This reminds me of a story by Bruce Sterling in the collection "A Good Old-Fashioned Future", where a US government agent with her builky PDA is harassed and overcome by Japanese coordinating their efforts through "Pokecon" smartphones.
I don't put my mp3s on Kazaa or Bittorrent or whatever the new distribution networks are. I'm not distributing perfect lossless copies. You don't have to be in favor of copyright violations to believe that the current legal environment for digital media is insane. So before you start painting the opponents of DRM as pirates, remember that there's a lot of us out there who think it makes you look like an astroturfer.
Those of us who depended on Microsoft Xenix and had the projects we were using on dumped when SCO took it over were immunized against depending on anything Microsoft does decades ago.
When Google announced the Android phone and cellphone carriers started to talk about how much better this was than OpenMoko I figured this was where things were going. They didn't care for OpenMoko because it was too open. The Android phone is thoroughly Tivoized... which is fine for a single-use device like a Tivo, or a plain old dumb phone, but it makes a mockery of the whole idea of a smartphone.
I bet Palm's new phone is locked up tighter than a drum, too.
Oh, the irony. Microsoft's smartphones are the open ones. Way to kill my schadenfreude, you bastards.
September 30, 2004 11:33 AM PDT - Microsoft FAT patent falls flat As part of a re-examination, the U.S. Patent Office has issued a preliminary rejection for a patent previously granted to Microsoft for a Windows file format.
January 10, 2006 2:09 PM PST - Microsoft's file system patent upheld Two patents covering one of Microsoft's main Windows file-storage systems are valid after all, federal patent examiners have decided.
The decision, announced Tuesday by the software giant, effectively ends a two-year saga over the patents and reverses two non-final rulings--the latest issued in October--in which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Microsoft's claims.
There are many licensees of the FAT32 patents. The "this" they would have pursued is "using FAT32 _without a license_", not merely "using FAT32".
THe point is that there is no indication that they are going after TomTom because they're using Linux. They're going after them because they're using FAT32 without a license.
I'm assuming that they're using FAT32 because that's the most likely format, and because it doesn't matter which FAT variant they use because they're all covered by patents.
It's arguable whether the location field belongs inside or outside the tab bar, but the rest of the toolbar and the bookmark bar certainly don't. And you can't configure Opera with the tab bar below the bookmark and toolbar, and above the location field.
For the second part... I'm still kind of confused exactly WHAT you're referring to, since Windows Explorer doesn't have tabs.
Microsoft has patented a bunch of stuff related to FAT32 and has aggressively licensed FAT32. They would have pursued this regardless of the OS underneath the TomTom software.
I would say that the correct statement is: tabs should frame the components whose presence or content depends on which tab you are on.
The bookmark bar doesn't depend on that, not do any of the toolbar widgets other than the location box. If they move the other widgets out of the toolbar, then perhaps, but the bookmark bar definitely doesn't belong inside the tab.
Because otherwise, following your logic, a tab bar in Windows (or Gnome, or KDE) should be "under" the window title bar.
What tab bar in Windows?
As for KDE and Gnome, consistency has never been a strong suit for them. APple, however, makes a point of their UI expertise. They shouldn't be screwing up like this.
Hm... tabs first appeared in v5, if I remember correctly. At that time, they were actually at the bottom of the window, so the overall look was as if Opera window had its own task bar (and I think that was deliberate). This persisted in v6, and I believe it was v7 which finally reverted to tabs at top, but also putting the tabs above the address bar (which, I think, was a first - at least it wasn't that way in various tabbed IE variants and Mozilla at that time).
Like I said, I don't recall a version of Opera in which tabs weren't in some way funky.
Tabs above the address bar is simply wrong. Tabs should frame the components whose presence depends on which tab you are on.
If you continuously leave your browser window maximized (many people do)
Only on Windows.
And I am so sick of people quoting Fitts Law where it doesn't apply. The location of the tabs changes depending on what tabs you have, so you can't use "muscle memory" to reliably hit a tab by sweeping your mouse to the top of the screen, you still have to look at the actual target and navigate to the specific tab... so it's no easier to hit than if it was inside the window.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to see David Brin's response to this, in the light of The Transparent Society.
Some more changes they need to do
1. Preference option to toggle "pin" and "open with", so that you can choose which operation requires "shift" held.
2. Preference option to toggle between Ribbon and Menu view for application commands. Quit trying to force the damn ribbon down our throats.
3. Bundle Interix with all versions of Windows 7, not just the Power Luser models.
4. If this isn't in there already... mount ISO images directly, like OS X does.
You're right, and a couple of seconds after I posted that I was *also* wishing /. had an edit feature.
This reminds me of a story by Bruce Sterling in the collection "A Good Old-Fashioned Future", where a US government agent with her builky PDA is harassed and overcome by Japanese coordinating their efforts through "Pokecon" smartphones.
