information has no desires and can't want to be free
And gases can't "want" to fill their containers, but when talking about the observed properties of gases, we anthropomorphize by describing the tendency as a "want." It's a rhetorical convention, not a conjecture that a gas is self-determining.
Google Docs has a lot of nice features. It's true that compared to OOo or MSOffice, it's under-featured, but then again, it has a large number of very cool collaborative and Web features you don't get with either of those. It's a trade-off.
But again, that's not the issue to which I replied, and I still contend that the original poster was wrong in his analysis of Google Docs as a piece of software.
Because people who actually have money are smarter than you. They understand economics and know that we won't suddenly wake up one otherwise normal sunny day and find ourselves out of dead dinosaurs to burn.[...]
These being the same people that said real estate values could continue to grow forever?
You're engaging in a straw-man (these guys over here are wrong, so you are too), and yet you're using a terrible example because the people who understand the real estate market were years ahead of the drop. I can't count the number of very well written essays, articles and books I read about how the housing market works that included the prediction that the current bubble would burst within 5-10 years of 2005. Lo, they were right.
I bought a house at the height of the market, and what seemed like dozens of my friends asked why I would do so when it was so obvious that the market was at its peek. My answer and the answer of the real estate community as a whole was that three factors increased the real estate market from where it was in 1900 to where it was in 2005: 1) single-income families have very broadly become multi-income families 2) far fewer extended families live under the same roof and 3) the average family is far more mobile than it was in 1900.
These three factors increased both the demand and the available cash for purchases. At the same time, we became capable of managing long-term debt in ways that were not nearly as ad hoc.
So, has the bubble burst? Yep, just as it did in the late 80s.
Does that matter? Not really. The price will eventually return to where it was, though at a slower pace. What the doom sayers are suggesting is that the fains of the 20th century will also erode, and we'll return to $50,000 homes. That, simply can't happen unless the market changes pretty radically. Real market forces forced those increases, and unless we return to the model of single-wage, extended families, there's just no reason that people would want to sell their homes for so little, nor why people would stop paying the current rates.
The same guys that realize that buying laws and advertising is cheaper than product development and customer service?
Eh?
The point is this group has its eyes firmly set on next quarter with a long range forecast of 2011.
Heh. You don't now Big Oil very well, do you? This is an industry whose wealth is entirely based on expanding resources that they won't be able to take advantage of for 5-10 years. They spend more on exploration and R&D for long-term returns than any other industry.
For 10-40 year vision you need a group of people that cares what the world looks like in 40 years.
You've contradicted your own point. The person you're responding to said that change in pricing would be gradual as supply waned and market pressures would facilitate a rational response. You're setting a timeline of 10-40 years, essentially backing up his thesis.
It takes Microsoft Excel approximately 1.5 seconds to load on a moderately old PC running Windows XP; this with many more features available to it...
Ignoring the issues of pre-warmed applications, I'll re-state what I said above:
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
How do I get Google Office to load in the less than.5 seconds it takes the various Office apps to start on my local system?
What Office apps are you using? I'm using Open Office and I just opened the spreadsheet app. it took exactly 11sec to open and present a blank spreadsheet.
On the other hand loading a 2-page long existing document in Google Docs just took 2 seconds (that's with a trans-national proxy through my company's gateway in the middle) in a browser that had not previously visited Google Docs (and thus had no cached JavaScript, etc.)
My experience with MS Office is that it's faster than OOo, but slower than Google Docs.
However, both MS Office and OOo speed up significantly once you've already loaded them once on most platforms. Why? Because they stay resident, taking up system resources. You can do the same thing in your browser with Google Docs. Just keep a tab open with Google Docs and all of your documents will come up faster.
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
you had to port to an unknown platform which wasn't local and wasn't quite generic either.
Are you talking about a solved problem or blithely claiming that one of the top programming languages currently in use is dead?
Java was essentially dead on arrival. It had several bursts of potential success, but ultimately, it's just become the less-horrible COBOL of the 1990s and 2000s.
That's not to say I dislike Java. It's not that bad as languages go, but it failed to capture a market outside of the world of highly captive environments.
