Okay, so what's stopping Microsoft from doing the same? Wouldn't you scream if M$ had a EULA that said in order to access the Internet using Windows, you needed to go through MSN because they wanted to check your license and to access the internet in any other way was a violation of the DMCA? ("To AOL From Microsoft: we are holding you accountable for the millions of users accessing the Internet through your servers using our software. Cease and desist immediately.") You'd go nuts as would everyone else. Blizzard shouldn't be able to get away with this crap either.
If I paid for software, I own it and they can't tell me what to do with it and the Adobe case IMHO proves that this is so in a court of law. If I buy a book and want to tear out pages and make paper airplanes, it's not illegal right? Same thing, 'cept different.;-)
Yeah, but using the DMCA to protect it is a really low, low act.
It seems to me that the argument that Blizzard is using - that this is our software and you only have a 'license' and thus have to use our servers to validate them - is exactly contrary to the Adobe case that said that EULAs restricting use aren't valid.
From The Register article: Specifically, the ruling decrees that software purchases be treated as sales transactions, rather than explicit license agreements. In other words, consumers should have the same rights they'd enjoy under existing copyright legislation when buying a CD or a book. They can't make copies, but they can resell what they own.
This means that I bought the software, I can use whatever server I want to and Blizzard shouldn't have the right to claim that creating another server is somehow restricting their licensing...
Okay, this is cool, but I need a more broad video-sharing FAQ...
What are the standard formats? MPEG-4? DIVX? Other?
How much degradation in content is there? Is it a postage-size stamp video or am I seeing VHS quality (bad but viewable) or DVD quality (great) content?
What's the common file sizes? Are we talking 300 Megs per 1/2 hour?
Do all these boxes have a standard format or do I need to translate the format from ReplayTV once it's recorded?
Where's the commonest source for this stuff? Morpheus? Gnutella?.RU websites?
I actually agree with you. Rants can be bad, uneffective or worse... Whoever moderated this down is a bozo because you make a good point. But still if you believe in something you need to spread the word and sometimes that means boring the pants off whoever will listen...
But man, when I think of the vegans or the Mac owners who pulled on my ear so hard I wanted to just cry or kill and it makes me think hard about choosing my battles.
Anti DMCA is a good battle. Blizzard, Adobe, Nintendo and any other idiot company that tries this bullshit gets my wrath.
-Russ
"Wow. We were just hanging out at my 5 year old niece's birthday party and when she got a new GameBoy cartridge for a present, this weird dude in the corner just snapped. He started giving her a lecture on the evils of corporations and why Nintendo is taking away her rights as human being. She started crying, it was awful. What a FREAK..."
You boycott something by not buying the product and then actively telling your friends and relatives not to buy it either. Whenever you hear people mention the name, you go into litanies about the company and don't shut up until whoever is listening to you agrees not to buy the product either. You post to message boards, you bug your local merchant, you do what you need to do to get your message across. Maybe you'll be lucky and get someone in the press to notice and then the word will spread even more.
3000 people know a lot of people. It's a networking effect.
I'm sorry, but fuck you, you obnoxious arrogant AC. Don't be a fucking language lawyer. I'm talking about making one XML spec that pleases everyone as a registry. Yes, this would be a DTD, good for you.
By the way, you asshole, DTDs aren't mandatory. I can create and parse an XML document quite fine without knowing its DTD. Do YOU know XML?
I totally disagree with this. We need a generic XML settings document that is both flexible and standard. Having 30 different DTDs is just making maintenence and support a nightmare.
If all the tools used the same settings file format (expressed in a DTD) then GUI tools, remote administration and general sanity would all benefit. I've got better things to do to have to learn a new file type every time I want to tweak a new tool.
We're talking about pretty basic stuff here. Setting names in a hierarchy with values. Using separate files and XML makes it both standard and much more flexible and recoverable which is one of the main complaints about the Registry. It's just too big and cumbersome.
I agree - though I think that XML is a GREAT idea for *nix to use, the format is just too flexible to just say "use XML" and leave it at that. There needs to be some sort of standard way of using XML as a registry so it's not a complete nightmare.
Etc. The variations on hierarchies and values are endless and is my main
beef with XML. It sometimes can be too flexible and people who are using
XML (especially newbies) make it overly complex or not suffieciently complex
enough for expansion. In other words, this needs to be thought out.
