When Apple shifted from OS 9 to OS X, they built in the Classic application to "emulate" the old OS. It's fast enough, once you have it already booted, and they gave all their developers enough information to port their apps to OS X without too much trouble. This allowed them to adopt an entirely different operating system while still preserving some kind of backward compatibility.
So why does Microsoft take an entirely different approach to the same problem? Every major OS change insists on building on the last OS, to maintain as much compatibility as possible. Okay, I understand that there a LOT of old Windows code out there, some of which dates back to Win3.1, and compatibility is necessary. But surely they could take the jump, redesign Windows from scratch like a genuinely modern OS should be done, and build in some kind of "emulation" for older apps?
Why, in short, is Microsoft so reluctant to dump the DOS core of their OS and start over from scratch? I mean, it could hardly take them any longer than they've already spent on Longhorn....
With handwriting and voice recognition technologies, is using a QWERTY keyboard with nine out of ten fingers something worth knowing anymore?
Handwriting recognition isn't much good at all yet, and voice recognition isn't much better. Besides, have you ever known anyone to write code using a microphone?
Full-size keyboards are still the fastest, easiest, and most cubicle-friendly way of entering data into any computer for about 99.9% of all users. (The last 0.1% use chording, and they spent their own time mastering it.)
I'm a web programmer who's worked on databases externally, and built a few in MS Access, but my new job has a big ol' MS SQL Server database and my project has a LOT of stored procedures. As in, there's nearly no SQL code in the ASP at all -- just calls to the stored procedures.
This is difficult for me, because in order to understand the code I've inherited, I need to read it in two places -- the ASP page and the SQL stored procedure. Both are somewhat weakly organized and incompletely commented. I can do it, but it would be much easier for me if all that logic were in the ASP. That's the down side.
The up side, I understand, is that it's more efficient to use stored procedures. Many of them involve procedural logic in addition to SQL queries, and (I'm told) it's more efficient from a processing perspective to have it there.
I'm confident I wouldn't have any problems if the ASP code were THOROUGHLY commented, especially when it calls a stored procedure, to tell me exactly what was going into it and what was coming back out. In other words, stored procedures should be treated as included functions by a programmer and explicated somewhere outside the database to make the programmer's life easier.
Personally, I disagree with putting too much procedural logic in a stored procedure. It just doesn't seem to belong there. But if I'd started out in databases instead of in Perl, I'd probably have a different outlook.
Poor verbal composition is combined with an almost complete lack of vocabulary, so characters are often caught referring to objects as "thing... uh..." -- pause while they look up the term through their Feed -- "table."
Nowadays, we call that "lag".
This is a typical result of lazy programming. Never underestimate the value of caching a local copy of your data for faster look-ups.
This effort by Real undermines this process and will only serve to make record labels more unwilling to participate in electronic delivery and dissemination of media.
How, exactly, did you come to that conclusion? Just because Real can sell music with "simulated" FairPlay DRM doesn't mean they don't have to license the music first. They'll have to enter into contracts with those record companies before they can sell any of their music, same as Apple did.
Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.
Oh, please. Apple is a publicly-traded business. They've always been about making money.
I love Apple dearly, but let's face it: the whole reason they've locked down their FairPlay DRM exclusively to iTunes and iPod is because they control both. If people only buy music from iTMS, they're more likely to buy iPods; similarly, if other companies licensed FairPlay for their music stores, they could use it in other portable music players so people could use iTMS and play those songs on non-iPod players.
Apple exists to make profits, and the iPod is currently their key profitmaker. They want to lock as many people into it as they can. Since they're not a monopoly, they're legally allowed to do so, and since they do it so darned well, nobody really complains. But it's lock-in nonetheless.
I was going to say something about the government taking issue with Microsoft outsourcing Windows code to non-Americans... how it might make it possible to introduce dangerous code, backdoors, security exceptions and all sorts of potential disasters.......and then I realized, well, how much worse could it be?
Whatever you think about LotR as a work of literature, there's little question it was the most influential book of the century. LotR virtually godfathered the entire fantasy genre as we know it today -- there's hardly a fantasy book or game in English that doesn't draw its influence from Tolkien's work.
If a CD costs $12 (a typical price in the US), then an electronic version should be about $2.
False. In practice, a CD in the US typically costs $15-$20, and the full electronic version costs $10. And yet, inexplicably enough, people buy music on iTMS in droves....
They want all the rights, and essentially want to charge the customers more.
False. Even today, e-books are almost always cheaper than paper ones. Also more convenient and more space-saving. That's the trade-off you make in exchange for first-sale rights.