COBOL was the world's most popular programming language for a long time. Thing is, a language whose use constrained to black-box environments isn't really going to be considered "alive," in the larger sense of programming language vitality because nothing new builds on it.
Eclipse and Open Office are the only two exceptions to this that I can think of. One was written by the company that published Java and one was designed to be an IDE for Java. That's not my definition of broad adoption outside of captive environments.
So, JavaScript makes it bloatware? Last time I checked, Google Docs was faster loading by large factor than OpenOffice, MS Office or any of the other WP/Spreadsheet apps out there. How do you define "bloated," here?
that stores all your stuff on someone else's server
You make it sound as if that comes with no advantages. There are dozens... here are a few.
Google's reliable storage which is backed up for you
documents and be shared or collaborated on with other users
the options for publishing to and interacting with the Web from docs is, frankly, a game-ender for locally hosted Office suites.
The ability to continue to access your documents even if your new computer is a different OS or hardware vendor with no purchased software.
There's also the fact that all Google applications allow you to export your data to local apps, if you wish. The Open Office format export is quite nice in Google Docs (import is OK, but at least for the spreadsheet it has a ways to go).
while feeding you a steady AJAX-based stream of ads.
Only if you don't want to pay for it. Google Docs via a premium Google Apps domain does not have ads.
The only reason this stuff is so popular now is because people won't pay $99.99 for a MS Office license anymore so instead MS/Google are writing server-side adware to try and get the $99 from advertisers over a couple of years.
Ah... no. That's the reason that they're doing it, not the reason that it's popular. The reason that it's popular is that it's useful and free (again, if you don't want to pay for the ad-free version).
Stuff your anti-spyware scanner would automatically delete for you if it was being run locally.
Most anti-spyware scanners don't give a rat's petard about applications that show ads or applications that store files remotely. Typically, the goal is to ferret out software that does either without the user's knowledge or ability to prevent. In both cases, Google Docs is 100% opt-in and entirely friendly to those who wish to opt out later on.
Web application == Remotely accessed spyware
If your definition of spyware is any Web site that records your activity on the site or saves documents that you create for later use, then you need to include every ecommerce site on the planet. I don't think that's a definition the majority of the technical community would agree with.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni
on
Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This just sounds hokey. The wind is free. How much cheaper is gas, according to your friend?
Wind is free. If what you want is to have your hair ruffled, you pay nothing.
If, on the other hand, you want to build an energy grid based on wind power, it costs far more than you might imagine. The post you're responding to has some salient points in this respect.
The problem of replacing or upgrading the single most important piece of our national infrastructure has always loomed as the greatest problem with converting to energy alternatives. Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on. Doing that leads to unpleasant things like brown-outs that kill the elderly during the height of summer or depths of winter.
These aren't unsolvable problems, but they cost a LOT of money to solve, and no one is yet willing to step up and pay for it, as the advantages are not easily recognized.
Good point about the license, but I wonder if I'd be able to take that spec, extend it, and still call the resulting language "Go". Is the name itself trademarked by Google (or the team)?
If the team is truly open, however (and not just for implementers, but for actual language design as well), then, yes, it's not proprietary.
I don't think the name matters. What matters is that, like C or Common LISP, the language is specified in an open (as in open to contribution) way. Sure, AT&T's Bell Labs created C (before the breakup), but it wasn't a proprietary language after its management was turned over to ANSI.
Go isn't at the stage where an international standards board makes sense, but I'm encouraged by the openness of the process.
So is Go a system language, or is it a high-level concurrent programming language?
It should really decide what it is.
It is a concurrent system programming language, and the fact that that terminology doesn't make any sense to you is probably evidence enough that it's doing something interesting (interesting does not equal successful... time will tell).
Go looks nice, but it still does not have real multi-dimensional arrays. This is the key issue that keeps me using Fortran.
Because it's spurious optimization.
