Excuse me, but those billions are earmarked for financing Europe for the next decade. Better save a whole bunch of billions for when the EU fines for illegal buisness practices start piling up in the mail.
Um, having developed for X for a long time, I must ask, what exactly is the problem? For plain GUI apps there isnt any that I've seen. Pick the toolkit that fits you the best and go ahead. What windowmanager unknowns? If you're dealing with the windowmanager outside of your chosen API you're going to make a very annoying application that doesnt work according to user preferences. Let the API and windowmanager work that out. Same if you're even close to getting to the parts of X programming that could reasonably be called 'aged' or 'cranky' (or more correctly, a PITA lowlevel API). If you're messing around there, you're not doing things right. Those parts were not meant to be used by the ordinary average application programmer, they were meant to be used by the toolkit designers. That's like dumping Win32 going for the lowerlevel parts of windows.
We have a secure, fast, reliable and stable standard. It's called X.
Why do it? There isnt any reason. There are various complaints about X, but I havent ever heard a complaint about X that actually has any factual base. Slow over network? Use LBX. Large memory footprint? Uuuuhm, well, subtract your card framebuffer and stored pixmaps from what X reports as memory footprint... Always uses the TCP/IP stack? Dont think so... it uses unix domain sockets and SHM locally, and even beyond that there's DGA. Etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. All complaints about X seem to come from people who dont have a clue about how X actually works.
It will never catch on because there isnt any reason to use it. The only situation where you have a use for something like DirectFB is when you have a situation like the guys at convergence did. Framebuffer driver for set top boxes? Sure, great idea (altho in 10 years when you may want to program your video remotely from the desktop they may think that coding the apps without outgoing network support wasnt such a good idea). But it's useless as a replacement for X, nor was it meant to ever replace X, nor have I heard a credible argument for replacing X (with the possible exception of if we ever make a transition to true 3d displays).
Running applications from their application service providers? Running apps on their own home computer when they're away from home? Being able to buy a cheap device to add another terminal at home for the kids instead of a whole new computer?
There are many reasons it makes sense for the average home user too.
The fast pretty desktop is best achieved elsewhere. The problem isnt X, the problem is insufficient use of hardware acceleration in X device drivers and/or software bloat.
Yes, X supports these things. And, heck, OpenGL/GLX is even a network transparent protocol that too, so you can even run your hardware accelerated remote-displayed 3d programs over the net. And networks get faster all the time. So, please, concentrate on making these things less painful in X.
Any attempt to replace X will only end up going back in time half a decade, reimlementing X and eventually being back where we started.
DirectFB sounds great. For what it's used for. But X will never be replaced as the basic GUI layer for Linux/UNIX operating systems. No such attempt has ever caught on (and there have been a number of them), and none ever will simply because the only reason to is when you have absolutely no use for network transparency and you have far too little resources to support X. Today that means calculators and lowpower PDA's, and the occasional non-networkable consumer product, and with the way things are going, within a decade or two those cases will probably involve the device in question being a museum exhibit.
Of course, for a long time it's been suggested that people use the safer alternatives like strncpy, strncpy and snprintf. Which is why it's a good idea to regularly grep through your code to see you didnt slip up by mistake somewhere.
Well, if you consider that their anti-trust judge Jackson was a mildly warm pro-buisness conservative judge to begin with, and ended up spewing obscenities over MS, comparing them with common thugs, I'd say that goes a long way towards pointing to them ending up being hated because they actually are, as you put it, assholes.
Personally, I dont think I've ever seen a TV newscast (or general newspaper article) about anything where I have knowledge about the subject where they get it right. I suspect the same is true about the subjects where I do not have knowledge, which means they likely dont get anything right. At best there is massive omissions, at worst there are huge amounts of factual errors.
Apart from that most mainstream media is rather biased (of course, if we get our news only from the mainstream media we dont realize this and we start believing that they are reporting the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is the whole idea behind propaganda). Bias means it isnt reliable or trustworthy, since you get only the parts of the story that promote the media interests point of view.
Streamlining ala cnn, ap, reuters is also bad, since the mainstream media is just spewing the same thing (usually with the same wording!) a large number of times. Biased unreliable news with factual errors repeated on many channels many times makes it _appear_ more true, but it doesnt make it more true.