But again, XML is a good idea. I hope it gets adopted as a general mechanism in *nix, but not in some random way...
-Russ
How to REALLY penetrate the Desktop
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Alan Cox Interview
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· Score: 3, Interesting
1) Kill off KDE or Gnome. We only need one. Going with Gnome is my vote. Screw the technical debate, we just need one GUI that works.
2) Clean up the file system. There should be:/documents and/system and that's it. Regular users shouldn't be allowed to enter the system area.
3) Make a list of all the applets included with Windows and Apple. Make perfect copies. Kill off all the rest of the crap - choice is complexity and complexity is bad.
4) Make it insanely easy to install. One click. Make applications standard to install (like install shield except without suckage).
5) Do the little things: Auto detect mountable drives like floppies and CDs. Printers. Digital Cameras. Make a list of things that DON'T have a driver and put in the back of the box.
6) Include OpenOffice, Mozilla and Evolution.
7) Put it all on one CD. Get Coca-cola to distribute the CDs free with every 2 liter.
8) See what Apple is doing with OSX? Do that. (And remember that Apple is a desktop enemy especially since they're using *nix. Every desktop that uses OSX isn't using Linux...
If I had a clue, I'd make a new distrib called "SuperSimpleLinux" and take over the desktop.
It seems to me that with digital technology, the systems will be easier to upgrade in the future to whatever speed and resolution is possible by the latest tech.
So this first retrofit to digital is just the first big, difficult step - from there, each step in quality will be easier and easier because it'll be just like throwing a new board in your computer.
I'm one of those people who really don't get assertions either. But regardless, from what I've read in order to use them, you have add a "-source 1.4" flag on your javac command in order to compile which I think is weird... I mean, if you're going to add a feature, you should add it and not start messing around with flags.
Woohooo! Way to go Rob! Good luck to the both of you guys!
Wow. This suddenly reminded me that today is Valentine's day. I really need to get a life... (And THAT'S why my wife was giving me hints this morning...)
-Russ
Re:Can't bring yourself to admit it?
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 2
Don't *sigh* it's annoying in real life and really fucking annoying on Slashdot.
Quote from Steve Jobs: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." And you know as well as I do that Jobs considers himself a great artist.
Saying that Apple didn't rip off Xerox is amazing Apple revisionist history. Didn't you see the interviews in "Triumph of the Nerds?" with the original Xerox guys? Jobs walked in, got a demo of the best stuff and walked out with all the most important concepts and the programmers were pissed. Whether Apple paid Xerox or not later it doesn't matter - Xerox didn't get nearly as much money as they should have for Apple's success. If Apple was still paying 10% of it's profits to Xerox, maybe, but if not they got ripped off.
And Microsoft licensed Java technology. Does that mean that they too didn't rip off Sun? Nope.
Stop being a freakin' language lawer. And stop SIGHING.
-Russ
Re:Was that so complicated?
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 2
Oh Jesus, you're an arrogant bastard.
There is no cross platform GUI system which uses native widgets and can maintain integruity across platforms.
That's my whole frigin' point, butthead. Sun needs to concentrate less on a perfect cross-platform GUI system and more on a functional system. Whether you say AWT is native or not (sure doesn't FEEL native) is besides the point. I used Eclipse's SWT as an example: "The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a widget set and graphics library integrated as much as possible with the native window system but with an OS-independent API. " Yeah it's definitely not the most in-the-lab perfect solution, but the SWT widgets are A LOT more responsive than SWING and available on the most popular platforms and is open enough to be implemented on others. Java is already a write-once, debug everywhere language so they might as well add a solution that makes the client apps usable. My point was that Java would be a lot farther along today if Sun had done this years ago instead of being stubborn dickheads like you.
Try to learn not to be an asshole and read the posts.
-Russ
Re:Can't bring yourself to admit it?
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No, I disagree.
Microsoft ripped off Sun the same way it ripped off Apple (who ripped off Xerox) when designing Windows. Yeah, you can say they helped develop the first apps for Mac, etc. etc. but the main idea was still Apple's who pushed the GUI concept and standardized the idea and then Microsoft came along six years later and launched Windows 3.0 based on those concepts developed at Apple.