Modern HLLs (and even most of the languages that live in the spaces between machine language/C and HLLs) spend so much time doing bounds protection, reference counting, garbage collection, constructing, destructing, etc, that if you find yourself in need of the extra cycle indicated by a double-indirect lookup, then you need to use a lower level tool for that code section, not a 2D array. In many languages this is commonly found in image processing and large math libraries. PIL for Python, PDL for Perl, etc. are designed to perform these low-level operations in a way that the high level language can manage cleanly.
You don't need a huge tumor on the side of the language syntax just so that your reference counted, garbage collected, safe accessed arrays are stored without an extra pointer. That would be absurd.
30 years ago there were enough programming languages "already". What do you need that can't be handled by COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, ANSI C and assembly language?
You kids and your Pascal and COBOL.
Get off my lawn!
*returns to toggling in bootloader code for reading the OS off paper tape*
You're making a very old argument. One that was made by C purists when C++ was introduced: that simply adding syntax for something doesn't make your language special. C++ users disagreed and many defected from the C camp. Were they right? Possibly.
Of course, the smalltalk users were also right: these were not new features. C++ was just applying previously developed tools to the C language.
None of that mattered in the long term.
Is Go the new C++? I have no idea, but I don't think you're taking an objective, historical view, here.
This summary reads like a bad infomercial. "How likely is it to really take over?" not likely at all, and nobody would ask that question unless they worked for Google Marketing.
As with many other Google efforts, Go isn't managed exclusively by Google (much like Android). So your statement really doesn't make much sense. There are many people who do feel that Go is the correct logical step from many existing languages. I'm on the fence, but as a disinterested observer, I think its reasonable to say that the community of folks who are anticipating that future are largely not Google employees.
Perl and python are quite portable too, though not as portable as Java.
They're far, far more portable than Java.
Java is essentially non-portable by design. It has only one environment where it runs: the JVM. Unfortunately, the JVM is only ported to new platforms in the loosest terms, though to be fair, they've done a large amount of work to make it more platform friendly under Windows, but it's still got a long way to go after more than a decade.
Python and Perl, on the other hand (along with other HLLs that don't use a platform-abstracting VM) are far more portable, interacting with system libraries and platform features in ways that make sense without having to re-specify the language to do so.
That's inevitable. It's certainly better than write everywhere, test everywhere.
No, it wasn't.
Java's platform abstraction meant that, instead of applying the rules that the vendor provided you with for adapting code to their platform (as every OS vendor did for, for example, C code), you had to port to an unknown platform which wasn't local and wasn't quite generic either. In the end, this lead to a schism that prevented Java from ever getting a foothold in any of the areas in which interoperability with existing infrastructure was key (systems administration, QA, scalable infrastructure, high performance tools, 3D applications, Desktop/office tools, etc.) All of these systems are still written in C or C++ to this day.
Java was only useful in captive environments like financial industry apps, early content delivery apps for the Web (though that has really eroded since Java's heyday) and embedded environments where there is no existing system (e.g. phones, DVD players).
Google Go is in basically the exact same position Java was. Both are technically OSS, but both are also controlled by a single company. I'm sure this exact same thing happened in Usenet back before Java was popular, and look where it is now.
Can you back that up? Was Java's spec under an open (CC-A) license? Was Java's core specification team a mix of in- and out-of-company people?
Can I get some sense of how you determined that Go was proprietary, then?
I don't think it's reasonable to call any language proprietary whose spec is licensed under CC-A and managed by an open team outside of the company. That's really hard to back up, and I'd need some kind of source for that.
It doesn't matter what's nice. Use the most popular distro, period. You've already made one major shift in favor of the technology by choosing Linux in the first place. If you're slightly more technical, sure, try out the path still less chosen. But the most important thing for a non-technical user is that a large number of other people have already tried to do whatever it is that you're going to try and they've already posted solutions (or hopefully, issued fixes) to the problems you're going to see.
Twitter's power is that you dont have to go there to use it or update it.
No, Twitter's power is that it provides a platform for popular people to communicate with their followers/fans/supporters. Twitter's draw these days is that it's a great place for anyone from a mayor to a moviestar to a CEO to the president to say whatever they like.
