PalmOS 5: Exactly! That's the #1 reason I'm not even considering one. #2 would be the fact that I already have an N760.:-)
Resolution: The included Hi-Res Assist converts text-heavy apps to the hi-res fonts, and pixel-doubles bitmaps, so most apps benefit automagically. And there are plenty of 320x320-aware apps out there now. 320x480 mode is another issue altogether. The only app that supports it out-of-the-box is PhotoStand?! Missed that boat. I wonder if they ever consuslted with HandEra on their virtual Graffiti support?
Battery life: Ugh. Runs contrary to the Zen of Palm. I guess that's what you get when you push a Dragonball that far. ARM-based chips are supposed to be better at power management, as long as the operating system doesn't squander the gains. *cough*PocketPC*cough*
Memory Stick/ATRAC3: I've combined these because I've lost count of the number of times I've had to clue-stick someone over this. It's smaller than all but SD, only fractionally more expensive than CF, cheaper than SD, no more difficult to license than consortium-controlled formats, and only CF is available in larger volumes (> 128MB). And, for the umpteenth time, you don't need MagicGate or ATRAC3 to listen to music! I repeat: You don't need MagicGate or ATRAC3 to listen to music! Dock, run MSImport, copy MP3s to/PALM/PROGRAMS/MSAUDIO, and enjoy. That's it. MagicGate is all but dead. ATRAC3 is back on MiniDisc, where it belongs.
Accessories: Sony's betwixt and between on that front. For Q1 2002, Sony leapfrogged Compaq and HP for #3 in handheld sales. So there's demand for periphials, right? Not exactly. Sony is still way behind Palm and Handspring. So they're outselling the best PocketPCs, but way behind on PalmOS. The fact that they switched connectors between the S/N-series and the T/NR-series didn't help. I think that, once Sony can convince accessory makers that the T/NR connector is the future, the market will open up.
How's this for a ringing endorsement of Microsoft's products?
[Madnick] showed the judge a diagram that depicted Windows as a system made up of dozens of oddly shaped, interconnected pieces.
Madnick said the diagram showed how Windows was like a "house of cards" that could collapse if any of the pieces were removed.
Mind you, this was a witness for Microsoft. Amazing. Microsoft is so arrogant, it can claim gross incompetence to avoid incrimination, and still look forward to getting away with it.
SO, you spend all of the endless amounts of cash necessary to replace this entire pile of equipment and media...
Here's the dirty little secret Big Media doesn't want you to hear: You can't replace the entire pile! Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why:
The Disney Demand trick: What's to stop those media companies from manipulating the market by arbitrarily offering and removing titles? That's how Disney has operated for years. That's how Lucas will sell Eps. 4-6. That's how the entire system will work once they have the consuming public by the balls.
Your camcorder: This is the real killer. Imagine all those videos you shot of little Johnny. The day you brought him home from the hosipital, his first word, his first steps, all those holidays and little league games and recitals, graduation, his wedding, the day he brought your first grandchild home from the hospital.... All of it hidden behind a preprogrammed FBI/Interpol warning screen because your Federal Issue television can't tell the difference between your child's life and a bootleg copy of "Howard The Duck". Of course, you can get it transferred, for a price. Which means that you'll be paying a license fee for your own content.
I leave you with this frightening unintended(?) side effect. In a worst-case scenario, the United States government will be responsible for approving the manufacture and sale of cameras. Orwell is already spinning in his grave. This should have him redlining a Formula One engine.
Due to it's ability to pause live programming, a real PVR records all the time, 24/7.
Are you sure about that? I thought TiVo handled the "spin-up" time by running everything through a buffer. You can observe this by tuning the same channel on both the TiVo and a regular TV. Or just have a friend watching the same Pirate game as you yell "Base hit!" while you're watching the pitcher's leg kick.:-) Anyway, is it buffering from the HD or memory?
And if you roll back the clock to when PS2 was no older than XBox is now, you'd see that only one of the super hot PS2 games you listed was available: SSX.
Right now, Microsoft is in the same boat Sony was in on PlayStation's launch: No franchises. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog and Sega Sports. Nintendo has Metroid (more off than on), Zelda (more on than off), and Mario (which has been on for close to 20 years!).
