Actually, he never said he was a "Mac fanboy," you just apparently made the assumption that only Mac people would complain about interfaces. What's worse, you made the assumption that the only complaints about UI design have to do with aesthetics. I'm sorry, but I complain about interface design much more frequently based on usability.
Based on your tone, you're preparing some comment about how only namby-pamby GUI users would ever care about that. But ask why people who have strong preferences for Emacs over Vim or vice-versa have such a preference. I can guarantee that "Emacs has a much prettier interface that matches my drapes nicely" is not going to come up very often. Now, ask why there are people who prefer NEdit, or BBEdit, or another full-featured GUI editor over both of those. I can guarantee that you for 99% of those people, it's because all of the functionality they need is wrapped up in an interface they find more intuitive, faster to learn, and faster to use.
UI "prettiness" is subjective, but a lot of usability principles aren't. NEdit will always be faster for a new user to learn than XEmacs. This isn't a slam on XEmacs or its functionality or on users who've become comfortable with it and have little reason to change, but NEdit is not less functional because it is easier to use.
And, yeah, Mac people tend to be more sensitive about UI design than some others. That may be because they're all nitpicky whiny bastards. Or, it may be because they've had twenty years of programs largely designed by people who put a lot of thought into how good interface design makes programs more intuitive and usable. Frankly, I wish free software developers would get down off their "the console is god" high horses and listen to the whining just a little more.
I don't know the state of Apple's X11 extensions. (Honestly, I'm not sure precisely what I'd be looking for!) My point was simply that it supports X11, but acknowledging the 'state of the art' on the Mac tends to be Apple's own GUI.
I suspect Apple Remote Desktop is a framebuffer forwarding solution, although I've heard pretty good things about its performance. The client-server model is one theoretical strength X11 has always had compared to, well, just about anything else, although in practice I'm not sure how much of an advantage it truly is for most people. Oddly enough, a project I'm on at work is expressly about using X11 remote desktops, the server on Linux and the desktop Windows; users have an option of using the Windows NX client and connecting directly to the Linux server, or using Citrix to connect to a Windows machine on the same LAN as the Linux server and then using Reflection X to hop from that to the Linux box. The usability surveys we've done so far don't show either one of those methods with a clear advantage over the other. (Which surprises us--several users insist the Citrix solution is more usable, which is quite the opposite of what we'd expect!)
According to a reply below, Cairo is closer to Quartz than I'd imagined it is. Which is good, as I think being able to port GTK apps directly to Aqua would be spiffy.
If you don't want to run primarily Mac (as opposed to X11) applications on OS X, there's really no point in using OS X. This isn't meant to be a provocative statement, just fact. I'd like X11 to be in a happier state on the Mac, but this is mostly academic; the only X11 application I run is XEmacs, and that pretty rarely. (If the XEmacs Carbon port stabilizes, which will probably involve getting a somewhat less prickly maintainer, even that will go away.)
Is there anything like X11 or rdesktop/NX that Macs support?
Whether you like Apple's implementation or not, X11 is an awful lot like X11.:) OS X also supports VNC and, wouldn't you know it, Apple Remote Desktop, although that's not a free solution.
Incidentally, Quartz != "DisplayPDF." It gets described that way a lot (including by Apple fans), but it's not true. I'm happy for GTK that it supports Cairo, but I suspect it's a matter of (long, torturous) debate as to whether the design philosophy behind Cairo is better, worse or just different than that behind Quartz.
A year ago [Macs] were still using bitmaps on the dock, and when it scales, it looks damn ugly.
Only if the icon is ugly to start with. Most of the icons on my dock are quite nice-looking.
Re:Sad end to a Sad story - One developer's view
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The End of PalmOS?
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From version 3 to 4.5, BeOS's sales were growing pretty substantially (in terms of percentage quarter-over-quarter) and they were amassing interest from commercial developers far out of proportion to their market share. There are apparently still shipping products from Teac and Roland that use embedded BeOS systems at their core, and the BeOS-only radio automation system, TuneTracker, is evidently selling well enough to keep being actively developed. (It shipped bundled with BeOS PE for a long time, and now ships with Zeta, BeOS's successor.) It's a mischaracterization to say that "no one wanted" BeOS--a lot of people wanted it.
Be, Inc. was not done in by their technology, they were done in by their management, who from all appearances were seeking ONE BIG THING that would give them world domination. First it was going to be being bundled with all the non-Apple Mac clones. When those were axed, the quick port to Intel, and an attempt to get bundled with one of the top five PC makers, with little concern for their existing developers. When that didn't work, a frantic move into internet appliances--and, again, no concern for existing developers. Jean Louis-Gassee was famously quoted as saying a difference between Be and Apple was that Be didn't shit on their developers, but in fact they did, repeatedly.
I'm aware I wasn't there and you were, but I find it difficult to believe that ex-Be engineers there are ultimately responsible for PalmSource's inability to market their way out of a paper bag. Marketing is the responsibility of, well, the marketing department.
Actually, I think the original poster's point is that it shouldn't be the private sector's job to handle disaster management, but that the Bush administration has pursued privatization in a wide-sweeping fashion based on the ideological notion that no matter the subject in question, "the market" is always more efficient than central planning. In pursuit of that, FEMA has been effectively gutted, with many plans being subcontracted out to the theoretically more efficient private contractors--including the plans for "catastrophic hurricane disaster" in New Orleans, which was supposed to be managed by the private company IEM in Baton Rouge.
Since IEM didn't actually come up with any plan, it's hard to say definitively that their plan wouldn't have worked, and it's clearly the government that failed here. The private organizations have done a better job than government ones during this crisis (and often, it seems, they've been actively foiled by the government).
Having said that, it's hard not to believe that it failed in part because the dominant political ideology is about slashing all social service aspects of government on the grounds that the best thing it can do is shrivel up and not bother anyone. While that's great rhetoric when you're the opposition party, I'm going to boldly suggest that hatred of government is not a good way to govern. An agency that's been rendered incapable of "interfering" is an agency that's likely incapable of providing needed services.