Then people like you sit around and say "I wonder why ebooks aren't taking off. I know! The DRM isn't good enough!".
Read my other posts. I never said e-books weren't taking off because of DRM, I said they weren't taking off because they're not as convenient to read as paper books. Fair and generous DRM, in the style of iTunes' FairPlay, is merely a tool we need to get publishers involved.
No, its not. I can "own" a CD. I can "own" a book. We can argue that I don't really own it. But for all practical purposes, when I buy a CD, I own it.
You own an original CD, yes. But when you buy online, you only "own" a license to the data. Apple's iTMS is generous enough to let you burn CDs, but that CD is just a copy which you're not legally allowed to resell.
That's the analogy I'm trying to draw here. Paper books are to purchased CDs as e-books are to downloaded music. You do not have the same rights to electronic media as you do to physical media, and since all you "own" is a copy, not a physical object, there's no reason to expect them.
Why should I be required to spend $x on backup media, when I've already bought the non-transferrable rights to the book?
You're not required to, no. But data failures happen, and you'd be an idiot not to keep backups.
I should be allowed to re-get it whenever and whereever I want.
Assuming the seller kept a record of your sale and can verify your ID. What if your seller goes out of business?
Otherwise, I want first sale rights.
That's nice. I want a new BMW.
You can't have it both ways and still get my business. I own the rights or I own the physical copy - you cut the cake, I choose the slice.
There is no physical copy; you don't seem to grasp this fundamental fact. With a paper book or a store-bought CD, you have an original physical object you can resell to your heart's content. When you buy electronic media, you can make a physical copy -- printing a book or burning a CD -- but doing so doesn't destroy the original. Same for selling or trading the version you downloaded. All you can do is copy, and copyright law says you can only do so legally in order to make personal backup.
As such, you have no first-sale rights and no original physical copy to own. This is the trade-off you make when you buy electronic media, and if you don't like it, you don't have to deal with it -- you can still buy a physical copy at your local store.
The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words.
This is a pipe dream. Even the iTunes Music Store doesn't let you keep or resell music you buy with impunity unless you transfer it to a physical medium.
Book publishers have a right to expect the same that the music publishers do. If you buy an electronic book (or CD), you're saving money over the physical book (or CD) but in exchange you have certain restrictions. In order to overcome them (although it may not be legal to do so in all cases), all you have to do is print the book (or burn the CD).
I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
I doubt you'll ever be able to keep your entire library on one eReader, even if you could. That's what PCs and regular backups are for.
I will buy an ebook when I can read it as comfortably as a normal book. High contrast, high resolution, readable in daylight.
Or at night. In addition, I'd like it to be lightweight, durable enough to stick in a backpack all day long, and be hinged with two screens on the inside so I can read it like it were a regular book.
The universal convenience of the long-established book user interface cannot be underestimated. In some strange, indescribable way, it's more natural for me to read a paper book than it is to read text on a flat screen, clicking a "next" button repeatedly.
Maybe it's just that a book is easier and more comfortable to hold in two hands than my Palm is to hold in one. But my point is: eBook readers aren't going to take off if they're confined to the tablet format. Give me a folding device with screens on both halves so I can hold it in my hand and "flip pages" instead of just scrolling text. Do this, make it cheap enough for consumers, and I'll be one of the first to buy it.
- Palm-sized handhelds are too small for convenient reading of large amounts of text.
- Larger LCD screens (say, 6 in. by 8 in, about the size of a paperback book cover) are still too expensive to use in a device intended solely for reading books, magazines and newspapers.
- Most people will not pay for a device that costs more than US$100 if all they can do with it is read.
- Making such a device multi-purpose, as a Palm or PocketPC handheld is, would either raise the price too high, make it too heavy to be portable, or both.
Simply put: we have the technology to make a portable eBook reader, but it's either too expensive for typical consumers (who aren't usually big readers to begin with) to buy or too large to be easily portable.
The entire issue over DRM really isn't an issue at all. Apple's iTunes Music Store shows that people will tolerate DRM provided that it doesn't interfere with casual copying. In addition, the cost of a music CD is $15-$20, even if you only want one song -- which you can now buy online for just $1. The issue is that there's just not a demand for books in this format, and there never will be as long as paperbacks can be bought for $7 while a downloaded eBook merely costs half of that.
Let's see... there's going to be a Super Mario game, a Mario Party game, a Mario Kart game (watch the drivers in front of you and behind you at the same time), a Metroid game, a Zelda game, two Pokemon games ("Fuschia" and "Teal"), and probably a version of Tetris that uses both screens as a single play area.
