Great, I have been waiting SO LONG for something I can read documents and books on without having to carry around a stack of documents and books.
Now, what's it say here?
You can change the font size of your text to suit your own reading comfort. (Format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE FORK???
Write and comment in articles (format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE [utensil]???!?!?!?!?!
I mean WHAT???
Sabotaging your own product like that is supposed to be the exclusing domain of Microsoft and maybe Sony. Now every small startup's jumping up on the 'make a product that's expressly designed so that others will actively desire to avoid using it' bandwagon.
Seriously.
Well, I guess I won't be buying one of those. I don't know or care exactly what DRM would prevent me from making notes on the text I'm reading. There's no real justification, but doubtless in some idiotic sense it counts as 'distributing a modified version'. Maybe nothing I would ever want to read would decide to be un-zoomable. But you know what? Why the fork should I even have to think about it for a second??
I especially like the 'not you and me' thing. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know what he's talking about, it doesn't matter that he's semi-literate, it doesn't matter that he is well above that threshold of wealth beyond which you simply don't have to know how things work or how to make them work; what matters is that he's on our side, the side of ordinary folks like you and me, the consumers.
I feel a warm fuzzy feeling. I'd vote for this guy.
SCO _have_ made their case. Specifically, they've effectively gone "our case is extremely weak and you should throw it out."
They can do this because their aim was to encourage investment in SCO (both via share buying and directly from coMpanieS willing to support anything that might weaken IBM), not to win a case.
If only all litigants were so forthright. Three cheers for these latter-day Washingtons!
1 -- Buy hardware from a company whose business model consists of selling brand hardware with particularly high margins. 2 -- High margins != high price. High margins > high price. High margins = high price + low costs. 3 -- ??? 4 -- Profit! For Apple!
This is my first time ever with the 'Profit!' cliche and I promise it will probably be my last.
Dude, I especially confined myself to _factual_ errors in the _first paragraph alone_, which if I say so myself shows hella restraint! I didn't even do anything with the 'Every state has an official religion' line! And _this_ is the thanks I get? I don't even get a rebuttal??
No wonder nobody invites you to those wild History Parties that are going on in your town. Oh, they didn't tell you about those? Oopsie! Anyway I gotta go... Svetlana is playing the part of Catherine the Great tonight...
In the Middle Ages, the states in Europe were relatively weak next to the Catholic Church;
Well, it varied; Henry of England managed to start his own competing church just in order to remarry and Philip of France plundered the Church whenever he needed a buck.
the Vatican maintained the Empire Rome had left behind.
If you mean the actual roman empire, it was of course Greek Orthodox and maintained (spiritually at least) by the Patriarchate until being overrun by Islamic forces. If you mean the Holy Roman Empire, it was an implacable enemy of the Vatican and fought innumerable wars against the Popes.
As individual states became more powerful and less subservient to the Vatican, the idea of a "law higher than the state" remained; this was used to justify England's Magna Carta,
Partly, yeah.
the USA's Declaration of Independence,
This was justified in Deist or Humanist terms, not Christian and certainly not Catholic ones.
and the French Revolution.
You mean the well-known atheist humanist movement which wiped out a good chunk of France's Christian clergy?!?!
In the case of Vatican City, the idea of church as an independent state remains.
No. A state directly controlled by the church remains. There used to be several such states, now there's only one. I don't think anybody goes from this to considering the remaining state and the church to be the same; it's just that one is based in, and forms the government of, the other.
To be honest, your reply comes across as 'don't use XUL'. Being cross-platform (to platforms that have Mozilla available and installed) is hardly a big unique selling point that justifies a whole new way of doing things. As you point out:
To be sure, you don't need to do XUL- you can do the application in Qt, GTK+, Fltk, and a few others and get the same results with less effort unless you need some HTML rendering support ...and even if I do need HTML rendering support, I can embed a browser or launch a browser or use an HTML control, or use Java or (on a good day with the wind blowing S by SE) Mono or Ruby+[binding].
