If we all quit using native languages, then what are we going to use to a) write embed code, b) write drivers, c) write operating systems and d) write the interpreted languages that we use to replace our native ones?
Bootstrapping!
As we all know, JIT technology is magic: with a JIT, you can deliberately write your code as inefficiently as possible and it will still run faster than the most finely-tuned hand-crafted assembly language imaginable, which is why (for example) the entire Linux kernel was recently reimplemented in Ruby, and tests of this on a 12 MHz 286 show it regularly outperforming experimental military quantum computers in several cryptographic benchmarks.
So, all we have to do is run a JIT recursively, and it will optimise itself, growing exponentially faster!
I reckon this technology will be with us in about 10 years. Just in time to power the navigation systems of your flying car.
developing VM apps is almost always faster and easier than compiled apps
No, developing high-level apps is faster and easier than developing low-level apps.
It is certainly not faster and easier to develop an application by writing Java bytecode directly, even though that is writing for a VM. And it certainly is faster and easier to develop in a high-level language like D or ML or Haskell than it is to develop in C, even though you are not writing for a VM.
Please, please, please, for the love of God, educate yourself a little and drop this simplistic artifical dichotomy that declares that every single language is either "compiled" and therefore horrible like C, or "interpreted" and therefore wonderful like Ruby. Because it's simply not true, not helpful, and makes you look ignorant. Thank you.
It is considered that the Virginia accent is closer to Elizabethan English than Modern British English is.
If by "it is considered" you are referring to the opinions of some non-specialists who are in no way qualified to discuss the matter, then yes. If you thought you were referring to any kind of serious theory that holds credence among specialist linguists, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but no, that is a myth.
The Virginia accent preserves some features of Elizabethan English that have been lost in certain modern British dialects. But it has also lost features of Elizabethan English that have been preserved in most modern British dialects. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Shakespeare would find rural American speech any more familiar to his ears than metropolitan British speech; both have changed drastically over the centuries.
Given the proper systems and environment in-game advertising could be amazing.
Key word: could be. Unfortunately, the advertisers would ruin it.
How? By destroying immersion.
How? By insisting that the advertised product has a monopoly in the virtual world.
Imagine a world where every soft drink was Coca-Cola. Where every drinks machine was a Coca-Cola machine. Where every billboard was an advert for Coca-Cola. Think that sounds realistic? Nope, me neither. Think Coca-Cola would let you sell advertising space to Pepsi in the same game? Nope, me neither.
Actually, even 30 fps only looks smooth because of motion blur. That's why computer games (which traditionally have not featured motion blur) don't start to look smooth until around 60 fps, and some people can tell the difference right up to about 120 fps or so.
Go to Friesland in northern Holland. Listen to the native speakers. If you want to retain the purity of your language, I suggest you start asking them for lessons.
Why? The language they speak today is not particularly closer to Old Frisian than modern English is to Old English.
It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know I am not going to email to or from. [...] 81
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the IP allocation system. Class A networks are not associated with single countries, but with registries. 81, for example, is one of the networks administered by the RIPE NCC; an IP address beginning with 81 could be located anywhere within Europe or the Middle East.
In fact, my very own IP address begins with 81. I live in Britain, which - as you may be aware - is not in "Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe". It's a good thing I don't want to email you, isn't it?
Because columns are bad. Columns were designed for print layout. The web is not print. When I am reading a web page, I want to read linearly. I do not want to scroll all the way down one column, only to have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page again to start reading the next column. It is seriously inconvenient. And, no, you can't simply design your page so that the columns fit on a single screen, because you don't know what size my screen and font will be. Your design must lay itself out elegantly at any size, any resolution, any zoom level.
This is why websites designed by graphic designers tend to suck, and why websites designed by serious web designers tend not to have silly print-inspired things like multiple columns.
It is of course quite normal to do it, but it's still illegal.
That's a very interesting point. Ultimately, in a democracy, surely something that becomes normal behaviour is going to end up becoming legal?