Which, of course, will be taken by ideologues as proof that the agency was unnecessary and harmful in the first place.
The way I design web pages -- and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, doing something very radical here! -- is to design for Gecko-based browsers and Safari first, because they very rarely show major deviances from one another or standards. Then I take the design to Windows IE and tweak the style sheets to account for anything that broke there, which is usually pretty minimal--frustrating, but its quirks are known and well documented. And I make sure the page is readable and usable in Lynx. At the end of the day, I have fine standards-compliant XHTML and CSS that works everywhere from Firefox to the Sidekick.
In almost all cases you can make IE happy without having to seriously compromise. There are broken browsers I'm perfectly happy to ignore: pre-Mozilla Netscape, pre-5.0 IE, NetPositive for BeOS, HotJava. These are ones that you simply can't tweak for; generating web pages that renders perfectly on all of those platforms can be done, as OS News proves -- and can only be done by creating hideously bloated web pages where 70-80% of what's being sent to the browsers is markup, as, uh, OS News proves. (The term "pathologically compliant" comes to mind.)
If you'd actually violated Slashdot protocol and RTFA, you'd see Costikyan was lamenting the fact that there isn't a model for games comparable to the independent film industry, and describing why he thinks that's true. There's a support system for such things in film and publishing that simply doesn't exist -- at least not yet -- for gaming The people who make independent films may not get rich but they often make a living at it; the people who make the game equivalent almost never can.
Costkiyan isn't predicting the death of the gaming industry (the article title is "Death to the Games Industry," like a call for revolution), he's presenting an argument that the industry is caught up in a spiral of ballooning costs and falling profits, which is making it progressively harder for it to develop and sell the very kinds of hits that would break it out of that rut. A visually stunning but terrible game is almost certain to make more money than a visually boring but innovative game, because the entire model of the industry, from development funding to publishing to distribution, is about selling as many copies as fast as possible--you're much better off building up anticipation with amazing-looking screen shots and selling a million units in pre-orders and the first couple weeks of release, knowing that your sales will collapse when the reviews come in, than trying to make a difficult-to-sell game that would require a slow buildup. Costikyan's assertion that The Sims would probably never be made today is very likely true.
The end result of his scenario isn't industry collapse, it's industry stagnation. And if you think that's such a laughable scenario, look at a list of current best-selling computer games and see how many are releases in franchises. And look at some of the figures actually in his article. If this trend continues, those games you find so many of that are still interesting will be harder and harder to find, because they'll be harder to get published and harder to find shelf space for.
If the big gaming industry is the equivalent of Hollywood, if EA and Midway and Sony are Paramount and Universal and, uh, Sony, that's fine. But there is no Lions Gate for the gaming industry. For that matter, there's no Fine Line, no Focus Features, no Paramount Classics -- no recognition on the part of the major players that the industry will benefit from having a "second tier" system for the development and distribution of titles which are meant to be experimental and risky.
If the only games you're looking forward to in the future are Madden 2004+d10,Half-Quake Arena VII Master Edition and The Sims: Please God Make It Stop, this isn't that big a deal. Personally, though, I find that "officially tiresome," and telling people like Costikyan to sit down and stop whining ain't gonna make it better.
The poster is insightful by simply pointing out that for an individual user, a desktop search feature is useful it if finds things he's looking for. The "critical mass" aspect of the ability to search for and index, say, Word documents is the mass of Word documents, not the number of people using the search technology.
Microsoft's real threat is google.
This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.
As John Gruber put it recently, "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.
Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.
Notice that the American company has a 30% minor ownership in the Canadian version. Hmm.
Notice the fact that the Canadian page says "Call for Help - coming to the US!" Hmm hmm hmm.
Why, yes! It's the same show! From the same production company!
Anyone who's given Mr. Laporte money has given money for the production of "This Week in Tech," which is a podcast, and has nothing to do with his television shows. HELLO.
So you just run along and heat your retards, 'kay? Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.
While I think there's a lot to your observation, I think the general point about "quashing innovation" is that Google is becoming the kind of competitor people simply don't want to step into the ring with. When you ask,
How are we to be sure innovation at that company would have been as skillfully executed or as good for the industry as it might be at Google?
I'd turn the question around, and ask, if "that company" is getting strangled at or even before the starting gate, how will we ever know? We shouldn't just take it for granted that Google's projects will always be skillfully executed and good for the industry, should we?
I know people are arguing--correctly--that (as far as we know) Google isn't intentionally strangling competition the way Microsoft has. But a lot of competition with Microsoft has historically been "strangled" by the perception that there's just no point in trying. Microsoft doesn't have to do anything illegal to keep Office competitors marginalized.
And the more space Google moves into, the wider their penumbra becomes, too.
People like to pose this as, "Is Google Evil?" That's the wrong question. I think a lot of the whining about Google qualifies as sour grapes at this point, to be sure. But Google doesn't have to be evil for even the most outlandish-sounding complaints in the NYT article to eventually come true. This isn't a "publicly traded companies inevitably become evil" thing, either -- Google doesn't have to give up any of their core values. It's simply their size, speed, and reach that can have a chilling effect on the access startups have to both funding and top-flight engineers.
Um, Radish's statement was, "They're just paying you for the service of producing a copy." How does that strike you as at odds with the very thing you just quoted ("The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software")?
It's great to leap to defend the GPL, but the distinction between "selling a copy of the software" and "selling the service of producing copies of the software" is a matter of semantics. In either case, what you're buying is the convenience entailed by packaged distribution of the software.
While I'm afraid I don't remember where I read this (it was from an article in a major business publication right after the changing of the guard at HP earlier this year), evidently Ms. Fiorina was a superb technology sales manager -- what she's good at, she's really good at. But what she's good at isn't being the CEO of a technology-driven company. I suspect what we may really have seen in her case was the Peter Principle operating at its highest possible level.
