Jef Raskin's Humane Interface was eye-opening and invigorating for me even though I disagreed with some big bits. Now perhaps we'll see some developers open up to his thoughts when they previously rejected him because of traditional industry cliques, ip concerns, herd-like marketing, or just plain laziness.
It's a sad, sad day; especially to lose another great mind to cancer. I just hope Jef's ideas may be taken even more seriously now that he's sloughed off this mortal coil.
When kids enter puberty and become capable of "logical thinking" they start questioning why and where they belong. That's probably just a horomonal thing built-in to get us to mix up the gene pool, but many kids are embarassed, isolated, and lonely no matter how loved they felt by their family before the horomones hit. Seeking a sense of community (without always a sense of maturity) is a tradition of growing up:
rock bands (as fans or players)
star trek conventions
jobs in the work force
groups for exploring sex or intoxicants
jail time
church time (including alternate faiths)
education
political groups
I agree that high schools could be improved, but they serve an important function beyond just education. A high school is a controlled community where people can constructively and carefully transition to new ways of thinking during a time of life they are adjusting to new ways of living.
High school changes as kids get more freedom. There was, for example, far more decadence in my sophomore year when students started getting driver's licenses and could really come out from their parents wing. Some people see the horrible changes of docile, faithful, maleable eighth graders and blame high school for changing them into decadent, questioning, unfulfilled seniors with dangerous disrespect for their parents. That's an almost unavoidable change that happens; I wouldn't deny the good things kids learn in high school because of this fear of growing up.
This isn't a new idea though. Down in the south, I've heard these suggestions to change, limit, or eliminate high school for years in various forms. This has had some success. Majority vote deciding to include Creationism. Home schooling to completely withdraw their children. Suggestions that job corps completely replace school sports. etc. Usually, these are people who see the prepubescent kid as having a state of mind that's good for their purposes:
Lengthening vacation for the farmer's cheap workforce
Poor abstract thinking without algebra and such
Less exposure to foreign communities (and religion)
Perception that the scientific method triggers religious doubt
These are crap ideas; these changes will happen as the horomones increase and freedom expands. Just because you want your factory or superstore to be full of non-union, hard-working, ignorant, monkeys doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of the kids or the community. If anything, taking away sports, homework, and the things that completely fill a high school student's life beyond the school day will only make things more decadent, more free, and more undesirable.
Just so I won't be accused of wandering to far atopic of the connection with Bill Gates, let me say that this may or may not be true, but I can see his taking this position either way. He may want good education for kids in the same way he (and Melinda) had when they were growing up (in which case this would be false). On the other hand, a good education does go against the non-programmer mentality of the eighth grade students who haven't really developed abstract thought. All this free education on algebra, scientific methodology, the ideas of standing on the shoulder's of giants, and the so forth probably does promote the open source community, the virus writer community, and the intellectual property piracy community moreso than it does the docile, licensed, Windows community. I can really see Bill backing either side of this debate without too much trouble.
Right now, there are pre-broadcast editors at some places who will edit the small time buffer between the live person and the broadcast.
Get one of these "pre-editors" to mark a spot in the buffer as possibly offensive. An audio mark is played exactly 2 seconds ahead of the offensive word in the broadcast. This causes the stream of new "smart-receivers" to "rot13" the audio or video.
This gives an audio signal (like a doorbell) that can warn people that something is coming and for them to mute their sound, turn away, or otherwise cover their small-minded heads or eyes. If this is done in a consistent manner, new "smart-receivers" could recognize the warning sound and automatically do an audio or video equivalent of rot13 on the signal beginning two seconds from receipt.
Being a country of free-speech this would be the default rather than scrambling the signal and having smart-receivers unscramble it.
Admittedly the use of technology to solve what's fundamentally a morality issuehasn't worked well in solving other morality issues, but it would cause the target group to massively upgrade (be it Pat Robertson branded radios for encoding offensive words or Howard Stern branded radios for decoding them). It would cause a massive upgrade cycle.
*Heh* I can imagine an iPod attachment that plays "uncensored" Howard Stern radio. It could be a very popular plug-in:-)
I was getting my shots for international travel at a county health clinic yesterday. Every terminal in this clinic (as probably every other one in the state) were running flat screen Windows systems that had one application: some sort of terminal server that logged into the mainframe where every financial, medical, and information app was running in text-only mode. The likely reason for this purchase was that some company offered sexy-cool flat screen machines with a promise that they'd work to make the mainframe app work 100% in the same manner.
My favorite two bookshops have web based terminals that allow a user to search for a book and not bug the employees. One is unable to get out of these screens and into Windows, but one can tell by the sound, cursors, and occasional reboots that they are really win machines running underneath.
All of this reminds me of those days in the 1980's when everyone was putting Apple ][ based end user terminals in their shops, but the app or utility that was being served was pretty trivial. When the Apple clones came out (like Franklin and their ilk) the expensive Apple hardware started going away. (You could tell on those machines because there were ways to crash the system or "break" into basic and see whose hardware it was.
My guess is that ultimately on web based terminals and other mainframe terminal services, that there's a huge market of machines that are being sold on price alone. As long as there are "some" varieties of cheap hardware that run with Linux, I can't see this ever becoming a lock-in... price is just too important for some people. To those markets, it's the lucrative OS that will fall out of fashion in favor of the cheap and functional alternative.
No doubt, someone will make the joke that you should boycott the MPAA by downloading a copy of the Oscars rather than watching it on tv.
But this raises some legit questions in my mind. While BitTorrent won't ever be MPAA approved, why wouldn't some other service that loaded it up with commercials, copy-protected the data, and gave blood-money to the data owners be allowed?
Just on idle speculation it would seem to do harm to the way these content providers do business now. Things like Nielson Ratings and other surveys are a joke. Even the somewhat more reliable "box office sales" are manipulable; for example, most movie-goers in my bible-belt state bought a ticket to "The Passion of the Christ" regardless of what movie they actually walked into.
Download statistics just don't offer the level of manipulable, vague uncertainty that the content providers are used to and would probably call into question the absurdity current licensing and advertising rates are calculated. Of course these groups would love to have another form of income, but not at the expense of their decades old statistical handwaving that everyone trusts now.
Enlightenment is the poster child for losing your following due to simply not releasing often enough to be considered relevant.