I don't put my mp3s on Kazaa or Bittorrent or whatever the new distribution networks are. I'm not distributing perfect lossless copies. You don't have to be in favor of copyright violations to believe that the current legal environment for digital media is insane. So before you start painting the opponents of DRM as pirates, remember that there's a lot of us out there who think it makes you look like an astroturfer.
Those of us who depended on Microsoft Xenix and had the projects we were using on dumped when SCO took it over were immunized against depending on anything Microsoft does decades ago.
When Google announced the Android phone and cellphone carriers started to talk about how much better this was than OpenMoko I figured this was where things were going. They didn't care for OpenMoko because it was too open. The Android phone is thoroughly Tivoized... which is fine for a single-use device like a Tivo, or a plain old dumb phone, but it makes a mockery of the whole idea of a smartphone.
I bet Palm's new phone is locked up tighter than a drum, too.
Oh, the irony. Microsoft's smartphones are the open ones. Way to kill my schadenfreude, you bastards.
Get a player that uses two transistors in the output stage, like the first generation iPod Shuffle, instead of a transistor and a capacitor.
http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/playertest.htm
Display global commands as:
[ ] Ribbon
[x] Menu bar
Please. Pretty please.
DO try to keep up, AC:
Do all devices which use CF and SD cards license Fat32 from Microsoft?
Pretty much, yes, as of a couple years ago.
Are GPS units a sector of the market where MS wants to make in-roads?
Microsoft has had the "car computer" in their sights since 2000, at least.
I don't mean Explorer, I mean Windows as a whole.
You mean MDI, then.
See my previous comment referring to MDI as "screwed up tabs".
And, yes, I've looked at BOFHish window managers like Ratpoison. They're cruddy user interfaces too.
Regardless, what's in Safari 4 is not MDI, and it's not Opera's tabs, it's a third kind of "just plain broken".
There are many licensees of the FAT32 patents. The "this" they would have pursued is "using FAT32 _without a license_", not merely "using FAT32".
THe point is that there is no indication that they are going after TomTom because they're using Linux. They're going after them because they're using FAT32 without a license.
I'm assuming that they're using FAT32 because that's the most likely format, and because it doesn't matter which FAT variant they use because they're all covered by patents.
The whole "Microsoft bought a chunk of Apple" thing was a face-saving way for Microsoft to pay off Apple to settle a lawsuit.
Why would Microsoft file suit against companies who have already bought licenses to FAT and FAT32?
It's arguable whether the location field belongs inside or outside the tab bar, but the rest of the toolbar and the bookmark bar certainly don't. And you can't configure Opera with the tab bar below the bookmark and toolbar, and above the location field.
For the second part... I'm still kind of confused exactly WHAT you're referring to, since Windows Explorer doesn't have tabs.
I was right, you don't know what DRM means.
Microsoft has patented a bunch of stuff related to FAT32 and has aggressively licensed FAT32. They would have pursued this regardless of the OS underneath the TomTom software.
"That word, you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means..." - Inigo Montoya, "The Princess Bride".
I would say that the correct statement is: tabs should frame the components whose presence or content depends on which tab you are on.
The bookmark bar doesn't depend on that, not do any of the toolbar widgets other than the location box. If they move the other widgets out of the toolbar, then perhaps, but the bookmark bar definitely doesn't belong inside the tab.
Because otherwise, following your logic, a tab bar in Windows (or Gnome, or KDE) should be "under" the window title bar.
What tab bar in Windows?
As for KDE and Gnome, consistency has never been a strong suit for them. APple, however, makes a point of their UI expertise. They shouldn't be screwing up like this.
Hm... tabs first appeared in v5, if I remember correctly. At that time, they were actually at the bottom of the window, so the overall look was as if Opera window had its own task bar (and I think that was deliberate). This persisted in v6, and I believe it was v7 which finally reverted to tabs at top, but also putting the tabs above the address bar (which, I think, was a first - at least it wasn't that way in various tabbed IE variants and Mozilla at that time).
Like I said, I don't recall a version of Opera in which tabs weren't in some way funky.
Tabs above the address bar is simply wrong. Tabs should frame the components whose presence depends on which tab you are on.
So when did they go to tabs-on-top?
I use Opera sporadically, but I don't recall ever using a version that had tabs that weren't in some way funky.
True, but Opera's quote-tabs-unquote have always been broken because they're really just a specialized mode of Opera's MDI interface.
But, OK, F*** you Opera, too.
If you continuously leave your browser window maximized (many people do)
Only on Windows.
And I am so sick of people quoting Fitts Law where it doesn't apply. The location of the tabs changes depending on what tabs you have, so you can't use "muscle memory" to reliably hit a tab by sweeping your mouse to the top of the screen, you still have to look at the actual target and navigate to the specific tab... so it's no easier to hit than if it was inside the window.