The propagation velocity of an electrical charge down a conductive wire is a significant fraction of the speed of light. In most cases, this might as well be the speed of light, because it's so much faster than anything else that we do, or work with. (The current doesn't actually flow at the speed of light, because not all the electrons are moving in a straight line down the wire. So even though the electrons are moving at the speed of light, the net velocity of the charge is some fraction thereof.) Something sticks in my mind about electricity usually propagating at around 0.3c, but I can't substantiate that.
However, light travels down a fiber optic cable at, unsurprisingly, the speed of light. This can be anywhere up to 3x faster than a signal moving down a conductive cable, depending on the properties of the fiber and the cable.
So while light is significantly faster than electricity, for all practical purposes today, they're both "really, really fast;" the limitations to data capacity arise for other reasons, mostly related to bandwidth, and not because of the time that the signal takes moving down the wire.
Not to put words in his mouth, but I think Google is providing that "network is the computer" concept when it provides web-delivered applications that replace things currently done on the desktop. E.g., Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Writely, etc. In those cases, you're moving the application into the datacenter instead of the end-user's PC, so it's a net centralization and not decentralization, but to the user it seems as though "the network is the computer."
If taken to the extreme -- and I'm not sure that it will -- a user might actually use applications which reside in any number of large datacenters. So while there is a lot of centralization, during the course of a day, a single user might request data from several locations. I.e., use GMail from Google's datacenter, then Flickr from Yahoo's, then some Citrix-delivered stuff from a coloed blade system that their company pays for...they're using datacenters, but from their perspective they're less centralized than they were before, when all of their work would be done locally.
So it's sort of as if we're centralizing some things while decentralizing others at the same time.
I agree, but I think at least right now, for every person who's like us, there's some asshole out there who insists on printing out 60+ pages of single-sided PowerPoint slides and distributing them to everyone in the audience at their presentation, because it's "the thing to do." Sure, 90% of them end up in the trash near the door within five minutes of the end, but they do it anyway. Somebody might want them, right? (And this is in an office where everyone -- down to the last clerk and secretary -- has a computer and an email address, and where the presenter probably sent the meeting invite via email and thus has the entire distribution list already.)
Computers made it easier to use up paper thoughtlessly. While going to the Xerox machine and photocopying a 100 page document at least requires you to stand there while it prints, you can print a 100-page Word document pretty much by accident. I know people that make a point of just printing entire 40+ page specification drafts when they only need a page or two, because "it's faster to just print it and pull the pages out later than figure out which I want." There no way they would be that cavalier about it, if printing required more than a "Control-P, Enter", and then picking up the sheaf of output the next time they're headed out to the water cooler.
People aren't logical. People are dumb. People are thoughtless. Computers make being thoughtless easier. When you make something wasteful easier, it happens more often.
You're assuming that children are "naturally" good, and require training to kill. I see no evidence for this. If it seems like children are naturally one way or the other, it's because we consider it normal to train them that way. I.e., we train children that hurting other people is wrong and bad, and that they should consider the feelings of others -- this seems "normal" to us. Children don't automatically realize that "other people have feelings, too," and you'd realize this if you spent some time around pre-schoolers.
If one kid wants a toy that some other kid has, and he hasn't been taught to think about others' feelings, he'll just walk up and take the toy from the other kid. But if someone does that to them, they'll get upset. That the other kid doesn't like it when they take the toy away from them, is not obvious. This is why you spend a lot of time trying to get kids to think about situations from somebody else's perspective. E.g.: "Tommy, would you like it if Joey punched you in the face? No? Well, then you shouldn't punch Joey in the face, because he doesn't like it either." That type of reasoning is pretty high-level. Unless you point out to them that they've done something wrong, a child won't feel bad about stealing another kid's toy or shoving them, they'll just go about their business and not think twice about it.
Without social conditioning, I don't think children would necessarily even realize that other people have feelings. More likely, they'd just determine a cause and effect which would discourage them from hurting people bigger than them, like animals do. My cat knows not to bite the dog, because if it does, the dog will really maul the shit out of it -- the cat doesn't (at least, I doubt it does) have any moral impulses about whether hurting the dog is a good thing or not, it just knows not to do it. In the absence of high-level social conditioning, I think that's what human children would probably operate according to if left totally to their own devices. (And you can see a little of this in the rare cases of children raised by animals, particularly social ones like wolves.)
So I think you're engaging in a whole lot of normalization. I think it's a mistake to think of any type of high-level social behavior as "natural." What seems 'natural' to us is a result of the social conditions that we think of as normal. Our "true nature," if you relied on our hardware alone, and tossed out all the programming we receive as we're growing up from our social structures, is probably not anything like what I think you're imagining it to be. In all honesty, it would probably be a lot closer to a pack of wolves with some very advanced language abilities, than any recognizable human society.
I know of a supermax prison where the inmates do car washing and detailing (it's a good deal, too -- $3 for a hand wash and $11 for an interior detail; only you have to clean every single weaponizable object out of your car first). Not sure where the money goes, whether the prison takes all of it or whether they split it with the inmates or what. I see no reason why the prison shouldn't just take it all, unless they're trying to teach some sort of a lesson about economics. (Although I think most criminals get the "money is good" aspect.) After a certain amount of time in prison I think most people would work for free just to relieve the boredom.
