Lanier's own "research" isn't all that creative. In VR he spent a crapload of money doing things that people would do anyway once the hardware gets cheap enough.
Aside from that, he tends toward a limited-understanding kind of bloviating. It's the worst kind of fluffy futurism. It wouldn't be so offensive if it weren't coupled with his oddly oily smugness.
Silverlight is not about competing with Javascript at all.
Yeah, right. Silverlight is a lot of things to a lot of people, but saying that it doesn't compete with Javascript/DHTML is silly. Both are ways of making web apps more interactive. The Chess speed demo from Mix 07 is one example of Microsoft explicitly comparing Silverlight to Javascript on speed. And speed (through, among other things, a type system) is one of the main additions in ES4.
Silverlight is about competing with adobe flash, which by the way is way ahead of microsoft at the moment for the robust web app space, so why did you choose to bash Microsoft and not adobe? Never mind, we know the answer.
The answer is because Adobe is helping with ES4 and Microsoft is spreading FUD about it.
They have no objections to something new, just dont break the old.
Ecmascript 4 doesn't break the old; it's completely compatible with (a superset of) Ecmascript 3. The Microsoft people haven't given a single example of an incompatibility; what they're saying is literally FUD.
Detect an opponent's emotions? Wow, it's not like we've had tens or hundreds of thousands of years living in communities to evolve something like that.
Of course, the capacity for empathy probably is lacking in some of our war planners.
BitTorrent is a bit like a poor-man's multicast. If the ISPs had properly implemented multicast in the first place, they could have saved themselves a lot of the bandwidth that Bittorrent is using now.
It would be nice to combine BitTorrent with multicast, especially for the initial seeding. Maybe we can have our bandwidth-saving multicast cake and eat our BitTorrent asynchrony as well.
I'd be willing to pay to get a machine-readable schedule of shows. But I'd certainly be willing to pay more for a machine-readable record of exactly when the commercials were.
My favorite earplugs for concert-going are the Alpine Musicsafe plugs. They have a decently flat attenuation curve, they're fairly low-profile (don't stick out much), and they don't completely kill the sound like safety-oriented plugs do.
Why should one person's missing 5% be so different from everyone else's? If any part of that 5% is missing functionality that most people want, then the right thing to do is implement that missing functionality for everyone, rather than having it be optional.
Also, when person A wants it one way and person B wants it another way, a lot of the time both ways are just special cases of some more general third way. In that case, synthesizing both of those viewpoints is the right way to go but it's hard work, and it takes time.
Leaving that stuff as a bunch of configuration options is just a cop-out; it's better to actually do the hard work of making it work right, rather than making people choose to have it work right in one situation or the other.
All of the commercial database software packages (that I know of) have a specific part of the license which forbids publishing benchmarks. You'll never see head-to-head benchmarks of MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or any others, because they don't feel that any benchmarks would reflect the results of their product fully optimized.
I have seen this said a number of times, and I believe it, but there must be some exception that allows the TPC results to get published. I'd love to see one of the Postgres support companies join TPC and get some numbers up there. They even have cost-normalized benchmarks (like transactions/second per dollar or data warehouse-type queries/second per dollar) that I'm sure would show the open source databases in a pretty good light. Especially in the "non-clustered" category. Even if Postgres didn't win, just having it shown in the same context would be great.
The people who are using JMRI's software without abiding by the license terms are clearly assholes, and I'll enjoy watching them lose this court battle.
That said, the project made things harder for their attorney by using the Artistic License. Wanting to avoid legalese is a nice sentiment, but it made the Artistic License less clear than it should be, and now the attorney is having to do extra work to shore it up (this takes up a big chunk of their November 3rd opposition).
People above you in the hierarchy are the ones who decide what resources you get, no? You've said that resource constraints are the reason you didn't implement all of the CSS fixes you would have liked.
When people at Microsoft (of all places) complain about being resource constrained, then it's clear that someone in the hierarchy doesn't consider what they're doing to be terribly important.
Good public policy, like good engineering, measures outcomes, not inputs. I don't care what class of car someone owns. Nor do I care that they are buying a gallon of gas today, which is what a tax on gas measures. Neither of those things has anything necessary connection with how much a person pollutes.
Since carbon is conserved, the carbon input is the same as the carbon output. If we're mainly interested in CO2 (and not, in the context of this lawsuit at least, interested in other pollutants) then measuring the fuel (carbon) input is a very good way of estimating the CO2 output.
