Hmmm. XML based configuration of menus and other stuff; support for ECMA script; support for an object embedding and linking model... Stir in Reiser FS (to handle data storage at the file system level instead of the file level)...
I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into a VB like application platform.
I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into Mozilla.:-) Seriously, I dunno about the file system stuff, but the rest of it sounds a lot like XPToolkit combined with XPCOM. Some people would argue that we really didn't need two or three different groups persuing the same kind of architecture, but I'm just as happy to see that multiple groups have caught on to the same basic idea, which is a pretty good one. Well, except for the javascript part; I still can't think very pleasant thoughts about that...
Has anyone tested how extensive the CSS/CSS2 support in Konqueror is? All of the other main browsers (yes, even Mozilla) support CSS in a very patchy 'mine field' sort of way.
Care to share where some of the worst bombs are?:-) Seriously, I've noticed that the latest version of Explorer on the Mac and Mozilla on, well, anything, do an almost perfect job at CSS1, at least according to the w3.org test suite
I'm getting really tired of writing CSS that works in only one version of one platform. What's up with that?
That's the sound of the market not insisting on standards compliance. But note that things are really beginning to catch up now. Within a year, I susptect sites that don't effectively use CSS (including slashdot) are going to look increasingly dorky.
How hard could it possibly be to support CSS in an even way, across *all* platforms??
Really, really hard I think. Seriously, once you start getting to support CSS at the level of units in ems, exes picas, mm and pixels when your output is some random CRT, I think it would make the strong weep.
What about CSS3? Anyone heard what the browsers are doing about this?
No college that I know of has hard SAT and GRE thresholds. In fact, (the last I checked) MIT's EECS department doesn't even require GRE scores for their Masters program.
Well, not many colleges may advertise hard thresholds, but actual practice can run very close to this. I do know of one Psychology program (at the University of Oregon) advertises the use of a linear discriminant based on GRE scores and GPA to do the "first pass" at graduate student applications. The theory behind this, which is due primarily to Robyn Dawes is reasonably clear: you set your threshold at a level slightly below the one where you have never, ever seen a successful graduate student in your program so that you don't unrealistically raise anybody's hopes. (And this includes wishful thinking among faculty members, too: you should definitely think twice before you accept a grad student whose chances of success, going from the previous record, are questionable at very best.
In this case, I have no idea how Greenspun U. is setting their threshold, but given the kind of intellectual energy they're looking for, I've seen many worse plans...
Breaking up a company does not cure the monopoly problem. Look at AT&T. They were broken up into one long distance company and several RBOC's (I think 7). However, if you wanted a telephone, you bought service from an RBOC and AT&T. There is still a monopoly, just more companies with monopolies in slightly smaller things.
Aggh. Wrong. Why do people post if they have no clue. Presumably, because they never did live under the old regime.
Once upon a time, there was a monopoly phone company, known affectionately as Ma Bell. Ma Bell sold you local telephone service, long distance service, and every freaking phone in your house. Wait; take that last part back: since Ma Bell charged you for extra phones and phonelines, most people only had one phone. Again, people actually didn't complain that much, since Ma Bell was seen as a benevolent dictator, subject to regulation, and the phone system was surely a natural monopoly, right?
Wrong. I don't know about you, but today I've got local service from one company, long distance from a second, three good, cheap phones from companies that couldn't make phones for the US market before the break-up. I can dial around the long distance provider at will. I can get a cell phone from one of several competing companies. My real cost per minute for service has gone down a lot. I could have gotten high speed internet access service (ADSL or ISDN)from the local phone company or from one of four local ISPs. Ironically, perhaps, I chose to get a cable modem from ATT itself because it was cheaper and better. In a week or three, I'll be doing my own in-home wireless networking set-up using technology from Lucent, which contains parts of the old ATT that used to make the solid but boring monopoly-priced phones you had to use.
Oh yeah: I inherited stock that used to be ATT shares, but ended up being stock in all the baby bells, Lucent, and now (after some financial dealings) Vodaphone Airtouch, a huge British wireless company. Needless to say, the babies and split-offs have done phenomenally better than the old ATT shares had done historically.
I could go on and on, but the point is that the break-up of ATT is now a textbook case on why it might still be a good idea to break up companies that have monopoly power, even when they have good PR. Whether or not breaking up Microsoft is the best idea or not does not mean that the break-up of ATT was anything but a huge win for everybody concerned.
If the worst possible thing happened and say we get another version of the 1930's happening again don't expect almost any new software to be produced and also further don't expect anyone to give a damn about writing free software.
Huh? Let's pretend for the moment that many people who write free software do it because it's fun. Now, why would those people suddenly lose interest in something they think is fun just because economic times are hard? I suppose you could argue that they'd have to work twice as hard to support families or some such thing, but I'd be surprised if that caused them to ditch something that gave them joy and the respect and recognition of their peers. It has only been very recently that free software developers had even the tiniest chance of becoming truly rich.
Or think about art. Art and artists might seem to flourish more when times are good and people spend money on art. But I don't think that means that the art world goes away when times are bad (sometimes the opposite).
Re:No, it's an "Insane IPO stock tumble"
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As an example: In the past year, Yahoo!, everyone's favorite Internet company, and one of the few Wall Street darlings to make a profit, as fallen 78 percent.
Uh, no. I think somebody might have missed a stocksplit or something. On an adjusted basis, the price of YHOO was $94 and change for the week of April 12, 1999. Last week, YHOO finished at $116. So over the last year, YHOO is actually up! Now, I don't know if this will be true by the time most people read this on Monday morning. The last I checked, the Nikkei was tanking *big time*, like down over 8%, while NASDAQ futures on GLOBEX had fallen as far as they were allowed to.