That's eight right there. Any obvious franchises I've overlooked?
The iPod's OS isn't MacOS. It isn't even made by Apple. They bought the OS and most of the hardware spec from PortalPlayer and then customized it to their liking.
I don't really like multi-gadgets, even ones as cool as this, for the simple reason that they always get the size wrong somehow. There are three types of "portability" that I usually come across in business:
1) hand-sized -- the mobile phone, which fits easily into any pocket and is comfortable to grip with the whole hand, but is unsuitable for reading more than about twenty characters per line.
2) palm-sized -- a small notepad or PDA, which can be easily gripped between the thumb and finger for reading or writing but still fits into a large, flat pocket in my coat or pants. GameBoys fit into this category as well.
3) tablet-sized -- a large pad of paper or a laptop PC screen, possibly a Tablet PC, but not a laptop computer (too thick and heavy).
A phone is simply too small for displaying large quantities of text, no matter how high the resolution. Contrariwise, a palm-sized PDA is too wide to be useful as a phone. And the idealized Tablet PC, complete with handwriting recognition and an all-day battery in a 1-lb. package, is still being pursued by many companies because it takes a screen that size to display more than a small amount of text or spreadsheet data.
But no matter how much you fold and hinge a device, it's nearly impossible to turn a gadget designed for one of these form factors into another form factor. And any device that tries to sit halfway between two of these form factors -- like the Treo smartphones or this Sony U70 -- generally fails to attract widespread interest. Most people find it easier to carry two devices that are correctly sized to two different form factors than to try to use one that uses neither.
The U70 will ship on 29 May for around ¥210,000 ($1871). Sony will also offer a lower spec. model, the U50, for ¥179,000 ($1595), which contains just 256MB of memory and a 900MHz ULV Celeron processor. It ships with Windows XP Home Edition.
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When Apple shifted from OS 9 to OS X, they built in the Classic application to "emulate" the old OS. It's fast enough, once you have it already booted, and they gave all their developers enough information to port their apps to OS X without too much trouble. This allowed them to adopt an entirely different operating system while still preserving some kind of backward compatibility.
So why does Microsoft take an entirely different approach to the same problem? Every major OS change insists on building on the last OS, to maintain as much compatibility as possible. Okay, I understand that there a LOT of old Windows code out there, some of which dates back to Win3.1, and compatibility is necessary. But surely they could take the jump, redesign Windows from scratch like a genuinely modern OS should be done, and build in some kind of "emulation" for older apps?
Why, in short, is Microsoft so reluctant to dump the DOS core of their OS and start over from scratch? I mean, it could hardly take them any longer than they've already spent on Longhorn....
With handwriting and voice recognition technologies, is using a QWERTY keyboard with nine out of ten fingers something worth knowing anymore?
Handwriting recognition isn't much good at all yet, and voice recognition isn't much better. Besides, have you ever known anyone to write code using a microphone?
Full-size keyboards are still the fastest, easiest, and most cubicle-friendly way of entering data into any computer for about 99.9% of all users. (The last 0.1% use chording, and they spent their own time mastering it.)
I'm a web programmer who's worked on databases externally, and built a few in MS Access, but my new job has a big ol' MS SQL Server database and my project has a LOT of stored procedures. As in, there's nearly no SQL code in the ASP at all -- just calls to the stored procedures.
This is difficult for me, because in order to understand the code I've inherited, I need to read it in two places -- the ASP page and the SQL stored procedure. Both are somewhat weakly organized and incompletely commented. I can do it, but it would be much easier for me if all that logic were in the ASP. That's the down side.
The up side, I understand, is that it's more efficient to use stored procedures. Many of them involve procedural logic in addition to SQL queries, and (I'm told) it's more efficient from a processing perspective to have it there.
I'm confident I wouldn't have any problems if the ASP code were THOROUGHLY commented, especially when it calls a stored procedure, to tell me exactly what was going into it and what was coming back out. In other words, stored procedures should be treated as included functions by a programmer and explicated somewhere outside the database to make the programmer's life easier.
Personally, I disagree with putting too much procedural logic in a stored procedure. It just doesn't seem to belong there. But if I'd started out in databases instead of in Perl, I'd probably have a different outlook.
Poor verbal composition is combined with an almost complete lack of vocabulary, so characters are often caught referring to objects as "thing... uh..." -- pause while they look up the term through their Feed -- "table."
Nowadays, we call that "lag".
This is a typical result of lazy programming. Never underestimate the value of caching a local copy of your data for faster look-ups.