Sony did it right. They let the franchises build themselves, as Nintendo and Sega did. Compare this to, say, NEC or Atari. Remember Bonk? Or Trevor McFur? While Bonk games did well with TG16 owners, he didn't get people to buy TG16s. And Jaguar was stillborn in the first place, so McFur was an excercise in futility. And both were ripoffs of Nintendo. (Bonk->Mario, McFur->Starfox)
I think Microsoft was trying to promote Abe and Munch as the signature franchise way before launch, but they backed off as Day One came closer and closer. I'm not sure if they learned from NEC and Atari a little late, or if they simply realized that cute, cartoon characters like rodents or blue-collar Italians make better mascots than over-detailed, creepy looking aliens. And don't forget the babe factor. Lara Croft, Joanna Dark,...Cortana?:-)
I hate it when people say this, but Mod Parent Up.
I'm amazed by the number of/. readers, journalists*, and analysts (who are paid big bucks to understand this industry!) who have convienently forgotten that Sony had a head start of almost a year. I know MS bashing is the internet's National Pasttime, but at least pick on them for something they've actually done wrong.
*: It's spelled "journalists", but it's pronounced "press-release-repeaters".
Does buying a PEG-NR70V mean having to re-purchase all the accessories?
Most of the accessories listed on sonystyle are also compatible with the T-series. Unfortunately, T- and NR-series accessories are not interchangeable with the N- or S-series. Rather like pre- and post-Universal Connector Palm devices.
I noticed that SONY has separate Memory Sticks for music and data. Which does the PEG-NR70V require to play MP3s? And does it actually play MP3s or require them to be converted to SONY's own ATRAC3 format?
In reality, it's separate sticks for ATRAC3 and (World + Dog - ATRAC3). I believe the NR-series is like the N-series, which means it will will work with both ATRAC3 on MagicGate and MP3 on Memory Stick, with no conversion necessary. Interestingly enough, sonystyle always listed both MagicGate and Memory Stick as accessories for the N-series, but only list Memory Stick for the NR. The only other devices that ever required MagicGate were their Network Walkman ATRAC3 players. Maybe they've finally realized that nobody will voluntarily choose Digital Rights Management when given an unencumbered alternative.
...does a 66MHz CPU have enough cycles to play MP3s and run an application in the foreground?
No. That's why N- and NR-series Clies use a separate DSP for audio and gMovie playback.
OK, wise guy. Give yourself 30 days, and see how many of these groups do anything worthy of praise. While you're doing that, I'll keep an eye out for flying pigs.
So when Sony admitted that they had invented a fake reviewer to generate favorable quotes for movie ads, did you write a venomous missive to your local newspaper, calling them hypocrites for a good review of "Black Hawk Down"? Because that is real journalistic integrity. They didn't let the misconduct of Sony's marketroids alter their opinion of the film. (Hypothetically speaking. For all I know, your local rag hated "Black Hawk Down".)
I don't seem to recall a post stating that all the editors got together and agreed that Vivendi/Blizzard are a bunch of soulless corporate bastards, and shall never get good press from Slashdot again. (Come to think of it, I don't seem to recall a post stating that all the editors got together for any reason. Unless a lan party at CowboyNeal's place went horribly wrong, and they're all sworn to secrecy. <g>)
Slashdot has no collective editorial opinion. It's quite possible that, while Michael loathes Blizzard for daring invoke the DMCA to squelch an Open Source project, Rob may agree with Blizzard that bnetd will let punks war3z them out of business. I don't know that for sure, but it illustrates the point that the editors are individuals. Each one posts what he thinks is important, and let's the reader make his or her own judgements.
Do I really want to ruin this AC's day by telling him/her that Slashdot is a diverse group of people, each with their own principles and opinions?
Slashdot's editors are free to post whatever they think is worthy. If that means CmdrTaco and Hemos post a review of WC3 while Michael reports on the crushing of bnetd, so be it. Face it, it's better this way. If it were just Rob & Jeff's Droolworthy Games, or Michael's Anti-Microsoft Rant of the Month, the site would have gotten stuffed a long time ago.
<god-forbid>The next big terror group thinks American media is the New World Order, and nukes Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta.</god-forbid>
I'm over-simplifying by picking on the home cities of the big 5 news networks, but it illustrates the point of having an emergency network: A series of contingencies to route around damage to the communications infrastructure.