After black monday, the US technically remained in a recession till around 1992.
Likewise, after the crash of 29, the stock market recovered within a few years. The rest of the economy didn't until pretty much after World War II.
Uh, no. On both counts.
There was no recession, technical or otherwise, accompanying the 1987 crash. Which was weird, actually. What did happen was that many people and companies in the financial services industry did end up getting hosed.
As far as 1929 goes, an investor who got in at the peak of the market and bought the equivalent of the Dow index wouldn't have gotten back into the black in terms of the market price for the shares (so we're ignoring dividends) until decades later. Economic growth in the US following the crash was interesting in that the economy did again show growth during 1936, but went back into a tailspin in 1937 (some blame an insistence on budget-balancing for this). By the early 40s, things might have been getting back to normal, but the US then entered the war, and war economies are very different beasts than peacetime economies, which is why you sometimes use to hear the boilerplate "longest continuous peacetime expansion in the history of the US".
At this point, there is some real cause for concern about a recession, but how long or deep such an event (should it occur) will be is very difficult to know.
It's obviously time for someone to file a patent on suing someone for patent violation. They'd clean up!
That itself probably wouldn't be patentable. There is lots of prior art for your proposed "Process to file a lawsuit for patent infringement" invention.
On the other hand, if you made it into a business model, you might well have a patentable invention. Thus it could go like this:
Process for the automatic filing of lawsuits alleging patent infringement over electronic data networks
[...] "The process then gathers S-1 filings from electronically accessible data networks and by means of a software invention described in US patent 6663666 ("automatic generation of legalistic prose from data obtainable from electronic data networks") fills out all the necessary paperwork to file a technically correct lawsuit against the company seeking a public offering for the infringement of patent 6543212 ("Use of electronic data networks to view automatically generated patent lawsuits"), a patent nearly certain to be violated the minute some schmuck clicks on his inbox and reads our law suit, or other patents that can be alleged to be violated using information gleaned from the S-1 filings or other SEC databases..."
The possibilities are recursive and endless. And also, now that you have read this, only patentable by me! And I have two years to file! Anybody want to buy rights to my inventions?:-)
If you're a CS grad student, and you want to do an interesting open source project, try designing a generic database filesystem for Linux/BSD-- (sqlfs, perhaps?). An fs with so many constraints (typed data, stored in records, flushed to disk before returning a successful write, presenting consistent views to concurrent access, etc.) would be more difficult to implement than a traditional fs, but it would also present many more avenues for optimization. At the end of the project, you'd have a pretty useful abstraction layer, and the free RDBMS folks could potentially spend their time implementing new features, instead of putting so much work into reinventing the wheel.
An interesting side light of something like this is that the project would eventually probably end unix text processing as we know it. The power of unix utilities to treat normal text files as quick and dirty databases is legendary. If you're just warped enough, you can see the translation of many unix utilities and pipelines into the project/restrict/join framework of relational database theory (which, alas, is not quite the same thing as any RDBMS).
Another interesting point is that I could swear that I read about a project to bring a peristent (and ultra-secure) computing environment to Linux, based on a research project done at Penn. But, of course, now I can't recover the URL of the project or what it really did.:-(
So with just 12 TB, you have 23 solid years of entertainment (assuming you have a job and sleep--that xlates to 69 years). Further, this assumes that data compression and storage models do not advance. So, in 6 years a PC off the shelf may have the ability to store everything to entertain you for a lifetime.
Well, my comment is coming in late, but better late than never. I think you're definitely on the right track (heh, heh). Raw storage capacity, just like raw processor speed, is quickly becoming a much less important issue for personal uses.
I mean, you think those numbers are huge, consider text: without compression, and with almost 100% formatting overhead, 1 TB would store hundreds of years of reading material. In other words, textbooks for any field of endeavor ever, all the classics, tons of science fiction (if everything were printed out)...
So the problem, as we already realize with the that puny artifact called the World Wide Web, is what the heck are you going to do about indexing, querying, and searching. Advances in those domains will very quickly dwarf the contributions of merely higher capacity or performance. Unfortunately, these are very, very hard problems.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
Dunno about the file size limit on the PC, but last I checked, MacOS 9.04 supported files up to 2 terabytes in size, precisely to support digital video applications.
Whatever you might think of Apple otherwise, it is manifestly clear that they are willing to do almost anything to own the DV market.
What do you call the likes of SQL Server(apart from half-arsed that is), Exchange Server, the fact that here in the UK two High street Banks run the cash machines on NT??
I'd call it two banks making poor choices...
First, I didn't say that MS didn't try to offer enterprise class software, only that they certainly aren't running away with that market. There's nothing like Oracle or even Sybase or Informix as competition to MS in the word-processing market, for example. As far as email goes, I'm way too familiar with Microsoft Exchange (since it's MU's email "solution", at least for the moment...)
I really think Babar has a point here. I'm not sure I totally agree with the whole neo-luddite "computer's haven't really gained anyone anything" (which isn't a particularly accurate paraphrase anyway) sentiment.
Indeed, computers have gained most people an immense amount, more than most of them can imagine. And I'm not (seriously) suggesting that office software is completely useless. MS Word is a perfectly serviceable, if rather byzantine, text editor. But I am suggesting that much of its perceived value comes from the fact that people like to use it, not from the fact that people get much more done with it. Heck, I'm all in favor of entertainment, or else why would I be posting to slashdot?
I think personal computers have made a number of things possible: desktop publishing and (more recently video). But these could also be shoehorned into "entertainment".