I'm writing this using an LCD panel that is 1920 actual physical pixels across and 1080 actual physical pixels vertically. It cost less than $1400 to my door; well in the consumer range. This display (the Westinghouse LVM-37w3) is actually the second generation; the previous one (the LVM-37w1) came out more than a year ago.
The AVS Forum threads on these things are huge--there must be a fair number of people buying them.
It's not technically a TV since there's no tuner, but that doesn't matter for the xbox.
I've got the Westinghouse LVM-37w3 hooked up to a PC over DVI, and it works great. It's doing 1920x1080 @ 60hz; when I watch DVDs the computer is doing the 24fps->60fps conversion. This does introduce some judder; it seems like the LCD ought to be able to do 24hz or a multiple thereof but I don't know how to do it.
The judder, by the way, is only rarely noticeable and is pretty much the same everywhere else AFAIK, but it would be nice to get rid of it. The software infrastructure for detecting the frame rate of the source and auto-switching the display mode just isn't there though. In other words, I want it to be 60hz most of the time, and automatically switch to 24 or 48 hz when I'm watching a DVD that originally came from a (24 fps) film source, but not when I'm watching a DVD that originally came from a (30 fps) video source. Getting the display and X and the media players to work together to do that is a little way off though AFAICT.
This is my X modeline:
ModeLine "1920x1080" 138.5 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1082 1087 1111
The standard autodetection/setup in Fedora Core 4 didn't set up the display right, but after trying it, I found the above numbers by looking in the X log output.
One difference is that the.NET native code interface (PInvoke) is easier to use than JNI. The GNOME mono people are having a much easier time wrapping native libs than the people working on the GNOME java bindings, for example.
Reporters and editors need to know who the source is to decide whether or not to write about what they say. Otherwise they'd be publishing all kinds of false-but-plausible stuff from cranks. If the reporters and editors know, a court can order them to testify. No amount of fancy software can eliminate that risk.
Depending on the show, I'd pay to avoid commercials. My time is worth more than advertisers are willing to pay--broadcasters get maybe a dollar or two (at most, and usually much less) for making me sit through 17 minutes of commercials (which is typical for an hour of US TV). I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people out there that would pay to avoid commercials on their favorite shows.
You have to build the foundation first. Making things easy to use is a hugely important goal for the GNOME devs, but there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of low-level system work that's required to make things easy to use. Things like HAL and NetworkManager are great examples of this. If you can write a piece of system software to configure something automatically, you'd be doing your users a disservice by diverting effort into making a pretty GUI to configure it.
The summary says it will make them feel lusty, but that reproduction is in the future. How cruel is it to make them want to reproduce without being able to?
Not that I've ever been in their position, of course. Ahem.
Slashdot Mirror
Lanier's own "research" isn't all that creative. In VR he spent a crapload of money doing things that people would do anyway once the hardware gets cheap enough.
Aside from that, he tends toward a limited-understanding kind of bloviating. It's the worst kind of fluffy futurism. It wouldn't be so offensive if it weren't coupled with his oddly oily smugness.
Right, so instead of running electrical cables into the fuel tanks, we'll just shoot lasers into them instead.
Yeah, right. Silverlight is a lot of things to a lot of people, but saying that it doesn't compete with Javascript/DHTML is silly. Both are ways of making web apps more interactive. The Chess speed demo from Mix 07 is one example of Microsoft explicitly comparing Silverlight to Javascript on speed. And speed (through, among other things, a type system) is one of the main additions in ES4.
The answer is because Adobe is helping with ES4 and Microsoft is spreading FUD about it.
Ecmascript 4 doesn't break the old; it's completely compatible with (a superset of) Ecmascript 3. The Microsoft people haven't given a single example of an incompatibility; what they're saying is literally FUD.
Detect an opponent's emotions? Wow, it's not like we've had tens or hundreds of thousands of years living in communities to evolve something like that.
Of course, the capacity for empathy probably is lacking in some of our war planners.
BitTorrent is a bit like a poor-man's multicast. If the ISPs had properly implemented multicast in the first place, they could have saved themselves a lot of the bandwidth that Bittorrent is using now.
It would be nice to combine BitTorrent with multicast, especially for the initial seeding. Maybe we can have our bandwidth-saving multicast cake and eat our BitTorrent asynchrony as well.
I'd be willing to pay to get a machine-readable schedule of shows. But I'd certainly be willing to pay more for a machine-readable record of exactly when the commercials were.
Not that that's likely to happen any time soon.
