I agree.. It took me a while to wrap my head around the changes, but when I realized what it *really* meant to finally know where how the ribbon bar was organized and that you didn't have a menu in sight, that definitely tore down some user interface walls for me. No more menus to traverse, making working with the interface at least for me feel much more "direct". It's a big relief to not have to dig through lots of hierarchies just to do the simplest of things.
Oh and that comment of mine was missing that there's also an IDE for cross platform GUI development? Wow, now we're starting to get into rare territory... I've been looking for *good* IDE's for this purpose in the past, the closest I came to was something like wxWidgets. I dislike large libraries that need to be installed for GUI support, and this one apparently only needs GTK for Linux, and nothing special at all for Windows. Getting more interesting...:-) If I only knew Pascal better, it was something like a decade since I worked on it last time...
With all the focus on JIT compiled and interpreted languages, it's nice to see this niche still being worked on and kept up to date with current software, like 64-bit Windows. There are still reasons to build applications for these platforms, while at the same time seeing cross platform source code as a benefit. This is why I also like the D programming language, although I have to admit Free Pascal got it beat as for the cross platform support, where it's still lacking things like native 64-bit and Windows CE compiling.
I'm no big web developer, but I know enough to know that PHP 5 isn't a rapid web development API like Ruby on Rails, but rather a programming language.:-S
Wouldn't comparing RoR to e.g. the Zend Framework make more sense / be more useful?
Ah, another piece of commercial, proprietary software derived from VNC.
Commercial. Proprietary. Yes, the magic words that get some people's blood to boil. You wield them well.
Here's a serious question: has Fog Creek ever given anything back to the open source community?
My question would be why you care? In case their VNC core comes from licensed software allowing a commercial derivate as a binary, there is no problem. I believe AT&T's core was GPL'ed so that would raise some questions, but it's possible that by "VNC core" they mean some VNC-compatible derivate with a compatible license. In that case, the devs of that core also specifically intended use of it like this, being more open than just for OSS devs to use. Yes, there is a "more open" than that. And those developers don't have an issue with this, and maybe just you not wanting to see a 100% free use of their code. And if it doesn't follow the license, there's a breach of license, and then that would indeed be bad.
But this is clearly an issue of whether licenses are followed, not about a company doing "good" or "bad". If they follow the license of the developers -- that is using the software like they specifically intended others to use it -- they are per definition doing good. At least unless if you disagree with how their VNC core devs chose their license.
If there's something I get annoyed about, it's not about companies properly using licenses, but people like you who try to impose a personal code of ethics on companies who only use the code the way the original devs intended it to.
Storage capacity is useful, however, something also necessary is an extremely parallelized system. Although what you say make sense -- we need to understand the brain in order to build one and know how the hardware should work (it most likely needs to be highly specialized for the purpose, not just a standard server farm) -- I'm also not sure we're even there as for the hardware either. It took a supercomputer to simulate a mouse brain, and that just comes across as highly inefficient to me, and hardly something we'll easier take much further in the future. It reminds me of the enormous computers in the past that now fit into a pocket calculator since we invented the transistors. Also, from the article:
Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved.
I think we need a similar push in technology besides the understanding of the brain. So it's not surprising that we're so far away still -- I think we're still missing both parts of the puzzle. Just to show how far we still have to go purely technically -- nature fits the power of that mouse brain on our supercomputer in a few square centimeters. Even if we understood the human brain perfectly, current technology would be so inefficient that I doubt it would even be able to simulate it at a reasonable speed.
It's perhaps a bit of a chicken & the egg scenario... Do we need the tech first to start working on our brain theories and simulate them more quickly and easily, for more useful lab experiments? Or do we need to understand the brain better to know what technology we even need to invent?
I think the reason they're focusing on Javascript here is because that's a major optimization that took place in Opera 9.5. Actually, the changelog tells that they rewrote the ECMAScript engine. But Opera also had optimizations done to its table renderer, and due to the still all too frequent table layouts on the web, even used by modern web designers, it would be interesting to see more general tests of loading times etc. Opera would probably still come out very close on top though, as it has before in the pre-9.5 versions too.
it's well worth to mention that a large number of telecommunication devices from Ericsson are running software written in Erlang Something more interesting to me would be use outside of Ericsson. Erlang is after all short of Ericsson Language, so what you say is not surprising. However, does this imply it's wide spread in e.g. telecommunications outside of Ericsson? Any other common, modern, use besides for the occasional pet project?
Why not just release an official Thunderbird Extension Pack? Voila, Eudora?
If it's just Thunderbird with some extensions, what's the point in a new product?
