he problem is, that for your actual "average user", they will say, "where is my MS Office"
The article points out CrossOver Office handles that one.
and "where is my internet explorer" and I need my Norton Anti-Virus.
The reason for switching was to get away from IE and viruses - if they were actually switching for that reason, why on earth would they then complain about the lack of it?
An acquainance of mine can't get over the fact that his win xp box doesn't have a floppy disk drive. What would he do if I took his start menu away?
Indeed. So which distribution is it that you're planning to give him that uses blackbox or windowmaker as the default desktop environment? Is there a reason you're thinking of giving him a more hard core hacker oriented distro instead of, saw Linspire or Xandros or Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora or any of the other multitudes of distros that use KDE or GNOME as their default DE?
The people who are constantly getting hit with viruses, spyware, IE holes, etc. are exactly the kind of people who would have a hard time getting used to and accepting Linux.
Really? That's what people keep saying, but I'm a little less sure it's true. What makes Linux hard is administering it. If you can't administer your windows box, what difference does it make that you can't administer your linux box either? Other than that it's just a "getting used to" issue - and again, the more computer phobic you are, and the less you understand, the easier this can tend to be. Serious windows users know all the shortcut keys, and the efficient ways of doing things. They know all about the nice extra functionality that is available. Naive users just don't know anything about that - they have much lower expectations of what a computer should be able to do. They don't understand how any of it works anyway, so the change is far less stressful than you would imagine (especially if you use something like Linspire or Xandros which hews pretty close to a lot of the basic windows ways of doing things). It's not like switching to linux means you have to grasp some new interface that doesn't use WIMP.
How about in practice? I switched my parents to linux. They had no problems using it. And believe me, my parents are far from computer savvy (my mother couldn't figure out how to install new fonts in windows). My girlfriend was curious as to what linux was like - I gave her a knoppix CD, and she figured everything else out herself.
Sure anecdotes are not data, b ut where is the data? Why is there an assumption that computer-phobic can't use linux? Certainly I haven't seen any real data on that either.
Yes. I've spent time with OpenDX. It is good but (1) the interface is on the archaic side, and (2) yeah, there is a lot of learning involved. (3) The quality of the resulting visualisations, in terms of their interactivity was a little limited (though perhaps I simply failed to learn how to do that part).
The idea is very nice - you simply connect together a bunch of boxes with inputs and outputs and construct a visualisation that way. It means you can do so in an entirely graphical manner, and get a good overview of what exactly you are doing.
VTK actually uses a similar scheme, with a render pipline, but rather than a graphical tool you use Java or C++ or Python to connect the elements (provided as objects) together. VTK does have a much larger range of objects to put in your render pipeline, providing extremely rich functionality.
So, I'm not really trying to dis OpenDX, it is a great tool, but I really do think VTK is a better option.
Anyone interested in doing powerful 3D data visualization should make a mandatory stop here. It's an open source visualization toolkit written in C++, but with bindings for Java and Python as well. This is a very powerful and very impressive system, and ought to be rated as one of the great open source projects. It doesn't seem to get much attention - I'm not sure why.
Have a look, and look at what it is actually capable of doing. If you want to do any sort of 3D visualization, it really is worth your time to learn a bit about VTK.
I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?
If I had to guess I would guess that they are doing 3D Self Organizing Maps, or something very similar.
The principle is: create a huge feature space for the documents in question (something like word counts for each document for each word in the corpus, with appropriate fixes (drop the most and least common words, do stemming etc.). You can now "visualize" the documents in a massive 20,000 dimensional space. However, what you can do, is try to create a projection from 20,000 dimensions down to 2 or 3 dimensions in a way that best preserves distances in the 20,000 dimensional space. This automatically creates a clustering of the documents as well, and you now have something that you can visualize practically. If you start doing things like labelling clusters and subsclusters by the words unique to/defining that cluster you can start to make some sense of the visualisation.