Yes, but these are primarily means to produce entertainment, not obtain it. The reason why desktop publishing was such a huge success was that it really, really did replace an outmoded technology, and it lead to a better separation of concerns between mock-up/design and the raw, gritty details of printing and binding and such. Plus, you know desktop publishing software is there for more than entertainment value because real businesses whose main product is printed material rely on the software. I suspect (but I'm less sure) that desktop video will have a similar effect in the video production industry.
Now, there's a funny thing going on here: the market for producing books and videos isn't nearly as large as the market for playing (with) them, so we can predict from the "Microsoft is primarily an entertainment company" thesis that MS won't worry too much about those niches. Sure enough, they really haven't. There's no "real" MS equivalent to PageMaker or Quark. [MS Publisher is basically the family/entertainment toy version.] Now, web browsers, on the other hand...
No hardware companies, no deep infrastructure, just stuff to keep people busy and happy.
Perhaps you remember the third member of the triad: Bill, Steve, and Paul. You DO remember what Paul Allen has been buying for the last 5 years or so, right? (hint: it's called cable)
Oh yes, I do know this very well. However, Paul Allen != Microsoft. Paul Allen is a way more complicated and interesting guy than the MS juggernaut.
Microsoft may have some inside traction on the Paul Allen investments, but MS and Paul Allen are distinct in a way that Ballmer or Gates and MS are clearly not. But, for that matter, cable TV is just the medium through which a lot of entertainment (including Microsoft's) will be delievered. So Paul Allen decides to leverage his Microsoft investment (and also his sports franchises) by buying cable companies; makes sense to me...:-)
There's a new sheriff in town, and this time it's got the law on its side and the courts in its pocket. And its name is... the Entertainment Industry. Yes, Microsoft dumbed down computing for the masses and in doing so they reduced the quality of the experience.
Ouch, you were so close to the truth I could taste it. I think much of what you say is true, but you miss the important point that Microsoft IS in the Entertainment Industry. (I've got another post in this thread about this point, but it's a sharper point in response to your post.) You're completely correct that they don't own the Enterprise (or embedded controllers, or any of the really important computer applications these days). That's tough to do, and doesn't play to what Microsoft's strength has always been, namely keeping people entertained.
People actually like to play with their fonts and "get creative" with their PowerPoint presentations. The actual productivity gain in all of this has been minimal (actually, people like Thomas K. Landauer have argued that the gain has been, uh, a loss). But, boy, has it ever kept a lot of office workers busy and entertained.
Of course, Microsoft did really figure this out at some point, and their non-core investments reflect this fact: MSNBC, Hotmail, WebTV, MSN, etc. No hardware companies, no deep infrastructure, just stuff to keep people busy and happy. The future success of Microsoft will be in Keeping it Fun, and learning to completely let go of grungy stuff like webserver OSes that you can literally pick up for free these days.
Even if Judge Jackson passes down the harshest ruling possible, Microsoft still has its software running on a huge percentage of the world's computers.
I keep reading stuff like this, and Yet Do I Marvel. I guess it's human nature to assume that most of the (important) computers in the world are like the one on your desk. Also, that the computer on your desk is particularly important. I'll submit to you that this just isn't true.
Most of the important computers in the world are either things like embedded controllers, or very, very large information systems that do important things, like run the phone system, send bills, or write checks. In other words, all the systems that people were getting freaked out about when Y2K rolled around.
Microsoft's real market share of crucial computing is just not very big. I hate to break it to people out there, but the computing that most of us do on our desktop machines is just not very important in the big scheme of things. I mean, how could it be? Sending memos back and forth doesn't really accomplish much. A spreadsheet may seem important, but very few of them reach or endorse conclusions that were either unknown or unreachable by other means.
What personal computers are really about, more than anything, is keeping people entertained. Microsoft is not a technology company, but an entertainment outfit. The Web was not a threat to Microsoft because somebody would write a java word processor or something that would eat into MS Office revenues per se. The Web was a threat because people found it more entertaining than existing MS product offerings.
Look carefully at Microsoft's investments outside of operating systems and applications. You've got a TV network (MSNBC), an alleged content provider (MSN), freemail (hotmail), a bunch of stuff like Encarta, kid's toys, now a gaming box... In other words, entertainment. What you don't see is serious vertical market software, or infrastructure stuff.
Interestingly, Microsoft has tried to enter one other non-entertainment area: money and financial software. That, of course, makes sense because the real money is, well, where the money is. But everybody knows that, so the competition there is both fierce and skilled; for PC-based entertainment (like MS Word), it just hasn't been.
They may have to take a step back in their development, but they'll find ways around any injunctions, just as the baby bells have.
Funny thing about that, however: the phone company break-up really did lead to huge improvements in the variety, cost, and even quality of service. And the resulting baby bells and their competitors have grown at a rate much faster than Ma Bell ever did. And investors have done incredibly well. Yes, there are some problems here and there, but the anti-trust ruling in this case clearly did us all a lot of good. If the MS case ends up half as well, we should all be thrilled.
It seems like his brain's been really screwed up by the accident. He pretty much doesn't remember anything.
And who says that geeks suffer from a total lack of social skills.:-(
OK. I am not a neurologist. I have, however, seen brain-injured people in my travels, and the one thing that's clear from those experiences is that you can see a wide variation in the rate and amount of recovery of function.
The fact that Jason Haas has already shown some improvement is encouraging, but it will take a while before anybody really knows what to expect in the long term.
The "word salad" character of his utterances is interesting because this kind of symptom sometimes does resolve fairly well. In particular, stroke patients who have lesions to parts of the temporal lobe can be really out there for some time, but within six months, most of them will have improved quite a bit, and will generally suffer primarily from, um, gosh; what's the word for it? Oh yeah: anomia (word-finding problems).