The net has one large advantage. You can find many different viewpoints, all of which may range from idiotic to completely kooky, but here at least you _know_ you are dealing with unreliable newssources and you can sift through them with that in mind.
TV appears to be more anchored in reality than the average slashdot comment. But that's what you get when you present put money and control behind the presentation. And the appearance is just appearance.
Your eventual price will be "cost to migrate everything minus $1 per period", where period is the time over which you have to justify the cost. Calculate what it would cost you to migrate everything out of your lock-in and then figure on paying that every one to three years.
You should also realize that you no longer have any control whatsoever about when you get to recode it all. That is entirely up to when the vendor (MS in this case) wants to ramp up revenue through releasing an upgrade that will break your code.
Wanting quicker/easier/less painful development is exactly why computers today are expensive, slow and unreliable.
Nope, Microsoft hasnt been nice with IP either. There was at least one case recently where they threatened lawsuit over a video codec. Perhaps not _as_ nasty as the worst, but nasty enough.
International political pressure isnt exactly under the jurisdiction of courts you know. Sure, it might not hold up in a court if a pharm company tried to sue a foreign government for patent violations on lifesaving drugs, but what can a court do to prevent trade limitations or withdrawal of support programes, etc?
So throw together a class action lawsuit against the Microsoft execs and lawyers who knowingly broke the law repeatedly, and the stock analysts who reccomended that people buy into a company they knew were engaged in illegal practices. Microsofts violations arent exactly news, nor would they take anyone with an inkling of knowledge about antitrust law by surprise, at least since the early to mid 90's.
Yes, the fall of a company engaging in illegal practices can have an effect on the stockmarket if it is large enough. However, this is a flaw in the company itself, and their SEC filings should probably contain "Since we are violating the law left and right and lying in court, our future ability to sustain profit levels through illegal practices may be hampered by the application of law".
Re:Palm is just not exciting anymore
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 2
Well, my iPAQ is gathering dust too. Mainly because it's a useless toy, and if a meeting or something isnt important enough for me to remember in da ole' head, it aint worth carrying around an easily breakable piece of electronics for.
Then again, I had both a mobile and a PDA in the early 90's and decided they werent an improvement to life.
Of course, in todays music industry the people who slaved and sacrifice to create that art are never compensated for it either way. It basically doesnt matter wether or not you buy all your music or copy it, because the artists and composers get the shaft where the sun doesnt shine by the RIAA corps and none of your money anyway.
There was plenty of similar concepts in video recording, playback and live editing back then. However there was one huge reason nobody tried to use it to mass market live TV pauseing devices back then:
Nobody would pay $10000 for such a device.
Five years later, the price sinks to $1000 and then they start developing, and a few years later its down to $100, and several companies independently have products that use such technology.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with invention or ideas. It might have been a new idea in the 60's, but since then it's merely been an impractical idea, requireing either a number of magnetic tapes or disk space worth tens of thousands of dollars.
And timing a patent filing on an old idea merely because it is within practical marketing reach is maybe a buisness plan (mmm, patentable buisness method maybe?), but it sure isnt worthy of a patent.
There just isnt any comparison. My old 75MHz model 715 was about twice as fast as my four years newer 300MHz P II machine for anything IO bound, like opening mailboxes, starting programs, etc.
My new 400MHz B2000 (with dual graphics cards:) is positively blazing fast compared to our standard 800MHz PC's.
The difference in IO and memory bandwidth makes for some sick amount of difference in actual daily performance.
The amount of computational power is irrelevant if you do not know where to look. Yes, they can scan every email they can intercept for trigger phrases. Yes they can even maybe decrypt a few RSA encrypted mails per year. But the number of circumspect ways you can transmit messages range in the tens of thousands.
Are they going to decrypt and listen in on every VPN tunnel? Are they going to try to break into every ssh login? Are they going to check every webserver log or web connection for possible encrypted messages in the sequence of URL's over certain time accessed from different clients? Are they going to shoot every pidgeon in the world to avoid homing pidgeons exchanging one time pads? Are they going to listen in on ICMP traffic to detect possible morse code pings? Analyze the headers of mails for forged header parts containing messages encrypted with OTP's? Listen in to IRC, ICQ, etc for embedded possible code? Someone could sit down for a week and come up with unique ways to transfer each message ranging in the thousands.