Effectively this is just a means of doing clustering on a large document space in such a way that the final output can be visualized (instead of the sort of results you get from k-means, or heirarchical clustering, which are a lot harder to visualize in a meaningful way for laymen). The benefit of being able to visualize it in that sense is that you can "see" patterns of other document attributes by adding that to the visualization (via colors, labels, etc.) and see a global overview of those attributes across the entire document space.
Just to reiterate: I do not know that this is what is being done, and they don't say a lot in the article, but I do have some experience in this field, and what I gleaned from the article would tend to imply an approach like this.
Jedidiah.
Re:Won't compete with IE6...
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A lot of us would like this to feature open standards, open source and other such goodness, but we need to take a long, hard look at the initiatives from MS - their market dominance means that THEIR standards will become a reality.
I don't think it is so cut and dried yet. Longhorn, and hence XAML and all, is still at least a couple years off. Everything I've heard implies the release is going to go one of two ways: (1) It will be horribly late (2) A bunch of promised features are going to be heaved over the side so it can deliver on time.
Either way that's at least 2 years before XAML can have any uptake. Being realistic, I think you can add another year to that safely as it will require at least that long for Longhorn to have sufficient market penetration in comparison to older windows products.
Given 3 years and a steady increase in browser market share it could be possible that mozilla/opera/khtml browsers could gain a much much larger following. Even if it's not past the magic 50% figure (which it could conceivably be), a mere 40% market share could make people wanting to deploy XAML think twice.
The crux of the problme here is that (looking at your replies to other posters) you want to search the content of pages in your bookmarks (or even just in your history).
For someone that's keen (I may even try myself if I find some time) couldn't a close approximation of this be done VERY simply by just sending a search request to google restricting to sites listed in your history? All you need to do is parse out the unique sites from your history or bookmarks, and just pass those in to the google search. You could practically just write a bookmarklet to do it right now...
The most annoying thing you can run into is when something you are used to using suddenly gets replaced with a "predictive" system. In some ways the collapsed "only what yo've used recently" start bar in windows had some merit, but really, mostly it was just a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS. It would have been fine if the start menu had been essentially normal and simply had an extra "Recent Programs" that did the collapsed menu as an ADDITIONAL PARALLEL feature, but no, the had to make a mess.
If anything gets added that's predictive, it should work cooperatively in parallel with everything else that's already there. An extra feature that you can exploit when you choose to.
Personally I am a fan of teaching some philosophy and more advanced mathematics (like algebra) in primary/elementary school. The aim here is not to get kids to be fantastic algebraic machines, but merely to think. I think there really is too little emphasis on critical and logical thought. Why not introduce a few of the classic philosophical quandries to elementary school kids - get them wondering about it. There's no reason they have to come up with answers, just challenge them to think about it.
Is this really lacking in schools you ask? The number of people who seem to think The Matrix was very deep for it's basic solipsist type arguments baffles me. There really was nothing overly deep or complicated in that film that I wouldn't have expected people to have already thought about as a mere effort of exercising a little mental muscle (that's not to say it wasn't a good, film, just not exactly presenting anything terribly revelationary). That says to me that there's not enough emphasis on merely teachign kids to think and wonder.
Already done. Everyone I know uses something else. My friends use firefox, my mother uses mozilla (it looks like netscape), my father uses opera (he just preferred it), my girlfriend uses firefox... It's surprisingly easy to do as well. Not being overzealous about it is probably good. I just pointed out to my girlfriend that there was another browser to try, so she downloaded it and, regardless of popup blocking or tabs, decided it was much nicer simply on look and feel. Once she got used to the search box, the tabs and the lack of popups she went to some effort to remove IE from her machine totally - no prompting. Now she's trying to convert her office mates over, with some success (again, it's been a try it and decide its better pretty much straight away). Sometimes you just need to point out the options and (more importantly) make sure they know it isn't s huge change (it is change that people mostly fear) then let them work it out in their own time.