Buzz is great for me, but when celebrities use it, their posts become spam magnets because the popularity of their post is shared with the responders. Twitter so loosely couples tweets with responses that there is little or no sharing of the popularity of the original.
There's nothing narcissistic in posting something to Twitter/Buzz/Facebook. The problem is that it's not clear who the audience is. I just posted something to buzz about a local restaurant I was getting takeout from. Someone might look at that and say, "why do we care?" On the other hand, the post achieved its purpose: it incited conversation among my friends about where to eat in the area.
Talk about the media taking it and running with it and blowing out of proportion
The issue isn't that the note contained a direct threat. It's that an anonymous cut-out-letter note was placed on his home doorstep. I'd be concerned for the safety of my family if people started coming to my house to leave such notes as well. It shows a degree of willingness to invade my personal space and at the same time a desire to remain anonymous that I can't imagine anyone NOT finding somewhat creepy and worrisome.
To be fair, the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door.
A gamer allegedly slipped a threatening note under his door.
No, read the OP you were quoting again: "the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door." That most certainly was the context. Did it happen? Probably, but if it hadn't that would still be the context of the statement. The fact that the entire context is an allegation is also interesting.
Strictly speaking, this is access control, not censorship. Censorship is prohibiting access based upon some moral or other judgment about the content itself. Access control is restricting the ability to obtain content based upon permissions.
No, access control IS censorship. So is not allowing US citizens to read a book because the publisher doesn't want to grant the rights. However, if Google can make a book available to someone in Canada they want to.
On the patent front, remember:
Google is proud to take part in the following technical and advocacy organizations... Open Invention Network is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment. It is refining the intellectual property model so that important patents are openly shared in a collaborative environment.
Slashdot Mirror
information has no desires and can't want to be free
And gases can't "want" to fill their containers, but when talking about the observed properties of gases, we anthropomorphize by describing the tendency as a "want." It's a rhetorical convention, not a conjecture that a gas is self-determining.
Google Docs has a lot of nice features. It's true that compared to OOo or MSOffice, it's under-featured, but then again, it has a large number of very cool collaborative and Web features you don't get with either of those. It's a trade-off.
But again, that's not the issue to which I replied, and I still contend that the original poster was wrong in his analysis of Google Docs as a piece of software.
Because people who actually have money are smarter than you. They understand economics and know that we won't suddenly wake up one otherwise normal sunny day and find ourselves out of dead dinosaurs to burn.[...]
These being the same people that said real estate values could continue to grow forever?
You're engaging in a straw-man (these guys over here are wrong, so you are too), and yet you're using a terrible example because the people who understand the real estate market were years ahead of the drop. I can't count the number of very well written essays, articles and books I read about how the housing market works that included the prediction that the current bubble would burst within 5-10 years of 2005. Lo, they were right.
I bought a house at the height of the market, and what seemed like dozens of my friends asked why I would do so when it was so obvious that the market was at its peek. My answer and the answer of the real estate community as a whole was that three factors increased the real estate market from where it was in 1900 to where it was in 2005: 1) single-income families have very broadly become multi-income families 2) far fewer extended families live under the same roof and 3) the average family is far more mobile than it was in 1900.
These three factors increased both the demand and the available cash for purchases. At the same time, we became capable of managing long-term debt in ways that were not nearly as ad hoc.
So, has the bubble burst? Yep, just as it did in the late 80s.
Does that matter? Not really. The price will eventually return to where it was, though at a slower pace. What the doom sayers are suggesting is that the fains of the 20th century will also erode, and we'll return to $50,000 homes. That, simply can't happen unless the market changes pretty radically. Real market forces forced those increases, and unless we return to the model of single-wage, extended families, there's just no reason that people would want to sell their homes for so little, nor why people would stop paying the current rates.
The same guys that realize that buying laws and advertising is cheaper than product development and customer service?
Eh?
The point is this group has its eyes firmly set on next quarter with a long range forecast of 2011.
Heh. You don't now Big Oil very well, do you? This is an industry whose wealth is entirely based on expanding resources that they won't be able to take advantage of for 5-10 years. They spend more on exploration and R&D for long-term returns than any other industry.
