In Windows (as opposed to CMD.EXE), the file parsing functions permit either \ or / to separate path components. And that is documented. As an exception, last time I looked, UNC names had to start with \\;// was not accepted.
Indeed, "/" works even in code, for example, fopen("c:/directory/foo.txt"). Also, "//" works as well as "\\", at least in code: fopen("//server/share/dir/foo.txt"). "//" doesn't seem to work on the CMD.EXE command line, though, probably because that begins the argument with "/" which is the switch character. But that is a terrible shell, anyone doing any sort of command line work on Windows should install Cygwin and use its bash (which does support "//" in the file name).
Will work? Cross platform worms have been done before. Though instead of being customized for each OS, it just compiled itself on the host system once it got in. Since most consumer computers these days don't have compilers installed, there would have to be precompiled parts for common systems, but the idea is the same.
I absolutely agree. All laws should have to be re-passed after a maximum of 10 years, even normal laws like murder. It's pretty unlikely that the law against murder wouldn't be re-passed, but forcing all laws to be re-evaluated every X years would do a lot to clean out the crufty laws that don't apply anymore, or laws that just aren't enfoced. It would be nice if during the re-evaluation, an objective analysis of the effect of the law (does it recude crime? is it enforced?) would be included.
Maybe if legislators were busy ensuring that murder didn't become legal, they wouldn't have time to think up new laws to take away our freedoms.
My biggest annoyance with OpenOffice is that on Solaris (my main work machine), the window titles are garbled. I'm not exactly sure what is going on, but instead of something like "Untitled1 - OpenOffice.org Calc", I see "Õîôéôìåä ÏðåîÏææéãå®ïòç ×òéôåò" (curtesy of xwininfo). I've looked around a little, but never found any information on this problem. I've only ever seen it on Solaris.
Update: after looking at the hex values of each of the characters, I discovered that the text I see is the ASCII values OR'd with 0x80. It's at least consistent, but really weird (and hard to read).
Isn't that a little like saying you can avoid New York income tax by moving to California? You're still paying a tax, just to a different company (one which, IMO, is even more closed and proprietary than MS).
It's laughable that the most well known of open source software doesn't function as seemlessly on an open source operating system as it does on a proprietary Microsoft one.
It's laughable that because of Windows pathetic software management system (if the uninstall registry keys even count) that programs have to worry about how to update themselves. No, wait, it's sad. There's no good reason that an application should have to build in logic to check for and then update itself. That should be the packaging system's job. The fact that FireFox doesn't update itself on Linux is not a bug -- it's not its responsibility, nor should it be.
6,850,691 - Automatic playback overshoot correction system [this is unclear to me, is this to handle synching? there's been such corrections for year otherwise what the heck are they talking about?]
I haven't looked at the patent, but this sounds like TiVo's system of stepping backwards a little bit after the user hits "play" while fast forwarding. It's a brilliant feature, since often you don't hit play until after the point at which you wanted to play begins. It works very well, but was made somewhat moot once I enabled 30 second skip. Now, if only I could get it to automatically filter all commercials (and be able to download and play TiVo files on my Linux box).
According to Wikipedia, "[Shared Source] is not open source according to the Open Source Definition, because none of the license programs allows for commercial use of modified code". I guess it's not "freelier" than Open Source.
Nobody ever explained to me why Microsoft would inherently give a damn about DRM. As far as I know, it's the content industry that says "chain up people's PCs or we won't release high defenition material at all".
You're right, it doesn't make sense at first glance. One would think MS would want to make it easy for people to use digital media, not harder by corrupting it with digital restrictions. However, I think MS is trying to position itself as the de facto DRM provider. If all media sold online used MS DRM, then MS would probably get some percentage of that revenue. And MS loves getting money for doing no work (and who could blame them for that -- I like getting paid for doing no work, too:) Just think -- if you could get 10 cents (or whatever the fee would be) of every music track purchased in the world, wouldn't you try? MS is just capitalizing on the media industry's fears of piracy.
Further, MS does have some incentive in terms of preventing software piracy. Though MS does depend heavily on piracy to gain marketshare, once it has saturated the market, they will want to prevent piracy as much as possible. Such things as activation schemes are part of that. Once everyone has to use MS software (because everyone else does), MS doesn't care if using it is a PITA.
Agreed. Picture 16 is kind of cool, though. The couch is in focus, but the background is heavily motion blurred. Makes it look like the couch is really moving.