It's making my mind wander to the old MSN Explorer of Microsoft, that was a customized Internet Explorer for their MSN network. But at least MS kept the name reasonably similar to not confuse too much.
Someone comes out with a technology that threatens Microsoft's dominance: Netscape. Microsoft develops a multiplatform technology to defeat it: IE on Mac. Microsoft incorporates it into its OS to get it into 90% of the PCs. Once the competition is destroyed, it levels off development, and ends support on non-Windows platforms: IE on Mac.
All this seems like a suspicious false deduction to me. I don't think IE on Mac got abandoned for them being "evil", but because Safari 1) came to existance and 2) started getting regularly updated by Apple, to put up a fight they just didn't bother to win. An example where Apple hasn't done this is with Microsoft Office. And lo and behold, Microsoft still produces Office for Mac. Office for Mac actually often go so far as to be superior to the Windows version.
I honestly don't think they have some secret agenda against Linux with this, but they honestly just want it to run on Linux as well, just like when they announced their Opera partnership to soon have an Opera version out despite its 3% marketshare as a browser in most surveys. The reason to me would be quite logical -- they obviously want their tech to be successful, and for that to happen, they understand they can't have something like 20% of the public running Firefox or other operating systems post bad PR on blogs all day long. So I don't think there's any complex reasons behind this, but just Microsoft for once working in favor of the community. The only goal being that they want it to become well used.
Wouldn't it be cool if some hacker got creative and instead of defacing sites, replaced them with logical layouts and no ads. Sort of a Benevolent Defacer.
Sure, it would take some extra effort, but the aftermath from disappointed customers now seeing what they missed, as they restored the site to the bloated mess could get pretty funny.:)
True, but it's no wonder neither Eclipse nor VA does that though. It can't be too common that won't give a huge chunk of false positives... Often, variables are abbreviated in more or less funny ways to not become too long. I think language awareness only in comments is a good compromise here.
That's also a pretty crappy idea, because what happens...? Well, since we became members of the EU, making online orders from outside the country became much cheaper, and I can just order 50 DVD-R's in bulk from Denmark for a cheaper price than in Sweden due to these fees, even including the shipping charges. All they're really achieving with these leives is risking making Swedish businesses lose profits due to these uncertain reports of how much the piracy even impact sales. I guess the fallacy being that Sweden is alone in the world, and they can do whatever they wish without impact to the economy.:-p
And the government is the agent that can change laws, not the Pirate Bay or their supporters (unless they get some serious popular support that translates to votes at election time).
Not only The Pirate Party is positive to our liberal file sharing laws, but also many youth organizations affiliated with our political parties. Heck, even some of our actual political parties have been cautiously positive (to not offende the IFPI etc too much, I suppose) to our existing laws.
So even if currently the Swedish government seems powerless to prosecute copyright infringers or Bittorrent tracker hosts, give them a little time and they'll remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
I'm not sure, we have even had an election and change of government inbetween the rise of The Pirate Bay... If they made it a priority, we wouldn't have that site anymore.
"It is a bad proposal, ineffective and wrong in principle, and I don't understand how it's supposed to work in practice," said CEO Marcus Nylén.
"We as an operator can't act like we're the police and check where our customers are surfing. Scaring internet users is the wrong way to tackle the issue," he added.
^- I'm just happy I'm a customer on this ISP.
The purposed "law" sounds completely arbitrary, and out of touch with the modern society... People are doing lots of other things than sharing P2P, and this proposal would require the ISP to scan *all* users to be on the safe side, including those who use their account for nothing more than online banking and private e-mails. Hardly something that should ever even risk being scanned without a much better reason than someone file sharing the latest movie release of Superbad.
That they're proposing to go the lengths like these, an online witch hunt comparable only to that of pedophiles that I can think of now, if not worse, really makes one wonder where things are heading... Protection of intellectual property at all costs, crossing the boundaries of privacy and raising a pretty much impossible mountain of efforts the ISP's have to climb.
Agreed, and two more things... There's probably more to it too...
1. How are they even going to successfully monitor their activity and avoid getting busted for it? I would not be a happy ISP CEO if I actually tried stopping this, much to my customers' fury, and still got busted, which will most likely happen if they just look at the customers. There's always some group of people doing illegal activities on their network.
2. If successful (which I doubt this even can be) -- won't their customers just risk opting for a cheaper, lower bandwidth offer? The ISP's risk losing tremendous amounts of revenue. In extension, ISP's could then try to raise the fees, but that could make Sweden regress its Internet presence and have a harder time convincing users of adopting high bandwidth services like Internet TV. I don't really think I'd like to see that sort of progress. I think that piracy is helping out a lot in increasing high bandwidth demand, and that can indirectly benefit other, more clean, service providers.