For 10-40 year vision you need a group of people that cares what the world looks like in 40 years.
You've contradicted your own point. The person you're responding to said that change in pricing would be gradual as supply waned and market pressures would facilitate a rational response. You're setting a timeline of 10-40 years, essentially backing up his thesis.
It takes Microsoft Excel approximately 1.5 seconds to load on a moderately old PC running Windows XP; this with many more features available to it...
Ignoring the issues of pre-warmed applications, I'll re-state what I said above:
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
How do I get Google Office to load in the less than .5 seconds it takes the various Office apps to start on my local system?
What Office apps are you using? I'm using Open Office and I just opened the spreadsheet app. it took exactly 11sec to open and present a blank spreadsheet.
On the other hand loading a 2-page long existing document in Google Docs just took 2 seconds (that's with a trans-national proxy through my company's gateway in the middle) in a browser that had not previously visited Google Docs (and thus had no cached JavaScript, etc.)
My experience with MS Office is that it's faster than OOo, but slower than Google Docs.
However, both MS Office and OOo speed up significantly once you've already loaded them once on most platforms. Why? Because they stay resident, taking up system resources. You can do the same thing in your browser with Google Docs. Just keep a tab open with Google Docs and all of your documents will come up faster.
The real bottom line isn't a matter of benchmarks, however, it's that the original poster's claim that Google Docs was "bloatware" ignores the fact that it's an implementation of a very large system which is at least as bloated in every fully-featured implementation.
Are you talking about a solved problem or blithely claiming that one of the top programming languages currently in use is dead?
Java was essentially dead on arrival. It had several bursts of potential success, but ultimately, it's just become the less-horrible COBOL of the 1990s and 2000s.
That's not to say I dislike Java. It's not that bad as languages go, but it failed to capture a market outside of the world of highly captive environments.
COBOL was the world's most popular programming language for a long time. Thing is, a language whose use constrained to black-box environments isn't really going to be considered "alive," in the larger sense of programming language vitality because nothing new builds on it.
Eclipse and Open Office are the only two exceptions to this that I can think of. One was written by the company that published Java and one was designed to be an IDE for Java. That's not my definition of broad adoption outside of captive environments.
Great, more JavaShit-ridden bloatware
So, JavaScript makes it bloatware? Last time I checked, Google Docs was faster loading by large factor than OpenOffice, MS Office or any of the other WP/Spreadsheet apps out there. How do you define "bloated," here?
that stores all your stuff on someone else's server
You make it sound as if that comes with no advantages. There are dozens ... here are a few.
One demo of the idea of publishing data to the Web that blew me away was in Google's Official Blog about their public data sources, where they plotted a time-series of world fertility data. There's lots of decent examples on the Google Docs official blog as well.
There's also the fact that all Google applications allow you to export your data to local apps, if you wish. The Open Office format export is quite nice in Google Docs (import is OK, but at least for the spreadsheet it has a ways to go).
while feeding you a steady AJAX-based stream of ads.
Only if you don't want to pay for it. Google Docs via a premium Google Apps domain does not have ads.
The only reason this stuff is so popular now is because people won't pay $99.99 for a MS Office license anymore so instead MS/Google are writing server-side adware to try and get the $99 from advertisers over a couple of years.
Ah... no. That's the reason that they're doing it, not the reason that it's popular. The reason that it's popular is that it's useful and free (again, if you don't want to pay for the ad-free version).
Stuff your anti-spyware scanner would automatically delete for you if it was being run locally.
Most anti-spyware scanners don't give a rat's petard about applications that show ads or applications that store files remotely. Typically, the goal is to ferret out software that does either without the user's knowledge or ability to prevent. In both cases, Google Docs is 100% opt-in and entirely friendly to those who wish to opt out later on.
Web application == Remotely accessed spyware
If your definition of spyware is any Web site that records your activity on the site or saves documents that you create for later use, then you need to include every ecommerce site on the planet. I don't think that's a definition the majority of the technical community would agree with.