Of course, it's obligatory for me to warn everyone that Microsoft Longhorn is making a darn good attempt to overtake this achievement. Give MS enough time and everyone will look upon enlightenment's delays as trivial.;-)
Personally, I have no interest in sex with kids or photos of young kids in states of undress; they do nothing for me sexually. I just remember the difficult time I had as a kid getting straight answers about sex from people. The teachers would say "Goto Parent". The parent would say "Goto Preacher". The preacher would say "Goto Hell".
I applaud the efforts of sites like jackinworld who show the danger of this "Goto" style of education and are able to use the internet to sidestep some legal troubles that one might have if they did this sort of "shared wisdom" in a face-to-face manner.
I realize the law lacks specifying the "intent" of the pictures and it therefore makes it a crazy patchwork of judge's rulings. So Kjella is probably right that self-made and self-published photos would be attempted to be prosecuted under today's law.
But all cases I'm aware of that did this had an adult involved at some point (giving them the idea, lending them the camera knowing their likely intent, etc). Is the same true if the child is completely without adult influence?
Compare masturbation without adult influence and masturbation with adult influence. While I feel that someone like Michael Jackson paying to watch a 12 year old masturbate is child molestation, I think that a janitor who accidentally walks in on a 12 year old masturbating in a stall but then abruptly leaves is a different intent. Though not tested legally, this would probably change the legal patchwork (if a case like this ever made it to court.)
Taking naked underage photographs of yourself with no adult involvment at all seems like a similar form of self-expression as masturbation. Yes, the lack of "intent" being specified in the legal definition of child porn makes a difficult case to win. But damn it, I should be allowed to take and display photos of myself if my parents can be allowed to photograph me as a two year old with an erection or as a three month old posed like a playgirl centerfold on a bear rug. Though not spelled out, I think there is some level of "intent" that the law requires, but just a very, very low and vague standard.
Shark72 made an observation that sounds quite reasonable:
If anybody can't be bothered to investigate a report of suspected kiddie porn on their own server, then they should not be running an ISP.
As with the similar U.S. laws, it gives a great deal of power to self-appointed censorsous grandmothers in Nowhere, GA. and Outback, Australia. If they report a photo of a young woman showing too much ankle for her age, or two fully clothed, same-gendered teens holding hands, the ISP still has to report it. The definition of pornography is too broad to risk not doing so.
On another note, the whole idea that aroused photos of a child (or even drawings of a naked child) can be considered child pornography if an adult was involved or aware of the photos somewhat confounds me. Puberty, sex, and arousal are constantly on a young person's mind. I started masturbating about age 10. I took some blurry, erotic pictures of myself about age 11. I started reading about sex in the library at age 12. I didn't start major puberty changes until 13. No doubt that there is child sexual abuse out there, but it never happened to me. I think many moral crusaders want kids to be ignorant of the huge changes going through their bodies because it advances their goals of shame, isolation, and manipulation of their mores. Exaggerated claims (and now just threats of accusations) of child pornography make many trusted sources of information back away from the conservative viewpoint of sexual development and scruples.
As an aside, I think that one day a very young kid is going to realize there's a fortune to be made in legal nude photos of themselves as a child. They'll take their parents' camcorder and make movies of him or herself doing things while naked. Dancing. Taking a shower. Demonstrating good hygiene habits. Giving an oral report on sexually transmitted diseases. Giving an anatomy lesson about changes expected during puberty. Demonstrating safe masturbation techniques. Demonstrating how to wear a jock strap or bra. Lots of things a kid should know about their body and their growth. Taking some footage of their private parts to show hair growth, bust development, and penile length. They'll wind up taking lots of footage but no adult will know they're doing this. They'll record themselves saying statements like they are the only one doing this and they aren't in any way feeling exploited by their work.
They'll keep the tape under a mattress or another safe place until age 18 and maybe even make more footage each year. Then as an adult they'll edit them with Final Cut or something into an educational DVD or video diary about puberty. They'll edit together a non-obscene film that shows them learning, awakening, masturbating, and otherwise developing their way through puberty. Then as an adult they can make whatever legal forms needed to have a valid consent.
Heck, if they want to push the envelope, they might even get try editing the footage from they used in their educational film into a more erotic and artistic expression of their feelings and emotions during that time of their life.
Too bad those pictures I made of myself at age 10 didn't come out better. They could definitely be used to illustrate a number of magazine length articles about my horniness at puberty. And I wouldn't feel in the least bit exploited that the photos were released to the public or describing my (pretty common) feelings at the time.
My fascination with solutions to these games is not really what they are, but how they developed. Of course the verification is boring since its simply brute force, but I do like strategies that have some clever evolution or a clever implementation.
A multi-user network client to "solve" Chess or Go might produce some fascinating results or verifications. Is there a way we can contribute our space CPU cycles to the end of these game as we know it?
Its no different than a standard breathalizer test is now. Except that is uses a hologram. A breathalizer test tells the officer if your drunk or not.
Is there really a correlation between low breath alcohol content and the ability to drive a car? I'll grant the converse (high alcohol correlates with inability to drive) but if there's not, then the "green car" hologram is deceptive.
The simple (unrealistic) example is that showing "Green Car" doesn't mean a sober 8-year-old has the knowledge and physical ability to reach the pedals and steer.
More complex is that alcohol has different effects on different people based on their tolerance and age. A licensed, sixteen-year-old driver having his first drink could still be under the legal limit of alcohol and see a "Green Car" on his test strip yet not be able to drive: a dangerous false positive.
What about a shipment of these hologram strips that gets mixed up and sent to state with a more lenient level of alcohol allowed. The test might show a "red handcuffs" picture to someone who isn't legally over the state's limit (just the test strip's limit for the wrong state): a false negative that adds unnecessary delay, testing, or other consequences.
Add these sorts of holograms to down syndrome tests, HIV tests, cancer tests, and you quickly get into very confusing areas where false results are more dangerous, emotional, and paranoia-inducing than a test result that's simply hard to interpret.
A post-it note on a breathalyzer is easy and inexpensive to update if the laws change. Tests with real numbers may be vague, but getting a feel for the uncertainty level of the results is itself a good thing.
Swamii paraphrased the legitimate portion of the troll: "is this a case of everybody vs. MS?"