My favorite earplugs for concert-going are the Alpine Musicsafe plugs. They have a decently flat attenuation curve, they're fairly low-profile (don't stick out much), and they don't completely kill the sound like safety-oriented plugs do.
Why should one person's missing 5% be so different from everyone else's? If any part of that 5% is missing functionality that most people want, then the right thing to do is implement that missing functionality for everyone, rather than having it be optional.
Also, when person A wants it one way and person B wants it another way, a lot of the time both ways are just special cases of some more general third way. In that case, synthesizing both of those viewpoints is the right way to go but it's hard work, and it takes time.
Leaving that stuff as a bunch of configuration options is just a cop-out; it's better to actually do the hard work of making it work right, rather than making people choose to have it work right in one situation or the other.
He's just opened up some pretty tough definition questions. Who counts as a "security researcher"? Who counts as a "film professor"?
Sign up now to be a faculty member in the film department of my brand new internet university!
The people who are using JMRI's software without abiding by the license terms are clearly assholes, and I'll enjoy watching them lose this court battle.
That said, the project made things harder for their attorney by using the Artistic License. Wanting to avoid legalese is a nice sentiment, but it made the Artistic License less clear than it should be, and now the attorney is having to do extra work to shore it up (this takes up a big chunk of their November 3rd opposition).
People above you in the hierarchy are the ones who decide what resources you get, no? You've said that resource constraints are the reason you didn't implement all of the CSS fixes you would have liked.
When people at Microsoft (of all places) complain about being resource constrained, then it's clear that someone in the hierarchy doesn't consider what they're doing to be terribly important.
I'm writing this using an LCD panel that is 1920 actual physical pixels across and 1080 actual physical pixels vertically. It cost less than $1400 to my door; well in the consumer range. This display (the Westinghouse LVM-37w3) is actually the second generation; the previous one (the LVM-37w1) came out more than a year ago.
The AVS Forum threads on these things are huge--there must be a fair number of people buying them.
It's not technically a TV since there's no tuner, but that doesn't matter for the xbox.
I've got the Westinghouse LVM-37w3 hooked up to a PC over DVI, and it works great. It's doing 1920x1080 @ 60hz; when I watch DVDs the computer is doing the 24fps->60fps conversion. This does introduce some judder; it seems like the LCD ought to be able to do 24hz or a multiple thereof but I don't know how to do it.
The judder, by the way, is only rarely noticeable and is pretty much the same everywhere else AFAIK, but it would be nice to get rid of it. The software infrastructure for detecting the frame rate of the source and auto-switching the display mode just isn't there though. In other words, I want it to be 60hz most of the time, and automatically switch to 24 or 48 hz when I'm watching a DVD that originally came from a (24 fps) film source, but not when I'm watching a DVD that originally came from a (30 fps) video source. Getting the display and X and the media players to work together to do that is a little way off though AFAICT.
This is my X modeline:
ModeLine "1920x1080" 138.5 1920 1968 2000 2080 1080 1082 1087 1111
The standard autodetection/setup in Fedora Core 4 didn't set up the display right, but after trying it, I found the above numbers by looking in the X log output.
If anything, python is getting less lisp-like. Guido wants to get rid of lambda, map(), filter() and reduce() in Python 3000.
A stray ricochet might also kill your spherical horse.
Silence!!!
I concur
Went to Slashdot, for transporting stories out of the past onto the front page.
One difference is that the .NET native code interface (PInvoke) is easier to use than JNI. The GNOME mono people are having a much easier time wrapping native libs than the people working on the GNOME java bindings, for example.
Reporters and editors need to know who the source is to decide whether or not to write about what they say. Otherwise they'd be publishing all kinds of false-but-plausible stuff from cranks. If the reporters and editors know, a court can order them to testify. No amount of fancy software can eliminate that risk.
Depending on the show, I'd pay to avoid commercials. My time is worth more than advertisers are willing to pay--broadcasters get maybe a dollar or two (at most, and usually much less) for making me sit through 17 minutes of commercials (which is typical for an hour of US TV). I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people out there that would pay to avoid commercials on their favorite shows.
You have to build the foundation first. Making things easy to use is a hugely important goal for the GNOME devs, but there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of low-level system work that's required to make things easy to use. Things like HAL and NetworkManager are great examples of this. If you can write a piece of system software to configure something automatically, you'd be doing your users a disservice by diverting effort into making a pretty GUI to configure it.
The summary says it will make them feel lusty, but that reproduction is in the future. How cruel is it to make them want to reproduce without being able to?
Not that I've ever been in their position, of course. Ahem.