"the reaction of everyone on this page is that there must be some that does: a fairly good indication that practitioners versed in the art regard the idea as obvious."
Right, and this forum is of course a fair, objective environment, where nobody has any kind of bias against Microsoft.;-)
I made a cursory reading the patent (my eyes start to glaze over if I try to read something like that in detail without sufficient preparation and motivation). If I had to guess, I would say this is part of Microsoft's effort to fix the hideous state of security design in their Windows product, as it is typically deployed for consumers. That is, everyone can do anything to most any Windows box, but still expects Microsoft to protect them from it. I'm thinking Microsoft is trying to come up with a way to let users do what they want, while still protecting users from themselves, using a daemon that checks what the code is trying to do.
Apple kinda does this with Mac OS X, which pops up dialogs whenever an installer needs more privileges, or whatever. And, of course, like everyone else here has been pointing out, the patent starts off with something very like sudo (but the patent goes into all sorts of detail that sudo doesn't care much about).
Whether or not the idea is patentable is not mine to say. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know when Microsoft developed these ideas. Remember, under US patent law, it is not when you file, but when you come up with the idea, that matters. If Microsoft came up with the idea before sudo's author did, sudo loses. (Not that I think that's likely, but that's just a guess on my part.)
"Win4Lin was basically the same thing OS/2 used to run Windows 3.1 applications."
Not quite. IBM and Microsoft of course had access to the Windows source code, so they basically built a version of Windows that ran as an application under OS/2. At least, that was how my "blue spine" version of OS/2 Warp worked. I never used the "red spine" flavor, so that might do things differently.
Win4Lin, on the other hand, is a third-party VM. It boots and runs the "regular" Microsoft Windows, much like you do on a real machine.
"It actually ran a patched version Windows next to Linux."
Win4Lin does not really patch Windows. They do provide drivers for their virtual hardware, but that's not the same thing. They also offer an optional Winsock replacement for single-IP-address network access. I suppose you could call that a patch, but as I said, it is optional. I run Win4Lin using their virtual network card instead, which gets its own IP address on the LAN.
"It required kernel patches to Linux, too..."
Yes. One patch to the kernel network interface (for the above mentioned network trickery), another to the scheduler to make it friendly to their VM technology. The scheduler patch is quite small and, as I understand it, fairly unobtrusive. I know that some distributions (e.g., Mandrake) even ship their kernels pre-patched for Win4Lin.
"... it was doing some very low-level trickery to basically make Windows and Linux run in the same memory space."
Not really the same memory space. My understanding is limited, but as I understand it, Linux is already giving each process a virtual memory space to run in. The patches enable Netraverse to give their VM a task and memory segment under Linux.
"I forget if it was 3.1 or 9x, though. I'm thinking 9x, but could be wrong."
Win4Lin can run MS-DOS, or MS-Windows 95, 98, or ME. Netraverse is currently working to enable Windows 2000/XP as well. No time frame yet.:-(
"Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it?"
Netraverse, of course. The Win4Lin people. Actually, Win4Lin and Merge are basically the same product.
"How does it compare with WINE?"
From a technical standpoint, we're talking apples and oranges. Wine is a project to independently implement a runtime environment that will be binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. Win4Lin is an i386 virtualization tool tailored to run Microsoft Windows in a VM (virtual machine) on i386-based *nix.
From a practical standpoint, both are useful. Wine is, of course, free, while Win4Lin is a commercial product. Wine does not require any Microsoft software; Win4Lin requires you to provide MS Windows (to install and run in the VM). Wine is trying to chase Microsoft's moving target; Win4Lin lets you run the real thing. Wine uses less resources. Win4Lin is far more compatible -- it works with most any non-multimedia application flawlessly.
I use both. Win4Lin is extremely useful; it lets me run "the real thing" in a VM ("Windows in a window"), but with significantly better performance then VMware (doubtless because Win4Lin is tuned to just run Windows, while VMware is a full-blown, general-purpose VM). Wine yields better performance for applications which work with Wine. Win4Lin means no Wine compatability headaches; just install and run like a "real" 'doze box.