Head trauma isn't exactly the same thing, however.
It also looks like he's suffering from a pretty dense retrograde amnesia. As is often the case, this is temporally graded: it's much worse for relatively recent events (e.g., his marriage 4 months ago) than for relatively distant events (e.g., he seems to have a better idea about his long-time family members). It was unclear to me from these reports whether he had any anterograde amnesia (crudely, can't form new memories). Again, amnestic syndromes can improve with time, although there is a good chance that his memory for experiences immediately (or not so immediately) before the accident may never be quite the same.
And another thing. I don't think I'd personally want to see Linux do better than all the Unix systems, or even equal them. Because if it equals them, but it's free of charge, it will beat them.
The mind boggles. The reason why competition is considered a Good Thing is it produces better products that people want at lower costs. In the case of Linux or *BSD versus Unix(tm), it is clear that Unix(tm) has a cost disadvantage. So, in order for Unix(tm) to retain market share, people really have to want it. In the particular case of SCO, if SCO can be (or could have been) a service organization that people would be willing to pay for, then...they'd pay for it.
A world where there's only one operating system is not a world in which I'd want to use computers. When we have just one operating system, we have no competition, and most of the drive for innovation is lost, plus there's nowhere to run if you don't like something. I've always thought Unix fragmentation was a good thing, not bad.
I think you miss the point almost completely. You suggest that it's nice to have a diversity of operating systems, and I think most people agree with that. Now think of what Unix fragmentation was really about. It wasn't about competition. It couldn't have been. I forget which sage said this, but the rule has always been:
Competition does not consist of being different, but, rather, of being the same.
Now think of why we had Unix fragmentation: because they ran on different hardware, and vendors had a motive for making it difficult to switch platforms once you'd developed for [name of company here]. Suppose you'd liked Irix for some reason, but wanted to run it on your bullet-proof HP box: couldn't do it. You had to run HP/UX. HP/UX and Irix themselves did not compete, rather the hardware/software monoliths sort of competed. But even there, the companies took great pains to develop their own little market niches because by being different, they didn't have to compete.
OK, so now what happens when Linux gets ported to a new platform? Yup, you now have some real competition: for Digital Unix or Solaris/x86 or what have you to survive, they have to be better than, better supported than, or cheaper than Linux. If they are none of these things in a given niche, then they will (and should) die.
Yes, that's true...but it's highly unlikely that this is what most people are interested in.
What you really want to read is the file perldelta.pod, that comes with the distribution, and, I hope, will appear outside of it somewhere (at www.perl.com?) in the very near future. The Changelog is 1.4 MB of lore that literally logs everything done to perl source since the Bronze age (or sometime around there; I'd have to check). Not that it isn't entertaining or interesting if you've achieved some level of geekiness, but it doesn't give easy answers to questions most people have.:-)
He actually answered this http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue2/2750 .html. Basically he says that he started installing SLS on some computers for a professor, and ended up fixing bugs in the SLS setup. The ball started rolling, and eventually he had slackware
That's nice, but not what I was really trying to ask about (perhaps I was too delicate). The SLS/Slackware story, as I remember it, involved attempts to "close" an open source license on the SLS install scripts, accusations that somebody was trying to prevent SLS from making money...a bunch of more sensitive issues that were presented way too emotionally at the time to allow any kind of rational analysis or learning to take place. Also, I think the current interest in the story is that SLS was, in many ways, the first Linux company on earth and it went out of that line of business. Slackware was not the sole cause of this by any means, but it is a fact that doesn't seem to be very widely known right now.
They could have named it Dotedu. Or Dotnet. Actually, I kinda like dotnet. Or Dotcouk.
Well, given that Dotcom is destined to be such a famous pig, I think it was very short-sighted to give it a name that you haven't claimed a hostname for. Take Dolly The Sheep. Or rather, don't, since dollythesheep.com is already taken (as is clonesheep.com).
Yes, these poor pignamers did face a challenge, since all of the following are already taken:
dotcom.com
dotcom.net
dotcom.org
com.com
com.net
com.org
net.com
net.net
net.edu
net.org
edu.com
edu.net
edu.edu
edu.org
Yes, com.edu is actually available. Now, the coolest name for the pig would have been dotdot. Dotdot.com is taken, but dotdot.edu is not, and we could pretend that this whole project has some educational or academic purpose...
Once upon a time, when the kernel version number was << 1, there was the SLS distribution put together by Peter MacDonald. Then there was Slackware, a distribution in a very similar vein assembled by our interview guest. And there were some...bad feelings about that.
Now that this is years in the past, would you care to make any comments about the early relationship between Slackware and SLS, and what if anything you think this teaches us in the Free Software (or Open Source) community today?
No kidding. I was *AMAZED* when I saw the iMac mouse for the first time. Here's a company that for years was espousing the virtues of ergonomics and good UI design. They come out with a "revolutionary" (ha!) new computer design -- and the mouse takes a 10 year step back in time.
No, that's not a terribly good mouse. The first ones were completely horrible; no tactile feedback at all that you were holding it crooked. The newer ones, weirdly enough, are much better: they put this dimply thing on the "front" so you can easily tell you're holding it crooked. That makes a big difference. Of course, it's still pretty lame to make the thing so easy to grab crooked in the first place...
The keyboard is the same one that ships with the iMacs -- it feels like a laptop keyboard. He says he got used to it after a while, but I'll keep my 10 pound huge footprint IBM keyboard, thanks.
