While we laud Lucas' vision, and the uber-coolness of all things Star Wars, let us not forget the massive campaign of media manipulation and promotion behind Star Wars, in itself an achievement of technical perfection. Lucas may be a cinematic visionary, but he is also a shrewd marketer and memetic engineer.
Darkness as industry standard
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
One answer to why Windows (mis)features are copied could be that Windows is so pervasive that it's more beneficial for a UI to look like Windows than to do things differently (even if the latter case is more logical). It's sort of like the semi-mythical QWERTY effect.
As for Neptune, perhaps that should be a separate UI from KDE/GNOME. One Microsoftism which should not be emulated is the tendency to integrate everything into one great big sticky lump.
...but usually butchers it before it does any good
on
UNIX for Moms
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft have some very bright people, and are good at skimming the cream of the meme-pool (the Windows 95 UI lifts some of the catchiest features from MacOS, NeXTSTEP and OS/2), and every so often comes up with a good original idea. However, the Microsoft environment is one centred around market domination and profits, to the exclusion of technical elegance or quality control; hence, a lot of their ideas end up being watered down, adulterated or otherwise butchered. The Windows 95 UI contains some glaring inconsistencies which impair usability and engender confusion; though it looks slick and high-tech enough to sell, so that's good enough for MSFT.
One problem with that is that, even if you succeed in creating a passable free CODEC, the battle is in getting content providers to use it.
Firstly, the content publication tools that content providers use (mostly from Adobe and Macromedia, running on MacOS or NT) would have to support it. The software publishers have investments in other CODECs and no real interest in providing a GPLed CODEC, especially since the bulk of the desktop market is Windows; if there's a sizable Linux desktop market, we're more likely to see players for the existing formats.
Secondly, the actual media providers have to decide to use this CODEC; and big corporations tend to trust products of other corporations, with intellectual-property investments and contracts, more than the output of the free-software rabble. (Media companies, in particular, tend to be paranoid about open digital formats.)
If a GPLed CODEC comes about, one could expect it to find a niche among geek-underground content providers (claymation Star Wars spoofs, &c.), with GPLed Linux authoring software and players; though breaking into the world of corporate media is another story.
$20M is nothing for Gates; he could almost pay it from petty cash. Certainly he could afford to indulge a $20M whim. And this is the man who has a room in Redmond lined with pictures of enemies (McNealy, Ellison and such); who's to say he wouldn't pull something like this just to rile RMS?
There's the problem of quality; current MP3 encoders/decoders don't support rates above 48kHz; also, the MP3 process distorts the high-frequency information a bit.
And higher sample rates are a Good Idea. While 44.1 is enough to represent frequencies up to 22.05kHz, the harmonics of the higher frequencies become distorted by the sampling process. 96kHz would allow pretty much all human-audible sound to be encoded non-marginally.
A wild thought: maybe had the government done a drug sweep of technology-intensive areas (the Bay Area, Cambridge (MA), &c.), mandatorily testing all tech workers for drug use, incarcerating drug users, herding them into Y2K work brigades and setting them to the task of fixing the Government's doomed mainframes, the coming collapse of the U.S. Government could have been averted?
(For those who don't get it, this is cynical black humour.)
If you want to go smoke-up, go ahead, but don't say the war on drugs is idiotic. The truth is that drugs are bad, in one way or another, and SOMETHING should be done to stop their abuse.
Assuming for a moment that your "drugs are bad and must be stopped" argument is valid, and disregarding pesky issues such as civil liberties, the argument is still flawed. The War on Drugs is not a consistent anti-drug campaign; some drugs (such as alcohol and tobacco) are tolerated, or even subsidised; other drugs are banned. And the latter category lumps together widely different drugs such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine and PCP. The difference between the dangers of marijuana (somewhere on the level of alcohol and tobacco) and those of crack cocaine (evil stuff, that) are quite dramatic.
The War on Drugs is not based on scientific evidence of harm; it's based on superstition and paranoia, and the age-old principle that if you unite the people against a common enemy and sow the seeds of fear, many will be willing to sacrifice any amount of freedom and privacy to win some modicum of security. Additionally, the growing prison-labour industry has many cost benefits, as the People's Republic of China discovered before and the U.S. is discovering now.
