely that they WILL.
If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Try buying another Palm, first. Not a new one, an old one.
I've had several handhelds, including two Jornadas, two iPaqs, and a T-Mobile phone... as well as a Visor, Visor Prism, and my current refurbished antiquated Sony Clie SJ22. After several years of trying to make my Pocket PCs live up to their potential, I went back to PalmOS 4 and I'm SO glad I did.
I can't imagine buying a PalmOS 5 device, though. Spending more money just to run 68000 code in an emulator instead of a real 68000, so I can do the stuff that I got the Pocket PCs for... and finally decided weren't worth the poor reliability and poor software selection.
I think that's whan Palm lost the plot. They should have stuck with the Dragonball chips for the run-of-the-mill handheld, and held off on the ARM until they had a real native ARM OS for it.
Oh, and blown whoever it took to keep Sony in the fold. Or at least put a bloody thumb controller on the thing so you can hold it comfortably in one hand while reading it. Though I guess Sony's no guarante of that... their last few models didn't have one either. Maybe someone stuck some stupid pills into the Palm OS 5 source code.
The technology that won the X-Prize is several orders of magnitude too inefficient for orbital flight, but if it could manage a suborbital ballistic trajectory from San Francisco to Tokyo it could beat the SST *and* do it more efficiently because it wouldn't need to fight drag all the way.
OK, all you rocket scientists... start your slide rules. How far away is the SS1 from this application (ignore the passenger and cargo capacity issues for now, just let us know if something like it can credibly be scaled up to supply the delta-v)?
Canonical example of difference between quantum and classical phenomena: Why can't a chair just spontaneously shift position?
It can and does, all the time.
Consider the chair as a fundamental particle. It can be described in terms of its mass, as a particle, or of its wavelength, as a wave. How far you can expect tunneling in a chair can be observed is a function of its wavelength, and for an object as massive as a chair its wavelength is terribly terribly small...
Upgrading the video processor in the Mac Mini to a Radeon 9600 would make this $500-$700 computer dangerously close in performance to a $1,300 low-end G5 iMac.
So the $700-$900 eMac with the Radeon 9600 is "dangerously close" in performance to the iMac G5? How about the $1000 iBook 12"?
It probably would be, if they'd stuck with the G4 long enough they could start shipping low end Macs with the MPC8641, but the 166 MHz CPU bus on the 74xx series G4s is just too slow.
Some times, the explicit activity that we're trying to be productive at is holding a conversation.
And sometimes the explicit activity we're trying to be productive at is creative work that conversation completely interrupts.
Oh, and telling someone "yes, I already understand that" while they're in the middle of explaining something is rarely productive. I have to tape my mouth shut, sometimes, because I've learned long since that it's MUCH more productive to let someone get the explaining out and finished before going on to the next point.
And what would have been a very lengthy back-and-forth is cut down to a very short conversation.
Yep, with both sides cutting straight through to "that guy's a fossil" so much faster.
Particularly with stuff like this:
But to completely deny the utility of live conversation for the next few decades, is quite another.
I never did. If you can jump to a conclusion like that when you have a chance to go back and re-read what I'd written at your leisure, how much harder would it be to ask yourself "hold on, am I really on track here" when you've got someone waiting for your response.
You're the one who said the next big platform is maybe a decade or more away.
Since you're not going to get what you want for that long, and you've rejected multiple desktop applications as a possibility, your super-platform isn't relevant. Which means that for the next decade or so... your best bet is the kind of web based application that you can direct someone to by pasting a URL rather than by waiting for several minutes while they download, install, and configure it.
Sincerely, I tell you- this conversation would have been much more efficient, had it been a live exchange.
You sure?
Sometimes live exchanges break down completely in short order, particularly when people are starting out with a complete misunderstanding of motives. You've never been involved in or witnessed one of those?
And an aside
In Second Life, people can see your head turn, and get a good concept of what you're looking at.
Except that's usually some random control around the periphery of *their* screen, not anything in the game world. That's a cute feature because it keeps people's heads moving... but it really makes the feature less than useful. Until I caught on to that, I was always mousing around to see what someone was looking at so intently... and there was nothing there.
I don't need to go online to watch someone staring at nothing. I've got cats already.
if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system.
Right. That's kind irrelevant, though, because I'm not talking about making a really big and complex environment.
This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium
You need a super-integrated single medium to keep a chat window open at the bottom of the screen?
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much
That's why I wouldn't do it that way.
Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app."
I like SL, I think it's a good idea, I haven't said it should be an AJAX app, I just said that it's got nothing to do with Flock and interruption-intensive user interfaces.
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it.
Manfred Macx mapped himself onto a flock of pigeons. When he was interested in something, he sent part of himself to look at it. When he was reincarnated in a human body agan, he had to get used to the old-fashioned idea of creating a sub-self to take care of it.
The Bureaucrat went to the Puzzle Palace and Agented himself multiple times. Each self was a full AI... he thought the idea of making his alternates less complete was silly. He didn't have to personally interact in real time with Eartth and his boss and the other members of his team, his Agents did it for him.
Gabriel routinely defers interactions with people to his subselves, even at one point leaving his lover with one while he was with another Aristoi in VR (and was deeply sorry for later).
Yatima verself doesn't split ver attention that way very much, but ve is from Konishi Polis... which is somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned: why, its citizens only get one visual and one streaming input. Ver friends in other polises pass around outlooks and gestalts routinely. In other books by Egan, some characters defer almost every interruption to their exoself.