This appears to be everybody against inertia; and Microsoft appears to be on the side of inertia. As another example, Dave Hyatt (a development lead on Apple's Safari) posted a tale about similar problems dealing with the inertia of the float handling in CSS:
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Like CSS adoption, the problem with XForms is the lack of backwards compatibility with the old de-facto standards. Now with major releases coming soon (Apple in the first half of the year, Mozilla before May) it's looking like XForms can move forward by offering pretty baubles to web developers and browsers with these backwards-compatible, familiar, tweaks to encourage upgrades (and while you're at it we'll be in a better place toward Xforms 1.0 or 1.1 adoption).
I get the feeling that the problem with adopting XForms is the "chicken and egg" issue of current browsers not supporting it so current websites would look like they were moving in REVERSE if they supported it.
It looks like nothing will get the current standard adoption out of NEUTRAL (XUL, XAML, XForms, or some proprietary tech) unless it can be compatible with the current browser tech.
Web Forms 2.0 offers something that the web sites could adopt that would still be backwards friendly to Internet Explorer. It's the lubrication that can get the websites to move their tech forward.
It seems that Apple and AOL are on the cusp of a new major browser release things are just about to be pushed into DRIVE. At the very least, this "super scripting" solution of Web Forms 2.0 looks like a way to push the website providers into an upgrade cycle for everyone.
My guess is that there's no significant reason this was done outside official W3C procedures other than the rapid speed of making changes, but it looks like they're planning to submit things to the W3C for the full, slow, tectonic ratification.
In a way, it's opened up the field of diagnostic medicine - as many of these functions require complex tests now. if technology can boil down the plethora of tests into a stick-it-on-and-read type instrument, then the standard level of healthcare will rise.
A complex test has more than the two positive and negative outcomes. Though I don't drink alcohol, I have a problem with a seizure-like condition that can confuse my coordination and reaction time like an inebriated person. In this condition, I'll pass all chemical tests for alcohol and drugs even though I shouldn't be driving. Now these tools will go ahead and render the verdict whether I can or can't drive? At least now with a result absurdly low (0%) it indicates that there's something else going on that is misleading the tests. With these tools obscuring the data the technician may just assume that I'm a "just squeaked under the borderline" case.
I dislike "wizards" in my software development tools that tell me what kind of mentality I should use to start my development; I don't want "wizards" to bug the emt's, police, or nurses that have very tight and constrained opportunities to help people. These tools may very well cover up some sort of useful data that would have indicated some other problem or more complex outcome.
Beyond just the annoyance and delay factor, we can also get into a Brazil or Philip K. Dick like realities where we no longer know what these results are showing us. Perhaps the CEO of the hologram company gets the DUI tests to check for a white list of genetic signatures and to always show them as passing the test no matter what the actual results. Perhaps a religiously obsessed development manager surreptitiously adds additional constraints that will cause certain pregnancy tests to fail until the fetus can't be aborted.
These tools are not developed under security and strong testing now because they don't render the judgement. If these tools can in any way cloud or mislead the judgement of those using them then they are a bad idea.
I don't think they will ever sell shows for that cheap because DVD sales are becoming very popular for TV. Why would you pay 30 dollars for season 2 of family guy when you could download the whole season for 5 bucks?
This is a compelling argument, but the original poster was speaking of an archive of the broadcast signals. If these "waves" are being sent through all our bodies, they should be available for copying and distribution as long as they are left intact and unaltered.
A cancer doctor might find it helpful to know what the broadcast spectrum was like on the night of the solar flares, for example. But even for the in terms of simple tv junkies who want to be able to "flip around" this should be legal to make available; not that it is certainly illegal now, but the copyright owners speak as if it's absurd to even consider the possibility (because it infringes on their revenue).
My local library, video store, or community access station might want to make archives of the broadcast spectrum and as long as the signal is simply what was there, including commercials, static, on-air bloopers, and wardrobe malfunctions this record should be as publicly saleable as a photo of the stars that night. My library could couldn't promote the slice of spectrum with trademarks of the broadcasters, and there would undoubtedly have to be a Linux appliance or simple GUI application to interpret the disk of spectrum (since it would be everything during a certain time period and not readable by most DVD players)
But none of this should stop or infringe on the people who sold these programs to the broadcasters from making a big, bundle of money from the cleaned up DVD releases (other than laziness). They'd still have:
No commercial's in their programs
No static or analog noise
No regulation from the FCC that necessitate censoring the broadcast spectrum
Corrected gaffes such as episode order, sound problems, and power outage blankspots that wouldn't be corrected on the broadcast spectrum recordings
Certain shows not broadcast via the spectrum and therefore still only available on cable/DVD
Penn & Teller Bullshit!
Nip / Tuck
Six Feet Under
Oz
Queer As Folk
And many more
Just recently I obtained the DVD of the first season of the Greatest American Hero. Only 8 episodes, but it included an array of great extras including:
episode commentaries and cast/crew interviews
explanations of things like "what was the symbol on his chest"?
episodes in order and free of syndication editing
recaps of what the surprising furvor surrounding this show was like
An "instruction" book slipped in between the DVDs (which was quite easy to lose)
The unaired pilot of "The Greatest American Heroine" which put to rest any doubt that it was right to not continue the show after season 3
Today, the only tv I watch are DVD's I rent (and a few I'll buy) but I've long since given up on the value of cable and satelite as offering worthwhile entertainment. I see only good things that could come out of the recording and legal distribution of broadcast spectrum:
More inspired distributors and a rejuvinated public domain.
More revenue for local libraries and other archivists of the spectrum
More research into the health effects of these "waves"
This is not uncommon, most states claim the right to tax things purchased outside of the state and will be used primarily within their own.
Just because the states claim the right doesn't mean that they will be allowed the right. Look at gay marriage and slavery.
But beyond that, it seems that the easiest way to beat this wrap is to take a vacation elsewhere (especially a place that doesn't have high smoking tax or regulation such as D.C., Mexico, or Puerto Rico) and take legal evidence of smoking and consuming these products outside of Michigan. You may not be able to show that you consumed all of the cigarettes outside of the state, but it will add a significant burden to the prosecution's case to prove that you consumed the majority inside the state.
Even so, I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time proving that the cigarettes were consumed at all. Some people collect cigarette packaging (or wine bottles or coke cans) and don't give a flip what happened to the content. Did the defendant smoke the cigarettes or did he simply throw them away? Prove it! Where were these sticks consumed
I personally don't smoke anything legal or illegal. But I find government regulation of smoking to have gone to greedy excess. As soon as this revenue stream starts drying up, they'll all move on to other items to tax (or other internet revenue). This needs to be stopped right now.