I know, I can remember going through those conversations in about 1999 (when it appeared superficially at least as if there were a case for trying to support characters outside of unicode).
However, there's also the opinion I've heard voiced that restricting Ruby's String class to a single representation internally completely ignores the fact that there are other encodings out there.
That's the kind of opinion that seems to make sense until it's written down. A single internal representation is a usful starting point for allowing for the various external encodings that need to be dealt with. Unless you do something incredibly clever, of course...
There is also the belief that it's not necessary to have a single internal representation, but that tagging and dynamic conversion...
Getting that to work _would_ be incredibly clever. But the fact that it was a Ruby hot topic in 1999 and that there has been no change since then -- and Japanese encodings, as distinct from every other language's encodings, are still special cases! argh! -- suggests that it might take more cleverness than actually exists:)
It doesn't seem to have much to reccommend it at first glance -- a language that lacks features and performance (javascript) a runtime that's bulky (mozilla), and worst of all a real case of Java-itis -- XML files and source files that endlessly have to be kept in sync and bundled together, no self-documentation and no metadata.
I ask because I tried porting a semi-complicated IE plugin to XUL and had to give up -- admittedly, I had to give up because of limitations in the HTML renderer, but long before then I had learned to dread the process of hooking into Mozilla at all. And that's saying something, considering that the original IE plugin was entirely made of hand-written COM, written against IE's none-too-predictable interfaces.
So, why XUL? I appreciate that you _could_ write an application in it, but what's the unique selling point that justifies all the work?
the opinion that "the best and most common way to use characters of other languages is UTF-8" is not universally held. It might be the most common, but many learned and respected individuals think it's not the best.
Indeed. For example, I prefer UTF-16 for most purposes, and I see that the MS and Java worlds agree with me; UTF-8 is primarily for Ugly Old Unix compatibility.
Unfortunately, Ruby's issue is not so much with UTF-8 as an encoding as with a perception that Unicode as a character set is insufficiently Japanese.
It's just extraordinary, there's nothing MS won't do to shoot itself in the foot. The only thing they've done since late 2000 that has been remotely constructive has been.NET, and even then it's worth remembering how despite having an excellent product, they rebranded it and spun it and confused the issue until not one manager in ten had any idea what it was. ".NET is XML," remember that? That's MS on marketing, that is.
The popular perception is that they excel at marketing rather than technology, but the reverse is true. They have top-notch geeks and project management, and then above that, suddenly, there's a layer of utter leaden idiocy that -- well, the chair thing. The chair thing.
It seems so obvious, from outside, that there's a layer of deadwood generic-mulitinational-parasite-management people gradually crushing the company and that they need to put someone up there whose focus is on delivering actual value to actual people. And I think a little bit of that awareness has reached MS itself (I mean the MS boardroom -- it's an accepted fact most other places). And so they decided to appoint Ozzie, because he's handled a real product that involved real software.
It's weird how being a tiny bit right, actually makes the decision so much more glaringly wrong. Of course, I've worked with Notes in some detail (anybody else remember the thing where if the server is too fast, the timestamp on everything starts gradually moving forward, becaues the timestamp is used as a unique ID? It was on thedailywtf.com a while ago) and so to me it's extra specially glaringly wrong.
Frozen Bubble? This is what passes for a classic??
Clones can't be classics. The original was a classic, albeit from the later age of classics. Porting it to Linux does not mean you have created a new classic -- it just means there's a shortage of games on Linux.
Whereas I have never, ever, in my life, since the days of Slackware, installed Linux on a machine and had it actually work, meaning network, graphics card, and all. Not on a Compaq 486SX, not on a Vaio, not on a Thinkpad which had a 1600x1200 screen back when that was an amazing thing for a laptop to have, but which was covered in cow stickers, not on the Dell at work, not on the Shuttle at home, never. I've managed to get 'everything except networking' once or twice but the advent of wireless cards just moved the goalposts further away again:(
So, wait, nanowires join together to make nanopaper which in turn is made into microcups. What the heck's going on? How do you make nanocups?? From femtowires????
