I can tell you the last thing I want to happen is for the kernel developers to start working on GUIs. Not only is this getting the wrong people to do the job, but it leads to the frightening possibility of the GUI actually being more integrated with the kernel.
That's not to say there aren't GUI-focussed processes that the kernel developers shouldn't be looking at, but you're asking them to work on making front ends that are minimalist and make the system more accessible, all of which are high level issues, whereas the work the kernel developers should be focusing on concerns performance, responsiveness, making good use of the hardware, and other lower level aspects that the kernel can directly help with.
Leave the look and feel to the experts on look and feel. The kernel is not the right place to be discussing look and feel.
This is not a solar eclipse. In a solar eclipse, the Moon stands directly between the Earth and the Sun, blocking the view of the Sun. Whereas in a lunar eclipse, the Sun stands directly between the Earth and the Moon, blocking your view of the Moon.
Which also means it's going to be very, very, hot on Tuesday morning.
AT&T and T-Mobile don't generally ban compatible phones from their networks - in fact, I'm unaware of a single instance in which they've done so, and it would be bad business for them to do so. And in Europe, it would be illegal for an operator to ban the use of a standard GSM phone that's otherwise CE approved.
(And if you're going to point at the IS-95/CDMA2000 operators, well, no open phone will ever be aimed at that "standard", so it's a non-issue anyway.)
Apple cannot misuse the DMCA that way, even if it was access to copyrighted content, and not hardware, that Apple was protecting. The US copyright office has explicitly made phone locking legal, overriding any aspect of the DMCA that could be tortured into such a role.
All of this crap about lawsuits can stop now. Apple cannot do anything other than implement more technical measures to lock the phone. If it throws lawyers at the problem, it will lose the suit.
Well, the FCC has dragged its feet enforcing a congressional mandate requiring that cable companies use an interoperable standard. The government most certainly never mandated the technology, the cable companies were most certainly allowed (required, indeed) to come up with the standards themselves. CableCARD is a CableLabs invention.
As far as the FCC and cellphone companies analogy goes, the word is "quite". Other countries, notably Europe, have required cellphone companies to cooperate on standards and allow the use of third party equipment that conforms to those standards to be used by their customers. The result is that the European mobile phone market is infinitely more vibrant than the US, where two "competing" standards, only one of which is open, make it harder for third party manufacturers to produce phones that aren't "approved" by the network operators.
And what does the customer gain from the FCC enforcing the government's mandate over interoperability? Choice. The ability to use equipment that's not designed according to the narrow wishes of the cable industry.
The main issues are the FCC dragging its feet, and the congress's exclusion of the satellite operators from the mandate. The fact is neither the FCC nor the legislature have done enough.
Competition can be a natural consequence of capitalism in the short term, but in the end a common equilibrium point is a monopoly that requires too much long term investment to topple in any realistic way. It's worth noting that in the late 1800s, monopolies were seen by many industrialists as the logical end point of where they were going, resulting in efficiencies that can only be gained through economies of scale, and a quality in services that can only be provided by a monopoly's network effect.
Really, people who assume capitalism always leads to choices and competition aren't generally paying attention. The best that can be said is that if a monopolistic provider gets too out of touch with the marketplace, alternatives will be given an opportunity to spring up. As long, however, as the monopolist serves the needs of the market, providing a good enough product at an acceptable price, there are no such opportunities, and nothing better will have a real opportunity to develop. The collapse of the major monopolies has occurred generally because either a government has intervened, seeing a market with real opportunities for development held back by a monopolist, or because the monopolist has grown so out of touch with reality they've provided opportunities for third parties to provide cheaper or better services.
In HD-DVD and Blu-ray's case, the two products are so alike in every practical sense that either one will succeed at the expense of the other, simply because network effects will help it, or neither will succeed because both fail the "good enough"/"acceptably priced" criteria. Pretty much everybody accepts this.
Personally, I think that if the original plan for HD-DVD had taken off (regular DVD disks with a higher quality codec used to provide the high definition), I doubt we'd be having this debate as virtually every DVD player sold after HD-DVD's introduction would have been built to support HD-DVD off the bat (for most it would have been a firmware upgrade.) The obsession with blue-ray lasers ultimately has damaged both formats chances, competing with an existing format requiring substantial investment in hardware with only an incremental improvement in quality.
That would make perfect sense if any of those words were actually used. However, when "could care less" is used the speaker normally neither speaks, nor implies, any "but..." clauses in what they say.