Also, the purpose of the EBS is to quickly preempt regular programming to deliver news. Do you really think the government needed it on 9/11, when every network that had an affiliated news channel switched to that channel, even if it wasn't American? I spent that evening switching between CBS, BBC (on Discovery) and CBC (on Home Shopping Network, of all places). And I watched the CBS coverage on my local (Pittsburgh) UPN station, since the CBS affiliate was staying local to concentrate on the crash in Shanksville. The infrastructure did it's job without government intervention.
Okay maybe that's an exaggeration, but someone else posted that it will be sql server type file system or a database RAW partition. If you ever used sybase you'll need the RAM RAM and CPU for these new features....
I'm not worried about RAM and CPU. There's plenty of spare timeslices to go around. It's the disk throughput that worries me. I don't anticipate blazing speed from an ATA-100 hard drive. For this to work we've got to hope that Ultra-160 SCSI gets dirt cheap, Serial ATA gets faster, and/or Microsoft writes some obscenely efficient FS code.
I thought the industry trend was to pda type devices. What happened with their Mira device?
Mira is a dumb terminal. It just speaks GDI+ instead of ESC codes, and uses wireless connections and pen input.
...I'm not going to lose my job and starve so someone lesser than me can have knowledge.
If you don't want to lose your job and starve, I suggest that you go get some more knowledge yourself. Of course, if everyone was like you, you wouldn't have any to begin with, let alone be in a position to get more.
I would consider someone who seeks and shares knowledge to be greater than someone who selfishly hoards it for their own gain. That is the difference between enlightenment and oppression.
Thank you so much for providing that textbook example of elitism in action. (/me shovels some more troll food in the trough.)
If you're only pulling down $30K because world+dog is now savvy enough to crank out Java code, it's your own damn fault. Not because you taught them your trade, but because you didn't learn another trade yourself. It's called complacency. Look it up.
It just has the ability to play MP3's so that you can hear that one or two songs you really like when you're waiting for a meeting or between classes if you're a student. With the limited amount of memory available to PDA's, even with 128MB memory sticks, it just doesn't qualify as a real MP3 player.
That's the usage pattern I've developed. I have a 64 MB stick full of low-bit "emergency" MP3s that don't suck and can drown out Muzak. And remember when 64-128MB did qualify as a real MP3 player? Damn you, Archos!:-)
I do agree with you that the memory stick is a very expensive format (about $1.20 per MB). It's very convenient since it's also used by a whole lot of other devices, but still, they have to be sony made, which sucks.
Actually, Sandisk and Lexar are manufacturing their own sticks now. So far, they're not all that much cheaper, but you can save a few bucks here and there. And the price per MB is on a sliding scale. Small sticks hit a floor, probably due to manufacturing costs. I just went to sonystyle.com to get some prices, and 8 and 16 MB sticks are both $24.95! The sweet spot is at 64 MB, where the price drops to US$49.95, or $0.78 per MB.
Or am I the only one who had a little deja vu with the "speeding through three dimensional traffic patterns with futuristic cars, followed by vertical plunge shot?"
And to top it off, the car they were in was yellow. Did anyone notice a checker pattern?:-) I'm waiting for this scene later on:
Yoda: Mmm. Great distance he has travelled to be here.
Obi-Wan: Yeah, I know. I was there when he took off.
And what's up with the "I hate flying" schtick? Was that Ewan MacGregor or Woody Allen? Looks like typical Lucas: Lame dialogue framing kick-ass battle sequences. I'm not looking forward to the Kenobi/Skywalker buddy-cop scenes. But it should be interesting to see the political conflict between the Jedi and Palpatine. (ObRipoff: Shades of the Alliance and Pres. Clark in Babylon 5?)
Preferences only allows you to ban domains from What's Related. To remove the tab entirely, open your sidebar, click the Tabs dropdown, then select Customize Sidebar.... If What's Related is in the Tabs in Sidebar list, remove it.
I'm amazed nobody's gone for the Monty Python parrot sketch reference.
This operating system is no more! It has ceased to Be!
I figured The Register would, if no one else. And we could have someone from the OpenBeOS team playing the shopkeeper. [Taps bottom of cage] "There! It just moved!"