Concurrency is hard to deal with. Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted. Converting concurrent event streams into serialised and buffered ones is something computers do naturally. I say... take advantage of that! Manfred Macx would.
They have legal right to fight infringing sales and uses of US music.
In Russian Courts.
In Russian Courts.
Under Russian Law.
Under Russian Law.
You keep emphasising that what they're doing is legal in Russia.
I keep agreeing with that.
You keep telling me that I'm wrong, what they're doing is legal in Russia.
I say, yes, you're right. It's legal in Russia.
You keep acting as if I'm saying something else. I don't know how many more ways I can put it, but maybe this will do the trick.
No Russian Court is going to declare that a Russian business running on servers in Russia selling material through client computers in the US is doing business in the US. So nothing that happens in Russia has any relevance to the issue of where the sale takes place, because in Russia it's always going to be interpreted that the sale has taken place in Russia.
Now.
Go back and re-read my last few messages with your knee-jerk "this is legal in Russia so there's no issue" response turned off. If you still don't get it, THEN please ask for clarification.
I'm going to say, first, that everything you have written about "side systems" and "integration between programs" is irrelevant to anything I've said here. Nowhere have I suggested that any of these applications talk to each other in any way. ALL the integration happens at the user level, using the cut-and-paste capabilities of their desktop OS, using multiple browser windows and a single shared chat channel. The web applications do not talk to each other, anywhere.
The point to them being "web applications" is not that this allows them to be integrated, but that it allows them to be used by all participants without them having to download, install, and configure software.
Second, the problem *you're* talking about when you talk about "if Fred & Bill use chat facilities that may be found in the other environment..." is the *exact* problem that I was talking about when I said "oh no" in the first place.
And that problem is the conflict between real-time attention-based interaction and deferred document-based interaction. These two mechanisms are inherently different, and when you have one you can't have the other. Even if you log every interaction and replay it for someone else, it doesn't get used, because replaying every comment that people make over the course of a meeting is boring as hell (which is why people take minutes of meetings that summarise the important points).
The closest thing to a solution I have ever seen is to restrict chat to one channel. When you go look at a shared page on the web, you don't discuss it in that page, you keep discussing it in channel. So "if Fred & Bill use chat facilities that may be found in the other environment" doesn't happen.
As for the rest, I don't need to read it. Greg Egan, Cory Docterow, Charley Stross, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, these people have done a much better job of presenting that argument... and I'm way ahead of you there. But anything like that is too far off to be anyways relevant to my "oh no" comment. THAT is all about here and now, and Sametime, and shared VNC, and 47 IM systems, and phone calls, and all the other fossilized "face to face" manager types who don't use the net effectively and force me to drop out and deal with all the timewasting personal 'are you paying attention to me? I'm important' primate crap. Once I can delegate that to subselves running in my processor implants and only bop into their old-fashioned 3d meeting-scapes if they say something the limited-AI can't handle, it won't matter.
AllOfMP3 is allowed, by law and by explicit agreement with the record labels, to sell that merchandise, and the agreement is cler that they may sell it at whatever price in whatever manner they please, so long as they continue to honor Russian law.
So long as they do it in Russia.
They are licensed to sell that music in Russia. They're not licensed to sell that music in the US. If they loaded that amount of music on a truck themselves and brought it across the border themselves, it'd be confiscated. So far from it being "still a legal sale of a song...", the distinction between the sale taking place in Russia and the US is critical to the question of whether it's legal or not.
The RIAA (well, the Russian equivalent organization) has looked into AllOfMP3 and did not take them to court.
Well, of course they didn't. Neither the Russian organization nor Russian courts have standing to take them to court over their activities in the US. If the RIAA can find a US court willing to take the "right" position on where they're doing business... well, that's a whole different story.
You are not harmed in not being able to listen to Britney Spears' new album on your Linux box,
The effects on open source software and the rights of consumers are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the water lurks a fractal explosion of rotten ice that's just waiting to rip the heart out of dozens of important players in Western society.
The use of encryption technology to control the playback of information leads to precisely the kind of pernicious situation the framers of the constitution were trying to head off when they exempted letterforms from copyright protection. If it's illegal to reverse enginer the software protecting a document, then it becomes impossible for individuals and public interest groups to legally posess editable or excerptable copies of that document. If that document turns out to be legally, historically, or otherwise important then being unable to reverse-engineer the protection is in massive opposition to the public interest.
The fact that once the DRM is cracked it's cracked for good, so it's impossible to just reverse-engineer the encryption technology for "important documents", must not be allowed to muddy the waters by redirecting the debate to "consumer rights".
As for the way you're trying to trivialise the debate by bringing in a fluffy pop icon, what about "Britney Spears' new album"? Tell me how, precisely, Brittney Spears' hypothetical interest in ever-so-slightly reducing the unauthorized copying of her music is so important. Her music will still be copied and shared online, no matter what technical orlegal measures she takes, so any protection DRM gives her is minor and short-lived... it hardly seems sufficient reason to set aside the important role that watchdogs, whistleblowers, and public interest organizations play in our society.
That is already illegal based on already existing law, and thus such a contract would be invalid to begin with. That is the balancing act between a parent's "right to sell their children" and the child's "right not to be sold". All rights are fictions, created in society for its benefit. A society that disgregards the basic tenets of contract law is a defunct society, for that kind of law is quite nearly as innate as it gets, and harkens back to "I'll give you this pointy rock if you give me that apple".
