Re:Most people know how to cover ass
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BSD And Politics
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· Score: 1
(ack! oops! "doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest..." should read "...that are of *no* interest..." Sorry! funny how two letters radically change the meaning of a sentence.)
Re:Most people know how to cover ass
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BSD And Politics
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· Score: 2
Huh? What?
Based on everything I've read about Bush (he's a manager, listens to aides, delegates work, doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest to him, likes brief analyses), I truly doubt that he gave any input into the choice of software that runs his web-site. I doubt he knows or cares what's running his official campaign site.
Realistically, a staffer, or even someone from the RNC, took bids for site-design & hosting, with the lowest bid winning (or someone's brother got the job:) That company is using MS.
"No the os is going to be an idilog choice... "
The OS is *not* an ideological issue in the election. The OS used by the company that hosts the web page for the candidate has *zero* significance to the public. That's like saying that the choice of engine in the tour bus McCain used has deep ideological import. Or that Bush chose his ad agency based on the software they use on their design computers.
That's just silly.
Don't look for correlation and causality where no exist.
Even if hardware were perfectly supported and Q3A for Linux was readily available, it would still be surprising if it did *well*.
Linux is a niche market, primarily (I'm guessing) run on dual-boot PCs, which usually have some version of windows and supported hardware. So, most people who could/would buy a game for Linux could/would buy it for Windows as well.
Since most of their other games are likely for Windows, it's not unreasonable for them to buy Q3A (or whatever) for windows, instead of Linux, just out of simplicity/momentum.
The ones who did buy it are the early-adopters, and that's generally a small crowd.
Poster writes: "... and why increasingly, in an American pop culture that doesn't represent them, 'geeks look to anime for their entertainment and self-images' and the portrayal of something that resembles the way they live their lives."
I agree with the sentiments expressed by the poster - I'd like to see a show representative of some part of the engineering/scientific community. We've got lawyer shows, doctor shows, politician shows, comedian shows, etc. The closest thing to shows about engineering/science is Star Trek. Why not a scientist show?.
So what does Anime have to do with geeks? Beats me. I like animated movies and have watched some anime recently, which I like a lot. But I don't find these movies "representative" of me in any way. If anything, I would have thought them more representative of English or Philosophy types who like vague, abstract subjects.
There is no such thing as a "representative geek." Technical people are as varied as, well, people in general. I'm in optical science. I like computers and video games. I've also studied Russian, enjoy traveling abroad and love childrens' literature. My roommate, another optics dude, composes music in his free time. A good friend married a History major, and has an interest in anthropology. I'm sure each of you could say much the same thing.
But then CmdrTaco continues:"I feel like American television has let me down (with a few rare exceptions like South Park and That 70s Show)...I am looking for it to be interesting, original and entertaining. Sadly very little of what I see on cable is any of these. "
This to me is a different issue entirely. What he's saying is that his tastes are not well served by mainstream media. Ok. That shows his tastes are not representative of the mainstream:) which includes some of us "geeks."
Personally, I think "Law & Order" and "The West Wing" are excellent. I find "That 70s Show" tedious and "Family Guy" banal. But I do like "King of the Hill" and reruns of "News Radio". I've watched a bit of Digimon and Pokemon, and can barely tolerate them. They are more slide show than animation (Pokemon: The Slide Show 2000:) This just shows that I shouldn't watch TV with CmdrTaco.
What CmdrTaco is concerned about is: are there shows that we find entertaining? For some people, anime does the job. For others, "Everybody Loves Raymond" is the cat's meow. (My sys-admin, webprogrammer, friend likes that show). Others, can't hardly find anything
Some peope like TV. Others don't. Are we surprised? No.:)
The first amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Strictly speaking, free speech only applies to enforcement, or lack thereof by the federal government. If a company, group of people, or individual person desire to limit speech within their private domains, that is their perogative. It may not be beneficial for their goals, but they can do it.
The poster is working at a company that wants to provide pay-per-use internet service to consumers. Limiting their access to information is not "censorship" or "evil". They are not forcing all people to use their limited services nor lobbying congress to enact speech-limiting laws. They are just providing a particularly scoped service to people. If people like the service and cost, they will make money. If not, then they will lose money.
Again, what's the problem?
I've been investigating getting my own domain name recently, and since the one I want was registered, expired, and then re-registered, I've dealt with these issues a bit. But it's also made me reflect on the long term viability of the current naming convention.
Consider telephones:
Telegraph was the precursor. Address were physical address; you just wired the message to the appropriate station and the hardcopy was delivered to the recipient. Any naming convention based on that is obsolete.