FWIW, IMO, YMMV, HTH, HAND, etc.
Here's the history behind Win4Lin/Netraverse, from my files:
It appears the company which originally developed the Merge software was "Locus Computing Corporation". They marketed a product called "DOS/Merge", which is the ancestor to the Win4Lin that we all know and love. DOS/Merge was later called "386/Merge" when 386 protected mode support was added.
At some point, a company called "Platinum" bought Locus. They apparently integrated Merge with other components into product lines called "PC-Enterprise" and "PC-Interface".
The Merge product was licensed to several other companies, including SCO, Sun, and HP. Sun and SCO both have commercial Unix products that run on Intel hardware; they offer "SCO Merge" and "Sun Merge" as layered products for their Unixes. (SCO, of course, later sold major assets (including their name) to Caldera, and Caldera then changed their name to SCO.)
At some point, a company called "DASCOM" bought the rights to Merge from Platinum. (Shortly thereafter, Platinum was bought by Computer Associates (CA), and fell off the Earth.) DASCOM was later bought by IBM. IBM was not interested in Merge, and spun the Merge group off as "TreLOS". TreLOS later merged with Lastfoot.com, and became "NeTraverse".
So:
Locus -> Platinum -> DASCOM -> IBM -> TreLOS + Lastfoot -> NeTraverse
"If what you want in a game is basically Doom with shiny surfaces, then you're fine."
It seems like a lot of people are complaining that Doom 3 is just like the original Doom and Doom 2. This seems rather obvious to me. I certainly expected Doom 3 to be like Doom 1 and Doom 2.
Complaining about this seems like complaining that the movie Titanic was too predictable. (Hint: The ship sinks.)
Obviously, Doom's style of gameplay isn't for everyone. I'm certainly not going to try and tell anyone that they have to like Doom 3. Or Far Cry, for that matter. But I am surprised that so many people were themselves surprised that this sequel to a sequel is just like it's predecessors.
I played Doom 3 for a little over an hour at one of those "computer game center" places. I was really impressed. My original thought was that the game would not be worth the $500 or so I will have to spend to upgrade my home game rig to play Doon 3. I have changed my mind; I will be upgrading and buying Doom 3 soon. Good job.
FYI, I've heard that game publishers don't like those "computer game centers" because they feel they are losing revenue (i.e., royalties). In my case, at least, you gained a customer -- you didn't lose one. If, on the other hand, I was not able to try the game cheaply and easily as I did, I likely would still be planning on holding off on my purchase.
Ignore all the people complaining that Doom 3 is just like Doom and Doom ][. I guess they must not have noticed the word "Doom" in the title.:-)
"Christ, I thought the exact thing when I first received my pistol and went into a dark room."
To heck with the duck tape. I have two hands. You can even see them by switching to the "Fists" weapon. I can hold a pistol with my right and a flashlight with my left. That lets me be able to aim and shoot *at the same time*. What a concept. Yet instead I'm running around like a headless chicken because the game's too stupid to let me use both, unless I'm punching someone. Argghhh!
I mean, obviously, you need two hands for anything larger then a pistol. And I am well-aware of the fact that a two-handed grip yields far better accuracy even for a wide-bore pistol. But being able to see your target yields better accuracy, too.
"64 bit processors also have 16 GPRs, which is a HUGE improvement over 8."
The number of registers has nothing to do with the word size. The 32-bit SPARC has 24 general-purpose registers, for example. The 64-bit Alpha has 64 GPRs (32 integer and 32 FP). There's no reason we have to have a 64-bit word size just to get more registers. Nor is there any reason to limit the number of registers to 16, for that matter. That smells like 8086-induced brain damage. If we're going to go for more registers, why not make it 32 or even more? Registers are something that most applications will actually use.
I can understand wanting more registers, but why needlessly couple that to the word size?
"When will they start building chips that have no support for 32-bit software?"
