Yeah, and this follows up on Cringely's bold 2003 prediction that spam would become "a real problem". Which is a terrific prediction, except that for most folks this happened around 2001.
Quite a few of his 2003 and 2004 predictions seem to be things that already happened, actually. I find that sort of prediction quite easy to make.
Re:XForms in Mozilla is not coming soon
on
XForms Essentials
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Having said the above, let me note that I just tracked down the W3C document XForms for HTML Authors. This document is another description of how to use XForms: I found it much easier to read than the text reviewed here.
Re:XForms in Mozilla is not coming soon
on
XForms Essentials
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I just read the first few chapters of the book online. They confirm my earlier impression from when some of my students tried to use XForms as a key piece in a project about a year ago: XForms is a classic committee standard. Xforms is too complicated for mere mortals to use, and too complicated for mere mortals to implement.
I'm not primarily a web designer, but I've built several HTML forms in my life. I found it quite simple, and found workarounds for many of the problems with HTML Forms cited in the text. It looks like it would take me literally a couple of weeks to figure out how to build the same forms using XForms. I don't have that kind of time. Nor, as the parent post implies, do I have the time to get the needed tools working so that anyone can use the resulting forms.
My students were trying to use XForms to define the GUI of a simple Java app. They ultimately got it to work, but by then, they had burned all the project time they had. They got too deep in the alphabet soup, and couldn't escape.
I'm neither stupid nor ignorant. I understand SGML, HTML, and XML passably well. If I can't figure XForms out easily, I hold out little hope for the average web designer to do it at all.
Seems to me that the PC is just another expensive thing to break. Look for a high-end wireless router that will supply whatever functionality you need in a self-contained box, and leave the PC out of it, at least until some need actually presents itself. You can probably find a decent router for under $100 at current prices; still much cheaper and simpler than $20 router + $200 PC.
Before you believe everything Parker Bros tells you, you might want to check out a revised history of Monopoly by the inventor of Anti-Monopoly. An excerpt on the site from a US Supreme Court ruling in the matter suggests that the game is actually 100% pirated.
As someone who is just putting the finishing touches on the production of a homemade game I have put together for Christmas gifts, I found this topic hilariously timely. I'll second some of parent's ideas.
About a year ago, friends and I put together a bunch of copies of an out-of-print board game. We built a mat-board board with a color-printed playfield glued on, made mat-board pieces, got wooden men from the craft store and painted them. A lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, and the results were quite nice. Some recommendations:
Craft punches, available at your local craft store, are quite useful.
Felt is also quite useful and easy to come by at craft or fabric stores. Pieces that move on a gameboard need felt bottoms.
Mat board is the basic board-making material for the hobbyist.
Rubber cement is a good glue for this work.
Seal things with a coat of oil-based varethane so they don't stain.
Parts like sand timers and dice are readily available at game stores.
For my latest game, an original design, I just needed a Pinochle deck, some Poker chips, and the rules. Much easier to build. Recommendations on game design:
Understand some basic game theory, or find a friend who does. Game balance is hard.
Don't make the rules too complicated. Everyone loves games they can just pick up and play for the first time.
Don't confuse the paint (i.e. the flavor text and pictures, the game setting, etc.) with the game itself. A good setting can be fun, but it has to overlay a game that is good in its own right.
There is usually some kind of balance between luck and skill. Some people won't play pure skill games. Almost no one will play pure luck games, except for money.
Of course, the question remains if, due to its proprietary-friendly licensing and relatively conservative (=stable) design process, FreeBSD wouldn't be the better "Enterprise Linux" anyway. After all, the GPLed Linux kernel could be ditched in favor of a BSD kernel with almost the same arguments the UserLinux project now ditched the GPLed KDE libraries in favor of the LPGLed Gnome libraries.
I'd be running BSD on my home boxes quite happily, but for two things. First, much random PC hardware that I own has drivers only for Linux, and I'm not willing to do a bunch of device driver porting or throw working hardware away. Second, a bunch of the apps I run have Linux binaries, but not BSD binaries, available, and I'm not willing to do a bunch of application porting and compilation.