Now Microsoft is doing the same with.Net. Back in 1996 when Sun was promoting net development and JITs and the whole concept of a better programming language, Microsoft was still knee-deep in C++ and COM (or was it OLE then?). Six years later, Microsoft looks at the progress Sun has made, copies the most successful parts and bastardizes the rest (again).
Yes they added some good ideas - just like they did with Windows vs. Mac - but they still ripped off the general concepts and tech gains that were made from Java.
Sorry, a ripoff's a ripoff.
-Russ
Re:Was that so complicated?
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What is .NET?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree that.NET is a Java ripoff. I think, however, that Sun needs to rip off some good ideas from.NET.
For instance the WindowsForms which are natively compiled components for building client-side applications. If Microsoft didn't do this, the client apps would probably have the same runtime performance problems that AWT and Swing has.
I may be wrong, but I think that Java would be A LOT farther along today if it wasn't trying to be the purest cross platform language. I mean, the number of platforms out there are finite. Sun could write some native code for widgets for the most popular platforms, make the APIs open for people to implement on the less popular and Java apps would be much more competitive to anything Microsoft could come up with.
I think that IBM has something like this with their SWT libraries in the Eclipse IDE... I think Sun needs to embrace that tech and put it on all their supported platforms. Then they could write major apps like StarOffice in Java and still have the usability of a fast GUI. Add in your basic SOAP calls to the J2EE servers and you've got yourself a real.NET competitor.
I'm always amazed with bibliophiles like you. I've got friends who won't bend the spine on a $5 paperback for fear of "ruining" the book. It's just a book! It's a container of information, that's all! Right now they're cheap, flexible and easy to produce, but this is changing. Like it or not traditional books are going away. Just like newspapers and magazines. The problem right now is that it's just not as economical to produce an ebook as a regular one (because of the price and tech of the readers). However if a major author like Rawlings decided to publish a major title as an ebook, suddenly the economics would change big-time.
Just because you kill a tree and throw some ink on it does not legitimize the words contained within in any way. You sound like the Olympics people who won't let the internet cover the games because they're not legitimate sources of news - probably because no plants have to die in order for people to read the words. And didn't you read the story? One of the booksellers interviewed said very clearly that without Harry Potter, they would have gone out of business. You can ROTFL all you want, but it's a fact that books are a slim-margin business. When a decent eBook reader DOES come, booksellers will be wiped out within several years.
So, sorry to break your heart, but eBooks are coming. Right now the tech isn't there, but it will be soon enough. And maybe you'll hold on to your "real" books until you die, but your kids will be shaking their head and laughing at you for sure.
Most of the popular books out there are available...
Yes, but mostly only books for geeks (sci-fi and programming-books) and only in English. The thing that people don't think about is using eBooks for learning another language.
My wife is Spanish and I've loaded up her Palm with a bunch of English language books for her to learn from and it's great - she can easily copy and paste a word she doesn't know over to the dictionary app and in an second know the word's meaning. This is a lot better than reading a real book in a foreign tongue where you have to put the book down (losing your place) get the dictionary out (or the Palm) find the word, then retrieve the book again, etc. It makes reading a lot less enjoyable the old way and a lot more fun the new way. I'm waiting for (and may write myself) a Palm text reader with integrated multi-language dictionary. It's awesome to learn from. Multi-media would be great too - if you could just click on a word in another language and have it pronounced and defined out loud, that would be great. No need to stop the flow...
Anyways, I've found 1 (count it) pirated eBook in Spanish using Gnutella that I've read on my Palm for ME to improve my Spanish... I really think the Spanish eBook pirates need to get cracking...
In the 80s in Lynn, Mass. there was this program where smart elementary school kids were taken out of class once a week and went to another school across town and taught advanced studies. For example, I remember we learned about prime numbers in the 4th grade. The other thing that was there were a bunch of TRS-80 color computers on which were taught programming. It was great. It was BASIC and simple, but the things I learned in those classes in 4th and 5th and 6th grades I still use every day.
Even though I went through high-school without a computer, as I got into college and got my first 286, it was intuitive how to get it running. Going to school for design and journalism, I was always the guy who could get the Mac networking working or recover from some error. And now I'm a programmer having switched to technical consulting after college to pay the rent and "magically" having the aptitude to do so.
My point is that the technical training I received as a child was as valuable to me in my life as any third language I might have learned or some musical training, and it was much, much more useful than "knitting a pair of socks with yarn I dyed myself" like that kid in the story. I think this will only continue to be true in the future.
