One could argue that future features in open source code could be more credible, not less. Features in Microsoft code are hidden from public view until they spring, fully developed, from the head of Bill. Until a product is released, nobody really knows how development is progressing
It should be pointed out that this (MS springing fully developed features on an unsuspecting public) is most likely more due to Microsoft's monopoly (and their own way of doing things) than due to any natural side effect of commercial, proprietary software development in general. Microsoft's monopoly means that they *don't have to give a damn* what customers *really* want, instead, they are free to put into their software whatever is in *their* best interests (a good example is the recent "smart links" fiasco). These features are not there because they are best for customers but because they are best for Microsoft, but the only reason Microsoft can get away with doing this is (1) the public usually doesn't *know* any better, and (2) the public has no alternatives. In a truly competitive environment, software features would probably align more closely to what customers want. Right now the public will simply swallow whatever is dished up onto their plates.
"While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten" correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't vb only 10 years old
Not only that, but Java is only about six years old. Although I suspect the poster knew that, this obviously isn't a valid claim.
I hate this term. Its completely meaningless. What does it mean to say something is "fully featured"? It implies that ALL possible features that anyone might want are there, which is obviously just marketing baloney, no existing software fits that description.
I guess when used like this it means the software "has lots of features". Isn't there a better term that means that?
You don't give children much credit either. They are often pretty capable of calling a spade a spade
I suspect propaganda campaigns aimed at children usually fail because children are more capable of thinking for themselves than the current culture gives them credit for. The designers of these campaigns usually assume that kids are stupid and impressionable and will fall for anything as long as you tell them its "cool" or "uncool", and work from that as a baseline. And then they wonder why the campaigns fail. Still, corporate branding seems to work better, so one has to wonder. Nonetheless, I get the impression that adults are at least as susceptible, if not more so, to this sort of propaganda.
The whole concept of "Stealing" is a wordfuck, a lie, a purposeful confusion of concepts to create a false fact, ie copying music=stealing the music
Hmm.. now that you mention that, I'm a bit surprised the RIAA hasn't yet made a public statement equating "copying music" with "terrorism". What an opportunity for them.
I would say that some viruses ARE terrorism. What about the big ol' DDoS we had a year or so ago? It was a smallish group targetting a list of victims for political means
From dictionary.com: "terrorism: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons".
Now where in the DDOS attacks does "violence" come into it?
Maybe there is some vague fear that ones servers are going to be attacked. But its severely reaching to go from that to calling a DDOS attack "terrorism". Terrorism specifically implies physical violence to induce terror/fear. Fear of having ones server DDOSed is not the same as fear of being violently brutally murdered.
Terrorism=crime, but crime!=terrorism, don't get confused. Writing viruses might be a crime, but they are certainly not terrorism, unless somehow someone manages to write a virus that *directly* physically harms or kills people. Terrorism is a crime, but you can't just call any crime "terrorism", its not an umbrella term, and you can't just broaden the term to include any crime of which you don't approve. This is akin to people apparently no longer being able to distinguish "flirting in the workplace" from "sexual harassment" - the part where actual *harassment* comes into it seems to have been forgotten (for something to be "harassment" it actually is supposed to need to be pretty harsh and distressing).
If we keep going your direction (any "smallish group targetting a list of victims") we're going to end with basically everything being labelled terrorism. From everything unpleasant being seen as "damn commies" in the 50s we'll just have everything unpleasant be "damn terrorists". Oops, too late.
Even if an actual terrorist (i.e. someone who plants bombs in public places or flies planes into buildings) decides to DDOS some servers, that STILL does not make it an act of terrorism, in the same way that if Osama bin Laden runs a red light, running a red light does not become a "terrorist crime". If a terrorist commits a DDOS attack, even if for the same reasons that he bombs buildings, its still not an act of terrorism. A crime, yes, but not really different to if some naive 14-year old script kiddie commits the same DDOS attack (except in *intent*, but its not an *act of terror*).
In the 50's everyone was seeing commies under every rock. This knee-jerk business of seeing terrorists under every rock is much the same.