Early phones (based on watching The Andy Griffith Show:) were was on a human operated switchboard system. A number was often not needed; rather, you requested a certain person and then were connected. Naming convention: obsolete
Party lines: Later, less populous areas got these. I'm not really familiar with them, but I think it was basically a single line shared by multiple households. I don't know if there was a unique number for each household, or one number for the whole thing. This may or may not be wholly obsolete
7-digit local: current system; been stable for quite a while. Number *does not* stay with you when you move, generally. There is almost no constancy to a person's phone #.
area code + 7 long distance: see above; necessary to differentiate regions
area code + 7 (10 digit) local: Due to growing numbers of phone users, the numbering convention is being increased in many areas. This may eventually make obsolete the 7-digit number (that is, your former number will be insufficient to dial you except for your closest neighbors)
What's next? IP telphony? Will we even have phone numbers? Will they be 10, 13, 20 digits long? Multiple phones with multiple numbers, or will we see consolidation efforts?
If the simple U.S. phone system has seen this, should we expect the *global* WWW naming convention to remain stable over the next several decades?
I predict major changes within 10 years, that make obsolete many of the current names, leading to a new cyber-squatting rush.
While an interesting idea (and appealing in many ways), I fear it will fall short in our mega-store society.
What.tld do you give to a ford dealership that: sells, leases, repairs, sells parts? That's a.car,.repair,.store, arguably. Or consider to push of mega-stores like Meijers and Walmart: They are stores, but they sell *everything* (food, clothing, gas, car parts, home appliances). There might be a case for multiple domains for such sub-categories.
There are also the merging of other institutions i.e. financial, legal, insurance.
I suppose you could require each sub-category to be strictly labeled, but that might be a mess as well.
Although I just commented in the discussion about the 1GHz via chip that I sometimes wish new chips didn't come so quickly, I read this article and thought, "Cool! Faster chips!" because I want the price of the 850MHz PIII to drop rapidly so I can upgrade my 450:)
I guess the moral of this lesson is that you can't make a geek happy, you can only hope to distract him for a while with new shiny objects.:)
After reading your reply (and laughing at seeing IAAL for the first time:), I realized that there was claim involved the tabs being moveable from one window to another. I didn't see that.
So I booted up Adobe Illustrator and tried it. It works! Cool! I didn't know I could do that! We didn't have that working back on the NeXT:) (never even thought about it). That's a very keen interface device. Should it be patentable? Perhaps. It's a somewhat novel extension of things done before. It was only obvious to me in hindsight. But the rest of the claim seems pretty shaky to me. But I'm just a scientist, what do I know?;)
Regarding more high-speed CPU production, the poster wrote, "More competition in this area can only be a good thing."
Is it really? Yes, competition drives down prices, which I like. But sometimes I wonder...
What would happen if CPU speed progressive much slower than it does today, and the speed increases had to be accomplished via more sophisticated programming? What if hardware change was slow enough, that developers had to finesse every last bit of performance from the machine?
Consider the lowly video-game console. The first gen. of games on those things are interesting, and look decent. By the third or fourth gen. of games, you might think someone secretly upgraded your console. Instead, locked into an unchanging hardware profile, developers learned sweet-nothings to whisper into the console's ears, in order to coax out greater performance. And, without losing system stability (maybe even increasing it?)
If nothing else, might we have more stable OS's and apps that crash less? The time I would save from a rock-solid system would probably be greater than that from tripling the system speed.
First - IANAL. I'm just a grad student who has had to read patents for my work. I've developed a bit of the patience needed to read these works of obfuscation, so I thought I'd take a gander at Adobe's at the IBM database. Here are a few thoughts.
From the synopsis, they are patenting a method to (1)section off a small region of the screen to display often-needed information and (2) using multiple selectors within that section to allow the user to choose which info to see, at which time, the information is displayed, displacing the previously shown info.
First thought: This patent was filed in 1994 and granted 1996. In 1993 I was developing software on NeXT computers for multi-view interface menus & manipulators, using drop-down selectors. This work was based on prior demos from the NeXT community. It seems that prior art makes trivial the Adobe patent.
Looking at the patent itself:
p1 - Ahh.. tabs... I've seen these in Illustrator (which I use for technical figures). Handy little things, those.
p2 - image of Apple menu
p3 - image of Apple dialog box
p4 - images of icon interface bars; iamges of tabbed palettes
p5 - images of palettes
p6 - flowchart of tabbed interface logic
p7 - intro: Hmm... they contrast their method (persistent info) to menus (drop down, then disappear) & dialog boxes (disappear after use). Menus get longer, dialogues more cluttered with greater info. Palettes will solve this problem in user interface design.
p8 - preferred embodiment: Seems to be saying that this patent covers all uses of tabbed interfaces for compact information flow, with any combination of previous developed menus, dialog boxes, icon palettes, etc.
p9 - p8 cont.: Here's a juicy quote: "The technique of the invention provides a way of combining palette controls to allow multiple sets of controls to occupy the same screen space. The invention allows any number of palettes to be combined or separated at the user's discretion." The claims given don't seem to require tabs.