And that is precisely why Fair Use must trump anti-reverse-engineering laws and similar terms in contracts, because such terms completely and irrecoverably throw off one of these balancing acts... and in favor of a "right" that didn't even exist ten years ago!
This part is actually correct, ladies and gentlemen. To pro-Linux folks, next time, think about the GPL as well. Consider the GPL a Technology Protection Device -- you cannot copy or improve a GPL-licensed technology without adhering to the GPL.
The GPL is not a "technology protection device". All HR-1201 would grant would be the right for you to read and analyse the GPL and the source code of a program under the GPL. There is no conflict between HR-1201.
Contract law must be held above Fair Use. Period.
Why? How does Fair Use differ from any of the other bases on which unreasonable contracts are held unenforcable? There's all kinds of things you can not enforce through contract law, there's nothing magic about this one.
Yeh, I want to know what these digital offerings are.
The media industries that have the worst problems with piracy are computer games and porn. Computer games are considered well protected if the cracks for them don't come out until after they're actually released, and pornsite operators rip each other off on a regular basis. And yet these remain tremendously profitable businesses and while I can't say much about the level of innovation in porn, the computer gaming industry is the driving force behind most of the development in personal computer hardware and has been since the '70s.
That's pretty good for an industry that had to fight in the courts to even get their content recognised as copyrightable works: in some early cases the conclusion was that compiled software wasn't human readable and so wasn't copyrightable... only source code was protected.
So, yeh, I see this hypothetical "innovative content" as a huge bluff.
Come up with a TPM that stops people from copying and distributing a work more than "fair use", but that allows "fair use". You get to decide exactly what "fair use" means technically, but it must fit today's working definition -- personal backups, personal use on other devices, research/library use.
It's impossible to come up with a technical mechanism that will stop people from distributing a work, period. Even with laws in place to prevent consumers from reverse-engineering the software and hardware, all it takes is for one person anywhere in the world to break that law and release an unlocked copy of the work, and it's "game over". And yet the computer game industry, where it's reckoned a win if you don't find a crack for your game out on the first day after release, is thriving.
You can't stop it, no matter what technical mechanisms or laws you impose you will never be able to stop it all you can do is make it harder, and even making it just a bit hard seems to be more than high enough a barrier to convince most consumers to buy rather than steal.
If all you can do is make it harder, and all you need to do is make it harder, then the challenge for you is to show that creating a new class of criminal behaviour is balanced by significant real benefits. Stuff you can support with figures that withstand scrutiny, not "we're going to hold our breath until we get our way" protests from the RIAA and MPAA.
Rather, I mean a system that is attached to some other system, that hasn't hit mainstream use within that system.
That's what I thouht yuo were talking about.
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page.
Do I really want to see several hundred icons floating by the side of any popular web pages almost all the time?
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
No, but you can implement the shared whiteboard tools that you were bemoaning the lack of on top of it.
You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window.
Why not? I do it all the time. Drag a picture from Wikipedia, drop it into a paint program, it shows up as a picture. Drag it to an IRC window and the URL gets pasted. What happens when you drag it into the browser depends on what you've written your Javascript to do.
And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back.
That problem is inherent in communications that emulate physical presence, and is the thing that made me go "no, please" in the first place. It doesn't matter what your software is, people who missed the discussion missed the discussion. Using URLs to whiteboardable object on a web page reduces that as much as anything I can thing, since no matter how many objects you're operating on the chat's in the same place.
They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment.
There's no environment to reconstruct, there's no hops that have been made:
Fred Manager: Bill, look at [url], tell me what you think. Bill Peon: Well, I'd change the wording like this (he edits the text in the refernnced page, Fred sees it in real time (if you like) or when he hits save (if I like). Fred Manager + Bill Peon (more discussion in chat, maybe more URLs pasted or dropped) Joe Visitor (comes in, scrolls back, looks at URL): YOu know, I think the original working was better for...
But I don't think that the super-environment I described will come about through it.
I din't say it would. I said that the functionality you need now can.
if I want to personally implement a lot of ideas together with friends, that a special uber-client is the way
You going to port it to my OS?
The things that really appear to succeed, are almost all integrated platforms. [...] wiki
To apply that clause of copyright law you have to assume that a business operating a server in Russia that's directly accessible from the US and selling in US dollars continues to be regarded by the US as a business operating in Russia that YOU are importing from, rather than a business with servers in Russia but operating in the USA.
There's all kinds of examples of governments treating internet transactions as if they were taking place at the client rather than at the server. Germany, France, China, Canada, many states in the USA,...
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work.
Yes, I know you made up the term yourself, so you can make it mean anything you want it to mean, but you seem to be changing what it means here. You previously were using it to refer to applications that took communication channels intended for humans and extracted data from them. Now you're using it to mean applications that happen to be implemented on a platform you don't approve of.
Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
Maybe, but I've been hoping for a new application platform that'll do for the graphical interface what the UNIX shell did for the command line interface for a lot longer than 10 years... and it hasn't happened yet.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe.
I. Didn't. Say. That. No matter how many times you put those words in my mouth, they're still your words, not mine.
I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't.
Whatever you're working on, it's not solving the problem you're complaining about. When I suggest a way that you can attack the problem you're complaining about, when I dare to think that there might be a way to use existing tools to make things better, when I dare to suggest that you might not have to wait 10 or 20 years for the UberSystem to get some part of what you want, what do you do? You call me a fossil again. And then complain that I'm badmouthing you?