1. "Sewage Workers Appreciation Day" - the fine men and women who recycle our shit surely deserve a special day of their own.
That's what "Email Administrator's Day" is for.
This effort by Real undermines this process and will only serve to make record labels more unwilling to participate in electronic delivery and dissemination of media.
How, exactly, did you come to that conclusion? Just because Real can sell music with "simulated" FairPlay DRM doesn't mean they don't have to license the music first. They'll have to enter into contracts with those record companies before they can sell any of their music, same as Apple did.
Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.
Oh, please. Apple is a publicly-traded business. They've always been about making money.
I love Apple dearly, but let's face it: the whole reason they've locked down their FairPlay DRM exclusively to iTunes and iPod is because they control both. If people only buy music from iTMS, they're more likely to buy iPods; similarly, if other companies licensed FairPlay for their music stores, they could use it in other portable music players so people could use iTMS and play those songs on non-iPod players.
Apple exists to make profits, and the iPod is currently their key profitmaker. They want to lock as many people into it as they can. Since they're not a monopoly, they're legally allowed to do so, and since they do it so darned well, nobody really complains. But it's lock-in nonetheless.
On a side note, I believe comic book Metropolis was based on Chicago.
Actually, Metropolis was based on NYC during the day, and Gotham City on NYC at night.
I wonder how many goth vampire wannabes will elect to have these implanted, just to improve their authenticity?
Why should a company's profit be at the expense of an individuals welfare?
Absolutely. Companies in this country should make the same profits regardless of how many employees they have to pay every month.
I was going to say something about the government taking issue with Microsoft outsourcing Windows code to non-Americans... how it might make it possible to introduce dangerous code, backdoors, security exceptions and all sorts of potential disasters.... ...and then I realized, well, how much worse could it be?
Whatever you think about LotR as a work of literature, there's little question it was the most influential book of the century. LotR virtually godfathered the entire fantasy genre as we know it today -- there's hardly a fantasy book or game in English that doesn't draw its influence from Tolkien's work.
If a CD costs $12 (a typical price in the US), then an electronic version should be about $2.
False. In practice, a CD in the US typically costs $15-$20, and the full electronic version costs $10. And yet, inexplicably enough, people buy music on iTMS in droves....
They want all the rights, and essentially want to charge the customers more.
False. Even today, e-books are almost always cheaper than paper ones. Also more convenient and more space-saving. That's the trade-off you make in exchange for first-sale rights.
Then people like you sit around and say "I wonder why ebooks aren't taking off. I know! The DRM isn't good enough!".
Read my other posts. I never said e-books weren't taking off because of DRM, I said they weren't taking off because they're not as convenient to read as paper books. Fair and generous DRM, in the style of iTunes' FairPlay, is merely a tool we need to get publishers involved.
No, its not. I can "own" a CD. I can "own" a book. We can argue that I don't really own it. But for all practical purposes, when I buy a CD, I own it.
You own an original CD, yes. But when you buy online, you only "own" a license to the data. Apple's iTMS is generous enough to let you burn CDs, but that CD is just a copy which you're not legally allowed to resell.
That's the analogy I'm trying to draw here. Paper books are to purchased CDs as e-books are to downloaded music. You do not have the same rights to electronic media as you do to physical media, and since all you "own" is a copy, not a physical object, there's no reason to expect them.
Why should I be required to spend $x on backup media, when I've already bought the non-transferrable rights to the book?
You're not required to, no. But data failures happen, and you'd be an idiot not to keep backups.
I should be allowed to re-get it whenever and whereever I want.
Assuming the seller kept a record of your sale and can verify your ID. What if your seller goes out of business?
Otherwise, I want first sale rights.
That's nice. I want a new BMW.
You can't have it both ways and still get my business. I own the rights or I own the physical copy - you cut the cake, I choose the slice.
There is no physical copy; you don't seem to grasp this fundamental fact. With a paper book or a store-bought CD, you have an original physical object you can resell to your heart's content. When you buy electronic media, you can make a physical copy -- printing a book or burning a CD -- but doing so doesn't destroy the original. Same for selling or trading the version you downloaded. All you can do is copy, and copyright law says you can only do so legally in order to make personal backup.
As such, you have no first-sale rights and no original physical copy to own. This is the trade-off you make when you buy electronic media, and if you don't like it, you don't have to deal with it -- you can still buy a physical copy at your local store.
The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words.
This is a pipe dream. Even the iTunes Music Store doesn't let you keep or resell music you buy with impunity unless you transfer it to a physical medium.
