Yes they did. Bright red block at the bottom with white letters. They give full credit.
Re:swap sucks with 2k & xp - disable it if pos
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Is Swap Necessary?
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Windows XP is horribly inefficient when it comes to swapping. I have 1GB of memory which is more than twice as much as is in use normally (typically 300-400 MB). An efficient swapping algorithm wouldn't dream of using the page file with more than 50% of the ram still available for use. Yet this is exactly what windows does. Even if you use some of the essential tweaks (like making sure the kernel is never swapped to disk) you still end up having to wait for the disk when switching between applications. Which is rediculous considering that you probably bought that much memory to prevent swapping (like I did).
I disabled my pagefile over a year ago (after observing that upgrading from 512MB to 1GB did not reduce the amount of swapping). The effect was very noticable and permanent. At the time I promised myself to use the third memory slot the moment I would get an out of memory error. That has never happened. I run all sorts of games that are known to require lots of ram. This has never caused me any trouble. I play far cry, unreal tournament, flight simulator and lots more, all without runnning out of memory (most of these games only allocate 200-300 MB at most). Unlike with the swapfile enabled, I can switch to my browser and back to the game in under three seconds (e.g. to reply to icq messages).
Switching between applications is instantaneous, even if you are running lots of them (with swap file enabled this is downright painful). I really can't think of any good reason why I would want to go back to swapping hell.
Most documentaries have a message and are therefore not documentaries according to your definition. I've noticed that many americans who don't agree with mr. Moores work choose to attack his journalism rather than the extremely valid points he makes (which would be harder presumably). Micheal Moore is very frank about his work and even goes as far to qualify it as commedy. His political views are no secret either. So you are sort of kicking in an open door.
But this movie is not being censored by those in power (which in the US are the oil billionairs and the two media conglomerates) because it is a commedy but because it raises valid issues that threaten them and are hard to counter. The truth about the republican party's ties with terrorists is embarrasing and in retrospect even more foolish than it was then. But it is the truth that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in making sure Saddam Hussein gained access to US produced WMDs (which is why he was so sure Iraq had them). Also during that time, US money flowed to such noble characters as Bin Laden. In fact Rumsfelds career started with his political involvement during the Vietnam war (another of the US long list of military triomfs). Very embarrasing indeed and well known & documented. We don't need Micheal Moore to prove these points but just to bring them to the attention to those who need to decide on the political future of the politicians involved. And that is why he is being censored. This message is exremely dangerous to Bush and his associates.
Bush needs stupid, misinformed, ignorant fools to vote for him. There are plenty of those left in the US so IMHO he shouldn't be worried, yet. Despite massive evidence to the contrary there is still some 40% of the electorate who figures that this Bush character is doing a fine job. Witness the power of the media.
Why would you spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary hardware/software combination only to top it off with a poormans office solution? That's very inconsistent.
I can appreciate your argument about most people not needing certain features but price aside, that seems to be the only argument against microsoft office. There are numerous open source and commercial alternatives that offer interesting subsets of features that are good enough solutions for most people. Some alternatives even have features that are better than the ms office equivalent. At the end of the day however, the full set of features found in ms office is pretty much unrivalled by any other product or collection of products.
People with macs like to pay for quality so it would be natural for them to consider ms office 2004. MS seems to have pulled of some nice improvements over the previous version. Compatibility is good, it integrates with OS X better than most other office suits. It's hard not to like it if you have the money and a taste for quality hardware & software.
Wasting time is indeed a very subjective thing. Personally I don't think time has a tendency to be wasted. It just passes. How you fill it is irrelevant.
You can look for aliens, worship your favorite person, rock, statue, icon, god, whatever or read slashdot. None of this is very productive.
Quite simple, they're not getting rich on people bothering to buy the connector although it's probably generating a steady revenue. A primary obstacle to evolution adoption in the market is that it requires a license fee in order to interoperate with exchange.
Meanwhile the big money comes from complete solutions including shrinkwrapped distributions, support and a complete set of features. The individual components are not worth much but combined they make up something valuable. Over the last two years, Novell has aqcuired all the parts, now it needs to turn those parts into a revenue generating product. The revenue of Ximian connector is peanuts and therefore not worth Novell's attention. Giving it away will likely generate more revenue (from people figuring out that a complete, shrinkwrapped, supported solution is worth a few $ as compared to a handpicked collection of loosely tied together components) than insisting on license fees.
It is pure Java. However, platform specific installers are nice for properly integrating with the native platform (icons, menu items, file associations, paths, shortcuts).
I can imagine there is little market demand for Mac OS X support and so little incentive for sun to invest time in it. In addition, Apple is a big competitor in the workstation market so SUN will likely prefer that developers use something else. Preferably something where SUN delivers the JVM (linux, solaris & win32) so they can hook into the compiler and sun specific JVM optimizations.
Probably, it is rather easy to get the thing going on a mac if you know what you are doing so I don't really see the problem.
Sounds like CNN today. Of course you were referring to the image quality whereas I am referring to the information quality. If you live in the US and inform yourself of the situation in Iraq using mainstream media such as the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, etc, you are unlikely to be aware of much that is going on there because that kind of information is deemed against the corporate interests of the involved media companies (of course these interests overlap partly with the interest of George Bush). The information presented on CNN is often biased, generally incomplete and of poor quality.
Of course if you work hard, getting to the information is not that hard but surprisingly few people bother to do that. Last week there was an interesting example of a few US casualties. In europe and elsewhere in the world there were photos and video of their corpses being dragged through the streets and hanged from a bridge. CNN and other US agencies ignored this news for hours (until they could no longer ignore it) and limited themselves to saying there had been a number of casualties. Right after seeing the news on tv in europe, I browsed several US news sites including the NYT site and CNN to verify my suspicion that they would attempt to keep this of the frontpage. CNN had several big headlines on domestic issues and a comparatively small story without pictures mentioning that four US citizens had been killed. Some of the more gruesome facts were hidden in the story but the message was clear: business as usual, this is not interesting for our readers & viewers. I also watched CNN on the tv: there was no mention of the incident. No breaking story, no shocked reporters, nothing. This lasted several hours until one news channel broke the silence.
In the days after the incident it became clear that the whitehouse had requested that the be censored for ethical reasons. Apparently that is all it takes these days to keep things out of the newspapers.
Then the Republican party must be dominated by socialists, how else would you explain the recent focus on Mars and Nasa:-).
Capitalists are a pretty stupid bunch. With their focus on short term profit they tend to be sort of self destructive. Socialism was a response to the capitalistic self destructiveness. Of course communism, which can be seen as the extreme form of socialism, is equally self destructive. The past century provides plenty of evidence that extreme forms of both are not a good idea. The US economy nearly collapsed in the thirties whereas communism has wreaked havoc in other parts of the world. Since then, moderated forms of both have been quite succesful. Communist China is currently one of the fastest growing economies whereas many european citizens maintain a lifestyle that is unthinkable in the rest of the world (including the US).
