Congratulations, you've managed to attach emotional significance to a closed-source OS, and it corporate parents. So much, in fact that you feel the need to lash out at people who insult it. This officially qualifies you for the title of "Sad"
Well, I don't know about QuarkXPress, but I know for sure that both Photoshop and Freehand are available in win32 format. You could run these in VM ware or possibly even WINE. Or you could just get win2k witch also supports AppleTalk. I'd be very surprised if Quark isn't available on windows, not many companies are willing to tie there software to the once sinking ship of MacOS
A while ago, someone here posted a link to an interview with Douglas Egglebart (I'm sorry, there's no way I'm going to be spelling his name right), the man who came up with the GUI. (A long with a little thing called Hypertext, I believe). To solve a problem, he also invented the mouse. A long with another device, a one handed keyboard.
From the tone of the article, it seemed almost that he was pissed that it had taken so long for his ideas to become reality. When Job's showed him an early Macintosh interface, he said he was upset that it didn't have networking, one of the key components of Egglebart's vision.
One other thing that the story mentioned was the computer he ran at home. It wasn't a Mac, or a Windows box, or even a Linux or other UNIX. He was running his own software, something called Augment. And he was using his one-handed keyboard (you hit 'chords' of a few keys to enter a letter).
A lot of 'hard-core' really seem to prefer a command line to anything else. I don't really believe its just nostalgia that makes us what to do it ether. Using the command line is just a faster way to interact with the machine. And there's a simple reason for that. With the keyboard, you have an infinite number of verbs that you can use to communicate. With the mouse, you only really have 3, 2, or 1 verb on UNIX(with X), windows, and the Mac respectively. This typically means ether "CLICK" or "CONTEXT MENU", where the context menu is another list of items you can "CLICK" on. While looking for a particular file that you forgot about (along with the filename (?)) might be speed up, just about every other type of file operation is slowed down. A lot.
When the interviewer saw the one-handed keyboard he said (something like) "They'd have to make it more user-friendly in order for me to want to use one". At witch point (and I wish I had the quote) Egglebart said that 'user-friendliness' was over-rated. If you weren't willing to learn anything new, you couldn't really use the computer to its full potential.
To be honest, I think the idea of the GUI has been tied to tightly to the misnomer 'user-friendly', and 'ease of use'. When in fact, a GUI isn't anymore easy to use the a command line its just easy to learn. You get to see all the options available to you, instead of needing to memorize commands. But in a lot of ways, what you learn ends up being weaker.
This gets me back to the one-handed keyboard. If you had a device like that, you could have the best of worlds, infinite data entry, and graphical layout. Imagine you wanted to copy a file to another directory. You could click on it and type "cp/wherever" directly into the icon. You could open any folder on the system (just click the desktop and type "open/bla/openthis". (One of the things that bugged me about BeOS was the lack of integration of the GUI and the CLI. It would have been nice to be able to open the folder I was in the CLI in the GUI, and vice versa. You can do this in Windows for god sakes.)
Unfortunately, in keeping with our two fisted keyboard design, we've really, really, limited what we can do with the GUI. Its my opinion that the current CLI/GUI combo is a horrible hack, inflicted on the world by the original Mac, Microsoft, for blindly following Apple, and the Linux Crowd for blindly following them both.
The spec is already open, otherwise people wouldn't be able to program games for it. The major problem is, that if you want to use direct3d, you'd need to implement a lot of windows core functionality in order to get it to work. It would probably end up being a lot more work then porting OpenGL, actualy. You'd need direct Draw, for sure. a lot of GDI code, and a lot of COM stuff, as well.
It's that sort of elitist crap that keeps the money rolling in for Microsoft.
I'm sorry, that statement makes no sense to me
Anyway, yes, the Internet sucks now. Its not the users so much, as the 'net itself. It just isn't the same as it was back when I got online. And I'd imagine that it isn't the same for a lot of people. The fact that there are uninformed, computer illiterate people on the internet doesn't effect me in anyway, except for the fact that everything has been dumbed down.