This just sounds hokey. The wind is free. How much cheaper is gas, according to your friend?
Wind is free. If what you want is to have your hair ruffled, you pay nothing.
If, on the other hand, you want to build an energy grid based on wind power, it costs far more than you might imagine. The post you're responding to has some salient points in this respect.
The problem of replacing or upgrading the single most important piece of our national infrastructure has always loomed as the greatest problem with converting to energy alternatives. Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on. Doing that leads to unpleasant things like brown-outs that kill the elderly during the height of summer or depths of winter.
These aren't unsolvable problems, but they cost a LOT of money to solve, and no one is yet willing to step up and pay for it, as the advantages are not easily recognized.
Good point about the license, but I wonder if I'd be able to take that spec, extend it, and still call the resulting language "Go". Is the name itself trademarked by Google (or the team)?
If the team is truly open, however (and not just for implementers, but for actual language design as well), then, yes, it's not proprietary.
I don't think the name matters. What matters is that, like C or Common LISP, the language is specified in an open (as in open to contribution) way. Sure, AT&T's Bell Labs created C (before the breakup), but it wasn't a proprietary language after its management was turned over to ANSI.
Go isn't at the stage where an international standards board makes sense, but I'm encouraged by the openness of the process.
So is Go a system language, or is it a high-level concurrent programming language?
It should really decide what it is.
It is a concurrent system programming language, and the fact that that terminology doesn't make any sense to you is probably evidence enough that it's doing something interesting (interesting does not equal successful... time will tell).
Go looks nice, but it still does not have real multi-dimensional arrays. This is the key issue that keeps me using Fortran.
Because it's spurious optimization.
Modern HLLs (and even most of the languages that live in the spaces between machine language/C and HLLs) spend so much time doing bounds protection, reference counting, garbage collection, constructing, destructing, etc, that if you find yourself in need of the extra cycle indicated by a double-indirect lookup, then you need to use a lower level tool for that code section, not a 2D array. In many languages this is commonly found in image processing and large math libraries. PIL for Python, PDL for Perl, etc. are designed to perform these low-level operations in a way that the high level language can manage cleanly.
You don't need a huge tumor on the side of the language syntax just so that your reference counted, garbage collected, safe accessed arrays are stored without an extra pointer. That would be absurd.
30 years ago there were enough programming languages "already". What do you need that can't be handled by COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, ANSI C and assembly language?
You kids and your Pascal and COBOL.
Get off my lawn!
*returns to toggling in bootloader code for reading the OS off paper tape*
You're making a very old argument. One that was made by C purists when C++ was introduced: that simply adding syntax for something doesn't make your language special. C++ users disagreed and many defected from the C camp. Were they right? Possibly.
Of course, the smalltalk users were also right: these were not new features. C++ was just applying previously developed tools to the C language.
None of that mattered in the long term.
Is Go the new C++? I have no idea, but I don't think you're taking an objective, historical view, here.
This summary reads like a bad infomercial. "How likely is it to really take over?" not likely at all, and nobody would ask that question unless they worked for Google Marketing.
As with many other Google efforts, Go isn't managed exclusively by Google (much like Android). So your statement really doesn't make much sense. There are many people who do feel that Go is the correct logical step from many existing languages. I'm on the fence, but as a disinterested observer, I think its reasonable to say that the community of folks who are anticipating that future are largely not Google employees.
Perl and python are quite portable too, though not as portable as Java.
They're far, far more portable than Java.
Java is essentially non-portable by design. It has only one environment where it runs: the JVM. Unfortunately, the JVM is only ported to new platforms in the loosest terms, though to be fair, they've done a large amount of work to make it more platform friendly under Windows, but it's still got a long way to go after more than a decade.
Python and Perl, on the other hand (along with other HLLs that don't use a platform-abstracting VM) are far more portable, interacting with system libraries and platform features in ways that make sense without having to re-specify the language to do so.
That's inevitable. It's certainly better than write everywhere, test everywhere.
No, it wasn't.