Consider homosexuality, for example. In the late 19th century you have a number of famous cases of people being jailed for having gay sex (Oscar Wilde and so forth). Fast forward to today, and because British society as a whole now believes any sexual practice involving consenting adults is OK, the only controversies I can think of in recent years are those that relate to homosexuality in children or churches.
In other cases, the behaviour remains technically illegal but is de facto permitted; e.g. the way even the police now regularly cruise at 80 on motorways and nobody bats an eyelid. I suspect that the only reason the speed limit hasn't been raised is that nobody faces jail for doing 80, so the public sees no reason to demand a change in the law.
Contrast cases where a significant part of the population thinks a behaviour should remain illegal: the Lambeth experiment with tolerance of cannabis use managed to cause quite a controversy, and there's no reason to suppose that law will become any more liberal than it currently is, because the majority of the population seems to agree that cannabis use should remain illegal but should be punished fairly lightly.
Where does copying music for personal use fit into all this? I suspect it's going to end up de facto legal but not de jure, since the music industry wants to avoid the risk of a slippery slope; again, we see the same effect in both the examples above (the government is reluctant to raise any speed limit for fear of encouraging people to drive even faster, and reluctant to liberalise drug laws for fear of encouraging wider use).
But it does seem strange, and strangely incompatible with democracy as it's popularly understood, to have a law deliberately criminalising "acceptable" activities, with no intention of enforcing it, solely to discourage "unacceptable" activities...
It's strange how much we detest government regulation in televsion, radio and voice services, but suddenly we're begging for in on the internet.
It's strange how much we detest government-imposed taxes, but suddenly we're begging to allow corporations to impose their own private tax burdens on people who don't even do business with them.
Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it? When send my customers packages, I have to pay UPS to deliver them. This isn't any different.
Actually, people are already paying to receive data. So this is like UPS saying "we're going to carry on charging you to send packages, but now we're going to charge your customers to receive them as well!"
Well, actually it's not very like anything to do with UPS at all. It's more like a sales tax being imposed both in the seller's state and in the buyer's state and in every state the package travels through in between. I'm sure you'd complain loudly about that if the state governments tried to do it. I'm not quite sure why you don't have any problem with corporations doing the same thing.
I don't believe any company has a monopoly on fibre, so websites can always move if they feel they are paying too much.
Uh... how? This isn't about the ISP that connects a website to the net, it's about the ISPs (plural) that connect a website's users to the net.
I guess a site could have a notice on its front page saying "NOTICE TO USERS OF $ISPS: your ISP is deliberately slowing down your access to this site. For a decent experience, please change ISP."
Yeah, I'm sure that would really help.
Bottom line: I see no reason why the market for bandwidth should not be as efficient as any other [...] so long as there's no monopolist.
That's just the problem: there are monopolists, built right into the system. For example, AOL has a monopoly on AOL customers. Without net neutrality, if you want your website to be accessible to AOL customers, you have to pay whatever AOL demands -- period.
The days of nasty payloads are over. They were popular in the early '90's (remember Michelangelo?), but nowadays it's more profitable to steal data instead. Armies of zombie computers, [...] that's what this is all about.
And how, exactly, do you think a computer is turned into a zombie, except by installing a nasty payload?
Even Windows doesn't come with a rootkit built in.
And there you have it. As more and more users come to understand the legal facts of the matter, as expounded in this thread, they will have a strong incentive to adopt other operating systems that cost less and impose less unreasonable conditions.
Newsflash: most people care more about staying in their comfort zone than about whether their OS phones home. Most people don't actually give a damn about this non-issue, because they "have nothing to hide" and are not so paranoid as to assume that anything Microsoft does must have an evil motive behind it.
Seriously, why should I care whether Microsoft knows when my computer is switched on or not? (Please avoid making reference to evil things they might hypothetically do in the future. I'm interested in knowing what's bad about what they're doing now, not what people's paranoid fantasies are.)
the key point is that [Linux's] weaknesses relative to Windows (read: buying objections) are rapidly disappearing.
Not obviously, they aren't; and even if they are, it certainly isn't "rapidly". You can tell this by the fact that Linux's market-share is not impinging on Windows' market-share to any significant degree. Practically all Linux's gains have been at the expense of proprietary Unix, not Windows.