Why is my story relevant? Because enterprises have the same issues I do, but maybe more so.
I'm a big fan of the BSDs. After all, 2.9BSD was the first minicomputer OS I ever worked on/in. I think there are a number of niches where BSD is exactly the right thing. But I'm not convinced that general-purpose enterprise desktop appliances is one of them.
Spolsky: "Aunt Madge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly or a program that produced no output because it misinterpreted your request."
Except on UNIX, even Aunt Madge will rapidly learn that programs just don't silently fail. If you can trust program failures to produce diagnostics, then you don't need diagnostics for program success.
IMHO, the biggest divide between the two camps is this: In UNIX, I am surprised when something is broken. In Windows, I am surprised when something works.
I agree. On the other hand, there is little chance of defendants ending up net positive on the whole experience, and significant risk of them ending up various kinds of net negative. Winning a summary judgement is no certainty, and getting reimbursement, while possible, is still a long shot IMHO. Given that, I suspect I'd fold in a second.
How is that site's existence dependent on Tivo's goodwill not making a DMCA claim?? The tivo issues that could cause a claim are...
Apparently you are not familiar with how the law actually works. The issue that could cause Tivo to make a DMCA claim is...they decide they want to.
Whether the claim is legitimate or not, the site host still has to decide between two
alternatives. They could ignore the claim, with the risk of spending many thousands of dollars to defend against the claim in court. This defense has the potential of losing for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars if something goes wrong. Alternatively, they could close the site and call it a day. Oddly, most folks not making money on the site choose the latter.
You have correctly identified the competition to MAS: JACK. Some of my colleagues and I have been wondering aloud whether one could build a nice interface to JACK for network audio. It looks like the answer is yes.
As you correctly note, the real issue is latency. Servers like MAS cannot generally promise reasonable latency on the local side: latency matters there (indeed, it's all that matters).
Dmix looks cool too, but as folks have pointed out, it's going to be tough to get it to work with the range of systems X runs on. Unless it's optionally layered atop JACK...
I wish the Xouvert folks every success, and it looks like they are having some! There are several alternatives to XFree86 out there now: any project that mismanages itself that badly is going to have problems.
The likely "middle man" for the fd.o migration is actually the DRI server, which is also hosted at fd.o. This is the separately maintained XFree86 branch which sources all the current X 3D rendering code. For desktop users, 3D is decreasingly optional, so until Kdrive has 3D (soon) the DRI server is likely the place to be for the average desktop user.
(BTW, Kdrive does not generally require recompilation to configure. It is configured with command line arguments, but normally autoconfigures quite well.)
The legal theory of "clean room" software development is quite complicated, and AFAIK not well-tested in court.
In traditional publishing, US courts have decided that copyright extends not just to text, but to characters, situations, etc. (IMHO, this was a fundamental mistake, but that's irrelevant...)
Now, imagine that I publish a book whose plot, characters, etc. are those of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. My legal defense, when sued, is that "It's a clean room implementation. I never read HPatSS. I read book reviews, talked to folks who had read it, etc."
AFAIK (and IANAL), I'd be laughed out of court. My book is still a derivative work.
Don't be so confident that "no sharing of code" = "no copyright".
A third main reason that biometrics haven't taken off is irrevocability. Bad guys can forge your fingerprints, and you can't counter this by changing fingers. DNA is particularly noxious in this regard: there's a lot one can do with stray hairs from a hat and some PCR.
The oldest biometric still in widespread use is the signature. Ironically, we are moving away from signatures because of the problems with biometrics. IMHO it is unlikely that newer biometrics will be better. The best seems to be the intelligent combination of biometrics with other methods---as with signatures now.
In order to get something patented, doesn't it have to be somewhat non-obvious? Isn't there are rule that says, if an engineer in the field would slap his head and say "duh!" and proceed to come up with your solution in an afternoon, you don't get the patent?