It's those damn libraries acting as huge intellectual property sharing hubs - they make Napster look tame! Just think of all the valuable content that is getting freely shared with no reimbursement to the author (other than the single original book purchase). It's theft, pure and simple. I'm surprised authors can afford to eat.
Are you getting these packages from the servers of the distribution you are using? You should only download rpms which are specifically built for the linux system you are using. For example, if you are using Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition, you should only download packages which are built for Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition.
As nice as this is, you just can't expect a single vendor to package everything you could ever want. At some point you're going to have to provide something packaged by someone else. That's the point where the trouble starts. Right now the only really distribution agnostic packaging system is source. Source is nice, and when well managed (say, with stow), it works very well for handling those few extra packages you want to install, but source does take a little more nouse than perhaps it should../configure; make; make install is great when it works, but working through any issues that arise when it doesn't (while still not that hard) is starting to get a little sticky. The fact is, there are still points at which software installation for Linux can become cumbersome and annoying for desktop users that don't want to have to fiddle. Fortunately things are being done about this. There are projects like autopackage which are looking to provide a nice clean simple to use distribution agnostic packaging format. It is worth recognising the weaknesses, and embracing the (still in development, but looking better all the time) solutions.
MS was interested in winning the original browser wars because they were afraid it would destroy their desktop market. Now that losing is no longer a fear, they can safely move away from free application development and focus on their core competancy: OS development. They can let Mozilla develop all they want, and integrate Mozilla at a later date.
Nope, MS can't let mozilla come in and dominate the browser market. That's potential death right there. If mozilla has 90% market share when Longhorn finally comes out then MS is going to have a very hard time selling XAML - what with a massive install base of XUL capable browsers already out there. If MS fails to sell XAML and XUL takes off, then all of a sudden you don't need MS APIs, or OSs to use all those XUL apps. That's a huge kick in the balls for maintaining a desktop OS monopoly. Lose that, and they lose REAL leverage.
There's a long line of dominoes, and as long as MS is relying on having a desktop monopoly to leverage their products they need to guard every point of entry into that line. They can't afford to give up the browser just yet.
Did you read the link? There's a pretty damn huge fudge factor going on there (there is little on common between the stories beyond vague similarity of name, and basic setting). Thet covers exactly what you are talking about. That's copyright law in practice for books. If it worked that way for software, I repeat, there would be no need for software patents. EVERYTHING you're talking about there falls within the scope of plaigarism/copyright cases such as the one I linked to.
But there's another reason not to do this. Software is copyrightable and patentable for a reason. The code itself may be protected by copyright, but a patent is for something else entirely. It's for the innovative methods, processes, combinations, etc, the inventor has implemented in code. It covers not just that exact code, but also other methods of implementing the same invention. This means, for instance, that someone can't just reimplement it in a different language and use it freely.
Let's be honest though, I imagine copyright law would extend fairly happily to covering a simple translation of your copyrighted source code to a new language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll still get sued for copyright violation if I take the latest Harry Potter book and translate it into French.
Even if I just translate the ideas of the Harry Potter over, I can still get in some difficulty, as this guy in Russia found out. That case is far from cut and dried (the link is fairly old, and I forget what the final results of the case were), but it certainly made it to court. If source code were held to the same levels with regard to copyright I don't think there would be any need for software patents as you claim.
Patenting software is a bit like patenting unpublished novels. You get a patent for "well, the story goes sort of like this...", and get to sue anyone who has a story that is at all similar.
As you say, the source code goes unreleased and unpublished, so all you've got to go on is the vague description of how the "story sort of goes" to compare an potentially infringing story to.
Imagine if this was the standard for plaigarism (which is, admittedly, under copyright law, not patents, but that's mostly because you can't patent stories - if you could, believe me, plenty of people would). Madness.
Surely patents are for the implementation - didn't you have to provide actual design blueprints etc. if you were patenting a new kind of engine? If you have to patent it on that levl - that is, patent a particular set of source files (where obvious derivatives etc. would still be liable), then software patents might almost work. Then again, you'd largely be duplicating existing copyright law, and what would be the point?