Thought on p6 - this chart is pretty similar to the logic used in getting multi-menu windows to work on the NeXT, as mentioned above.
Thought on p9 - claims not requiring tabs. Common practice in patents is to make your claim as broad as possible, so I'd expect Adobe to do the same.
Other thoughts - if you've been in the science/engineering business then you probably know that it's common practice to file patents on anything you can afford to file on, making the claims as broad as possible to maximize potential profits. It's also known that larger companies sometimes file facetious patent-infringement suits against smaller ones to bleed of cash (and possibley market cachet) and thus hinder their product development & sales.
Following the claims, it seems this work was laregly accomplished well before 1994. (Given a NeXT computer, I could probably resurrect examples of such code.) It would seem that Adobe is following time-honored business practices of siccing lawyers armed with dubious patents against competitors.
You raise a good point. There are a couple of reasons, I think, that it is good to prevent others from using copyrighted work willy-nilly.
1) Prevents others from building their work on the backs of the original author - this goes for all media, not just games.
2) Protects the public perception of the property. Copyright & trademark laws give artists the power to protect their work from undesired manipulations that could potentially hinder future marketability of products based on their works. e.g. If someone sold a game where you play Mickey Mouse and the point is shooting Minny Mouse, Donald Duck, etc., people might not realize it's not a "sanctioned" product, and thus could hurt Disney's marketing of its characters.
3) Relevant to maintaining trademarks. If a trademarked name becomes a generic word for that general category of process or product, the trademark is lost, and anyone can use it. This is why e.g. Xerox works hard to distinguish a "Xerox" machine and the photocopy process. I imagine if people could use "abandonware" images & sounds without limitation, it might negatively impact trademarks.
Consider - Infocom games could have been considered "abandonware" a few years back. But then Activision revived the Zork series for a while with new graphical versions, and also sold compilations of the original text games. By possessing the rights to the works, they could market so-called abandonware, and have recourse to stop others who would give it away for free (and thus hurt their sales).
I don't think that it is necessarily in an artist's or company's best interests to hold copyrights to apparently dead works. But I think they should have the ability to do so.
This is an interesting issue. Like every other high school student with a computer, I pirated games (for my Atari 800XL:) I gave that up in college, suspiciously close to the time that I began working summers as a paid developer. So now I am reflective as I consider the non-legal distribution of software from my childhood.
If a company made a non-expirable contract with a buyer to replace software media, they ought to live with it (especially if us consumers gotta live with their EULA's). If this is not fulfilled, the "legal" recourse would be to sue. Since suing over $1 in media is not tenable (it's downright stupid), the more reasonable recourse is to just download the software. Not legal, really, but I think it is ethical.
But that only applies to previous purchasers. What about those who download it, never having paid for it, claiming that it's abandoned, making no money, and thus should be freely dessiminated?
The financial argument doesn't hold, since "abandonware" can become "commercialware" quite easily. Since someone had the copyrights to PacMan, Centipede, Frogger, etc, Microsoft (I think) was able to acquire them and release their "retro" gaming packs a couple of years ago, selling "abandonware" games for profit. Likewise, Hasbro was able to purchase them, make new versions, and sell them. Further, copyrights can be used (or sold) so that a sequel can be made, e.g. Syndicate. If the copyrights were thrown out after some short period of non-use, then everyone and their brother could resell, remake, or sequel-ize the games, which I don't think is a good thing.
Whether it is a good, bad, or ugly thing that copyrights can be held, sold, utilized, and employed to sequels, is perhaps the real issue, since this is relevant to movies, books, and other things, as others have pointed out.
NeXT came out while I was in college, and my Alma Mater bought into it. Thus began my love-affair:)
I spent three summers full-time, and three academic years part-time programming edu apps on the NeXT at Rose-Hulman. I also learned C at the same time. Here are some random thoughts on the computer.
It's ironic that in the Newsweek article Bill Gates poo-poo's the computer, saying it's no big deal (everyone's got a graphical interface, everyone's got a mouse). I believe MS was transitioning from Win 2.0 to Win 3.0 (or maybe 3.1). The windows interface was an abomination, obviously designed by people who knew nothing about human design issues. The NeXT crushed it in terms of ease of use. Still, Gates was right -- the NeXT was the computer equivalent of a 45rpm record.
Programming the NeXT was, in many ways, a wonderful experience. The Interface Builder allowed you to create your basic interface 'live', and in some cases, have some basic functionality, before writing a line of code. Perhaps windows and Mac can do this too, but I haven't found a gui programming environment to match the features of the 10 yr old NeXT's.