Yes there is. One of the biggest problems with the current patent system is that it turns out that this is an almost impossible thing to prove in court. How do you establish what a competent practitioner of the art would have figured out if they hadn't seen the patented invention? First, you have to find competent practitioners who aren't familiar with the invention---in this case the FAT FS. Then, you have to convince a judge/jury that the folks you found aren't some kind of serious genius experts who could invent a novel thing on their own---oh, but are competent enough to have a believable story as to why the court should listen to what they say. Finally, you have to convince the judge/jury that they are claiming the invention is obvious because it is, rather than because you are rewarding them somehow to say this.
Keith Packard is currently finishing up a sample compositing manager for his X server that presents live app windows updated in essentially real time. Should see a live demo in the next day or two---a preliminary screen shot is already available in the freedesktop.org article from earlier today.
I'm glad the WM folks are already duplicating Mac eXpose layout and function: once the two are combined, the X desktop should have the full Mac eXpose functionality.
Even better, this is only the beginning of the cool things that can be done quickly and easily with X compositing... It looks like X is finally almost ready for the (modern) desktop.
10. Posted by "Debian Troll's Best".
9. "regionalization" vs. "internationalization".
8. "Hebrew libraries present on Debian".
7. "LISP hooks in apt-get".
6. "right to left as in Hebrew" (Hebrew is boustrephodonic).
5. "apt.sources file".
4. "they were pretty tight for cash".
3. "low-level display routines in dselect".
2. (Can't find #2. Did I miss anything?)
Just FYI, if any part of a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor oxidizes noticeably (due to heat or for any other reason), something has gone horribly, awfully wrong. The outsides are supposed to be essentially invisible, and you don't ever want the insides getting outside the outsides.
You may recallIcarus as the son of Daedalus. Daedalus was an early technological innovator, who developed wings to allow himself and his son to escape the prison they were confined in by King Minos. Minos was angry that Daedalus had given a citizen the key to the maze that Minos had required Daedalus to build for Minos' benefit. Unfortunately, Icarus tried to exploit his father's wing technology incautiously, thus bringing destruction on himself and grief and guilt to his father.
Not that there's a modern metaphor there anywhere...okay, maybe. Key:
Sun couldn't have sold China a million Linux desktops: the report has to be a hoax. Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I know this for a fact, because Red Hat said so.
Good thing it is a hoax: otherwise Red Hat might be kicking themselves pretty hard for missing the opportunity to sell $1M units of their desktop product.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and this follows up on Cringely's bold 2003 prediction that spam would become "a real problem". Which is a terrific prediction, except that for most folks this happened around 2001.
Quite a few of his 2003 and 2004 predictions seem to be things that already happened, actually. I find that sort of prediction quite easy to make.
Having said the above, let me note that I just tracked down the W3C document XForms for HTML Authors. This document is another description of how to use XForms: I found it much easier to read than the text reviewed here.
I just read the first few chapters of the book online. They confirm my earlier impression from when some of my students tried to use XForms as a key piece in a project about a year ago: XForms is a classic committee standard. Xforms is too complicated for mere mortals to use, and too complicated for mere mortals to implement.
I'm not primarily a web designer, but I've built several HTML forms in my life. I found it quite simple, and found workarounds for many of the problems with HTML Forms cited in the text. It looks like it would take me literally a couple of weeks to figure out how to build the same forms using XForms. I don't have that kind of time. Nor, as the parent post implies, do I have the time to get the needed tools working so that anyone can use the resulting forms.
My students were trying to use XForms to define the GUI of a simple Java app. They ultimately got it to work, but by then, they had burned all the project time they had. They got too deep in the alphabet soup, and couldn't escape.
I'm neither stupid nor ignorant. I understand SGML, HTML, and XML passably well. If I can't figure XForms out easily, I hold out little hope for the average web designer to do it at all.
Seems to me that the PC is just another expensive thing to break. Look for a high-end wireless router that will supply whatever functionality you need in a self-contained box, and leave the PC out of it, at least until some need actually presents itself. You can probably find a decent router for under $100 at current prices; still much cheaper and simpler than $20 router + $200 PC.
Before you believe everything Parker Bros tells you, you might want to check out a revised history of Monopoly by the inventor of Anti-Monopoly. An excerpt on the site from a US Supreme Court ruling in the matter suggests that the game is actually 100% pirated.