Oh, *I* get it. They probably made nanocups, and then they were like, hey, what's even more cool than nanotechnology? HUGE nanotechnology, that's what! So they tried to build the biggest nanotechnology they could -- the microcup!
Only now it's NOT NANO ANY MORE, is it? You scientists think you're so smart, but you're just mean to rabbits.
In order to finance such research as this, one must have something known as a 'large sum of money'.
Although there are many sources of these, the easiest one to use is known as the 'taxpayer'.
Most LSofM extracted from taxpayers goes to pensions, health, farm subsidies, bailing out airlines, making 'Mission Accomplished' banners, social welfare, corporate welfare, and defence.
Only one of the above needs high technology.
Luckily, any technology, no matter how useless, will usually find some interest somewhere in the defence industry if the economics are right. For example, the US Navy needs technology to enable it to perform a shore bombardment role; buying a lot of actual guns would be very expensive and wouldn't really benefit the Navy itself; so they need an 'abstract' technology that costs enough that they can say they are trying, but not nearly as much as actual weapons would. That particular niche is already filled, but that's the general way it works.
Thus, an important thing to do, when trying to develop a new technology, is to think of a military application -- a military application for which the research budget and requirements will appeal to some are of the defence establishment.
It's not a military obsession, it's just how money flow in the USA works.
Many corporations have lost site of actually providing valuable service to the customer and have become only about making money
Ok, let me help you out with that. Corporations (of the type under discussion, ie privately held or freely traded for-profit corporations) exist SOLELY for the purpose of making money and have a LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY TO DO EXACTLY THAT AND ONLY THAT. If a corporation stands to make money by regulating internet bandwidth, it MUST do so or it's executive officers are likely to face the wrath of the shareholders.
If you want an entity whose responsibility is to provide services to the public, government (i.e. the public) has to set it up. That's how come many countries do this for trains, power, health etc., things that tend (to varying degrees) to be seen as more a service for the public than as an area to make money for private investors.
C'mon, basic basic understanding in the vaguest possible terms of the fundamental infrastructure of your economic system isn't too much to ask, even from a Libertarian.
There's still people out there doing that stuff? That's too much! Good luck, semantic web dudes!
N.B. The above is a flippant, snide, and unhelpful comment. However, in my defence, I submit that that is _exactly_ the sort of comment that any remaining semantic web diehards should be most used to hearing.
You are making the unwarranted assumption that people who commit/abet copyright infringement do so as a 'special' activity. For instance:
frail nerds tell each other that they aren't bad persons
The thought that watching a copied DVD makes you a bad person never crosses anyone's mind. Someone brings round a copy of a movie, and they're like "Let's watch this," what I am going to say? Am I going to get up on a chair and go "NO! THAT WOULD MAKE US BAD PEOPLE!" No. Party because that would make me a twit, but mainly because, meh, getting up on the chair takes effort.
Or again:
you'll be lauded because you've provided moral cover for someone.
Nobody _needs_ moral cover. Watching that DVD would infringe copyright laws, I guess, like the first time I drank a beer or bought a pack of cigarettes infringed a law, and like the phone company overcharges me and people cross the road when the Walk light is really pretty well red but there are no cars around.
It's all just stuff that makes ya go "whatever". It's hard to ban behaviour that doesn't _feel_ bad.
Of course there is at least one pasty-faced Slashdot troll who _does_ try and pretend it's a big moral issue: you. I dunno if anyone will go for that, though:)
Now Microsoft, my dear fellow, here's a thing: one doesn't create cool, real-world apps on a 120-day trial version of an OS. It simply isn't done. Oh, how I wish it were; but as it's not, it just isn't.
Now, I realize this is all part of your 'capture markets that everyone actively avoids' strategy.
Having advanced into the 'phones that stop you from playing music' market and the 'OS licenses that suddenly cut out because you didn't keep on paying' market, you're now charging into the 'writing software for environments which you have so little interest in that you need a time-limited trial version' market.