I'm not even convinced it's better. I run both Windows and Linux, I use both regularly, I'm comfortable and experienced at using both, and I prefer Windows. Sorry if that shatters your worldview.
Admittedly, I still have Office 97 which is arguably inferior to Office 2003, but why should I shell out big bucks every few years for what is essentially the same product?
Er... what? Either Office 2003 is better than Office 97, or it's the same product. You can't have it both ways.
Oh, whats this? It pops up every 10 minutes asking me to reboot and gives me no option like "remind me tomorrow"
Open the Services panel, find "Automatic Updates", click the Stop button. The nagging will cease and your update will be installed when you choose to restart Windows.
I agree it's not obvious, but at least it can be done.
How much do you want to bet if they came out with the a new console, the "iGame", with a white designer pod look, and designed to interface with your iPod, that it would be a groundbreaking success!?
Not much.
The thing about music and video is that they're very easy to convert into any given format. Apple can easily introduce products like the iPod that simply take data that other people have created and play it back. That's trivial. But games aren't. Games have to be designed to run on a certain platform, not the other way round. Would Apple be able to convince people to develop games for this "iGame"? Unlikely.
So they'd have to make it a clone of someone else's platform, or license someone else's platform and brand it. Your "iGame" would either be an overpriced Apple-branded DS, or it would be restricted to playing crappy Java games designed for mobile phones. Either way, it's hard to see who exactly would want one.
What gets me about those calling for increased Linux "usability" want it to work more like Windows or the Mac. If you want it to work like Windows why not use Windows? If you want it to work like the Mac, why not use a Mac?
Suppose I have a hammer with a comfortable grip, and an axe with an uncomfortable grip. Suppose you come across me chopping wood, and I mention to you that I don't like the grip on the axe as much as the grip on my hammer. Would you tell me to stop whining and chop wood with the hammer if that's what I like?
Some people want Mac usability with Linux value and performance, or Windows familiarity with Linux reliability. These people are not wrong or stupid, and you have absolutely no cause to tell them that they should not want these things.
For as long as the people are afraid of terrorists, crime, and the "axis of evil", the people will willingly give up personal freedoms in vain hope of personal security.
Those who would give up a little freedom to gain a little security, deserve neither and lose both. -- Ben Franklin
Yes, yes, Ben Franklin, very profound. Of course, that's not quite what he actually said (I seem to recall specifics about essential freedom and temporary security).
The simple fact is that we don't have the information to determine whether these wiretaps are doing more harm than good or not -- in Franklin's terms, whether they are providing anything more than temporary security. They might, after all, be providing essential intelligence that is leading to the constant thwarting of a significant number of terrorist operations; on the other hand, they might not. We simply don't know.
So since we can't judge how useful this is, what it comes down to is a matter of principle: do we have a God-given right to private conversations? And the answer is clearly no.
How do I come to that conclusion? Simple: ask any representative sample of Americans who believe in God (a prerequisite for believing in God-given anything), and I bet you anything that nearly all of them will tell you that God listens in on all their private conversations, and indeed on all their most secret thoughts, and that this is right and proper. Ergo, God does not recognise any right to privacy, QED.:P
one of the standard operating procedures for MS is to keep changing the file formats, macro language syntax etc continually to keep moving the "targets".
BS.
Microsoft does not break backwards compatibility on every release. The day Microsoft breaks backwards-compatibility is the day millions of businesses decide not to upgrade. This is not what Microsoft wants. Which is why the next Office will continue to support the old binary file formats perfectly alongside the new XML formats.
How well does it work in practice? Pretty damn well. Just this weekend I took a spreadsheet written and saved in Excel XP, opened it in Excel 97, wrote a complex macro, saved it again, emailed it back to the guy with Excel XP, and my macro worked perfectly for him first time. If Microsoft kept breaking the file format and macro language the way you claim, clearly that would not have been possible.
Please, if you want to criticise Microsoft, pick on a criticism that's actually true, like their unfair business practices, their laughable security record, or (clutches at straws) their ugly GUI or something. But don't criticise their compatibility record -- because it's among the best in the industry. (Not that that's saying much.)