But that isn't the real problem, that I have with the 'online information super-web' anyway. It's the crass commercialism. About how almost all available webspace is going to bare adds whether you want them on the page or not. About how IRC has been replaced by ICQ, even though ICQ is terrible, and IRC is fine. The fact, that the Internet is quickly becoming just another conduit for people to contend over 'eyeballs'. I don't think that there really is a way to stop it, or even if it should be.
Well, there is no way that bill gates could get all of that money, if he quit, the value of the stock would probably go down quite a bit. And of course, trying to sell %10 of the company or whatever would increase the supply, without increasing the demand, thereby lowering the stock even more.
Currently, Gates can't sell stock without getting the sale approved by the SEC.
Windows isn't that bad. And in fact Most Microsoft products are pretty good. Espesialy in the User-interface department.
However, all you have to do is read the articals about this very topic, to see why we dislike them. Closed standards, etc, embrace-extend. I have no problem with Windows, but I don't like Microsoft.
It is often easier to vilify an entire organization and all those associated with it rather than take the time to reason out the inner divisions that most likely exist.
It's an interesting question, actually as to whether you should do that or not. On the one hand, a lot of the people there have only a small responsibility for what there doing, unfortunately, that is still a small responsibility. Vilifying an entire organization may be an overstep, but on the other hand it isn't.
The reason is that people in the organization do the same thing. Everyone in Microsoft can say, "I'm not responsible, I'm just doing a little, I'm just following directions" A person in an evil organization feels no guilt, no one there does. So the organization itself doesn't.
Take as example Nazi Germany (not that I'm comparing M$ to The Nazi party, or BillG to Hitler). Everyone there was able to slug off personal responsibility for there actions, it was the organization, not them. But in the end, their efforts led to the death of millions of people. Similarly, everyone at M$ must have some culpability. Ether that, or no one does, and the organization can continue to operate without a conscious.
Everyone at microsoft bares some responsiblity for this, wether they agree with it or not.
A cream Pie isn't a gun, the security there probably didn't really have a problem with it, since you can't kill anyone with it. They also didn't exspect it to be used on gates, I'd guess.
The majority of commercial software is distributed as highly encoded binaries that are very difficult to reverse compile and get and useful code.
Uh, "Highly Encoded binaries "? As opposed to what, lowly encoded binary code? They're not that hard to reverse engineer, it just takes a lot of time, and while doing it would tell you how it worked, you couldn't "plug and play" it into other projects.
Anyway, I seriously doubt that companies like blizzard rip off code, first of all, there isn't really any open source products that they could have ripped off for starcraft and such, and often its a pain to integrate code from something into something else. I'd personally rather just rewrite the code anyway. Just having the source files doesn't mean you can understand them easily, if you write your own code, you understand it... most of the time... (There's one line in a prime number generator I wrote that still in retrospect)
The problems with multiplayer, especially with Quake isn't synching issues, people changing there stats, but rather with people 'augmenting' There reflexes, IE auto-aim, and auto-dodge (I think). There isn't really much you can do about that, and in fact it was a problem with even the closed source versions, from what I've heard.
Since this program is more of an RTS type thing it isn't really an issue as much. Computer Augmentation can pretty much make you invulnerable and a perfect shot in quake, but It wouldn't really be able to do that much in starcraft (Humans can already beat the computer in general).
I'm not sure how much of an issue it would be in Black and White.
Would this technically be "Open Source", doesn't that imply that you can use it for commercial purposes? I mean, this would be very similar to Sun's community source license, witch a lot of people have a problem with (though, I personally don't).
Personally, I'd like to distribute software like this myself, I mean, I don't see a problem with other people using stuff I write, but I don't see why they should get to profit from it when I don't. (Also, it goes against the teachings of Eric S Raymond, so it must be good, right?)
How could this be covert if everyone knows about it? If your sniffing the line, your going to be getting all the data anyway, and if you know about this technique, then you can read the information. Not exactly ultra-l33t stuff here.
Security through obscurity isn't very good security, and since this has been posted on/. it isn't even obscure anymore.