Tally-ho, eh?
Splendid stuff but to be quite honest I'm not at all sure you know what you're doing!
Anyway toodle-pip. I have the Duke of Guernsey coming over for Quake. Quake 2, that is -- old Guernsey isn't quite on top of the trends, I fear! Splendid chap nonetheless. Anyway I must dash. Fucktard.
Lordy lordy, it would take me YEARS of work at a regular job to afford these kind of luxury status symbols! But now Microsoft is giving me a one-in-a-million shot at joining the middle class -- and I might just be lucky!
No, seriously, I know.
But listen, while you're here, buddy *hic* what about FlexWiki? I'm talkin' about the honkin' big Microsoft open source Wiki project here. I mean, what I'm sayin' is... *hic* why's it so worthless? When it oughta have so many resources behind it, and when MS (and me, too) could really do with a wiki written in C# as opposed to PHP? Wouldn't ya think they could just take a few guys aside, give'em 6 months to come up with a good wiki? And yet here we are. Here we are, buddy. Bartender! Another glass of C# for my freind here! And go easy on the XML this time, huh?
You didn't even scratch the surface! Wait till you start trying to figure out how the scroll bars work! It's a mouse driven system... in which left-clicking on a scroll bar does _nothing_! You can't drag the tracker up and down! It's actually _less_ usable than an xterm scrollbar! But by right clicking, middle clicking, and left+right clicking, you _can_ eventually scroll back to the place you want!
OR CAN YOU?
This thing's great. Wait till you get to the bit where you middle-click and drag over a word to run a command (because pressing a couple of keys just wouldn't require enough dexterity!) and then you have to guess whether it will consider the 'command' to be a unix shell command, an internal editor command, a Plan 9 filesystem path... of course, while you're thinking about that you'll likely select a character too many, with catastrophic results!
This software only needs one thing -- a good way to trick unsuspecting people into trying to use it!
This is quite simply the hardest software to pick up and figure out I have EVER encountered -- and I'm a pretty advanced user of vim _and_ developer studio. I can honestly say that in 20 minutes of playing around I had not yet established what the application was for.
Right click on the help link, 'acme(1)' and a window comes up called "/+ Error Del Snarf | Look". Hmm, I'd like to get rid of that. Click on the little box in the corner of the window. The window gets bigger -- not really big, just a _bit_ bigger! Ok, try right clicking on the little box. Now the window is really big! Further right clicks do nothing, but now a _left_ click makes it smaller again and I can see the window I started with, which is now only 1 line high. Try to drag the window divider -- no effect. Left click 'Del', right click 'del', double click on the window divider -- you can make it change size a bit but you can't close it.
Restart application and this time remember to _not_ click on the help link. Try to select text with middle mouse button because apparrently that 'executes' it in some way. Incomprehensible, uncloseable window reappears -- but THIS time it has a long list of lines starting with a # character in it! How to make it go away... maybe click left AND right buttons on the title bar? Er... I have now pasted some text into the title bar of the window. I edit it to say 'Del Snarf' again -- but something seems to have broken now. Better restart.
And so it goes.
Brilliant! I'm not actually going to try and use this ever again (because it's pre-alpha, it doesn't seem to do anything vim doesn't, and it's too mouse-driven), but it is one of my favorite pieces of software anyway because at least it's not just unix/java/lisp/MSVC 4.0 redone. It's something totally, utterly different.
And it is sooooooo haaaaaard to uuuuuuse! Ah, I love it, but I love it in an 'I am going to delete you now' kind of way!
Slashdot Mirror
Great, I have been waiting SO LONG for something I can read documents and books on without having to carry around a stack of documents and books.
Now, what's it say here?
You can change the font size of your text to suit your own reading comfort. (Format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE FORK???
Write and comment in articles (format and DRM dependant.)
WHAT THE [utensil]???!?!?!?!?!
I mean WHAT???