I'd be more interested in an AI accelerator. I want my games to be interesting to play; having the most realistically-modelled explosions EVAR is fun for a few hours, but having enemies that behave like humans could be fun for months.
(No, online play is not a solution. Human enemies don't behave like this.)
Well, I'm a great fan of Delphi-style object-pascal, maybe using it has brain-damaged me, or maybe it doesn't bear too much resemblance to original pascal, I don't know.
The latter, I suspect. The original Pascal had some mind-numbingly dumb "features", like fixed-length strings.
No, I don't mean just fixed-length buffers like bad C. I mean fixed-length strings. If you wanted to store a five-character string in a variable declared as a 10-character string, you had to pad it out manually with spaces.
Delphi's actually a very nice language. If they hadn't marketed it as a Pascal dialect, it would probably have done much better. Calling it Pascal in a world full of Pascal-haters was a bit like opening a French bistro called "L'homme efféminé" in Texas the day after the invasion of Iraq. That is, not a great business move.
If you truly do not want to make your code FOSS, then I am a believer in not giving the code out at all, even under contract. Code has a way of making it out to the 'net.
Too true, too true. But how could you forget the obligatory link?:P
Adobe wants to be able to sell Acrobat Pro to its users, and if Microsoft starts bundling the functionality in Office, Office users will have less reason to buy Acrobat or the Creative Suite.
Acrobat? Possibly. Although anyone who wants to create PDFs from Office has had dozens of free options to choose from for years now, so it's hard to see it making much difference.
CS? You've got to be kidding. There is nothing in Office that even attempts to compete with Adobe's graphic design & layout programs. Anyone whose needs are satisfied by the limited layout functionality provided by Word and Publisher already has absolutely no reason whatsoever to buy anything else, so I totally fail to see how the ability to write PDFs would change anything at all there.
If Microsoft wanted to compete with Adobe, they'd buy out Quark and Corel.
Slashdot Mirror
If we all quit using native languages, then what are we going to use to a) write embed code, b) write drivers, c) write operating systems and d) write the interpreted languages that we use to replace our native ones?
Bootstrapping!
As we all know, JIT technology is magic: with a JIT, you can deliberately write your code as inefficiently as possible and it will still run faster than the most finely-tuned hand-crafted assembly language imaginable, which is why (for example) the entire Linux kernel was recently reimplemented in Ruby, and tests of this on a 12 MHz 286 show it regularly outperforming experimental military quantum computers in several cryptographic benchmarks.
So, all we have to do is run a JIT recursively, and it will optimise itself, growing exponentially faster!
I reckon this technology will be with us in about 10 years. Just in time to power the navigation systems of your flying car.
developing VM apps is almost always faster and easier than compiled apps
No, developing high-level apps is faster and easier than developing low-level apps.
It is certainly not faster and easier to develop an application by writing Java bytecode directly, even though that is writing for a VM. And it certainly is faster and easier to develop in a high-level language like D or ML or Haskell than it is to develop in C, even though you are not writing for a VM.
Please, please, please, for the love of God, educate yourself a little and drop this simplistic artifical dichotomy that declares that every single language is either "compiled" and therefore horrible like C, or "interpreted" and therefore wonderful like Ruby. Because it's simply not true, not helpful, and makes you look ignorant. Thank you.
It is considered that the Virginia accent is closer to Elizabethan English than Modern British English is.
If by "it is considered" you are referring to the opinions of some non-specialists who are in no way qualified to discuss the matter, then yes. If you thought you were referring to any kind of serious theory that holds credence among specialist linguists, then I'm sorry to break it to you, but no, that is a myth.
The Virginia accent preserves some features of Elizabethan English that have been lost in certain modern British dialects. But it has also lost features of Elizabethan English that have been preserved in most modern British dialects. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Shakespeare would find rural American speech any more familiar to his ears than metropolitan British speech; both have changed drastically over the centuries.
The article is indeed about stenography.
Really? I read it three times, and I still can't see a single reference to shorthand.
Given the proper systems and environment in-game advertising could be amazing.
Key word: could be. Unfortunately, the advertisers would ruin it.