Luckily there are shades of grey for those with enough of a brain to grasp concepts other than black and white. Hopefully one of those is elected in November.
Now back to the energy debate. Capitalist individuals tend to not account for a major portion of the cost: cleaning up the mess. Good functioning governments do because usually that cost ends up on their balance sheet in one way or another. Obviously the US goverment is dysfunctional in this respect because it has to subsidize oil to sustain a rediculous (from a technical perspective) waste of energy. For example, billions of dollars are currently being spend to safeguard access to middle east oilsupplies (exercise: divide defense budget by population number, add amount to your annual fuel expenses. Now compensate for the fact that not all US citizens drive cars. Don't worry you've already payed your bill via other taxes). At the same time the US government allows their citizens to drive SUVs which burn the subsidized fuel like crazy. Something is deeply wrong there from an economical perspective.
Calculations of when the world oil supplies will be depleted vary widely (personally I don't think it will happen during my life time) but it is becoming painfully obvious that it will be much sooner than is necessary from a technical point of view (just compare the average fuelconsumption per kilometer of cars in the US and Europe). Fuel consumption could easily be throttled down 20 to 30% using existing technology. Using more advanced techniques, you can go much further (40-50%). Abandon the concept of combustion as a means of powering engines and you can go even further than that. This is why I believe the currently projected oil reserves will last much longer than it would if todays technology would cease to develop.
Investments in alternative forms of energy have no short term advantage. However, the long term advantages are critical from both a strategic and economical point of view. Hence, it is something governments should be stimulating. Right now this strategically important technology is being developed, and commercialized outside of the US. By the time the US needs the technology they'll need to import it. By this time capitalism will be mercyless to the US.
Your theory sounds nice, except that in africa an extremely large percentage of the population depends on farming for their income and food. In those countries it is either farming or no income because there are no alternative forms of income. The consequence of some farmers outcompeting all other farmers are predicable and desastrous.
Of course farmers shouldn't be stopped from going to some company (on a voluntary basis) to buy genetically modified seeds at the market price. That's free market and I expect that under such circumstances few will actually buy them. But that is something different than saying to a government buy our seeds or you get no money from us and we start bullying you about some loans. That doesn't help anyone but the gene companies. The latter is what is being lobbied for by the gene companies and contrary to the common belief it is not in the best interest of those farmers.
Using genetically modified seeds is something any educated farmer would consider. Using those seeds effectively probably also requires education. There are very few well educated farmers in africa (most of them are white). In fact, most aftrican farmers probably can't read or write. If you give genetically modified seeds to such farmers, the netto effect will be that they have no seeds to plant the next year and no money to buy new seeds.
The story of your friend is illustrative of the effectiveness of western aid to africa. Much of this aid is actually not very effective at best and usually quite damaging to the local economy. Giving seeds to some hungry farmers without any food is not a solution to any problem but their immidiate need for food. But what about the few farmers who did manage to grow a crop? They just saw the crop value change to 0$ because there's plenty available for free and next year join the hungry masses.
It is not really cheaper, without taxpayer money, the grain and milk could never be produced cost effectively at that price level. Because of the subidies, the prices are kept low artificially.
Dumping makes it impossible to compete for these african farmers. Without dumping and without import restrictions, these african farmers would be able to outcompete european/us farmers without the need for genetically modified seeds. I've seen cost models where all charity that goes into africa combined is less than the effect of dumping and export restrictions. If we'd stop all forms of financial aid and lift the dumping and import restrictions, africa would actually be better off.
Some of the more fertile grounds in africa have recently seen massive deathrates because of a lack of food. The primary threat to foodsupply in Africa is the political instability in some african countries, not the crop yields.
While genetically manipulated vegetables and grain have higher yields when you grow them, there's a catch: using them creates a financial dependency on the companies that produce the seeds (gene technology is of course patented). Typically, the genetically modified seeds will work as advertised only you can't use the result for planting a new crop: you have to buy new seeds each year. And guess what, these are mostly US companies and these companies are lobbying very actively for African countries to adopt their products. Genetically modified seeds are a major export product for the US.
This at first sight very reasonable story on how to save the world from hunger is IMHO not primarily motivated from charity (though many may misguidedly believe they are doing a good thing). This is just a semi scientific piece of advertisement material, carefully designed to push African goverments and charity organizations to support the point of view that genetically modified food is good for them.
To understand how damaging this is, you have to understand how the local African economy works. Typically an African peasant saves some seeds each year from his crop to sow next year, of the rest he sells (either for consumption or new crops) a small percentage on the local market (typically the only form of income) and he depends on the rest to have enough to eat throughout the year. If you introduce genetically modified seeds on these local markets, then the richer peasants can get higher yields and sell more at the local market: at the cost of the poor peasant who cannot afford to buy genetically modified seeds and who will be outcompeted and lose his only source of income. The net result will be that this poor peasant now has even less of an income and totally depends on his own crop.
At first this may work out well, until after a few years non genetically modified seeds are getting more rare. By then there will be a few farmers who are doing well and can afford to buy the seeds each year and a lot of farmers who cannot afford it and don't have access to the non genetically modified seeds anymore. No income and they now have to buy their food instead of being able to grow their own. This horror scenario is the long term strategy of the gene lobby: total dependence on US supplied genetically modified seeds.
I'm not saying genetically modified food is evil but I am saying that this whole thing is motivated by greed rather than charity. What would really help African farmers is if the EU and the US would stop dumping their subsidized milk and grain on the african market. That would allow african economies to export more food. Even a modest growth of export would help most african economies a lot.
Normally I would agree. There's a lot of reinvent the wheel type of languages. However, this particular language uses a delegation based, class-less paradigm rather than the class based, inheritance paradigm most other languages come with.
It derives from Self, which was an experimental language developed by SUN's researchers in the eighties. While the language itself never got out of the prototype stage (ironically), much of the research that went into the project eventually resulted in Java. Particularly hotspot derives from compiler research for self.
Prototype languages are really cool once you grasp how they work. Especially in a dynamically typed environment like a scripting language, it makes sense to use one. Prothon seems to combine the right concepts with a popular, proven python like syntax and for that alone deserves some attention.
Basically delegation is a feature that current oo languages do not have. They allow you to delegate to another object but you then get to suffer from the so-called self problem (if the delegating method calls a method on itself, the executing object is not the same as the delegating object).
Example: suppose your object A was based on object B (i.e. B is the prototype of A). Suppose B has a method m1 that calls another method m2 on self. Now m1 is called on A which does not have that method and delegates to its prototype B. B executes m1 and calls m2. Suppose that A does have a method m2. In prothon and self m2 will be called on A, in java, c++, c#, smalltalk and all regular OO languages m2 will be called on B.
