One thing that might help, if the single window model is impossible, could be if they "snapped" to, say, 2 pixels of the desktop edge (as they do in Photoshop) and remember their positions between sessions. This'd at least let me quickly impose order on my GIMP virtual desktop.
Any decent window manager ought to do this already. I think a lot of the complaints about the GIMP are due to the fact that it tends to delegate window management (including those palettes) to the window manager (which is actually sensible) but MS Windows and Metacity both tend to suck for anythign but the most basic window management. GIMP under enlightenment with edge snapping, stacking layers, multiple desktops, and window grouping is really quite pleasant to use.
If Metacity could implement at least a few of these things (edge resistance and a basic window groups system) you would see fewer complaints. As for GIMP for MS Windows - perhaps they'll have to come up with some hack to make that work especially for windows - I don't see MS ever writing a decent window manager.
How? Which window manager do you use? I am looking for a good window manager than can do this!
Depressing isn't it? Grouping does make lot of sense, an it can be a very powerful window management tool (see my sig for a pwer user oriented version of window groups). The question is, why is it not supported by window managers? It was. Enlightenment, Sawfish, even FVWM to some extent, had the capacity to do grouping. The newer window managers like Metacity have dropped it. While I appreciate a slimming down of the featureset, given the number of arguments I've seen about, for instance GIMP and other "I want it to be MDI" programs, it seems like it is a much needed feature.
Perhaps they simply haven't seen a good interface to it. I know that Enlightenment's hadling of window grouping was clunky - you could do it, but it wasn't something you wanted to do on a regular basis for a selection of windows on the fly. So if you're a WM developer have a read of link in my sig. You don't have to incorporate all of it (as I say, it's power user oriented) but it does provide a simple and intuitive basic interface to window groups that is worth implementing.
Saying the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the French is the understatement of the year. Japan invaded China to open World War II and killed nearly 30 million Chinese people.
I agree entirely. In fact see my post from the earlier article on Fusion. And while we're at it, it's worth pointing out that Korea is the China and Japan what Poland is the Germany and Russia as far as long term histry goes.
Had I been realistic, however, it would just get ignored, so I went for the soft sell...
I'm glad Ballmer has been so proactive in helping China figure out what to do with software patents. It looks like Europe is leaning toward at least minimizing -- if not eliminating -- software patents. When China turns its attention to the subject, Ballmer's little speech should give them some food for thought on which direction they should go.
Keep in mind that China is a Communist country and any concept of intellectual property is relatively novel.
Keep in mind that China, Japan and Korea are cooperating together to create a standardised asian linux system, and considerable sums of money have been invested in the project. A large pat of the reason was to remove dependence on foreign companies... which is to say, Microsoft.
China, Japan and Korea working together is no mean feat either - they are historically incredibly bitter enemies. Think a nice English/Irish/French cooperative linux distribution and you might get the idea.
I doubt China will be scared of Liux by anything Ballmer has to say about patents. You're quite right. They are more likely to take the other option and view the software patents as the problem.
If I were a fusion scientist going to work on ITER, I'd much prefer to live in beautiful France than in the sparsely populated bit of North Japan where ITER would be built.
Northern Japan is very beautiful itself. You should go for a visit, get a rail pass and head north (as surprisingly few tourists do. Plenty of nice scenery in Nikko (just north of Tokyo and inland), and Matsushima (very beatiful there) in Tohoku (the northern half on Honshuu). Still fairly touristy for either of those, but I wouldn't want to push you too far from the mainstream.
Actually, if you read the article, China is in favour of the EU site - they don't get on too well with Japan
That is a terrible understatement. Many many Chinese have never forgiven Japan for the terrible atrocities during the Second World War. It didnt involve westerners so most in the west have nly a few scant ideas of what went on, but to the Chinese it is never to be forgotten.
I know Chinese people who simply refuse, on spec, to ever speak to anyone of Japanese decent. Yes it really is that serious.
A significat new energy source is going to be huge, especially with world demand for oil (due to the growth in Chinese industry) rising to the point where its pushing supply to the limits...
Supposedly this reactor would represent the last major step required before, hopefully, fusion power stations could become a reality. The EU very naturally wants t locate it in Europe, thus giving Europe a stronger edge and focus in alternative energy research.
Interestingly the alternate site is not in the US, but rather in Japan. And that is certainly what the EU is worried about - the Japanese economy, afte a decade and more of recession is finally starting to crawl back. And the Japanese are very good at small and efficient, and are already leading the world (jointly with Korea I guess) in alternative power transport (hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell cars).