A big buzz-phrase in recent years is "object reuse." Been there, done that. By my third year of programming, I understood the system pretty well, and developed a couple standard interface tools that could be implemented from the Interface Builder, and configured with minimal programming additional coding. These were used by my fellow developers to provide a more consistent user interface across our applications. This was not terribly difficult to do with the NeXT.
I still miss its file manager. I really liked the multi-paned hierarchical browser. It was what Windows Explorer is supposed to be.
Why did NeXT fail? Because Jobs ran it. I believe that Steve Jobs is a computer visionary. I think he understands what people want, what's cool, and what we be great to work with. I also think that he's got a technical savvy. However, I think he let's his desire for "cool" block his sense of "realistic." The NeXT was awesome. It was truly years ahead of its time. It was also double the cost of an equivalent PC, and more expensive that Macs too. It had a magnesium case (hello? extra cost?), and other such things. Nice, but not helpful in trying to break into a larger market.
Currently, I am a PC guy. I can't get the software I need on a Mac, and I am put off by the consistent 30% price difference between a PC and it's equivalent Mac. But if the Mac OS X brings in the best parts of NeXT, appropriately improved over the past several years, along with the best of Mac, it may be time to switch computers.
Well, that makes sense, and is a good use of expensive gadgetry to do something that can't be done otherwise. (not that expensive gadgetry needs to be justifified...)
I'm just laughing at people who have a 21"-27" TV in their living room in front of the couch, but watch DVDs on a 17" monitor sitting in an office chair.:)
How does the in-between compare that the article talks about: emulated games in a cabinet with (presumably) real arcade controls. Would it still be susbtantially different from the real thing?
Some interesting benefits. Another one that may go in the general category of "why do open source?":
Method to find new talent: If someone contributes particularly noteworthy additions to your code, it would be in the companies best interest to bring them in for an interview. The beauty is, the first step of the hiring process is free: skilled people with demonstrated work with your product are being pre-filtered by the coding process.
I'm not a CTO, have no idea how to be. I'm just a lowly engineer in grad school, so I'm in no position to criticize the questioner.
I am concerned about his statement: "'m looking for other options, opinions, and bulletproof arguments to take to Open Source-leery business types to convince them to release earlier (my preference) rather than later"
It sounds like he is looking for answers that justify his desires, not necessarily what is best for his company or the investors.
I would think it would be better to ask the question:
"Are there good reasons to release code earlier rather than later?" then make the decision.
Of course some might still want to ask
"Are there good reasons for a commerical enterprise to make available its source code?"
(no flaming on the above; I have no opinion and it's obviously not a settled questions)
As pointed out by the article, the simple solution is to not get a Windows license when you first buy the computer, and then you're only paying for the Select License.
The irony is that, of course, MS really doesn't want anyone to unbundle Windows from an OEM PC.
I rather liked this quote:
"Almost all of what they have in their statement is correct, except for a few little things," he said. "But I would take issue with the tone of the letter and the title that 'Microsoft uses the license compliance confusion to drive new revenue.'"
It's all correct, but the tone is wrong. Hmmm... The facts are right, but the spin is wrong. It's not a bug, it's a feature!
juniorbird & Aerolith_alpha have given some excellent comments on this. But there is another issue that is raised by your point.
"HTML is a logical markup language where the client (not the server) makes formatting decisions. "
That is exactly right! Which is why HTML is really the wrong language to be using for today's web design purposes.
The original intent of HTML, if I understand correctly, was to provide a method for describing the abstract format of the content, and then allow the viewer to format that content according to his desires. Want BIG BOLD headlines? Got it. Want small italic body text? No problem. Want everything mono-space fonts? Can do.
The problem is that that is not a good way to present most information, nor is it generally desireable. Further, companies (and many users) want you to see their information in a very specific way, and don't want you mucking around with it. Pepsi wants you to see their blue cans blue, not mauve with pink polka dots. IBM wants their computer specs presented with a certain combination of fonts, sizes, and images they think is most enticing to a potential buyer. They don't want you to fool around with their formatting and maybe make something less enticing to yourself. And so on. What web designers want to do is page layout! Not logical formatting.
The thing is, HTML sucks as a page layout device. That's not what it's meant to do, but that's what we use it for. Which is why web designers (even the finger-painting equivalent of designers, like me) do un-natural and perverse things with 1x1 invisi-gifs; so we can get things to right.
As Murphy said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
As an amateur (hobbyist) web designer, I'm wondering what you use 1x1 images for. In my very limited experience, they're handy when stretched to various sizes, but I haven't seen a need (yet) for a one pixel offset. So can you give a pointer or two on the secrets of web design?:)
My attempts at HTML coding can be seen at fischer_dj.tripod.com.
Slashdot Mirror
(ack! oops! "doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest..." should read "...that are of *no* interest..." Sorry! funny how two letters radically change the meaning of a sentence.)
Huh? What?
:) That company is using MS.