This is what delegation is about in a nutshell. Inheritance and polymorphism in regular OO languages can be seen as very limited version of delegation. If class A (which has m2) inherits from class B (which has m1 and m2), instance o of A will use B's m1 and A's m2.
Interestingly C# has a delegate construct used for events, but language purists will be able to point out this is not the real deal and that C# suffers from the self problem.
You have a point with the standards body though you might consider it an industry standard by now.
The idea of ebxml is so simple that it should be possible to create a similar standard. In any case, lossless transformations between xml and ebxml should not be that hard so it is not to late in that sense.
I suggest you read my post again. This time think about it a bit longer and then counter your own arguments one by one. I could do it for you but I have better things to do.
I know life of Brian was quite controversial at the time. My whole point is that I believe that in todays america it would be even more controversial.
I saw Dogma, pretty boring hollywood production IMHO. The temptation of Christ is a pretty old movie (1988). I glanced through imdb (have not seen it my self). It seems to explore some alternative fictional plot of stuff that could have happened. This apparently was seen as controversial by some fundamentalists and I can see why it must have been popular in the US.
So we have one mediocre action-comedy and one serious drama movie that extrapolates on some original bible plotlines. Both in the end communicate a relegious movie.
Life of Brian is different since it is both very satirical and quite succesful in portraying how christian religion is based on a bunch of peasants attributing all sorts of things to some other peasant. I imagine that is quite disturbing to those who actually believe in that kind of stuff.
Well in a christian fundamentalist country, displaying life of Brian to counter the hype is not a bad thing IMHO. It will be interesting how much freedom has suffered in the US since the late seventies.
I've written my phd thesis and master thesis as wel as several articles in framemaker 5.5 and 6.0. What I have since noticed is that adobe apears to have little interest in adressing severe issues (one level undo, a UI that feels out of place on any platform, various display bugs, lack of interoperability with office and open office). Basically, 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 have been minor, incremental updates over 5.0.
A theory is that after aquiring framemaker and decimating the developerstaff that came with it, adobe has limited itself to bolting on some features (xml) to the increasingly obsolete core functionality which has not changed significantly in at least six years. Currently it is lacking many features that will very likely never be added simply because that would require changing the more or less black box like functionality from the pre adobe era.
For these reasons I stopped using it about two years ago now. I still have good hopes that eventually the openoffice people will pick up some of the better framemaker features (please implement crossreferences properly already, that would be a good start). Meanwhile I use ms word, which with some discipline (ok, lots) and knowledge of its many bugs can be forced to behave somewhat consistently for smaller documents (luckily a Ph D. thesis is a one time effort, I'd hate to do that in word).
Framemaker was a great product, with a unique featureset that to this day is basically unrivalled. For a long time it was the product of choice for any kind of technical documentation. But it is getting old and I deduce from the lack of updates from adobe that they are not interested in anything but minor updates to keep their existing userbase happy.
In addition you could use ebxml, which is xml in a binary form. This is currently mostly used in wap2.0 and soap. But there's no reason to not use it elsewhere.
The human readable part of xml is a myth. It is just structured data. The most common way to represent this data happens to be very verbose unicode formatted text. Ebxml can be seen as a binary equivalent representation of this data. Instead of the verbose tags and the tedious brackets, whitespace, comments, etc a few bits are used as symbols for tags and attributenames so it is just textual data decorated with binary symbols. Ebxml can be parsed very efficiently (after all xml is nothing but a simple tree representation) and in case of automated generation/consumption, you don't have to worry so much about well formedness (of course you can validate if you want), assuming the generator puts the bits in the right order.
IMHO it is ideal for situations where one program dumps xml to a stream that is read by another program, for example XHTML generated from a contentmanagement system and consumed by a browser. Or embedded svg objects in a openoffice document. Or XML fragments stored in a database.
Currently lots of bandwidth and computer resources are wasted on the human readable part (just, for a second, consider how many bytes of totally pointless commented xml/html fragments are transmitted on the average site, how many brackets, quotes and verbose tagnames the average webpage contains).
But most XML is never touched by a human editor. There is no technical reason for storing XML as very verbose text other than that this is easier to read, debug and generate from scripts. If you construct xml using an api rather than output text to some stream (which in the long term will save you from some headaches), ebxml makes no difference at all.
Ebxml, in combination with gzip compression, would be hard to beat for equivalent datastreams (with the same information). You get very compact data that is easy to parse back into a dom datastructure without giving up the advantage of being able to approach the data using the standard apis (including being able to dump regular unicode xml if needed).
The embedded world is also subject to moore's law. While 8 and 16 bit processors are still very dominant, 32 bit processors are rapidly being adopted. Combined with enough memory, linux is a very good choice for such systems. Since in many embedded devices, building the software is the critical path on the project, many embedded hardware vendors opt for 32 bit + linux rather than 16 bit and lots of development and licensing cost.
That's why basically all consumer electronics, mobile phones, etc. come with 32 bit processors and lots of memory. Mass produced electronics that go into kitchen appliances, cars, warches etc have a much smaller margins and for those things it is not (yet) economically feasible.
I read a paper from philips once describing the amount of memory in their television sets over the years. This was a paper from 96 I think and they were talking about 512kb. The observation they made was that this amount appeared to grow exponentially (up 64kb in the early nineties) growing to a predicted 4MB shortly after y2k. Assuming their prediction was accurate we are talking about embedded systems with between 4 an 32 MB for operating television sets right now. This is more than enough for running linux (although I'm not sure that Philips uses it).
Yep the full 3 million lines of code are there for me to read. I'm pretty sure that even Linus Torvalds can't claim to have read all of it and analyzed it for security. I'm pretty sure that the portion you have read is much less than 1%. For all we know linux could be very secure, we really have no way of finding out because scriptkiddies don't seem to be very interested in exploiting the publically available knowledge on identified (and of course patched) security problems. I also know that there's a steady flow of newly discovered buffer overflows being patched which were unpatched until they were discovered and remain an issue until someone bothers to update all the deployed software.
So you are basically saying that it is impossible to gain root access because you use linux??? And you call me naive!!! I'm willing to accept that it is possible to configure linux such that this is very hard (just like windows). I'll even acknowledge that out of the box you are much better off with some linux distros (not all and especially the popular ones have many issues).
To comment on your car example, if you put a very expensive mercedes in front of your house, it will come with comparatively good security. Now put a pinto next to it with the default, off the shelf security. Guess which one is more likely to be stolen. The locks don't matter much here. The point is that while the pinto is easier to steal, the mercedes is not impossible te steal and is much more likely target because of its value. It needs the expensive lock just to lower the risk to acceptable levels. With comparable levels of security, a linux system is less likely to be affected by security problems simply because there are more windows systems. It would be wrong to conclude that because of that linux is somehow more secure. You can actually get away with running an improperly secured&patched linux box for a very long time. Try that with a windows 2k server and you are asking for trouble. Yet both configurations are flawed and offer plenty of opportunities for a disastrous attack.