-Russ
If anyone is reading this and has any idea what Project Summit was, please inform me, because beyond having spent a bunch of time in the program, me and my parents don't know much about it or even if it's still going on today... Thanks.
Hey, some of us Americans have read "In a Sunburned Country," watched the Olympics and seen that movie where you all got blown up in Turkey during WWII... relax.
I mean, Australia's a very imporant country. What would 2 a.m. be without Australian Rules Football and Insanely Violent Rugby? Fosters? Outback Steakhouse? Priscilla, Ballroom and Muriel (the holy trinity of Australian filmmaking)? These are all important additions to life.
I did get laughed at heartily once by asking how long the ferry ride between Australia and New Zealand was, but hey... What's the state capital of Louisiana? Didn't think so... And there's no fucking way anyone on Earth can tell the difference between the Aussie and Kiwi accents. Sorry it's true. (Though normally the Kiwi's are the ones to get nuts about this not you guys... Sorta the way Canadians get in Europe - the kiwis need a national symbol they can tatoo to their foreheads like the 51st state does with that leaf thing. But I digress...)
Anyways, being an American abroad living here in Spain there's nothing that cheeses me off more than someone calling Americans ignorant or arrogent in general because of one idiot's remarks (like pResident Bush, for example...). There's 280 MILLION Americans and we're a Democracy (unlike Australia) and have been so for 200+ years. That means that we're free to be idiots if we want to. And since there's so many of us, there's a high percentage you're going to meet them or read their remarks on Slashdot. But in general, show some fucking respect.
And finally, if you're going to swear, get it right. That guy was an asshole (like I am right now), not a cunt.
My main problem with the word "unAustralian" is that it's not English. Don't they have spell checkers in Australia?
I understand that the popularity of eToys, eBay, iPlanet, etc. may have this sort of thing common in trademarks, but in regular English, we like to use a dash between the "un" and whatever noun we're un-ing. For example, "un-American." Except of course if the term you're negating is generic, then you just smoosh [1] it all together like "uncircumcised."
I know I'm just an American and have little to no control over the Queen's English, but it might be nice for journalists of all nations to agree to some basics. Since the spelling of color, labor and aluminum will never be agreed upon, they might as well try to focus on general grammar, hey?
-Russ
[1] Smoosh isn't a real word.
[2] It's a joke... smile.
Now a weird thing is that some of this stuff is already available.
I'm an American living in Spain and I recently bought box sets of the first four "Friends" seasons on DVD to watch with my wife. They were just sitting there in the DVD section of a big department store here. (Subtitles and various soundtracks make DVDs perfect viewing for bilingual couples like us... and hell, let's watch tonight's episode in Polish!)
It seems that you can't get these box sets in the U.S., only here in Europe. You can, however, go to Amazon.co.uk and see that all of the seasons up to #8 are available (a little net research and I found out that season #9 is being aired now in the U.S. and that Rachael is pregnant. Oh no! I've been out of the country too long!).
Who knows if they'll ever sell these DVDs in the U.S. It basically seems that Warner Bros. is relying on country codes to keep U.S. viewers from getting all of the shows on DVD, thus forcing you to watch the repeats at 7 p.m. on channel 25 or whatever your local UHF/Cable licensee is... I guess they don't do that sort of thing here (cable not existing here in Spain) so they just sell the DVDs.
Random info: The weird thing about these box-set DVDs is that they are double-sided and only contain 3 episodes per side except for the last which contains 4 episodes on one side (for a total of 25 episodes per season). My best guess is that all the soundtracks and subtitles bloat the shows so they have to do this to fit it all in.
It's called a headset. It comes with it for free. ALSO, the Treo seems to have some sort of "personal speaker phone" capabilities which means that as you're using the phone you can hear your caller and continue talking to them.
How about READING the freakin' article? It's not like I knew this before or had to search for it, it's in the second paragraph down.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so what's stopping Microsoft from doing the same? Wouldn't you scream if M$ had a EULA that said in order to access the Internet using Windows, you needed to go through MSN because they wanted to check your license and to access the internet in any other way was a violation of the DMCA? ("To AOL From Microsoft: we are holding you accountable for the millions of users accessing the Internet through your servers using our software. Cease and desist immediately.") You'd go nuts as would everyone else. Blizzard shouldn't be able to get away with this crap either.