As someone who is just putting the finishing touches on the production of a homemade game I have put together for Christmas gifts, I found this topic hilariously timely. I'll second some of parent's ideas.
About a year ago, friends and I put together a bunch of copies of an out-of-print board game. We built a mat-board board with a color-printed playfield glued on, made mat-board pieces, got wooden men from the craft store and painted them. A lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, and the results were quite nice. Some recommendations:
For my latest game, an original design, I just needed a Pinochle deck, some Poker chips, and the rules. Much easier to build. Recommendations on game design:
Above all, have fun.
Of course, the question remains if, due to its proprietary-friendly licensing and relatively conservative (=stable) design process, FreeBSD wouldn't be the better "Enterprise Linux" anyway. After all, the GPLed Linux kernel could be ditched in favor of a BSD kernel with almost the same arguments the UserLinux project now ditched the GPLed KDE libraries in favor of the LPGLed Gnome libraries.
I'd be running BSD on my home boxes quite happily, but for two things. First, much random PC hardware that I own has drivers only for Linux, and I'm not willing to do a bunch of device driver porting or throw working hardware away. Second, a bunch of the apps I run have Linux binaries, but not BSD binaries, available, and I'm not willing to do a bunch of application porting and compilation.
Why is my story relevant? Because enterprises have the same issues I do, but maybe more so.
I'm a big fan of the BSDs. After all, 2.9BSD was the first minicomputer OS I ever worked on/in. I think there are a number of niches where BSD is exactly the right thing. But I'm not convinced that general-purpose enterprise desktop appliances is one of them.
Spolsky: "Aunt Madge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly or a program that produced no output because it misinterpreted your request."
Except on UNIX, even Aunt Madge will rapidly learn that programs just don't silently fail. If you can trust program failures to produce diagnostics, then you don't need diagnostics for program success.
IMHO, the biggest divide between the two camps is this: In UNIX, I am surprised when something is broken. In Windows, I am surprised when something works.
I agree. On the other hand, there is little chance of defendants ending up net positive on the whole experience, and significant risk of them ending up various kinds of net negative. Winning a summary judgement is no certainty, and getting reimbursement, while possible, is still a long shot IMHO. Given that, I suspect I'd fold in a second.
(IANAL, YMMV.)
How is that site's existence dependent on Tivo's goodwill not making a DMCA claim?? The tivo issues that could cause a claim are...
Apparently you are not familiar with how the law actually works. The issue that could cause Tivo to make a DMCA claim is...they decide they want to.
Whether the claim is legitimate or not, the site host still has to decide between two alternatives. They could ignore the claim, with the risk of spending many thousands of dollars to defend against the claim in court. This defense has the potential of losing for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars if something goes wrong. Alternatively, they could close the site and call it a day. Oddly, most folks not making money on the site choose the latter.
You have correctly identified the competition to MAS: JACK. Some of my colleagues and I have been wondering aloud whether one could build a nice interface to JACK for network audio. It looks like the answer is yes.
As you correctly note, the real issue is latency. Servers like MAS cannot generally promise reasonable latency on the local side: latency matters there (indeed, it's all that matters).
Dmix looks cool too, but as folks have pointed out, it's going to be tough to get it to work with the range of systems X runs on. Unless it's optionally layered atop JACK...
I wish the Xouvert folks every success, and it looks like they are having some! There are several alternatives to XFree86 out there now: any project that mismanages itself that badly is going to have problems.
The likely "middle man" for the fd.o migration is actually the DRI server, which is also hosted at fd.o. This is the separately maintained XFree86 branch which sources all the current X 3D rendering code. For desktop users, 3D is decreasingly optional, so until Kdrive has 3D (soon) the DRI server is likely the place to be for the average desktop user.
(BTW, Kdrive does not generally require recompilation to configure. It is configured with command line arguments, but normally autoconfigures quite well.)
WRONG.
The legal theory of "clean room" software development is quite complicated, and AFAIK not well-tested in court.
