Why would we want or need computers to 'see' in 3d? Sure, if might be of an advantage to people who need their computer to read their lips. All in all, though, it is of very little use.
Oh, you small-minded moron. See my post elsewhere in the thread about mensuration. There is more image processing going on in the scientific, commercial, and government worlds than you realize.
A cool application (I haven't seen if they've done this yet) is rendering in Open GL the internal view of what the robot eyes see. It would allow you to walk through a building, and then have a 3D model for various other uses.
There are some commercial apps (I'm thinking of something from RealViz, but I can't remember the name) that do something like this-- generating 3D models out of a number of photos of an object-- but they require a user to set a number of control points before processing. The number of control points required ranges from the tiresome through the annoying all the way up to the silly.
Doing it automatically (or at least semi-automatically) would be a pretty serious upgrade to that software.
I honestly cannot think of any other logical uses for this library.
One word: mensuration.
Read that again. It's not a typo. Mensuration (which generally means the act or process of measuring) specifically means figuring out how tall buildings or features are from satellite photographs. Traditionally it involves calculating heights trigonometrically based on the time of day, latitude, and angle of lens inclination from which the photograph was taken, using shadows as points of reference.
This is not a research project. It's a very practical process, with tons of applications in the commercial world.
My point is that there are a lot of image analysis techniques that you've probably never heard of before. Don't mistake a lack of experience on your part for a lack of usefulness on theirs.
Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 2
But wouldn't this expose hundreds and hundreds of unsuspecting people to various lawsuits from copyright holders and such?
Hmm. Good point. Maybe there could be some kind of loophole based on the fact that the content server running on your computer only ever gets content from the request brokers, so those brokers have to be responsible for their own content.
Maybe if the content server started out by allocating a big sparse file on your system, and filled it with the content in the form of raw binary data. So the individual users would have no easy access to the content in the content share at all. Hell, while we're at it, just encrypt the stuff with some fast commercial-grade encryption to make it possible to store sensitive materials from private web sites on distributed servers.
The truth is, we have no central scheduling app. We have a bunch of admins with those big spiral-bound calendar books like they use at doctor's offices to write your appointment down in, and then the little card, which you lose, like, immediately, like it doesn't even make it into your pocket somehow, and you miss your appointment and then you get the statement from your HMO that says they paid for the visit anyway, and you wonder if you've just accidentally committed insurance fraud.
The theory I believe suggests that the big bang was essentially a really large supernova.
Which is about like saying that the universe is like a really large apartment.
Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 2
Yes, I'm replying to myself. I just re-read my post, and it sounds like a pretty damn good idea.
The model thusfar: you have a central web server that has copies of all its own content (naturally) that is also running cache broker software. You also have one or more computers elsewhere that talk to the content server: "Hello, I'd like to cache some of your content. I have so-n-so megs of space free. Give me a file!" The broker makes a note of the server's location and sends it some data. The server caches it.
When the central broker receives a request for a URL, it figures out which content server has the file requested, picks the one "closest" to the requester, and redirects.
What we'd need:
A protocol for communicating between content server and central broker.
An algorithm for figuring out how "close" a content server is to a requester
A reference implementation of a request broker, probably as a CGI program. How to implement the database: NDBM, or something more complex?
A reference implementation of a caching content server.
Any volunteers?
Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Freenet is nifty and all, but it lacks a few important things: content control for synchronous updates or deletions, an HTTP gateway, and so on.
(I know, I know, these things are largely orthogonal to the purposes of Freenet. This is kind of my point. Read on.)
I've always liked the Akamai model-- static content is distributed to edge servers, and users are directed to their optimum edge server by magic. (If I knew how Akamai did it, I'd be doing it myself instead of talking to you freaks.)
The thing with that model is that you can put plain old HREFs on plain old web pages, and instead of the content being served by one NetBSD box (or whatever) that explodes every time Taco even thinks of posting a link to it, the actual content comes off these load-balanced servers all over the world.
There's only one problem with this: it can be either really expensive, or really unreliable. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it both cheap and robust.
Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache. (I guess each file-- image or movie or document or whatever-- would have to be on a single server, because it would have to be served up by a single HTTP request.)