Why not leave part of this up to the user to decide the tradeoff in some situations? Just as we have the concept now of volume and brightness being properties that a user can adjust depending on the application and whims.
Imagine a media player or DVD app. As one tries to playback a several videos on a machine with a slow "left brain", the display drops frames, skips, and jerks as it presents each frame extremely accurately. The user cranks up a gui widget that looks like a volume knob on the window, and this actively funnels off co-processing tasks to the "right brain" processing chips in the system. The playback becomes more fluid at the expense of color accuracy and perhaps even adding a bit of static.
The programmer provides default values, but the user is able to actively adjust and find the level they're comfortable with. If they're unable to find a good tradeoff, they can upgrade their right brain chip (probably a cheap thing to do) if speed is what they perceive to be the problem. If they find that they just can't accept the inaccuracies introduced, then upgrading the left brain and completely lobotomizing the right brain altogether for this application is their option.
Some programmers might perceive no need for inaccuracy and set the defaults of their program to allow no math inaccuracy in their Excel spreadsheet or Quicken checkbook calculations. But a frustrated grad student trying to see some vague trends in civil war death statistics over absurdly massive (but extremely accurate) data collections might be willing to crank up the lossiness of their calculations to at least get a vague idea of the patterns in their graphs. They'd need to remember to crank up the accuracy again for the final stats, but at least they could find where the "interesting" parts of these mountainous collections are in hours rather than waiting for five days for the stats to run, (then re-run after having made a trivial mistake).
As an example, it seems that Apple is refactoring some of their Aqua anti-aliasing GUI code to use GPU speed if available in precisely this kind of lossy way. I wish they'd go a few steps further and do something like this to the CPU instruction set and providing a control widget for users (like me) who would really like to control the speed-hit vs. beauty-level in my GUI.
We've had spreadsheets since the days of the Apple 2's 8-bit processors. Despite accountants insistence on complete accuracy, they found tools and techniques that worked well when they needed the speed rather than the accuracy. CPU's with a rated level of inaccuracy would be a useful thing to have even if mathematicians and accountants don't want to admit that today.
Just because JPEG is lossy does not mean it can be encoded using "lossy" circuits. The reason it is lossy is the same as if you were to store a 24 bit image using 16 bits. However, the way it does this and stores the image is NOT fault tolerant.
Disregarding the huffman compression (which must be coded/decoded using exact circuits), a slightly wrong value in one of the coefficients can result in an entire 8x8 block of wrong color.
You are clearly more experienced in this area than I am; this was probably a bad example. Forget I mentioned initial jpeg compression. (Though perhaps in rapid display of jpegs such as an iPhoto slideshow or screensaver the lossiness would be more acceptable.
I think it just supports the egocentric idea that I am the only opener of Shrodinger-cat-boxes in the universe as I perceive it.
I have grown up convinced that there are other people like Presidents and Terrorists out there but when I go to sleep these competing ideas change my perception of the universe. Like lucid-dreamers or budhist meditators, my experiences and expectations effect reality but I don't realize it. I perceive some religious, closed-minded, draft dodger as leader of the free world because of my own prejudices buried in my super-ego.
This box predicts the future simply because for now, I've gone into the reality where a box is predicting the future. As my perceptions and expectations change, it's predictions will either reflect reality or diverge from it depending on my subconcious perceptions.
Of course, I have to write a disclaimer that this is really a witty expression of [your / my] subconcious. If I said that this was expressly my opinion I very well might induce another gran mal seizure and I really can't afford more hospital bills right now. (At least I don't perceive that I can afford them. Aghhh!)
While FPU calculations still require the precision, reproducability, and speed limitiations currently applied to all CPU chip work, this article seems to be aiming at loosening up the precision of calculations we don't really need right now.
the initial JPEG lossy compression
the texture mapping of blood splatters in first person shooters
mp3 playback for people who don't care about things like fidelity and consistency
voice compression in internet telephony
barcode analysis when using a symbology developed in the days of 72 dpi printers but where everyone today uses 1200dpi readers and printers.
people deliberately trying to add entropy for security or artistic reasons.
I seriously doubt any accountant, music snob, or cs major would allow the main cpu to become inconsistent, but if Apple or some other trendsetting company offered a new computer with a "Right Brain" chip just for these entropic applications I'd expect it to start a whole new fashion in desktop computers.
Is the person a member of AA? Try the serenity prayer. Don't know what their interests might be? check out their fridge magnets.
There are an infinite number of quotes, but most people will choose an easy phrase from their church, favorite politician, or tv show or commercial.
Most people just aren't creative enough to come up with something unique and creative.
If they have to work too hard to find a quote that speaks to them, many people's pride in their own cleverness will lead them to tell their best friends about their inciteful choice of password.
And at the other extreme, the rabid fans of a pop culture phrase will whine until they're allowed to use "DOH!" or "WWJD?" as their pass phrase desipte its extremely short length.
I see this as offering no solid improvement since the problem is people's laziness and herdlike mentality. It seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to standardize security departments into using a procedure that will probably be revealed to have been patented by Microsoft already.
The status quo really seems to be the only option at this point.
Actually, the name "subversion" was a real concern for me at a former jingoistic, anti-terrorist, amazingly technically ignorant employer of mine.
I found that I had to refer to it as svn all the time... at least until my overseer started calling it subversion on his own. Like Al Gore under the impression that he invented the internet, my task master thinks he was responsible for the subversive nickname.
This was very common problem back during the days of usenet news discussion boards. Other people have described the essence of the problem: that the non-desctructive backspace key (^H) would make the terminal screen appear correct, even though it was really just adding all of the characters to what was being written.
While this sounds like a pretty silly mistake, in my personal experience it happened a lot on Georgia Tech campus-specific newsgroups back in the early 1990's. rn and vi were the default usenet newsreader and text editor. Many lurkers who normally never posted things to usenet would be provoked by the highly divisive topics about the campus gay group, religious issues, or student government idiocy. When they wrote their first post, rn invoked ed instead of vi to edit the posting. One would frequently see postings that probably looked okay on the original author's screen:
In the last student government meeting, repesentatives voted to deny charter to the friends of gays and lesbians trying to form a new student organization. Mr. Mason, our student body and Campus Crusade president, led the moving discussion of whether our campus really needs this liberal distraction. Mr. Bobo, the computer science major who led the fight for charter, is expected to be going to court next week.
but when actually posted to the campus newsgroups, would betray any editing done (and could frequently reveal embarassing original intentions) such as:
In the last student government meeting, repesentatives voted to deny charter to the faggots^H^H^H^H^H^Hriends of gays and lesbians trying to form a new sex^H^Htudent organization. Mr. Mason, our student body and Campus Crusade president, led the mocking^H^H^H^H^Hving discussion of whether our campus really needs this libertine^H^H^H^Hal diversity^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstraction. Mr. Bobo, the cocksucker^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Homputer science major who led the fight for charter, is expected to be going to hell^H^H^H^Hcourt next week.