You do realize that you're effectively creating a race of genitic slaves among your offspring. What if one of your great grandchildren don't wish to be covered by the LGPL?
Then the grandchild simply needs to negotiate to be released under a different license with the copyright holder - which, presuming the original poster is sensible, will be a living family member (the copyright being passed down through the family). I would imagine that this need not be too difficult.
More sensible again would be to have any offspring also gain copyright preiviliges once they reach a certain age, and hence be able to change their own licensing at will.
I'm really impressed with the White Knight launching vehicle and the new rocket design but all the Spaceship One team have proven that given enough money, anyone can build a spaceship. We knew that already however.
Really? It seems to me that Scaled Composites have redefined "enough money" to be a hell of a lot lower than it used to be. So far they've spent about $20 million, which sounds like a lot, but let's put that into some perspective: That's less than the cost of a brand new 747. It's about 5% of the cost of a single shuttle launch. It's less than a 5th of what the Canadian government recently pissed away on cronyism in the recent sponsorship scandal. It's the amount of cash Peter Jackson is getting paid to direct King Kong. On the scale that these guys are operating $20 million is a piss in the bucket. It's more than you or I might happen to have lying around in spare change, but compared to the costs for standard everyday (non space going)performance aircraft it is unbelievably cheap.
The author claims that VHS succeeding over Betamax is inexplicable. This is an Urban Legend
No, the author says that VHS succeeding over Betamax was inexplicable to consumers. The fact that there is an Urban Legend (read popular belief) that it is inexplicable says that, to the average consumer, it was.
The point is not that the success or failure is something that cannot be seen, predicted, or understood, but rather, the forces determining success or failure are in some manner removed from, or less visible to, the consumer. Thus the average consumer making their purchasing or browsing decisions is less able to understand the full impact of their choices.
On the one hand, we have people who don't like Moore and his films, and they cry "YOU"RE ALL WACKO LEFTIES!", and on the other hand, we have people who do like Moore and his films, crying "YOU"RE ALL WACKO RIGHT-WINGERS!".
I think this is a largely an American thing. Ever run into "Fisher's Deduction"?
"The more issues a person tries to crudely simplify and shoehorn into an arbitrary liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Naturally this is a gross generalisation, but it has that very bitter hint of truth that makes it stick in ones mind.
This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.
You like GNOME but don't like the new nautilus? You can use Konqueror from inside GNOME no problems. You can use Evidence from inside GNOME.
Dearly love Nautilus but don't like spatial? GConf is far from cryptic. The choice is right there.
Don't want to have spatial existant in any way shape or form? Grab the Nautilus source, make a few edits so that only the navigation behaviour is enabled in the build, and build your own version.
Explain to me... where exactly was your choice taken away?
I wonder how much productivity FPSes have stolen from our lives?
There's a great quote from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to the effect that he would have released a couple of more albums if it hadn't been for Doom. Of course now he's doing all the music and sound design for Doom III, but at least you can claim that's productively spending all your time on Doom...
Not quite what I got from it. Ext2 was certainly faster for a lot of operations, but is, of course, not journalled. XFS and JFS were fast, but most importantly, when it came to large files, these two tended to really take the lead. XFS was particularly good at handling large files. Overall Ext3 was disappointingly slow surprisingly often.
Slashdot Mirror
he problem is, that for your actual "average user", they will say, "where is my MS Office"
The article points out CrossOver Office handles that one.
and "where is my internet explorer" and I need my Norton Anti-Virus.
The reason for switching was to get away from IE and viruses - if they were actually switching for that reason, why on earth would they then complain about the lack of it?
An acquainance of mine can't get over the fact that his win xp box doesn't have a floppy disk drive. What would he do if I took his start menu away?