64.28.67.48 != slashdot.org, at least not here. And since every link seems to want to point to slashdot.org/whatever, its somewhat a problem... Anyway, is this search engine better then google or not? It came up with more results for "maruchan ramen", but about the same for "Chad Okere".
I think I'm doing to trademark the words: you are violating our trademark and threaten all the fscking lawyers that "dilute" my oh-so-valuable trademark
While lawyers wouldn't be able to write any books or sell any products intitled you are violating our trademark, they would certanly still be able to use the word in letters. Just like you can use the word "for dummies" in speach. Idiot.
Any reasonable person would want to be protected I think. If you want to buy a Sony TV, it doesn't mean that you want a television with the word "Sony" tacked on, it means you want a TV from a particular Japanese company. Of course, with anything there can be abuses. That doesn't' mean it' bad thing. Also, it isn't just to protect Consumers, but Large and small companies as well. Suppose you were a small company and came out with a new product, let say a program. What's to stop M$ from simply recoding your product and selling it with the same name? Trademark law.
The world would be a very confusing and annoying world without Trademark law.
It is completely doable today, using OCR and Digital Signatures, to create a product that scans webpages and images for trademarks and checks meta-data for the trademark owners signature.
That's great for the internet, but what about the real world? Or should people have to carry around Palm(TM) pilots(TM) wherever they go to read these things?
I say screw them.
Good for you. Because really, your opinion matters a huge amount.
Trademarks have nothing to do with what you can say only what you can title things. I can't start making TVs and calling them "Sonys", I can't stat a company called "Sun" with and OS called "Solaris". I can't make a website called "Slashdot." Why should I be able to?
There is no restrictions on thought inherent in this, you are still allowed to think, and speak, publish documents with the words in it, you just can use the words in naming your own products.
I don't see what problem having everyone think of your brand for something as generic as vaccum cleaners, or for that matter books.
If that happens in the US, then it becomes a 'word', and you no longer have a trademark. Anyone can call there tissues "Kleenex" beacuse Kleenex didn't defend there trademark, It was happening with Xerox as well. People wern't photocopying, they were Xeroxing, and if Xerox didn't do anything to stop it, it would have ment everyone could have started making Xerox machines. if IDG dosn't stop whats going on, they will have no basis to stop people from calling other books 'for dummies'. Its a perfictly valid use of trademark.
But treating customers with contempt,
I have reviewed the site and found it very interesting and amusing. Unfortunately, it utilizes the phrase "for Dummies" which is confusingly similar to the well-known trademark owned by IDG Books....I assume that you did not intend to infringe and dilute the "For Dummies®" mark and meant well. However, I must ask you to remove the trademarked material from your web site on or November 11th, 1999.
Again we appreciate your ideas, but we must protect our trademarks.
Does that sound like contempt to you? It dosn't to me.
Perhaps if you'd read the article before spouting of you would know that they are not attacking a parody site, they politely asked a site called "Screen printing for dummies" to change its name.
Really, What the hell is so hard about doing like, 3 minutes of research before making completely uninformed posts about something? I'm surprised your post hasn't been modded up as 'insightful' yet. It is so fucking annoying to see post, after uninformed post spouting completely useless, wrong garbage. Why is it so hard for you people to even bother to learn what's actually occurring? Its as simple as following a link!
Dude, I could not write a bunch of crap code in an OS and call it 'solaris', or take mySQL and sell it as IBM DB/2, that would be stupid. Why should people be able to title there websites "whatever for dummies"? Its a perfictly valid trademark, and it dosn't stop you from using the word, just nameing stuff after it.
Kindof ironic that IDG is yelling at people for using these terms in their emails (a free speech forum) dontcha think!
IDG was complaning that they were using there trademark to name there page not for using the term. They did use email as a medium to complain, though, if that's what you ment....
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... did he insult your precious Crappy OS?