Ergo the speaker/writer when using that phrase is normally a moron who isn't really thinking about what they're saying, just repeating stock phrases they've either misheard (as in the infamous "all intensive purposes") or heard misspoken.
You kind of wonder how far the grandparent would take the principle suggesting otherwise. For example:
7.2 The customer agrees that AT&T may take any measures necessary to enforce payment of an unpaid bill after 90 days delinquency, and deter others from withholding payment, including causing bodily harm and/or death to the customer, at AT&T's discretion.
Access to the law would seem to me to be one of the more obvious rights that cannot be given up.
So perhaps the solution to this is to program computers to output information only in the style of a contestant on Jeopardy. eg:
User: "A list of files in the/etc directory"
Computer: "What is resolv.conf, passwd, group, rc {etc}...?"
Re:Kicking their own asses...
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
Alas, I don't believe there's any question that SCO was legally allowed to resell Unix licenses (just as Sun, HP, IBM, et al are.) The fraud here would have been only their suggestion that they are the copyright holder and therefore that users of "unlicensed" "Unix IP" were obliged to pay SCO license fees or face legitimate lawsuits from SCO.
Telling people, and encouraging them, to do something that is clearly dangerous without warning them of the dangers is utterly irresponsible. I'm amazed this is on the front page of Slashdot. Yes, 90% of "nerds" may technically know that lasers may harm eyesight, but there's the other 10%, not to mention the (probably high) proportion of the 90% that might assume that the lasers being discussed pose less dangers by virtue of the fact someone might post articles encouraging building them without warning them of the high likelihood of accidental blinding themselves.
That's right. We should all try to price everything identically and then somehow end up with choices of different products and services that cater to different needs despite all of that.
Well, maybe not. Perhaps we should see what RedHat plans to produce that justifies the expense. Me, personally, I've subscribed to pay services in lieu of free services because I felt the pay service was worth spending money on, it wasn't excessively priced, and I'd rather support an organization dedicated to providing me with a service than one that ultimately is responsible only to itself, or to a myriad of advertisers with their own agendas.
I'm not knocking Ubuntu, and without seeing RedHat's product, it's impossible for me to judge as to whether it'll be worth the money, but the notion that we can make that judgement right now purely on the basis of cost per month of service is ridiculous.
In fairness, I don't think anyone saw the Wii coming or could have planned on the fact that simpler game play, with less intense graphics, that actually involved moving around would have captivated so many people.
Honestly, I don't think you're right. I think the games industry didn't "get it", and those who pride themselves on being "hard core gamers" were likewise, but the Wii was generating genuine excitement in most circles outside of those. The Nintendo DS should have been enough to slap those in the face who thought "Cheap and innovative" was a recipe for disaster.
The failure to recognize the Wii was going to be a hit was entirely the result of myopia on the part of a tired, unimaginative, and ultimately largely conservative games industry that couldn't see what was staring it in the face. Not only was the Wii innovative, low cost, and "good enough" where it needed to be, but nobody but a bunch of completely self-absorbed morons could have failed to see that Sony and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft were going to hand the entire market to Nintendo on a plate by choosing to make unimaginative, if powerful, consoles that were incapable of being priced at a sane consumer level.
Everyone beyond the aforementioned groups was saying this when the Wii was still called the Revolution. It was obvious. It was so, so, obvious.
Postscript: I just Googled "site:slashdot.org squiggleslash Nintendo revolution" and was able to find this comment buried in one of the pages that came up. Hey, Golias! Nuh-nuh ne nuh nuh!
It got quiet a bit of interest, but was hampered by two major issues initially.
First, it wasn't free software. It was shared source, you could obtain the source after buying a copy and share that source with others who had also bought a copy, but you couldn't just modify it and pass on your modifications to anyone who wanted. That extra step of "Receiver must already have a license" was an issue, and reduced the number of experimenters and tinkerers drastically. GNU/Linux has achieved much of its popularity through the ability of virtually anyone who has a copy to pass on that copy to others, with freely downloadable LiveCDs and other ways to be exposed to it with little commitment on your part.
The other was that it was (usually, at least in x86) 16 bit. Applications generally ran in 64k memory spaces (albeit different spaces for code and data.) This severely limited the available functionality.
Linus, in part, wrote the first Linux kernel to try to overcome the second issue. By using Linux + the GNU toolchain instead of Minix, you had a full blown 32 bit operating system. Things like the X11 Windowing System suddenly became possible. His eventual adoption of the GPL also gave Linux users the freedom needed to ensure they could build a much bigger community around that kernel than Minix was able to achieve.