When you're away from your computer, it acts like a little caching edge server for web content. When you sit down and start using your computer, it drops off the content network until it's idle again.
Because every request goes through a central request broker, the system should be able to handle edge servers coming on and dropping off the network all the time.
Okay, so there'd have to be a central authority to handle all requests... but there wouldn't necessarily have to be just one central authority. Say I set up "webcache.org" (although that name is taken) and you access content on it by going to "http://webcache.org/cachemonster.cgi?somerandomst ring." Then the guy down the block sets up "getyerowncache.org" and does the same thing, only URLs to his cache network would have to go through "http://getyerowncache.org/...." But all the content lives on a single network, and every broker talks to every edge server.
(How do the edge servers know about the brokers? Why, through a central registry, of course. Look, if I had it all figured out, I would have done it by now!)
I dunno. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I don't think so. I just don't have time to work on it.
Step right up, folks! I'm givin' 'em away for free, here!
(Hope this isn't redundant; I just skimmed the comments at 3 before posting. That's right, baby. I'm bad.)
I visit apple.com/trailers pretty regularly-- at least once a week. Apple uses it to showcase QuickTime technology, and I'm sure there's some arrangement between Apple and the movie studios to get those trailers out there.
I wonder if Apple would be interested in picking up Ad Critic's yoke? I mean, the infrastructure is already there; Apple's got their content for the trailers site akamai'd all to heck, so it's as immune to the Slashdot effect as a site can be. And I'm sure agencies would like to get more eyeballs in front of their ads, especially now when PVRs are just starting to give viewers a viable choice to watching them on tee vee.
(Uh-oh. I mentioned Apple, QuickTime, and advertising all in one post. From the time I click "submit" we'll have about two minutes to reach minimum safe distance.)
I really doubt that your method of numeric integration is going to be that critical an influence on the quality of game play.
If your game lacks a good physics model, players are going to find that it "feels funny." They don't mean that it isn't realistic, rather they mean that your game isn't consistent.
People are incredibly good at figuring out their environment, even if it's a different environment from the one they grew up in. But if the environment isn't consistent (read, "the math is isn't very good") you can tell intuitively.
Some people aren't into super realistic physics. Some don't want to read a 300 page manual for a flight sim and spend weeks figuring out the flight model. They would rather just grab a joystick and start playing like in Wing Commander.
Whether the physics model is realistic or not, every game has to have one. Even if you choose to calculate position, motion, and reaction and stuff in a way very different from the one that applies to the real world, you have to calculate those things somehow.
I think the features they are talking about are things like calendar support, etc. I don't see why they are so important for an organization, however, since I've always thought that your mail client should be your mail client, not your toaster or PDA.
Have you ever used Outlook in a non-fubared Exchange environment? If you had, I doubt that you would make such a statement.
Our sales guys have to manage an incredible amount of contact and schedule information-- sometimes two or three hundred events a week for each of them! ("Events" include phone calls, which the sales manager requires them to log, and of which there are many.) Every time we bring in a new sales guy I have to answer the question: we used Exchange at my last company to do all this; why aren't we using Exchange here? And every time I have to give the "half of our employees don't use Windows and could not use Exchange; setting up a complete system for only half of the staff isn't something we can spend resources to do" speech. It's getting harder and harder as we grow to resist their logic. If it worked properly, an Outlook/Exchange system would work very well for those guys. I just don't wanna mess with making it work properly.
But because the sales guys directly pay my salary, as they do in most companies, I'm pretty close to telling them that I'll implement whatever the heck they want.
Every time they connect to the server, I can send them a MOTD, reset their security settings to my way, and force all incoming/outgoing mail to be plain text if I so please.
How does that work, exactly?
If the message includes both an HTML part and a text part, I guess you could strip the HTML part and assume the text part contains the entire message.
But what if there is only the HTML part? Does OpenMail (or whatever does what you referred to) just change the MIME type but leave the content alone? Then every recipient will get an email full of raw HTML source, and the user won't know until he starts getting complaints from recipients-- obviously non-optimal.
Or does OpenMail try to somehow intelligently convert the HTML into plain text, dropping all the formatting but keeping important things like line and paragraph breaks?
Either way, I'd expect that it wouldn't work all that well. Is there something going on with OpenMail that allows it to do what you said in some way that doesn't destroy messages?