Congratulations, you've managed to attach emotional significance to a closed-source OS, and it corporate parents. So much, in fact that you feel the need to lash out at people who insult it. This officially qualifies you for the title of "Sad"
Well, I don't know about QuarkXPress, but I know for sure that both Photoshop and Freehand are available in win32 format. You could run these in VM ware or possibly even WINE. Or you could just get win2k witch also supports AppleTalk. I'd be very surprised if Quark isn't available on windows, not many companies are willing to tie there software to the once sinking ship of MacOS
A while ago, someone here posted a link to an interview with Douglas Egglebart (I'm sorry, there's no way I'm going to be spelling his name right), the man who came up with the GUI. (A long with a little thing called Hypertext, I believe). To solve a problem, he also invented the mouse. A long with another device, a one handed keyboard.
/wherever" directly into the icon. You could open any folder on the system (just click the desktop and type "open /bla/openthis". (One of the things that bugged me about BeOS was the lack of integration of the GUI and the CLI. It would have been nice to be able to open the folder I was in the CLI in the GUI, and vice versa. You can do this in Windows for god sakes.)
From the tone of the article, it seemed almost that he was pissed that it had taken so long for his ideas to become reality. When Job's showed him an early Macintosh interface, he said he was upset that it didn't have networking, one of the key components of Egglebart's vision.
One other thing that the story mentioned was the computer he ran at home. It wasn't a Mac, or a Windows box, or even a Linux or other UNIX. He was running his own software, something called Augment. And he was using his one-handed keyboard (you hit 'chords' of a few keys to enter a letter).
A lot of 'hard-core' really seem to prefer a command line to anything else. I don't really believe its just nostalgia that makes us what to do it ether. Using the command line is just a faster way to interact with the machine. And there's a simple reason for that. With the keyboard, you have an infinite number of verbs that you can use to communicate. With the mouse, you only really have 3, 2, or 1 verb on UNIX(with X), windows, and the Mac respectively. This typically means ether "CLICK" or "CONTEXT MENU", where the context menu is another list of items you can "CLICK" on. While looking for a particular file that you forgot about (along with the filename (?)) might be speed up, just about every other type of file operation is slowed down. A lot.
When the interviewer saw the one-handed keyboard he said (something like) "They'd have to make it more user-friendly in order for me to want to use one". At witch point (and I wish I had the quote) Egglebart said that 'user-friendliness' was over-rated. If you weren't willing to learn anything new, you couldn't really use the computer to its full potential.
To be honest, I think the idea of the GUI has been tied to tightly to the misnomer 'user-friendly', and 'ease of use'. When in fact, a GUI isn't anymore easy to use the a command line its just easy to learn. You get to see all the options available to you, instead of needing to memorize commands. But in a lot of ways, what you learn ends up being weaker.
This gets me back to the one-handed keyboard. If you had a device like that, you could have the best of worlds, infinite data entry, and graphical layout. Imagine you wanted to copy a file to another directory. You could click on it and type "cp
Unfortunately, in keeping with our two fisted keyboard design, we've really, really, limited what we can do with the GUI. Its my opinion that the current CLI/GUI combo is a horrible hack, inflicted on the world by the original Mac, Microsoft, for blindly following Apple, and the Linux Crowd for blindly following them both.
No one I have ever known has done that. And they get pretty good performance to, at 100mhz :)
The spec is already open, otherwise people wouldn't be able to program games for it. The major problem is, that if you want to use direct3d, you'd need to implement a lot of windows core functionality in order to get it to work. It would probably end up being a lot more work then porting OpenGL, actualy. You'd need direct Draw, for sure. a lot of GDI code, and a lot of COM stuff, as well.
It's that sort of elitist crap that keeps the money rolling in for Microsoft.
I'm sorry, that statement makes no sense to me
Anyway, yes, the Internet sucks now. Its not the users so much, as the 'net itself. It just isn't the same as it was back when I got online. And I'd imagine that it isn't the same for a lot of people. The fact that there are uninformed, computer illiterate people on the internet doesn't effect me in anyway, except for the fact that everything has been dumbed down.
But that isn't the real problem, that I have with the 'online information super-web' anyway. It's the crass commercialism. About how almost all available webspace is going to bare adds whether you want them on the page or not. About how IRC has been replaced by ICQ, even though ICQ is terrible, and IRC is fine. The fact, that the Internet is quickly becoming just another conduit for people to contend over 'eyeballs'. I don't think that there really is a way to stop it, or even if it should be.