"64-bit" is not "better" then "32-bit" just because 64 > 32.
The size of an address word determines the memory space you can address, and most people are simply unlikely to need more then 4 GB of virtual segment size for at least the next ten years. I'm convinced that most processors will have a 64-bit address word because obviously most people think like you do and believe a bigger number automatically means a better product. That does not, however, change the reality that a 64-bit address space is a complete waste for most people.
"64bit CPUs to become the norm (seems to be happening)"
Why do people care about this so much? A 64-bit address space only matters if you have more then 4 GB of RAM. That's a crapload of RAM, any way you look at it. In some cases, moving from 32-bit to 64-bit can even slow things down, because now you're spending time managing twice the address space. I'd much rather have a dual-core 32-bit chip then a 64-bit chip.
Me: "Just like we had the state of software back in 1956 when he wrote the book."
AC: "It was actually 1975. But your point still holds true."
That was a deliberate over-simplification. I should have known somebody here would call me on it. Full version:
The original edition of TMMM was copyright in 1975, yes. However, Brooks based his writings on his professional experience. He was working on projects relating to IBM's mainframe computer products in 1956. He became manager of the OS/360 project in 1964. He actually wrote most of the essays in TMMM from 1965 to 1974. I don't have exact dates for original publication, but I know some or all of the essays (including the "The Mythical Man-Month") were published separately, albeit in much less widely distributed media, prior to the book.
Then, of course, in the "20th Anniversary" Edition, we have a renewed copyright of 1995, an essay "No Silver Bullet" first published in 1986, and a retrospective chapter written in 1994.
I, of course, used the 1956 date because it sounds the most impressive. However, I honestly believe it is a valid "starting date" for the field of personal experience on which Brooks bases his essays.
"instead of creating something new that also works... or works better"
Well, there is no doubt a tendency to stick with what is known to work. It's down to a science at this point, meaning it's a lot cheaper to produce. Creativity costs time (and therefore money); a creative idea needs to be developed before it becomes a working technique; and most of all, it might not work as well the tried-and-true. There's thus little incentive to try new things, and quite a bit of incentive to go with what works.
At the same time, though, you have to remember that they're ultimately working with human psychology, which means that the number of different things they can do that work will be limited. Us humans will react certain ways to certain things because biology has programmed us that way. That puts a bounding box around their potential creativity. They have to push the envelope without breaking it. That's even harder, and more of an engineering problem then an artistic one. It may well be that the tried-and-true formula is the most reliable way to get the most people excited the way they want. It's tried-and-true for a reason, after all.
Remember, the goal of a game trailer (or even most movies) isn't to be as creative as possible, but to sell as much product as possible.
When Fred Brooks published his book, The Mythical Man-Month, one of the things he noted was that testing should acount for *more then half* of the budget of a software project. Actual design and coding should be the minority. This is because software is complex, inter-related, easy to do wrong, and not obvious when it is done wrong.
Of course, nobody wants to do that, because it's expensive and/or boring. Thus we have the state of software today. Just like we had the state of software back in 1956 when he wrote the book.
It never ceases to amaze me that we're still making the same exact mistakes, 50 years later. If you work in software engineering, and you haven't read The Mythical Man-Month, you *need* to. Period. Go do it right now, before you write another line of code.
"Why does nearly every single video game "trailer" try to copy the "cool kids" in Hollywood?!"
Because pretty much all of their customers are human, and thus will react the same way to that carefully constructed stimuli. Video directors use those techniques because they *work*. They trigger the same reactions in most humans, by working on the wetware at a very old and fundamental level. They thus attract interest and get the blood pumping, making people want to see the movie/play the game/buy the product. Thus generating more money.
To people new to BitTorrent: Leave the BitTorrent program running after your download completes. That lets other people grab fragments of the file from your computer, using your outgoing bandwidth (which is likely mostly idle anyway). I downloaded the file in a couple of minutes, but my cable modem is still pumping out 30 kilobyte/sec to other BT peers.