Just tell them that it _is_ exchange (honest) and they'll shut up and go away, happy that they've thrown a buzzword at you that makes them look knowlegable.
And then one of them will try to schedule a meeting with the group calendar feature, only to find that his Outlook isn't configured for Exchange after all, and he'll be all confused. He'll call you for help.
If you worked for me, I'd fucking fire you on the spot.
Lying to your users-- whether they're your peers or your bosses or your subordinates-- is never okay.
I'm still holding ot for a ximian evolution server.
As far as I'm concerned, this will have the same problem that Exchange Server has: its coolest feature (calendaring) is supported in the Linux client only.
Our enterprise is about evenly split between Windows users and Mac OS X users-- we recently went through a huge rush of employees buying new iBooks. Any email/messaging/whatever platform that requires a specific client must provide that client for both of those operating systems for it to be useful to our company.
I'm this --> <-- close to giving up and doing the whole thing on the intranet with PHP and Postgresql.
Blame Sonny Bono and Di$ney for such a counterproductively long copyprivilege term.
You know, I have found that the sort of person who uses a made-up term like "copyprivilege" is almost without exception a person who has never created anything of merit in his or her life.
Create something. Work hard for years to create something truly original and unique. Then answer this question: is being the only one allowed to decide the use and dispensation of your creation a right, or a privilege?
It's not necessary for him to read it [the DMCA]. All he needs is to just look at how it's being applied. Ever hear of Felten?
The Felten case, of course, has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
One: the DMCA does not, and never has, applied to the Felten case, because SDMI granted their explicit permission to study the technologies in question. The DMCA would have only been applicable if the work had been done without the SDMI's permission.
Two: had the DMCA applied to the Felten case, it still would not have been a First Amendment issue. The courts have ruled over and over that "free speech" does not literally mean being able to say what you want. Some kinds of public speech are criminal: libel, slander, the disclosure of classified information, trademark and copyright violations, truth in advertising, and so on. Generally speaking, the courts have held that the free expression of opinions is inviolate, while the communication of facts (or alleged facts) can be restricted in specific circumstances.
In other words, the DMCA may be unconstitutional (I express no opinion), but not due to violation of the First Amendment. It's more of an enumerated powers/Title 17 issue.
[T]hey helped fund the DMCA to strip me of my First Amendment rights.
Of exactly which First Amendment right have you been deprived by the DMCA? The right of the people to peaceably assemble? Has your personal freedom of speech been abridged? Ooh, I got it! You've found an otherwise overlooked passage in the law that prohibits you from petitioning the government for a redress of grievances!
Idiot. Have you even read the DMCA? Argue about it all you want, but make sure you're at least informed first.
They went out of their way to avoid doing it the right way. I don't see how that could be considered ignorance or stupidity.
First of all, it's incredibly arrogant to talk about this in terms of "right way" and "wrong way." As far as implementation goes, it seems like one person's idea of "wrong way" is "a way dissimilar to what I think ought to have been done."
When you write your own web browser that is feature-for-feature, capability-for-capability equivalent to Internet Explorer, then you're qualified to talk about "right way" and "wrong way." Until then, it's all just opinion.
And secondly, it seems pretty clear that Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer share a lot of code; it's very reasonable-- to me, anyway-- to imagine that they reused some of the code that went into Windows Explorer's file type heuristics in Internet Explorer. Everything we've been bitching about simply falls into the category of unintended consequences.
That's easily explained by the act that most people prior to 1995 were college educated, and at the very least above 18... Most folks around that time were, amongst other things, expected to have some semblance of a level of literacy.
also b4 95 not as mny ppl had carpal tunnel probs.
Remember Asimov's Law: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance or stupidity."
This isn't a "monopolistic tactic." It's just a design flaw that slipped through QA and out into the world. Nobody in Redmond is tenting their fingers and muttering "Excellent."
Conspiracy theorists please get off at the next stop.
I think it's even worse than that. Why should a web browser parse a URL at all, except as far as the "http://" (or whatever), server name, and the rest of the URL? Everything after the third slash gets passed to the server as a "GET" request anyway, so why parse it at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we want or need computers to 'see' in 3d? Sure, if might be of an advantage to people who need their computer to read their lips. All in all, though, it is of very little use.