;-)
If I paid for software, I own it and they can't tell me what to do with it and the Adobe case IMHO proves that this is so in a court of law. If I buy a book and want to tear out pages and make paper airplanes, it's not illegal right? Same thing, 'cept different.
-Russ
Yeah, but using the DMCA to protect it is a really low, low act.
It seems to me that the argument that Blizzard is using - that this is our software and you only have a 'license' and thus have to use our servers to validate them - is exactly contrary to the Adobe case that said that EULAs restricting use aren't valid.
From The Register article: Specifically, the ruling decrees that software purchases be treated as sales transactions, rather than explicit license agreements. In other words, consumers should have the same rights they'd enjoy under existing copyright legislation when buying a CD or a book. They can't make copies, but they can resell what they own.
This means that I bought the software, I can use whatever server I want to and Blizzard shouldn't have the right to claim that creating another server is somehow restricting their licensing...
But what the fsck do I know? IANAL...
-Russ
What are the standard formats? MPEG-4? DIVX? Other?
How much degradation in content is there? Is it a postage-size stamp video or am I seeing VHS quality (bad but viewable) or DVD quality (great) content?
What's the common file sizes? Are we talking 300 Megs per 1/2 hour?
Do all these boxes have a standard format or do I need to translate the format from ReplayTV once it's recorded?
Where's the commonest source for this stuff? Morpheus? Gnutella? .RU websites?
Thanks,
-Russ
I actually agree with you. Rants can be bad, uneffective or worse... Whoever moderated this down is a bozo because you make a good point. But still if you believe in something you need to spread the word and sometimes that means boring the pants off whoever will listen...
But man, when I think of the vegans or the Mac owners who pulled on my ear so hard I wanted to just cry or kill and it makes me think hard about choosing my battles.
Anti DMCA is a good battle. Blizzard, Adobe, Nintendo and any other idiot company that tries this bullshit gets my wrath.
-Russ
"Wow. We were just hanging out at my 5 year old niece's birthday party and when she got a new GameBoy cartridge for a present, this weird dude in the corner just snapped. He started giving her a lecture on the evils of corporations and why Nintendo is taking away her rights as human being. She started crying, it was awful. What a FREAK..."
You're an idiot.
You boycott something by not buying the product and then actively telling your friends and relatives not to buy it either. Whenever you hear people mention the name, you go into litanies about the company and don't shut up until whoever is listening to you agrees not to buy the product either. You post to message boards, you bug your local merchant, you do what you need to do to get your message across. Maybe you'll be lucky and get someone in the press to notice and then the word will spread even more.
3000 people know a lot of people. It's a networking effect.
-Russ
But starting last month (January 2002) the bandwidth used by the rest of campus increased in an unexpected and unexplained way.
Someone tell those guys at Berkeley to stop downloading so much freakin' PR0N!!!
-Russ
Kgnode?
Gnoked?
Gnodek?
Kdome?
Kgdneome?
or my favorite:
Gnuked.
-Russ
I'm sorry, but fuck you, you obnoxious arrogant AC. Don't be a fucking language lawyer. I'm talking about making one XML spec that pleases everyone as a registry. Yes, this would be a DTD, good for you.
By the way, you asshole, DTDs aren't mandatory. I can create and parse an XML document quite fine without knowing its DTD. Do YOU know XML?
What a fuck head.
-Russ
I totally disagree with this. We need a generic XML settings document that is both flexible and standard. Having 30 different DTDs is just making maintenence and support a nightmare.
If all the tools used the same settings file format (expressed in a DTD) then GUI tools, remote administration and general sanity would all benefit. I've got better things to do to have to learn a new file type every time I want to tweak a new tool.
We're talking about pretty basic stuff here. Setting names in a hierarchy with values. Using separate files and XML makes it both standard and much more flexible and recoverable which is one of the main complaints about the Registry. It's just too big and cumbersome.
-Russ
I agree - though I think that XML is a GREAT idea for *nix to use, the format is just too flexible to just say "use XML" and leave it at that. There needs to be some sort of standard way of using XML as a registry so it's not a complete nightmare.