(If someone here is actually using your outgoing bandwidth for other things, consider yourself mentioned, and spare the Slashdot reply.:) )
You've obviously never seen the battery plant in a telco CO.
The telephone system (in the US, anyway) runs on -48 volts of direct current. Every telco CO (Central Office -- the other end of your phone line) has big banks of batteries. We're talking rows and rows of shelves of batteries for a big city CO. It may be less then 50 volts, but we're talking thousands of amps. You short a main bus bar with a screwdriver, and you'll likely vaporize the screwdriver -- and go blind from the arc flash.
As I've been zapped by talk battery on residental lines and felt the tingle, *something* must be flowing. So I wouldn't want to bet my line of that 50 volt potential not being strong enough to make it over your skin.
The Escalade 8506-12 has 12 x SATA ports onboard. Full hardware implementation; appears as a SCSI host adapter to the OS. Drivers and management utilities for MS-Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. It will even email you if you have a disk failure.
3Ware was one of the first ATA RAID vendors to put a driver in the Linux kernel, and it was a fully-supported, GPL driver from day one. Rock solid stuff. Good tech support, too.
"... mainframe had 32K, and the tube was black and green..."
You had memory? Why, back in my day, all we had was a bunch of people standing around flipping knife-switches. Tube?!? We didn't have no stinking tubes! We had a stone tablets hooked up to a steam-driven hammer! And you didn't hear us complaining, let me tell you! We were happy for what we had!
Matlock? Matlock!? Is that one of those new-fangled tele-vision thingies? Why...
"sigh... OK, you're right, I'm just arguing from emotion."
Look, do you have a point to make, or not? You keep asserting there is some fundamental difference between the *doze and *nix features I am describing, but don't detail what those differences are. I list what I think are critical similarities, and you tell my I'm silly. Maybe I am, but that's not the subject under discussion. If you honestly believe what you say, I expect you to back it up. Maybe you've got some angle or data-point I haven't considered. Something that might change my mind. However, I am unlikely to change my mind based solely on the fact that you think I'm silly.
"you're not differentiating between a protocol handler and/bin/sh... this is just silly."
You are required to do more then just say "this is just silly" before one can reasonably say you have submitted sufficient evidence to justify an argument.
What is the difference between a "protocol handler" and a "script interpreter" in this discussion? Both are programs which handle data Mozilla could not otherwise handle. Both are external to Mozilla. Both are provided by the host OS. Both can be matched to data using facilities provided by the host OS. Neither should be blindly trusted with untrusted input.
What is the difference between the "URI scheme registry" and "/etc/mailcap" in this discussion? Both are a central location where external mechanisms can be looked up. Both are provided by the host OS. Neither should be blindly used with untrusted input.
If your only proof-point is to say "this is just silly", I can only conclude you are arguing from emotion rather then logic. I'd like to blame this on Microsoft incompetence, too. But the fact of the matter is, there is/was a security exposure in Mozilla.
"This is not an executable, it's an URL (or at least it looks like one), and Windows is supposed to handle it as an URL."
I don't see anything anywhere that says "URLs are always safe". Please point me to the section of some document where that is claimed.
"An URL firefox doesn't understand could be news: - and calling Windows' URL-handler is supposed to open the news reader."
Right. And I don't want Mozilla opening any external program without asking first, unless I've explictly told it to do so. Period. It doesn't do that on *nix; why does it do that on *doze?
Slashdot Mirror
"if it is not realistic then they have no business claiming the authority"
We (or rather, our ancestors) *gave* them that authority. Read the Constituion some time.
(My apologies to non-US citizens. This is a US-centric post. But then, so is the article.)
"the reaction of everyone on this page is that there must be some that does: a fairly good indication that practitioners versed in the art regard the idea as obvious."
;-)
Right, and this forum is of course a fair, objective environment, where nobody has any kind of bias against Microsoft.