If done right you could have one hell of a series about the remnants of humanity trying to piece itself back together.
I think that's where he's going. In that post, he made a point of mentioning how the Renaissance grew out of the Black Plague. He sees the Big Death as a similar inflection point in history. This either spurs a new era of growth, or marks the beginning of the end.
Which is why I have high hopes for this series. Plenty of direct-to-video MST3K fodder has been produced about a declining post-apocalypse. I would expect JMS to have a higher standard. After all, we did tell the Vorlons to bugger off.:-) And I, for one, am glad it's on Showtime, and not on Sci-Fi, TNT, or some other commercial-fed network. Pay-TV networks are more willing to take risks, and I can't imagine JMS accepting the deal if it didn't come with the sort of control he expects.
You have to be careful when speaking of C++ in VS.NET. You see, there's C++ and Managed C++.
C++ is C++. As close to ANSI/ISO as Microsoft feels like this week. All the wonderful toys you had in VC++ 6 are here, including multiple inheritance. There's only one catch: As is, you can't write CLR-compliant classes with raw C++.
For that, you need Managed C++. By designating a class as managed, you tell the compiler that this class is to be managed by the CLR. That means it will be garbage collected. It also means that CLR type compliance must be enforced on your public interface. The class and it's public members must all be, or derive from, CLR types. Templates are strictly verboten, and while you can implement multiple interfaces, you're restricted to single inheritance.
Note the emphasis on "public interface." If a class is assembly-private, you can use language-specific features to your heart's content. And class-private members of an assembly-public class can still use non-CLR types. For C++, this means, among other things, templates and classes built with multiple inheritance. This is not a big deal for VB.NET or C#, since they're purpose-built for the CLR. This allows libraries from other languages, including C++, to play nice in the same framework.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the.NET Framework. Unfortunately, it appears that the author of this ZDNet puff piece fell for it.
I think what she's trying to say, in a rather roundabout, "let me adjust my tin foil hat" sort of way, is that there's no legal precedent for this situation. Is there an implicit patent license when patented material is contributed to an Open Source project by the patent holder? Look at it this way:
Ximian adopts X11 license for parts of Mono
Intel contributes to X11-licensed parts, including Intel-patented code
Gnome 4.0 is converted completely to Mono
Gnome acheives World Domination
Intel calls in its marker on Ximian and Gnome, demanding royalties for that Intel-patented code
Everyone gets dragged into court
Miguel stands up in court and says, "Of course, there's Intel-patented code in Mono. Intel put it there in the first place!"
Intel responds, "Yep. We did."
So what happens now? Will the judge have a sudden flash of common sense and tell Intel where to stick it's legal briefs? Or will Intel's high-priced landsharks invoke some strange combination of DMCA, SSSCA, the Patriot Act, and a rider on some farm subsidy legislation to swing the case their way?
It is a valid concern, and I would hate to see projects as significant as Mono and Gnome be taken down by it. But I think Tina is being a bit too alarmist.
OT: This is what Slashdot's email auto-obfuscator generated for my email address:
krussell@
mEEEsa.com minus threevowels
Hey, Taco! I do not work for Jar-Jar Binks!:-)
Company releases new software. Film at 11
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 2
Lots of.NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.
In other news, Motor Trend covered the 2002 North American International Auto Show with two sentences: "Cobo Hall was filled with cars. Some of them were brand new."
Let me get this straight. Microsoft is, for better or worse, the most significant software company in the world. They have just released a profoundly significant update to their development environment. The computer trade media is paying more than just lip service to it all. And Michael somehow thinks it's media bias, simply because it's a company he doesn't like?
It's 9:35 pm EST, and Windows Update seems to have fallen off the DNS. Interesting timing, that. Is it just my ISP? Microsoft forget to pay its bills, again? Or is something more sinister at work?
Maybe it's just me, but my inner conspiracy theorist is telling me that someone evil enough to start an IM worm using a patchable exploit could also be evil enough to cut off the first place people would go to look for that patch.
"Hey, I am doing nothing wrong, and if it helps catch people that are, so much the better." Well, the problem starts when innocent people are accused of doing something by mistake.
Don't forget the possibility of some influential entity deciding that perfectly legal activities should be criminalized to protect their interests.