<SARCASM> A republican who believes in evolution? Will wonders never cease? </SARCASM>
Seriously, the unfortunate reality is that sensible republicans are surrounded by the theocrats; it's an unfortunate fact that the more fanatical one is, the more effort one is going to put into their campaigning and politicking, which is why a small extremist fringe holds alarming sway over one of the two major US political parties. Even though the religiots haven't yet succeeded in turning the Republican Party into a Pentecostal Hezbollah, the party line has to bend a lot to accommodate their prejudices and tyrannical ambitions. And that in itself is more cause to worry than bozotic buzzword dropping.
Isn't the opposition to Gore the Republican Party, which is dominated by fundamentalist theocrats and authoritarian reactionaries? Surely a bozo who inanely spouts buzzwords he doesn't understand would be the lesser evil in this case.
Or do you mean Libertarian or Socialist or Natural Law Party or some other unlikely-to-get-elected fringe group?
...which would have the effect of reinforcing the stereotype of Linux users as sexually-frustrated, vaguely misogynistic misfits. And would probably alienate some proportion of female potential Linux users.
Which is exactly why any Windows open-source licence must be drafted meticulously, to make such a betrayal impossible; nothing else will assuage the (justified) fears of open-source developers and win their confidence.
In my opinion, that won't happen. If some visionary at Microsoft decides to open the Windows code, the armies of lawyers and executives indoctrinated in the One Microsoft Way and the ideology of control will put the brakes on it enough to ensure its stillbirth.
Note that the Windows API is, for better or worse, obnoxiously popular, and has lots of applications running on it. Therefore, were Windows truly open, someone would surely port it to Linux, or to a Mach microkernel or something similar.
However, if there is anything to inspire the least bit of distrust, such as a termination clause or any restrictions or controls over releases of the code, it will be all for naught; developers are not likely to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
If Microsoft fully open-source Windows (which I believe is unlikely), it'd be possible to port parts of it to run on top of Linux, or merge it with a forked version of WINE.
It'd probably require a lot of tidying up to prune back the spaghetti tying subroutines in the GDI and application levels to the kernel/drivers/bare metal, but it should be possible.
There seems to be a vestigial contempt for the idea of computers that are designed to look good. I wonder whether, when attractively-styled cars started becoming widespread, they drew the same jeers and catcalls from Model T aficionados, denouncing them as pretty, impractical toys. (Not without reason; unlike the "cute" newer cars, the utilitarian Model T could be configured as a sedan, a light truck or a number of other roles.) Nowadays almost everybody drives relatively un-ugly, minimally configurable end-user cars.
I'd rather like to see computers become more attractively styled (and I don't mean tacky futurist fantasies of fluorescent colours). I also wouldn't mind if a lot of the functions of PCI slots and direct motherboard access were replaced by the likes of USB, FireWire and perhaps PCMCIA; most computers take up too much space as it is.
I wouldn't call the iMac a "toy". It has a pretty powerful processor (G3/233), and while it's not a server-grade machine, it makes a useful desktop.
Currently the iMac's greatest limitation is its lack of PCI slots and SCSI. Once there are ample USB peripherals (soon enough; I've already seen USB scanners, MIDI interfaces and serial adaptors), this will become less important. Once iMacs have FireWire (the new ones reportedly will), the lack of SCSI won't matter.
When I bought my Mac (a G3 desktop from before the blue-and-white models), I was impressed by the case design. I opened it up to install more RAM, and found that the assembly with the disk drives and power supply pivots up, and even comes with a retractable foot on the side. I wish my Linux box (a homemade K6-200 jobbie) had a case as easy to access as that.
Could have been AOL or WorldCom or Time Warner or any one of a number of huge, soulless corporations concerned about nothing more than making a buck. At least Salon, while a for-profit company, comes from a Bay Area liberal intellectual mindset, and is in some kind of harmony with the WELL's values. We can probably rest assured that they won't strip-mine the WELL for maximum profit or dilute it into another middle-American chatroom system.
Slashdot Mirror
Tried reading it. Gave up. The writing style is rather dense, and a chore to get through. Maybe one needs to be on the right kind of drugs?