Well, shit.
If someone isn't participating in this "new browser," or this "new virtual environment," then people won't see what you're seeing, or know what you're doing, or whatever.
Wrong.
That's NOT what I mean.
What I mean is that if this new tool, whatever it is, requires (however that's implemented, logging on, registering, broadcasting, whatever) that unless you take some explicit action to avoid it that people will be able to see what you're doing or looking at to use it... like some kind of World Wide Web Second Life cross... it won't fly.
Every time something new comes along, it lets me be in more places and do more things online at the same time. Your Not The Web But better has to allow that, surely. So. What's it going to do, rez up an avatar of me at every Not The Web But Better site? So now there's 10 different images of my icon floating in 10 cyberscapes? Or do I give up trying to juggle 10 VR selves (each of them subject to interruption) and go back to a single window like some old dumb terminal on a single-tasking OS?
You have noticably ignored the problem of: The person who was away from that environment at the time. They come back, but they can't see the conversation, because it transcended to a different dimension. (A different web page, environment.)
It doesn't "transcend to a different environment". I already brought that up... just because you're working on a shared whiteboard in the browser, that doesn't mean you're going to leave the logged-and-archived IRC conversation. If it does, then that's a problem with your whiteboard tool.
Your UberWeb environment is going to have the same problem, when Fred Manager drags the meeting off to a different Cyberscape.
You have all these different mediums, and all these different windows. "Skype." Check. "IRC." Check. "Shared web browsing window." Check. "Shared editor." Check. "Shared drawing board." Check. "Allright, cleared for takeoff!"
YOU may, because you're trying to do everything in separate programs. Your "side systems" have the same problem, they're separate programs on the outside of the web... I'm talking about implementing the tools on the platform you have rather than trying to create a bunch of separate and independant platforms that you have to keep working together.
I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I've already said there's nothing wrong with having that option, and suggested a way you could implement that option without having to install specific software on everyone's computer.
All I'm saying is that I've watched this cycle play out on top of various technologies over the years, and there's these two things that always happen.
1. You get some people who insist on only using it, so if you're dealing with them you don't have an option... you HAVE to be in real time. These ar the same people who send yuo email saying they're going to call you on the phone, and call 3 meetings to get an answer they could have got in one email. Which is incredibly disheartening if it's your boss.
2. After a while, people give up on using special software to do stuff.
Implementing this as some kind of Javascript-based tool, and you'll get somewhere, without creating another application that I have to use to interact with these "special" people.
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone.
That's because you *go into* it. You're not using it along with your existing IRC. I don't know why, I don't know what aspectes of the interface make IRC undesirable as a part of the tool, but that's something you need to solve.
I think that somewhere around 2010-2015, we're going to see a new platform take over.
The new platform will support both 3-D & 2-D. It'll have online activity awareness (you'll be able to see what people are doing, where they are in the various spaces.) It'll be live (real-time) and lively (fun,) for most people.
I think that you're going to see more 3d user interfaces, definitely. But I don't think they're going to change the default situation whereby unless you explicitly choose to enter an interactive space people do not see you and do not know what yuo're doing any more than they do now. At the very least, if they do it will turn into a disaster.
Many people believe that we don't need to perform any additional work
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
It's not that the task is difficult (it is not,) it's that it is an interruption. Specifically, it can take about 45-120 seconds to do so. All conversation must stop, while everyone calibrates their getup to the new environment.
If you do it the way I'm suggesting, it will take then 10 seconds at the most, if their computer's really slow, to click on the link to *the specific page* that you dropped into the channel and bring up the shared whitebord.
Dropping links into channel doesn't interrupt anyone. You click on the link, the browser window opens, and even if you have to wait you don't have to EVER stop communicating on channel.
If you have some idea about how to improve the system, or have some idea about how to implement it, or if you have some other constructive idea, I'd like to hear it.
Then quit reading what you want to read into what I'm saying, and pay attention to what I'm actually saying, because I've been doing that. And quit complaining about *my* tone if you're not willing to listen to the way you're presenting yourself. You did it again in this message, telling me that if I don't like *your* idea I'm some kind of fossil.
Slashdot Mirror
"Since this software is available on UNIX (which Mac OS X is built on) and also on Windows (Intel hardware), is the Apple switch to Intel-based hardware going to better my chances for a MacOS CAD workstation, or will it remain a pipedream?"
If the software is available on UNIX, and is not available on the Mac right now, then whatever is holding it back is unrelated to the processor the Mac is using. Either the vendor does not consider the Mac market large enough (which is odd, since by this time the majority of workstations capable of running UNIX software are Macs), or they consider even a port to another UNIX platform unreasonably difficult, or they don't realise that Mac OS X runs ordinary UNIX applications very well.
These are not problems that will be solved by switching to a new processor, case design, color scheme, mouse, keyboard, monitor, or pizza topping.
Therein lies the rub. Microsoft cannot fix the code--that's the point. It apparently cannot be done. Get over it. And when the spyware epidemic appeared, the company had to throw in the towel. Spyware exploits the basic architecture of the operating system, and no amount of patches will change that. A barrier has to be erected that changes the way the computer works, by monitoring things more aggressively.
... instead of having individual applications that build extensions of appropriate security around a set of resources (HTML rendering, HTTP access, CIFS access, scripting, the registry, and so on) they have committed to applications (Windows Update, Windows Explorer to an ever-increasing degree, Outlook, ...) built out of components running under the web browser.