;
/>
Other variations:
<DocumentRoot>
<setting name="someSetting">SettingValue</setting>
<someSetting>SettingValue</someSetting>
<someSection value="SettingName">settingValue</someSettin g>
<someSection>
<settings>
<settingGroupName>Test</settingGroupName& gt;
<setting name="SettingName" value="settingValue"
</settings>
</someSection>
</DocumentRoot>
Etc. The variations on hierarchies and values are endless and is my main beef with XML. It sometimes can be too flexible and people who are using XML (especially newbies) make it overly complex or not suffieciently complex enough for expansion. In other words, this needs to be thought out.
But again, XML is a good idea. I hope it gets adopted as a general mechanism in *nix, but not in some random way...
-Russ
1) Kill off KDE or Gnome. We only need one. Going with Gnome is my vote. Screw the technical debate, we just need one GUI that works.
/documents and /system and that's it. Regular users shouldn't be allowed to enter the system area.
2) Clean up the file system. There should be:
3) Make a list of all the applets included with Windows and Apple. Make perfect copies. Kill off all the rest of the crap - choice is complexity and complexity is bad.
4) Make it insanely easy to install. One click. Make applications standard to install (like install shield except without suckage).
5) Do the little things: Auto detect mountable drives like floppies and CDs. Printers. Digital Cameras. Make a list of things that DON'T have a driver and put in the back of the box.
6) Include OpenOffice, Mozilla and Evolution.
7) Put it all on one CD. Get Coca-cola to distribute the CDs free with every 2 liter.
8) See what Apple is doing with OSX? Do that. (And remember that Apple is a desktop enemy especially since they're using *nix. Every desktop that uses OSX isn't using Linux...
If I had a clue, I'd make a new distrib called "SuperSimpleLinux" and take over the desktop.
-Russ
It seems to me that with digital technology, the systems will be easier to upgrade in the future to whatever speed and resolution is possible by the latest tech.
So this first retrofit to digital is just the first big, difficult step - from there, each step in quality will be easier and easier because it'll be just like throwing a new board in your computer.
-Russ
I'm one of those people who really don't get assertions either. But regardless, from what I've read in order to use them, you have add a "-source 1.4" flag on your javac command in order to compile which I think is weird... I mean, if you're going to add a feature, you should add it and not start messing around with flags.
-Russ
Woohooo! Way to go Rob! Good luck to the both of you guys!
Wow. This suddenly reminded me that today is Valentine's day. I really need to get a life... (And THAT'S why my wife was giving me hints this morning...)
-Russ
Don't *sigh* it's annoying in real life and really fucking annoying on Slashdot.
Quote from Steve Jobs: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." And you know as well as I do that Jobs considers himself a great artist.
Saying that Apple didn't rip off Xerox is amazing Apple revisionist history. Didn't you see the interviews in "Triumph of the Nerds?" with the original Xerox guys? Jobs walked in, got a demo of the best stuff and walked out with all the most important concepts and the programmers were pissed. Whether Apple paid Xerox or not later it doesn't matter - Xerox didn't get nearly as much money as they should have for Apple's success. If Apple was still paying 10% of it's profits to Xerox, maybe, but if not they got ripped off.
And Microsoft licensed Java technology. Does that mean that they too didn't rip off Sun? Nope.
Stop being a freakin' language lawer. And stop SIGHING.
-Russ
Oh Jesus, you're an arrogant bastard.
There is no cross platform GUI system which uses native widgets and can maintain integruity across platforms.
That's my whole frigin' point, butthead. Sun needs to concentrate less on a perfect cross-platform GUI system and more on a functional system. Whether you say AWT is native or not (sure doesn't FEEL native) is besides the point. I used Eclipse's SWT as an example: "The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a widget set and graphics library integrated as much as possible with the native window system but with an OS-independent API. " Yeah it's definitely not the most in-the-lab perfect solution, but the SWT widgets are A LOT more responsive than SWING and available on the most popular platforms and is open enough to be implemented on others. Java is already a write-once, debug everywhere language so they might as well add a solution that makes the client apps usable. My point was that Java would be a lot farther along today if Sun had done this years ago instead of being stubborn dickheads like you.
Try to learn not to be an asshole and read the posts.
-Russ
No, I disagree.
.Net. Back in 1996 when Sun was promoting net development and JITs and the whole concept of a better programming language, Microsoft was still knee-deep in C++ and COM (or was it OLE then?). Six years later, Microsoft looks at the progress Sun has made, copies the most successful parts and bastardizes the rest (again).