But that doesn't mean I can't say it sucks
Well, there is no way that bill gates could get all of that money, if he quit, the value of the stock would probably go down quite a bit. And of course, trying to sell %10 of the company or whatever would increase the supply, without increasing the demand, thereby lowering the stock even more.
Currently, Gates can't sell stock without getting the sale approved by the SEC.
Windows isn't that bad. And in fact Most Microsoft products are pretty good. Espesialy in the User-interface department.
However, all you have to do is read the articals about this very topic, to see why we dislike them. Closed standards, etc, embrace-extend. I have no problem with Windows, but I don't like Microsoft.
It is often easier to vilify an entire organization and all those associated with it rather than take the time to reason out the inner divisions that most likely exist.
It's an interesting question, actually as to whether you should do that or not. On the one hand, a lot of the people there have only a small responsibility for what there doing, unfortunately, that is still a small responsibility. Vilifying an entire organization may be an overstep, but on the other hand it isn't.
The reason is that people in the organization do the same thing. Everyone in Microsoft can say, "I'm not responsible, I'm just doing a little, I'm just following directions" A person in an evil organization feels no guilt, no one there does. So the organization itself doesn't.
Take as example Nazi Germany (not that I'm comparing M$ to The Nazi party, or BillG to Hitler). Everyone there was able to slug off personal responsibility for there actions, it was the organization, not them. But in the end, their efforts led to the death of millions of people. Similarly, everyone at M$ must have some culpability. Ether that, or no one does, and the organization can continue to operate without a conscious.
Everyone at microsoft bares some responsiblity for this, wether they agree with it or not.
A cream Pie isn't a gun, the security there probably didn't really have a problem with it, since you can't kill anyone with it. They also didn't exspect it to be used on gates, I'd guess.
You can still do comercial things with GPL'd software. Just look at redhat, that's certanly comercial.
The majority of commercial software is distributed as highly encoded binaries that are very difficult to reverse compile and get and useful code.
Uh, "Highly Encoded binaries "? As opposed to what, lowly encoded binary code? They're not that hard to reverse engineer, it just takes a lot of time, and while doing it would tell you how it worked, you couldn't "plug and play" it into other projects.
Anyway, I seriously doubt that companies like blizzard rip off code, first of all, there isn't really any open source products that they could have ripped off for starcraft and such, and often its a pain to integrate code from something into something else. I'd personally rather just rewrite the code anyway. Just having the source files doesn't mean you can understand them easily, if you write your own code, you understand it... most of the time... (There's one line in a prime number generator I wrote that still in retrospect)
The problems with multiplayer, especially with Quake isn't synching issues, people changing there stats, but rather with people 'augmenting' There reflexes, IE auto-aim, and auto-dodge (I think). There isn't really much you can do about that, and in fact it was a problem with even the closed source versions, from what I've heard.
Since this program is more of an RTS type thing it isn't really an issue as much. Computer Augmentation can pretty much make you invulnerable and a perfect shot in quake, but It wouldn't really be able to do that much in starcraft (Humans can already beat the computer in general).
I'm not sure how much of an issue it would be in Black and White.
(not doing this logged, so I can't turn of +2)
Would this technically be "Open Source", doesn't that imply that you can use it for commercial purposes? I mean, this would be very similar to Sun's community source license, witch a lot of people have a problem with (though, I personally don't).
Personally, I'd like to distribute software like this myself, I mean, I don't see a problem with other people using stuff I write, but I don't see why they should get to profit from it when I don't. (Also, it goes against the teachings of Eric S Raymond, so it must be good, right?)
How could this be covert if everyone knows about it? If your sniffing the line, your going to be getting all the data anyway, and if you know about this technique, then you can read the information. Not exactly ultra-l33t stuff here.
/. it isn't even obscure anymore.
Security through obscurity isn't very good security, and since this has been posted on
64.28.67.48 != slashdot.org, at least not here. And since every link seems to want to point to slashdot.org/whatever, its somewhat a problem... Anyway, is this search engine better then google or not? It came up with more results for "maruchan ramen", but about the same for "Chad Okere".