The amount of information and the ways it can be hidden is so huge that it doesnt matter how powerful your computers are because you cannot apply the power to the problem.
There would be a lot more support for your position were it actually the case that banning crypto, or inserting backdoors would prevent a single terrorism act.
It wont.
Apart from the numerous ways anyone who wanted to could continue to use crypto anyway, apart from the problem that one time pads are extremely secure and wouldnt be caught in any encryption law, apart from the problem that there are thousands of ways to encrypt that nobody would even notice, apart from all that, nobody can even say wether they're using crypto over the internet or friggin homing pidgeons.
You are asked to give up your right to privacy for nothing at all.
Just because some opportunistic politicians want to use this tragedy to further their own political agenda.
Ah, I must have been unclear then:). What I meant about uniqueness is that unlike maybe a few hundred years ago, few scientists are unique in their fields of expertise. Not anyone, but anyone out of the dozen or hundreds more other scientists and researchers working on the same or similar problems can and will solve them. And someone will go public with the research, ethical considerations or not.
Well, research and advances are actually being made and published, perhaps not using google, but various abstract search engines. Comparing and expanding on other researchers data is a time-honored way of doing research.
But that isnt really the point. The point is that much broad science today is a competition. Take for example the human genome. No question about wether it will be mapped or not, but who would do it first. The knowledge about genome mapping is spread so widely, through the mapping of various other creatures DNA, that the number of people who could do it would range in thousands or maybe tens of thousands, and the number of people who could learn to do it would range in millions or billions. Same with physics; who will be able to prove the existence of various particles first? Same with computer science, medicine, mathematics, etc. It isnt a coincidence that there are many different types of virtually unbreakable encryption types today. It isnt a coincidence that several medical companies launch medicines for the same things within a few months or years of eachother. Knowledge is spread to orders of magnitudes more people today, and while it may take five smart guys a year more that it would take a real genious to leap to a conclusion, it will be done.
The point being: As a scientist, it doesnt matter if you try to keep silent about something because you fear the consequences. The discovery will be made, wether you keep silent or not.
You're making the mistake of thinking the old way, the same as the patent system. Scientist are no longer unique, nor do they do anything unique. Knowledge and research is by now so widely done and so distributed that invention has become an iterative process where there is no longer any question about if something will be solved or invented, but rather who, out of hundreds of scientists and teams, will do it first.
The research and dispersal of information is by now inevitable. Go ahead, keep it silent, and read all about it next month when someone else goes public with it instead.
No, that would single out the poor airlines. I'm more for banning air. Without air, the dangerous planes will no longer have the lifting power necessary to reach the height necessary for these heinous acts.
Well, at least here the notice does go both ways. I have three months notice to my current company before I can start a new job, just as they have three months notice if they want to lay me off.
Of course, after notice has been given you can usually negotiate to leave earlier, if possible. That means, if you can be easily replaced, you've got documentation in order, etc, you can usually leave quicker.
Actually, the changes the paper made make me think of semantically engineered propaganda. I have yet to ever hear of anyone Ive ever known get quoted right in any paper. I strongly suspect that standard practice in media is to modify 'quotes' to support whatever political agenda the journalist or paper has. The solution, of course, is never ever talk to a journalist for any reason. They will never help get _your_ message out, they'll use you to get _their_ message out.
What the free press gives us today is propaganda. It has been for a long time. The only chance anyone has to get informed is to listen to all available views and try to sift out the truth somewhere. If there is a truth.
It's rather hard to convince people to encrypt mail; there simply isnt enough reason for most people. Even the more technically sophisticated people I know rarely use crypto, simply because most of their email is either company internal or jokes. Neither of which qualifies for encryption for various reasons. Important company communications going to external parties would qualify, but not many below management level sends that kind of info (and management... well, raise your hand anyone whose corporate management has any clue about security...).