Today, Minix version 3 is available as free software, and in 32 bit form, but it happened too late to stop the GNU/Linux juggernaut from rolling right over it.
Well, obviously the first part is (probably) not about American citizens, but given the number of locals around here who think "Always, I could care less about alls that stuff, for all intensive purposes" is English, I'm pretty sure many Americans would fit into the second category.
Explain the intrinsic unsafeness of Objective-C, as opposed to C or C++, and watch us laugh at you.
What a bankrupt argument. He never mentioned C or C++, and it would be entirely in opposition to what he's proposing if he argued that C or C++ should have been used instead of Objective C.
The GP argued that using an unsafe language like Objective C was a mistake. It was. Languages like C, C++, and Objective C, are increasingly difficult to justify while the increasing efficiency of safer alternatives such as Java and C# makes performance issues increasingly irrelevant.
Apple's problem is that it's inherited a lot of bad legacy technologies from NeXT. It's not alone, a huge amount of the problems we have with modern computer security have to do with our continued dependence upon 1970s OS and language designs, and the legacy issues related to the degree we relied upon those designs when building pretty much everything until the mid-nineties. That, and the poor rep systems like Java suffered due to initially poor implementations and marketing that promoted "platform independence" ahead of security issues, has made it difficult to get everyone on board with the idea of efficient, managed, operating systems and languages.
We can move away from environments like ObjC, but it takes the will to look at the alternatives and take them seriously.
He hasn't even figured out that the Opera browser even runs on mobile phones, and using the same engine as the desktop version
If you're referring to Opera mini, which is pretty much the only genericly available "runs on mobile phones" browser (as opposed to versions that run on some smartphones), then no, it doesn't use the same engine. Opera mini is a very lightweight client to a proxy that runs at Opera's HQ, which reformats web pages to create much simplier pages containing more or less the same content.
It's very useful, better than nothing, and arguably better than trying to fit a "real" rendering of a webpage onto such a small screen (I also have the Nintendo DS version of Opera, which has a mode based upon this simplified page rendering as well as a full HTML mode, and the former is, usually, more practical than the latter. Something for Apple to think about, perhaps), but it's certainly not using the same engine or anything close to it as the desktop Opera.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you the last thing I want to happen is for the kernel developers to start working on GUIs. Not only is this getting the wrong people to do the job, but it leads to the frightening possibility of the GUI actually being more integrated with the kernel.
That's not to say there aren't GUI-focussed processes that the kernel developers shouldn't be looking at, but you're asking them to work on making front ends that are minimalist and make the system more accessible, all of which are high level issues, whereas the work the kernel developers should be focusing on concerns performance, responsiveness, making good use of the hardware, and other lower level aspects that the kernel can directly help with.
Leave the look and feel to the experts on look and feel. The kernel is not the right place to be discussing look and feel.
This is not a solar eclipse. In a solar eclipse, the Moon stands directly between the Earth and the Sun, blocking the view of the Sun. Whereas in a lunar eclipse, the Sun stands directly between the Earth and the Moon, blocking your view of the Moon.
Which also means it's going to be very, very, hot on Tuesday morning.
Which carriers?
AT&T and T-Mobile don't generally ban compatible phones from their networks - in fact, I'm unaware of a single instance in which they've done so, and it would be bad business for them to do so. And in Europe, it would be illegal for an operator to ban the use of a standard GSM phone that's otherwise CE approved.
(And if you're going to point at the IS-95/CDMA2000 operators, well, no open phone will ever be aimed at that "standard", so it's a non-issue anyway.)
Apple cannot misuse the DMCA that way, even if it was access to copyrighted content, and not hardware, that Apple was protecting. The US copyright office has explicitly made phone locking legal, overriding any aspect of the DMCA that could be tortured into such a role.
All of this crap about lawsuits can stop now. Apple cannot do anything other than implement more technical measures to lock the phone. If it throws lawyers at the problem, it will lose the suit.
Well, the FCC has dragged its feet enforcing a congressional mandate requiring that cable companies use an interoperable standard. The government most certainly never mandated the technology, the cable companies were most certainly allowed (required, indeed) to come up with the standards themselves. CableCARD is a CableLabs invention.
As far as the FCC and cellphone companies analogy goes, the word is "quite". Other countries, notably Europe, have required cellphone companies to cooperate on standards and allow the use of third party equipment that conforms to those standards to be used by their customers. The result is that the European mobile phone market is infinitely more vibrant than the US, where two "competing" standards, only one of which is open, make it harder for third party manufacturers to produce phones that aren't "approved" by the network operators.