Now, I'm not supremely picky about keyboards despite being a pretty good (>70 wpm) touch typist. I was pretty sure I'd hate the iMac keyboard, since it seemed lame at the store. But since I've used it at home at a work station with a keyboard shelf, I have to admit that it isn't really any problem. I certainly don't miss all the extra keypad/Print Screen crappiness on the side, and having a narrower keyboard means the mouse is closer to my hand. It's still in the "penalty zone", (Tom Christiansen's term) but not nearly as much so as with a "battleship" keyboard.
Now, if you want to know what's really lame about the iMac design, it's the confusability of the modem port and the ethernet jack combined with the expectation that a modem has both a line in and a line out.
The translucent junk has been around long before the Imac. The first time I was offered a translucent aqua rodent was in 1995 if not even earlier. Manufactured by one of the numerous Taiwanese companies, forgot which one.
Uh, but what does this have to do with anything? The existence of a translucent aqua rodent doesn't have much to do with a copyright-protected design for a one-piece PC using two colors of plastic, a distinctive shape, and a crappily shaped mouse.:-)
Again, seriously, you can't copyright an idea but only particular expressions of an idea. And then the big question is whether two particular copyright-protected expressions, A, and B, differ enough from each other that neither one infringes on the other. In the Apple/emachines case, emachines admitted that their intention was to mimic the Apple design. I don't think you could ask for a better situation if you were Apple's lawyers. But I suspect that there are many iMac-like designs that would not infringe.
In btw: neither the NeXT black nor the SGI blue have been ever defended as designs.
Uh, perhaps they were never infringed upon during the time when anybody could care? I personally never saw another black magnesium cube or swooshy blue pizza box from any other manufacturer. On the other hand, the design of the NeXT file selector widget was copied, and NeXT was very noisy about that.
And they have much better looks than the iroast. See the new Aptivas, IBM thin clients and SGI boxen for examples.
Not sure I follow you. SGI can't infringe on their own trademarks, while I don't see a huge resemblence between the IBM boxes and much of anything else. Certainly not to the degree that the eMachines PC cloned the superficial look of the iMac.
There is a program produced under the GNU GPL called octave that supposedly interprets matlab commands. Never tried it because it barfed on my libc version.
I can confirm that Octave is a very useful piece of free software. It provides an essentially complete Matlab 4 environment, and some current development effort is going into Matlab 5 compatibility.
Octave's author, John W. Eaton, has put an amazing amount of effort into the project, and is willing to do more as funding for the project allows. Coders and documenters are also welcome, I believe. A curious point about Octave has been that, despite being a godsend for those who need it worst (starving students), it hasn't "caught on" in the Free Software community as thoroughly as you might suppose.
Meanwhile, if you couldn't use Octave due to an unreported library incompatibility, it would probably be nice to mention this to somebody who could fix it...
Slashdot Mirror
I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into Mozilla. :-) Seriously, I dunno about the file system stuff, but the rest of it sounds a lot like XPToolkit combined with XPCOM. Some people would argue that we really didn't need two or three different groups persuing the same kind of architecture, but I'm just as happy to see that multiple groups have caught on to the same basic idea, which is a pretty good one. Well, except for the javascript part; I still can't think very pleasant thoughts about that...
Care to share where some of the worst bombs are? :-) Seriously, I've noticed that the latest version of Explorer on the Mac and Mozilla on, well, anything, do an almost perfect job at CSS1, at least according to the w3.org test suite
That's the sound of the market not insisting on standards compliance. But note that things are really beginning to catch up now. Within a year, I susptect sites that don't effectively use CSS (including slashdot) are going to look increasingly dorky.
Really, really hard I think. Seriously, once you start getting to support CSS at the level of units in ems, exes picas, mm and pixels when your output is some random CRT, I think it would make the strong weep.
CSS3 is, alas, way out there; there's not even a unified proposal yet
I suspect that the first universal thing we'll see out of CSS3 is the paged media stuff, which is already sort of available in Explorer.
Doing style right is hard, and I think everybody can see now that it's worth doing right. At least, I hope that's the case...
Well, not many colleges may advertise hard thresholds, but actual practice can run very close to this. I do know of one Psychology program (at the University of Oregon) advertises the use of a linear discriminant based on GRE scores and GPA to do the "first pass" at graduate student applications. The theory behind this, which is due primarily to Robyn Dawes is reasonably clear: you set your threshold at a level slightly below the one where you have never, ever seen a successful graduate student in your program so that you don't unrealistically raise anybody's hopes. (And this includes wishful thinking among faculty members, too: you should definitely think twice before you accept a grad student whose chances of success, going from the previous record, are questionable at very best.
In this case, I have no idea how Greenspun U. is setting their threshold, but given the kind of intellectual energy they're looking for, I've seen many worse plans...
Aggh. Wrong. Why do people post if they have no clue. Presumably, because they never did live under the old regime.
Once upon a time, there was a monopoly phone company, known affectionately as Ma Bell. Ma Bell sold you local telephone service, long distance service, and every freaking phone in your house. Wait; take that last part back: since Ma Bell charged you for extra phones and phonelines, most people only had one phone. Again, people actually didn't complain that much, since Ma Bell was seen as a benevolent dictator, subject to regulation, and the phone system was surely a natural monopoly, right?
Wrong. I don't know about you, but today I've got local service from one company, long distance from a second, three good, cheap phones from companies that couldn't make phones for the US market before the break-up. I can dial around the long distance provider at will. I can get a cell phone from one of several competing companies. My real cost per minute for service has gone down a lot. I could have gotten high speed internet access service (ADSL or ISDN)from the local phone company or from one of four local ISPs. Ironically, perhaps, I chose to get a cable modem from ATT itself because it was cheaper and better. In a week or three, I'll be doing my own in-home wireless networking set-up using technology from Lucent, which contains parts of the old ATT that used to make the solid but boring monopoly-priced phones you had to use.