It will be interesting to see how the fight finally plays out.
Where did you study law bro? The Constitution is the supreme law of the land! Defend it or take a hike, Mike....
The constitution was designed to be challenged and changedas social values changed. It requires a large majority (of the democratic representatives) to make a change, but it certainly can and will happen - most of the the points you discuss are amendments to the constitution - that is changes. Sure, many of them happened almost mmediately, but the point is that the document was designed to be a living one, and hence to be challenged.
To defend everything in the sonstitution somply because it is the constitution is at least as stupid as challenging ideas that someone thinks have become outdated and worthy of alteration or new amendments.
Think about the things that are broken in the default solaris install:
sed, awk, tar
Depending on what you're looking for you (ie. if you like a lot of the GNU convenience features) can include
ls (no, really, no colors, and lacking all manner of other sugary features) grep (the raw Solaris grep is surprisngly slow compared to GNU grep, not to mentiona lack of options) diff (go on, try diff --help, again, all the nice options are missing)
and as you say, many many more. That's some pretty basic stuff that, while not "broken", feels broken when you're used to the GNU versions.
Oh, and killall. killall is always fun on Solaris...
China seem to be determined to push boundaries at the moment. Putting a man in orbit is no mean feat. Yes the US did it along time ago, but I don't see them doing it at all at the moment due to the shuttle grounding. Now pushing for the still unexplored regions of the world. I wonder if they have any deep sea missions planned for some time in the next few years. China has definitely decided that they have somethign to prove. The impressive part is that they aren't doing a bad job of proving it.
And this really ought to mildly concern people in the US. Yes the US already has done most of these things or something similar (they have a couple of Antarctic bases, one at the pole I believe). But that's the key point. The US has done such things, but doesn't seem to be expending quite the effort they use to on pushing boundaries of exploration and science. Increasingly it seems to be Chinese and Indians with the real fire to try and push ahead. And all the better I say. The US seemed to slacken off and grow complacent, so its about time there was some serious competition again.
Go China.
(Hopefully they can break new ground sorting out their political issues too)
How can you say this is Disney's last chance? They can afford to churn out non-revenue generating crap for years without the worry about going under. So what if they blow Toy Story 3?
This is Disney's last chance to remain a respected player in the animated feature film business. If they lose this, they'll lose respect as there is just too much competition these days. Disney the company will keep trucking along - they've got many many many other interests than animated feature films, and it would take a miracle to slay the beast.
If they slaughter Toy Story, how would it be any different than Alladin or Little Mermaid?
When "The Black Cauldron" came out (the previous potential death gasp for Disney) there just wasn't anyone else in the field. The closest real competition was Jim Henson Workshops with films like "The Dark Crystal". Of course, the year after "The Black Cauldron" Henson came out with Labyrinth which moved them distinctly away from anything resembling animation.
Right now Disney has 3 very string contenders to face on the animated film front. If they lose now, their ability to keep trying is seriously diminished. I'm not saying Disney won't keep churning out animated films, nor that they won't have any more successes. I am saying they will lose their shine and respect in the genre, making any new successes much much harder work than they would otherwise be.
I think your analysis is apt. Except for one point. If the movie stinks, meaning it is a critical mess, it will still make hundreds of millions of dollars on name recognition alone.
Quite possible, but audiences can be suprisingly fickle. I wouldn't bet that it will necessarily make money, especially if the "no Pixar" aspect gets widely publicised. You may say most people don't know or care about Pixar, but that's what the media is for. If there are enough pre release articles discussing the film as "being done by a completely different animation studio" or some such, people will get the idea.
If sequels were guaranteed money in the bank, there wouldn't be so damn many flops, and all those direct to video Disney sequels would be busy getting theatrical releases to pull in the guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars.
It is, of course, too early to completely write of Toy Story 3 as crap just yet. Disney has pulled amazing things out of their hat before - just look at "The Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King" after what was a very serious slump indeed. Then again, we really are into seriously derivative work here - spinning a part 3 to what is someone elses work doesn't exactly represent the spark of originality that is often required for "new beginnings".
The reality is, however, that this could be the end of Disney as the great purveyor of animated feature films. They were king for a long time, but there is very serious competition in the field now (Dreamworks SKG, Pixar, Studio Ghibli), and all of Disney's "recent successes" have been acting as a distributor for someone elses film. If Disney is to continue to command any respect in the animated feature film arena it is going to need to produce it's own high quality work very soon (as everyone else is gaining enoug status to not require Disney as a distributor anymore).