In traditional publishing, US courts have decided that copyright extends not just to text, but to characters, situations, etc. (IMHO, this was a fundamental mistake, but that's irrelevant...)
Now, imagine that I publish a book whose plot, characters, etc. are those of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. My legal defense, when sued, is that "It's a clean room implementation. I never read HPatSS. I read book reviews, talked to folks who had read it, etc."
AFAIK (and IANAL), I'd be laughed out of court. My book is still a derivative work.
Don't be so confident that "no sharing of code" = "no copyright".
I would certainly be so bold as to suggest that
But then again, I'm an educator.A third main reason that biometrics haven't taken off is irrevocability. Bad guys can forge your fingerprints, and you can't counter this by changing fingers. DNA is particularly noxious in this regard: there's a lot one can do with stray hairs from a hat and some PCR.
The oldest biometric still in widespread use is the signature. Ironically, we are moving away from signatures because of the problems with biometrics. IMHO it is unlikely that newer biometrics will be better. The best seems to be the intelligent combination of biometrics with other methods---as with signatures now.
I don't know what happened here, other than maybe Williams has Weber's arm up his ass -- that's the only explanation I can come up for this book.
This is the most inappropriate comment I have ever seen in a published book review.
In order to get something patented, doesn't it have to be somewhat non-obvious? Isn't there are rule that says, if an engineer in the field would slap his head and say "duh!" and proceed to come up with your solution in an afternoon, you don't get the patent?
Yes there is. One of the biggest problems with the current patent system is that it turns out that this is an almost impossible thing to prove in court. How do you establish what a competent practitioner of the art would have figured out if they hadn't seen the patented invention? First, you have to find competent practitioners who aren't familiar with the invention---in this case the FAT FS. Then, you have to convince a judge/jury that the folks you found aren't some kind of serious genius experts who could invent a novel thing on their own---oh, but are competent enough to have a believable story as to why the court should listen to what they say. Finally, you have to convince the judge/jury that they are claiming the invention is obvious because it is, rather than because you are rewarding them somehow to say this.
Good luck.
Right you are. My apologies.
Keith Packard is currently finishing up a sample compositing manager for his X server that presents live app windows updated in essentially real time. Should see a live demo in the next day or two---a preliminary screen shot is already available in the freedesktop.org article from earlier today.
I'm glad the WM folks are already duplicating Mac eXpose layout and function: once the two are combined, the X desktop should have the full Mac eXpose functionality.
Even better, this is only the beginning of the cool things that can be done quickly and easily with X compositing... It looks like X is finally almost ready for the (modern) desktop.
Top 10 hints that parent was a troll:
And the #1 hint that parent was a troll...s/invisible/invincible/. Sigh. I'm going to bed now.
Just FYI, if any part of a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor oxidizes noticeably (due to heat or for any other reason), something has gone horribly, awfully wrong. The outsides are supposed to be essentially invisible, and you don't ever want the insides getting outside the outsides.
You may recall Icarus as the son of Daedalus. Daedalus was an early technological innovator, who developed wings to allow himself and his son to escape the prison they were confined in by King Minos. Minos was angry that Daedalus had given a citizen the key to the maze that Minos had required Daedalus to build for Minos' benefit. Unfortunately, Icarus tried to exploit his father's wing technology incautiously, thus bringing destruction on himself and grief and guilt to his father.
Not that there's a modern metaphor there anywhere...okay, maybe. Key:
- Daedalus = the
/. crowd
- Icarus = the general computer-using public
- wings = peer-to-peer networking
- prison = DMCA
- King Minos = RIAA/MPAA etc.
- key = DeCSS etc.
- maze = copy prevention
- incautiously = without adequate anonymity
- destruction = massive lawsuits, etc.
But you knew this...Sun couldn't have sold China a million Linux desktops: the report has to be a hoax. Linux isn't ready for the desktop. I know this for a fact, because Red Hat said so.
Good thing it is a hoax: otherwise Red Hat might be kicking themselves pretty hard for missing the opportunity to sell $1M units of their desktop product.
Better now. /.ing is slowing down, and Keithp reconfigured freedesktop.org some. Sorry for the inconvenience.