Now in a corporate setting, windows users will not be running outlook or ie with administrator rights (which many linux users seem to believe). Very few viruses actually require them to do so./home/user/* is where the important data lives, not/etc or/bin. If my program files directory is corrupted, my sysadmin will just reinstall the ghost image (annoying). If "My Documents" is corrupted I have a slightly bigger problem (lose a few days/weeks/months of work).
If a virus manages to exploit mozilla (which conveniently includes a mailclient and an address book) on linux it will be able to do anything it wants with your data (rm -rf ~/*) and spread to other users. Of course the success of this virus would depend on the percentage of vulnerable recipients in your addressbook, not on the amount of damage it can do. Mozilla is an excellent product and mozilla.org has a very good security policy for the inevitable security problems. So this scenario is unlikely but not impossible because of linux or any design choice. The reality is that many linux distros ship with old versions of mozilla (e.g. 1.0 instead of 1.6).
The security comes from the policy to patch and update not from any technological choices. I don't see any significant differences between the linux and windows communities here. So linux is not inherently more secure just less likely to be a target. Any good sysadmin knows this.
Running linux is like living in a nice neighbourhood, you can leave your backdoor open without much risk.
If linux were as popular as windows, I'm sure someone would exploit one of the widely published security holes in key linux software such as the kernel or other server software written in C. Just monitor the appropriate mailinglists if you are interested in the latest identified buffer overflows. Of course those running the latest patches would hardly be affected but we all know that world + dog doesn't update their linux software just like their windows counterparts don't update their windows software. However, worms and viruses need something linux cannot (yet) provide: substantial market penetration. Linux software has many known issues and many organizations are very reluctant to upgrade their software (redhat 6.2 is still found in the wild even though red hat has long since stopped supporting it, aside from really critical updates). However, deployed linux configurations tend to be very dissimilar so you are unlikely to find a security hole that affects more than a few percent of users (of which the total population is 1 or 2 percent of pc users according to the most optimistic estimates). Because of this linux viruses and worms cannot propagate. A good mailvirus needs an addressbook full of potential victims. A hypothetical pine worm would not find many potential victims in the average pine user's addressbook (is there such a thing in pine?).
This security is no inherent quality of the software but just a consequence of very few people using the same version of linux. Linux security is essentially security by obscurity. By using software that nobody else uses you avoid being targeted by viruses and worms that depend on mainstream adoption for propagation. Just like in nature, monocultures are vulnerable to viruses. I'm not saying that linux is insecure, I'm just saying that many people confuse the lack of attacks on linux with its alledged security.
If you want security, install BSD. Even less people use it and many BSD users suffer from severe paranoia (resulting in increased awareness with respect to security issues) so you are unlikely to be ever affected by the latent security holes that are waiting to be discovered. Even MS uses BSD software to keep the scriptkiddies out:-).
Ironically, Microsoft's biggest security problem is that people are buying and using their products. I'm sure that is something they don't want to fix. Upgrading is another issue, MS is actively pushing their customers to upgrade (though not necessarily to protect them:-).
IMHO this is yet another w3c standard that almost nobody uses or will use. I looked through the list of eight known voicexml implementors. The only familiar name I see there is Motorola. The rest of the bunch is small telcos and voice product companies. No doubt there's a niche for this kind of thing and its nice that the w3c offers a platform for industies and organizations in this niche to negotiate some industry standards.
However, my main objection to the word 'recommended standard' is that the w3c publishes these things like crazy without anyone bothering to implement them. A recommended standard from the w3c has little or no authority because you are unlikely to find 100% compliant products (or even 80% compliant).
Something is not a standard because the w3c recommends it but because key software products implement them in an interoperable fashion. For many w3c recommended specifications this is simply not true or at best only partially true. This is especially true for key specifications such as XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1, SVG1.1 and MathML (all versions). None of these standards have 100% compliant products in the market nor the commitment of industry to actually provide such an implementation. The mathml implementations mostly have the status of prototypes. SVG is partially supported in some products (e.g. adobes plugin which nobody seems to use, mozilla which you have to recompile to get a partial implementation and a bunch of vector graphics packages which use it as an exchange format with other software). CSS2.1 is partially implemented by some browsers. Most of these implementations have known flaws (including mozilla and safari) and because the standard is ambiguous there are multiple correct implementations (e.g. safari won't necessarily interpret things in the same way as mozilla). XHTML is barely used beyond the 1.0 transitional stage and you have to look for actually validating webpages with a candle. Many of these standards are superceded by new standards without a single compliant implementation of the old standard on the market.
Of course there are a few succesful standards as well. For example XML 1.0 is a successtory, as is SOAP. These standards have in common that several large industries were backing them from the beginning with implementations, support and feedback. For many other w3c standards this not true. W3C standards inflation is one of the key problems on the web. Nobody seems to care anymore about w3c press releases. A few years ago a new w3c standard would have been frontpage news on all major webpages. Now it is yet another pointless specification.
I don't criticize the technical innovation behind these w3c specicications, I just ciriticize the fact that the label "recommended standard" is awarded too easily and means nothing in daily practice. Almost none of the recommended standards released by the w3c meet my definition of a standard. A standard without compliant products (not proofs of concept but actual products) is nothing but a specification for such products. Without the commitment of key industry players to actually implement these specifications you can't even call it a recommended specification.
This wasn't a market study but a technology study. Actually the hardware requirements are pretty modest: some GPS hardware; a computer with 3d sound, some headphones and a joystick. In a couple of years all of these will probably be embedded in most mobile phones. Aside from that, a gps device might come in very handy if you are blind.
I saw a demo of this on tv yesterday. Some blind kids were having quite a bit of fun. It looked really silly seeing them move around seemingly random in some field. But the whole point was that this kind of stuff is possible with off the shelf hardware and a couple of students doing some coding after classes.
Eh did you even read the article? This thing is not targeted at end users but at pda/smartphone manufacturers. A lot of high end smartphones don't run windows and never will. These phones need browsers too and minimo seems like a really valid option in a field where currently opera (and not IE) is the browser of choice. If this thing takes off, there will be several millions of minimo users in a couple of years. That's a huge market. If by that time you are still stuck with your ubercool ms pocket pc, a nice, unintended side effect will be that you can still install oss software updates on your otherwise obsolete and unsupported device. But that is strictly for geeks, as you argued quite convincingly.
BTW. the thing is crossplatform. It would surprise me if it wouldn't be ported to pocketpc (it probably was months ago). It's just very unlikely that a smartphone/pda manufacturer is going to bundle a non MS browser with it so you'll have to forgive the minimo developers for having more important things to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they did. Bright red block at the bottom with white letters. They give full credit.