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but those billions are earmarked for financing Europe for the next decade. Better save a whole bunch of billions for when the EU fines for illegal buisness practices start piling up in the mail.
Um, having developed for X for a long time, I must ask, what exactly is the problem? For plain GUI apps there isnt any that I've seen. Pick the toolkit that fits you the best and go ahead. What windowmanager unknowns? If you're dealing with the windowmanager outside of your chosen API you're going to make a very annoying application that doesnt work according to user preferences. Let the API and windowmanager work that out. Same if you're even close to getting to the parts of X programming that could reasonably be called 'aged' or 'cranky' (or more correctly, a PITA lowlevel API). If you're messing around there, you're not doing things right. Those parts were not meant to be used by the ordinary average application programmer, they were meant to be used by the toolkit designers. That's like dumping Win32 going for the lowerlevel parts of windows.
We have a secure, fast, reliable and stable standard. It's called X.
Why do it? There isnt any reason. There are various complaints about X, but I havent ever heard a complaint about X that actually has any factual base. Slow over network? Use LBX. Large memory footprint? Uuuuhm, well, subtract your card framebuffer and stored pixmaps from what X reports as memory footprint... Always uses the TCP/IP stack? Dont think so... it uses unix domain sockets and SHM locally, and even beyond that there's DGA. Etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. All complaints about X seem to come from people who dont have a clue about how X actually works.
It will never catch on because there isnt any reason to use it. The only situation where you have a use for something like DirectFB is when you have a situation like the guys at convergence did. Framebuffer driver for set top boxes? Sure, great idea (altho in 10 years when you may want to program your video remotely from the desktop they may think that coding the apps without outgoing network support wasnt such a good idea). But it's useless as a replacement for X, nor was it meant to ever replace X, nor have I heard a credible argument for replacing X (with the possible exception of if we ever make a transition to true 3d displays).
Running applications from their application service providers? Running apps on their own home computer when they're away from home? Being able to buy a cheap device to add another terminal at home for the kids instead of a whole new computer?
There are many reasons it makes sense for the average home user too.
The fast pretty desktop is best achieved elsewhere. The problem isnt X, the problem is insufficient use of hardware acceleration in X device drivers and/or software bloat.
Yes, X supports these things. And, heck, OpenGL/GLX is even a network transparent protocol that too, so you can even run your hardware accelerated remote-displayed 3d programs over the net. And networks get faster all the time. So, please, concentrate on making these things less painful in X.
Any attempt to replace X will only end up going back in time half a decade, reimlementing X and eventually being back where we started.
DirectFB sounds great. For what it's used for. But X will never be replaced as the basic GUI layer for Linux/UNIX operating systems. No such attempt has ever caught on (and there have been a number of them), and none ever will simply because the only reason to is when you have absolutely no use for network transparency and you have far too little resources to support X. Today that means calculators and lowpower PDA's, and the occasional non-networkable consumer product, and with the way things are going, within a decade or two those cases will probably involve the device in question being a museum exhibit.
Of course, for a long time it's been suggested that people use the safer alternatives like strncpy, strncpy and snprintf. Which is why it's a good idea to regularly grep through your code to see you didnt slip up by mistake somewhere.
Well, if you consider that their anti-trust judge Jackson was a mildly warm pro-buisness conservative judge to begin with, and ended up spewing obscenities over MS, comparing them with common thugs, I'd say that goes a long way towards pointing to them ending up being hated because they actually are, as you put it, assholes.
You trust TV?
Personally, I dont think I've ever seen a TV newscast (or general newspaper article) about anything where I have knowledge about the subject where they get it right. I suspect the same is true about the subjects where I do not have knowledge, which means they likely dont get anything right. At best there is massive omissions, at worst there are huge amounts of factual errors.
Apart from that most mainstream media is rather biased (of course, if we get our news only from the mainstream media we dont realize this and we start believing that they are reporting the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is the whole idea behind propaganda). Bias means it isnt reliable or trustworthy, since you get only the parts of the story that promote the media interests point of view.
Streamlining ala cnn, ap, reuters is also bad, since the mainstream media is just spewing the same thing (usually with the same wording!) a large number of times. Biased unreliable news with factual errors repeated on many channels many times makes it _appear_ more true, but it doesnt make it more true.