Indeed. So which distribution is it that you're planning to give him that uses blackbox or windowmaker as the default desktop environment? Is there a reason you're thinking of giving him a more hard core hacker oriented distro instead of, saw Linspire or Xandros or Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora or any of the other multitudes of distros that use KDE or GNOME as their default DE?
Jedidiah.
The people who are constantly getting hit with viruses, spyware, IE holes, etc. are exactly the kind of people who would have a hard time getting used to and accepting Linux.
Really? That's what people keep saying, but I'm a little less sure it's true. What makes Linux hard is administering it. If you can't administer your windows box, what difference does it make that you can't administer your linux box either? Other than that it's just a "getting used to" issue - and again, the more computer phobic you are, and the less you understand, the easier this can tend to be. Serious windows users know all the shortcut keys, and the efficient ways of doing things. They know all about the nice extra functionality that is available. Naive users just don't know anything about that - they have much lower expectations of what a computer should be able to do. They don't understand how any of it works anyway, so the change is far less stressful than you would imagine (especially if you use something like Linspire or Xandros which hews pretty close to a lot of the basic windows ways of doing things). It's not like switching to linux means you have to grasp some new interface that doesn't use WIMP.
How about in practice? I switched my parents to linux. They had no problems using it. And believe me, my parents are far from computer savvy (my mother couldn't figure out how to install new fonts in windows). My girlfriend was curious as to what linux was like - I gave her a knoppix CD, and she figured everything else out herself.
Sure anecdotes are not data, b ut where is the data? Why is there an assumption that computer-phobic can't use linux? Certainly I haven't seen any real data on that either.
Jedidiah.
Yes. I've spent time with OpenDX. It is good but (1) the interface is on the archaic side, and (2) yeah, there is a lot of learning involved. (3) The quality of the resulting visualisations, in terms of their interactivity was a little limited (though perhaps I simply failed to learn how to do that part).
The idea is very nice - you simply connect together a bunch of boxes with inputs and outputs and construct a visualisation that way. It means you can do so in an entirely graphical manner, and get a good overview of what exactly you are doing.
VTK actually uses a similar scheme, with a render pipline, but rather than a graphical tool you use Java or C++ or Python to connect the elements (provided as objects) together. VTK does have a much larger range of objects to put in your render pipeline, providing extremely rich functionality.
So, I'm not really trying to dis OpenDX, it is a great tool, but I really do think VTK is a better option.
Jedidiah.
Anyone interested in doing powerful 3D data visualization should make a mandatory stop here. It's an open source visualization toolkit written in C++, but with bindings for Java and Python as well. This is a very powerful and very impressive system, and ought to be rated as one of the great open source projects. It doesn't seem to get much attention - I'm not sure why.
Have a look, and look at what it is actually capable of doing. If you want to do any sort of 3D visualization, it really is worth your time to learn a bit about VTK.
Jedidiah.
I wish this story went into more details into the algorithms used. Saying stuff like "we take tons of data and out comes a 3D image" is great, but what does the 3D image actually represent? What are the dimensions being graphed?
If I had to guess I would guess that they are doing 3D Self Organizing Maps, or something very similar.
The principle is: create a huge feature space for the documents in question (something like word counts for each document for each word in the corpus, with appropriate fixes (drop the most and least common words, do stemming etc.). You can now "visualize" the documents in a massive 20,000 dimensional space. However, what you can do, is try to create a projection from 20,000 dimensions down to 2 or 3 dimensions in a way that best preserves distances in the 20,000 dimensional space. This automatically creates a clustering of the documents as well, and you now have something that you can visualize practically. If you start doing things like labelling clusters and subsclusters by the words unique to/defining that cluster you can start to make some sense of the visualisation.
Effectively this is just a means of doing clustering on a large document space in such a way that the final output can be visualized (instead of the sort of results you get from k-means, or heirarchical clustering, which are a lot harder to visualize in a meaningful way for laymen). The benefit of being able to visualize it in that sense is that you can "see" patterns of other document attributes by adding that to the visualization (via colors, labels, etc.) and see a global overview of those attributes across the entire document space.