Because this was not WYSIWYG, and because it happened with the default setup of tools, it was very common even for people who were familiar with the normal tools or other computer uses. If this was their first usenet posting with the default toolset, they'd frequently post more than they thought they were going to.
User interfaces for artists are, by definition, inconsistent. Are watercolors or acrylics a "better" interface for painiting? Will one produce a "truer" work with synthetic or natural modelling clays?
Warnock's Postscript was an amazing technical creation; I think it deserves its success over its page description competitors. Adobe also kept the Type 1 font hinting as their special technical secret about creating great fonts.
You'd expect Adobe's font creation tools, and vector graphic tools to monopolize their marketplaces. They don't.
Macromeida's Typographer dominates the "hinted font" market. And Corel Draw and Macromedia Freehand are solid competitors for Adobe's Illustrator almost solely distinguished by the look and feel of their user interfaces.
Page layout tools are a different area where Adobe has tried to buy its way into the market (Buying Aldus PageMaker) and use its weight to change the standards (PDF and FrameMaker). The suprise is that they haven't been more successful than they have been so far. While there are all sorts of legacy issues in this area, the extreme stinkiness of FrameMaker 1.0's user interface turned a lot of people off to their toolset.
And then the big suprise was the fantastic success of Adobe's Photoshop. There was nothing particularly spectactular technically about the bitmap files they were producing. But the amazing look and feel the Knolls' imbued in the user interface is what made this tool the success it was. The filter specs didn't offer anything much better than Pixel Paint or most other bitmap tools, but the sub-pixel look and feel of the tools gave Photoshop its anti-aliasing edge.
Personally, I think this standards war may already be too far lost. I'd look into something else. Suites of tools for school teachers or librarians. Something where there's a definite technical aspect, but where the personal touch can go a LONG way toward distinguishing and defining what people demand in their tools. I think artists may have already had these battles fought. While I'm not arguing about giving up, other areas might be more open toward wooing.
I didn't think I was distracted, but when I read the the first sentence of this posting as "The VatIcAn is announcing their new PT series of chip sets at the masses."
I thought for a moment that the Pope might be giving some competition to the unholy trinity of Gates, Barret, and Dell.
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It's a sad, sad day; especially to lose another great mind to cancer. I just hope Jef's ideas may be taken even more seriously now that he's sloughed off this mortal coil.
- rock bands (as fans or players)
- star trek conventions
- jobs in the work force
- groups for exploring sex or intoxicants
- jail time
- church time (including alternate faiths)
- education
- political groups
I agree that high schools could be improved, but they serve an important function beyond just education. A high school is a controlled community where people can constructively and carefully transition to new ways of thinking during a time of life they are adjusting to new ways of living.High school changes as kids get more freedom. There was, for example, far more decadence in my sophomore year when students started getting driver's licenses and could really come out from their parents wing. Some people see the horrible changes of docile, faithful, maleable eighth graders and blame high school for changing them into decadent, questioning, unfulfilled seniors with dangerous disrespect for their parents. That's an almost unavoidable change that happens; I wouldn't deny the good things kids learn in high school because of this fear of growing up.
This isn't a new idea though. Down in the south, I've heard these suggestions to change, limit, or eliminate high school for years in various forms. This has had some success. Majority vote deciding to include Creationism. Home schooling to completely withdraw their children. Suggestions that job corps completely replace school sports. etc. Usually, these are people who see the prepubescent kid as having a state of mind that's good for their purposes:
- Lengthening vacation for the farmer's cheap workforce
- Poor abstract thinking without algebra and such
- Less exposure to foreign communities (and religion)
- Perception that the scientific method triggers religious doubt
These are crap ideas; these changes will happen as the horomones increase and freedom expands. Just because you want your factory or superstore to be full of non-union, hard-working, ignorant, monkeys doesn't mean that it's in the best interest of the kids or the community. If anything, taking away sports, homework, and the things that completely fill a high school student's life beyond the school day will only make things more decadent, more free, and more undesirable.Just so I won't be accused of wandering to far atopic of the connection with Bill Gates, let me say that this may or may not be true, but I can see his taking this position either way. He may want good education for kids in the same way he (and Melinda) had when they were growing up (in which case this would be false). On the other hand, a good education does go against the non-programmer mentality of the eighth grade students who haven't really developed abstract thought. All this free education on algebra, scientific methodology, the ideas of standing on the shoulder's of giants, and the so forth probably does promote the open source community, the virus writer community, and the intellectual property piracy community moreso than it does the docile, licensed, Windows community. I can really see Bill backing either side of this debate without too much trouble.
Right now, there are pre-broadcast editors at some places who will edit the small time buffer between the live person and the broadcast.
:-)
Get one of these "pre-editors" to mark a spot in the buffer as possibly offensive. An audio mark is played exactly 2 seconds ahead of the offensive word in the broadcast. This causes the stream of new "smart-receivers" to "rot13" the audio or video.
This gives an audio signal (like a doorbell) that can warn people that something is coming and for them to mute their sound, turn away, or otherwise cover their small-minded heads or eyes. If this is done in a consistent manner, new "smart-receivers" could recognize the warning sound and automatically do an audio or video equivalent of rot13 on the signal beginning two seconds from receipt.
Being a country of free-speech this would be the default rather than scrambling the signal and having smart-receivers unscramble it.
Admittedly the use of technology to solve what's fundamentally a morality issuehasn't worked well in solving other morality issues, but it would cause the target group to massively upgrade (be it Pat Robertson branded radios for encoding offensive words or Howard Stern branded radios for decoding them). It would cause a massive upgrade cycle.
*Heh* I can imagine an iPod attachment that plays "uncensored" Howard Stern radio. It could be a very popular plug-in
The use of curses has always been a freedom taken for granted by most geeks on Unix systems. Next thing you know they'll be going after CUPS as well.