The net has one large advantage. You can find many different viewpoints, all of which may range from idiotic to completely kooky, but here at least you _know_ you are dealing with unreliable newssources and you can sift through them with that in mind.
TV appears to be more anchored in reality than the average slashdot comment. But that's what you get when you present put money and control behind the presentation. And the appearance is just appearance.
Your eventual price will be "cost to migrate everything minus $1 per period", where period is the time over which you have to justify the cost. Calculate what it would cost you to migrate everything out of your lock-in and then figure on paying that every one to three years.
You should also realize that you no longer have any control whatsoever about when you get to recode it all. That is entirely up to when the vendor (MS in this case) wants to ramp up revenue through releasing an upgrade that will break your code.
Wanting quicker/easier/less painful development is exactly why computers today are expensive, slow and unreliable.
Nope, Microsoft hasnt been nice with IP either. There was at least one case recently where they threatened lawsuit over a video codec. Perhaps not _as_ nasty as the worst, but nasty enough.
International political pressure isnt exactly under the jurisdiction of courts you know. Sure, it might not hold up in a court if a pharm company tried to sue a foreign government for patent violations on lifesaving drugs, but what can a court do to prevent trade limitations or withdrawal of support programes, etc?
So throw together a class action lawsuit against the Microsoft execs and lawyers who knowingly broke the law repeatedly, and the stock analysts who reccomended that people buy into a company they knew were engaged in illegal practices. Microsofts violations arent exactly news, nor would they take anyone with an inkling of knowledge about antitrust law by surprise, at least since the early to mid 90's.
Yes, the fall of a company engaging in illegal practices can have an effect on the stockmarket if it is large enough. However, this is a flaw in the company itself, and their SEC filings should probably contain "Since we are violating the law left and right and lying in court, our future ability to sustain profit levels through illegal practices may be hampered by the application of law".
Well, my iPAQ is gathering dust too. Mainly because it's a useless toy, and if a meeting or something isnt important enough for me to remember in da ole' head, it aint worth carrying around an easily breakable piece of electronics for.
Then again, I had both a mobile and a PDA in the early 90's and decided they werent an improvement to life.
Of course, in todays music industry the people who slaved and sacrifice to create that art are never compensated for it either way. It basically doesnt matter wether or not you buy all your music or copy it, because the artists and composers get the shaft where the sun doesnt shine by the RIAA corps and none of your money anyway.
If they're lucky they dont get a lifetime debt.
There was plenty of similar concepts in video recording, playback and live editing back then. However there was one huge reason nobody tried to use it to mass market live TV pauseing devices back then:
Nobody would pay $10000 for such a device.
Five years later, the price sinks to $1000 and then they start developing, and a few years later its down to $100, and several companies independently have products that use such technology.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with invention or ideas. It might have been a new idea in the 60's, but since then it's merely been an impractical idea, requireing either a number of magnetic tapes or disk space worth tens of thousands of dollars.
And timing a patent filing on an old idea merely because it is within practical marketing reach is maybe a buisness plan (mmm, patentable buisness method maybe?), but it sure isnt worthy of a patent.
There just isnt any comparison. My old 75MHz model 715 was about twice as fast as my four years newer 300MHz P II machine for anything IO bound, like opening mailboxes, starting programs, etc.
:) is positively blazing fast compared to our standard 800MHz PC's.
My new 400MHz B2000 (with dual graphics cards
The difference in IO and memory bandwidth makes for some sick amount of difference in actual daily performance.
The amount of computational power is irrelevant if you do not know where to look. Yes, they can scan every email they can intercept for trigger phrases. Yes they can even maybe decrypt a few RSA encrypted mails per year. But the number of circumspect ways you can transmit messages range in the tens of thousands.
Are they going to decrypt and listen in on every VPN tunnel? Are they going to try to break into every ssh login? Are they going to check every webserver log or web connection for possible encrypted messages in the sequence of URL's over certain time accessed from different clients? Are they going to shoot every pidgeon in the world to avoid homing pidgeons exchanging one time pads? Are they going to listen in on ICMP traffic to detect possible morse code pings? Analyze the headers of mails for forged header parts containing messages encrypted with OTP's? Listen in to IRC, ICQ, etc for embedded possible code? Someone could sit down for a week and come up with unique ways to transfer each message ranging in the thousands.