Oh, you small-minded moron. See my post elsewhere in the thread about mensuration. There is more image processing going on in the scientific, commercial, and government worlds than you realize.
A cool application (I haven't seen if they've done this yet) is rendering in Open GL the internal view of what the robot eyes see. It would allow you to walk through a building, and then have a 3D model for various other uses.
There are some commercial apps (I'm thinking of something from RealViz, but I can't remember the name) that do something like this-- generating 3D models out of a number of photos of an object-- but they require a user to set a number of control points before processing. The number of control points required ranges from the tiresome through the annoying all the way up to the silly.
Doing it automatically (or at least semi-automatically) would be a pretty serious upgrade to that software.
I honestly cannot think of any other logical uses for this library.
One word: mensuration.
Read that again. It's not a typo. Mensuration (which generally means the act or process of measuring) specifically means figuring out how tall buildings or features are from satellite photographs. Traditionally it involves calculating heights trigonometrically based on the time of day, latitude, and angle of lens inclination from which the photograph was taken, using shadows as points of reference.
This is not a research project. It's a very practical process, with tons of applications in the commercial world.
My point is that there are a lot of image analysis techniques that you've probably never heard of before. Don't mistake a lack of experience on your part for a lack of usefulness on theirs.
But wouldn't this expose hundreds and hundreds of unsuspecting people to various lawsuits from copyright holders and such?
Hmm. Good point. Maybe there could be some kind of loophole based on the fact that the content server running on your computer only ever gets content from the request brokers, so those brokers have to be responsible for their own content.
Maybe if the content server started out by allocating a big sparse file on your system, and filled it with the content in the form of raw binary data. So the individual users would have no easy access to the content in the content share at all. Hell, while we're at it, just encrypt the stuff with some fast commercial-grade encryption to make it possible to store sensitive materials from private web sites on distributed servers.
So what are you using?
Um... an IMAP server and calendar.yahoo.com.
The truth is, we have no central scheduling app. We have a bunch of admins with those big spiral-bound calendar books like they use at doctor's offices to write your appointment down in, and then the little card, which you lose, like, immediately, like it doesn't even make it into your pocket somehow, and you miss your appointment and then you get the statement from your HMO that says they paid for the visit anyway, and you wonder if you've just accidentally committed insurance fraud.
...But I can remember people saying things like this about the laser. It was called "a solution looking for an application."
So... you're saying that cats will love this thing?
The theory I believe suggests that the big bang was essentially a really large supernova.
Which is about like saying that the universe is like a really large apartment.
The model thusfar: you have a central web server that has copies of all its own content (naturally) that is also running cache broker software. You also have one or more computers elsewhere that talk to the content server: "Hello, I'd like to cache some of your content. I have so-n-so megs of space free. Give me a file!" The broker makes a note of the server's location and sends it some data. The server caches it.
When the central broker receives a request for a URL, it figures out which content server has the file requested, picks the one "closest" to the requester, and redirects.
What we'd need:
Any volunteers?
Freenet is nifty and all, but it lacks a few important things: content control for synchronous updates or deletions, an HTTP gateway, and so on.
t ring." Then the guy down the block sets up "getyerowncache.org" and does the same thing, only URLs to his cache network would have to go through "http://getyerowncache.org/...." But all the content lives on a single network, and every broker talks to every edge server.
(I know, I know, these things are largely orthogonal to the purposes of Freenet. This is kind of my point. Read on.)
I've always liked the Akamai model-- static content is distributed to edge servers, and users are directed to their optimum edge server by magic. (If I knew how Akamai did it, I'd be doing it myself instead of talking to you freaks.)
The thing with that model is that you can put plain old HREFs on plain old web pages, and instead of the content being served by one NetBSD box (or whatever) that explodes every time Taco even thinks of posting a link to it, the actual content comes off these load-balanced servers all over the world.
There's only one problem with this: it can be either really expensive, or really unreliable. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it both cheap and robust.
Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache. (I guess each file-- image or movie or document or whatever-- would have to be on a single server, because it would have to be served up by a single HTTP request.)