I don't think I'd blame her for encouraging the spinoff of Bell Labs and Bellcore as separate companies -- it only means she was following the common wisdom of the internet bubble. The company I was at, Intermedia Communications, bought one of the core backbone providers (Digex), kept the network, and spun Digex back off just as a managed web hosting company they kept controlling interest in, and the "new" Digex's stock peaked around $180 a share. For managed web hosting. By that logic, a company that actually, y'know, created things like Lucent and Telcordia did should have been trading at, what, one or two thousand? (Intermedia was actually bought by a company that wanted control of Digex, but the bubble was already collapsing by the time the deal finished, and the new owners not only couldn't unload Intermedia as their original plan had been, Digex had fallen to $60 and was still plummeting, finally ending up as an OTCBB penny stock. What genius telecom company ended up with Intermedia and Digex? WorldCom.)
The Business Week cover "nowhere to go but down" theory is pretty amusing, though, and there's probably something to it.
The "planned status" isn't in their control. The copyright office isn't the one doing the back end for their web site that has this requirement, and actually, I'm not sure it's the requirement that people are making it to be.
I don't think people are actually reading this in detail, or perhaps this particular article (TPFA?) doesn't contain the specifics, but the problem here is that the copyright office uses Siebel, which only certifies their current system for use with IE and Netscape 7.02.
This news.com article talks about that more, complete with a quote from someone at Siebel:
"We're running a business, and testing is extremely costly," said Stacey Schneider, director of technology product marketing. "We optimize against what our customers demand. For Siebel 7.8, it became clear, especially for the government sector, that there's demand for Mozilla. But there are hundreds of vendors out there with their own browsers. And not many applications support many more than what we do."
(Currently the copyright office uses Siebel 7.7. They've indicated 7.8 won't be tested with Safari or Opera, of course.) Contacting the copyright office, politely, is a good idea. But I think perhaps Ms. Schneider needs to be contacted, too; ultimately, it's her company that's the problem child.
I don't blame the copyright office for making this choice initially; the chances are checking on Siebel's web server implementation wasn't in their initial requirements for a CRM. The problem is that Siebel knows how difficult it is for their customers to move to another system, so they feel they can get away with half-assed "do it our way or the highway" implementations like this. It'd be great if the copyright office was willing to say, "This must be fixed by [insert deadline here] or we'll migrate to something else," but following through on that would be an extremely non-trivial undertaking.
I think you're confusing API with ABI; the former is at a source level, and the latter is at a binary level. When an API changes, programs have to be rewritten, but when an ABI changes, programs just have to be recompiled. The GCC incarnation of the C++ ABI has changed, but that has nothing to do with the APIs of the underlying operating system. And, really, programs don't have to be recompiled if you have a system which sanely handles versioning; you just need both versions of the libraries. (I say "both" because as far as I know, the only major shift in GCC happened between version 3.3 and 3.4.)
I'm aware there's a lot of hostility to C++ out there, but it's arguably more flexible and powerful than straight C is* and it's a lot more recognized by most programmers than Objective-C is. That's an advantage you shouldn't write off that quickly.
By the way, Gil Amelio was CEO of Apple when they bought Next, not Michael Spindler.:)
-- *I say "arguably" because I know a lot of people will argue that.:) To be fair, I prefer Objective-C, but I've met more than one programmer who looks at ObjC source code and reacts like they have spiders crawling on them. I don't know.
Actually, I think Apple going with Be would have worked just fine, from a technology standpoint. You need to remember that MacOS had no more in common with NextStep than it did with BeOS, and it took years of engineering work to get from NextStep to OS X. If the same amount of engineering work had been put into Be, there's no reason to assume it wouldn't have achieved just as smooth an integration.
Would that have been better than what we've got now? I don't know. There were BeOS-specific multimedia programs that were very promising, and doing things that couldn't have been done under Linux. (Note this is circa 1999, so I'm making no claims about what can be done under Linux currently.) Of course, we'd have had something like Spotlight from the very start.
The main thing Apple wouldn't have gotten with Be isn't technology. It's Steve Jobs. For all his foibles, it's possible that without him, Apple might have lasted about three years before going tits-up anyway.:)
Well, depending on what Bob's situation is, cutting costs may not be very practical -- his business doesn't have to be marginal before Wal-Mart (or a similar "big box" competitor with similar economic pressures) appears. There are floors below which you can't really go. If you're a bookstore, you have to have a certain amount of physical space, ideally in a place you'll get walk-by shoppers; you obviously need to carry physical inventory; and, if you're not making enough money to at least pay yourself a living wage, there's trouble a-comin'.
Having said that, sure, the best way to compete is to take yourself out of the direct competition. Independent bookstores usually do that by focusing on genres: a sci-fi bookstore, a mystery bookstore, a feminist bookstore. That's still something of a double-edged sword, from what I've seen, though. A store like that needs to be in a sufficiently urbane area to pull it off, and may need to get additional sales even beyond that to survive (a mail-order business, travelling to conventions, etc.). Other stores that have "overlap" with Wal-Mart can differentiate themselves similarly -- but usually with the same provisos, I think. It's the small town generalist stores that aren't in areas where making such a shift is feasible that are most vulnerable.
As far as I know, the last software Bill Gates actually worked on was the included software, notably the text editor, for the TRS-80 Model 100/200 portable computers from Radio Shack.
It's more amusing to assume his last work was a crappy BASIC game, I suppose. But for what they were, the Model 100/200 machines were really pretty damn cool little gadgets. For all of the obvious limitations (a 16-line, 40-character screen, 32K of RAM expandable to 96K at most, IIRC), my Model 200 had the best keyboard of any laptop I've ever used -- and ran for about 15 hours on AA batteries. (And the file system was similar in some ways to the Palm's a few years later: a flat system you didn't ever save anything to, because files were persistent.)
"if local merchants go out of business because Walmart moves into a local town, blame the local townspeople, not Walmart."
While this is off-topic....
Let's imagine a small town with a store called Bob's Books. It's an independent bookseller, not part of any chain. It's reasonable to assume Bob's gross profit margin is about 25% and his net profit margin is maybe 3-5%. (Borders and Barnes & Nobles both have GPMs of about 30%, and their current NPMs are both actually under 1%!)