:-)
Oh! You mean those #*&@%ing curses. Well, I better look out when the feds start spying on my WiFi network
I was getting my shots for international travel at a county health clinic yesterday. Every terminal in this clinic (as probably every other one in the state) were running flat screen Windows systems that had one application: some sort of terminal server that logged into the mainframe where every financial, medical, and information app was running in text-only mode. The likely reason for this purchase was that some company offered sexy-cool flat screen machines with a promise that they'd work to make the mainframe app work 100% in the same manner.
My favorite two bookshops have web based terminals that allow a user to search for a book and not bug the employees. One is unable to get out of these screens and into Windows, but one can tell by the sound, cursors, and occasional reboots that they are really win machines running underneath.
All of this reminds me of those days in the 1980's when everyone was putting Apple ][ based end user terminals in their shops, but the app or utility that was being served was pretty trivial. When the Apple clones came out (like Franklin and their ilk) the expensive Apple hardware started going away. (You could tell on those machines because there were ways to crash the system or "break" into basic and see whose hardware it was.
My guess is that ultimately on web based terminals and other mainframe terminal services, that there's a huge market of machines that are being sold on price alone. As long as there are "some" varieties of cheap hardware that run with Linux, I can't see this ever becoming a lock-in... price is just too important for some people. To those markets, it's the lucrative OS that will fall out of fashion in favor of the cheap and functional alternative.
No doubt, someone will make the joke that you should boycott the MPAA by downloading a copy of the Oscars rather than watching it on tv.
But this raises some legit questions in my mind. While BitTorrent won't ever be MPAA approved, why wouldn't some other service that loaded it up with commercials, copy-protected the data, and gave blood-money to the data owners be allowed?
Just on idle speculation it would seem to do harm to the way these content providers do business now. Things like Nielson Ratings and other surveys are a joke. Even the somewhat more reliable "box office sales" are manipulable; for example, most movie-goers in my bible-belt state bought a ticket to "The Passion of the Christ" regardless of what movie they actually walked into.
Download statistics just don't offer the level of manipulable, vague uncertainty that the content providers are used to and would probably call into question the absurdity current licensing and advertising rates are calculated. Of course these groups would love to have another form of income, but not at the expense of their decades old statistical handwaving that everyone trusts now.
I applaud the efforts of sites like jackinworld who show the danger of this "Goto" style of education and are able to use the internet to sidestep some legal troubles that one might have if they did this sort of "shared wisdom" in a face-to-face manner.
I realize the law lacks specifying the "intent" of the pictures and it therefore makes it a crazy patchwork of judge's rulings. So Kjella is probably right that self-made and self-published photos would be attempted to be prosecuted under today's law.
But all cases I'm aware of that did this had an adult involved at some point (giving them the idea, lending them the camera knowing their likely intent, etc). Is the same true if the child is completely without adult influence?
Compare masturbation without adult influence and masturbation with adult influence. While I feel that someone like Michael Jackson paying to watch a 12 year old masturbate is child molestation, I think that a janitor who accidentally walks in on a 12 year old masturbating in a stall but then abruptly leaves is a different intent. Though not tested legally, this would probably change the legal patchwork (if a case like this ever made it to court.)
Taking naked underage photographs of yourself with no adult involvment at all seems like a similar form of self-expression as masturbation. Yes, the lack of "intent" being specified in the legal definition of child porn makes a difficult case to win. But damn it, I should be allowed to take and display photos of myself if my parents can be allowed to photograph me as a two year old with an erection or as a three month old posed like a playgirl centerfold on a bear rug. Though not spelled out, I think there is some level of "intent" that the law requires, but just a very, very low and vague standard.
On another note, the whole idea that aroused photos of a child (or even drawings of a naked child) can be considered child pornography if an adult was involved or aware of the photos somewhat confounds me. Puberty, sex, and arousal are constantly on a young person's mind. I started masturbating about age 10. I took some blurry, erotic pictures of myself about age 11. I started reading about sex in the library at age 12. I didn't start major puberty changes until 13. No doubt that there is child sexual abuse out there, but it never happened to me. I think many moral crusaders want kids to be ignorant of the huge changes going through their bodies because it advances their goals of shame, isolation, and manipulation of their mores. Exaggerated claims (and now just threats of accusations) of child pornography make many trusted sources of information back away from the conservative viewpoint of sexual development and scruples.
As an aside, I think that one day a very young kid is going to realize there's a fortune to be made in legal nude photos of themselves as a child. They'll take their parents' camcorder and make movies of him or herself doing things while naked. Dancing. Taking a shower. Demonstrating good hygiene habits. Giving an oral report on sexually transmitted diseases. Giving an anatomy lesson about changes expected during puberty. Demonstrating safe masturbation techniques. Demonstrating how to wear a jock strap or bra. Lots of things a kid should know about their body and their growth. Taking some footage of their private parts to show hair growth, bust development, and penile length. They'll wind up taking lots of footage but no adult will know they're doing this. They'll record themselves saying statements like they are the only one doing this and they aren't in any way feeling exploited by their work.
They'll keep the tape under a mattress or another safe place until age 18 and maybe even make more footage each year. Then as an adult they'll edit them with Final Cut or something into an educational DVD or video diary about puberty. They'll edit together a non-obscene film that shows them learning, awakening, masturbating, and otherwise developing their way through puberty. Then as an adult they can make whatever legal forms needed to have a valid consent.
Heck, if they want to push the envelope, they might even get try editing the footage from they used in their educational film into a more erotic and artistic expression of their feelings and emotions during that time of their life.
Too bad those pictures I made of myself at age 10 didn't come out better. They could definitely be used to illustrate a number of magazine length articles about my horniness at puberty. And I wouldn't feel in the least bit exploited that the photos were released to the public or describing my (pretty common) feelings at the time.
My fascination with solutions to these games is not really what they are, but how they developed. Of course the verification is boring since its simply brute force, but I do like strategies that have some clever evolution or a clever implementation.
A multi-user network client to "solve" Chess or Go might produce some fascinating results or verifications. Is there a way we can contribute our space CPU cycles to the end of these game as we know it?
The simple (unrealistic) example is that showing "Green Car" doesn't mean a sober 8-year-old has the knowledge and physical ability to reach the pedals and steer.