(1) and (2) are nonsense, they're myths. MS tech support costs LOTS of money and is tantamount to useless anyway ("have you tried restarting the computer?"). And when last did you hear of Microsoft actually listening to complaints about broken software? The notion is ridiculous on its face - they flat out ignore complaints about serious defects in the software, and how many people do you know of who have refunded their MS software? SourceSafe has very serious bugs in that have been there for years now, and in spite of various complaints and very precise descriptions of the problems, not a peep from MS, nor a bugfix. What can we do about it, as clients of Microsoft? NOTHING. There is NOTHING we can do about it, but pray that when we fork out lots of money for the next version, whenever that comes out, that they have maybe fixed some of those bugs. The latest service packs don't fix the bugs. Same with Office 2000 - Microsoft Word has very serious defects regarding the "master document" functionality (its horribly broken), but even the latest service packs don't fix ANY of the dozen or so issues that I've found myself. So guess what, our company will just be forking out lots of money to upgrade to Office XP not for new functionality but just in the hope that maybe they've fixed the defects.
With (3), you have a very good point, and I think thats a big one - software projects frequently stagnate. Even the GIMP, often touted as an example of a success story of OSS, almost entirely stagnated for a long time before reaching version 1 because the lead developers lost interest. It happens all the time with OSS, a package will often stagnate for years until somebody decides to pick it up. I have a smallish OS project that I've been working on (very intermittently) for about six years, and its probably about halfway now:) The longest I've not worked on it was a full one and a half years.
Thats easy to say for people who have fast connections, but remember, not everyone is in the same situation as you (surprise). The best connection I can get that isn't ludicrously priced in my country is 64K ISDN, and if a single ISO is 80MB smaller zipped, thats FOUR HOURS of download time saved. Two ISO images, that saves EIGHT HOURS of download time, a lot longer than it would take to unzip the files. And here (South Africa) our telephone bills are charged per-second.
Thats assuming you can save 80MB on an ISO, a claim which I admit I find a little dubious, given that virtually everything on the CD is already compressed, and I don't think the CD filesystem occupies more than about 30 MB uncompressed. I haven't tried it though.
Actually, joking aside, I actually think this is one of the reasons for the success of Windows - in the years from 1995 (when Win95 was released) up until the year 2000, Windows practically never changed at all. A couple bugfixes here and there, support for new devices, and "integrating internet explorer". But thats about it. And while this sort of software stagnation is obviously not a good thing for software, for users, its actually a sort of a blessing, because they don't need to keep relearning new stuff and installing new stuff etc, they can just pretty much rely on Windows being what they've come to think of as what Windows is. With Linux, the rabid pace of development is frightening (compare Win95 to WinMe, then compare Linux in 1995 to Linux in, say, 2000), every time I install a new version, large amounts have changed, and I have to almost "relearn" software that I already knew. It usually takes me a few days to adjust to a new (six-monthly) release of Linux. Back in 1995, to give some background: no desktop environments AT ALL (no KDE, no gnome, only some simple window managers, e.g. fvwm95, afterstep etc), I had to recompile the kernel just to get my sound card to work, no real game libraries (such as libsdl) or 3d acceleration support, no gtk, no qt, I spent hours figuring out the scripts and command line options required just to get dial-up-networking to work etc.
For Joe Enduser, there is unfortunately something to be said for a software interface which they can "rely on" to be predictable and in line with what they know and expect. If a significantly new/different version of Windows came out every six months (as it seems to with Linux, e.g. if you stick with RH), Joe Enduser would probably give up on it and go buy a Mac, the anxiety of having to keep learning all the new stuff is apparently just too big a load to bear for non-technical people:)
For the FBI to pull this off, they would certainly need quantum computers
So basically what you're saying is that this isn't a problem because they won't be able to do it effectively (i.e. close to 100% monitoring) with todays computers but will require computer technology that will be available 15 to 25 years from now?
Personally, I would like to still have freedom 15 to 25 years from now. In fact, I would ideally still like to be living on this planet 50 years from now.
Lets try to use long-term thinking when discussing authoritarian policy-making, because technology will make it possible in the very foreseeable future for the FBI to do whatever they want, and any legal powers we relinquish now (due to lame arguments like "they'll never be able to tap that much information with todays computers anyway") are going to cause serious repurcussions when tomorrows computers are built. You sound like you don't believe quantum computers will EVER exist anyway, or that computers will never be able to detect and compensate for things like spelling errors and typos. Come on. Some forward-thinking, please.