Realistically Toy Story 3 would be the last real chance for Disney to prove itself. All their hand animated fare has been drivel of late, and they are deperately in need of a fresh approach. A CGI film might be the way. If Toy Story 3 sinks though, I suspect it will be the end of Disney as a serious player in animated feature films. They may surprise me, but I don't think they have anything else left in them, and the competition is just too strong.
What I'm interested in is: Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox? Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
It doesn't matter. Firefox is employing viral marketing at its best. The all important fact here is hype can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The more hype they can get about firefox (by widely publicising the massive number of downloads - regardless of whether they are new converts or not), the more media they get discussing the hype about firefox, which in turn gets more media interested...
The reality is that these days the media largely feeds off itself, so if you reach critical mass, the hype and coverage are self propagating. Cheering about massive numbers of downloads (regardless of who they're by - do you think the media bothers to check?!) is a large part of hitting that critical mass. As long as firefox manages to push past the tipping point on media mindshare it'll get wide enough media coverage that a lot of those downloads will start coming from people honestly switching because they want to see what the fuss is about.
Which is to say the massive number of downloads is all about marketing, which as we all know, doesn't have to connect with reality. Who is doing to the downloading doesn't matter (for now). Wait 6 months and then ask that question.
The truly amazing part is that unlike id, who up until (and some would argue, including) Doom 3 simply made an engine and slapped some quick levels together to show it off
Anyone who thinks the levels in Doom 3 were "slapped together" to show off the engine should spend a little time designing levels. The general design, lighting, sound design (which was surprisngly important for some levels), and all around attention to detail in Doom 3 was very impressive. Whether you were a fan of the gameplay or not, you would be a fool to claim the levels were "thrown together".
Quake I... well, you might have an argument there. Some truly excellent levels, some appalling levels, and a surprising hodge podge of inconsistent design - that speaks of a certain amount of "slapped together".
He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme....It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.
He got 9 years for criminal fraud because he was fraudelently selling goods. Basically everything he sold was a complete scam. He committed literally many many milltions of dollars in fraud (half a million dollars a month on average). The fact that he did this by scamming hundreds and thousands of people out of a small amount of cash instead of the usual where you scam a few people for vast sums of money each doesn't really make a difference in the total amount of harm he caused.
To some extent I agree, 9 years is harsh, but it is in line with the rest of US sentencing, which is equally harsh. Just keep in mind: 9 years in jail for multi-million dollar fraud, not 9 years in jail for bulk advertising.
It's nice, but it would be far more interesting if working from that page gave you a nice XUL interface to your search results. Maybe they could do clustering like http://www.clusty.com/ except have the drillable clusters in proper tree widgets, and a preview pane showing the google cache of the site and... well, there's plenty they could do if they got serious about using XUL. Until that happens it's just bothering to be nice to the browsers out there - they have asimilar page for IE, although to be fair mozilla, safari and opera don't have any such thing.
Well, there's already search functionality present in Windows 2k and XP - that's not been exploited (afaik). Also, what's to prevent a virus writer from just doing a brute-force scan of the hard drive anyway?
There is existing search functionality, but you have to have to already own the machine before you can use it, because it only does local searches. On the other hand, this proposed new system connects to the internet for searches as well, which may mean there are nice big exploitable holes - there s often are in any internet connected MS software.
Why is this better than a brute force scan of the hard drive... well, presuming you can do it remotely through a hole in the search tool it saves you haveing to go to the hard work of owning to box wiithout knowing what's on it. equally importantly its using an indexed search of the local disk which means it is (1) much much faster (2) isn't going to cause a whole lot of disk churning that the person sitting at the machine might notice.
I can't wait for the next generation of viruses which will spawn from this. Is this a recipe for disaster or what:
Who said anything about viruses, looks more like Microsoft is now designing in a new system to help script kiddies locate the pr0n and warez on your hard drive. I think this is a great step forward for Microsoft on security concerns. Really, how many CPU cycles were wasted, how much senseless disk churning was there, on all those owned machines? With this tools script kiddies can get a complete list of everything on your hard drive before they own you, thus saving you time and money.
When I started working at WP, they owned over 90% of the PC Word Processing market.
Doesn't that make it a monopoly? That's the percent Windows had at the time it was considered a monopoly.