How? By destroying immersion.
How? By insisting that the advertised product has a monopoly in the virtual world.
Imagine a world where every soft drink was Coca-Cola. Where every drinks machine was a Coca-Cola machine. Where every billboard was an advert for Coca-Cola. Think that sounds realistic? Nope, me neither. Think Coca-Cola would let you sell advertising space to Pepsi in the same game? Nope, me neither.
Actually, even 30 fps only looks smooth because of motion blur. That's why computer games (which traditionally have not featured motion blur) don't start to look smooth until around 60 fps, and some people can tell the difference right up to about 120 fps or so.
Go to Friesland in northern Holland. Listen to the native speakers. If you want to retain the purity of your language, I suggest you start asking them for lessons.
Why? The language they speak today is not particularly closer to Old Frisian than modern English is to Old English.
It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know
I am not going to email to or from.
[...]
81
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the IP allocation system. Class A networks are not associated with single countries, but with registries. 81, for example, is one of the networks administered by the RIPE NCC; an IP address beginning with 81 could be located anywhere within Europe or the Middle East.
In fact, my very own IP address begins with 81. I live in Britain, which - as you may be aware - is not in "Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe". It's a good thing I don't want to email you, isn't it?
That is totally broken; I opened up their example, with my standard settings, and the "header" text was printed over the top of the left-hand column.
Why is it so hard to make equal-height columns?
Because columns are bad. Columns were designed for print layout. The web is not print. When I am reading a web page, I want to read linearly. I do not want to scroll all the way down one column, only to have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page again to start reading the next column. It is seriously inconvenient. And, no, you can't simply design your page so that the columns fit on a single screen, because you don't know what size my screen and font will be. Your design must lay itself out elegantly at any size, any resolution, any zoom level.
This is why websites designed by graphic designers tend to suck, and why websites designed by serious web designers tend not to have silly print-inspired things like multiple columns.
It is of course quite normal to do it, but it's still illegal.
That's a very interesting point. Ultimately, in a democracy, surely something that becomes normal behaviour is going to end up becoming legal?
Consider homosexuality, for example. In the late 19th century you have a number of famous cases of people being jailed for having gay sex (Oscar Wilde and so forth). Fast forward to today, and because British society as a whole now believes any sexual practice involving consenting adults is OK, the only controversies I can think of in recent years are those that relate to homosexuality in children or churches.
In other cases, the behaviour remains technically illegal but is de facto permitted; e.g. the way even the police now regularly cruise at 80 on motorways and nobody bats an eyelid. I suspect that the only reason the speed limit hasn't been raised is that nobody faces jail for doing 80, so the public sees no reason to demand a change in the law.
Contrast cases where a significant part of the population thinks a behaviour should remain illegal: the Lambeth experiment with tolerance of cannabis use managed to cause quite a controversy, and there's no reason to suppose that law will become any more liberal than it currently is, because the majority of the population seems to agree that cannabis use should remain illegal but should be punished fairly lightly.
Where does copying music for personal use fit into all this? I suspect it's going to end up de facto legal but not de jure, since the music industry wants to avoid the risk of a slippery slope; again, we see the same effect in both the examples above (the government is reluctant to raise any speed limit for fear of encouraging people to drive even faster, and reluctant to liberalise drug laws for fear of encouraging wider use).
But it does seem strange, and strangely incompatible with democracy as it's popularly understood, to have a law deliberately criminalising "acceptable" activities, with no intention of enforcing it, solely to discourage "unacceptable" activities...
It's strange how much we detest government regulation in televsion, radio and voice services, but suddenly we're begging for in on the internet.
It's strange how much we detest government-imposed taxes, but suddenly we're begging to allow corporations to impose their own private tax burdens on people who don't even do business with them.
Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it? When send my customers packages, I have to pay UPS to deliver them. This isn't any different.
Actually, people are already paying to receive data. So this is like UPS saying "we're going to carry on charging you to send packages, but now we're going to charge your customers to receive them as well!"