While we laud Lucas' vision, and the uber-coolness of all things Star Wars, let us not forget the
massive campaign of media manipulation and promotion behind Star Wars, in itself an achievement of technical perfection. Lucas may be a cinematic visionary, but he is also a shrewd marketer and memetic engineer.
One answer to why Windows (mis)features are copied could be that Windows is so pervasive that it's more beneficial for a UI to look like Windows than to do things differently (even if the latter case is more logical). It's sort of like the semi-mythical QWERTY effect.
As for Neptune, perhaps that should be a separate UI from KDE/GNOME. One Microsoftism which should not be emulated is the tendency to integrate everything into one great big sticky lump.
Microsoft have some very bright people, and are good at skimming the cream of the meme-pool (the Windows 95 UI lifts some of the catchiest features from MacOS, NeXTSTEP and OS/2), and every so often comes up with a good original idea. However, the Microsoft environment is one centred around market domination and profits, to the exclusion of technical elegance or quality control; hence, a lot of their ideas end up being watered down, adulterated or otherwise butchered. The Windows 95 UI contains some glaring inconsistencies which impair usability and engender confusion; though it looks slick and high-tech enough to sell, so that's good enough for MSFT.
One problem with that is that, even if you succeed in creating a passable free CODEC, the battle is in getting content providers to use it.
Firstly, the content publication tools that content providers use (mostly from Adobe and Macromedia, running on MacOS or NT) would have to support it. The software publishers have investments in other CODECs and no real interest in providing a GPLed CODEC, especially since the bulk of the desktop market is Windows; if there's a sizable Linux desktop market, we're more likely to see players for the existing formats.
Secondly, the actual media providers have to decide to use this CODEC; and big corporations tend to trust products of other corporations, with intellectual-property investments and contracts, more than the output of the free-software rabble. (Media companies, in particular, tend to be paranoid about open digital formats.)
If a GPLed CODEC comes about, one could expect it to find a niche among geek-underground content providers (claymation Star Wars spoofs, &c.), with GPLed Linux authoring software and players; though breaking into the world of corporate media is another story.
Things I'd like to see on the pilot:
* Emacs
You must have a pretty big Pilot...
$20M is nothing for Gates; he could almost pay it from petty cash. Certainly he could afford to indulge a $20M whim. And this is the man who has a room in Redmond lined with pictures of enemies (McNealy, Ellison and such); who's to say he wouldn't pull something like this just to rile RMS?
Does anyone know whether DVD Audio titles will still have geographic zone restriction like DVD video titles?
There's the problem of quality; current MP3 encoders/decoders don't support rates above 48kHz; also, the MP3 process distorts the high-frequency information a bit.
And higher sample rates are a Good Idea. While 44.1 is enough to represent frequencies up to 22.05kHz, the harmonics of the higher frequencies become distorted by the sampling process. 96kHz would allow pretty much all human-audible sound to be encoded non-marginally.
A wild thought: maybe had the government done a drug sweep of technology-intensive areas (the Bay Area, Cambridge (MA), &c.), mandatorily testing all tech workers for drug use, incarcerating drug users, herding them into Y2K work brigades and setting them to the task of fixing the Government's doomed mainframes, the coming collapse of the U.S. Government could have been averted?
(For those who don't get it, this is cynical black humour.)
If you want to go smoke-up, go ahead, but don't say the war on drugs is idiotic. The truth is that drugs are bad, in one way or another, and SOMETHING should be done to stop their abuse.
Assuming for a moment that your "drugs are bad and must be stopped" argument is valid, and disregarding pesky issues such as civil liberties, the argument is still flawed. The War on Drugs is not a consistent anti-drug campaign; some drugs (such as alcohol and tobacco) are tolerated, or even subsidised; other drugs are banned. And the latter category lumps together widely different drugs such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine and PCP. The difference between the dangers of marijuana (somewhere on the level of alcohol and tobacco) and those of crack cocaine (evil stuff, that) are quite dramatic.
The War on Drugs is not based on scientific evidence of harm; it's based on superstition and paranoia, and the age-old principle that if you unite the people against a common enemy and sow the seeds of fear, many will be willing to sacrifice any amount of freedom and privacy to win some modicum of security. Additionally, the growing prison-labour industry has many cost benefits, as the People's Republic of China discovered before and the U.S. is discovering now.