Microsoft CAN fix the code, but there is no way they can get the political will to do it. They have too much time, face, and capital tied up in their internet-oriented OS to ever back away from it. Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows Update,
The security problems inherent in such a design were obvious to me in 1997, and when I banned the use of the "outside-facing" members of this family of tools at the local office we were able to easily ride out every one of the worm/virus outbreaks that slammed the rest of the company on a regular basis. I don't claim any great insight in this... virtually everyone else I knew in the security business came to more or less the same conclusion... but unfortunately few of them had the luxury of working for a company willing to give them the support for such an obvious step, and equally unfortunately I wasn't able to expand the policy beyond our building
Microsoft could redesign their system to once again be application-centered, with the HTML control a display-only module that requires the application to install internet access, trusted scripting, and other potentially dangerous components only when needed. But they're moving the other direction, and so while they COULD fix their basic problems it's ever less likely that they WILL.
If I had a dollar for every time my *&%&^$ Palm Pilot froze on me during a hotsync, I could buy a damn Pocket PC.
Try buying another Palm, first. Not a new one, an old one.
I've had several handhelds, including two Jornadas, two iPaqs, and a T-Mobile phone... as well as a Visor, Visor Prism, and my current refurbished antiquated Sony Clie SJ22. After several years of trying to make my Pocket PCs live up to their potential, I went back to PalmOS 4 and I'm SO glad I did.
I can't imagine buying a PalmOS 5 device, though. Spending more money just to run 68000 code in an emulator instead of a real 68000, so I can do the stuff that I got the Pocket PCs for... and finally decided weren't worth the poor reliability and poor software selection.
I think that's whan Palm lost the plot. They should have stuck with the Dragonball chips for the run-of-the-mill handheld, and held off on the ARM until they had a real native ARM OS for it.
Oh, and blown whoever it took to keep Sony in the fold. Or at least put a bloody thumb controller on the thing so you can hold it comfortably in one hand while reading it. Though I guess Sony's no guarante of that... their last few models didn't have one either. Maybe someone stuck some stupid pills into the Palm OS 5 source code.
and the Apple Nazi's too.
Apostrophe abusers will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Presumably this means that they're going to come up with new USB drivers for OS X that actually work reliably. I can't wait!
Frontrow is not competition for Media Center
Right. It's missing the all-important virus, malware, and invisible system corruption features that Windows brings to the table.
The technology that won the X-Prize is several orders of magnitude too inefficient for orbital flight, but if it could manage a suborbital ballistic trajectory from San Francisco to Tokyo it could beat the SST *and* do it more efficiently because it wouldn't need to fight drag all the way.
OK, all you rocket scientists... start your slide rules. How far away is the SS1 from this application (ignore the passenger and cargo capacity issues for now, just let us know if something like it can credibly be scaled up to supply the delta-v)?
Canonical example of difference between quantum and classical phenomena: Why can't a chair just spontaneously shift position?
It can and does, all the time.
Consider the chair as a fundamental particle. It can be described in terms of its mass, as a particle, or of its wavelength, as a wave. How far you can expect tunneling in a chair can be observed is a function of its wavelength, and for an object as massive as a chair its wavelength is terribly terribly small...
Upgrading the video processor in the Mac Mini to a Radeon 9600 would make this $500-$700 computer dangerously close in performance to a $1,300 low-end G5 iMac.
So the $700-$900 eMac with the Radeon 9600 is "dangerously close" in performance to the iMac G5? How about the $1000 iBook 12"?
It probably would be, if they'd stuck with the G4 long enough they could start shipping low end Macs with the MPC8641, but the 166 MHz CPU bus on the 74xx series G4s is just too slow.
512MB RAM is now standard
512MB has been standard sice the last update.
Some times, the explicit activity that we're trying to be productive at is holding a conversation.
And sometimes the explicit activity we're trying to be productive at is creative work that conversation completely interrupts.
Oh, and telling someone "yes, I already understand that" while they're in the middle of explaining something is rarely productive. I have to tape my mouth shut, sometimes, because I've learned long since that it's MUCH more productive to let someone get the explaining out and finished before going on to the next point.
And what would have been a very lengthy back-and-forth is cut down to a very short conversation.
Yep, with both sides cutting straight through to "that guy's a fossil" so much faster.
Particularly with stuff like this:
But to completely deny the utility of live conversation for the next few decades, is quite another.
I never did. If you can jump to a conclusion like that when you have a chance to go back and re-read what I'd written at your leisure, how much harder would it be to ask yourself "hold on, am I really on track here" when you've got someone waiting for your response.
You're the one who said the next big platform is maybe a decade or more away.
Since you're not going to get what you want for that long, and you've rejected multiple desktop applications as a possibility, your super-platform isn't relevant. Which means that for the next decade or so... your best bet is the kind of web based application that you can direct someone to by pasting a URL rather than by waiting for several minutes while they download, install, and configure it.
Sincerely, I tell you- this conversation would have been much more efficient, had it been a live exchange.
You sure?
Sometimes live exchanges break down completely in short order, particularly when people are starting out with a complete misunderstanding of motives. You've never been involved in or witnessed one of those?
And an aside
In Second Life, people can see your head turn, and get a good concept of what you're looking at.
Except that's usually some random control around the periphery of *their* screen, not anything in the game world. That's a cute feature because it keeps people's heads moving... but it really makes the feature less than useful. Until I caught on to that, I was always mousing around to see what someone was looking at so intently... and there was nothing there.