More complex is that alcohol has different effects on different people based on their tolerance and age. A licensed, sixteen-year-old driver having his first drink could still be under the legal limit of alcohol and see a "Green Car" on his test strip yet not be able to drive: a dangerous false positive.
What about a shipment of these hologram strips that gets mixed up and sent to state with a more lenient level of alcohol allowed. The test might show a "red handcuffs" picture to someone who isn't legally over the state's limit (just the test strip's limit for the wrong state): a false negative that adds unnecessary delay, testing, or other consequences.
Add these sorts of holograms to down syndrome tests, HIV tests, cancer tests, and you quickly get into very confusing areas where false results are more dangerous, emotional, and paranoia-inducing than a test result that's simply hard to interpret.
A post-it note on a breathalyzer is easy and inexpensive to update if the laws change. Tests with real numbers may be vague, but getting a feel for the uncertainty level of the results is itself a good thing.
This appears to be everybody against inertia; and Microsoft appears to be on the side of inertia. As another example, Dave Hyatt (a development lead on Apple's Safari) posted a tale about similar problems dealing with the inertia of the float handling in CSS:
Like CSS adoption, the problem with XForms is the lack of backwards compatibility with the old de-facto standards. Now with major releases coming soon (Apple in the first half of the year, Mozilla before May) it's looking like XForms can move forward by offering pretty baubles to web developers and browsers with these backwards-compatible, familiar, tweaks to encourage upgrades (and while you're at it we'll be in a better place toward Xforms 1.0 or 1.1 adoption).I get the feeling that the problem with adopting XForms is the "chicken and egg" issue of current browsers not supporting it so current websites would look like they were moving in REVERSE if they supported it.
It looks like nothing will get the current standard adoption out of NEUTRAL (XUL, XAML, XForms, or some proprietary tech) unless it can be compatible with the current browser tech.
Web Forms 2.0 offers something that the web sites could adopt that would still be backwards friendly to Internet Explorer. It's the lubrication that can get the websites to move their tech forward.
It seems that Apple and AOL are on the cusp of a new major browser release things are just about to be pushed into DRIVE. At the very least, this "super scripting" solution of Web Forms 2.0 looks like a way to push the website providers into an upgrade cycle for everyone.
My guess is that there's no significant reason this was done outside official W3C procedures other than the rapid speed of making changes, but it looks like they're planning to submit things to the W3C for the full, slow, tectonic ratification.
I dislike "wizards" in my software development tools that tell me what kind of mentality I should use to start my development; I don't want "wizards" to bug the emt's, police, or nurses that have very tight and constrained opportunities to help people. These tools may very well cover up some sort of useful data that would have indicated some other problem or more complex outcome.
Beyond just the annoyance and delay factor, we can also get into a Brazil or Philip K. Dick like realities where we no longer know what these results are showing us. Perhaps the CEO of the hologram company gets the DUI tests to check for a white list of genetic signatures and to always show them as passing the test no matter what the actual results. Perhaps a religiously obsessed development manager surreptitiously adds additional constraints that will cause certain pregnancy tests to fail until the fetus can't be aborted.
These tools are not developed under security and strong testing now because they don't render the judgement. If these tools can in any way cloud or mislead the judgement of those using them then they are a bad idea.
A cancer doctor might find it helpful to know what the broadcast spectrum was like on the night of the solar flares, for example. But even for the in terms of simple tv junkies who want to be able to "flip around" this should be legal to make available; not that it is certainly illegal now, but the copyright owners speak as if it's absurd to even consider the possibility (because it infringes on their revenue).
My local library, video store, or community access station might want to make archives of the broadcast spectrum and as long as the signal is simply what was there, including commercials, static, on-air bloopers, and wardrobe malfunctions this record should be as publicly saleable as a photo of the stars that night. My library could couldn't promote the slice of spectrum with trademarks of the broadcasters, and there would undoubtedly have to be a Linux appliance or simple GUI application to interpret the disk of spectrum (since it would be everything during a certain time period and not readable by most DVD players)
But none of this should stop or infringe on the people who sold these programs to the broadcasters from making a big, bundle of money from the cleaned up DVD releases (other than laziness). They'd still have:
- No commercial's in their programs
- No static or analog noise
- No regulation from the FCC that necessitate censoring the broadcast spectrum
- Corrected gaffes such as episode order, sound problems, and power outage blankspots that wouldn't be corrected on the broadcast spectrum recordings
- Certain shows not broadcast via the spectrum and therefore still only available on cable/DVD
- Penn & Teller Bullshit!
- Nip / Tuck
- Six Feet Under
- Oz
- Queer As Folk
- And many more
Just recently I obtained the DVD of the first season of the Greatest American Hero. Only 8 episodes, but it included an array of great extras including:Today, the only tv I watch are DVD's I rent (and a few I'll buy) but I've long since given up on the value of cable and satelite as offering worthwhile entertainment. I see only good things that could come out of the recording and legal distribution of broadcast spectrum:
Just because the states claim the right doesn't mean that they will be allowed the right. Look at gay marriage and slavery.
But beyond that, it seems that the easiest way to beat this wrap is to take a vacation elsewhere (especially a place that doesn't have high smoking tax or regulation such as D.C., Mexico, or Puerto Rico) and take legal evidence of smoking and consuming these products outside of Michigan. You may not be able to show that you consumed all of the cigarettes outside of the state, but it will add a significant burden to the prosecution's case to prove that you consumed the majority inside the state.
Even so, I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time proving that the cigarettes were consumed at all. Some people collect cigarette packaging (or wine bottles or coke cans) and don't give a flip what happened to the content. Did the defendant smoke the cigarettes or did he simply throw them away? Prove it! Where were these sticks consumed
I personally don't smoke anything legal or illegal. But I find government regulation of smoking to have gone to greedy excess. As soon as this revenue stream starts drying up, they'll all move on to other items to tax (or other internet revenue). This needs to be stopped right now.
Imagine a media player or DVD app. As one tries to playback a several videos on a machine with a slow "left brain", the display drops frames, skips, and jerks as it presents each frame extremely accurately. The user cranks up a gui widget that looks like a volume knob on the window, and this actively funnels off co-processing tasks to the "right brain" processing chips in the system. The playback becomes more fluid at the expense of color accuracy and perhaps even adding a bit of static.