Rightly or wrongly, the general public associates crashing with Windows. Any above average occurance of crashes will doom this product, and be a black eye for Microsoft
I'm not so sure. The general public associates crashing with computers more than they associate it with Windows (they regard computer crashes as "just how computers are"). Thanks to Win9X, the general public has never had an expectation of computers running 24/7 anyway, and I think most people will quickly mentally adjust to accepting XBox crashes as "normal", even if they did not think of game consoles as being unstable before. At most LANs I've been to I've seen many people resetting their frozen Windows boxes, and nobody even bats an eyelid, its such a "normal", accepted part of using Windows; people have been conditioned to accept defective products as normal, and this sort of conditioning happens extremely quickly. You'll probably see some bitching in the media for a month (or two at most) while people are still a bit peeved, but after that people will have gotten used to the idea and will have accepted the fact that they can do nothing about it anyway.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and Me, as defective products, have been an incredibly huge "black eye" for Microsoft over the past decade, yet millions of people blithely accept it and buy it anyway. Its taken MS almost ten years to even bother to try to start producing a somewhat more stable consumer OS - they very obviously have NO sense of urgency in pushing a stable, reliable product out the door. I don't see MS giving a shit about it if the XBox is as unstable as Win9X.
Still, if the problem isn't the heat, then it shouldn't be too difficult for them to locate the problems and fix them in future XBox releases, and we can possibly expect them to even actually fix the problems during the first year (might be driver issues or hardware issues). People generally have very short memories, and if future releases are a lot more stable, then XBox will be a big success anyway, 99% of people will completely forget that the 1st generation was unstable, the other 1% will reminisce about it on online forums such as/.
You have to code "it all TWICE"?? Holy shit, dude, you ever heard of "standards"? Geez.. I got my web site looking virtually the same on both IE and Mozilla *just by following standards*, almost no extra effort (except to work around some IE CSS bugs).
And forcing everyone to "go Microsoft" is NOT making things cheaper, in case you hadn't noticed, Windows is fscking expensive, and its *getting more expensive* lately.
Fsck/. "invalid form key" errors, this is pissing me off now.
I generally use Mozilla, IE is pretty buggy (stable, but buggy, e.g. sometimes the drop-down menus just don't work unless you alt+tab and alt+tab back again, or clicking 'back' results in form data being lost, or when you click "refresh" and it totally ignores your request to refresh etc), but there is one reason I often go back to IE: the "save as" feature that will save the page along with all inlined images etc, converting the addresses to local addresses. If Mozilla had that, I would probably ditch IE totally. It would probably be fairly easy to add too, I've even considered getting the source code and having a go at adding it myself.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet
Personally, I think they should just call it "Mozilla 5" or "Mozilla 6" when they hit "version 1" status. Purely for "marketing" reasons -> Mozilla 1.0 will be approximately equivalent to at least IE 5. But naming it "version 1" when IE is at "version 6" will look bad in the eyes of the sheeple.
Theres a third reason to prefer reverse engineering from creating something new: riding off the success of your predecessor. When you make something that is compatible with something that 50 million people are already using, you have an existing potential market of 50 million people who can automatically use your product. If you make something new, there is nobody using it, no existing software base that already works with it etc, so the barrier to market entry is much higher.
games are the only real application pushing chips into new speeds
This statement is inaccurate. It needs an extra word: "games are the only real application pushing mainstream chips into new speeds".
There are plenty of high-end applications (e.g. scientific visualisation, special effects, simulation, high-end servers etc, weather prediction/modelling etc) that have been pushing chips (and computers in general) to high speeds over the last 20 odd years, but not in a way that has been affordable to the consumer. The manufacturers of those systems make lots of money by selling those systems at extremely high prices. Games push companies to try make that level of functionality affordable to the man on the street, but games have never resulted in the actual creation of any of those technologies (the closest thing to innovation I can think of is programmable shaders on the GPU, but even that concept is very old, the only new thing is that its fast and its on the GPU; even the GPU concept was nothing new, it was only new to *mainstream* folk).
Side note, what is it with this slashdot "invalid form key" crap?
Many people these days don't seem to remember that far back (maybe I'm getting old), but for a long time, AMD (and in those days Cyrix was the other big one) *were* virtually exact clones (of 386/486 etc).
Its only *relatively* recently (three or four years ago?) that AMD decided to "fork" the design and start adding features of their own.
"Hopefully with XP and in the future Microsoft will step up on security issues from a software design level"
You know, replace "XP" in that statement with "[latest MS OS]" and you get something people have been saying for close to ten years now (right up there alongside "hopefully the next version of Windows will be stable". Ten years. I remember people saying it when Win95 came out. And when Win98 came out. And when WinMe came out. How patient should consumers be??!? Is it OK to wait ten years for "the basics" like stability and security? There comes a time when people need to stop saying "hopefully the next version...", realise the pattern, and just give up on the company. Microsoft has had a LONG time now to "prove themselves", and they still haven't. The fact that people have been saying that for so long and not given up on the product is evidence of a distinct lack of alternatives.