When you're away from your computer, it acts like a little caching edge server for web content. When you sit down and start using your computer, it drops off the content network until it's idle again.
Because every request goes through a central request broker, the system should be able to handle edge servers coming on and dropping off the network all the time.
Okay, so there'd have to be a central authority to handle all requests... but there wouldn't necessarily have to be just one central authority. Say I set up "webcache.org" (although that name is taken) and you access content on it by going to "http://webcache.org/cachemonster.cgi?somerandoms
(How do the edge servers know about the brokers? Why, through a central registry, of course. Look, if I had it all figured out, I would have done it by now!)
I dunno. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I don't think so. I just don't have time to work on it.
Step right up, folks! I'm givin' 'em away for free, here!
(Hope this isn't redundant; I just skimmed the comments at 3 before posting. That's right, baby. I'm bad.)
I visit apple.com/trailers pretty regularly-- at least once a week. Apple uses it to showcase QuickTime technology, and I'm sure there's some arrangement between Apple and the movie studios to get those trailers out there.
I wonder if Apple would be interested in picking up Ad Critic's yoke? I mean, the infrastructure is already there; Apple's got their content for the trailers site akamai'd all to heck, so it's as immune to the Slashdot effect as a site can be. And I'm sure agencies would like to get more eyeballs in front of their ads, especially now when PVRs are just starting to give viewers a viable choice to watching them on tee vee.
(Uh-oh. I mentioned Apple, QuickTime, and advertising all in one post. From the time I click "submit" we'll have about two minutes to reach minimum safe distance.)
I really doubt that your method of numeric integration is going to be that critical an influence on the quality of game play.
If your game lacks a good physics model, players are going to find that it "feels funny." They don't mean that it isn't realistic, rather they mean that your game isn't consistent.
People are incredibly good at figuring out their environment, even if it's a different environment from the one they grew up in. But if the environment isn't consistent (read, "the math is isn't very good") you can tell intuitively.
That's why a good physics model is important.
Some people aren't into super realistic physics. Some don't want to read a 300 page manual for a flight sim and spend weeks figuring out the flight model. They would rather just grab a joystick and start playing like in Wing Commander.
Whether the physics model is realistic or not, every game has to have one. Even if you choose to calculate position, motion, and reaction and stuff in a way very different from the one that applies to the real world, you have to calculate those things somehow.
That's the point of this book.
It's "viruses," goddammit. Not "virii."
I think the features they are talking about are things like calendar support, etc. I don't see why they are so important for an organization, however, since I've always thought that your mail client should be your mail client, not your toaster or PDA.
Have you ever used Outlook in a non-fubared Exchange environment? If you had, I doubt that you would make such a statement.
Our sales guys have to manage an incredible amount of contact and schedule information-- sometimes two or three hundred events a week for each of them! ("Events" include phone calls, which the sales manager requires them to log, and of which there are many.) Every time we bring in a new sales guy I have to answer the question: we used Exchange at my last company to do all this; why aren't we using Exchange here? And every time I have to give the "half of our employees don't use Windows and could not use Exchange; setting up a complete system for only half of the staff isn't something we can spend resources to do" speech. It's getting harder and harder as we grow to resist their logic. If it worked properly, an Outlook/Exchange system would work very well for those guys. I just don't wanna mess with making it work properly.
But because the sales guys directly pay my salary, as they do in most companies, I'm pretty close to telling them that I'll implement whatever the heck they want.
Every time they connect to the server, I can send them a MOTD, reset their security settings to my way, and force all incoming/outgoing mail to be plain text if I so please.
How does that work, exactly?
If the message includes both an HTML part and a text part, I guess you could strip the HTML part and assume the text part contains the entire message.
But what if there is only the HTML part? Does OpenMail (or whatever does what you referred to) just change the MIME type but leave the content alone? Then every recipient will get an email full of raw HTML source, and the user won't know until he starts getting complaints from recipients-- obviously non-optimal.
Or does OpenMail try to somehow intelligently convert the HTML into plain text, dropping all the formatting but keeping important things like line and paragraph breaks?
Either way, I'd expect that it wouldn't work all that well. Is there something going on with OpenMail that allows it to do what you said in some way that doesn't destroy messages?