Oh yeah: I inherited stock that used to be ATT shares, but ended up being stock in all the baby bells, Lucent, and now (after some financial dealings) Vodaphone Airtouch, a huge British wireless company. Needless to say, the babies and split-offs have done phenomenally better than the old ATT shares had done historically.
I could go on and on, but the point is that the break-up of ATT is now a textbook case on why it might still be a good idea to break up companies that have monopoly power, even when they have good PR. Whether or not breaking up Microsoft is the best idea or not does not mean that the break-up of ATT was anything but a huge win for everybody concerned.
Huh? Let's pretend for the moment that many people who write free software do it because it's fun. Now, why would those people suddenly lose interest in something they think is fun just because economic times are hard? I suppose you could argue that they'd have to work twice as hard to support families or some such thing, but I'd be surprised if that caused them to ditch something that gave them joy and the respect and recognition of their peers. It has only been very recently that free software developers had even the tiniest chance of becoming truly rich.
Or think about art. Art and artists might seem to flourish more when times are good and people spend money on art. But I don't think that means that the art world goes away when times are bad (sometimes the opposite).
Uh, no. I think somebody might have missed a stocksplit or something. On an adjusted basis, the price of YHOO was $94 and change for the week of April 12, 1999. Last week, YHOO finished at $116. So over the last year, YHOO is actually up! Now, I don't know if this will be true by the time most people read this on Monday morning. The last I checked, the Nikkei was tanking *big time*, like down over 8%, while NASDAQ futures on GLOBEX had fallen as far as they were allowed to.
Uh, no. On both counts.
There was no recession, technical or otherwise, accompanying the 1987 crash. Which was weird, actually. What did happen was that many people and companies in the financial services industry did end up getting hosed.
As far as 1929 goes, an investor who got in at the peak of the market and bought the equivalent of the Dow index wouldn't have gotten back into the black in terms of the market price for the shares (so we're ignoring dividends) until decades later. Economic growth in the US following the crash was interesting in that the economy did again show growth during 1936, but went back into a tailspin in 1937 (some blame an insistence on budget-balancing for this). By the early 40s, things might have been getting back to normal, but the US then entered the war, and war economies are very different beasts than peacetime economies, which is why you sometimes use to hear the boilerplate "longest continuous peacetime expansion in the history of the US".
At this point, there is some real cause for concern about a recession, but how long or deep such an event (should it occur) will be is very difficult to know.
That itself probably wouldn't be patentable. There is lots of prior art for your proposed "Process to file a lawsuit for patent infringement" invention.
On the other hand, if you made it into a business model, you might well have a patentable invention. Thus it could go like this:
Process for the automatic filing of lawsuits alleging patent infringement over electronic data networks
[...] "The process then gathers S-1 filings from electronically accessible data networks and by means of a software invention described in US patent 6663666 ("automatic generation of legalistic prose from data obtainable from electronic data networks") fills out all the necessary paperwork to file a technically correct lawsuit against the company seeking a public offering for the infringement of patent 6543212 ("Use of electronic data networks to view automatically generated patent lawsuits"), a patent nearly certain to be violated the minute some schmuck clicks on his inbox and reads our law suit, or other patents that can be alleged to be violated using information gleaned from the S-1 filings or other SEC databases..."
The possibilities are recursive and endless. And also, now that you have read this, only patentable by me! And I have two years to file! Anybody want to buy rights to my inventions? :-)
An interesting side light of something like this is that the project would eventually probably end unix text processing as we know it. The power of unix utilities to treat normal text files as quick and dirty databases is legendary. If you're just warped enough, you can see the translation of many unix utilities and pipelines into the project/restrict/join framework of relational database theory (which, alas, is not quite the same thing as any RDBMS).
Another interesting point is that I could swear that I read about a project to bring a peristent (and ultra-secure) computing environment to Linux, based on a research project done at Penn. But, of course, now I can't recover the URL of the project or what it really did. :-(
Well, my comment is coming in late, but better late than never. I think you're definitely on the right track (heh, heh). Raw storage capacity, just like raw processor speed, is quickly becoming a much less important issue for personal uses.
I mean, you think those numbers are huge, consider text: without compression, and with almost 100% formatting overhead, 1 TB would store hundreds of years of reading material. In other words, textbooks for any field of endeavor ever, all the classics, tons of science fiction (if everything were printed out)...
So the problem, as we already realize with the that puny artifact called the World Wide Web, is what the heck are you going to do about indexing, querying, and searching. Advances in those domains will very quickly dwarf the contributions of merely higher capacity or performance. Unfortunately, these are very, very hard problems.
Dunno about the file size limit on the PC, but last I checked, MacOS 9.04 supported files up to 2 terabytes in size, precisely to support digital video applications.
Whatever you might think of Apple otherwise, it is manifestly clear that they are willing to do almost anything to own the DV market.
First, I didn't say that MS didn't try to offer enterprise class software, only that they certainly aren't running away with that market. There's nothing like Oracle or even Sybase or Informix as competition to MS in the word-processing market, for example. As far as email goes, I'm way too familiar with Microsoft Exchange (since it's MU's email "solution", at least for the moment...)
Indeed, computers have gained most people an immense amount, more than most of them can imagine. And I'm not (seriously) suggesting that office software is completely useless. MS Word is a perfectly serviceable, if rather byzantine, text editor. But I am suggesting that much of its perceived value comes from the fact that people like to use it, not from the fact that people get much more done with it. Heck, I'm all in favor of entertainment, or else why would I be posting to slashdot?