Is everything so simplistic in your world? Does everything in your world boil down to who we are "supposed to be" hating now, to the point where you actually get *confused* if somebody you thought you were "supposed to be" hating happens to be a victim in some things too? How sad. The world is a complicated place. Perhaps such simplistic thinking is the result of the media's perpetual insistence that everything is either "good" or "evil", I don't know.
It depresses me to read patents like this. This sort of thing really shouldn't be allowed to be patented. Its just so fscking simple. I swear, if people can patent this, I can patent a system called "parking", which describes a technique whereby a person manouvres a "vehicle" into a "parking bay" by a specific sequence of steps involving a "clutch", a "gearbox" and a "steering wheel". This sort of thing (the macromedia patent describes) really does equate to such horribly simple everyday things - any dumbass 8 year old could come up with it. I can almost understand people patenting things like sophisticated and mathematically intensive compression algorithms for, say, compression and transmission of real-time character animation information by inverse kinematics. That involves putting together things in a NEW, ORIGINAL, COMPLEX way. But this macromedia patent is just depressingly trivial.
On a side note, what is it with this slashdot "invalid form key" crap?
True, but this post was moderated as INTERESTING, which is what the person was referring to. I can understand it being moderated as funny, and I can understand it being moderated as flamebait.. but interesting?
I've seen a lot of GIMP art. I've seen a lot of Photoshop art. The capacity and useability of GIMP - particularly with regards to fonts, anti-aliasing, color control (emphasis), et. al., is severly lacking. I've seen some mindblowing graphics produced with photoshop.... I have yet to see anything comprable with the GIMP
You know, I much prefer Photoshop to the GIMP myself. But this statement is just crap. Has it occurred to you that there might be so much more "mindblowing" photoshop art because over 90% of art colleges are TEACHING PHOTOSHOP!? And the students of these places are already artistically talented people. So there is simply a far greater number of Photoshop users out there, and the percentage of Photoshop users that are artistically talented is much higher than of GIMP users. Most GIMP users probably have technical, not artistic backgrounds. So OBVIOUSLY there is going to be a lot more great photoshop art out there than GIMP art.
If you really want to be scientific about it, do a study of 100 artworks done by randomly selected real artists using GIMP, and compare them to 100 artworks done by randomly selected real artists using Photoshop.
The GIMP is powerful, and I don't think there is any basis for your statements about fonts, of all things. If you're going to criticise GIMP, there are things that are much more worthy of criticism - which is why I'm guessing that you haven't really used GIMP very much.
As I said though, I prefer Photoshop, the main reasons being: (1) the interface, its just so much more usable, (2) I already know Photoshop well, there is not enough incentive for me to head off on a new learning curve. But at least I have used GIMP fairly extensively at times in the past, back in the days of Photoshop 4, where feature-wise it still compared well to Photoshop.
How can you say the GIMP doesn't support "a gazillion fonts"? The GIMP supports all the fonts you have installed on your system, if you don't know how to install new fonts its your problem, my Linux box has hundreds of fonts installed. And complaining about keyboard shortcuts and PSD files is like complaining that Photoshop doesn't use GIMPs keyboard shortcuts and that it doesn't read XCF files - thats just lame. And why should GIMP allocate swap disks when the OS has a decent disk swapping mechanism? GIMP scripting is about 1000 times more powerful than Photoshops "actions".
Come on - I'm sure if you knew GIMP better you could have come up with FAR more valid criticisms against it. You come across as someone who tried GIMP for a couple of days at most and felt frustrated because it "wasn't like Photoshop", which you already knew. I'm not saying you are, but thats how you sound.
While you're there, check out http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=iro nic ("poignantly contrary to what was expected").. I think you meant, on a "coincidental" note:) (Check out their "usage note" for 'ironic' too:).
MissMyNewton's post is so precisely on-topic, I can't begin to imagine what somebody needed to have been smoking to have moderated it as "off topic". Reeks of "personal agenda". Moderation quality on slashdot stinks so much these days that even meta-moderation seems to struggle to save it.