Sabotaging your own product like that is supposed to be the exclusing domain of Microsoft and maybe Sony. Now every small startup's jumping up on the 'make a product that's expressly designed so that others will actively desire to avoid using it' bandwagon.
Seriously.
Well, I guess I won't be buying one of those. I don't know or care exactly what DRM would prevent me from making notes on the text I'm reading. There's no real justification, but doubtless in some idiotic sense it counts as 'distributing a modified version'. Maybe nothing I would ever want to read would decide to be un-zoomable. But you know what? Why the fork should I even have to think about it for a second??
Republicans. There's a lot of them, they vote, thus, Ted Stevens et al. You might notice the White House itself is not immune to this effect!
I especially like the 'not you and me' thing. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know what he's talking about, it doesn't matter that he's semi-literate, it doesn't matter that he is well above that threshold of wealth beyond which you simply don't have to know how things work or how to make them work; what matters is that he's on our side, the side of ordinary folks like you and me, the consumers.
I feel a warm fuzzy feeling. I'd vote for this guy.
SCO _have_ made their case. Specifically, they've effectively gone "our case is extremely weak and you should throw it out."
They can do this because their aim was to encourage investment in SCO (both via share buying and directly from coMpanieS willing to support anything that might weaken IBM), not to win a case.
If only all litigants were so forthright. Three cheers for these latter-day Washingtons!
1 -- Buy hardware from a company whose business model consists of selling brand hardware with particularly high margins.
2 -- High margins != high price. High margins > high price. High margins = high price + low costs.
3 -- ???
4 -- Profit! For Apple!
This is my first time ever with the 'Profit!' cliche and I promise it will probably be my last.
Dude, I especially confined myself to _factual_ errors in the _first paragraph alone_, which if I say so myself shows hella restraint! I didn't even do anything with the 'Every state has an official religion' line! And _this_ is the thanks I get? I don't even get a rebuttal??
No wonder nobody invites you to those wild History Parties that are going on in your town. Oh, they didn't tell you about those? Oopsie! Anyway I gotta go... Svetlana is playing the part of Catherine the Great tonight...
In the Middle Ages, the states in Europe were relatively weak next to the Catholic Church;
Well, it varied; Henry of England managed to start his own competing church just in order to remarry and Philip of France plundered the Church whenever he needed a buck.
the Vatican maintained the Empire Rome had left behind.
If you mean the actual roman empire, it was of course Greek Orthodox and maintained (spiritually at least) by the Patriarchate until being overrun by Islamic forces. If you mean the Holy Roman Empire, it was an implacable enemy of the Vatican and fought innumerable wars against the Popes.
As individual states became more powerful and less subservient to the Vatican, the idea of a "law higher than the state" remained; this was used to justify England's Magna Carta,
Partly, yeah.
the USA's Declaration of Independence,
This was justified in Deist or Humanist terms, not Christian and certainly not Catholic ones.
and the French Revolution.
You mean the well-known atheist humanist movement which wiped out a good chunk of France's Christian clergy?!?!
In the case of Vatican City, the idea of church as an independent state remains.
No. A state directly controlled by the church remains. There used to be several such states, now there's only one. I don't think anybody goes from this to considering the remaining state and the church to be the same; it's just that one is based in, and forms the government of, the other.
Anyway, you get the idea...
To be honest, your reply comes across as 'don't use XUL'. Being cross-platform (to platforms that have Mozilla available and installed) is hardly a big unique selling point that justifies a whole new way of doing things. As you point out:
To be sure, you don't need to do XUL- you can do the application in Qt, GTK+, Fltk, and a few others and get
the same results with less effort unless you need some HTML rendering support
So, why use XUL...
I know, I can remember going through those conversations in about 1999 (when it appeared superficially at least as if there were a case for trying to support characters outside of unicode).
However, there's also the opinion I've heard voiced that restricting Ruby's String class to a single representation internally completely ignores the fact that there are other encodings out there.