And what does the customer gain from the FCC enforcing the government's mandate over interoperability? Choice. The ability to use equipment that's not designed according to the narrow wishes of the cable industry.
The main issues are the FCC dragging its feet, and the congress's exclusion of the satellite operators from the mandate. The fact is neither the FCC nor the legislature have done enough.
I stopped reading there. Hyperbole followed by a clearly wrong assertion, followed by a hyperbolic lie about me.
If you really have something to contribute to this discussion, keep it rational and keep to the facts.
Competition can be a natural consequence of capitalism in the short term, but in the end a common equilibrium point is a monopoly that requires too much long term investment to topple in any realistic way. It's worth noting that in the late 1800s, monopolies were seen by many industrialists as the logical end point of where they were going, resulting in efficiencies that can only be gained through economies of scale, and a quality in services that can only be provided by a monopoly's network effect.
Really, people who assume capitalism always leads to choices and competition aren't generally paying attention. The best that can be said is that if a monopolistic provider gets too out of touch with the marketplace, alternatives will be given an opportunity to spring up. As long, however, as the monopolist serves the needs of the market, providing a good enough product at an acceptable price, there are no such opportunities, and nothing better will have a real opportunity to develop. The collapse of the major monopolies has occurred generally because either a government has intervened, seeing a market with real opportunities for development held back by a monopolist, or because the monopolist has grown so out of touch with reality they've provided opportunities for third parties to provide cheaper or better services.
In HD-DVD and Blu-ray's case, the two products are so alike in every practical sense that either one will succeed at the expense of the other, simply because network effects will help it, or neither will succeed because both fail the "good enough"/"acceptably priced" criteria. Pretty much everybody accepts this.
Personally, I think that if the original plan for HD-DVD had taken off (regular DVD disks with a higher quality codec used to provide the high definition), I doubt we'd be having this debate as virtually every DVD player sold after HD-DVD's introduction would have been built to support HD-DVD off the bat (for most it would have been a firmware upgrade.) The obsession with blue-ray lasers ultimately has damaged both formats chances, competing with an existing format requiring substantial investment in hardware with only an incremental improvement in quality.
That would make perfect sense if any of those words were actually used. However, when "could care less" is used the speaker normally neither speaks, nor implies, any "but..." clauses in what they say.
Ergo the speaker/writer when using that phrase is normally a moron who isn't really thinking about what they're saying, just repeating stock phrases they've either misheard (as in the infamous "all intensive purposes") or heard misspoken.
You kind of wonder how far the grandparent would take the principle suggesting otherwise. For example:
Access to the law would seem to me to be one of the more obvious rights that cannot be given up.
User: "A list of files in the /etc directory"
Computer: "What is resolv.conf, passwd, group, rc {etc}...?"
Alas, I don't believe there's any question that SCO was legally allowed to resell Unix licenses (just as Sun, HP, IBM, et al are.) The fraud here would have been only their suggestion that they are the copyright holder and therefore that users of "unlicensed" "Unix IP" were obliged to pay SCO license fees or face legitimate lawsuits from SCO.
Well, there was one good CPU design, but unfortunately the 6809 just never took off...
Which is only possible with informed consent.
Telling people, and encouraging them, to do something that is clearly dangerous without warning them of the dangers is utterly irresponsible. I'm amazed this is on the front page of Slashdot. Yes, 90% of "nerds" may technically know that lasers may harm eyesight, but there's the other 10%, not to mention the (probably high) proportion of the 90% that might assume that the lasers being discussed pose less dangers by virtue of the fact someone might post articles encouraging building them without warning them of the high likelihood of accidental blinding themselves.
Or worse, blinding others.
That's right. We should all try to price everything identically and then somehow end up with choices of different products and services that cater to different needs despite all of that.
Well, maybe not. Perhaps we should see what RedHat plans to produce that justifies the expense. Me, personally, I've subscribed to pay services in lieu of free services because I felt the pay service was worth spending money on, it wasn't excessively priced, and I'd rather support an organization dedicated to providing me with a service than one that ultimately is responsible only to itself, or to a myriad of advertisers with their own agendas.
I'm not knocking Ubuntu, and without seeing RedHat's product, it's impossible for me to judge as to whether it'll be worth the money, but the notion that we can make that judgement right now purely on the basis of cost per month of service is ridiculous.
Sadly the makers of Budweiser have that patented already.
Great news, we already started that bit... ;-)
Ok, maybe your conclusion is right after all...
And apparently it's provisionally called Jack Thompson's Baby Slicing, Dicing, Cooking, and Chomping Challenge.