I don't need to go online to watch someone staring at nothing. I've got cats already.
if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system.
Right. That's kind irrelevant, though, because I'm not talking about making a really big and complex environment.
This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium
You need a super-integrated single medium to keep a chat window open at the bottom of the screen?
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much
That's why I wouldn't do it that way.
Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app."
I like SL, I think it's a good idea, I haven't said it should be an AJAX app, I just said that it's got nothing to do with Flock and interruption-intensive user interfaces.
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it.
Manfred Macx mapped himself onto a flock of pigeons. When he was interested in something, he sent part of himself to look at it. When he was reincarnated in a human body agan, he had to get used to the old-fashioned idea of creating a sub-self to take care of it.
The Bureaucrat went to the Puzzle Palace and Agented himself multiple times. Each self was a full AI... he thought the idea of making his alternates less complete was silly. He didn't have to personally interact in real time with Eartth and his boss and the other members of his team, his Agents did it for him.
Gabriel routinely defers interactions with people to his subselves, even at one point leaving his lover with one while he was with another Aristoi in VR (and was deeply sorry for later).
Yatima verself doesn't split ver attention that way very much, but ve is from Konishi Polis... which is somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned: why, its citizens only get one visual and one streaming input. Ver friends in other polises pass around outlooks and gestalts routinely. In other books by Egan, some characters defer almost every interruption to their exoself.
Concurrency is hard to deal with. Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted. Converting concurrent event streams into serialised and buffered ones is something computers do naturally. I say... take advantage of that! Manfred Macx would.
They have legal right to fight infringing sales and uses of US music.
In Russian Courts.
In Russian Courts.
Under Russian Law.
Under Russian Law.
You keep emphasising that what they're doing is legal in Russia.
I keep agreeing with that.
You keep telling me that I'm wrong, what they're doing is legal in Russia.
I say, yes, you're right. It's legal in Russia.
You keep acting as if I'm saying something else. I don't know how many more ways I can put it, but maybe this will do the trick.
No Russian Court is going to declare that a Russian business running on servers in Russia selling material through client computers in the US is doing business in the US. So nothing that happens in Russia has any relevance to the issue of where the sale takes place, because in Russia it's always going to be interpreted that the sale has taken place in Russia.
Now.
Go back and re-read my last few messages with your knee-jerk "this is legal in Russia so there's no issue" response turned off. If you still don't get it, THEN please ask for clarification.
I'm not going to try and parse all that.
I'm going to say, first, that everything you have written about "side systems" and "integration between programs" is irrelevant to anything I've said here. Nowhere have I suggested that any of these applications talk to each other in any way. ALL the integration happens at the user level, using the cut-and-paste capabilities of their desktop OS, using multiple browser windows and a single shared chat channel. The web applications do not talk to each other, anywhere.
The point to them being "web applications" is not that this allows them to be integrated, but that it allows them to be used by all participants without them having to download, install, and configure software.
Second, the problem *you're* talking about when you talk about "if Fred & Bill use chat facilities that may be found in the other environment..." is the *exact* problem that I was talking about when I said "oh no" in the first place.
And that problem is the conflict between real-time attention-based interaction and deferred document-based interaction. These two mechanisms are inherently different, and when you have one you can't have the other. Even if you log every interaction and replay it for someone else, it doesn't get used, because replaying every comment that people make over the course of a meeting is boring as hell (which is why people take minutes of meetings that summarise the important points).
The closest thing to a solution I have ever seen is to restrict chat to one channel. When you go look at a shared page on the web, you don't discuss it in that page, you keep discussing it in channel. So "if Fred & Bill use chat facilities that may be found in the other environment" doesn't happen.
As for the rest, I don't need to read it. Greg Egan, Cory Docterow, Charley Stross, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, these people have done a much better job of presenting that argument... and I'm way ahead of you there. But anything like that is too far off to be anyways relevant to my "oh no" comment. THAT is all about here and now, and Sametime, and shared VNC, and 47 IM systems, and phone calls, and all the other fossilized "face to face" manager types who don't use the net effectively and force me to drop out and deal with all the timewasting personal 'are you paying attention to me? I'm important' primate crap. Once I can delegate that to subselves running in my processor implants and only bop into their old-fashioned 3d meeting-scapes if they say something the limited-AI can't handle, it won't matter.
AllOfMP3 is allowed, by law and by explicit agreement with the record labels, to sell that merchandise, and the agreement is cler that they may sell it at whatever price in whatever manner they please, so long as they continue to honor Russian law.
So long as they do it in Russia.
They are licensed to sell that music in Russia. They're not licensed to sell that music in the US. If they loaded that amount of music on a truck themselves and brought it across the border themselves, it'd be confiscated. So far from it being "still a legal sale of a song...", the distinction between the sale taking place in Russia and the US is critical to the question of whether it's legal or not.
The RIAA (well, the Russian equivalent organization) has looked into AllOfMP3 and did not take them to court.
Well, of course they didn't. Neither the Russian organization nor Russian courts have standing to take them to court over their activities in the US. If the RIAA can find a US court willing to take the "right" position on where they're doing business... well, that's a whole different story.
You are not harmed in not being able to listen to Britney Spears' new album on your Linux box,
The effects on open source software and the rights of consumers are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the water lurks a fractal explosion of rotten ice that's just waiting to rip the heart out of dozens of important players in Western society.