Now, suppose WalMart moves into town. They sell a much smaller subset of books than Bob's, mostly just the bestsellers. Now, that's going to be enough to bleed off some of Bob's customers, because there are people who only buy the bestsellers, right? And WalMart is selling those books for 30% off. Great!
Except that if Bob loses about 25% of his customers to WalMart -- just 1 in 4 -- he's going to go out of business. He can't match WalMart's prices to get those customers back, because if he does, he'll lose money faster. (WalMart is getting a price Bob isn't offered, because he's just one store, and if they desired to, they could actually sell the books at a loss for a short time because they have the whole rest of their store as a balance.)
So the idea that "if the local businesses go under, it's because their customers are choosing WalMart over them" is a half-truth at best. It only means some of the local businesses' customers are: they could actually keep the majority of their customers and still sink.
I started looking for a new job after being with my last employer seven years. It took me 4.5 weeks from posting my resume to accepting an offer yesterday on a new job for 37% more money with equal benefits. Plus I had two other offers and a lot more interviews lined up.
That you've had a relatively great experience with this doesn't mean that it's directly applicable to others, and it doesn't (necessarily) mean that people who don't bounce back into a new job in a month are doing something wrong in their job search. It may mean that you're exceptionally good at what you do and thus highly sought after. It may mean that you're really good at playing the job hunting game. It may mean that you're in a part of the country which has a good ratio of open jobs to job seekers. And, honestly, it may mean you had awfully good luck.
The standard advice in job hunting is that you should expect to take about a month searching for each $10-15K of salary that you're seeking. I can't say my experience has directly matched that, since I haven't had permanent, full-time employment since mid-2002... just contract work. I've had *interviews* a lot, but I'm in Silicon Valley. At least through 2003, there were actually still a lot of open jobs out here (compared to where I'd lived before, Tampa Bay), but that's tempered by the fact that there are a lot of other desperate unemployed techs here. Positions that were $70-100K in 2000 are being advertised for $40-50K now and they'll get hundreds of applications.
As for the "40 hour a week or walk away" thing, while I generally agree with the sentiment, it's very uncommon in the tech industry from what I've seen. At one of the contracts I was at, a canonical Silicon Valley startup company, I was getting definite vibes of being looked at as a slacker because I was only there nine hours a day. (My contract called for a per-week payment, prorated daily, so I didn't get overtime.) Again, if you're really good you can make a demand like that, but you'd better be so good that the employer isn't going to think, "Well, there's this other guy who's good enough for what we need and says he'll work 60 hours a week as long as we buy him pizza each night."
I'm hoping to have about six months' of living expenses socked away if I can, which is closer to three months' salary on my current contract... which I'm not sure will last past three more months.
But in your example, an alloy that's patented isn't (likely) something that's occurring in nature: it's actually an invention. To me, that's the real key here. If I invent a way to synthesize a medicine from tulip bulbs, I can patent the process that creates that medicine -- but I shouldn't be able to patent tulip bulbs themselves, even if I've found a new and non-obvious use for them.
In the original poster's example, he's postulating a company which discovered what a gene does. If they have a process for discovering what genes do, great--if they base new processes on what they've learned about genes, also great. But the fact that they were the first to discover something important about a gene's function shouldn't give them the right to patent the gene itself. Patenting things they can do with that knowledge about what the gene does, sure--the equivalent of your alloy example. (At least once they actually do those things, rather than preemptively patenting them just because they might be possible.) The gene is not their invention, and it's not even their discovery.
What the original poster is writing about isn't the equivalent of patenting an alloy -- it's the equivalent of patenting the metals that go in the alloy, and going after anyone who tries to use those metals in different ways.
While this is straying pretty far from the topic of free wifi in coffee shops, I think limiting access to the courts is a terrible idea -- even when the intentions behind it are quite good and sincere.
I think most people would agree that sometimes corporations are bad actors (just like individuals, and for that matter, governments). We're not just talking about suing GM for drunk drivers -- we're talking about Ford knowing safety hazards with the Pinto's fuel tank and actually running the calculations to determine that the costs of lawsuits resulting from the deaths of their customers would be likely to be less than the cost of fixing the problem, and deciding that was sufficient justification to let a certain small number of their customers die due to a preventable defect. Sometimes it really is the business who actually did the bad thing.
There are really only two ways to address these situations: to try to do it proactively through regulation, or to try to do it retroactively through the legal system. The thing is, both these checks are under assault right now: regulation is frequently seen as "too oppressive," and lawsuits are frequently seen as "too frivolous." This is a dangerous combination, because the outcome could easily be giving bad actors free reign to commit profitable abuse with very little consequences.
A lot of times regulations may well be too oppressive, and a lot of lawsuits certainly are frivolous. But suppose a shield law written to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits resulting in deaths caused by their weapons passes, and a few years down the road the death that's caused by a gun is that of a police officer due to a manufacturing defect. Should the gun company really be shielded from that? I can guarantee you if the gun companies are involved in writing the shield laws, they will be shielded from that -- and as a practical matter, the law really can't take into account every exception.
I understand why it seems to make sense to protect manufacturers, but I'd really rather trust the legal system to junk most frivolous lawsuits. Remember, the "outrageous" ones you hear about are the rare exceptions, newsworthy precisely because they are rare exceptions.
After glancing over the screenshots and reading some of the comments the author had, the appearance to firefox is remarkable.
Tabbed browsing has been added, dropdown search, add-on manager. Now where have I seen those all before?
Now, let's be fair--not all the ideas in the IE7 screenshots come from Firefox. For instance, the idea of combining the refresh button and stop button into one control is lifted straight from Safari.
It also depends on what you're using for SMS. On my Sidekick II, which has a QWERTY-style thumb keyboard rather than a number pad, my admittedly informal test just now suggests I'm doing about 40 wpm. (I actually did 50 in the test, but I imagine in practice I'm usually not going that fast.)
What incentive is there for most of Congress to just give up their control?
The knowledge that in exchange for giving corporations as many breaks as possible, their personal futures will be secured by moving into waiting job positions with those corporations.