That's the kind of opinion that seems to make sense until it's written down. A single internal representation is a usful starting point for allowing for the various external encodings that need to be dealt with. Unless you do something incredibly clever, of course...
There is also the belief that it's not necessary to have a single internal representation, but that tagging and dynamic conversion...
Getting that to work _would_ be incredibly clever. But the fact that it was a Ruby hot topic in 1999 and that there has been no change since then -- and Japanese encodings, as distinct from every other language's encodings, are still special cases! argh! -- suggests that it might take more cleverness than actually exists
Is XUL a good application platform? If so, why?
It doesn't seem to have much to reccommend it at first glance -- a language that lacks features and performance (javascript) a runtime that's bulky (mozilla), and worst of all a real case of Java-itis -- XML files and source files that endlessly have to be kept in sync and bundled together, no self-documentation and no metadata.
I ask because I tried porting a semi-complicated IE plugin to XUL and had to give up -- admittedly, I had to give up because of limitations in the HTML renderer, but long before then I had learned to dread the process of hooking into Mozilla at all. And that's saying something, considering that the original IE plugin was entirely made of hand-written COM, written against IE's none-too-predictable interfaces.
So, why XUL? I appreciate that you _could_ write an application in it, but what's the unique selling point that justifies all the work?
everything's just a bunch of bytes.
Or, to put it another way, no, it still doesn't.
the opinion that "the best and most common way to use characters of other languages is UTF-8" is not universally held. It might be the most common, but many learned and respected individuals think it's not the best.
Indeed. For example, I prefer UTF-16 for most purposes, and I see that the MS and Java worlds agree with me; UTF-8 is primarily for Ugly Old Unix compatibility.
Unfortunately, Ruby's issue is not so much with UTF-8 as an encoding as with a perception that Unicode as a character set is insufficiently Japanese.
I know I have plugged this once before in a Ruby discussion, but anyway, my thoughts on attitudes to Unicode in Japan.
It's just extraordinary, there's nothing MS won't do to shoot itself in the foot. The only thing they've done since late 2000 that has been remotely constructive has been .NET, and even then it's worth remembering how despite having an excellent product, they rebranded it and spun it and confused the issue until not one manager in ten had any idea what it was. ".NET is XML," remember that? That's MS on marketing, that is.
The popular perception is that they excel at marketing rather than technology, but the reverse is true. They have top-notch geeks and project management, and then above that, suddenly, there's a layer of utter leaden idiocy that -- well, the chair thing. The chair thing.
It seems so obvious, from outside, that there's a layer of deadwood generic-mulitinational-parasite-management people gradually crushing the company and that they need to put someone up there whose focus is on delivering actual value to actual people. And I think a little bit of that awareness has reached MS itself (I mean the MS boardroom -- it's an accepted fact most other places). And so they decided to appoint Ozzie, because he's handled a real product that involved real software.
It's weird how being a tiny bit right, actually makes the decision so much more glaringly wrong. Of course, I've worked with Notes in some detail (anybody else remember the thing where if the server is too fast, the timestamp on everything starts gradually moving forward, becaues the timestamp is used as a unique ID? It was on thedailywtf.com a while ago) and so to me it's extra specially glaringly wrong.
Frozen Bubble? This is what passes for a classic??
Clones can't be classics. The original was a classic, albeit from the later age of classics. Porting it to Linux does not mean you have created a new classic -- it just means there's a shortage of games on Linux.
Singularity weapons? Do people still even use those? We should be building more probability inverters.
all the benefits of the Unix security model
Oh, GREAT.
with the developer base of Windows
Oh, EVEN BETTER!
Whereas I have never, ever, in my life, since the days of Slackware, installed Linux on a machine and had it actually work, meaning network, graphics card, and all. Not on a Compaq 486SX, not on a Vaio, not on a Thinkpad which had a 1600x1200 screen back when that was an amazing thing for a laptop to have, but which was covered in cow stickers, not on the Dell at work, not on the Shuttle at home, never. I've managed to get 'everything except networking' once or twice but the advent of wireless cards just moved the goalposts further away again
But that's not the actual point of my post.