The use of encryption technology to control the playback of information leads to precisely the kind of pernicious situation the framers of the constitution were trying to head off when they exempted letterforms from copyright protection. If it's illegal to reverse enginer the software protecting a document, then it becomes impossible for individuals and public interest groups to legally posess editable or excerptable copies of that document. If that document turns out to be legally, historically, or otherwise important then being unable to reverse-engineer the protection is in massive opposition to the public interest.
The fact that once the DRM is cracked it's cracked for good, so it's impossible to just reverse-engineer the encryption technology for "important documents", must not be allowed to muddy the waters by redirecting the debate to "consumer rights".
As for the way you're trying to trivialise the debate by bringing in a fluffy pop icon, what about "Britney Spears' new album"? Tell me how, precisely, Brittney Spears' hypothetical interest in ever-so-slightly reducing the unauthorized copying of her music is so important. Her music will still be copied and shared online, no matter what technical orlegal measures she takes, so any protection DRM gives her is minor and short-lived... it hardly seems sufficient reason to set aside the important role that watchdogs, whistleblowers, and public interest organizations play in our society.
That is already illegal based on already existing law, and thus such a contract would be invalid to begin with. That is the balancing act between a parent's "right to sell their children" and the child's "right not to be sold". All rights are fictions, created in society for its benefit. A society that disgregards the basic tenets of contract law is a defunct society, for that kind of law is quite nearly as innate as it gets, and harkens back to "I'll give you this pointy rock if you give me that apple".
And that is precisely why Fair Use must trump anti-reverse-engineering laws and similar terms in contracts, because such terms completely and irrecoverably throw off one of these balancing acts... and in favor of a "right" that didn't even exist ten years ago!
This part is actually correct, ladies and gentlemen. To pro-Linux folks, next time, think about the GPL as well. Consider the GPL a Technology Protection Device -- you cannot copy or improve a GPL-licensed technology without adhering to the GPL.
The GPL is not a "technology protection device". All HR-1201 would grant would be the right for you to read and analyse the GPL and the source code of a program under the GPL. There is no conflict between HR-1201.
Contract law must be held above Fair Use. Period.
Why? How does Fair Use differ from any of the other bases on which unreasonable contracts are held unenforcable? There's all kinds of things you can not enforce through contract law, there's nothing magic about this one.
Yeh, I want to know what these digital offerings are.
The media industries that have the worst problems with piracy are computer games and porn. Computer games are considered well protected if the cracks for them don't come out until after they're actually released, and pornsite operators rip each other off on a regular basis. And yet these remain tremendously profitable businesses and while I can't say much about the level of innovation in porn, the computer gaming industry is the driving force behind most of the development in personal computer hardware and has been since the '70s.
That's pretty good for an industry that had to fight in the courts to even get their content recognised as copyrightable works: in some early cases the conclusion was that compiled software wasn't human readable and so wasn't copyrightable... only source code was protected.
So, yeh, I see this hypothetical "innovative content" as a huge bluff.
Come up with a TPM that stops people from copying and distributing a work more than "fair use", but that allows "fair use". You get to decide exactly what "fair use" means technically, but it must fit today's working definition -- personal backups, personal use on other devices, research/library use.
It's impossible to come up with a technical mechanism that will stop people from distributing a work, period. Even with laws in place to prevent consumers from reverse-engineering the software and hardware, all it takes is for one person anywhere in the world to break that law and release an unlocked copy of the work, and it's "game over". And yet the computer game industry, where it's reckoned a win if you don't find a crack for your game out on the first day after release, is thriving.
You can't stop it, no matter what technical mechanisms or laws you impose you will never be able to stop it all you can do is make it harder, and even making it just a bit hard seems to be more than high enough a barrier to convince most consumers to buy rather than steal.
If all you can do is make it harder, and all you need to do is make it harder, then the challenge for you is to show that creating a new class of criminal behaviour is balanced by significant real benefits. Stuff you can support with figures that withstand scrutiny, not "we're going to hold our breath until we get our way" protests from the RIAA and MPAA.
That's what I thouht yuo were talking about.
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page.
Do I really want to see several hundred icons floating by the side of any popular web pages almost all the time?
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
No, but you can implement the shared whiteboard tools that you were bemoaning the lack of on top of it.
You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window.
Why not? I do it all the time. Drag a picture from Wikipedia, drop it into a paint program, it shows up as a picture. Drag it to an IRC window and the URL gets pasted. What happens when you drag it into the browser depends on what you've written your Javascript to do.
And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back.
That problem is inherent in communications that emulate physical presence, and is the thing that made me go "no, please" in the first place. It doesn't matter what your software is, people who missed the discussion missed the discussion. Using URLs to whiteboardable object on a web page reduces that as much as anything I can thing, since no matter how many objects you're operating on the chat's in the same place.
They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment.
There's no environment to reconstruct, there's no hops that have been made: But I don't think that the super-environment I described will come about through it.
I din't say it would. I said that the functionality you need now can.
if I want to personally implement a lot of ideas together with friends, that a special uber-client is the way
You going to port it to my OS?
The things that really appear to succeed, are almost all integrated platforms. [...] wiki
I'm talking ABOUT something like Wiki.
I'm looking at a higher level.
...
To apply that clause of copyright law you have to assume that a business operating a server in Russia that's directly accessible from the US and selling in US dollars continues to be regarded by the US as a business operating in Russia that YOU are importing from, rather than a business with servers in Russia but operating in the USA.