Windows XP is horribly inefficient when it comes to swapping. I have 1GB of memory which is more than twice as much as is in use normally (typically 300-400 MB). An efficient swapping algorithm wouldn't dream of using the page file with more than 50% of the ram still available for use. Yet this is exactly what windows does. Even if you use some of the essential tweaks (like making sure the kernel is never swapped to disk) you still end up having to wait for the disk when switching between applications. Which is rediculous considering that you probably bought that much memory to prevent swapping (like I did).
I disabled my pagefile over a year ago (after observing that upgrading from 512MB to 1GB did not reduce the amount of swapping). The effect was very noticable and permanent. At the time I promised myself to use the third memory slot the moment I would get an out of memory error. That has never happened. I run all sorts of games that are known to require lots of ram. This has never caused me any trouble. I play far cry, unreal tournament, flight simulator and lots more, all without runnning out of memory (most of these games only allocate 200-300 MB at most). Unlike with the swapfile enabled, I can switch to my browser and back to the game in under three seconds (e.g. to reply to icq messages).
Switching between applications is instantaneous, even if you are running lots of them (with swap file enabled this is downright painful). I really can't think of any good reason why I would want to go back to swapping hell.
Most documentaries have a message and are therefore not documentaries according to your definition. I've noticed that many americans who don't agree with mr. Moores work choose to attack his journalism rather than the extremely valid points he makes (which would be harder presumably). Micheal Moore is very frank about his work and even goes as far to qualify it as commedy. His political views are no secret either. So you are sort of kicking in an open door.
But this movie is not being censored by those in power (which in the US are the oil billionairs and the two media conglomerates) because it is a commedy but because it raises valid issues that threaten them and are hard to counter. The truth about the republican party's ties with terrorists is embarrasing and in retrospect even more foolish than it was then. But it is the truth that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in making sure Saddam Hussein gained access to US produced WMDs (which is why he was so sure Iraq had them). Also during that time, US money flowed to such noble characters as Bin Laden. In fact Rumsfelds career started with his political involvement during the Vietnam war (another of the US long list of military triomfs). Very embarrasing indeed and well known & documented. We don't need Micheal Moore to prove these points but just to bring them to the attention to those who need to decide on the political future of the politicians involved. And that is why he is being censored. This message is exremely dangerous to Bush and his associates.
Bush needs stupid, misinformed, ignorant fools to vote for him. There are plenty of those left in the US so IMHO he shouldn't be worried, yet. Despite massive evidence to the contrary there is still some 40% of the electorate who figures that this Bush character is doing a fine job. Witness the power of the media.
Why would you spend thousands of dollars on a proprietary hardware/software combination only to top it off with a poormans office solution? That's very inconsistent.
I can appreciate your argument about most people not needing certain features but price aside, that seems to be the only argument against microsoft office. There are numerous open source and commercial alternatives that offer interesting subsets of features that are good enough solutions for most people. Some alternatives even have features that are better than the ms office equivalent. At the end of the day however, the full set of features found in ms office is pretty much unrivalled by any other product or collection of products.
People with macs like to pay for quality so it would be natural for them to consider ms office 2004. MS seems to have pulled of some nice improvements over the previous version. Compatibility is good, it integrates with OS X better than most other office suits. It's hard not to like it if you have the money and a taste for quality hardware & software.
Wasting time is indeed a very subjective thing. Personally I don't think time has a tendency to be wasted. It just passes. How you fill it is irrelevant.
You can look for aliens, worship your favorite person, rock, statue, icon, god, whatever or read slashdot. None of this is very productive.
Quite simple, they're not getting rich on people bothering to buy the connector although it's probably generating a steady revenue. A primary obstacle to evolution adoption in the market is that it requires a license fee in order to interoperate with exchange.
Meanwhile the big money comes from complete solutions including shrinkwrapped distributions, support and a complete set of features. The individual components are not worth much but combined they make up something valuable. Over the last two years, Novell has aqcuired all the parts, now it needs to turn those parts into a revenue generating product. The revenue of Ximian connector is peanuts and therefore not worth Novell's attention. Giving it away will likely generate more revenue (from people figuring out that a complete, shrinkwrapped, supported solution is worth a few $ as compared to a handpicked collection of loosely tied together components) than insisting on license fees.
It is pure Java. However, platform specific installers are nice for properly integrating with the native platform (icons, menu items, file associations, paths, shortcuts).
I can imagine there is little market demand for Mac OS X support and so little incentive for sun to invest time in it. In addition, Apple is a big competitor in the workstation market so SUN will likely prefer that developers use something else. Preferably something where SUN delivers the JVM (linux, solaris & win32) so they can hook into the compiler and sun specific JVM optimizations.
Probably, it is rather easy to get the thing going on a mac if you know what you are doing so I don't really see the problem.
Sounds like CNN today. Of course you were referring to the image quality whereas I am referring to the information quality. If you live in the US and inform yourself of the situation in Iraq using mainstream media such as the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, etc, you are unlikely to be aware of much that is going on there because that kind of information is deemed against the corporate interests of the involved media companies (of course these interests overlap partly with the interest of George Bush). The information presented on CNN is often biased, generally incomplete and of poor quality.
Of course if you work hard, getting to the information is not that hard but surprisingly few people bother to do that. Last week there was an interesting example of a few US casualties. In europe and elsewhere in the world there were photos and video of their corpses being dragged through the streets and hanged from a bridge. CNN and other US agencies ignored this news for hours (until they could no longer ignore it) and limited themselves to saying there had been a number of casualties. Right after seeing the news on tv in europe, I browsed several US news sites including the NYT site and CNN to verify my suspicion that they would attempt to keep this of the frontpage. CNN had several big headlines on domestic issues and a comparatively small story without pictures mentioning that four US citizens had been killed. Some of the more gruesome facts were hidden in the story but the message was clear: business as usual, this is not interesting for our readers & viewers. I also watched CNN on the tv: there was no mention of the incident. No breaking story, no shocked reporters, nothing. This lasted several hours until one news channel broke the silence.
In the days after the incident it became clear that the whitehouse had requested that the be censored for ethical reasons. Apparently that is all it takes these days to keep things out of the newspapers.
Then the Republican party must be dominated by socialists, how else would you explain the recent focus on Mars and Nasa :-).
Capitalists are a pretty stupid bunch. With their focus on short term profit they tend to be sort of self destructive. Socialism was a response to the capitalistic self destructiveness. Of course communism, which can be seen as the extreme form of socialism, is equally self destructive. The past century provides plenty of evidence that extreme forms of both are not a good idea. The US economy nearly collapsed in the thirties whereas communism has wreaked havoc in other parts of the world. Since then, moderated forms of both have been quite succesful. Communist China is currently one of the fastest growing economies whereas many european citizens maintain a lifestyle that is unthinkable in the rest of the world (including the US).