Well, actually it's not very like anything to do with UPS at all. It's more like a sales tax being imposed both in the seller's state and in the buyer's state and in every state the package travels through in between. I'm sure you'd complain loudly about that if the state governments tried to do it. I'm not quite sure why you don't have any problem with corporations doing the same thing.
I don't believe any company has a monopoly on fibre, so websites can always move if they feel they are paying too much.
Uh... how? This isn't about the ISP that connects a website to the net, it's about the ISPs (plural) that connect a website's users to the net.
I guess a site could have a notice on its front page saying "NOTICE TO USERS OF $ISPS: your ISP is deliberately slowing down your access to this site. For a decent experience, please change ISP."
Yeah, I'm sure that would really help.
Bottom line: I see no reason why the market for bandwidth should not be as efficient as any other [...] so long as there's no monopolist.
That's just the problem: there are monopolists, built right into the system. For example, AOL has a monopoly on AOL customers. Without net neutrality, if you want your website to be accessible to AOL customers, you have to pay whatever AOL demands -- period.
How is that an "efficient market"?
The days of nasty payloads are over. They were popular in the early '90's (remember Michelangelo?), but nowadays it's more profitable to steal data instead. Armies of zombie computers, [...] that's what this is all about.
And how, exactly, do you think a computer is turned into a zombie, except by installing a nasty payload?
Even Windows doesn't come with a rootkit built in.
And there you have it. As more and more users come to understand the legal facts of the matter, as expounded in this thread, they will have a strong incentive to adopt other operating systems that cost less and impose less unreasonable conditions.
Newsflash: most people care more about staying in their comfort zone than about whether their OS phones home. Most people don't actually give a damn about this non-issue, because they "have nothing to hide" and are not so paranoid as to assume that anything Microsoft does must have an evil motive behind it.
Seriously, why should I care whether Microsoft knows when my computer is switched on or not? (Please avoid making reference to evil things they might hypothetically do in the future. I'm interested in knowing what's bad about what they're doing now, not what people's paranoid fantasies are.)
the key point is that [Linux's] weaknesses relative to Windows (read: buying objections) are rapidly disappearing.
Not obviously, they aren't; and even if they are, it certainly isn't "rapidly". You can tell this by the fact that Linux's market-share is not impinging on Windows' market-share to any significant degree. Practically all Linux's gains have been at the expense of proprietary Unix, not Windows.
I'm not even convinced it's better. I run both Windows and Linux, I use both regularly, I'm comfortable and experienced at using both, and I prefer Windows. Sorry if that shatters your worldview.
Admittedly, I still have Office 97 which is arguably inferior to Office 2003, but why should I shell out big bucks every few years for what is essentially the same product?
Er... what? Either Office 2003 is better than Office 97, or it's the same product. You can't have it both ways.
Oh, whats this? It pops up every 10 minutes asking me to reboot and gives me no option like "remind me tomorrow"
Open the Services panel, find "Automatic Updates", click the Stop button. The nagging will cease and your update will be installed when you choose to restart Windows.
I agree it's not obvious, but at least it can be done.
How much do you want to bet if they came out with the a new console, the "iGame", with a white designer pod look, and designed to interface with your iPod, that it would be a groundbreaking success!?
Not much.
The thing about music and video is that they're very easy to convert into any given format. Apple can easily introduce products like the iPod that simply take data that other people have created and play it back. That's trivial. But games aren't. Games have to be designed to run on a certain platform, not the other way round. Would Apple be able to convince people to develop games for this "iGame"? Unlikely.
So they'd have to make it a clone of someone else's platform, or license someone else's platform and brand it. Your "iGame" would either be an overpriced Apple-branded DS, or it would be restricted to playing crappy Java games designed for mobile phones. Either way, it's hard to see who exactly would want one.
What gets me about those calling for increased Linux "usability" want it to work more like Windows or the Mac. If you want it to work like Windows why not use Windows? If you want it to work like the Mac, why not use a Mac?
Suppose I have a hammer with a comfortable grip, and an axe with an uncomfortable grip. Suppose you come across me chopping wood, and I mention to you that I don't like the grip on the axe as much as the grip on my hammer. Would you tell me to stop whining and chop wood with the hammer if that's what I like?