Slashdot Mirror
My $0.02:
How's this for a ringing endorsement of Microsoft's products?
Emphasis mine. Source: ZDNet: Microsoft's MIT prof gets grilled by states
Mind you, this was a witness for Microsoft. Amazing. Microsoft is so arrogant, it can claim gross incompetence to avoid incrimination, and still look forward to getting away with it.
Here's the dirty little secret Big Media doesn't want you to hear: You can't replace the entire pile! Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why:
I leave you with this frightening unintended(?) side effect. In a worst-case scenario, the United States government will be responsible for approving the manufacture and sale of cameras. Orwell is already spinning in his grave. This should have him redlining a Formula One engine.
Are you sure about that? I thought TiVo handled the "spin-up" time by running everything through a buffer. You can observe this by tuning the same channel on both the TiVo and a regular TV. Or just have a friend watching the same Pirate game as you yell "Base hit!" while you're watching the pitcher's leg kick. :-) Anyway, is it buffering from the HD or memory?
And if you roll back the clock to when PS2 was no older than XBox is now, you'd see that only one of the super hot PS2 games you listed was available: SSX.
Right now, Microsoft is in the same boat Sony was in on PlayStation's launch: No franchises. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog and Sega Sports. Nintendo has Metroid (more off than on), Zelda (more on than off), and Mario (which has been on for close to 20 years!).
Sony did it right. They let the franchises build themselves, as Nintendo and Sega did. Compare this to, say, NEC or Atari. Remember Bonk? Or Trevor McFur? While Bonk games did well with TG16 owners, he didn't get people to buy TG16s. And Jaguar was stillborn in the first place, so McFur was an excercise in futility. And both were ripoffs of Nintendo. (Bonk->Mario, McFur->Starfox)
I think Microsoft was trying to promote Abe and Munch as the signature franchise way before launch, but they backed off as Day One came closer and closer. I'm not sure if they learned from NEC and Atari a little late, or if they simply realized that cute, cartoon characters like rodents or blue-collar Italians make better mascots than over-detailed, creepy looking aliens. And don't forget the babe factor. Lara Croft, Joanna Dark, ...Cortana? :-)
I hate it when people say this, but Mod Parent Up.
I'm amazed by the number of /. readers, journalists*, and analysts (who are paid big bucks to understand this industry!) who have convienently forgotten that Sony had a head start of almost a year. I know MS bashing is the internet's National Pasttime, but at least pick on them for something they've actually done wrong.
*: It's spelled "journalists", but it's pronounced "press-release-repeaters".
Most of the accessories listed on sonystyle are also compatible with the T-series. Unfortunately, T- and NR-series accessories are not interchangeable with the N- or S-series. Rather like pre- and post-Universal Connector Palm devices.
In reality, it's separate sticks for ATRAC3 and (World + Dog - ATRAC3). I believe the NR-series is like the N-series, which means it will will work with both ATRAC3 on MagicGate and MP3 on Memory Stick, with no conversion necessary. Interestingly enough, sonystyle always listed both MagicGate and Memory Stick as accessories for the N-series, but only list Memory Stick for the NR. The only other devices that ever required MagicGate were their Network Walkman ATRAC3 players. Maybe they've finally realized that nobody will voluntarily choose Digital Rights Management when given an unencumbered alternative.
No. That's why N- and NR-series Clies use a separate DSP for audio and gMovie playback.
OK, wise guy. Give yourself 30 days, and see how many of these groups do anything worthy of praise. While you're doing that, I'll keep an eye out for flying pigs.
So when Sony admitted that they had invented a fake reviewer to generate favorable quotes for movie ads, did you write a venomous missive to your local newspaper, calling them hypocrites for a good review of "Black Hawk Down"? Because that is real journalistic integrity. They didn't let the misconduct of Sony's marketroids alter their opinion of the film. (Hypothetically speaking. For all I know, your local rag hated "Black Hawk Down".)
I don't seem to recall a post stating that all the editors got together and agreed that Vivendi/Blizzard are a bunch of soulless corporate bastards, and shall never get good press from Slashdot again. (Come to think of it, I don't seem to recall a post stating that all the editors got together for any reason. Unless a lan party at CowboyNeal's place went horribly wrong, and they're all sworn to secrecy. <g>)
Slashdot has no collective editorial opinion. It's quite possible that, while Michael loathes Blizzard for daring invoke the DMCA to squelch an Open Source project, Rob may agree with Blizzard that bnetd will let punks war3z them out of business. I don't know that for sure, but it illustrates the point that the editors are individuals. Each one posts what he thinks is important, and let's the reader make his or her own judgements.