Quite possibly they did have an effective monopoly, yes. The key point is that having an effective monopoly is not illegal. Using your monpoly position to unfairly leverage other products - that is what gets you in trouble.
Have you ever tried to distribute a program in binary from for Linux? You are directly in distribution hell, because every distribution (and different versions as well) contain incompatible library versions. Static linking used to be a resolution, but since glibc 2.3.3 it does not work anymore (even worse, it prints out warning, then works on your computer, but crashes on a computer with a different glibc version).
Check out Autopackage. It's not finished yet, but it is designed specifically to handle the sorts of cross distribution packaging issues you're talking about.
The current package formats are not broken, and are not badly designed. They work brilliantly for what they were designed to do: provide a way for a distribution to package up binaries so as to modularise and make maintainable a large system with lots and lots of optional packages. Using rpm/deb with yum/apt-rpm/apt is an excellent way to maintain your distribution. It doesn't help you with third party packages.
If you want third party packages that anyone can make, you need another way. Autopackage is making excellent inroads into making that other way a reality. Really, check it out.
If the next version of MSIE has a big fat SEARCH button in the navigation bar
You think MS is going to include a search button in IE's navigation bar?
I think you're grossly underestimating the plans for Longhorn, which is all about "web enabling" the OS (think XAML and all that).
What you'll have is every search entry box in every Microsoft app, from the search box in the IE toolbar (you know, just like the Firefox one) to the search entry in any help window, will be "MSN search enabled", and return a set of MSN search results as well as a set local search results.
Microsoft is going to do Google Desktop search inside out - every search dialog anywhere in windows is going to haul back results from MSN search as well, and present them in parallel.
Well, I'd like to know, how many civilians have been killed in Iraq?
Is "we don't know" not an acceptable answer? It should be, because we honestly don't. We have a very poor study, or official counts that probably low ball the number a little - no one has actually conducted a good study, so we just don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that might help, if the single window model is impossible, could be if they "snapped" to, say, 2 pixels of the desktop edge (as they do in Photoshop) and remember their positions between sessions. This'd at least let me quickly impose order on my GIMP virtual desktop.
Any decent window manager ought to do this already. I think a lot of the complaints about the GIMP are due to the fact that it tends to delegate window management (including those palettes) to the window manager (which is actually sensible) but MS Windows and Metacity both tend to suck for anythign but the most basic window management. GIMP under enlightenment with edge snapping, stacking layers, multiple desktops, and window grouping is really quite pleasant to use.
If Metacity could implement at least a few of these things (edge resistance and a basic window groups system) you would see fewer complaints. As for GIMP for MS Windows - perhaps they'll have to come up with some hack to make that work especially for windows - I don't see MS ever writing a decent window manager.
Jedidiah.
How? Which window manager do you use? I am looking for a good window manager than can do this!
Depressing isn't it? Grouping does make lot of sense, an it can be a very powerful window management tool (see my sig for a pwer user oriented version of window groups). The question is, why is it not supported by window managers? It was. Enlightenment, Sawfish, even FVWM to some extent, had the capacity to do grouping. The newer window managers like Metacity have dropped it. While I appreciate a slimming down of the featureset, given the number of arguments I've seen about, for instance GIMP and other "I want it to be MDI" programs, it seems like it is a much needed feature.
Perhaps they simply haven't seen a good interface to it. I know that Enlightenment's hadling of window grouping was clunky - you could do it, but it wasn't something you wanted to do on a regular basis for a selection of windows on the fly. So if you're a WM developer have a read of link in my sig. You don't have to incorporate all of it (as I say, it's power user oriented) but it does provide a simple and intuitive basic interface to window groups that is worth implementing.
Jedidiah.
Saying the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the French is the understatement of the year. Japan invaded China to open World War II and killed nearly 30 million Chinese people.
I agree entirely. In fact see my post from the earlier article on Fusion. And while we're at it, it's worth pointing out that Korea is the China and Japan what Poland is the Germany and Russia as far as long term histry goes.
Had I been realistic, however, it would just get ignored, so I went for the soft sell...
Jedidiah.
I'm glad Ballmer has been so proactive in helping China figure out what to do with software patents. It looks like Europe is leaning toward at least minimizing -- if not eliminating -- software patents. When China turns its attention to the subject, Ballmer's little speech should give them some food for thought on which direction they should go.
Keep in mind that China is a Communist country and any concept of intellectual property is relatively novel.