I made a cursory reading the patent (my eyes start to glaze over if I try to read something like that in detail without sufficient preparation and motivation). If I had to guess, I would say this is part of Microsoft's effort to fix the hideous state of security design in their Windows product, as it is typically deployed for consumers. That is, everyone can do anything to most any Windows box, but still expects Microsoft to protect them from it. I'm thinking Microsoft is trying to come up with a way to let users do what they want, while still protecting users from themselves, using a daemon that checks what the code is trying to do.
Apple kinda does this with Mac OS X, which pops up dialogs whenever an installer needs more privileges, or whatever. And, of course, like everyone else here has been pointing out, the patent starts off with something very like sudo (but the patent goes into all sorts of detail that sudo doesn't care much about).
Whether or not the idea is patentable is not mine to say. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know when Microsoft developed these ideas. Remember, under US patent law, it is not when you file, but when you come up with the idea, that matters. If Microsoft came up with the idea before sudo's author did, sudo loses. (Not that I think that's likely, but that's just a guess on my part.)
"No one I know personally has had much of a life since the release of Doom III."
What do you mean, "since"?
(Sorry, but I saw the shot and had to take it.)
"Win4Lin was basically the same thing OS/2 used to run Windows 3.1 applications."
..."
:-(
Not quite. IBM and Microsoft of course had access to the Windows source code, so they basically built a version of Windows that ran as an application under OS/2. At least, that was how my "blue spine" version of OS/2 Warp worked. I never used the "red spine" flavor, so that might do things differently.
Win4Lin, on the other hand, is a third-party VM. It boots and runs the "regular" Microsoft Windows, much like you do on a real machine.
"It actually ran a patched version Windows next to Linux."
Win4Lin does not really patch Windows. They do provide drivers for their virtual hardware, but that's not the same thing. They also offer an optional Winsock replacement for single-IP-address network access. I suppose you could call that a patch, but as I said, it is optional. I run Win4Lin using their virtual network card instead, which gets its own IP address on the LAN.
"It required kernel patches to Linux, too
Yes. One patch to the kernel network interface (for the above mentioned network trickery), another to the scheduler to make it friendly to their VM technology. The scheduler patch is quite small and, as I understand it, fairly unobtrusive. I know that some distributions (e.g., Mandrake) even ship their kernels pre-patched for Win4Lin.
"... it was doing some very low-level trickery to basically make Windows and Linux run in the same memory space."
Not really the same memory space. My understanding is limited, but as I understand it, Linux is already giving each process a virtual memory space to run in. The patches enable Netraverse to give their VM a task and memory segment under Linux.
"I forget if it was 3.1 or 9x, though. I'm thinking 9x, but could be wrong."
Win4Lin can run MS-DOS, or MS-Windows 95, 98, or ME. Netraverse is currently working to enable Windows 2000/XP as well. No time frame yet.
More info here: http://www.netraverse.com.
"Hmm, never heard of NeTraverse Merge... who develops it?"
Netraverse, of course. The Win4Lin people. Actually, Win4Lin and Merge are basically the same product.
"How does it compare with WINE?"
From a technical standpoint, we're talking apples and oranges. Wine is a project to independently implement a runtime environment that will be binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. Win4Lin is an i386 virtualization tool tailored to run Microsoft Windows in a VM (virtual machine) on i386-based *nix.
From a practical standpoint, both are useful. Wine is, of course, free, while Win4Lin is a commercial product. Wine does not require any Microsoft software; Win4Lin requires you to provide MS Windows (to install and run in the VM). Wine is trying to chase Microsoft's moving target; Win4Lin lets you run the real thing. Wine uses less resources. Win4Lin is far more compatible -- it works with most any non-multimedia application flawlessly.
I use both. Win4Lin is extremely useful; it lets me run "the real thing" in a VM ("Windows in a window"), but with significantly better performance then VMware (doubtless because Win4Lin is tuned to just run Windows, while VMware is a full-blown, general-purpose VM). Wine yields better performance for applications which work with Wine. Win4Lin means no Wine compatability headaches; just install and run like a "real" 'doze box.
FWIW, IMO, YMMV, HTH, HAND, etc.