Just to reiterate: I do not know that this is what is being done, and they don't say a lot in the article, but I do have some experience in this field, and what I gleaned from the article would tend to imply an approach like this.
Jedidiah.
A lot of us would like this to feature open standards, open source and other such goodness, but we need to take a long, hard look at the initiatives from MS - their market dominance means that THEIR standards will become a reality.
I don't think it is so cut and dried yet. Longhorn, and hence XAML and all, is still at least a couple years off. Everything I've heard implies the release is going to go one of two ways: (1) It will be horribly late (2) A bunch of promised features are going to be heaved over the side so it can deliver on time.
Either way that's at least 2 years before XAML can have any uptake. Being realistic, I think you can add another year to that safely as it will require at least that long for Longhorn to have sufficient market penetration in comparison to older windows products.
Given 3 years and a steady increase in browser market share it could be possible that mozilla/opera/khtml browsers could gain a much much larger following. Even if it's not past the magic 50% figure (which it could conceivably be), a mere 40% market share could make people wanting to deploy XAML think twice.
Jedidiah.
The crux of the problme here is that (looking at your replies to other posters) you want to search the content of pages in your bookmarks (or even just in your history).
For someone that's keen (I may even try myself if I find some time) couldn't a close approximation of this be done VERY simply by just sending a search request to google restricting to sites listed in your history? All you need to do is parse out the unique sites from your history or bookmarks, and just pass those in to the google search. You could practically just write a bookmarklet to do it right now...
Jedidiah.
The most annoying thing you can run into is when something you are used to using suddenly gets replaced with a "predictive" system. In some ways the collapsed "only what yo've used recently" start bar in windows had some merit, but really, mostly it was just a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS. It would have been fine if the start menu had been essentially normal and simply had an extra "Recent Programs" that did the collapsed menu as an ADDITIONAL PARALLEL feature, but no, the had to make a mess.
If anything gets added that's predictive, it should work cooperatively in parallel with everything else that's already there. An extra feature that you can exploit when you choose to.
Jedidiah.
Personally I am a fan of teaching some philosophy and more advanced mathematics (like algebra) in primary/elementary school. The aim here is not to get kids to be fantastic algebraic machines, but merely to think. I think there really is too little emphasis on critical and logical thought. Why not introduce a few of the classic philosophical quandries to elementary school kids - get them wondering about it. There's no reason they have to come up with answers, just challenge them to think about it.
Is this really lacking in schools you ask? The number of people who seem to think The Matrix was very deep for it's basic solipsist type arguments baffles me. There really was nothing overly deep or complicated in that film that I wouldn't have expected people to have already thought about as a mere effort of exercising a little mental muscle (that's not to say it wasn't a good, film, just not exactly presenting anything terribly revelationary). That says to me that there's not enough emphasis on merely teachign kids to think and wonder.
Jedidiah.
Already done. Everyone I know uses something else. My friends use firefox, my mother uses mozilla (it looks like netscape), my father uses opera (he just preferred it), my girlfriend uses firefox... It's surprisingly easy to do as well. Not being overzealous about it is probably good. I just pointed out to my girlfriend that there was another browser to try, so she downloaded it and, regardless of popup blocking or tabs, decided it was much nicer simply on look and feel. Once she got used to the search box, the tabs and the lack of popups she went to some effort to remove IE from her machine totally - no prompting. Now she's trying to convert her office mates over, with some success (again, it's been a try it and decide its better pretty much straight away). Sometimes you just need to point out the options and (more importantly) make sure they know it isn't s huge change (it is change that people mostly fear) then let them work it out in their own time.
Jedidiah.
It's those damn libraries acting as huge intellectual property sharing hubs - they make Napster look tame! Just think of all the valuable content that is getting freely shared with no reimbursement to the author (other than the single original book purchase). It's theft, pure and simple. I'm surprised authors can afford to eat.
Jedidiah.