Java's platform abstraction meant that, instead of applying the rules that the vendor provided you with for adapting code to their platform (as every OS vendor did for, for example, C code), you had to port to an unknown platform which wasn't local and wasn't quite generic either. In the end, this lead to a schism that prevented Java from ever getting a foothold in any of the areas in which interoperability with existing infrastructure was key (systems administration, QA, scalable infrastructure, high performance tools, 3D applications, Desktop/office tools, etc.) All of these systems are still written in C or C++ to this day.
Java was only useful in captive environments like financial industry apps, early content delivery apps for the Web (though that has really eroded since Java's heyday) and embedded environments where there is no existing system (e.g. phones, DVD players).
Google Go is in basically the exact same position Java was. Both are technically OSS, but both are also controlled by a single company. I'm sure this exact same thing happened in Usenet back before Java was popular, and look where it is now.
Can you back that up? Was Java's spec under an open (CC-A) license? Was Java's core specification team a mix of in- and out-of-company people?
Can I get some sense of how you determined that Go was proprietary, then?
I don't think it's reasonable to call any language proprietary whose spec is licensed under CC-A and managed by an open team outside of the company. That's really hard to back up, and I'd need some kind of source for that.
C# it ain't.
How prophetic was that?!
Thursday night some drunk guy tried to get into my house in the middle of the night. When he proceeded on to trying car doors, I called the cops.
Still, freaky coincidence. I've had two incidents where I've had to call the police from my home. One was an accident and that was the second.
It doesn't matter what's nice. Use the most popular distro, period. You've already made one major shift in favor of the technology by choosing Linux in the first place. If you're slightly more technical, sure, try out the path still less chosen. But the most important thing for a non-technical user is that a large number of other people have already tried to do whatever it is that you're going to try and they've already posted solutions (or hopefully, issued fixes) to the problems you're going to see.
Twitter's power is that you dont have to go there to use it or update it.
No, Twitter's power is that it provides a platform for popular people to communicate with their followers/fans/supporters. Twitter's draw these days is that it's a great place for anyone from a mayor to a moviestar to a CEO to the president to say whatever they like.
Buzz is great for me, but when celebrities use it, their posts become spam magnets because the popularity of their post is shared with the responders. Twitter so loosely couples tweets with responses that there is little or no sharing of the popularity of the original.
No, I just can't buy into this any longer.
There's nothing narcissistic in posting something to Twitter/Buzz/Facebook. The problem is that it's not clear who the audience is. I just posted something to buzz about a local restaurant I was getting takeout from. Someone might look at that and say, "why do we care?" On the other hand, the post achieved its purpose: it incited conversation among my friends about where to eat in the area.
Here is a copy of the note itself
http://imgur.com/CeACw.png
How does this constitute a threatening letter?
"Dear Mick, I Can Has R18 Rating Pls? kthxbai"
Screen shot Taken from http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/02/16/2820930.htm (not by me)
Talk about the media taking it and running with it and blowing out of proportion
The issue isn't that the note contained a direct threat. It's that an anonymous cut-out-letter note was placed on his home doorstep. I'd be concerned for the safety of my family if people started coming to my house to leave such notes as well. It shows a degree of willingness to invade my personal space and at the same time a desire to remain anonymous that I can't imagine anyone NOT finding somewhat creepy and worrisome.
A gamer allegedly slipped a threatening note under his door.
No, read the OP you were quoting again: "the context was that a gamer slipped a threatening note under his door." That most certainly was the context. Did it happen? Probably, but if it hadn't that would still be the context of the statement. The fact that the entire context is an allegation is also interesting.
Strictly speaking, this is access control, not censorship. Censorship is prohibiting access based upon some moral or other judgment about the content itself. Access control is restricting the ability to obtain content based upon permissions.
No, access control IS censorship. So is not allowing US citizens to read a book because the publisher doesn't want to grant the rights. However, if Google can make a book available to someone in Canada they want to.
On the patent front, remember:
Google is proud to take part in the following technical and advocacy organizations ... Open Invention Network is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative environment. It is refining the intellectual property model so that important patents are openly shared in a collaborative environment.