Slashdot Mirror
One could argue that future features in open source code could be more credible, not less. Features in Microsoft code are hidden from public view until they spring, fully developed, from the head of Bill. Until a product is released, nobody really knows how development is progressing
It should be pointed out that this (MS springing fully developed features on an unsuspecting public) is most likely more due to Microsoft's monopoly (and their own way of doing things) than due to any natural side effect of commercial, proprietary software development in general. Microsoft's monopoly means that they *don't have to give a damn* what customers *really* want, instead, they are free to put into their software whatever is in *their* best interests (a good example is the recent "smart links" fiasco). These features are not there because they are best for customers but because they are best for Microsoft, but the only reason Microsoft can get away with doing this is (1) the public usually doesn't *know* any better, and (2) the public has no alternatives. In a truly competitive environment, software features would probably align more closely to what customers want. Right now the public will simply swallow whatever is dished up onto their plates.
The FULL source code? I don't think so. Parts of it yes, under strict NDAs.
"While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten" correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't vb only 10 years old
Not only that, but Java is only about six years old. Although I suspect the poster knew that, this obviously isn't a valid claim.
fully featured
I hate this term. Its completely meaningless. What does it mean to say something is "fully featured"? It implies that ALL possible features that anyone might want are there, which is obviously just marketing baloney, no existing software fits that description.
I guess when used like this it means the software "has lots of features". Isn't there a better term that means that?
You don't give children much credit either. They are often pretty capable of calling a spade a spade
I suspect propaganda campaigns aimed at children usually fail because children are more capable of thinking for themselves than the current culture gives them credit for. The designers of these campaigns usually assume that kids are stupid and impressionable and will fall for anything as long as you tell them its "cool" or "uncool", and work from that as a baseline. And then they wonder why the campaigns fail. Still, corporate branding seems to work better, so one has to wonder. Nonetheless, I get the impression that adults are at least as susceptible, if not more so, to this sort of propaganda.
The whole concept of "Stealing" is a wordfuck, a lie, a purposeful confusion of concepts to create a false fact, ie copying music=stealing the music
Hmm .. now that you mention that, I'm a bit surprised the RIAA hasn't yet made a public statement equating "copying music" with "terrorism". What an opportunity for them.
Ah well, wait for it I guess.
I would say that some viruses ARE terrorism. What about the big ol' DDoS we had a year or so ago? It was a smallish group targetting a list of victims for political means
From dictionary.com: "terrorism: The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons".
Now where in the DDOS attacks does "violence" come into it?
Maybe there is some vague fear that ones servers are going to be attacked. But its severely reaching to go from that to calling a DDOS attack "terrorism". Terrorism specifically implies physical violence to induce terror/fear. Fear of having ones server DDOSed is not the same as fear of being violently brutally murdered.
Terrorism=crime, but crime!=terrorism, don't get confused. Writing viruses might be a crime, but they are certainly not terrorism, unless somehow someone manages to write a virus that *directly* physically harms or kills people. Terrorism is a crime, but you can't just call any crime "terrorism", its not an umbrella term, and you can't just broaden the term to include any crime of which you don't approve. This is akin to people apparently no longer being able to distinguish "flirting in the workplace" from "sexual harassment" - the part where actual *harassment* comes into it seems to have been forgotten (for something to be "harassment" it actually is supposed to need to be pretty harsh and distressing).
If we keep going your direction (any "smallish group targetting a list of victims") we're going to end with basically everything being labelled terrorism. From everything unpleasant being seen as "damn commies" in the 50s we'll just have everything unpleasant be "damn terrorists". Oops, too late.
Even if an actual terrorist (i.e. someone who plants bombs in public places or flies planes into buildings) decides to DDOS some servers, that STILL does not make it an act of terrorism, in the same way that if Osama bin Laden runs a red light, running a red light does not become a "terrorist crime". If a terrorist commits a DDOS attack, even if for the same reasons that he bombs buildings, its still not an act of terrorism. A crime, yes, but not really different to if some naive 14-year old script kiddie commits the same DDOS attack (except in *intent*, but its not an *act of terror*).
In the 50's everyone was seeing commies under every rock. This knee-jerk business of seeing terrorists under every rock is much the same.