Just tell them that it _is_ exchange (honest) and they'll shut up and go away, happy that they've thrown a buzzword at you that makes them look knowlegable.
And then one of them will try to schedule a meeting with the group calendar feature, only to find that his Outlook isn't configured for Exchange after all, and he'll be all confused. He'll call you for help.
If you worked for me, I'd fucking fire you on the spot.
Lying to your users-- whether they're your peers or your bosses or your subordinates-- is never okay.
I'm still holding ot for a ximian evolution server.
As far as I'm concerned, this will have the same problem that Exchange Server has: its coolest feature (calendaring) is supported in the Linux client only.
Our enterprise is about evenly split between Windows users and Mac OS X users-- we recently went through a huge rush of employees buying new iBooks. Any email/messaging/whatever platform that requires a specific client must provide that client for both of those operating systems for it to be useful to our company.
I'm this --> <-- close to giving up and doing the whole thing on the intranet with PHP and Postgresql.
That's okay. If I don't get modded "flamebait" at least from time to time, I'm not doing my job right.
Blame Sonny Bono and Di$ney for such a counterproductively long copyprivilege term.
You know, I have found that the sort of person who uses a made-up term like "copyprivilege" is almost without exception a person who has never created anything of merit in his or her life.
Create something. Work hard for years to create something truly original and unique. Then answer this question: is being the only one allowed to decide the use and dispensation of your creation a right, or a privilege?
It's not necessary for him to read it [the DMCA]. All he needs is to just look at how it's being applied. Ever hear of Felten?
The Felten case, of course, has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
One: the DMCA does not, and never has, applied to the Felten case, because SDMI granted their explicit permission to study the technologies in question. The DMCA would have only been applicable if the work had been done without the SDMI's permission.
Two: had the DMCA applied to the Felten case, it still would not have been a First Amendment issue. The courts have ruled over and over that "free speech" does not literally mean being able to say what you want. Some kinds of public speech are criminal: libel, slander, the disclosure of classified information, trademark and copyright violations, truth in advertising, and so on. Generally speaking, the courts have held that the free expression of opinions is inviolate, while the communication of facts (or alleged facts) can be restricted in specific circumstances.
In other words, the DMCA may be unconstitutional (I express no opinion), but not due to violation of the First Amendment. It's more of an enumerated powers/Title 17 issue.
I stand by my cry of "idiot."
[T]hey helped fund the DMCA to strip me of my First Amendment rights.
Of exactly which First Amendment right have you been deprived by the DMCA? The right of the people to peaceably assemble? Has your personal freedom of speech been abridged? Ooh, I got it! You've found an otherwise overlooked passage in the law that prohibits you from petitioning the government for a redress of grievances!
Idiot. Have you even read the DMCA? Argue about it all you want, but make sure you're at least informed first.
They went out of their way to avoid doing it the right way. I don't see how that could be considered ignorance or stupidity.
First of all, it's incredibly arrogant to talk about this in terms of "right way" and "wrong way." As far as implementation goes, it seems like one person's idea of "wrong way" is "a way dissimilar to what I think ought to have been done."
When you write your own web browser that is feature-for-feature, capability-for-capability equivalent to Internet Explorer, then you're qualified to talk about "right way" and "wrong way." Until then, it's all just opinion.
And secondly, it seems pretty clear that Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer share a lot of code; it's very reasonable-- to me, anyway-- to imagine that they reused some of the code that went into Windows Explorer's file type heuristics in Internet Explorer. Everything we've been bitching about simply falls into the category of unintended consequences.
That's easily explained by the act that most people prior to 1995 were college educated, and at the very least above 18... Most folks around that time were, amongst other things, expected to have some semblance of a level of literacy.
also b4 95 not as mny ppl had carpal tunnel probs.
Remember Asimov's Law: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance or stupidity."
This isn't a "monopolistic tactic." It's just a design flaw that slipped through QA and out into the world. Nobody in Redmond is tenting their fingers and muttering "Excellent."
Conspiracy theorists please get off at the next stop.
I think it's even worse than that. Why should a web browser parse a URL at all, except as far as the "http://" (or whatever), server name, and the rest of the URL? Everything after the third slash gets passed to the server as a "GET" request anyway, so why parse it at all?