Yes, but these are primarily means to produce entertainment, not obtain it. The reason why desktop publishing was such a huge success was that it really, really did replace an outmoded technology, and it lead to a better separation of concerns between mock-up/design and the raw, gritty details of printing and binding and such. Plus, you know desktop publishing software is there for more than entertainment value because real businesses whose main product is printed material rely on the software. I suspect (but I'm less sure) that desktop video will have a similar effect in the video production industry.
Now, there's a funny thing going on here: the market for producing books and videos isn't nearly as large as the market for playing (with) them, so we can predict from the "Microsoft is primarily an entertainment company" thesis that MS won't worry too much about those niches. Sure enough, they really haven't. There's no "real" MS equivalent to PageMaker or Quark. [MS Publisher is basically the family/entertainment toy version.] Now, web browsers, on the other hand...
Oh yes, I do know this very well. However, Paul Allen != Microsoft. Paul Allen is a way more complicated and interesting guy than the MS juggernaut.
Microsoft may have some inside traction on the Paul Allen investments, but MS and Paul Allen are distinct in a way that Ballmer or Gates and MS are clearly not. But, for that matter, cable TV is just the medium through which a lot of entertainment (including Microsoft's) will be delievered. So Paul Allen decides to leverage his Microsoft investment (and also his sports franchises) by buying cable companies; makes sense to me... :-)
Ouch, you were so close to the truth I could taste it. I think much of what you say is true, but you miss the important point that Microsoft IS in the Entertainment Industry. (I've got another post in this thread about this point, but it's a sharper point in response to your post.) You're completely correct that they don't own the Enterprise (or embedded controllers, or any of the really important computer applications these days). That's tough to do, and doesn't play to what Microsoft's strength has always been, namely keeping people entertained.
People actually like to play with their fonts and "get creative" with their PowerPoint presentations. The actual productivity gain in all of this has been minimal (actually, people like Thomas K. Landauer have argued that the gain has been, uh, a loss). But, boy, has it ever kept a lot of office workers busy and entertained.
Of course, Microsoft did really figure this out at some point, and their non-core investments reflect this fact: MSNBC, Hotmail, WebTV, MSN, etc. No hardware companies, no deep infrastructure, just stuff to keep people busy and happy. The future success of Microsoft will be in Keeping it Fun, and learning to completely let go of grungy stuff like webserver OSes that you can literally pick up for free these days.
I keep reading stuff like this, and Yet Do I Marvel. I guess it's human nature to assume that most of the (important) computers in the world are like the one on your desk. Also, that the computer on your desk is particularly important. I'll submit to you that this just isn't true.
Most of the important computers in the world are either things like embedded controllers, or very, very large information systems that do important things, like run the phone system, send bills, or write checks. In other words, all the systems that people were getting freaked out about when Y2K rolled around.
Microsoft's real market share of crucial computing is just not very big. I hate to break it to people out there, but the computing that most of us do on our desktop machines is just not very important in the big scheme of things. I mean, how could it be? Sending memos back and forth doesn't really accomplish much. A spreadsheet may seem important, but very few of them reach or endorse conclusions that were either unknown or unreachable by other means.
What personal computers are really about, more than anything, is keeping people entertained. Microsoft is not a technology company, but an entertainment outfit. The Web was not a threat to Microsoft because somebody would write a java word processor or something that would eat into MS Office revenues per se. The Web was a threat because people found it more entertaining than existing MS product offerings.
Look carefully at Microsoft's investments outside of operating systems and applications. You've got a TV network (MSNBC), an alleged content provider (MSN), freemail (hotmail), a bunch of stuff like Encarta, kid's toys, now a gaming box... In other words, entertainment. What you don't see is serious vertical market software, or infrastructure stuff.
Interestingly, Microsoft has tried to enter one other non-entertainment area: money and financial software. That, of course, makes sense because the real money is, well, where the money is. But everybody knows that, so the competition there is both fierce and skilled; for PC-based entertainment (like MS Word), it just hasn't been.
Funny thing about that, however: the phone company break-up really did lead to huge improvements in the variety, cost, and even quality of service. And the resulting baby bells and their competitors have grown at a rate much faster than Ma Bell ever did. And investors have done incredibly well. Yes, there are some problems here and there, but the anti-trust ruling in this case clearly did us all a lot of good. If the MS case ends up half as well, we should all be thrilled.
And who says that geeks suffer from a total lack of social skills. :-(
OK. I am not a neurologist. I have, however, seen brain-injured people in my travels, and the one thing that's clear from those experiences is that you can see a wide variation in the rate and amount of recovery of function.
The fact that Jason Haas has already shown some improvement is encouraging, but it will take a while before anybody really knows what to expect in the long term.
The "word salad" character of his utterances is interesting because this kind of symptom sometimes does resolve fairly well. In particular, stroke patients who have lesions to parts of the temporal lobe can be really out there for some time, but within six months, most of them will have improved quite a bit, and will generally suffer primarily from, um, gosh; what's the word for it? Oh yeah: anomia (word-finding problems).
Head trauma isn't exactly the same thing, however.
It also looks like he's suffering from a pretty dense retrograde amnesia. As is often the case, this is temporally graded: it's much worse for relatively recent events (e.g., his marriage 4 months ago) than for relatively distant events (e.g., he seems to have a better idea about his long-time family members). It was unclear to me from these reports whether he had any anterograde amnesia (crudely, can't form new memories). Again, amnestic syndromes can improve with time, although there is a good chance that his memory for experiences immediately (or not so immediately) before the accident may never be quite the same.
The mind boggles. The reason why competition is considered a Good Thing is it produces better products that people want at lower costs. In the case of Linux or *BSD versus Unix(tm), it is clear that Unix(tm) has a cost disadvantage. So, in order for Unix(tm) to retain market share, people really have to want it. In the particular case of SCO, if SCO can be (or could have been) a service organization that people would be willing to pay for, then...they'd pay for it.