Though they are concerned about the poor taste in basing the game on Jack Thompson, so some changes may be imminent.
Honestly, I don't think you're right. I think the games industry didn't "get it", and those who pride themselves on being "hard core gamers" were likewise, but the Wii was generating genuine excitement in most circles outside of those. The Nintendo DS should have been enough to slap those in the face who thought "Cheap and innovative" was a recipe for disaster.
The failure to recognize the Wii was going to be a hit was entirely the result of myopia on the part of a tired, unimaginative, and ultimately largely conservative games industry that couldn't see what was staring it in the face. Not only was the Wii innovative, low cost, and "good enough" where it needed to be, but nobody but a bunch of completely self-absorbed morons could have failed to see that Sony and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft were going to hand the entire market to Nintendo on a plate by choosing to make unimaginative, if powerful, consoles that were incapable of being priced at a sane consumer level.
Everyone beyond the aforementioned groups was saying this when the Wii was still called the Revolution. It was obvious. It was so, so, obvious.
Postscript: I just Googled "site:slashdot.org squiggleslash Nintendo revolution" and was able to find this comment buried in one of the pages that came up. Hey, Golias! Nuh-nuh ne nuh nuh!
It got quiet a bit of interest, but was hampered by two major issues initially.
First, it wasn't free software. It was shared source, you could obtain the source after buying a copy and share that source with others who had also bought a copy, but you couldn't just modify it and pass on your modifications to anyone who wanted. That extra step of "Receiver must already have a license" was an issue, and reduced the number of experimenters and tinkerers drastically. GNU/Linux has achieved much of its popularity through the ability of virtually anyone who has a copy to pass on that copy to others, with freely downloadable LiveCDs and other ways to be exposed to it with little commitment on your part.
The other was that it was (usually, at least in x86) 16 bit. Applications generally ran in 64k memory spaces (albeit different spaces for code and data.) This severely limited the available functionality.
Linus, in part, wrote the first Linux kernel to try to overcome the second issue. By using Linux + the GNU toolchain instead of Minix, you had a full blown 32 bit operating system. Things like the X11 Windowing System suddenly became possible. His eventual adoption of the GPL also gave Linux users the freedom needed to ensure they could build a much bigger community around that kernel than Minix was able to achieve.
Today, Minix version 3 is available as free software, and in 32 bit form, but it happened too late to stop the GNU/Linux juggernaut from rolling right over it.
Well, obviously the first part is (probably) not about American citizens, but given the number of locals around here who think "Always, I could care less about alls that stuff, for all intensive purposes" is English, I'm pretty sure many Americans would fit into the second category.
What a bankrupt argument. He never mentioned C or C++, and it would be entirely in opposition to what he's proposing if he argued that C or C++ should have been used instead of Objective C.
The GP argued that using an unsafe language like Objective C was a mistake. It was. Languages like C, C++, and Objective C, are increasingly difficult to justify while the increasing efficiency of safer alternatives such as Java and C# makes performance issues increasingly irrelevant.
Apple's problem is that it's inherited a lot of bad legacy technologies from NeXT. It's not alone, a huge amount of the problems we have with modern computer security have to do with our continued dependence upon 1970s OS and language designs, and the legacy issues related to the degree we relied upon those designs when building pretty much everything until the mid-nineties. That, and the poor rep systems like Java suffered due to initially poor implementations and marketing that promoted "platform independence" ahead of security issues, has made it difficult to get everyone on board with the idea of efficient, managed, operating systems and languages.
We can move away from environments like ObjC, but it takes the will to look at the alternatives and take them seriously.
If you're referring to Opera mini, which is pretty much the only genericly available "runs on mobile phones" browser (as opposed to versions that run on some smartphones), then no, it doesn't use the same engine. Opera mini is a very lightweight client to a proxy that runs at Opera's HQ, which reformats web pages to create much simplier pages containing more or less the same content.
It's very useful, better than nothing, and arguably better than trying to fit a "real" rendering of a webpage onto such a small screen (I also have the Nintendo DS version of Opera, which has a mode based upon this simplified page rendering as well as a full HTML mode, and the former is, usually, more practical than the latter. Something for Apple to think about, perhaps), but it's certainly not using the same engine or anything close to it as the desktop Opera.
AAC players do require the payment of royalties, unfortunately.
If you want a free, royalty-free, codec comparable to AAC or MP3, the only choice right now is OGG.
Never get moderation privileges these days, so here's a reply that you can take as virtual moderation of "+1 Awesome."
Are they really setting a script setuid? Because that doesn't normally work.