The programmer provides default values, but the user is able to actively adjust and find the level they're comfortable with. If they're unable to find a good tradeoff, they can upgrade their right brain chip (probably a cheap thing to do) if speed is what they perceive to be the problem. If they find that they just can't accept the inaccuracies introduced, then upgrading the left brain and completely lobotomizing the right brain altogether for this application is their option.
Some programmers might perceive no need for inaccuracy and set the defaults of their program to allow no math inaccuracy in their Excel spreadsheet or Quicken checkbook calculations. But a frustrated grad student trying to see some vague trends in civil war death statistics over absurdly massive (but extremely accurate) data collections might be willing to crank up the lossiness of their calculations to at least get a vague idea of the patterns in their graphs. They'd need to remember to crank up the accuracy again for the final stats, but at least they could find where the "interesting" parts of these mountainous collections are in hours rather than waiting for five days for the stats to run, (then re-run after having made a trivial mistake).
As an example, it seems that Apple is refactoring some of their Aqua anti-aliasing GUI code to use GPU speed if available in precisely this kind of lossy way. I wish they'd go a few steps further and do something like this to the CPU instruction set and providing a control widget for users (like me) who would really like to control the speed-hit vs. beauty-level in my GUI.
We've had spreadsheets since the days of the Apple 2's 8-bit processors. Despite accountants insistence on complete accuracy, they found tools and techniques that worked well when they needed the speed rather than the accuracy. CPU's with a rated level of inaccuracy would be a useful thing to have even if mathematicians and accountants don't want to admit that today.
I think it just supports the egocentric idea that I am the only opener of Shrodinger-cat-boxes in the universe as I perceive it.
I have grown up convinced that there are other people like Presidents and Terrorists out there but when I go to sleep these competing ideas change my perception of the universe. Like lucid-dreamers or budhist meditators, my experiences and expectations effect reality but I don't realize it. I perceive some religious, closed-minded, draft dodger as leader of the free world because of my own prejudices buried in my super-ego.
This box predicts the future simply because for now, I've gone into the reality where a box is predicting the future. As my perceptions and expectations change, it's predictions will either reflect reality or diverge from it depending on my subconcious perceptions.
Of course, I have to write a disclaimer that this is really a witty expression of [your / my] subconcious. If I said that this was expressly my opinion I very well might induce another gran mal seizure and I really can't afford more hospital bills right now. (At least I don't perceive that I can afford them. Aghhh!)
I seriously doubt any accountant, music snob, or cs major would allow the main cpu to become inconsistent, but if Apple or some other trendsetting company offered a new computer with a "Right Brain" chip just for these entropic applications I'd expect it to start a whole new fashion in desktop computers.
Is the person a member of AA? Try the serenity prayer. Don't know what their interests might be? check out their fridge magnets.
There are an infinite number of quotes, but most people will choose an easy phrase from their church, favorite politician, or tv show or commercial.
Most people just aren't creative enough to come up with something unique and creative.
If they have to work too hard to find a quote that speaks to them, many people's pride in their own cleverness will lead them to tell their best friends about their inciteful choice of password.
And at the other extreme, the rabid fans of a pop culture phrase will whine until they're allowed to use "DOH!" or "WWJD?" as their pass phrase desipte its extremely short length.
I see this as offering no solid improvement since the problem is people's laziness and herdlike mentality. It seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to standardize security departments into using a procedure that will probably be revealed to have been patented by Microsoft already.
The status quo really seems to be the only option at this point.
Actually, the name "subversion" was a real concern for me at a former jingoistic, anti-terrorist, amazingly technically ignorant employer of mine.
I found that I had to refer to it as svn all the time... at least until my overseer started calling it subversion on his own. Like Al Gore under the impression that he invented the internet, my task master thinks he was responsible for the subversive nickname.
While this sounds like a pretty silly mistake, in my personal experience it happened a lot on Georgia Tech campus-specific newsgroups back in the early 1990's. rn and vi were the default usenet newsreader and text editor. Many lurkers who normally never posted things to usenet would be provoked by the highly divisive topics about the campus gay group, religious issues, or student government idiocy. When they wrote their first post, rn invoked ed instead of vi to edit the posting. One would frequently see postings that probably looked okay on the original author's screen:
but when actually posted to the campus newsgroups, would betray any editing done (and could frequently reveal embarassing original intentions) such as:
Because this was not WYSIWYG, and because it happened with the default setup of tools, it was very common even for people who were familiar with the normal tools or other computer uses. If this was their first usenet posting with the default toolset, they'd frequently post more than they thought they were going to.
User interfaces for artists are, by definition, inconsistent. Are watercolors or acrylics a "better" interface for painiting? Will one produce a "truer" work with synthetic or natural modelling clays?
Warnock's Postscript was an amazing technical creation; I think it deserves its success over its page description competitors. Adobe also kept the Type 1 font hinting as their special technical secret about creating great fonts.
You'd expect Adobe's font creation tools, and vector graphic tools to monopolize their marketplaces. They don't.
Macromeida's Typographer dominates the "hinted font" market. And Corel Draw and Macromedia Freehand are solid competitors for Adobe's Illustrator almost solely distinguished by the look and feel of their user interfaces.
Page layout tools are a different area where Adobe has tried to buy its way into the market (Buying Aldus PageMaker) and use its weight to change the standards (PDF and FrameMaker). The suprise is that they haven't been more successful than they have been so far. While there are all sorts of legacy issues in this area, the extreme stinkiness of FrameMaker 1.0's user interface turned a lot of people off to their toolset.
And then the big suprise was the fantastic success of Adobe's Photoshop. There was nothing particularly spectactular technically about the bitmap files they were producing. But the amazing look and feel the Knolls' imbued in the user interface is what made this tool the success it was. The filter specs didn't offer anything much better than Pixel Paint or most other bitmap tools, but the sub-pixel look and feel of the tools gave Photoshop its anti-aliasing edge.
Personally, I think this standards war may already be too far lost. I'd look into something else. Suites of tools for school teachers or librarians. Something where there's a definite technical aspect, but where the personal touch can go a LONG way toward distinguishing and defining what people demand in their tools. I think artists may have already had these battles fought. While I'm not arguing about giving up, other areas might be more open toward wooing.
I didn't think I was distracted, but when I read the the first sentence of this posting as "The VatIcAn is announcing their new PT series of chip sets at the masses."
I thought for a moment that the Pope might be giving some competition to the unholy trinity of Gates, Barret, and Dell.
Oh well, maybe after some white smoke clears...