The actual point of my post is:
Take away the curse...
With a great big ZOTZ!!
So, wait, nanowires join together to make nanopaper which in turn is made into microcups. What the heck's going on? How do you make nanocups?? From femtowires????
Oh, *I* get it. They probably made nanocups, and then they were like, hey, what's even more cool than nanotechnology? HUGE nanotechnology, that's what! So they tried to build the biggest nanotechnology they could -- the microcup!
Only now it's NOT NANO ANY MORE, is it? You scientists think you're so smart, but you're just mean to rabbits.
In order to finance such research as this, one must have something known as a 'large sum of money'.
Although there are many sources of these, the easiest one to use is known as the 'taxpayer'.
Most LSofM extracted from taxpayers goes to pensions, health, farm subsidies, bailing out airlines, making 'Mission Accomplished' banners, social welfare, corporate welfare, and defence.
Only one of the above needs high technology.
Luckily, any technology, no matter how useless, will usually find some interest somewhere in the defence industry if the economics are right. For example, the US Navy needs technology to enable it to perform a shore bombardment role; buying a lot of actual guns would be very expensive and wouldn't really benefit the Navy itself; so they need an 'abstract' technology that costs enough that they can say they are trying, but not nearly as much as actual weapons would. That particular niche is already filled, but that's the general way it works.
Thus, an important thing to do, when trying to develop a new technology, is to think of a military application -- a military application for which the research budget and requirements will appeal to some are of the defence establishment.
It's not a military obsession, it's just how money flow in the USA works.
I am a Libertarian but I'm also a realist.
Uhuh, sure. I'm a venusian death shrimp.
Many corporations have lost site of actually providing valuable service to the customer and have become only about making money
Ok, let me help you out with that. Corporations (of the type under discussion, ie privately held or freely traded for-profit corporations) exist SOLELY for the purpose of making money and have a LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY TO DO EXACTLY THAT AND ONLY THAT. If a corporation stands to make money by regulating internet bandwidth, it MUST do so or it's executive officers are likely to face the wrath of the shareholders.
If you want an entity whose responsibility is to provide services to the public, government (i.e. the public) has to set it up. That's how come many countries do this for trains, power, health etc., things that tend (to varying degrees) to be seen as more a service for the public than as an area to make money for private investors.
C'mon, basic basic understanding in the vaguest possible terms of the fundamental infrastructure of your economic system isn't too much to ask, even from a Libertarian.
There's still people out there doing that stuff? That's too much! Good luck, semantic web dudes!
N.B. The above is a flippant, snide, and unhelpful comment. However, in my defence, I submit that that is _exactly_ the sort of comment that any remaining semantic web diehards should be most used to hearing.
You are making the unwarranted assumption that people who commit/abet copyright infringement do so as a 'special' activity. For instance:
:)
frail nerds tell each other that they aren't bad persons
The thought that watching a copied DVD makes you a bad person never crosses anyone's mind. Someone brings round a copy of a movie, and they're like "Let's watch this," what I am going to say? Am I going to get up on a chair and go "NO! THAT WOULD MAKE US BAD PEOPLE!" No. Party because that would make me a twit, but mainly because, meh, getting up on the chair takes effort.
Or again:
you'll be lauded because you've provided moral cover for someone.
Nobody _needs_ moral cover. Watching that DVD would infringe copyright laws, I guess, like the first time I drank a beer or bought a pack of cigarettes infringed a law, and like the phone company overcharges me and people cross the road when the Walk light is really pretty well red but there are no cars around.
It's all just stuff that makes ya go "whatever". It's hard to ban behaviour that doesn't _feel_ bad.
Of course there is at least one pasty-faced Slashdot troll who _does_ try and pretend it's a big moral issue: you. I dunno if anyone will go for that, though
Now Microsoft, my dear fellow, here's a thing: one doesn't create cool, real-world apps on a 120-day trial version of an OS. It simply isn't done. Oh, how I wish it were; but as it's not, it just isn't.