(1) and (2) are nonsense, they're myths. MS tech support costs LOTS of money and is tantamount to useless anyway ("have you tried restarting the computer?"). And when last did you hear of Microsoft actually listening to complaints about broken software? The notion is ridiculous on its face - they flat out ignore complaints about serious defects in the software, and how many people do you know of who have refunded their MS software? SourceSafe has very serious bugs in that have been there for years now, and in spite of various complaints and very precise descriptions of the problems, not a peep from MS, nor a bugfix. What can we do about it, as clients of Microsoft? NOTHING. There is NOTHING we can do about it, but pray that when we fork out lots of money for the next version, whenever that comes out, that they have maybe fixed some of those bugs. The latest service packs don't fix the bugs. Same with Office 2000 - Microsoft Word has very serious defects regarding the "master document" functionality (its horribly broken), but even the latest service packs don't fix ANY of the dozen or so issues that I've found myself. So guess what, our company will just be forking out lots of money to upgrade to Office XP not for new functionality but just in the hope that maybe they've fixed the defects.
With (3), you have a very good point, and I think thats a big one - software projects frequently stagnate. Even the GIMP, often touted as an example of a success story of OSS, almost entirely stagnated for a long time before reaching version 1 because the lead developers lost interest. It happens all the time with OSS, a package will often stagnate for years until somebody decides to pick it up. I have a smallish OS project that I've been working on (very intermittently) for about six years, and its probably about halfway now :) The longest I've not worked on it was a full one and a half years.
Why? It saves you ZERO time in downloading it
Thats easy to say for people who have fast connections, but remember, not everyone is in the same situation as you (surprise). The best connection I can get that isn't ludicrously priced in my country is 64K ISDN, and if a single ISO is 80MB smaller zipped, thats FOUR HOURS of download time saved. Two ISO images, that saves EIGHT HOURS of download time, a lot longer than it would take to unzip the files. And here (South Africa) our telephone bills are charged per-second.
Thats assuming you can save 80MB on an ISO, a claim which I admit I find a little dubious, given that virtually everything on the CD is already compressed, and I don't think the CD filesystem occupies more than about 30 MB uncompressed. I haven't tried it though.
Actually, joking aside, I actually think this is one of the reasons for the success of Windows - in the years from 1995 (when Win95 was released) up until the year 2000, Windows practically never changed at all. A couple bugfixes here and there, support for new devices, and "integrating internet explorer". But thats about it. And while this sort of software stagnation is obviously not a good thing for software, for users, its actually a sort of a blessing, because they don't need to keep relearning new stuff and installing new stuff etc, they can just pretty much rely on Windows being what they've come to think of as what Windows is. With Linux, the rabid pace of development is frightening (compare Win95 to WinMe, then compare Linux in 1995 to Linux in, say, 2000), every time I install a new version, large amounts have changed, and I have to almost "relearn" software that I already knew. It usually takes me a few days to adjust to a new (six-monthly) release of Linux. Back in 1995, to give some background: no desktop environments AT ALL (no KDE, no gnome, only some simple window managers, e.g. fvwm95, afterstep etc), I had to recompile the kernel just to get my sound card to work, no real game libraries (such as libsdl) or 3d acceleration support, no gtk, no qt, I spent hours figuring out the scripts and command line options required just to get dial-up-networking to work etc. :)
For Joe Enduser, there is unfortunately something to be said for a software interface which they can "rely on" to be predictable and in line with what they know and expect. If a significantly new/different version of Windows came out every six months (as it seems to with Linux, e.g. if you stick with RH), Joe Enduser would probably give up on it and go buy a Mac, the anxiety of having to keep learning all the new stuff is apparently just too big a load to bear for non-technical people
they'll start earning their keep by nailing the copyright terrorists
And of course you forgot the "virus writing terrorists" :)
For the FBI to pull this off, they would certainly need quantum computers
So basically what you're saying is that this isn't a problem because they won't be able to do it effectively (i.e. close to 100% monitoring) with todays computers but will require computer technology that will be available 15 to 25 years from now?
Personally, I would like to still have freedom 15 to 25 years from now. In fact, I would ideally still like to be living on this planet 50 years from now.
Lets try to use long-term thinking when discussing authoritarian policy-making, because technology will make it possible in the very foreseeable future for the FBI to do whatever they want, and any legal powers we relinquish now (due to lame arguments like "they'll never be able to tap that much information with todays computers anyway") are going to cause serious repurcussions when tomorrows computers are built. You sound like you don't believe quantum computers will EVER exist anyway, or that computers will never be able to detect and compensate for things like spelling errors and typos. Come on. Some forward-thinking, please.