If you're going to be that cynical about your congresscritter's motivations, c'mon, take it to the limit -- there's no reason for them to protect the gravy train for their legislative successors.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he never said he was a "Mac fanboy," you just apparently made the assumption that only Mac people would complain about interfaces. What's worse, you made the assumption that the only complaints about UI design have to do with aesthetics. I'm sorry, but I complain about interface design much more frequently based on usability.
Based on your tone, you're preparing some comment about how only namby-pamby GUI users would ever care about that. But ask why people who have strong preferences for Emacs over Vim or vice-versa have such a preference. I can guarantee that "Emacs has a much prettier interface that matches my drapes nicely" is not going to come up very often. Now, ask why there are people who prefer NEdit, or BBEdit, or another full-featured GUI editor over both of those. I can guarantee that you for 99% of those people, it's because all of the functionality they need is wrapped up in an interface they find more intuitive, faster to learn, and faster to use.
UI "prettiness" is subjective, but a lot of usability principles aren't. NEdit will always be faster for a new user to learn than XEmacs. This isn't a slam on XEmacs or its functionality or on users who've become comfortable with it and have little reason to change, but NEdit is not less functional because it is easier to use.
And, yeah, Mac people tend to be more sensitive about UI design than some others. That may be because they're all nitpicky whiny bastards. Or, it may be because they've had twenty years of programs largely designed by people who put a lot of thought into how good interface design makes programs more intuitive and usable. Frankly, I wish free software developers would get down off their "the console is god" high horses and listen to the whining just a little more.
I don't know the state of Apple's X11 extensions. (Honestly, I'm not sure precisely what I'd be looking for!) My point was simply that it supports X11, but acknowledging the 'state of the art' on the Mac tends to be Apple's own GUI.
I suspect Apple Remote Desktop is a framebuffer forwarding solution, although I've heard pretty good things about its performance. The client-server model is one theoretical strength X11 has always had compared to, well, just about anything else, although in practice I'm not sure how much of an advantage it truly is for most people. Oddly enough, a project I'm on at work is expressly about using X11 remote desktops, the server on Linux and the desktop Windows; users have an option of using the Windows NX client and connecting directly to the Linux server, or using Citrix to connect to a Windows machine on the same LAN as the Linux server and then using Reflection X to hop from that to the Linux box. The usability surveys we've done so far don't show either one of those methods with a clear advantage over the other. (Which surprises us--several users insist the Citrix solution is more usable, which is quite the opposite of what we'd expect!)
According to a reply below, Cairo is closer to Quartz than I'd imagined it is. Which is good, as I think being able to port GTK apps directly to Aqua would be spiffy.
If you don't want to run primarily Mac (as opposed to X11) applications on OS X, there's really no point in using OS X. This isn't meant to be a provocative statement, just fact. I'd like X11 to be in a happier state on the Mac, but this is mostly academic; the only X11 application I run is XEmacs, and that pretty rarely. (If the XEmacs Carbon port stabilizes, which will probably involve getting a somewhat less prickly maintainer, even that will go away.)
:) OS X also supports VNC and, wouldn't you know it, Apple Remote Desktop, although that's not a free solution.
Is there anything like X11 or rdesktop/NX that Macs support?
Whether you like Apple's implementation or not, X11 is an awful lot like X11.
Incidentally, Quartz != "DisplayPDF." It gets described that way a lot (including by Apple fans), but it's not true. I'm happy for GTK that it supports Cairo, but I suspect it's a matter of (long, torturous) debate as to whether the design philosophy behind Cairo is better, worse or just different than that behind Quartz.
A year ago [Macs] were still using bitmaps on the dock, and when it scales, it looks damn ugly.
Only if the icon is ugly to start with. Most of the icons on my dock are quite nice-looking.
From version 3 to 4.5, BeOS's sales were growing pretty substantially (in terms of percentage quarter-over-quarter) and they were amassing interest from commercial developers far out of proportion to their market share. There are apparently still shipping products from Teac and Roland that use embedded BeOS systems at their core, and the BeOS-only radio automation system, TuneTracker, is evidently selling well enough to keep being actively developed. (It shipped bundled with BeOS PE for a long time, and now ships with Zeta, BeOS's successor.) It's a mischaracterization to say that "no one wanted" BeOS--a lot of people wanted it.
Be, Inc. was not done in by their technology, they were done in by their management, who from all appearances were seeking ONE BIG THING that would give them world domination. First it was going to be being bundled with all the non-Apple Mac clones. When those were axed, the quick port to Intel, and an attempt to get bundled with one of the top five PC makers, with little concern for their existing developers. When that didn't work, a frantic move into internet appliances--and, again, no concern for existing developers. Jean Louis-Gassee was famously quoted as saying a difference between Be and Apple was that Be didn't shit on their developers, but in fact they did, repeatedly.
I'm aware I wasn't there and you were, but I find it difficult to believe that ex-Be engineers there are ultimately responsible for PalmSource's inability to market their way out of a paper bag. Marketing is the responsibility of, well, the marketing department.
Actually, I think the original poster's point is that it shouldn't be the private sector's job to handle disaster management, but that the Bush administration has pursued privatization in a wide-sweeping fashion based on the ideological notion that no matter the subject in question, "the market" is always more efficient than central planning. In pursuit of that, FEMA has been effectively gutted, with many plans being subcontracted out to the theoretically more efficient private contractors--including the plans for "catastrophic hurricane disaster" in New Orleans, which was supposed to be managed by the private company IEM in Baton Rouge.
Since IEM didn't actually come up with any plan, it's hard to say definitively that their plan wouldn't have worked, and it's clearly the government that failed here. The private organizations have done a better job than government ones during this crisis (and often, it seems, they've been actively foiled by the government).
Having said that, it's hard not to believe that it failed in part because the dominant political ideology is about slashing all social service aspects of government on the grounds that the best thing it can do is shrivel up and not bother anyone. While that's great rhetoric when you're the opposition party, I'm going to boldly suggest that hatred of government is not a good way to govern. An agency that's been rendered incapable of "interfering" is an agency that's likely incapable of providing needed services.