Luckily there are shades of grey for those with enough of a brain to grasp concepts other than black and white. Hopefully one of those is elected in November.
Now back to the energy debate. Capitalist individuals tend to not account for a major portion of the cost: cleaning up the mess. Good functioning governments do because usually that cost ends up on their balance sheet in one way or another. Obviously the US goverment is dysfunctional in this respect because it has to subsidize oil to sustain a rediculous (from a technical perspective) waste of energy. For example, billions of dollars are currently being spend to safeguard access to middle east oilsupplies (exercise: divide defense budget by population number, add amount to your annual fuel expenses. Now compensate for the fact that not all US citizens drive cars. Don't worry you've already payed your bill via other taxes). At the same time the US government allows their citizens to drive SUVs which burn the subsidized fuel like crazy. Something is deeply wrong there from an economical perspective.
Calculations of when the world oil supplies will be depleted vary widely (personally I don't think it will happen during my life time) but it is becoming painfully obvious that it will be much sooner than is necessary from a technical point of view (just compare the average fuelconsumption per kilometer of cars in the US and Europe). Fuel consumption could easily be throttled down 20 to 30% using existing technology. Using more advanced techniques, you can go much further (40-50%). Abandon the concept of combustion as a means of powering engines and you can go even further than that. This is why I believe the currently projected oil reserves will last much longer than it would if todays technology would cease to develop.
Investments in alternative forms of energy have no short term advantage. However, the long term advantages are critical from both a strategic and economical point of view. Hence, it is something governments should be stimulating. Right now this strategically important technology is being developed, and commercialized outside of the US. By the time the US needs the technology they'll need to import it. By this time capitalism will be mercyless to the US.
Your theory sounds nice, except that in africa an extremely large percentage of the population depends on farming for their income and food. In those countries it is either farming or no income because there are no alternative forms of income. The consequence of some farmers outcompeting all other farmers are predicable and desastrous.
Of course farmers shouldn't be stopped from going to some company (on a voluntary basis) to buy genetically modified seeds at the market price. That's free market and I expect that under such circumstances few will actually buy them. But that is something different than saying to a government buy our seeds or you get no money from us and we start bullying you about some loans. That doesn't help anyone but the gene companies. The latter is what is being lobbied for by the gene companies and contrary to the common belief it is not in the best interest of those farmers.
Using genetically modified seeds is something any educated farmer would consider. Using those seeds effectively probably also requires education. There are very few well educated farmers in africa (most of them are white). In fact, most aftrican farmers probably can't read or write. If you give genetically modified seeds to such farmers, the netto effect will be that they have no seeds to plant the next year and no money to buy new seeds.
The story of your friend is illustrative of the effectiveness of western aid to africa. Much of this aid is actually not very effective at best and usually quite damaging to the local economy. Giving seeds to some hungry farmers without any food is not a solution to any problem but their immidiate need for food. But what about the few farmers who did manage to grow a crop? They just saw the crop value change to 0$ because there's plenty available for free and next year join the hungry masses.
It is not really cheaper, without taxpayer money, the grain and milk could never be produced cost effectively at that price level. Because of the subidies, the prices are kept low artificially.
Dumping makes it impossible to compete for these african farmers. Without dumping and without import restrictions, these african farmers would be able to outcompete european/us farmers without the need for genetically modified seeds. I've seen cost models where all charity that goes into africa combined is less than the effect of dumping and export restrictions. If we'd stop all forms of financial aid and lift the dumping and import restrictions, africa would actually be better off.
Some of the more fertile grounds in africa have recently seen massive deathrates because of a lack of food. The primary threat to foodsupply in Africa is the political instability in some african countries, not the crop yields.
While genetically manipulated vegetables and grain have higher yields when you grow them, there's a catch: using them creates a financial dependency on the companies that produce the seeds (gene technology is of course patented). Typically, the genetically modified seeds will work as advertised only you can't use the result for planting a new crop: you have to buy new seeds each year. And guess what, these are mostly US companies and these companies are lobbying very actively for African countries to adopt their products. Genetically modified seeds are a major export product for the US.
This at first sight very reasonable story on how to save the world from hunger is IMHO not primarily motivated from charity (though many may misguidedly believe they are doing a good thing). This is just a semi scientific piece of advertisement material, carefully designed to push African goverments and charity organizations to support the point of view that genetically modified food is good for them.
To understand how damaging this is, you have to understand how the local African economy works. Typically an African peasant saves some seeds each year from his crop to sow next year, of the rest he sells (either for consumption or new crops) a small percentage on the local market (typically the only form of income) and he depends on the rest to have enough to eat throughout the year. If you introduce genetically modified seeds on these local markets, then the richer peasants can get higher yields and sell more at the local market: at the cost of the poor peasant who cannot afford to buy genetically modified seeds and who will be outcompeted and lose his only source of income. The net result will be that this poor peasant now has even less of an income and totally depends on his own crop.
At first this may work out well, until after a few years non genetically modified seeds are getting more rare. By then there will be a few farmers who are doing well and can afford to buy the seeds each year and a lot of farmers who cannot afford it and don't have access to the non genetically modified seeds anymore. No income and they now have to buy their food instead of being able to grow their own. This horror scenario is the long term strategy of the gene lobby: total dependence on US supplied genetically modified seeds.
I'm not saying genetically modified food is evil but I am saying that this whole thing is motivated by greed rather than charity. What would really help African farmers is if the EU and the US would stop dumping their subsidized milk and grain on the african market. That would allow african economies to export more food. Even a modest growth of export would help most african economies a lot.
Normally I would agree. There's a lot of reinvent the wheel type of languages. However, this particular language uses a delegation based, class-less paradigm rather than the class based, inheritance paradigm most other languages come with.
It derives from Self, which was an experimental language developed by SUN's researchers in the eighties. While the language itself never got out of the prototype stage (ironically), much of the research that went into the project eventually resulted in Java. Particularly hotspot derives from compiler research for self.
Prototype languages are really cool once you grasp how they work. Especially in a dynamically typed environment like a scripting language, it makes sense to use one. Prothon seems to combine the right concepts with a popular, proven python like syntax and for that alone deserves some attention.
Basically delegation is a feature that current oo languages do not have. They allow you to delegate to another object but you then get to suffer from the so-called self problem (if the delegating method calls a method on itself, the executing object is not the same as the delegating object).
Example: suppose your object A was based on object B (i.e. B is the prototype of A). Suppose B has a method m1 that calls another method m2 on self. Now m1 is called on A which does not have that method and delegates to its prototype B. B executes m1 and calls m2. Suppose that A does have a method m2. In prothon and self m2 will be called on A, in java, c++, c#, smalltalk and all regular OO languages m2 will be called on B.