The amount of information and the ways it can be hidden is so huge that it doesnt matter how powerful your computers are because you cannot apply the power to the problem.
There would be a lot more support for your position were it actually the case that banning crypto, or inserting backdoors would prevent a single terrorism act.
It wont.
Apart from the numerous ways anyone who wanted to could continue to use crypto anyway, apart from the problem that one time pads are extremely secure and wouldnt be caught in any encryption law, apart from the problem that there are thousands of ways to encrypt that nobody would even notice, apart from all that, nobody can even say wether they're using crypto over the internet or friggin homing pidgeons.
You are asked to give up your right to privacy for nothing at all.
Just because some opportunistic politicians want to use this tragedy to further their own political agenda.
Ah, I must have been unclear then :). What I meant about uniqueness is that unlike maybe a few hundred years ago, few scientists are unique in their fields of expertise. Not anyone, but anyone out of the dozen or hundreds more other scientists and researchers working on the same or similar problems can and will solve them. And someone will go public with the research, ethical considerations or not.
Well, research and advances are actually being made and published, perhaps not using google, but various abstract search engines. Comparing and expanding on other researchers data is a time-honored way of doing research.
But that isnt really the point. The point is that much broad science today is a competition. Take for example the human genome. No question about wether it will be mapped or not, but who would do it first. The knowledge about genome mapping is spread so widely, through the mapping of various other creatures DNA, that the number of people who could do it would range in thousands or maybe tens of thousands, and the number of people who could learn to do it would range in millions or billions. Same with physics; who will be able to prove the existence of various particles first? Same with computer science, medicine, mathematics, etc. It isnt a coincidence that there are many different types of virtually unbreakable encryption types today. It isnt a coincidence that several medical companies launch medicines for the same things within a few months or years of eachother. Knowledge is spread to orders of magnitudes more people today, and while it may take five smart guys a year more that it would take a real genious to leap to a conclusion, it will be done.
The point being: As a scientist, it doesnt matter if you try to keep silent about something because you fear the consequences. The discovery will be made, wether you keep silent or not.
You're making the mistake of thinking the old way, the same as the patent system. Scientist are no longer unique, nor do they do anything unique. Knowledge and research is by now so widely done and so distributed that invention has become an iterative process where there is no longer any question about if something will be solved or invented, but rather who, out of hundreds of scientists and teams, will do it first.
The research and dispersal of information is by now inevitable. Go ahead, keep it silent, and read all about it next month when someone else goes public with it instead.
No, that would single out the poor airlines. I'm more for banning air. Without air, the dangerous planes will no longer have the lifting power necessary to reach the height necessary for these heinous acts.
So, clearly, we _must_ ban air.
Well, at least here the notice does go both ways. I have three months notice to my current company before I can start a new job, just as they have three months notice if they want to lay me off.
Of course, after notice has been given you can usually negotiate to leave earlier, if possible. That means, if you can be easily replaced, you've got documentation in order, etc, you can usually leave quicker.
Remind me, how much does apache cost to produce, as opposed to IIS?
Actually, the changes the paper made make me think of semantically engineered propaganda. I have yet to ever hear of anyone Ive ever known get quoted right in any paper. I strongly suspect that standard practice in media is to modify 'quotes' to support whatever political agenda the journalist or paper has. The solution, of course, is never ever talk to a journalist for any reason. They will never help get _your_ message out, they'll use you to get _their_ message out.
What the free press gives us today is propaganda. It has been for a long time. The only chance anyone has to get informed is to listen to all available views and try to sift out the truth somewhere. If there is a truth.
It's rather hard to convince people to encrypt mail; there simply isnt enough reason for most people. Even the more technically sophisticated people I know rarely use crypto, simply because most of their email is either company internal or jokes. Neither of which qualifies for encryption for various reasons. Important company communications going to external parties would qualify, but not many below management level sends that kind of info (and management... well, raise your hand anyone whose corporate management has any clue about security...).