Based on everything I've read about Bush (he's a manager, listens to aides, delegates work, doesn't like to deal with things that are of interest to him, likes brief analyses), I truly doubt that he gave any input into the choice of software that runs his web-site. I doubt he knows or cares what's running his official campaign site.
Realistically, a staffer, or even someone from the RNC, took bids for site-design & hosting, with the lowest bid winning (or someone's brother got the job
"No the os is going to be an idilog choice... "
The OS is *not* an ideological issue in the election. The OS used by the company that hosts the web page for the candidate has *zero* significance to the public. That's like saying that the choice of engine in the tour bus McCain used has deep ideological import. Or that Bush chose his ad agency based on the software they use on their design computers.
That's just silly.
Don't look for correlation and causality where no exist.
Ahh...you have learned a valuable consumer lesson, which I too have learned in recent years:
Do not buy based on what *might* happen. Rather, buy what *is* available and working.
Companies say all sorts of things, which may or not come to be soon enough for your needs. Buy what they have, not what they don't.
Even if hardware were perfectly supported and Q3A for Linux was readily available, it would still be surprising if it did *well*.
Linux is a niche market, primarily (I'm guessing) run on dual-boot PCs, which usually have some version of windows and supported hardware. So, most people who could/would buy a game for Linux could/would buy it for Windows as well.
Since most of their other games are likely for Windows, it's not unreasonable for them to buy Q3A (or whatever) for windows, instead of Linux, just out of simplicity/momentum.
The ones who did buy it are the early-adopters, and that's generally a small crowd.
Poster writes: "... and why increasingly, in an American pop culture that doesn't represent them, 'geeks look to anime for their entertainment and self-images' and the portrayal of something that resembles the way they live their lives." I agree with the sentiments expressed by the poster - I'd like to see a show representative of some part of the engineering/scientific community. We've got lawyer shows, doctor shows, politician shows, comedian shows, etc. The closest thing to shows about engineering/science is Star Trek. Why not a scientist show?. So what does Anime have to do with geeks? Beats me. I like animated movies and have watched some anime recently, which I like a lot. But I don't find these movies "representative" of me in any way. If anything, I would have thought them more representative of English or Philosophy types who like vague, abstract subjects. There is no such thing as a "representative geek." Technical people are as varied as, well, people in general. I'm in optical science. I like computers and video games. I've also studied Russian, enjoy traveling abroad and love childrens' literature. My roommate, another optics dude, composes music in his free time. A good friend married a History major, and has an interest in anthropology. I'm sure each of you could say much the same thing. But then CmdrTaco continues:"I feel like American television has let me down (with a few rare exceptions like South Park and That 70s Show)...I am looking for it to be interesting, original and entertaining. Sadly very little of what I see on cable is any of these. " This to me is a different issue entirely. What he's saying is that his tastes are not well served by mainstream media. Ok. That shows his tastes are not representative of the mainstream :) which includes some of us "geeks."
Personally, I think "Law & Order" and "The West Wing" are excellent. I find "That 70s Show" tedious and "Family Guy" banal. But I do like "King of the Hill" and reruns of "News Radio". I've watched a bit of Digimon and Pokemon, and can barely tolerate them. They are more slide show than animation (Pokemon: The Slide Show 2000 :) This just shows that I shouldn't watch TV with CmdrTaco.
What CmdrTaco is concerned about is: are there shows that we find entertaining? For some people, anime does the job. For others, "Everybody Loves Raymond" is the cat's meow. (My sys-admin, webprogrammer, friend likes that show). Others, can't hardly find anything
Some peope like TV. Others don't. Are we surprised? No. :)
The first amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Strictly speaking, free speech only applies to enforcement, or lack thereof by the federal government. If a company, group of people, or individual person desire to limit speech within their private domains, that is their perogative. It may not be beneficial for their goals, but they can do it. The poster is working at a company that wants to provide pay-per-use internet service to consumers. Limiting their access to information is not "censorship" or "evil". They are not forcing all people to use their limited services nor lobbying congress to enact speech-limiting laws. They are just providing a particularly scoped service to people. If people like the service and cost, they will make money. If not, then they will lose money. Again, what's the problem?
I've been investigating getting my own domain name recently, and since the one I want was registered, expired, and then re-registered, I've dealt with these issues a bit. But it's also made me reflect on the long term viability of the current naming convention.
:) were was on a human operated switchboard system. A number was often not needed; rather, you requested a certain person and then were connected. Naming convention: obsolete
:)
Consider telephones:
Telegraph was the precursor. Address were physical address; you just wired the message to the appropriate station and the hardcopy was delivered to the recipient. Any naming convention based on that is obsolete.