There's all kinds of examples of governments treating internet transactions as if they were taking place at the client rather than at the server. Germany, France, China, Canada, many states in the USA,
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work.
Yes, I know you made up the term yourself, so you can make it mean anything you want it to mean, but you seem to be changing what it means here. You previously were using it to refer to applications that took communication channels intended for humans and extracted data from them. Now you're using it to mean applications that happen to be implemented on a platform you don't approve of.
Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
Maybe, but I've been hoping for a new application platform that'll do for the graphical interface what the UNIX shell did for the command line interface for a lot longer than 10 years... and it hasn't happened yet.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe.
I. Didn't. Say. That. No matter how many times you put those words in my mouth, they're still your words, not mine.
I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't.
Whatever you're working on, it's not solving the problem you're complaining about. When I suggest a way that you can attack the problem you're complaining about, when I dare to think that there might be a way to use existing tools to make things better, when I dare to suggest that you might not have to wait 10 or 20 years for the UberSystem to get some part of what you want, what do you do? You call me a fossil again. And then complain that I'm badmouthing you?
Well, shit.
If someone isn't participating in this "new browser," or this "new virtual environment," then people won't see what you're seeing, or know what you're doing, or whatever.
Wrong.
That's NOT what I mean.
What I mean is that if this new tool, whatever it is, requires (however that's implemented, logging on, registering, broadcasting, whatever) that unless you take some explicit action to avoid it that people will be able to see what you're doing or looking at to use it... like some kind of World Wide Web Second Life cross... it won't fly.
Every time something new comes along, it lets me be in more places and do more things online at the same time. Your Not The Web But better has to allow that, surely. So. What's it going to do, rez up an avatar of me at every Not The Web But Better site? So now there's 10 different images of my icon floating in 10 cyberscapes? Or do I give up trying to juggle 10 VR selves (each of them subject to interruption) and go back to a single window like some old dumb terminal on a single-tasking OS?
You have noticably ignored the problem of: The person who was away from that environment at the time. They come back, but they can't see the conversation, because it transcended to a different dimension. (A different web page, environment.)
It doesn't "transcend to a different environment". I already brought that up... just because you're working on a shared whiteboard in the browser, that doesn't mean you're going to leave the logged-and-archived IRC conversation. If it does, then that's a problem with your whiteboard tool.
Your UberWeb environment is going to have the same problem, when Fred Manager drags the meeting off to a different Cyberscape.
You have all these different mediums, and all these different windows. "Skype." Check. "IRC." Check. "Shared web browsing window." Check. "Shared editor." Check. "Shared drawing board." Check. "Allright, cleared for takeoff!"
YOU may, because you're trying to do everything in separate programs. Your "side systems" have the same problem, they're separate programs on the outside of the web... I'm talking about implementing the tools on the platform you have rather than trying to create a bunch of separate and independant platforms that you have to keep working together.
I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I've already said there's nothing wrong with having that option, and suggested a way you could implement that option without having to install specific software on everyone's computer.
All I'm saying is that I've watched this cycle play out on top of various technologies over the years, and there's these two things that always happen.
1. You get some people who insist on only using it, so if you're dealing with them you don't have an option... you HAVE to be in real time. These ar the same people who send yuo email saying they're going to call you on the phone, and call 3 meetings to get an answer they could have got in one email. Which is incredibly disheartening if it's your boss.
2. After a while, people give up on using special software to do stuff.
Implementing this as some kind of Javascript-based tool, and you'll get somewhere, without creating another application that I have to use to interact with these "special" people.
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone.
That's because you *go into* it. You're not using it along with your existing IRC. I don't know why, I don't know what aspectes of the interface make IRC undesirable as a part of the tool, but that's something you need to solve.
I think that somewhere around 2010-2015, we're going to see a new platform take over.
The new platform will support both 3-D & 2-D. It'll have online activity awareness (you'll be able to see what people are doing, where they are in the various spaces.) It'll be live (real-time) and lively (fun,) for most people.
I think that you're going to see more 3d user interfaces, definitely. But I don't think they're going to change the default situation whereby unless you explicitly choose to enter an interactive space people do not see you and do not know what yuo're doing any more than they do now. At the very least, if they do it will turn into a disaster.
Many people believe that we don't need to perform any additional work
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
It's not that the task is difficult (it is not,) it's that it is an interruption. Specifically, it can take about 45-120 seconds to do so. All conversation must stop, while everyone calibrates their getup to the new environment.
If you do it the way I'm suggesting, it will take then 10 seconds at the most, if their computer's really slow, to click on the link to *the specific page* that you dropped into the channel and bring up the shared whitebord.
Dropping links into channel doesn't interrupt anyone. You click on the link, the browser window opens, and even if you have to wait you don't have to EVER stop communicating on channel.
If you have some idea about how to improve the system, or have some idea about how to implement it, or if you have some other constructive idea, I'd like to hear it.
Then quit reading what you want to read into what I'm saying, and pay attention to what I'm actually saying, because I've been doing that. And quit complaining about *my* tone if you're not willing to listen to the way you're presenting yourself. You did it again in this message, telling me that if I don't like *your* idea I'm some kind of fossil.
Being able to read what people speak isn't duplicating reality.
I'm talking about:
In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice.
AND we'll still have a hold button. Because "synthing a voice" is duplicating reality, adding a "pause" is improving it.
because you like to (A) read the text, and (B) hear the original artist's voice.
Right. the original artist as opposed to a synthesiser.