Here's the history behind Win4Lin/Netraverse, from my files:
It appears the company which originally developed the Merge software was "Locus Computing Corporation". They marketed a product called "DOS/Merge", which is the ancestor to the Win4Lin that we all know and love. DOS/Merge was later called "386/Merge" when 386 protected mode support was added.
At some point, a company called "Platinum" bought Locus. They apparently integrated Merge with other components into product lines called "PC-Enterprise" and "PC-Interface".
The Merge product was licensed to several other companies, including SCO, Sun, and HP. Sun and SCO both have commercial Unix products that run on Intel hardware; they offer "SCO Merge" and "Sun Merge" as layered products for their Unixes. (SCO, of course, later sold major assets (including their name) to Caldera, and Caldera then changed their name to SCO.)
At some point, a company called "DASCOM" bought the rights to Merge from Platinum. (Shortly thereafter, Platinum was bought by Computer Associates (CA), and fell off the Earth.) DASCOM was later bought by IBM. IBM was not interested in Merge, and spun the Merge group off as "TreLOS". TreLOS later merged with Lastfoot.com, and became "NeTraverse".
So:
Locus -> Platinum -> DASCOM -> IBM -> TreLOS + Lastfoot -> NeTraverse
DOS/Merge -> 386/Merge -> PC-Enterprise & PC-Interface -> Win4Lin
"I don't care if it's in the dictionary or not."
:-)
That's funny in itself.
"'Obsolete' is not a verb, damnit."
All nouns can be verbed.
"If what you want in a game is basically Doom with shiny surfaces, then you're fine."
It seems like a lot of people are complaining that Doom 3 is just like the original Doom and Doom 2. This seems rather obvious to me. I certainly expected Doom 3 to be like Doom 1 and Doom 2.
Complaining about this seems like complaining that the movie Titanic was too predictable. (Hint: The ship sinks.)
Obviously, Doom's style of gameplay isn't for everyone. I'm certainly not going to try and tell anyone that they have to like Doom 3. Or Far Cry, for that matter. But I am surprised that so many people were themselves surprised that this sequel to a sequel is just like it's predecessors.
I played Doom 3 for a little over an hour at one of those "computer game center" places. I was really impressed. My original thought was that the game would not be worth the $500 or so I will have to spend to upgrade my home game rig to play Doon 3. I have changed my mind; I will be upgrading and buying Doom 3 soon. Good job.
:-)
FYI, I've heard that game publishers don't like those "computer game centers" because they feel they are losing revenue (i.e., royalties). In my case, at least, you gained a customer -- you didn't lose one. If, on the other hand, I was not able to try the game cheaply and easily as I did, I likely would still be planning on holding off on my purchase.
Ignore all the people complaining that Doom 3 is just like Doom and Doom ][. I guess they must not have noticed the word "Doom" in the title.
"Christ, I thought the exact thing when I first received my pistol and went into a dark room."
:-)
To heck with the duck tape. I have two hands. You can even see them by switching to the "Fists" weapon. I can hold a pistol with my right and a flashlight with my left. That lets me be able to aim and shoot *at the same time*. What a concept. Yet instead I'm running around like a headless chicken because the game's too stupid to let me use both, unless I'm punching someone. Argghhh!
I mean, obviously, you need two hands for anything larger then a pistol. And I am well-aware of the fact that a two-handed grip yields far better accuracy even for a wide-bore pistol. But being able to see your target yields better accuracy, too.
It's not like I'm asking a lot, id.
"64 bit processors also have 16 GPRs, which is a HUGE improvement over 8."
The number of registers has nothing to do with the word size. The 32-bit SPARC has 24 general-purpose registers, for example. The 64-bit Alpha has 64 GPRs (32 integer and 32 FP). There's no reason we have to have a 64-bit word size just to get more registers. Nor is there any reason to limit the number of registers to 16, for that matter. That smells like 8086-induced brain damage. If we're going to go for more registers, why not make it 32 or even more? Registers are something that most applications will actually use.