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I agree.. It took me a while to wrap my head around the changes, but when I realized what it *really* meant to finally know where how the ribbon bar was organized and that you didn't have a menu in sight, that definitely tore down some user interface walls for me. No more menus to traverse, making working with the interface at least for me feel much more "direct". It's a big relief to not have to dig through lots of hierarchies just to do the simplest of things.
Yeah, because Apple, Sun et al can't wait to have pirates move to their platform! Keep in mind what demography this article is talking about.
Not that this article is saying that it'll run natively.
Oh and that comment of mine was missing that there's also an IDE for cross platform GUI development? Wow, now we're starting to get into rare territory... I've been looking for *good* IDE's for this purpose in the past, the closest I came to was something like wxWidgets. I dislike large libraries that need to be installed for GUI support, and this one apparently only needs GTK for Linux, and nothing special at all for Windows. Getting more interesting... :-) If I only knew Pascal better, it was something like a decade since I worked on it last time...
With all the focus on JIT compiled and interpreted languages, it's nice to see this niche still being worked on and kept up to date with current software, like 64-bit Windows. There are still reasons to build applications for these platforms, while at the same time seeing cross platform source code as a benefit. This is why I also like the D programming language, although I have to admit Free Pascal got it beat as for the cross platform support, where it's still lacking things like native 64-bit and Windows CE compiling.
I'm no big web developer, but I know enough to know that PHP 5 isn't a rapid web development API like Ruby on Rails, but rather a programming language. :-S
Wouldn't comparing RoR to e.g. the Zend Framework make more sense / be more useful?
Commercial. Proprietary. Yes, the magic words that get some people's blood to boil. You wield them well.
My question would be why you care? In case their VNC core comes from licensed software allowing a commercial derivate as a binary, there is no problem. I believe AT&T's core was GPL'ed so that would raise some questions, but it's possible that by "VNC core" they mean some VNC-compatible derivate with a compatible license. In that case, the devs of that core also specifically intended use of it like this, being more open than just for OSS devs to use. Yes, there is a "more open" than that. And those developers don't have an issue with this, and maybe just you not wanting to see a 100% free use of their code. And if it doesn't follow the license, there's a breach of license, and then that would indeed be bad.
But this is clearly an issue of whether licenses are followed, not about a company doing "good" or "bad". If they follow the license of the developers -- that is using the software like they specifically intended others to use it -- they are per definition doing good. At least unless if you disagree with how their VNC core devs chose their license.
If there's something I get annoyed about, it's not about companies properly using licenses, but people like you who try to impose a personal code of ethics on companies who only use the code the way the original devs intended it to.
I think we need a similar push in technology besides the understanding of the brain. So it's not surprising that we're so far away still -- I think we're still missing both parts of the puzzle. Just to show how far we still have to go purely technically -- nature fits the power of that mouse brain on our supercomputer in a few square centimeters. Even if we understood the human brain perfectly, current technology would be so inefficient that I doubt it would even be able to simulate it at a reasonable speed.
It's perhaps a bit of a chicken & the egg scenario... Do we need the tech first to start working on our brain theories and simulate them more quickly and easily, for more useful lab experiments? Or do we need to understand the brain better to know what technology we even need to invent?
since we will have to invent a way to stop the ultra-intelligent machines from destroying the inferior human race.
I don't really see why intelligence would necessarily be a breeding ground for evil.
Speaking of which, I wonder what the largest pixel in the world is.
I couldn't find anything even when Googling it.
Wow, you must be a favorite at Microsoft!
To hell with optimizations and fancy-schmancy new standard support, can you read forums and visit YouTube? Ship it!
I think the reason they're focusing on Javascript here is because that's a major optimization that took place in Opera 9.5. Actually, the changelog tells that they rewrote the ECMAScript engine. But Opera also had optimizations done to its table renderer, and due to the still all too frequent table layouts on the web, even used by modern web designers, it would be interesting to see more general tests of loading times etc. Opera would probably still come out very close on top though, as it has before in the pre-9.5 versions too.
I'm still a bit sad that our Designer don't design animals with three jaws. Imagine what a concept, 50% more powerful than these!
Can't these tools be uninstalled? Anyone? It just sounds like a regular bunch of software you can opt to install if you wish to me.
Why not just release an official Thunderbird Extension Pack? Voila, Eudora?
If it's just Thunderbird with some extensions, what's the point in a new product?
It's making my mind wander to the old MSN Explorer of Microsoft, that was a customized Internet Explorer for their MSN network.