Keep in mind that China, Japan and Korea are cooperating together to create a standardised asian linux system, and considerable sums of money have been invested in the project. A large pat of the reason was to remove dependence on foreign companies... which is to say, Microsoft.
China, Japan and Korea working together is no mean feat either - they are historically incredibly bitter enemies. Think a nice English/Irish/French cooperative linux distribution and you might get the idea.
I doubt China will be scared of Liux by anything Ballmer has to say about patents. You're quite right. They are more likely to take the other option and view the software patents as the problem.
Jedidiah.
If I were a fusion scientist going to work on ITER, I'd much prefer to live in beautiful France than in the sparsely populated bit of North Japan where ITER would be built.
Northern Japan is very beautiful itself. You should go for a visit, get a rail pass and head north (as surprisingly few tourists do. Plenty of nice scenery in Nikko (just north of Tokyo and inland), and Matsushima (very beatiful there) in Tohoku (the northern half on Honshuu). Still fairly touristy for either of those, but I wouldn't want to push you too far from the mainstream.
Jedidiah.
Actually, if you read the article, China is in favour of the EU site - they don't get on too well with Japan
That is a terrible understatement. Many many Chinese have never forgiven Japan for the terrible atrocities during the Second World War. It didnt involve westerners so most in the west have nly a few scant ideas of what went on, but to the Chinese it is never to be forgotten.
I know Chinese people who simply refuse, on spec, to ever speak to anyone of Japanese decent. Yes it really is that serious.
Jedidiah.
A significat new energy source is going to be huge, especially with world demand for oil (due to the growth in Chinese industry) rising to the point where its pushing supply to the limits...
Supposedly this reactor would represent the last major step required before, hopefully, fusion power stations could become a reality. The EU very naturally wants t locate it in Europe, thus giving Europe a stronger edge and focus in alternative energy research.
Interestingly the alternate site is not in the US, but rather in Japan. And that is certainly what the EU is worried about - the Japanese economy, afte a decade and more of recession is finally starting to crawl back. And the Japanese are very good at small and efficient, and are already leading the world (jointly with Korea I guess) in alternative power transport (hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell cars).
It will be interesting to see how the fight finally plays out.
Jedidiah.
Where did you study law bro?
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land!
Defend it or take a hike, Mike....
The constitution was designed to be challenged and changedas social values changed. It requires a large majority (of the democratic representatives) to make a change, but it certainly can and will happen - most of the the points you discuss are amendments to the constitution - that is changes. Sure, many of them happened almost mmediately, but the point is that the document was designed to be a living one, and hence to be challenged.
To defend everything in the sonstitution somply because it is the constitution is at least as stupid as challenging ideas that someone thinks have become outdated and worthy of alteration or new amendments.
Jedidiah.
Think about the things that are broken in the default solaris install:
sed, awk, tar
Depending on what you're looking for you (ie. if you like a lot of the GNU convenience features) can include
ls (no, really, no colors, and lacking all manner of other sugary features)
grep (the raw Solaris grep is surprisngly slow compared to GNU grep, not to mentiona lack of options)
diff (go on, try diff --help, again, all the nice options are missing)
and as you say, many many more. That's some pretty basic stuff that, while not "broken", feels broken when you're used to the GNU versions.
Oh, and killall. killall is always fun on Solaris...
Jedidiah.
China seem to be determined to push boundaries at the moment. Putting a man in orbit is no mean feat. Yes the US did it along time ago, but I don't see them doing it at all at the moment due to the shuttle grounding. Now pushing for the still unexplored regions of the world. I wonder if they have any deep sea missions planned for some time in the next few years. China has definitely decided that they have somethign to prove. The impressive part is that they aren't doing a bad job of proving it.
And this really ought to mildly concern people in the US. Yes the US already has done most of these things or something similar (they have a couple of Antarctic bases, one at the pole I believe). But that's the key point. The US has done such things, but doesn't seem to be expending quite the effort they use to on pushing boundaries of exploration and science. Increasingly it seems to be Chinese and Indians with the real fire to try and push ahead. And all the better I say. The US seemed to slacken off and grow complacent, so its about time there was some serious competition again.
Go China.
(Hopefully they can break new ground sorting out their political issues too)
Jedidiah.
How can you say this is Disney's last chance? They can afford to churn out non-revenue generating crap for years without the worry about going under. So what if they blow Toy Story 3?