I can understand wanting more registers, but why needlessly couple that to the word size?
"When will they start building chips that have no support for 32-bit software?"
"64-bit" is not "better" then "32-bit" just because 64 > 32.
The size of an address word determines the memory space you can address, and most people are simply unlikely to need more then 4 GB of virtual segment size for at least the next ten years. I'm convinced that most processors will have a 64-bit address word because obviously most people think like you do and believe a bigger number automatically means a better product. That does not, however, change the reality that a 64-bit address space is a complete waste for most people.
"64bit CPUs to become the norm (seems to be happening)"
Why do people care about this so much? A 64-bit address space only matters if you have more then 4 GB of RAM. That's a crapload of RAM, any way you look at it. In some cases, moving from 32-bit to 64-bit can even slow things down, because now you're spending time managing twice the address space. I'd much rather have a dual-core 32-bit chip then a 64-bit chip.
Me: "Just like we had the state of software back in 1956 when he wrote the book."
AC: "It was actually 1975. But your point still holds true."
That was a deliberate over-simplification. I should have known somebody here would call me on it. Full version:
The original edition of TMMM was copyright in 1975, yes. However, Brooks based his writings on his professional experience. He was working on projects relating to IBM's mainframe computer products in 1956. He became manager of the OS/360 project in 1964. He actually wrote most of the essays in TMMM from 1965 to 1974. I don't have exact dates for original publication, but I know some or all of the essays (including the "The Mythical Man-Month") were published separately, albeit in much less widely distributed media, prior to the book.
Then, of course, in the "20th Anniversary" Edition, we have a renewed copyright of 1995, an essay "No Silver Bullet" first published in 1986, and a retrospective chapter written in 1994.
I, of course, used the 1956 date because it sounds the most impressive. However, I honestly believe it is a valid "starting date" for the field of personal experience on which Brooks bases his essays.
"instead of creating something new that also works... or works better"
Well, there is no doubt a tendency to stick with what is known to work. It's down to a science at this point, meaning it's a lot cheaper to produce. Creativity costs time (and therefore money); a creative idea needs to be developed before it becomes a working technique; and most of all, it might not work as well the tried-and-true. There's thus little incentive to try new things, and quite a bit of incentive to go with what works.
At the same time, though, you have to remember that they're ultimately working with human psychology, which means that the number of different things they can do that work will be limited. Us humans will react certain ways to certain things because biology has programmed us that way. That puts a bounding box around their potential creativity. They have to push the envelope without breaking it. That's even harder, and more of an engineering problem then an artistic one. It may well be that the tried-and-true formula is the most reliable way to get the most people excited the way they want. It's tried-and-true for a reason, after all.
Remember, the goal of a game trailer (or even most movies) isn't to be as creative as possible, but to sell as much product as possible.
When Fred Brooks published his book, The Mythical Man-Month, one of the things he noted was that testing should acount for *more then half* of the budget of a software project. Actual design and coding should be the minority. This is because software is complex, inter-related, easy to do wrong, and not obvious when it is done wrong.
Of course, nobody wants to do that, because it's expensive and/or boring. Thus we have the state of software today. Just like we had the state of software back in 1956 when he wrote the book.
It never ceases to amaze me that we're still making the same exact mistakes, 50 years later. If you work in software engineering, and you haven't read The Mythical Man-Month, you *need* to. Period. Go do it right now, before you write another line of code.
"Why does nearly every single video game "trailer" try to copy the "cool kids" in Hollywood?!"
Because pretty much all of their customers are human, and thus will react the same way to that carefully constructed stimuli. Video directors use those techniques because they *work*. They trigger the same reactions in most humans, by working on the wetware at a very old and fundamental level. They thus attract interest and get the blood pumping, making people want to see the movie/play the game/buy the product. Thus generating more money.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.
To people new to BitTorrent: Leave the BitTorrent program running after your download completes. That lets other people grab fragments of the file from your computer, using your outgoing bandwidth (which is likely mostly idle anyway). I downloaded the file in a couple of minutes, but my cable modem is still pumping out 30 kilobyte/sec to other BT peers.