Now, I realize this is all part of your 'capture markets that everyone actively avoids' strategy.
Having advanced into the 'phones that stop you from playing music' market and the 'OS licenses that suddenly cut out because you didn't keep on paying' market, you're now charging into the 'writing software for environments which you have so little interest in that you need a time-limited trial version' market.
Tally-ho, eh?
Splendid stuff but to be quite honest I'm not at all sure you know what you're doing!
Anyway toodle-pip. I have the Duke of Guernsey coming over for Quake. Quake 2, that is -- old Guernsey isn't quite on top of the trends, I fear! Splendid chap nonetheless. Anyway I must dash. Fucktard.
Lordy lordy, it would take me YEARS of work at a regular job to afford these kind of luxury status symbols! But now Microsoft is giving me a one-in-a-million shot at joining the middle class -- and I might just be lucky!
No, seriously, I know.
But listen, while you're here, buddy *hic* what about FlexWiki? I'm talkin' about the honkin' big Microsoft open source Wiki project here. I mean, what I'm sayin' is... *hic* why's it so worthless? When it oughta have so many resources behind it, and when MS (and me, too) could really do with a wiki written in C# as opposed to PHP? Wouldn't ya think they could just take a few guys aside, give'em 6 months to come up with a good wiki? And yet here we are. Here we are, buddy. Bartender! Another glass of C# for my freind here! And go easy on the XML this time, huh?
You didn't even scratch the surface! Wait till you start trying to figure out how the scroll bars work! It's a mouse driven system... in which left-clicking on a scroll bar does _nothing_! You can't drag the tracker up and down! It's actually _less_ usable than an xterm scrollbar! But by right clicking, middle clicking, and left+right clicking, you _can_ eventually scroll back to the place you want!
OR CAN YOU?
This thing's great. Wait till you get to the bit where you middle-click and drag over a word to run a command (because pressing a couple of keys just wouldn't require enough dexterity!) and then you have to guess whether it will consider the 'command' to be a unix shell command, an internal editor command, a Plan 9 filesystem path... of course, while you're thinking about that you'll likely select a character too many, with catastrophic results!
This software only needs one thing -- a good way to trick unsuspecting people into trying to use it!
This is quite simply the hardest software to pick up and figure out I have EVER encountered -- and I'm a pretty advanced user of vim _and_ developer studio. I can honestly say that in 20 minutes of playing around I had not yet established what the application was for.
Right click on the help link, 'acme(1)' and a window comes up called "/+ Error Del Snarf | Look". Hmm, I'd like to get rid of that. Click on the little box in the corner of the window. The window gets bigger -- not really big, just a _bit_ bigger! Ok, try right clicking on the little box. Now the window is really big! Further right clicks do nothing, but now a _left_ click makes it smaller again and I can see the window I started with, which is now only 1 line high. Try to drag the window divider -- no effect. Left click 'Del', right click 'del', double click on the window divider -- you can make it change size a bit but you can't close it.
Restart application and this time remember to _not_ click on the help link. Try to select text with middle mouse button because apparrently that 'executes' it in some way. Incomprehensible, uncloseable window reappears -- but THIS time it has a long list of lines starting with a # character in it! How to make it go away... maybe click left AND right buttons on the title bar? Er... I have now pasted some text into the title bar of the window. I edit it to say 'Del Snarf' again -- but something seems to have broken now. Better restart.
And so it goes.
Brilliant! I'm not actually going to try and use this ever again (because it's pre-alpha, it doesn't seem to do anything vim doesn't, and it's too mouse-driven), but it is one of my favorite pieces of software anyway because at least it's not just unix/java/lisp/MSVC 4.0 redone. It's something totally, utterly different.
And it is sooooooo haaaaaard to uuuuuuse! Ah, I love it, but I love it in an 'I am going to delete you now' kind of way!