Early phones (based on watching The Andy Griffith Show
Party lines: Later, less populous areas got these. I'm not really familiar with them, but I think it was basically a single line shared by multiple households. I don't know if there was a unique number for each household, or one number for the whole thing. This may or may not be wholly obsolete
7-digit local: current system; been stable for quite a while. Number *does not* stay with you when you move, generally. There is almost no constancy to a person's phone #.
area code + 7 long distance: see above; necessary to differentiate regions
area code + 7 (10 digit) local: Due to growing numbers of phone users, the numbering convention is being increased in many areas. This may eventually make obsolete the 7-digit number (that is, your former number will be insufficient to dial you except for your closest neighbors)
What's next? IP telphony? Will we even have phone numbers? Will they be 10, 13, 20 digits long? Multiple phones with multiple numbers, or will we see consolidation efforts?
If the simple U.S. phone system has seen this, should we expect the *global* WWW naming convention to remain stable over the next several decades?
I predict major changes within 10 years, that make obsolete many of the current names, leading to a new cyber-squatting rush.
But, IANAC (I am not a clairvoyant
While an interesting idea (and appealing in many ways), I fear it will fall short in our mega-store society.
.tld do you give to a ford dealership that: sells, leases, repairs, sells parts? That's a .car, .repair, .store, arguably. Or consider to push of mega-stores like Meijers and Walmart: They are stores, but they sell *everything* (food, clothing, gas, car parts, home appliances). There might be a case for multiple domains for such sub-categories.
What
There are also the merging of other institutions i.e. financial, legal, insurance.
I suppose you could require each sub-category to be strictly labeled, but that might be a mess as well.
Although I just commented in the discussion about the 1GHz via chip that I sometimes wish new chips didn't come so quickly, I read this article and thought, "Cool! Faster chips!" because I want the price of the 850MHz PIII to drop rapidly so I can upgrade my 450 :)
I guess the moral of this lesson is that you can't make a geek happy, you can only hope to distract him for a while with new shiny objects. :)
After reading your reply (and laughing at seeing IAAL for the first time :), I realized that there was claim involved the tabs being moveable from one window to another. I didn't see that.
:) (never even thought about it). That's a very keen interface device. Should it be patentable? Perhaps. It's a somewhat novel extension of things done before. It was only obvious to me in hindsight. But the rest of the claim seems pretty shaky to me. But I'm just a scientist, what do I know? ;)
So I booted up Adobe Illustrator and tried it. It works! Cool! I didn't know I could do that! We didn't have that working back on the NeXT
Regarding more high-speed CPU production, the poster wrote, "More competition in this area can only be a good thing." Is it really? Yes, competition drives down prices, which I like. But sometimes I wonder... What would happen if CPU speed progressive much slower than it does today, and the speed increases had to be accomplished via more sophisticated programming? What if hardware change was slow enough, that developers had to finesse every last bit of performance from the machine? Consider the lowly video-game console. The first gen. of games on those things are interesting, and look decent. By the third or fourth gen. of games, you might think someone secretly upgraded your console. Instead, locked into an unchanging hardware profile, developers learned sweet-nothings to whisper into the console's ears, in order to coax out greater performance. And, without losing system stability (maybe even increasing it?) If nothing else, might we have more stable OS's and apps that crash less? The time I would save from a rock-solid system would probably be greater than that from tripling the system speed.
First - IANAL. I'm just a grad student who has had to read patents for my work. I've developed a bit of the patience needed to read these works of obfuscation, so I thought I'd take a gander at Adobe's at the IBM database. Here are a few thoughts. From the synopsis, they are patenting a method to (1)section off a small region of the screen to display often-needed information and (2) using multiple selectors within that section to allow the user to choose which info to see, at which time, the information is displayed, displacing the previously shown info. First thought: This patent was filed in 1994 and granted 1996. In 1993 I was developing software on NeXT computers for multi-view interface menus & manipulators, using drop-down selectors. This work was based on prior demos from the NeXT community. It seems that prior art makes trivial the Adobe patent. Looking at the patent itself: p1 - Ahh.. tabs... I've seen these in Illustrator (which I use for technical figures). Handy little things, those. p2 - image of Apple menu p3 - image of Apple dialog box p4 - images of icon interface bars; iamges of tabbed palettes p5 - images of palettes p6 - flowchart of tabbed interface logic p7 - intro: Hmm... they contrast their method (persistent info) to menus (drop down, then disappear) & dialog boxes (disappear after use). Menus get longer, dialogues more cluttered with greater info. Palettes will solve this problem in user interface design. p8 - preferred embodiment: Seems to be saying that this patent covers all uses of tabbed interfaces for compact information flow, with any combination of previous developed menus, dialog boxes, icon palettes, etc. p9 - p8 cont.: Here's a juicy quote: "The technique of the invention provides a way of combining palette controls to allow multiple sets of controls to occupy the same screen space. The invention allows any number of palettes to be combined or separated at the user's discretion." The claims given don't seem to require tabs. Thought on p6 - this chart is pretty similar to the logic used in getting multi-menu windows to work on the NeXT, as mentioned above. Thought on p9 - claims not requiring tabs. Common practice in patents is to make your claim as broad as possible, so I'd expect Adobe to do the same. Other thoughts - if you've been in the science/engineering business then you probably know that it's common practice to file patents on anything you can afford to file on, making the claims as broad as possible to maximize potential profits. It's also known that larger companies sometimes file facetious patent-infringement suits against smaller ones to bleed of cash (and possibley market cachet) and thus hinder their product development & sales. Following the claims, it seems this work was laregly accomplished well before 1994. (Given a NeXT computer, I could probably resurrect examples of such code.) It would seem that Adobe is following time-honored business practices of siccing lawyers armed with dubious patents against competitors.