Do I really want to ruin this AC's day by telling him/her that Slashdot is a diverse group of people, each with their own principles and opinions ?
Slashdot's editors are free to post whatever they think is worthy. If that means CmdrTaco and Hemos post a review of WC3 while Michael reports on the crushing of bnetd, so be it. Face it, it's better this way. If it were just Rob & Jeff's Droolworthy Games, or Michael's Anti-Microsoft Rant of the Month, the site would have gotten stuffed a long time ago.
<god-forbid>The next big terror group thinks American media is the New World Order, and nukes Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta.</god-forbid>
I'm over-simplifying by picking on the home cities of the big 5 news networks, but it illustrates the point of having an emergency network: A series of contingencies to route around damage to the communications infrastructure.
Also, the purpose of the EBS is to quickly preempt regular programming to deliver news. Do you really think the government needed it on 9/11, when every network that had an affiliated news channel switched to that channel, even if it wasn't American? I spent that evening switching between CBS, BBC (on Discovery) and CBC (on Home Shopping Network, of all places). And I watched the CBS coverage on my local (Pittsburgh) UPN station, since the CBS affiliate was staying local to concentrate on the crash in Shanksville. The infrastructure did it's job without government intervention.
What, you mean you've never whipped up some wonderfully elegant Perl code at four in the morning?
Oh, um... uh.... Neither have I! Yeah, that's it. Of course not. Neither have... I. [whimper] I hate my life.
I'm not worried about RAM and CPU. There's plenty of spare timeslices to go around. It's the disk throughput that worries me. I don't anticipate blazing speed from an ATA-100 hard drive. For this to work we've got to hope that Ultra-160 SCSI gets dirt cheap, Serial ATA gets faster, and/or Microsoft writes some obscenely efficient FS code.
Mira is a dumb terminal. It just speaks GDI+ instead of ESC codes, and uses wireless connections and pen input.
If you don't want to lose your job and starve, I suggest that you go get some more knowledge yourself. Of course, if everyone was like you, you wouldn't have any to begin with, let alone be in a position to get more.
I would consider someone who seeks and shares knowledge to be greater than someone who selfishly hoards it for their own gain. That is the difference between enlightenment and oppression.
Thank you so much for providing that textbook example of elitism in action. (/me shovels some more troll food in the trough.)
If you're only pulling down $30K because world+dog is now savvy enough to crank out Java code, it's your own damn fault. Not because you taught them your trade, but because you didn't learn another trade yourself. It's called complacency. Look it up.
That's the usage pattern I've developed. I have a 64 MB stick full of low-bit "emergency" MP3s that don't suck and can drown out Muzak. And remember when 64-128MB did qualify as a real MP3 player? Damn you, Archos! :-)
Actually, Sandisk and Lexar are manufacturing their own sticks now. So far, they're not all that much cheaper, but you can save a few bucks here and there. And the price per MB is on a sliding scale. Small sticks hit a floor, probably due to manufacturing costs. I just went to sonystyle.com to get some prices, and 8 and 16 MB sticks are both $24.95! The sweet spot is at 64 MB, where the price drops to US$49.95, or $0.78 per MB.
And to top it off, the car they were in was yellow. Did anyone notice a checker pattern? :-) I'm waiting for this scene later on:
Yoda: Mmm. Great distance he has travelled to be here.
Obi-Wan: Yeah, I know. I was there when he took off.
And what's up with the "I hate flying" schtick? Was that Ewan MacGregor or Woody Allen? Looks like typical Lucas: Lame dialogue framing kick-ass battle sequences. I'm not looking forward to the Kenobi/Skywalker buddy-cop scenes. But it should be interesting to see the political conflict between the Jedi and Palpatine. (ObRipoff: Shades of the Alliance and Pres. Clark in Babylon 5?)
Preferences only allows you to ban domains from What's Related. To remove the tab entirely, open your sidebar, click the Tabs dropdown, then select Customize Sidebar.... If What's Related is in the Tabs in Sidebar list, remove it.