I think you miss the point almost completely. You suggest that it's nice to have a diversity of operating systems, and I think most people agree with that. Now think of what Unix fragmentation was really about. It wasn't about competition. It couldn't have been. I forget which sage said this, but the rule has always been:
Competition does not consist of being different, but, rather, of being the same.
Now think of why we had Unix fragmentation: because they ran on different hardware, and vendors had a motive for making it difficult to switch platforms once you'd developed for [name of company here]. Suppose you'd liked Irix for some reason, but wanted to run it on your bullet-proof HP box: couldn't do it. You had to run HP/UX. HP/UX and Irix themselves did not compete, rather the hardware/software monoliths sort of competed. But even there, the companies took great pains to develop their own little market niches because by being different, they didn't have to compete.
OK, so now what happens when Linux gets ported to a new platform? Yup, you now have some real competition: for Digital Unix or Solaris/x86 or what have you to survive, they have to be better than, better supported than, or cheaper than Linux. If they are none of these things in a given niche, then they will (and should) die.
Ah, service with a smile. :-) That should do the trick. [Moderators: please bink up the above post rather than the Changelog one.]
Yes, that's true...but it's highly unlikely that this is what most people are interested in.
What you really want to read is the file perldelta.pod, that comes with the distribution, and, I hope, will appear outside of it somewhere (at www.perl.com?) in the very near future. The Changelog is 1.4 MB of lore that literally logs everything done to perl source since the Bronze age (or sometime around there; I'd have to check). Not that it isn't entertaining or interesting if you've achieved some level of geekiness, but it doesn't give easy answers to questions most people have. :-)
That's nice, but not what I was really trying to ask about (perhaps I was too delicate). The SLS/Slackware story, as I remember it, involved attempts to "close" an open source license on the SLS install scripts, accusations that somebody was trying to prevent SLS from making money...a bunch of more sensitive issues that were presented way too emotionally at the time to allow any kind of rational analysis or learning to take place. Also, I think the current interest in the story is that SLS was, in many ways, the first Linux company on earth and it went out of that line of business. Slackware was not the sole cause of this by any means, but it is a fact that doesn't seem to be very widely known right now.
Well, given that Dotcom is destined to be such a famous pig, I think it was very short-sighted to give it a name that you haven't claimed a hostname for. Take Dolly The Sheep. Or rather, don't, since dollythesheep.com is already taken (as is clonesheep.com).
Yes, these poor pignamers did face a challenge, since all of the following are already taken:
Yes, com.edu is actually available. Now, the coolest name for the pig would have been dotdot. Dotdot.com is taken, but dotdot.edu is not, and we could pretend that this whole project has some educational or academic purpose...
Now that this is years in the past, would you care to make any comments about the early relationship between Slackware and SLS, and what if anything you think this teaches us in the Free Software (or Open Source) community today?
No, that's not a terribly good mouse. The first ones were completely horrible; no tactile feedback at all that you were holding it crooked. The newer ones, weirdly enough, are much better: they put this dimply thing on the "front" so you can easily tell you're holding it crooked. That makes a big difference. Of course, it's still pretty lame to make the thing so easy to grab crooked in the first place...
Now, I'm not supremely picky about keyboards despite being a pretty good (>70 wpm) touch typist. I was pretty sure I'd hate the iMac keyboard, since it seemed lame at the store. But since I've used it at home at a work station with a keyboard shelf, I have to admit that it isn't really any problem. I certainly don't miss all the extra keypad/Print Screen crappiness on the side, and having a narrower keyboard means the mouse is closer to my hand. It's still in the "penalty zone", (Tom Christiansen's term) but not nearly as much so as with a "battleship" keyboard.
Now, if you want to know what's really lame about the iMac design, it's the confusability of the modem port and the ethernet jack combined with the expectation that a modem has both a line in and a line out.
Uh, but what does this have to do with anything? The existence of a translucent aqua rodent doesn't have much to do with a copyright-protected design for a one-piece PC using two colors of plastic, a distinctive shape, and a crappily shaped mouse. :-)
Again, seriously, you can't copyright an idea but only particular expressions of an idea. And then the big question is whether two particular copyright-protected expressions, A, and B, differ enough from each other that neither one infringes on the other. In the Apple/emachines case, emachines admitted that their intention was to mimic the Apple design. I don't think you could ask for a better situation if you were Apple's lawyers. But I suspect that there are many iMac-like designs that would not infringe.
Uh, perhaps they were never infringed upon during the time when anybody could care? I personally never saw another black magnesium cube or swooshy blue pizza box from any other manufacturer. On the other hand, the design of the NeXT file selector widget was copied, and NeXT was very noisy about that.
Not sure I follow you. SGI can't infringe on their own trademarks, while I don't see a huge resemblence between the IBM boxes and much of anything else. Certainly not to the degree that the eMachines PC cloned the superficial look of the iMac.
Oh yeah: IANAL.
I can confirm that Octave is a very useful piece of free software. It provides an essentially complete Matlab 4 environment, and some current development effort is going into Matlab 5 compatibility.
Octave's author, John W. Eaton, has put an amazing amount of effort into the project, and is willing to do more as funding for the project allows. Coders and documenters are also welcome, I believe. A curious point about Octave has been that, despite being a godsend for those who need it worst (starving students), it hasn't "caught on" in the Free Software community as thoroughly as you might suppose.
Meanwhile, if you couldn't use Octave due to an unreported library incompatibility, it would probably be nice to mention this to somebody who could fix it...