I was expecting this sort of comment :)
You raise a good point. There are a couple of reasons, I think, that it is good to prevent others from using copyrighted work willy-nilly.
1) Prevents others from building their work on the backs of the original author - this goes for all media, not just games.
2) Protects the public perception of the property. Copyright & trademark laws give artists the power to protect their work from undesired manipulations that could potentially hinder future marketability of products based on their works. e.g. If someone sold a game where you play Mickey Mouse and the point is shooting Minny Mouse, Donald Duck, etc., people might not realize it's not a "sanctioned" product, and thus could hurt Disney's marketing of its characters.
3) Relevant to maintaining trademarks. If a trademarked name becomes a generic word for that general category of process or product, the trademark is lost, and anyone can use it. This is why e.g. Xerox works hard to distinguish a "Xerox" machine and the photocopy process. I imagine if people could use "abandonware" images & sounds without limitation, it might negatively impact trademarks.
Consider - Infocom games could have been considered "abandonware" a few years back. But then Activision revived the Zork series for a while with new graphical versions, and also sold compilations of the original text games. By possessing the rights to the works, they could market so-called abandonware, and have recourse to stop others who would give it away for free (and thus hurt their sales).
I don't think that it is necessarily in an artist's or company's best interests to hold copyrights to apparently dead works. But I think they should have the ability to do so.
This is an interesting issue. Like every other high school student with a computer, I pirated games (for my Atari 800XL :) I gave that up in college, suspiciously close to the time that I began working summers as a paid developer. So now I am reflective as I consider the non-legal distribution of software from my childhood.
If a company made a non-expirable contract with a buyer to replace software media, they ought to live with it (especially if us consumers gotta live with their EULA's). If this is not fulfilled, the "legal" recourse would be to sue. Since suing over $1 in media is not tenable (it's downright stupid), the more reasonable recourse is to just download the software. Not legal, really, but I think it is ethical.
But that only applies to previous purchasers. What about those who download it, never having paid for it, claiming that it's abandoned, making no money, and thus should be freely dessiminated?
The financial argument doesn't hold, since "abandonware" can become "commercialware" quite easily. Since someone had the copyrights to PacMan, Centipede, Frogger, etc, Microsoft (I think) was able to acquire them and release their "retro" gaming packs a couple of years ago, selling "abandonware" games for profit. Likewise, Hasbro was able to purchase them, make new versions, and sell them. Further, copyrights can be used (or sold) so that a sequel can be made, e.g. Syndicate. If the copyrights were thrown out after some short period of non-use, then everyone and their brother could resell, remake, or sequel-ize the games, which I don't think is a good thing.
Whether it is a good, bad, or ugly thing that copyrights can be held, sold, utilized, and employed to sequels, is perhaps the real issue, since this is relevant to movies, books, and other things, as others have pointed out.
NeXT came out while I was in college, and my Alma Mater bought into it. Thus began my love-affair :)
I spent three summers full-time, and three academic years part-time programming edu apps on the NeXT at Rose-Hulman. I also learned C at the same time. Here are some random thoughts on the computer.
It's ironic that in the Newsweek article Bill Gates poo-poo's the computer, saying it's no big deal (everyone's got a graphical interface, everyone's got a mouse). I believe MS was transitioning from Win 2.0 to Win 3.0 (or maybe 3.1). The windows interface was an abomination, obviously designed by people who knew nothing about human design issues. The NeXT crushed it in terms of ease of use. Still, Gates was right -- the NeXT was the computer equivalent of a 45rpm record.
Programming the NeXT was, in many ways, a wonderful experience. The Interface Builder allowed you to create your basic interface 'live', and in some cases, have some basic functionality, before writing a line of code. Perhaps windows and Mac can do this too, but I haven't found a gui programming environment to match the features of the 10 yr old NeXT's.