This is what delegation is about in a nutshell. Inheritance and polymorphism in regular OO languages can be seen as very limited version of delegation. If class A (which has m2) inherits from class B (which has m1 and m2), instance o of A will use B's m1 and A's m2.
Interestingly C# has a delegate construct used for events, but language purists will be able to point out this is not the real deal and that C# suffers from the self problem.
You have a point with the standards body though you might consider it an industry standard by now.
The idea of ebxml is so simple that it should be possible to create a similar standard. In any case, lossless transformations between xml and ebxml should not be that hard so it is not to late in that sense.
I suggest you read my post again. This time think about it a bit longer and then counter your own arguments one by one. I could do it for you but I have better things to do.
I know life of Brian was quite controversial at the time. My whole point is that I believe that in todays america it would be even more controversial.
I saw Dogma, pretty boring hollywood production IMHO. The temptation of Christ is a pretty old movie (1988). I glanced through imdb (have not seen it my self). It seems to explore some alternative fictional plot of stuff that could have happened. This apparently was seen as controversial by some fundamentalists and I can see why it must have been popular in the US.
So we have one mediocre action-comedy and one serious drama movie that extrapolates on some original bible plotlines. Both in the end communicate a relegious movie.
Life of Brian is different since it is both very satirical and quite succesful in portraying how christian religion is based on a bunch of peasants attributing all sorts of things to some other peasant. I imagine that is quite disturbing to those who actually believe in that kind of stuff.
But feel free to call me 'massively clueless'.
Well in a christian fundamentalist country, displaying life of Brian to counter the hype is not a bad thing IMHO. It will be interesting how much freedom has suffered in the US since the late seventies.
I've written my phd thesis and master thesis as wel as several articles in framemaker 5.5 and 6.0. What I have since noticed is that adobe apears to have little interest in adressing severe issues (one level undo, a UI that feels out of place on any platform, various display bugs, lack of interoperability with office and open office). Basically, 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 have been minor, incremental updates over 5.0.
A theory is that after aquiring framemaker and decimating the developerstaff that came with it, adobe has limited itself to bolting on some features (xml) to the increasingly obsolete core functionality which has not changed significantly in at least six years. Currently it is lacking many features that will very likely never be added simply because that would require changing the more or less black box like functionality from the pre adobe era.
For these reasons I stopped using it about two years ago now. I still have good hopes that eventually the openoffice people will pick up some of the better framemaker features (please implement crossreferences properly already, that would be a good start). Meanwhile I use ms word, which with some discipline (ok, lots) and knowledge of its many bugs can be forced to behave somewhat consistently for smaller documents (luckily a Ph D. thesis is a one time effort, I'd hate to do that in word).
Framemaker was a great product, with a unique featureset that to this day is basically unrivalled. For a long time it was the product of choice for any kind of technical documentation. But it is getting old and I deduce from the lack of updates from adobe that they are not interested in anything but minor updates to keep their existing userbase happy.
In addition you could use ebxml, which is xml in a binary form. This is currently mostly used in wap2.0 and soap. But there's no reason to not use it elsewhere.
The human readable part of xml is a myth. It is just structured data. The most common way to represent this data happens to be very verbose unicode formatted text. Ebxml can be seen as a binary equivalent representation of this data. Instead of the verbose tags and the tedious brackets, whitespace, comments, etc a few bits are used as symbols for tags and attributenames so it is just textual data decorated with binary symbols. Ebxml can be parsed very efficiently (after all xml is nothing but a simple tree representation) and in case of automated generation/consumption, you don't have to worry so much about well formedness (of course you can validate if you want), assuming the generator puts the bits in the right order.
IMHO it is ideal for situations where one program dumps xml to a stream that is read by another program, for example XHTML generated from a contentmanagement system and consumed by a browser. Or embedded svg objects in a openoffice document. Or XML fragments stored in a database.
Currently lots of bandwidth and computer resources are wasted on the human readable part (just, for a second, consider how many bytes of totally pointless commented xml/html fragments are transmitted on the average site, how many brackets, quotes and verbose tagnames the average webpage contains).
But most XML is never touched by a human editor. There is no technical reason for storing XML as very verbose text other than that this is easier to read, debug and generate from scripts. If you construct xml using an api rather than output text to some stream (which in the long term will save you from some headaches), ebxml makes no difference at all.
Ebxml, in combination with gzip compression, would be hard to beat for equivalent datastreams (with the same information). You get very compact data that is easy to parse back into a dom datastructure without giving up the advantage of being able to approach the data using the standard apis (including being able to dump regular unicode xml if needed).
The embedded world is also subject to moore's law. While 8 and 16 bit processors are still very dominant, 32 bit processors are rapidly being adopted. Combined with enough memory, linux is a very good choice for such systems. Since in many embedded devices, building the software is the critical path on the project, many embedded hardware vendors opt for 32 bit + linux rather than 16 bit and lots of development and licensing cost.
That's why basically all consumer electronics, mobile phones, etc. come with 32 bit processors and lots of memory. Mass produced electronics that go into kitchen appliances, cars, warches etc have a much smaller margins and for those things it is not (yet) economically feasible.
I read a paper from philips once describing the amount of memory in their television sets over the years. This was a paper from 96 I think and they were talking about 512kb. The observation they made was that this amount appeared to grow exponentially (up 64kb in the early nineties) growing to a predicted 4MB shortly after y2k. Assuming their prediction was accurate we are talking about embedded systems with between 4 an 32 MB for operating television sets right now. This is more than enough for running linux (although I'm not sure that Philips uses it).
Yep the full 3 million lines of code are there for me to read. I'm pretty sure that even Linus Torvalds can't claim to have read all of it and analyzed it for security. I'm pretty sure that the portion you have read is much less than 1%. For all we know linux could be very secure, we really have no way of finding out because scriptkiddies don't seem to be very interested in exploiting the publically available knowledge on identified (and of course patched) security problems. I also know that there's a steady flow of newly discovered buffer overflows being patched which were unpatched until they were discovered and remain an issue until someone bothers to update all the deployed software.
/home/user/* is where the important data lives, not /etc or /bin. If my program files directory is corrupted, my sysadmin will just reinstall the ghost image (annoying). If "My Documents" is corrupted I have a slightly bigger problem (lose a few days/weeks/months of work).
So you are basically saying that it is impossible to gain root access because you use linux??? And you call me naive!!! I'm willing to accept that it is possible to configure linux such that this is very hard (just like windows). I'll even acknowledge that out of the box you are much better off with some linux distros (not all and especially the popular ones have many issues).