1)Could you post more often???
probably. i used to post more often then I do now, actualy.
2)Could you spell any worse?
Yes.
I understand that most people don't spell very well, but your post just makes humans look illiterate!
How can my one post make everyone else look illiterate? Anyway, if you have a problem with my spelling, its just that, your problem.
I think I'm doing to trademark the words: you are violating our trademark and threaten all the fscking lawyers that "dilute" my oh-so-valuable trademark
While lawyers wouldn't be able to write any books or sell any products intitled you are violating our trademark, they would certanly still be able to use the word in letters. Just like you can use the word "for dummies" in speach. Idiot.
Any reasonable person would want to be protected I think. If you want to buy a Sony TV, it doesn't mean that you want a television with the word "Sony" tacked on, it means you want a TV from a particular Japanese company. Of course, with anything there can be abuses. That doesn't' mean it' bad thing. Also, it isn't just to protect Consumers, but Large and small companies as well. Suppose you were a small company and came out with a new product, let say a program. What's to stop M$ from simply recoding your product and selling it with the same name? Trademark law.
The world would be a very confusing and annoying world without Trademark law.
It is completely doable today, using OCR and Digital Signatures, to create a product that scans webpages and images for trademarks and checks meta-data for the trademark owners signature.
That's great for the internet, but what about the real world? Or should people have to carry around Palm(TM) pilots(TM) wherever they go to read these things?
I say screw them.
Good for you. Because really, your opinion matters a huge amount.
Trademarks have nothing to do with what you can say only what you can title things. I can't start making TVs and calling them "Sonys", I can't stat a company called "Sun" with and OS called "Solaris". I can't make a website called "Slashdot." Why should I be able to?
There is no restrictions on thought inherent in this, you are still allowed to think, and speak, publish documents with the words in it, you just can use the words in naming your own products.
What part of TRADEmark don't you understand? Non-commercial use, including everyday conversation and parody, is not TRADING.
Well, it was nether normal conversation or a parody site that IDG was complaing about, but rather an informational site about screen printing.
I don't see what problem having everyone think of your brand for something as generic as vaccum cleaners, or for that matter books.
....I assume that you did not intend to infringe and dilute the "For Dummies®" mark and meant well. However, I must ask you to remove the trademarked material from your web site on or November 11th, 1999.
If that happens in the US, then it becomes a 'word', and you no longer have a trademark. Anyone can call there tissues "Kleenex" beacuse Kleenex didn't defend there trademark, It was happening with Xerox as well. People wern't photocopying, they were Xeroxing, and if Xerox didn't do anything to stop it, it would have ment everyone could have started making Xerox machines. if IDG dosn't stop whats going on, they will have no basis to stop people from calling other books 'for dummies'. Its a perfictly valid use of trademark.
But treating customers with contempt,
I have reviewed the site and found it very interesting and amusing. Unfortunately, it utilizes the phrase "for Dummies" which is confusingly similar to the well-known trademark owned by IDG Books
Again we appreciate your ideas, but we must protect our trademarks.
Does that sound like contempt to you? It dosn't to me.
Perhaps if you'd read the article before spouting of you would know that they are not attacking a parody site, they politely asked a site called "Screen printing for dummies" to change its name.
Really, What the hell is so hard about doing like, 3 minutes of research before making completely uninformed posts about something? I'm surprised your post hasn't been modded up as 'insightful' yet. It is so fucking annoying to see post, after uninformed post spouting completely useless, wrong garbage. Why is it so hard for you people to even bother to learn what's actually occurring? Its as simple as following a link!
Dude, I could not write a bunch of crap code in an OS and call it 'solaris', or take mySQL and sell it as IBM DB/2, that would be stupid. Why should people be able to title there websites "whatever for dummies"? Its a perfictly valid trademark, and it dosn't stop you from using the word, just nameing stuff after it.
Kindof ironic that IDG is yelling at people for using these terms in their emails (a free speech forum) dontcha think!
IDG was complaning that they were using there trademark to name there page not for using the term. They did use email as a medium to complain, though, if that's what you ment....