:) )
(If someone here is actually using your outgoing bandwidth for other things, consider yourself mentioned, and spare the Slashdot reply.
"So it's pretty hard to hurt yourself with DC."
You've obviously never seen the battery plant in a telco CO.
The telephone system (in the US, anyway) runs on -48 volts of direct current. Every telco CO (Central Office -- the other end of your phone line) has big banks of batteries. We're talking rows and rows of shelves of batteries for a big city CO. It may be less then 50 volts, but we're talking thousands of amps. You short a main bus bar with a screwdriver, and you'll likely vaporize the screwdriver -- and go blind from the arc flash.
As I've been zapped by talk battery on residental lines and felt the tingle, *something* must be flowing. So I wouldn't want to bet my line of that 50 volt potential not being strong enough to make it over your skin.
3Ware Escalade -- http://www.3ware.com/
The Escalade 8506-12 has 12 x SATA ports onboard. Full hardware implementation; appears as a SCSI host adapter to the OS. Drivers and management utilities for MS-Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. It will even email you if you have a disk failure.
3Ware was one of the first ATA RAID vendors to put a driver in the Linux kernel, and it was a fully-supported, GPL driver from day one. Rock solid stuff. Good tech support, too.
Highly recommended.
"... mainframe had 32K, and the tube was black and green ..."
You had memory? Why, back in my day, all we had was a bunch of people standing around flipping knife-switches. Tube?!? We didn't have no stinking tubes! We had a stone tablets hooked up to a steam-driven hammer! And you didn't hear us complaining, let me tell you! We were happy for what we had!
Matlock? Matlock!? Is that one of those new-fangled tele-vision thingies? Why...
"Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 coming out soon, I think its time to upgrade from windows 95"
Or, in my case, I think it's time to revive my MS-Windows partition.
Sorry, Linux, but a geek's gotta do what a geek's gotta do.
"sigh... OK, you're right, I'm just arguing from emotion."
Look, do you have a point to make, or not? You keep asserting there is some fundamental difference between the *doze and *nix features I am describing, but don't detail what those differences are. I list what I think are critical similarities, and you tell my I'm silly. Maybe I am, but that's not the subject under discussion. If you honestly believe what you say, I expect you to back it up. Maybe you've got some angle or data-point I haven't considered. Something that might change my mind. However, I am unlikely to change my mind based solely on the fact that you think I'm silly.
"you're not differentiating between a protocol handler and /bin/sh... this is just silly."
You are required to do more then just say "this is just silly" before one can reasonably say you have submitted sufficient evidence to justify an argument.
What is the difference between a "protocol handler" and a "script interpreter" in this discussion? Both are programs which handle data Mozilla could not otherwise handle. Both are external to Mozilla. Both are provided by the host OS. Both can be matched to data using facilities provided by the host OS. Neither should be blindly trusted with untrusted input.
What is the difference between the "URI scheme registry" and "/etc/mailcap" in this discussion? Both are a central location where external mechanisms can be looked up. Both are provided by the host OS. Neither should be blindly used with untrusted input.
If your only proof-point is to say "this is just silly", I can only conclude you are arguing from emotion rather then logic. I'd like to blame this on Microsoft incompetence, too. But the fact of the matter is, there is/was a security exposure in Mozilla.
"The fact that once they realized it could be a problem they did block it is only a good thing."
Unfortunately, it appears it took Mozilla at least two years to fix this problem.
See my comment here for details.
"This is not an executable, it's an URL (or at least it looks like one), and Windows is supposed to handle it as an URL."
I don't see anything anywhere that says "URLs are always safe". Please point me to the section of some document where that is claimed.
"An URL firefox doesn't understand could be news: - and calling Windows' URL-handler is supposed to open the news reader."
Right. And I don't want Mozilla opening any external program without asking first, unless I've explictly told it to do so. Period. It doesn't do that on *nix; why does it do that on *doze?