But at least MS kept the name reasonably similar to not confuse too much.
Someone comes out with a technology that threatens Microsoft's dominance: Netscape.
Microsoft develops a multiplatform technology to defeat it: IE on Mac.
Microsoft incorporates it into its OS to get it into 90% of the PCs.
Once the competition is destroyed, it levels off development, and ends support on non-Windows platforms: IE on Mac.
All this seems like a suspicious false deduction to me. I don't think IE on Mac got abandoned for them being "evil", but because Safari 1) came to existance and 2) started getting regularly updated by Apple, to put up a fight they just didn't bother to win. An example where Apple hasn't done this is with Microsoft Office. And lo and behold, Microsoft still produces Office for Mac. Office for Mac actually often go so far as to be superior to the Windows version.
I honestly don't think they have some secret agenda against Linux with this, but they honestly just want it to run on Linux as well, just like when they announced their Opera partnership to soon have an Opera version out despite its 3% marketshare as a browser in most surveys. The reason to me would be quite logical -- they obviously want their tech to be successful, and for that to happen, they understand they can't have something like 20% of the public running Firefox or other operating systems post bad PR on blogs all day long. So I don't think there's any complex reasons behind this, but just Microsoft for once working in favor of the community. The only goal being that they want it to become well used.
Wouldn't it be cool if some hacker got creative and instead of defacing sites, replaced them with logical layouts and no ads. Sort of a Benevolent Defacer.
:)
Sure, it would take some extra effort, but the aftermath from disappointed customers now seeing what they missed, as they restored the site to the bloated mess could get pretty funny.
That product would never get popular among geeks anyway. ;)
True, but it's no wonder neither Eclipse nor VA does that though. It can't be too common that won't give a huge chunk of false positives... Often, variables are abbreviated in more or less funny ways to not become too long. I think language awareness only in comments is a good compromise here.
Canada for instance has a surcharge on blank CDs that goes to the media trade groups.
:-p
Sweden actually has the same kind of organization ( http://www.copyswede.se/default.asp?ML=10622 )... I think it even applies to hard drives!
That's also a pretty crappy idea, because what happens...? Well, since we became members of the EU, making online orders from outside the country became much cheaper, and I can just order 50 DVD-R's in bulk from Denmark for a cheaper price than in Sweden due to these fees, even including the shipping charges. All they're really achieving with these leives is risking making Swedish businesses lose profits due to these uncertain reports of how much the piracy even impact sales. I guess the fallacy being that Sweden is alone in the world, and they can do whatever they wish without impact to the economy.
And the government is the agent that can change laws, not the Pirate Bay or their supporters (unless they get some serious popular support that translates to votes at election time).
Not only The Pirate Party is positive to our liberal file sharing laws, but also many youth organizations affiliated with our political parties. Heck, even some of our actual political parties have been cautiously positive (to not offende the IFPI etc too much, I suppose) to our existing laws.
So even if currently the Swedish government seems powerless to prosecute copyright infringers or Bittorrent tracker hosts, give them a little time and they'll remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.
I'm not sure, we have even had an election and change of government inbetween the rise of The Pirate Bay... If they made it a priority, we wouldn't have that site anymore.
^- I'm just happy I'm a customer on this ISP.
The purposed "law" sounds completely arbitrary, and out of touch with the modern society... People are doing lots of other things than sharing P2P, and this proposal would require the ISP to scan *all* users to be on the safe side, including those who use their account for nothing more than online banking and private e-mails. Hardly something that should ever even risk being scanned without a much better reason than someone file sharing the latest movie release of Superbad.
That they're proposing to go the lengths like these, an online witch hunt comparable only to that of pedophiles that I can think of now, if not worse, really makes one wonder where things are heading... Protection of intellectual property at all costs, crossing the boundaries of privacy and raising a pretty much impossible mountain of efforts the ISP's have to climb.
Agreed, and two more things... There's probably more to it too...
1. How are they even going to successfully monitor their activity and avoid getting busted for it? I would not be a happy ISP CEO if I actually tried stopping this, much to my customers' fury, and still got busted, which will most likely happen if they just look at the customers. There's always some group of people doing illegal activities on their network.
2. If successful (which I doubt this even can be) -- won't their customers just risk opting for a cheaper, lower bandwidth offer? The ISP's risk losing tremendous amounts of revenue. In extension, ISP's could then try to raise the fees, but that could make Sweden regress its Internet presence and have a harder time convincing users of adopting high bandwidth services like Internet TV. I don't really think I'd like to see that sort of progress. I think that piracy is helping out a lot in increasing high bandwidth demand, and that can indirectly benefit other, more clean, service providers.