Are you getting these packages from the servers of the distribution you are using? You should only download rpms which are specifically built for the linux system you are using. For example, if you are using Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition, you should only download packages which are built for Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition.
./configure; make; make install is great when it works, but working through any issues that arise when it doesn't (while still not that hard) is starting to get a little sticky. The fact is, there are still points at which software installation for Linux can become cumbersome and annoying for desktop users that don't want to have to fiddle. Fortunately things are being done about this. There are projects like autopackage which are looking to provide a nice clean simple to use distribution agnostic packaging format. It is worth recognising the weaknesses, and embracing the (still in development, but looking better all the time) solutions.
As nice as this is, you just can't expect a single vendor to package everything you could ever want. At some point you're going to have to provide something packaged by someone else. That's the point where the trouble starts. Right now the only really distribution agnostic packaging system is source. Source is nice, and when well managed (say, with stow), it works very well for handling those few extra packages you want to install, but source does take a little more nouse than perhaps it should.
Jedidiah
MS was interested in winning the original browser wars because they were afraid it would destroy their desktop market. Now that losing is no longer a fear, they can safely move away from free application development and focus on their core competancy: OS development. They can let Mozilla develop all they want, and integrate Mozilla at a later date.
Nope, MS can't let mozilla come in and dominate the browser market. That's potential death right there. If mozilla has 90% market share when Longhorn finally comes out then MS is going to have a very hard time selling XAML - what with a massive install base of XUL capable browsers already out there. If MS fails to sell XAML and XUL takes off, then all of a sudden you don't need MS APIs, or OSs to use all those XUL apps. That's a huge kick in the balls for maintaining a desktop OS monopoly. Lose that, and they lose REAL leverage.
There's a long line of dominoes, and as long as MS is relying on having a desktop monopoly to leverage their products they need to guard every point of entry into that line. They can't afford to give up the browser just yet.
Jedidiah
Did you read the link? There's a pretty damn huge fudge factor going on there (there is little on common between the stories beyond vague similarity of name, and basic setting). Thet covers exactly what you are talking about. That's copyright law in practice for books. If it worked that way for software, I repeat, there would be no need for software patents. EVERYTHING you're talking about there falls within the scope of plaigarism/copyright cases such as the one I linked to.
Jedidiah
But there's another reason not to do this. Software is copyrightable and patentable for a reason. The code itself may be protected by copyright, but a patent is for something else entirely. It's for the innovative methods, processes, combinations, etc, the inventor has implemented in code. It covers not just that exact code, but also other methods of implementing the same invention. This means, for instance, that someone can't just reimplement it in a different language and use it freely.
Let's be honest though, I imagine copyright law would extend fairly happily to covering a simple translation of your copyrighted source code to a new language. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll still get sued for copyright violation if I take the latest Harry Potter book and translate it into French.
Even if I just translate the ideas of the Harry Potter over, I can still get in some difficulty, as this guy in Russia found out. That case is far from cut and dried (the link is fairly old, and I forget what the final results of the case were), but it certainly made it to court. If source code were held to the same levels with regard to copyright I don't think there would be any need for software patents as you claim.
Jedidiah.
Patenting software is a bit like patenting unpublished novels. You get a patent for "well, the story goes sort of like this...", and get to sue anyone who has a story that is at all similar.
As you say, the source code goes unreleased and unpublished, so all you've got to go on is the vague description of how the "story sort of goes" to compare an potentially infringing story to.
Imagine if this was the standard for plaigarism (which is, admittedly, under copyright law, not patents, but that's mostly because you can't patent stories - if you could, believe me, plenty of people would). Madness.
Surely patents are for the implementation - didn't you have to provide actual design blueprints etc. if you were patenting a new kind of engine? If you have to patent it on that levl - that is, patent a particular set of source files (where obvious derivatives etc. would still be liable), then software patents might almost work. Then again, you'd largely be duplicating existing copyright law, and what would be the point?
Jedidiah.