I'm no Windows fan, but technically, the same is true of IE. It's tied into the desktop environment the same way KHTML is. The two big differences (which help KDE) are (a) most users don't run as root in KDE, while most users run as root (Administrator) in Windows, and (b) KDE isn't the only DE for Linux, while Explorer is the only DE in Windows. That latter point is why people tend to think that IE is tied into the OS. It's not; it's tied into the only DE in Windows. Overall, not much different, but structurally, it's not much different from KDE.
Kernel developers would support kernel problems from people who have nvidia.ko loaded (I don't blame them for not wanting to hear about problems that may have been caused by the binary module).
Support for non x86 platforms (IIRC, NVidia only releases x86 binary drivers).
Enhancement of the drivers by kernel developers (for free!).
More compatitble with kernel changes (i.e., updated with the change).
Support for older cards nVidia may not want to expend resources supporting.
Going with the spirit of the Linux kernel and the GPL and the good PR that would produce.
More sales as OSS people recommend getting the nVidia card because there are good OSS drivers.
Did I miss any?
Just to be fair, disadvantages (for nVidia, there are none for the users I could think of):
Scary. I guess.
There's probably some risk involved, though I don't know what.
Would air any dirty secrets that nVidia doesn't want most people to know (but that their competitors already know because they dissassembled their closed source drivers and examined their cards). Not sure what goes here. Maybe something like the difference between a $100 card and a $200 card is the driver telling the $200 card to go faster?
No, I like innovation. Just not buying products that are just about a particular innovation (unless it's really good). I prefer products that take the best ideas from everyone else and mesh them into a nicely designed product. Though one could argue that's innovative, too. So maybe I can't escape!
I must have missed the part where I said that innovation was bad. Since I explicitly said that I like innovation. Just that innovation isn't the main driver in many of the products that I use every day. Sure, there's a little special innovation in each of them (usually in how the design is all put together), but most major stuff I let other people test before it's incorporated into the products I use. So, I know that there were innovations in the products that I use, but most of the products aren't innovations in and of themselves.
You're probably right about me being a late adopter. My VCR is still working just fine on my analog cable and low definition TV. But at least I've been running Linux for a while, so I can't be all bad:)
Personally, I think that innovation is overrated in the tech world. Sure, it's important, but how many of the products that you use on a daily basis are truly innovative in their own rights? And how many are simply other people's innovations put together in a nice package that works well? For every 1 innovative product, there are 100 others that aren't. And the 100 others will on the whole work better than the 1 innovative one.
For example, how many people want to drive an innovative car? I prefer my car to use time tested technology. Not the latest "innovative" breaking system that may or may not work all the time.
Now, don't take this to mean I don't like innovation. I do. But that shouldn't be the deciding factor for any product. Saying something is innovative says that it's new and untested. That may be great for some things, but for most things it's not. I like my non-innovative TCP/IP and non-innovative bash shell, thank you very much (to pick two things that haven't changed all that much over the years). And frankly, I like having consistency in the other applications I use, like word processors and web browsers.
So I agree with the book, innovatition is not as important as a good overall product.
And do you want a federal judge saying that you can't teach string theory in phyisics classes? AFAICT, string theory and ID are about the same scientifically (since neither can be tested). I don't think that ID should be taught in science classrooms either, but this is rediculous. Federal judges ruling what is and is not science? Since when did lawyers get that priveledge?
Actually, this is pretty standard for Microsoft. They always say that choice is good when it allows someone to choose Microsoft (i.e., if there was no choice they wouldn't get business) and that choice is bad when it allows someone to choose someone other than Microsoft (i.e., Linux, OpenOffice where ODF isn't a big push). Microsoft is all about choice in the areas that it doesn't have a monopoly.
And while it's somewhat hypocrical, it does make sense from the "we want all the money" point of view.
If users modify their system in any way, anything that happens is their fault. Smoke coming out of the power supply? It's because you added new applications to the Start toolbar!
You sure? I just tried the mouse wheel, and it scrolled the area up and down. It was kind of funny seeing the little arrow and zoom box scroll over the Windows Live logo and then up off the top of the page:)
Well, along with that, why couldn't the X server compress the image itself, independent of the app? There wouldn't need to be any changes to the X protocol, this would be something done internal to the server. I suppose there could be an extension to the protocol that allows XPixmaps to be sent in JPEG compressed format or something as well, to reduce transmission time. If this was done, then apps like Firefox wouldn't have to change to get the benifit the author is describing.
Besides, I'm not sure that storing the images compressed on the client side is going to work as well as the author hopes. In fact, it would increase the RSS of the firefox app, making people think that FF is even more bloated, even though it reduced memory usage overall. How many people have even heard of xrestop (I hadn't until I read the article)?
I wish they'd just make a "Slashvertisement" topic. I probably wouldn't even block it, since I'm lazy and at least some of the products might be interesting. But to pass off ads as real stories is pretty sleazy. Especially when the product in question doesn't even run on Linux!