This is Disney's last chance to remain a respected player in the animated feature film business. If they lose this, they'll lose respect as there is just too much competition these days. Disney the company will keep trucking along - they've got many many many other interests than animated feature films, and it would take a miracle to slay the beast.
Jedidiah.
If they slaughter Toy Story, how would it be any different than Alladin or Little Mermaid?
When "The Black Cauldron" came out (the previous potential death gasp for Disney) there just wasn't anyone else in the field. The closest real competition was Jim Henson Workshops with films like "The Dark Crystal". Of course, the year after "The Black Cauldron" Henson came out with Labyrinth which moved them distinctly away from anything resembling animation.
Right now Disney has 3 very string contenders to face on the animated film front. If they lose now, their ability to keep trying is seriously diminished. I'm not saying Disney won't keep churning out animated films, nor that they won't have any more successes. I am saying they will lose their shine and respect in the genre, making any new successes much much harder work than they would otherwise be.
Jedidiah.
I think your analysis is apt. Except for one point. If the movie stinks, meaning it is a critical mess, it will still make hundreds of millions of dollars on name recognition alone.
Quite possible, but audiences can be suprisingly fickle. I wouldn't bet that it will necessarily make money, especially if the "no Pixar" aspect gets widely publicised. You may say most people don't know or care about Pixar, but that's what the media is for. If there are enough pre release articles discussing the film as "being done by a completely different animation studio" or some such, people will get the idea.
If sequels were guaranteed money in the bank, there wouldn't be so damn many flops, and all those direct to video Disney sequels would be busy getting theatrical releases to pull in the guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jedidiah.
It is, of course, too early to completely write of Toy Story 3 as crap just yet. Disney has pulled amazing things out of their hat before - just look at "The Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King" after what was a very serious slump indeed. Then again, we really are into seriously derivative work here - spinning a part 3 to what is someone elses work doesn't exactly represent the spark of originality that is often required for "new beginnings".
The reality is, however, that this could be the end of Disney as the great purveyor of animated feature films. They were king for a long time, but there is very serious competition in the field now (Dreamworks SKG, Pixar, Studio Ghibli), and all of Disney's "recent successes" have been acting as a distributor for someone elses film. If Disney is to continue to command any respect in the animated feature film arena it is going to need to produce it's own high quality work very soon (as everyone else is gaining enoug status to not require Disney as a distributor anymore).
Realistically Toy Story 3 would be the last real chance for Disney to prove itself. All their hand animated fare has been drivel of late, and they are deperately in need of a fresh approach. A CGI film might be the way. If Toy Story 3 sinks though, I suspect it will be the end of Disney as a serious player in animated feature films. They may surprise me, but I don't think they have anything else left in them, and the competition is just too strong.
My bet: Goodbye Disney animation.
Jedidiah.
What I'm interested in is:
Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox?
Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
It doesn't matter. Firefox is employing viral marketing at its best. The all important fact here is hype can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The more hype they can get about firefox (by widely publicising the massive number of downloads - regardless of whether they are new converts or not), the more media they get discussing the hype about firefox, which in turn gets more media interested...
The reality is that these days the media largely feeds off itself, so if you reach critical mass, the hype and coverage are self propagating. Cheering about massive numbers of downloads (regardless of who they're by - do you think the media bothers to check?!) is a large part of hitting that critical mass. As long as firefox manages to push past the tipping point on media mindshare it'll get wide enough media coverage that a lot of those downloads will start coming from people honestly switching because they want to see what the fuss is about.
Which is to say the massive number of downloads is all about marketing, which as we all know, doesn't have to connect with reality. Who is doing to the downloading doesn't matter (for now). Wait 6 months and then ask that question.
Jedidiah.
The truly amazing part is that unlike id, who up until (and some would argue, including) Doom 3 simply made an engine and slapped some quick levels together to show it off
Anyone who thinks the levels in Doom 3 were "slapped together" to show off the engine should spend a little time designing levels. The general design, lighting, sound design (which was surprisngly important for some levels), and all around attention to detail in Doom 3 was very impressive. Whether you were a fan of the gameplay or not, you would be a fool to claim the levels were "thrown together".
Quake I... well, you might have an argument there. Some truly excellent levels, some appalling levels, and a surprising hodge podge of inconsistent design - that speaks of a certain amount of "slapped together".
Jedidiah.
He gets 9 years? I think that's very extreme....It's a very long time. And he only sent out some bulk advertising.