You do realize that you're effectively creating a race of genitic slaves among your offspring. What if one of your great grandchildren don't wish to be covered by the LGPL?
Then the grandchild simply needs to negotiate to be released under a different license with the copyright holder - which, presuming the original poster is sensible, will be a living family member (the copyright being passed down through the family). I would imagine that this need not be too difficult.
More sensible again would be to have any offspring also gain copyright preiviliges once they reach a certain age, and hence be able to change their own licensing at will.
Jedidiah
I'm really impressed with the White Knight launching vehicle and the new rocket design but all the Spaceship One team have proven that given enough money, anyone can build a spaceship. We knew that already however.
Really? It seems to me that Scaled Composites have redefined "enough money" to be a hell of a lot lower than it used to be. So far they've spent about $20 million, which sounds like a lot, but let's put that into some perspective: That's less than the cost of a brand new 747. It's about 5% of the cost of a single shuttle launch. It's less than a 5th of what the Canadian government recently pissed away on cronyism in the recent sponsorship scandal. It's the amount of cash Peter Jackson is getting paid to direct King Kong. On the scale that these guys are operating $20 million is a piss in the bucket. It's more than you or I might happen to have lying around in spare change, but compared to the costs for standard everyday (non space going)performance aircraft it is unbelievably cheap.
Jedidiah.
No, no, it's probably quite true. I would imagine you could get by with only that area. After all, he never said how DEEP it was did he?
I guess if you get all the way through the mantle you've got an instant recycling system instead of landfill though.
Jedidiah
The author claims that VHS succeeding over Betamax is inexplicable. This is an Urban Legend
No, the author says that VHS succeeding over Betamax was inexplicable to consumers. The fact that there is an Urban Legend (read popular belief) that it is inexplicable says that, to the average consumer, it was.
The point is not that the success or failure is something that cannot be seen, predicted, or understood, but rather, the forces determining success or failure are in some manner removed from, or less visible to, the consumer. Thus the average consumer making their purchasing or browsing decisions is less able to understand the full impact of their choices.
It made sense to me.
Jedidiah.
On the one hand, we have people who don't like Moore and his films, and they cry "YOU"RE ALL WACKO LEFTIES!", and on the other hand, we have people who do like Moore and his films, crying "YOU"RE ALL WACKO RIGHT-WINGERS!".
I think this is a largely an American thing. Ever run into "Fisher's Deduction"?
"The more issues a person tries to crudely simplify and shoehorn into an arbitrary liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Naturally this is a gross generalisation, but it has that very bitter hint of truth that makes it stick in ones mind.
Jedidiah.
This so-called 'paradigm shift' of spatial browsing should not be enforced on users. We like Linux. We like choice. Stop being fascists and give us a 'turn off spatial browsing' button.
... where exactly was your choice taken away?
You have choice. Use KDE. Use Rox Filer. Use Evidence.
You like GNOME but don't like the new nautilus? You can use Konqueror from inside GNOME no problems. You can use Evidence from inside GNOME.
Dearly love Nautilus but don't like spatial? GConf is far from cryptic. The choice is right there.
Don't want to have spatial existant in any way shape or form? Grab the Nautilus source, make a few edits so that only the navigation behaviour is enabled in the build, and build your own version.
Explain to me
Jedidiah.
Hmmm
SELinux or Windows 2003 Server.
I wonder which is more secure and less of a national security risk?
Jedidiah
I wonder how much productivity FPSes have stolen from our lives?
There's a great quote from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to the effect that he would have released a couple of more albums if it hadn't been for Doom. Of course now he's doing all the music and sound design for Doom III, but at least you can claim that's productively spending all your time on Doom...
Jedidiah.
Not quite what I got from it. Ext2 was certainly faster for a lot of operations, but is, of course, not journalled. XFS and JFS were fast, but most importantly, when it came to large files, these two tended to really take the lead. XFS was particularly good at handling large files. Overall Ext3 was disappointingly slow surprisingly often.
Jedidiah.