Microsoft ripped off Sun the same way it ripped off Apple (who ripped off Xerox) when designing Windows. Yeah, you can say they helped develop the first apps for Mac, etc. etc. but the main idea was still Apple's who pushed the GUI concept and standardized the idea and then Microsoft came along six years later and launched Windows 3.0 based on those concepts developed at Apple.
Now Microsoft is doing the same with
Yes they added some good ideas - just like they did with Windows vs. Mac - but they still ripped off the general concepts and tech gains that were made from Java.
Sorry, a ripoff's a ripoff.
-Russ
I agree that .NET is a Java ripoff. I think, however, that Sun needs to rip off some good ideas from .NET.
.NET competitor.
For instance the WindowsForms which are natively compiled components for building client-side applications. If Microsoft didn't do this, the client apps would probably have the same runtime performance problems that AWT and Swing has.
I may be wrong, but I think that Java would be A LOT farther along today if it wasn't trying to be the purest cross platform language. I mean, the number of platforms out there are finite. Sun could write some native code for widgets for the most popular platforms, make the APIs open for people to implement on the less popular and Java apps would be much more competitive to anything Microsoft could come up with.
I think that IBM has something like this with their SWT libraries in the Eclipse IDE... I think Sun needs to embrace that tech and put it on all their supported platforms. Then they could write major apps like StarOffice in Java and still have the usability of a fast GUI. Add in your basic SOAP calls to the J2EE servers and you've got yourself a real
Just my opinion,
-Russ
1500+ books in your house? You counted them?
I'm always amazed with bibliophiles like you. I've got friends who won't bend the spine on a $5 paperback for fear of "ruining" the book. It's just a book! It's a container of information, that's all! Right now they're cheap, flexible and easy to produce, but this is changing. Like it or not traditional books are going away. Just like newspapers and magazines. The problem right now is that it's just not as economical to produce an ebook as a regular one (because of the price and tech of the readers). However if a major author like Rawlings decided to publish a major title as an ebook, suddenly the economics would change big-time.
Just because you kill a tree and throw some ink on it does not legitimize the words contained within in any way. You sound like the Olympics people who won't let the internet cover the games because they're not legitimate sources of news - probably because no plants have to die in order for people to read the words. And didn't you read the story? One of the booksellers interviewed said very clearly that without Harry Potter, they would have gone out of business. You can ROTFL all you want, but it's a fact that books are a slim-margin business. When a decent eBook reader DOES come, booksellers will be wiped out within several years.
So, sorry to break your heart, but eBooks are coming. Right now the tech isn't there, but it will be soon enough. And maybe you'll hold on to your "real" books until you die, but your kids will be shaking their head and laughing at you for sure.
Just my thoughts...
-Russ
Most of the popular books out there are available...
Yes, but mostly only books for geeks (sci-fi and programming-books) and only in English. The thing that people don't think about is using eBooks for learning another language.
My wife is Spanish and I've loaded up her Palm with a bunch of English language books for her to learn from and it's great - she can easily copy and paste a word she doesn't know over to the dictionary app and in an second know the word's meaning. This is a lot better than reading a real book in a foreign tongue where you have to put the book down (losing your place) get the dictionary out (or the Palm) find the word, then retrieve the book again, etc. It makes reading a lot less enjoyable the old way and a lot more fun the new way. I'm waiting for (and may write myself) a Palm text reader with integrated multi-language dictionary. It's awesome to learn from. Multi-media would be great too - if you could just click on a word in another language and have it pronounced and defined out loud, that would be great. No need to stop the flow...
Anyways, I've found 1 (count it) pirated eBook in Spanish using Gnutella that I've read on my Palm for ME to improve my Spanish... I really think the Spanish eBook pirates need to get cracking...
-Russ
In the 80s in Lynn, Mass. there was this program where smart elementary school kids were taken out of class once a week and went to another school across town and taught advanced studies. For example, I remember we learned about prime numbers in the 4th grade. The other thing that was there were a bunch of TRS-80 color computers on which were taught programming. It was great. It was BASIC and simple, but the things I learned in those classes in 4th and 5th and 6th grades I still use every day.
Even though I went through high-school without a computer, as I got into college and got my first 286, it was intuitive how to get it running. Going to school for design and journalism, I was always the guy who could get the Mac networking working or recover from some error. And now I'm a programmer having switched to technical consulting after college to pay the rent and "magically" having the aptitude to do so.