Is "yutz" an actual Yiddish word, or a spontaneously improvised faux-Yiddishism?
Inquiring Minds Must Know.
<SARCASM>
A republican who believes in evolution? Will wonders never cease?
</SARCASM>
Seriously, the unfortunate reality is that sensible republicans are surrounded by the theocrats; it's an unfortunate fact that the more fanatical one is, the more effort one is going to put into their campaigning and politicking, which is why a small extremist fringe holds alarming sway over one of the two major US political parties. Even though the religiots haven't yet succeeded in turning the Republican Party into a Pentecostal Hezbollah, the party line has to bend a lot to accommodate their prejudices and tyrannical ambitions. And that in itself is more cause to worry than bozotic buzzword dropping.
Isn't the opposition to Gore the Republican Party, which is dominated by fundamentalist theocrats and authoritarian reactionaries? Surely a bozo who inanely spouts buzzwords he doesn't understand would be the lesser evil in this case.
Or do you mean Libertarian or Socialist or Natural Law Party or some other unlikely-to-get-elected fringe group?
- BAB3Z !!!!!!1
HTH
I rather like the iMac anime girl myself.
...which would have the effect of reinforcing the stereotype of Linux users as sexually-frustrated, vaguely misogynistic misfits. And would probably alienate some proportion of female potential Linux users.
Which is exactly why any Windows open-source licence must be drafted meticulously, to make such a betrayal impossible; nothing else will assuage the (justified) fears of open-source developers and win their confidence.
In my opinion, that won't happen. If some visionary at Microsoft decides to open the Windows code, the armies of lawyers and executives indoctrinated in the One Microsoft Way and the ideology of control will put the brakes on it enough to ensure its stillbirth.
Note that the Windows API is, for better or worse, obnoxiously popular, and has lots of applications running on it. Therefore, were Windows truly open, someone would surely port it to Linux, or to a Mach microkernel or something similar.
However, if there is anything to inspire the least bit of distrust, such as a termination clause or any restrictions or controls over releases of the code, it will be all for naught; developers are not likely to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
If Microsoft fully open-source Windows (which I believe is unlikely), it'd be possible to port parts of it to run on top of Linux, or merge it with a forked version of WINE.
It'd probably require a lot of tidying up to prune back the spaghetti tying subroutines in the GDI and application levels to the kernel/drivers/bare metal, but it should be possible.
There seems to be a vestigial contempt for the idea of computers that are designed to look good. I wonder whether, when attractively-styled cars started becoming widespread, they drew the same jeers and catcalls from Model T aficionados, denouncing them as pretty, impractical toys. (Not without reason; unlike the "cute" newer cars, the utilitarian Model T could be configured as a sedan, a light truck or a number of other roles.) Nowadays almost everybody drives relatively un-ugly, minimally configurable end-user cars.
I'd rather like to see computers become more attractively styled (and I don't mean tacky futurist fantasies of fluorescent colours). I also wouldn't mind if a lot of the functions of PCI slots and direct motherboard access were replaced by the likes of USB, FireWire and perhaps PCMCIA; most computers take up too much space as it is.
I wouldn't call the iMac a "toy". It has a pretty powerful processor (G3/233), and while it's not a server-grade machine, it makes a useful desktop.
Currently the iMac's greatest limitation is its lack of PCI slots and SCSI. Once there are ample USB peripherals (soon enough; I've already seen USB scanners, MIDI interfaces and serial adaptors), this will become less important. Once iMacs have FireWire (the new ones reportedly will), the lack of SCSI won't matter.
When I bought my Mac (a G3 desktop from before the blue-and-white models), I was impressed by the case design. I opened it up to install more RAM, and found that the assembly with the disk drives and power supply pivots up, and even comes with a retractable foot on the side. I wish my Linux box (a homemade K6-200 jobbie) had a case as easy to access as that.
Could have been AOL or WorldCom or Time Warner or any one of a number of huge, soulless corporations concerned about nothing more than making a buck. At least Salon, while a for-profit company, comes from a Bay Area liberal intellectual mindset, and is in some kind of harmony with the WELL's values. We can probably rest assured that they won't strip-mine the WELL for maximum profit or dilute it into another middle-American chatroom system.
Publish the details, under an open-source licence. That way we can all hack on brainwave-driven computing.