Some people want Mac usability with Linux value and performance, or Windows familiarity with Linux reliability. These people are not wrong or stupid, and you have absolutely no cause to tell them that they should not want these things.
Yes, yes, Ben Franklin, very profound. Of course, that's not quite what he actually said (I seem to recall specifics about essential freedom and temporary security).
The simple fact is that we don't have the information to determine whether these wiretaps are doing more harm than good or not -- in Franklin's terms, whether they are providing anything more than temporary security. They might, after all, be providing essential intelligence that is leading to the constant thwarting of a significant number of terrorist operations; on the other hand, they might not. We simply don't know.
So since we can't judge how useful this is, what it comes down to is a matter of principle: do we have a God-given right to private conversations? And the answer is clearly no.
How do I come to that conclusion? Simple: ask any representative sample of Americans who believe in God (a prerequisite for believing in God-given anything), and I bet you anything that nearly all of them will tell you that God listens in on all their private conversations, and indeed on all their most secret thoughts, and that this is right and proper. Ergo, God does not recognise any right to privacy, QED.
one of the standard operating procedures for MS is to keep changing the file formats, macro language syntax etc continually to keep moving the "targets".
BS.
Microsoft does not break backwards compatibility on every release. The day Microsoft breaks backwards-compatibility is the day millions of businesses decide not to upgrade. This is not what Microsoft wants. Which is why the next Office will continue to support the old binary file formats perfectly alongside the new XML formats.
How well does it work in practice? Pretty damn well. Just this weekend I took a spreadsheet written and saved in Excel XP, opened it in Excel 97, wrote a complex macro, saved it again, emailed it back to the guy with Excel XP, and my macro worked perfectly for him first time. If Microsoft kept breaking the file format and macro language the way you claim, clearly that would not have been possible.
Please, if you want to criticise Microsoft, pick on a criticism that's actually true, like their unfair business practices, their laughable security record, or (clutches at straws) their ugly GUI or something. But don't criticise their compatibility record -- because it's among the best in the industry. (Not that that's saying much.)
So, have they found the problem yet?
I'd be more interested in an AI accelerator. I want my games to be interesting to play; having the most realistically-modelled explosions EVAR is fun for a few hours, but having enemies that behave like humans could be fun for months.
(No, online play is not a solution. Human enemies don't behave like this.)
Well, I'm a great fan of Delphi-style object-pascal, maybe using it has brain-damaged me, or maybe it doesn't bear too much resemblance to original pascal, I don't know.
The latter, I suspect. The original Pascal had some mind-numbingly dumb "features", like fixed-length strings.
No, I don't mean just fixed-length buffers like bad C. I mean fixed-length strings. If you wanted to store a five-character string in a variable declared as a 10-character string, you had to pad it out manually with spaces.
Delphi's actually a very nice language. If they hadn't marketed it as a Pascal dialect, it would probably have done much better. Calling it Pascal in a world full of Pascal-haters was a bit like opening a French bistro called "L'homme efféminé" in Texas the day after the invasion of Iraq. That is, not a great business move.
Do you have anything to back up that claim of "nothing else could cope", or is it simply baseless speculation?
I believe the technical term is "fanaticism". Also known as "BS".
If you truly do not want to make your code FOSS, then I am a believer in not giving the code out at all, even under contract. Code has a way of making it out to the 'net.
:P
Too true, too true. But how could you forget the obligatory link?
Adobe wants to be able to sell Acrobat Pro to its users, and if Microsoft starts bundling the functionality in Office, Office users will have less reason to buy Acrobat or the Creative Suite.
Acrobat? Possibly. Although anyone who wants to create PDFs from Office has had dozens of free options to choose from for years now, so it's hard to see it making much difference.
CS? You've got to be kidding. There is nothing in Office that even attempts to compete with Adobe's graphic design & layout programs. Anyone whose needs are satisfied by the limited layout functionality provided by Word and Publisher already has absolutely no reason whatsoever to buy anything else, so I totally fail to see how the ability to write PDFs would change anything at all there.
If Microsoft wanted to compete with Adobe, they'd buy out Quark and Corel.