A big buzz-phrase in recent years is "object reuse." Been there, done that. By my third year of programming, I understood the system pretty well, and developed a couple standard interface tools that could be implemented from the Interface Builder, and configured with minimal programming additional coding. These were used by my fellow developers to provide a more consistent user interface across our applications. This was not terribly difficult to do with the NeXT.
I still miss its file manager. I really liked the multi-paned hierarchical browser. It was what Windows Explorer is supposed to be.
Why did NeXT fail? Because Jobs ran it. I believe that Steve Jobs is a computer visionary. I think he understands what people want, what's cool, and what we be great to work with. I also think that he's got a technical savvy. However, I think he let's his desire for "cool" block his sense of "realistic." The NeXT was awesome. It was truly years ahead of its time. It was also double the cost of an equivalent PC, and more expensive that Macs too. It had a magnesium case (hello? extra cost?), and other such things. Nice, but not helpful in trying to break into a larger market.
Currently, I am a PC guy. I can't get the software I need on a Mac, and I am put off by the consistent 30% price difference between a PC and it's equivalent Mac. But if the Mac OS X brings in the best parts of NeXT, appropriately improved over the past several years, along with the best of Mac, it may be time to switch computers.
Well, that makes sense, and is a good use of expensive gadgetry to do something that can't be done otherwise. (not that expensive gadgetry needs to be justifified...)
:)
I'm just laughing at people who have a 21"-27" TV in their living room in front of the couch, but watch DVDs on a 17" monitor sitting in an office chair.
How does the in-between compare that the article talks about: emulated games in a cabinet with (presumably) real arcade controls. Would it still be susbtantially different from the real thing?
Sort of like watching DVD's on your computer...
:)
(Oh no, I'm in for it now, donning flame-retardant gear from lab
That's what I had hoped you meant, but I wasn't for sure. Thanks for the clarification.
Some interesting benefits. Another one that may go in the general category of "why do open source?":
Method to find new talent: If someone contributes particularly noteworthy additions to your code, it would be in the companies best interest to bring them in for an interview. The beauty is, the first step of the hiring process is free: skilled people with demonstrated work with your product are being pre-filtered by the coding process.
I'm not a CTO, have no idea how to be. I'm just a lowly engineer in grad school, so I'm in no position to criticize the questioner. I am concerned about his statement:
"'m looking for other options, opinions, and bulletproof arguments to take to Open Source-leery business types to convince them to release earlier (my preference) rather than later" It sounds like he is looking for answers that justify his desires, not necessarily what is best for his company or the investors. I would think it would be better to ask the question:
"Are there good reasons to release code earlier rather than later?" then make the decision. Of course some might still want to ask
"Are there good reasons for a commerical enterprise to make available its source code?" (no flaming on the above; I have no opinion and it's obviously not a settled questions)
As pointed out by the article, the simple solution is to not get a Windows license when you first buy the computer, and then you're only paying for the Select License.
The irony is that, of course, MS really doesn't want anyone to unbundle Windows from an OEM PC.
It seems they really do want it both ways.
I rather liked this quote: "Almost all of what they have in their statement is correct, except for a few little things," he said. "But I would take issue with the tone of the letter and the title that 'Microsoft uses the license compliance confusion to drive new revenue.'" It's all correct, but the tone is wrong. Hmmm... The facts are right, but the spin is wrong. It's not a bug, it's a feature!
juniorbird & Aerolith_alpha have given some excellent comments on this. But there is another issue that is raised by your point. "HTML is a logical markup language where the client (not the server) makes formatting decisions. " That is exactly right! Which is why HTML is really the wrong language to be using for today's web design purposes. The original intent of HTML, if I understand correctly, was to provide a method for describing the abstract format of the content, and then allow the viewer to format that content according to his desires. Want BIG BOLD headlines? Got it. Want small italic body text? No problem. Want everything mono-space fonts? Can do. The problem is that that is not a good way to present most information, nor is it generally desireable. Further, companies (and many users) want you to see their information in a very specific way, and don't want you mucking around with it. Pepsi wants you to see their blue cans blue, not mauve with pink polka dots. IBM wants their computer specs presented with a certain combination of fonts, sizes, and images they think is most enticing to a potential buyer. They don't want you to fool around with their formatting and maybe make something less enticing to yourself. And so on. What web designers want to do is page layout! Not logical formatting. The thing is, HTML sucks as a page layout device. That's not what it's meant to do, but that's what we use it for. Which is why web designers (even the finger-painting equivalent of designers, like me) do un-natural and perverse things with 1x1 invisi-gifs; so we can get things to right. As Murphy said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
As an amateur (hobbyist) web designer, I'm wondering what you use 1x1 images for. In my very limited experience, they're handy when stretched to various sizes, but I haven't seen a need (yet) for a one pixel offset. So can you give a pointer or two on the secrets of web design? :)
My attempts at HTML coding can be seen at fischer_dj.tripod.com.