Book publishers have a right to expect the same that the music publishers do. If you buy an electronic book (or CD), you're saving money over the physical book (or CD) but in exchange you have certain restrictions. In order to overcome them (although it may not be legal to do so in all cases), all you have to do is print the book (or burn the CD).
I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
I doubt you'll ever be able to keep your entire library on one eReader, even if you could. That's what PCs and regular backups are for.
Good books that people want to read
More often than not, that's an oxymoron.
I will buy an ebook when I can read it as comfortably as a normal book. High contrast, high resolution, readable in daylight.
Or at night. In addition, I'd like it to be lightweight, durable enough to stick in a backpack all day long, and be hinged with two screens on the inside so I can read it like it were a regular book.
The universal convenience of the long-established book user interface cannot be underestimated. In some strange, indescribable way, it's more natural for me to read a paper book than it is to read text on a flat screen, clicking a "next" button repeatedly.
Maybe it's just that a book is easier and more comfortable to hold in two hands than my Palm is to hold in one. But my point is: eBook readers aren't going to take off if they're confined to the tablet format. Give me a folding device with screens on both halves so I can hold it in my hand and "flip pages" instead of just scrolling text. Do this, make it cheap enough for consumers, and I'll be one of the first to buy it.
- Palm-sized handhelds are too small for convenient reading of large amounts of text.
- Larger LCD screens (say, 6 in. by 8 in, about the size of a paperback book cover) are still too expensive to use in a device intended solely for reading books, magazines and newspapers.
- Most people will not pay for a device that costs more than US$100 if all they can do with it is read.
- Making such a device multi-purpose, as a Palm or PocketPC handheld is, would either raise the price too high, make it too heavy to be portable, or both.
Simply put: we have the technology to make a portable eBook reader, but it's either too expensive for typical consumers (who aren't usually big readers to begin with) to buy or too large to be easily portable.
The entire issue over DRM really isn't an issue at all. Apple's iTunes Music Store shows that people will tolerate DRM provided that it doesn't interfere with casual copying. In addition, the cost of a music CD is $15-$20, even if you only want one song -- which you can now buy online for just $1. The issue is that there's just not a demand for books in this format, and there never will be as long as paperbacks can be bought for $7 while a downloaded eBook merely costs half of that.
Doesn't that make it theirs then? If they bought it, and customised it?
No, because PortalPlayer is continuing to license (or try to license) their OS to other manufacturers of portable music devices.
Let's see... there's going to be a Super Mario game, a Mario Party game, a Mario Kart game (watch the drivers in front of you and behind you at the same time), a Metroid game, a Zelda game, two Pokemon games ("Fuschia" and "Teal"), and probably a version of Tetris that uses both screens as a single play area.
That's eight right there. Any obvious franchises I've overlooked?
The iPod's OS isn't MacOS. It isn't even made by Apple. They bought the OS and most of the hardware spec from PortalPlayer and then customized it to their liking.
I don't really like multi-gadgets, even ones as cool as this, for the simple reason that they always get the size wrong somehow. There are three types of "portability" that I usually come across in business:
1) hand-sized -- the mobile phone, which fits easily into any pocket and is comfortable to grip with the whole hand, but is unsuitable for reading more than about twenty characters per line.
2) palm-sized -- a small notepad or PDA, which can be easily gripped between the thumb and finger for reading or writing but still fits into a large, flat pocket in my coat or pants. GameBoys fit into this category as well.
3) tablet-sized -- a large pad of paper or a laptop PC screen, possibly a Tablet PC, but not a laptop computer (too thick and heavy).
A phone is simply too small for displaying large quantities of text, no matter how high the resolution. Contrariwise, a palm-sized PDA is too wide to be useful as a phone. And the idealized Tablet PC, complete with handwriting recognition and an all-day battery in a 1-lb. package, is still being pursued by many companies because it takes a screen that size to display more than a small amount of text or spreadsheet data.
But no matter how much you fold and hinge a device, it's nearly impossible to turn a gadget designed for one of these form factors into another form factor. And any device that tries to sit halfway between two of these form factors -- like the Treo smartphones or this Sony U70 -- generally fails to attract widespread interest. Most people find it easier to carry two devices that are correctly sized to two different form factors than to try to use one that uses neither.
The U70 will ship on 29 May for around ¥210,000 ($1871). Sony will also offer a lower spec. model, the U50, for ¥179,000 ($1595), which contains just 256MB of memory and a 900MHz ULV Celeron processor. It ships with Windows XP Home Edition.
-- from the Register