Which, of course, will be taken by ideologues as proof that the agency was unnecessary and harmful in the first place.
The way I design web pages -- and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, doing something very radical here! -- is to design for Gecko-based browsers and Safari first, because they very rarely show major deviances from one another or standards. Then I take the design to Windows IE and tweak the style sheets to account for anything that broke there, which is usually pretty minimal--frustrating, but its quirks are known and well documented. And I make sure the page is readable and usable in Lynx. At the end of the day, I have fine standards-compliant XHTML and CSS that works everywhere from Firefox to the Sidekick.
In almost all cases you can make IE happy without having to seriously compromise. There are broken browsers I'm perfectly happy to ignore: pre-Mozilla Netscape, pre-5.0 IE, NetPositive for BeOS, HotJava. These are ones that you simply can't tweak for; generating web pages that renders perfectly on all of those platforms can be done, as OS News proves -- and can only be done by creating hideously bloated web pages where 70-80% of what's being sent to the browsers is markup, as, uh, OS News proves. (The term "pathologically compliant" comes to mind.)
If you'd actually violated Slashdot protocol and RTFA, you'd see Costikyan was lamenting the fact that there isn't a model for games comparable to the independent film industry, and describing why he thinks that's true. There's a support system for such things in film and publishing that simply doesn't exist -- at least not yet -- for gaming The people who make independent films may not get rich but they often make a living at it; the people who make the game equivalent almost never can.
Costkiyan isn't predicting the death of the gaming industry (the article title is "Death to the Games Industry," like a call for revolution), he's presenting an argument that the industry is caught up in a spiral of ballooning costs and falling profits, which is making it progressively harder for it to develop and sell the very kinds of hits that would break it out of that rut. A visually stunning but terrible game is almost certain to make more money than a visually boring but innovative game, because the entire model of the industry, from development funding to publishing to distribution, is about selling as many copies as fast as possible--you're much better off building up anticipation with amazing-looking screen shots and selling a million units in pre-orders and the first couple weeks of release, knowing that your sales will collapse when the reviews come in, than trying to make a difficult-to-sell game that would require a slow buildup. Costikyan's assertion that The Sims would probably never be made today is very likely true.
The end result of his scenario isn't industry collapse, it's industry stagnation. And if you think that's such a laughable scenario, look at a list of current best-selling computer games and see how many are releases in franchises. And look at some of the figures actually in his article. If this trend continues, those games you find so many of that are still interesting will be harder and harder to find, because they'll be harder to get published and harder to find shelf space for.
If the big gaming industry is the equivalent of Hollywood, if EA and Midway and Sony are Paramount and Universal and, uh, Sony, that's fine. But there is no Lions Gate for the gaming industry. For that matter, there's no Fine Line, no Focus Features, no Paramount Classics -- no recognition on the part of the major players that the industry will benefit from having a "second tier" system for the development and distribution of titles which are meant to be experimental and risky.
If the only games you're looking forward to in the future are Madden 2004+d10, Half-Quake Arena VII Master Edition and The Sims: Please God Make It Stop, this isn't that big a deal. Personally, though, I find that "officially tiresome," and telling people like Costikyan to sit down and stop whining ain't gonna make it better.
The poster is insightful by simply pointing out that for an individual user, a desktop search feature is useful it if finds things he's looking for. The "critical mass" aspect of the ability to search for and index, say, Word documents is the mass of Word documents, not the number of people using the search technology.
Microsoft's real threat is google.
This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.
As John Gruber put it recently, "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.
Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.
http://www.g4techtv.ca/
http://www.g4tv.com/
Notice the "Copyright G4 Media" on both pages. Hmm.
Notice how they have almost the same shows. Hmm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G4_Media
Notice that the American company has a 30% minor ownership in the Canadian version. Hmm.
Notice the fact that the Canadian page says "Call for Help - coming to the US!" Hmm hmm hmm.
Why, yes! It's the same show! From the same production company!
Anyone who's given Mr. Laporte money has given money for the production of "This Week in Tech," which is a podcast, and has nothing to do with his television shows. HELLO.
So you just run along and heat your retards, 'kay? Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.
While I think there's a lot to your observation, I think the general point about "quashing innovation" is that Google is becoming the kind of competitor people simply don't want to step into the ring with. When you ask,
I'd turn the question around, and ask, if "that company" is getting strangled at or even before the starting gate, how will we ever know? We shouldn't just take it for granted that Google's projects will always be skillfully executed and good for the industry, should we?
I know people are arguing--correctly--that (as far as we know) Google isn't intentionally strangling competition the way Microsoft has. But a lot of competition with Microsoft has historically been "strangled" by the perception that there's just no point in trying. Microsoft doesn't have to do anything illegal to keep Office competitors marginalized.
And the more space Google moves into, the wider their penumbra becomes, too.
People like to pose this as, "Is Google Evil?" That's the wrong question. I think a lot of the whining about Google qualifies as sour grapes at this point, to be sure. But Google doesn't have to be evil for even the most outlandish-sounding complaints in the NYT article to eventually come true. This isn't a "publicly traded companies inevitably become evil" thing, either -- Google doesn't have to give up any of their core values. It's simply their size, speed, and reach that can have a chilling effect on the access startups have to both funding and top-flight engineers.
Um, Radish's statement was, "They're just paying you for the service of producing a copy." How does that strike you as at odds with the very thing you just quoted ("The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software")?
It's great to leap to defend the GPL, but the distinction between "selling a copy of the software" and "selling the service of producing copies of the software" is a matter of semantics. In either case, what you're buying is the convenience entailed by packaged distribution of the software.
While I'm afraid I don't remember where I read this (it was from an article in a major business publication right after the changing of the guard at HP earlier this year), evidently Ms. Fiorina was a superb technology sales manager -- what she's good at, she's really good at. But what she's good at isn't being the CEO of a technology-driven company. I suspect what we may really have seen in her case was the Peter Principle operating at its highest possible level.