My point is that the technical training I received as a child was as valuable to me in my life as any third language I might have learned or some musical training, and it was much, much more useful than "knitting a pair of socks with yarn I dyed myself" like that kid in the story. I think this will only continue to be true in the future.
-Russ
If anyone is reading this and has any idea what Project Summit was, please inform me, because beyond having spent a bunch of time in the program, me and my parents don't know much about it or even if it's still going on today... Thanks.
LOL.
Hey, some of us Americans have read "In a Sunburned Country," watched the Olympics and seen that movie where you all got blown up in Turkey during WWII... relax.
I mean, Australia's a very imporant country. What would 2 a.m. be without Australian Rules Football and Insanely Violent Rugby? Fosters? Outback Steakhouse? Priscilla, Ballroom and Muriel (the holy trinity of Australian filmmaking)? These are all important additions to life.
I did get laughed at heartily once by asking how long the ferry ride between Australia and New Zealand was, but hey... What's the state capital of Louisiana? Didn't think so... And there's no fucking way anyone on Earth can tell the difference between the Aussie and Kiwi accents. Sorry it's true. (Though normally the Kiwi's are the ones to get nuts about this not you guys... Sorta the way Canadians get in Europe - the kiwis need a national symbol they can tatoo to their foreheads like the 51st state does with that leaf thing. But I digress...)
Anyways, being an American abroad living here in Spain there's nothing that cheeses me off more than someone calling Americans ignorant or arrogent in general because of one idiot's remarks (like pResident Bush, for example...). There's 280 MILLION Americans and we're a Democracy (unlike Australia) and have been so for 200+ years. That means that we're free to be idiots if we want to. And since there's so many of us, there's a high percentage you're going to meet them or read their remarks on Slashdot. But in general, show some fucking respect.
And finally, if you're going to swear, get it right. That guy was an asshole (like I am right now), not a cunt.
-Russ
P.S. It's pronounced "zee".
My main problem with the word "unAustralian" is that it's not English. Don't they have spell checkers in Australia?
I understand that the popularity of eToys, eBay, iPlanet, etc. may have this sort of thing common in trademarks, but in regular English, we like to use a dash between the "un" and whatever noun we're un-ing. For example, "un-American." Except of course if the term you're negating is generic, then you just smoosh [1] it all together like "uncircumcised."
I know I'm just an American and have little to no control over the Queen's English, but it might be nice for journalists of all nations to agree to some basics. Since the spelling of color, labor and aluminum will never be agreed upon, they might as well try to focus on general grammar, hey?
-Russ
[1] Smoosh isn't a real word.
[2] It's a joke... smile.
Now a weird thing is that some of this stuff is already available.
I'm an American living in Spain and I recently bought box sets of the first four "Friends" seasons on DVD to watch with my wife. They were just sitting there in the DVD section of a big department store here. (Subtitles and various soundtracks make DVDs perfect viewing for bilingual couples like us... and hell, let's watch tonight's episode in Polish!)
It seems that you can't get these box sets in the U.S., only here in Europe. You can, however, go to Amazon.co.uk and see that all of the seasons up to #8 are available (a little net research and I found out that season #9 is being aired now in the U.S. and that Rachael is pregnant. Oh no! I've been out of the country too long!).
Who knows if they'll ever sell these DVDs in the U.S. It basically seems that Warner Bros. is relying on country codes to keep U.S. viewers from getting all of the shows on DVD, thus forcing you to watch the repeats at 7 p.m. on channel 25 or whatever your local UHF/Cable licensee is... I guess they don't do that sort of thing here (cable not existing here in Spain) so they just sell the DVDs.
Random info: The weird thing about these box-set DVDs is that they are double-sided and only contain 3 episodes per side except for the last which contains 4 episodes on one side (for a total of 25 episodes per season). My best guess is that all the soundtracks and subtitles bloat the shows so they have to do this to fit it all in.
-Russ
It's called a headset. It comes with it for free. ALSO, the Treo seems to have some sort of "personal speaker phone" capabilities which means that as you're using the phone you can hear your caller and continue talking to them.
How about READING the freakin' article? It's not like I knew this before or had to search for it, it's in the second paragraph down.
-Russ