He got 9 years for criminal fraud because he was fraudelently selling goods. Basically everything he sold was a complete scam. He committed literally many many milltions of dollars in fraud (half a million dollars a month on average). The fact that he did this by scamming hundreds and thousands of people out of a small amount of cash instead of the usual where you scam a few people for vast sums of money each doesn't really make a difference in the total amount of harm he caused.
To some extent I agree, 9 years is harsh, but it is in line with the rest of US sentencing, which is equally harsh. Just keep in mind: 9 years in jail for multi-million dollar fraud, not 9 years in jail for bulk advertising.
Jedidiah.
Check this out http://www.google.com/firefox
It's nice, but it would be far more interesting if working from that page gave you a nice XUL interface to your search results. Maybe they could do clustering like http://www.clusty.com/ except have the drillable clusters in proper tree widgets, and a preview pane showing the google cache of the site and... well, there's plenty they could do if they got serious about using XUL. Until that happens it's just bothering to be nice to the browsers out there - they have asimilar page for IE, although to be fair mozilla, safari and opera don't have any such thing.
Jedidiah.
Well, there's already search functionality present in Windows 2k and XP - that's not been exploited (afaik). Also, what's to prevent a virus writer from just doing a brute-force scan of the hard drive anyway?
There is existing search functionality, but you have to have to already own the machine before you can use it, because it only does local searches. On the other hand, this proposed new system connects to the internet for searches as well, which may mean there are nice big exploitable holes - there s often are in any internet connected MS software.
Why is this better than a brute force scan of the hard drive... well, presuming you can do it remotely through a hole in the search tool it saves you haveing to go to the hard work of owning to box wiithout knowing what's on it. equally importantly its using an indexed search of the local disk which means it is (1) much much faster (2) isn't going to cause a whole lot of disk churning that the person sitting at the machine might notice.
Jedidiah.
I can't wait for the next generation of viruses which will spawn from this. Is this a recipe for disaster or what:
Who said anything about viruses, looks more like Microsoft is now designing in a new system to help script kiddies locate the pr0n and warez on your hard drive. I think this is a great step forward for Microsoft on security concerns. Really, how many CPU cycles were wasted, how much senseless disk churning was there, on all those owned machines? With this tools script kiddies can get a complete list of everything on your hard drive before they own you, thus saving you time and money.
Hooray for Microsoft.
Jedidiah.
Quite possibly they did have an effective monopoly, yes. The key point is that having an effective monopoly is not illegal. Using your monpoly position to unfairly leverage other products - that is what gets you in trouble.
Jedidiah
Have you ever tried to distribute a program in binary from for Linux? You are directly in distribution hell, because every distribution (and different versions as well) contain incompatible library versions. Static linking used to be a resolution, but since glibc 2.3.3 it does not work anymore (even worse, it prints out warning, then works on your computer, but crashes on a computer with a different glibc version).
Check out Autopackage. It's not finished yet, but it is designed specifically to handle the sorts of cross distribution packaging issues you're talking about.
The current package formats are not broken, and are not badly designed. They work brilliantly for what they were designed to do: provide a way for a distribution to package up binaries so as to modularise and make maintainable a large system with lots and lots of optional packages. Using rpm/deb with yum/apt-rpm/apt is an excellent way to maintain your distribution. It doesn't help you with third party packages.
If you want third party packages that anyone can make, you need another way. Autopackage is making excellent inroads into making that other way a reality. Really, check it out.
Jedidiah.
If the next version of MSIE has a big fat SEARCH button in the navigation bar
You think MS is going to include a search button in IE's navigation bar?
I think you're grossly underestimating the plans for Longhorn, which is all about "web enabling" the OS (think XAML and all that).
What you'll have is every search entry box in every Microsoft app, from the search box in the IE toolbar (you know, just like the Firefox one) to the search entry in any help window, will be "MSN search enabled", and return a set of MSN search results as well as a set local search results.
Microsoft is going to do Google Desktop search inside out - every search dialog anywhere in windows is going to haul back results from MSN search as well, and present them in parallel.
Jedidiah.
Well, I'd like to know, how many civilians have been killed in Iraq?
Is "we don't know" not an acceptable answer? It should be, because we honestly don't. We have a very poor study, or official counts that probably low ball the number a little - no one has actually conducted a good study, so we just don't know.
Jedidiah.
Journalism is enertainment for profit and sciense is ....
For grant money?
Jedidiah.