I don't think I'd blame her for encouraging the spinoff of Bell Labs and Bellcore as separate companies -- it only means she was following the common wisdom of the internet bubble. The company I was at, Intermedia Communications, bought one of the core backbone providers (Digex), kept the network, and spun Digex back off just as a managed web hosting company they kept controlling interest in, and the "new" Digex's stock peaked around $180 a share. For managed web hosting. By that logic, a company that actually, y'know, created things like Lucent and Telcordia did should have been trading at, what, one or two thousand? (Intermedia was actually bought by a company that wanted control of Digex, but the bubble was already collapsing by the time the deal finished, and the new owners not only couldn't unload Intermedia as their original plan had been, Digex had fallen to $60 and was still plummeting, finally ending up as an OTCBB penny stock. What genius telecom company ended up with Intermedia and Digex? WorldCom.)
The Business Week cover "nowhere to go but down" theory is pretty amusing, though, and there's probably something to it.
The "planned status" isn't in their control. The copyright office isn't the one doing the back end for their web site that has this requirement, and actually, I'm not sure it's the requirement that people are making it to be.
I don't think people are actually reading this in detail, or perhaps this particular article (TPFA?) doesn't contain the specifics, but the problem here is that the copyright office uses Siebel, which only certifies their current system for use with IE and Netscape 7.02.
This news.com article talks about that more, complete with a quote from someone at Siebel:
(Currently the copyright office uses Siebel 7.7. They've indicated 7.8 won't be tested with Safari or Opera, of course.) Contacting the copyright office, politely, is a good idea. But I think perhaps Ms. Schneider needs to be contacted, too; ultimately, it's her company that's the problem child.
I don't blame the copyright office for making this choice initially; the chances are checking on Siebel's web server implementation wasn't in their initial requirements for a CRM. The problem is that Siebel knows how difficult it is for their customers to move to another system, so they feel they can get away with half-assed "do it our way or the highway" implementations like this. It'd be great if the copyright office was willing to say, "This must be fixed by [insert deadline here] or we'll migrate to something else," but following through on that would be an extremely non-trivial undertaking.
I think you're confusing API with ABI; the former is at a source level, and the latter is at a binary level. When an API changes, programs have to be rewritten, but when an ABI changes, programs just have to be recompiled. The GCC incarnation of the C++ ABI has changed, but that has nothing to do with the APIs of the underlying operating system. And, really, programs don't have to be recompiled if you have a system which sanely handles versioning; you just need both versions of the libraries. (I say "both" because as far as I know, the only major shift in GCC happened between version 3.3 and 3.4.)
:)
:) To be fair, I prefer Objective-C, but I've met more than one programmer who looks at ObjC source code and reacts like they have spiders crawling on them. I don't know.
I'm aware there's a lot of hostility to C++ out there, but it's arguably more flexible and powerful than straight C is* and it's a lot more recognized by most programmers than Objective-C is. That's an advantage you shouldn't write off that quickly.
By the way, Gil Amelio was CEO of Apple when they bought Next, not Michael Spindler.
--
*I say "arguably" because I know a lot of people will argue that.
Actually, I think Apple going with Be would have worked just fine, from a technology standpoint. You need to remember that MacOS had no more in common with NextStep than it did with BeOS, and it took years of engineering work to get from NextStep to OS X. If the same amount of engineering work had been put into Be, there's no reason to assume it wouldn't have achieved just as smooth an integration.
:)
Would that have been better than what we've got now? I don't know. There were BeOS-specific multimedia programs that were very promising, and doing things that couldn't have been done under Linux. (Note this is circa 1999, so I'm making no claims about what can be done under Linux currently.) Of course, we'd have had something like Spotlight from the very start.
The main thing Apple wouldn't have gotten with Be isn't technology. It's Steve Jobs. For all his foibles, it's possible that without him, Apple might have lasted about three years before going tits-up anyway.
Well, depending on what Bob's situation is, cutting costs may not be very practical -- his business doesn't have to be marginal before Wal-Mart (or a similar "big box" competitor with similar economic pressures) appears. There are floors below which you can't really go. If you're a bookstore, you have to have a certain amount of physical space, ideally in a place you'll get walk-by shoppers; you obviously need to carry physical inventory; and, if you're not making enough money to at least pay yourself a living wage, there's trouble a-comin'.
Having said that, sure, the best way to compete is to take yourself out of the direct competition. Independent bookstores usually do that by focusing on genres: a sci-fi bookstore, a mystery bookstore, a feminist bookstore. That's still something of a double-edged sword, from what I've seen, though. A store like that needs to be in a sufficiently urbane area to pull it off, and may need to get additional sales even beyond that to survive (a mail-order business, travelling to conventions, etc.). Other stores that have "overlap" with Wal-Mart can differentiate themselves similarly -- but usually with the same provisos, I think. It's the small town generalist stores that aren't in areas where making such a shift is feasible that are most vulnerable.
Warning: pedantic geekery ahead. :)
As far as I know, the last software Bill Gates actually worked on was the included software, notably the text editor, for the TRS-80 Model 100/200 portable computers from Radio Shack.
http://www.tcp.com/~lgreenf/bill.htm
It's more amusing to assume his last work was a crappy BASIC game, I suppose. But for what they were, the Model 100/200 machines were really pretty damn cool little gadgets. For all of the obvious limitations (a 16-line, 40-character screen, 32K of RAM expandable to 96K at most, IIRC), my Model 200 had the best keyboard of any laptop I've ever used -- and ran for about 15 hours on AA batteries. (And the file system was similar in some ways to the Palm's a few years later: a flat system you didn't ever save anything to, because files were persistent.)
"if local merchants go out of business because Walmart moves into a local town, blame the local townspeople, not Walmart."
While this is off-topic....
Let's imagine a small town with a store called Bob's Books. It's an independent bookseller, not part of any chain. It's reasonable to assume Bob's gross profit margin is about 25% and his net profit margin is maybe 3-5%. (Borders and Barnes & Nobles both have GPMs of about 30%, and their current NPMs are both actually under 1%!)
Now, suppose WalMart moves into town. They sell a much smaller subset of books than Bob's, mostly just the bestsellers. Now, that's going to be enough to bleed off some of Bob's customers, because there are people who only buy the bestsellers, right? And WalMart is selling those books for 30% off. Great!