Slashdot Mirror
In Windows (as opposed to CMD.EXE), the file parsing functions permit either \ or / to separate path components. And that is documented. As an exception, last time I looked, UNC names had to start with \\; // was not accepted.
Indeed, "/" works even in code, for example, fopen("c:/directory/foo.txt"). Also, "//" works as well as "\\", at least in code: fopen("//server/share/dir/foo.txt"). "//" doesn't seem to work on the CMD.EXE command line, though, probably because that begins the argument with "/" which is the switch character. But that is a terrible shell, anyone doing any sort of command line work on Windows should install Cygwin and use its bash (which does support "//" in the file name).
Will work? Cross platform worms have been done before. Though instead of being customized for each OS, it just compiled itself on the host system once it got in. Since most consumer computers these days don't have compilers installed, there would have to be precompiled parts for common systems, but the idea is the same.
I absolutely agree. All laws should have to be re-passed after a maximum of 10 years, even normal laws like murder. It's pretty unlikely that the law against murder wouldn't be re-passed, but forcing all laws to be re-evaluated every X years would do a lot to clean out the crufty laws that don't apply anymore, or laws that just aren't enfoced. It would be nice if during the re-evaluation, an objective analysis of the effect of the law (does it recude crime? is it enforced?) would be included.
Maybe if legislators were busy ensuring that murder didn't become legal, they wouldn't have time to think up new laws to take away our freedoms.
My biggest annoyance with OpenOffice is that on Solaris (my main work machine), the window titles are garbled. I'm not exactly sure what is going on, but instead of something like "Untitled1 - OpenOffice.org Calc", I see "Õîôéôìåä ÏðåîÏææéãå®ïòç ×òéôåò" (curtesy of xwininfo). I've looked around a little, but never found any information on this problem. I've only ever seen it on Solaris.
Update: after looking at the hex values of each of the characters, I discovered that the text I see is the ASCII values OR'd with 0x80. It's at least consistent, but really weird (and hard to read).
Isn't that a little like saying you can avoid New York income tax by moving to California? You're still paying a tax, just to a different company (one which, IMO, is even more closed and proprietary than MS).
It's laughable that the most well known of open source software doesn't function as seemlessly on an open source operating system as it does on a proprietary Microsoft one.
It's laughable that because of Windows pathetic software management system (if the uninstall registry keys even count) that programs have to worry about how to update themselves. No, wait, it's sad. There's no good reason that an application should have to build in logic to check for and then update itself. That should be the packaging system's job. The fact that FireFox doesn't update itself on Linux is not a bug -- it's not its responsibility, nor should it be.
6,850,691 - Automatic playback overshoot correction system
[this is unclear to me, is this to handle synching? there's been such corrections for year otherwise what the heck are they talking about?]
I haven't looked at the patent, but this sounds like TiVo's system of stepping backwards a little bit after the user hits "play" while fast forwarding. It's a brilliant feature, since often you don't hit play until after the point at which you wanted to play begins. It works very well, but was made somewhat moot once I enabled 30 second skip. Now, if only I could get it to automatically filter all commercials (and be able to download and play TiVo files on my Linux box).
According to Wikipedia, "[Shared Source] is not open source according to the Open Source Definition, because none of the license programs allows for commercial use of modified code". I guess it's not "freelier" than Open Source.
Nobody ever explained to me why Microsoft would inherently give a damn about DRM. As far as I know, it's the content industry that says "chain up people's PCs or we won't release high defenition material at all".
:) Just think -- if you could get 10 cents (or whatever the fee would be) of every music track purchased in the world, wouldn't you try? MS is just capitalizing on the media industry's fears of piracy.
You're right, it doesn't make sense at first glance. One would think MS would want to make it easy for people to use digital media, not harder by corrupting it with digital restrictions. However, I think MS is trying to position itself as the de facto DRM provider. If all media sold online used MS DRM, then MS would probably get some percentage of that revenue. And MS loves getting money for doing no work (and who could blame them for that -- I like getting paid for doing no work, too
Further, MS does have some incentive in terms of preventing software piracy. Though MS does depend heavily on piracy to gain marketshare, once it has saturated the market, they will want to prevent piracy as much as possible. Such things as activation schemes are part of that. Once everyone has to use MS software (because everyone else does), MS doesn't care if using it is a PITA.
Actually, it's not GPL -- ImageMagick can be used in commercial products as well, more like the LGPL (but it's not that either, it's its own license).
Agreed. Picture 16 is kind of cool, though. The couch is in focus, but the background is heavily motion blurred. Makes it look like the couch is really moving.