Rightly or wrongly, the general public associates crashing with Windows. Any above average occurance of crashes will doom this product, and be a black eye for Microsoft
I'm not so sure. The general public associates crashing with computers more than they associate it with Windows (they regard computer crashes as "just how computers are"). Thanks to Win9X, the general public has never had an expectation of computers running 24/7 anyway, and I think most people will quickly mentally adjust to accepting XBox crashes as "normal", even if they did not think of game consoles as being unstable before. At most LANs I've been to I've seen many people resetting their frozen Windows boxes, and nobody even bats an eyelid, its such a "normal", accepted part of using Windows; people have been conditioned to accept defective products as normal, and this sort of conditioning happens extremely quickly. You'll probably see some bitching in the media for a month (or two at most) while people are still a bit peeved, but after that people will have gotten used to the idea and will have accepted the fact that they can do nothing about it anyway.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and Me, as defective products, have been an incredibly huge "black eye" for Microsoft over the past decade, yet millions of people blithely accept it and buy it anyway. Its taken MS almost ten years to even bother to try to start producing a somewhat more stable consumer OS - they very obviously have NO sense of urgency in pushing a stable, reliable product out the door. I don't see MS giving a shit about it if the XBox is as unstable as Win9X.
Still, if the problem isn't the heat, then it shouldn't be too difficult for them to locate the problems and fix them in future XBox releases, and we can possibly expect them to even actually fix the problems during the first year (might be driver issues or hardware issues). People generally have very short memories, and if future releases are a lot more stable, then XBox will be a big success anyway, 99% of people will completely forget that the 1st generation was unstable, the other 1% will reminisce about it on online forums such as /.
You have to code "it all TWICE"?? Holy shit, dude, you ever heard of "standards"? Geez .. I got my web site looking virtually the same on both IE and Mozilla *just by following standards*, almost no extra effort (except to work around some IE CSS bugs).
/. "invalid form key" errors, this is pissing me off now.
And forcing everyone to "go Microsoft" is NOT making things cheaper, in case you hadn't noticed, Windows is fscking expensive, and its *getting more expensive* lately.
Fsck
I generally use Mozilla, IE is pretty buggy (stable, but buggy, e.g. sometimes the drop-down menus just don't work unless you alt+tab and alt+tab back again, or clicking 'back' results in form data being lost, or when you click "refresh" and it totally ignores your request to refresh etc), but there is one reason I often go back to IE: the "save as" feature that will save the page along with all inlined images etc, converting the addresses to local addresses. If Mozilla had that, I would probably ditch IE totally. It would probably be fairly easy to add too, I've even considered getting the source code and having a go at adding it myself.
Mozilla is the best browser on the market and it's not even version one yet
Personally, I think they should just call it "Mozilla 5" or "Mozilla 6" when they hit "version 1" status. Purely for "marketing" reasons -> Mozilla 1.0 will be approximately equivalent to at least IE 5. But naming it "version 1" when IE is at "version 6" will look bad in the eyes of the sheeple.
Theres a third reason to prefer reverse engineering from creating something new: riding off the success of your predecessor. When you make something that is compatible with something that 50 million people are already using, you have an existing potential market of 50 million people who can automatically use your product. If you make something new, there is nobody using it, no existing software base that already works with it etc, so the barrier to market entry is much higher.
games are the only real application pushing chips into new speeds
This statement is inaccurate. It needs an extra word: "games are the only real application pushing mainstream chips into new speeds".
There are plenty of high-end applications (e.g. scientific visualisation, special effects, simulation, high-end servers etc, weather prediction/modelling etc) that have been pushing chips (and computers in general) to high speeds over the last 20 odd years, but not in a way that has been affordable to the consumer. The manufacturers of those systems make lots of money by selling those systems at extremely high prices. Games push companies to try make that level of functionality affordable to the man on the street, but games have never resulted in the actual creation of any of those technologies (the closest thing to innovation I can think of is programmable shaders on the GPU, but even that concept is very old, the only new thing is that its fast and its on the GPU; even the GPU concept was nothing new, it was only new to *mainstream* folk).
Side note, what is it with this slashdot "invalid form key" crap?
Many people these days don't seem to remember that far back (maybe I'm getting old), but for a long time, AMD (and in those days Cyrix was the other big one) *were* virtually exact clones (of 386/486 etc).
Its only *relatively* recently (three or four years ago?) that AMD decided to "fork" the design and start adding features of their own.