Except that if Bob loses about 25% of his customers to WalMart -- just 1 in 4 -- he's going to go out of business. He can't match WalMart's prices to get those customers back, because if he does, he'll lose money faster. (WalMart is getting a price Bob isn't offered, because he's just one store, and if they desired to, they could actually sell the books at a loss for a short time because they have the whole rest of their store as a balance.)
So the idea that "if the local businesses go under, it's because their customers are choosing WalMart over them" is a half-truth at best. It only means some of the local businesses' customers are: they could actually keep the majority of their customers and still sink.
I started looking for a new job after being with my last employer seven years. It took me 4.5 weeks from posting my resume to accepting an offer yesterday on a new job for 37% more money with equal benefits. Plus I had two other offers and a lot more interviews lined up.
That you've had a relatively great experience with this doesn't mean that it's directly applicable to others, and it doesn't (necessarily) mean that people who don't bounce back into a new job in a month are doing something wrong in their job search. It may mean that you're exceptionally good at what you do and thus highly sought after. It may mean that you're really good at playing the job hunting game. It may mean that you're in a part of the country which has a good ratio of open jobs to job seekers. And, honestly, it may mean you had awfully good luck.
The standard advice in job hunting is that you should expect to take about a month searching for each $10-15K of salary that you're seeking. I can't say my experience has directly matched that, since I haven't had permanent, full-time employment since mid-2002... just contract work. I've had *interviews* a lot, but I'm in Silicon Valley. At least through 2003, there were actually still a lot of open jobs out here (compared to where I'd lived before, Tampa Bay), but that's tempered by the fact that there are a lot of other desperate unemployed techs here. Positions that were $70-100K in 2000 are being advertised for $40-50K now and they'll get hundreds of applications.
As for the "40 hour a week or walk away" thing, while I generally agree with the sentiment, it's very uncommon in the tech industry from what I've seen. At one of the contracts I was at, a canonical Silicon Valley startup company, I was getting definite vibes of being looked at as a slacker because I was only there nine hours a day. (My contract called for a per-week payment, prorated daily, so I didn't get overtime.) Again, if you're really good you can make a demand like that, but you'd better be so good that the employer isn't going to think, "Well, there's this other guy who's good enough for what we need and says he'll work 60 hours a week as long as we buy him pizza each night."
I'm hoping to have about six months' of living expenses socked away if I can, which is closer to three months' salary on my current contract... which I'm not sure will last past three more months.
But in your example, an alloy that's patented isn't (likely) something that's occurring in nature: it's actually an invention. To me, that's the real key here. If I invent a way to synthesize a medicine from tulip bulbs, I can patent the process that creates that medicine -- but I shouldn't be able to patent tulip bulbs themselves, even if I've found a new and non-obvious use for them.
In the original poster's example, he's postulating a company which discovered what a gene does. If they have a process for discovering what genes do, great--if they base new processes on what they've learned about genes, also great. But the fact that they were the first to discover something important about a gene's function shouldn't give them the right to patent the gene itself. Patenting things they can do with that knowledge about what the gene does, sure--the equivalent of your alloy example. (At least once they actually do those things, rather than preemptively patenting them just because they might be possible.) The gene is not their invention, and it's not even their discovery.
What the original poster is writing about isn't the equivalent of patenting an alloy -- it's the equivalent of patenting the metals that go in the alloy, and going after anyone who tries to use those metals in different ways.
While this is straying pretty far from the topic of free wifi in coffee shops, I think limiting access to the courts is a terrible idea -- even when the intentions behind it are quite good and sincere.
I think most people would agree that sometimes corporations are bad actors (just like individuals, and for that matter, governments). We're not just talking about suing GM for drunk drivers -- we're talking about Ford knowing safety hazards with the Pinto's fuel tank and actually running the calculations to determine that the costs of lawsuits resulting from the deaths of their customers would be likely to be less than the cost of fixing the problem, and deciding that was sufficient justification to let a certain small number of their customers die due to a preventable defect. Sometimes it really is the business who actually did the bad thing.
There are really only two ways to address these situations: to try to do it proactively through regulation, or to try to do it retroactively through the legal system. The thing is, both these checks are under assault right now: regulation is frequently seen as "too oppressive," and lawsuits are frequently seen as "too frivolous." This is a dangerous combination, because the outcome could easily be giving bad actors free reign to commit profitable abuse with very little consequences.
A lot of times regulations may well be too oppressive, and a lot of lawsuits certainly are frivolous. But suppose a shield law written to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits resulting in deaths caused by their weapons passes, and a few years down the road the death that's caused by a gun is that of a police officer due to a manufacturing defect. Should the gun company really be shielded from that? I can guarantee you if the gun companies are involved in writing the shield laws, they will be shielded from that -- and as a practical matter, the law really can't take into account every exception.
I understand why it seems to make sense to protect manufacturers, but I'd really rather trust the legal system to junk most frivolous lawsuits. Remember, the "outrageous" ones you hear about are the rare exceptions, newsworthy precisely because they are rare exceptions.
Now, let's be fair--not all the ideas in the IE7 screenshots come from Firefox. For instance, the idea of combining the refresh button and stop button into one control is lifted straight from Safari.
You have a user ID in the 500K range, and you're asking what happened to Slashdot? Ha. Back in my day...
I'm going to take my cane and hobble on back inside. Mutter mutter.
It also depends on what you're using for SMS. On my Sidekick II, which has a QWERTY-style thumb keyboard rather than a number pad, my admittedly informal test just now suggests I'm doing about 40 wpm. (I actually did 50 in the test, but I imagine in practice I'm usually not going that fast.)
What incentive is there for most of Congress to just give up their control?
:)
The knowledge that in exchange for giving corporations as many breaks as possible, their personal futures will be secured by moving into waiting job positions with those corporations.
If you're going to be that cynical about your congresscritter's motivations, c'mon, take it to the limit -- there's no reason for them to protect the gravy train for their legislative successors.