To comment on your car example, if you put a very expensive mercedes in front of your house, it will come with comparatively good security. Now put a pinto next to it with the default, off the shelf security. Guess which one is more likely to be stolen. The locks don't matter much here. The point is that while the pinto is easier to steal, the mercedes is not impossible te steal and is much more likely target because of its value. It needs the expensive lock just to lower the risk to acceptable levels. With comparable levels of security, a linux system is less likely to be affected by security problems simply because there are more windows systems. It would be wrong to conclude that because of that linux is somehow more secure. You can actually get away with running an improperly secured&patched linux box for a very long time. Try that with a windows 2k server and you are asking for trouble. Yet both configurations are flawed and offer plenty of opportunities for a disastrous attack.
Now in a corporate setting, windows users will not be running outlook or ie with administrator rights (which many linux users seem to believe). Very few viruses actually require them to do so.
If a virus manages to exploit mozilla (which conveniently includes a mailclient and an address book) on linux it will be able to do anything it wants with your data (rm -rf ~/*) and spread to other users. Of course the success of this virus would depend on the percentage of vulnerable recipients in your addressbook, not on the amount of damage it can do. Mozilla is an excellent product and mozilla.org has a very good security policy for the inevitable security problems. So this scenario is unlikely but not impossible because of linux or any design choice. The reality is that many linux distros ship with old versions of mozilla (e.g. 1.0 instead of 1.6).
The security comes from the policy to patch and update not from any technological choices. I don't see any significant differences between the linux and windows communities here. So linux is not inherently more secure just less likely to be a target. Any good sysadmin knows this.
Running linux is like living in a nice neighbourhood, you can leave your backdoor open without much risk.
If linux were as popular as windows, I'm sure someone would exploit one of the widely published security holes in key linux software such as the kernel or other server software written in C. Just monitor the appropriate mailinglists if you are interested in the latest identified buffer overflows. Of course those running the latest patches would hardly be affected but we all know that world + dog doesn't update their linux software just like their windows counterparts don't update their windows software. However, worms and viruses need something linux cannot (yet) provide: substantial market penetration. Linux software has many known issues and many organizations are very reluctant to upgrade their software (redhat 6.2 is still found in the wild even though red hat has long since stopped supporting it, aside from really critical updates). However, deployed linux configurations tend to be very dissimilar so you are unlikely to find a security hole that affects more than a few percent of users (of which the total population is 1 or 2 percent of pc users according to the most optimistic estimates). Because of this linux viruses and worms cannot propagate. A good mailvirus needs an addressbook full of potential victims. A hypothetical pine worm would not find many potential victims in the average pine user's addressbook (is there such a thing in pine?).
:-).
:-).
This security is no inherent quality of the software but just a consequence of very few people using the same version of linux. Linux security is essentially security by obscurity. By using software that nobody else uses you avoid being targeted by viruses and worms that depend on mainstream adoption for propagation. Just like in nature, monocultures are vulnerable to viruses. I'm not saying that linux is insecure, I'm just saying that many people confuse the lack of attacks on linux with its alledged security.
If you want security, install BSD. Even less people use it and many BSD users suffer from severe paranoia (resulting in increased awareness with respect to security issues) so you are unlikely to be ever affected by the latent security holes that are waiting to be discovered. Even MS uses BSD software to keep the scriptkiddies out
Ironically, Microsoft's biggest security problem is that people are buying and using their products. I'm sure that is something they don't want to fix. Upgrading is another issue, MS is actively pushing their customers to upgrade (though not necessarily to protect them
IMHO this is yet another w3c standard that almost nobody uses or will use. I looked through the list of eight known voicexml implementors. The only familiar name I see there is Motorola. The rest of the bunch is small telcos and voice product companies. No doubt there's a niche for this kind of thing and its nice that the w3c offers a platform for industies and organizations in this niche to negotiate some industry standards.
However, my main objection to the word 'recommended standard' is that the w3c publishes these things like crazy without anyone bothering to implement them. A recommended standard from the w3c has little or no authority because you are unlikely to find 100% compliant products (or even 80% compliant).
Something is not a standard because the w3c recommends it but because key software products implement them in an interoperable fashion. For many w3c recommended specifications this is simply not true or at best only partially true. This is especially true for key specifications such as XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1, SVG1.1 and MathML (all versions). None of these standards have 100% compliant products in the market nor the commitment of industry to actually provide such an implementation. The mathml implementations mostly have the status of prototypes. SVG is partially supported in some products (e.g. adobes plugin which nobody seems to use, mozilla which you have to recompile to get a partial implementation and a bunch of vector graphics packages which use it as an exchange format with other software). CSS2.1 is partially implemented by some browsers. Most of these implementations have known flaws (including mozilla and safari) and because the standard is ambiguous there are multiple correct implementations (e.g. safari won't necessarily interpret things in the same way as mozilla). XHTML is barely used beyond the 1.0 transitional stage and you have to look for actually validating webpages with a candle. Many of these standards are superceded by new standards without a single compliant implementation of the old standard on the market.
Of course there are a few succesful standards as well. For example XML 1.0 is a successtory, as is SOAP. These standards have in common that several large industries were backing them from the beginning with implementations, support and feedback. For many other w3c standards this not true. W3C standards inflation is one of the key problems on the web. Nobody seems to care anymore about w3c press releases. A few years ago a new w3c standard would have been frontpage news on all major webpages. Now it is yet another pointless specification.
I don't criticize the technical innovation behind these w3c specicications, I just ciriticize the fact that the label "recommended standard" is awarded too easily and means nothing in daily practice. Almost none of the recommended standards released by the w3c meet my definition of a standard. A standard without compliant products (not proofs of concept but actual products) is nothing but a specification for such products. Without the commitment of key industry players to actually implement these specifications you can't even call it a recommended specification.
This wasn't a market study but a technology study. Actually the hardware requirements are pretty modest: some GPS hardware; a computer with 3d sound, some headphones and a joystick. In a couple of years all of these will probably be embedded in most mobile phones. Aside from that, a gps device might come in very handy if you are blind.
I saw a demo of this on tv yesterday. Some blind kids were having quite a bit of fun. It looked really silly seeing them move around seemingly random in some field. But the whole point was that this kind of stuff is possible with off the shelf hardware and a couple of students doing some coding after classes.
Eh did you even read the article? This thing is not targeted at end users but at pda/smartphone manufacturers. A lot of high end smartphones don't run windows and never will. These phones need browsers too and minimo seems like a really valid option in a field where currently opera (and not IE) is the browser of choice. If this thing takes off, there will be several millions of minimo users in a couple of years. That's a huge market. If by that time you are still stuck with your ubercool ms pocket pc, a nice, unintended side effect will be that you can still install oss software updates on your otherwise obsolete and unsupported device. But that is strictly for geeks, as you argued quite convincingly.
BTW. the thing is crossplatform. It would surprise me if it wouldn't be ported to pocketpc (it probably was months ago). It's just very unlikely that a smartphone/pda manufacturer is going to bundle a non MS browser with it so you'll have to forgive the minimo developers for having more important things to do.