"Hopefully with XP and in the future Microsoft will step up on security issues from a software design level"
You know, replace "XP" in that statement with "[latest MS OS]" and you get something people have been saying for close to ten years now (right up there alongside "hopefully the next version of Windows will be stable". Ten years. I remember people saying it when Win95 came out. And when Win98 came out. And when WinMe came out. How patient should consumers be??!? Is it OK to wait ten years for "the basics" like stability and security? There comes a time when people need to stop saying "hopefully the next version...", realise the pattern, and just give up on the company. Microsoft has had a LONG time now to "prove themselves", and they still haven't. The fact that people have been saying that for so long and not given up on the product is evidence of a distinct lack of alternatives.
Is everything so simplistic in your world? Does everything in your world boil down to who we are "supposed to be" hating now, to the point where you actually get *confused* if somebody you thought you were "supposed to be" hating happens to be a victim in some things too? How sad. The world is a complicated place. Perhaps such simplistic thinking is the result of the media's perpetual insistence that everything is either "good" or "evil", I don't know.
It depresses me to read patents like this. This sort of thing really shouldn't be allowed to be patented. Its just so fscking simple. I swear, if people can patent this, I can patent a system called "parking", which describes a technique whereby a person manouvres a "vehicle" into a "parking bay" by a specific sequence of steps involving a "clutch", a "gearbox" and a "steering wheel". This sort of thing (the macromedia patent describes) really does equate to such horribly simple everyday things - any dumbass 8 year old could come up with it. I can almost understand people patenting things like sophisticated and mathematically intensive compression algorithms for, say, compression and transmission of real-time character animation information by inverse kinematics. That involves putting together things in a NEW, ORIGINAL, COMPLEX way. But this macromedia patent is just depressingly trivial.
On a side note, what is it with this slashdot "invalid form key" crap?
True, but this post was moderated as INTERESTING, which is what the person was referring to. I can understand it being moderated as funny, and I can understand it being moderated as flamebait .. but interesting?
I've seen a lot of GIMP art. I've seen a lot of Photoshop art. The capacity and useability of GIMP - particularly with regards to fonts, anti-aliasing, color control (emphasis), et. al., is severly lacking. I've seen some mindblowing graphics produced with photoshop.... I have yet to see anything comprable with the GIMP
You know, I much prefer Photoshop to the GIMP myself. But this statement is just crap. Has it occurred to you that there might be so much more "mindblowing" photoshop art because over 90% of art colleges are TEACHING PHOTOSHOP!? And the students of these places are already artistically talented people. So there is simply a far greater number of Photoshop users out there, and the percentage of Photoshop users that are artistically talented is much higher than of GIMP users. Most GIMP users probably have technical, not artistic backgrounds. So OBVIOUSLY there is going to be a lot more great photoshop art out there than GIMP art.
If you really want to be scientific about it, do a study of 100 artworks done by randomly selected real artists using GIMP, and compare them to 100 artworks done by randomly selected real artists using Photoshop.
The GIMP is powerful, and I don't think there is any basis for your statements about fonts, of all things. If you're going to criticise GIMP, there are things that are much more worthy of criticism - which is why I'm guessing that you haven't really used GIMP very much.
As I said though, I prefer Photoshop, the main reasons being: (1) the interface, its just so much more usable, (2) I already know Photoshop well, there is not enough incentive for me to head off on a new learning curve. But at least I have used GIMP fairly extensively at times in the past, back in the days of Photoshop 4, where feature-wise it still compared well to Photoshop.
How can you say the GIMP doesn't support "a gazillion fonts"? The GIMP supports all the fonts you have installed on your system, if you don't know how to install new fonts its your problem, my Linux box has hundreds of fonts installed. And complaining about keyboard shortcuts and PSD files is like complaining that Photoshop doesn't use GIMPs keyboard shortcuts and that it doesn't read XCF files - thats just lame. And why should GIMP allocate swap disks when the OS has a decent disk swapping mechanism? GIMP scripting is about 1000 times more powerful than Photoshops "actions".
Come on - I'm sure if you knew GIMP better you could have come up with FAR more valid criticisms against it. You come across as someone who tried GIMP for a couple of days at most and felt frustrated because it "wasn't like Photoshop", which you already knew. I'm not saying you are, but thats how you sound.
On the ironic note
While you're there, check out http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=iro nic ("poignantly contrary to what was expected") .. I think you meant, on a "coincidental" note :) (Check out their "usage note" for 'ironic' too :).
MissMyNewton's post is so precisely on-topic, I can't begin to imagine what somebody needed to have been smoking to have moderated it as "off topic". Reeks of "personal agenda". Moderation quality on slashdot stinks so much these days that even meta-moderation seems to struggle to save it.