I'm no Windows fan, but technically, the same is true of IE. It's tied into the desktop environment the same way KHTML is. The two big differences (which help KDE) are (a) most users don't run as root in KDE, while most users run as root (Administrator) in Windows, and (b) KDE isn't the only DE for Linux, while Explorer is the only DE in Windows. That latter point is why people tend to think that IE is tied into the OS. It's not; it's tied into the only DE in Windows. Overall, not much different, but structurally, it's not much different from KDE.
It really is hard to get past the fact that it's unconstitutional, though.
So was income tax, once upon a time.
Of course, in today's environment, being unconstitutional doesn't seem to stop anyone anyway.
Did I miss any?
Just to be fair, disadvantages (for nVidia, there are none for the users I could think of):
I kill any processes I don't like on my computer. Sometimes, with extreme prejudice (kill -9). And I don't even live in Texas!
No, I like innovation. Just not buying products that are just about a particular innovation (unless it's really good). I prefer products that take the best ideas from everyone else and mesh them into a nicely designed product. Though one could argue that's innovative, too. So maybe I can't escape!
I must have missed the part where I said that innovation was bad. Since I explicitly said that I like innovation. Just that innovation isn't the main driver in many of the products that I use every day. Sure, there's a little special innovation in each of them (usually in how the design is all put together), but most major stuff I let other people test before it's incorporated into the products I use. So, I know that there were innovations in the products that I use, but most of the products aren't innovations in and of themselves.
:)
You're probably right about me being a late adopter. My VCR is still working just fine on my analog cable and low definition TV. But at least I've been running Linux for a while, so I can't be all bad
Personally, I think that innovation is overrated in the tech world. Sure, it's important, but how many of the products that you use on a daily basis are truly innovative in their own rights? And how many are simply other people's innovations put together in a nice package that works well? For every 1 innovative product, there are 100 others that aren't. And the 100 others will on the whole work better than the 1 innovative one.
For example, how many people want to drive an innovative car? I prefer my car to use time tested technology. Not the latest "innovative" breaking system that may or may not work all the time.
Now, don't take this to mean I don't like innovation. I do. But that shouldn't be the deciding factor for any product. Saying something is innovative says that it's new and untested. That may be great for some things, but for most things it's not. I like my non-innovative TCP/IP and non-innovative bash shell, thank you very much (to pick two things that haven't changed all that much over the years). And frankly, I like having consistency in the other applications I use, like word processors and web browsers.
So I agree with the book, innovatition is not as important as a good overall product.
And do you want a federal judge saying that you can't teach string theory in phyisics classes? AFAICT, string theory and ID are about the same scientifically (since neither can be tested). I don't think that ID should be taught in science classrooms either, but this is rediculous. Federal judges ruling what is and is not science? Since when did lawyers get that priveledge?
Actually, this is pretty standard for Microsoft. They always say that choice is good when it allows someone to choose Microsoft (i.e., if there was no choice they wouldn't get business) and that choice is bad when it allows someone to choose someone other than Microsoft (i.e., Linux, OpenOffice where ODF isn't a big push). Microsoft is all about choice in the areas that it doesn't have a monopoly.
And while it's somewhat hypocrical, it does make sense from the "we want all the money" point of view.
Rule 1. They lie. End users often tell you what they think you want to hear.
Only because of the second rule in this post:
If users modify their system in any way, anything that happens is their fault. Smoke coming out of the power supply? It's because you added new applications to the Start toolbar!
You sure? I just tried the mouse wheel, and it scrolled the area up and down. It was kind of funny seeing the little arrow and zoom box scroll over the Windows Live logo and then up off the top of the page :)
Right now, it's about 68f (20c). I like snow as much as the next guy, but I think I'll stick it out here for a little while :P
Well, along with that, why couldn't the X server compress the image itself, independent of the app? There wouldn't need to be any changes to the X protocol, this would be something done internal to the server. I suppose there could be an extension to the protocol that allows XPixmaps to be sent in JPEG compressed format or something as well, to reduce transmission time. If this was done, then apps like Firefox wouldn't have to change to get the benifit the author is describing.
Besides, I'm not sure that storing the images compressed on the client side is going to work as well as the author hopes. In fact, it would increase the RSS of the firefox app, making people think that FF is even more bloated, even though it reduced memory usage overall. How many people have even heard of xrestop (I hadn't until I read the article)?
I wish they'd just make a "Slashvertisement" topic. I probably wouldn't even block it, since I'm lazy and at least some of the products might be interesting. But to pass off ads as real stories is pretty sleazy. Especially when the product in question doesn't even run on Linux!