I'm amazed nobody's gone for the Monty Python parrot sketch reference.
I figured The Register would, if no one else. And we could have someone from the OpenBeOS team playing the shopkeeper. [Taps bottom of cage] "There! It just moved!"
I think that's where he's going. In that post, he made a point of mentioning how the Renaissance grew out of the Black Plague. He sees the Big Death as a similar inflection point in history. This either spurs a new era of growth, or marks the beginning of the end.
Which is why I have high hopes for this series. Plenty of direct-to-video MST3K fodder has been produced about a declining post-apocalypse. I would expect JMS to have a higher standard. After all, we did tell the Vorlons to bugger off. :-) And I, for one, am glad it's on Showtime, and not on Sci-Fi, TNT, or some other commercial-fed network. Pay-TV networks are more willing to take risks, and I can't imagine JMS accepting the deal if it didn't come with the sort of control he expects.
You have to be careful when speaking of C++ in VS.NET. You see, there's C++ and Managed C++.
C++ is C++. As close to ANSI/ISO as Microsoft feels like this week. All the wonderful toys you had in VC++ 6 are here, including multiple inheritance. There's only one catch: As is, you can't write CLR-compliant classes with raw C++.
For that, you need Managed C++. By designating a class as managed, you tell the compiler that this class is to be managed by the CLR. That means it will be garbage collected. It also means that CLR type compliance must be enforced on your public interface. The class and it's public members must all be, or derive from, CLR types. Templates are strictly verboten, and while you can implement multiple interfaces, you're restricted to single inheritance.
Note the emphasis on "public interface." If a class is assembly-private, you can use language-specific features to your heart's content. And class-private members of an assembly-public class can still use non-CLR types. For C++, this means, among other things, templates and classes built with multiple inheritance. This is not a big deal for VB.NET or C#, since they're purpose-built for the CLR. This allows libraries from other languages, including C++, to play nice in the same framework.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the .NET Framework. Unfortunately, it appears that the author of this ZDNet puff piece fell for it.
I think what she's trying to say, in a rather roundabout, "let me adjust my tin foil hat" sort of way, is that there's no legal precedent for this situation. Is there an implicit patent license when patented material is contributed to an Open Source project by the patent holder? Look at it this way:
- Ximian adopts X11 license for parts of Mono
- Intel contributes to X11-licensed parts, including Intel-patented code
- Gnome 4.0 is converted completely to Mono
- Gnome acheives World Domination
- Intel calls in its marker on Ximian and Gnome, demanding royalties for that Intel-patented code
- Everyone gets dragged into court
- Miguel stands up in court and says, "Of course, there's Intel-patented code in Mono. Intel put it there in the first place!"
- Intel responds, "Yep. We did."
So what happens now? Will the judge have a sudden flash of common sense and tell Intel where to stick it's legal briefs? Or will Intel's high-priced landsharks invoke some strange combination of DMCA, SSSCA, the Patriot Act, and a rider on some farm subsidy legislation to swing the case their way?It is a valid concern, and I would hate to see projects as significant as Mono and Gnome be taken down by it. But I think Tina is being a bit too alarmist.
OT: This is what Slashdot's email auto-obfuscator generated for my email address:
Hey, Taco! I do not work for Jar-Jar Binks!In other news, Motor Trend covered the 2002 North American International Auto Show with two sentences: "Cobo Hall was filled with cars. Some of them were brand new."
Let me get this straight. Microsoft is, for better or worse, the most significant software company in the world. They have just released a profoundly significant update to their development environment. The computer trade media is paying more than just lip service to it all. And Michael somehow thinks it's media bias, simply because it's a company he doesn't like?
It's not a "total coincidence". It's news!
It's 9:35 pm EST, and Windows Update seems to have fallen off the DNS. Interesting timing, that. Is it just my ISP? Microsoft forget to pay its bills, again? Or is something more sinister at work?
Maybe it's just me, but my inner conspiracy theorist is telling me that someone evil enough to start an IM worm using a patchable exploit could also be evil enough to cut off the first place people would go to look for that patch.
Don't forget the possibility of some influential entity deciding that perfectly legal activities should be criminalized to protect their interests.