At any rate, I'm all about getting the maximum amount of work we can get from incarcerated people. Since apparently we have a labor shortage in this country -- as evidenced by the outsourcing we do, and the arguments for allowing immigration -- there's no reason why we ought not have criminals do those jobs that Americans aren't doing already.
And if a particular prisoner is good at something marketable, and allowing them to do it doesn't present a risk to society (i.e., he can do it from within the prison without communicating with anyone), all the better. Society is still protected from the criminal element, and gets some useful work done.
Better than just having them sit around and pump iron all day and think of new and amusing ways to sodomize each other, which seems to be the current situation.
Couldn't they prohibit you from doing this, though?
Say they somehow incorporate the public key of the "Microsoft Uber-Master Root Certificate" into the kernel itself, which itself can't be modified. Then, only 'root' certificates which have been signed by Microsoft are allowed to be used.
So that way, the only person who can sign drivers is Microsoft, and the only valid root certs are those approved by Microsoft. No unsigned drivers, and no self-signed certificates or "illegal" CAs.
What's really too bad is that they're not open-sourcing Eudora as it exists today, so that Thunderbird could benefit from the last 15-odd years of experience that they have. That's the direction that it sounds like things need to go in.
Instead, they're going to throw all that away in favor of TBird's codebase, which is apparently unstable and generally a mess, and then open-source that. Well great; it'll just be Thunderbird with a Eudora-like interface on it, and Eudora's interface wasn't great shakes to begin with. Basically this is "we need to kill Eudora, but we don't want to piss off our users -- how can we get them to switch to Thunderbird without realizing they're switching to Thunderbird?"
Kind of a sad end for a venerable program, although better than just totally killing it, I suppose. Maybe some parts of Eudora's extant codebase will be merged with TBird's and released in the process, so it won't be a total duplicated effort.
The only party that can do so would be Tucows, who registered Spamhaus.
Actually I think the party that could actually do so would be the Public Interest Registry, who maintain the.org TLD. If Tucows wanted to pull the spamhaus.org domain, they'd basically just be submitting a request to PIR anyway, so it would seem like the most direct route if you wanted to go after the domain, would be to order the registry to do it.
That's where things really get dangerous in my mind. If the TLD organizations (there are different ones for the various TLDs, VeriSign has.com and.net, PIR has.org, EduCause has.edu) can be forced at any time to deep-six a domain, it basically means that the entire non-country-coded internet is part of U.S. court jurisdiction. While I think that's preferable to it being, say, under Chinese or Iranian jurisdiction, I can imagine it might not please a lot of people in other countries to know that if they don't defend themselves in a U.S. court, their domain can be killed if it's in one of the top-level (non-cc) TLDs.
I think the likely choices are either Tucows (as the registrar) or the Public Interest Registry, who is the actual maintainance organization for the.org TLD.
I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.
Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?
It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?
Need to make tabs the "base unit" of the UI.
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Google "Office" Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The problem is that the whole concept of tabbed windows isn't well integrated into the rest of the Mac UI philosophy. Frankly it's not much better in Windows.
If you have a bunch of stacked browser windows, everything works peachy on OS X, just like you described. Cmd-Tab cycles through applications, and then Cmd-` goes through the windows. This is because the OS is designed with the idea of a "window" as its most basic unit. Each window is owned by an application and has one task going on in it. This has been the way of things since the MultiFinder in MacOS 6... but I think we're getting close to needing an update.
Unfortunately, since tabs are part of the application and not really handled by the OS, there's no universal command for cycling through them. In some applications (e.g. Adium), you use Command-[left/right arrow]; in other applications (Firefox) it's different. I don't even know if there's a hotkey for cycling through tabs in Safari -- I hope there is, but that I just haven't found it yet.
At any rate, I think tabs are something where the application developers and users latched onto a useful feature, which the operating system UI designers never really counted on.
What needs to happen is that the OS' windowing system itself needs to implement tabbing, instead of leaving it to each application to do differently. Think of the neat stuff you could do -- any window could become a tab in any other window, maybe by just dragging one window's title bar into another. So you could have a Finder tab going inside of a Safari "window," or vice versa. Want to break a tab off into a separate window? You could do that, too. Individual tabs could be independently reduced to the Dock, and expanded back up into their parent windows, or their own, or into different windows.
But the point is that rather than leaving tabbing up to each application to do a little differently, Apple needs to step in and provide a guideline as to what the best practice is, and make it easy to implement universally.
IMO, rather than having the "window" being the base unit of UI design, the tab needs to become that. Today's "window" needs to become a looser concept -- call it a "frame." A frame is just a variable-size, resizable object that holds tabs; if it only has one tab in it, then the tab itself isn't shown and it looks like a window does today. The frame isn't owned by any application; applications instead create tabs in frames. So if an application instance crashes, all of its tabs would close, but any other tabs in the same frame would be unaffected. The menu bar would change contexts as the user switched from one tab to another, rather from one frame/window to another as it does now.
Tabs are a really useful invention, and frankly I think the concept should be broadened. Word processing and many other activities could each benefit from tabbing, and the user would get a coherent and cohesive interface for manipulating and working with tabs, that would save them time and confusion over the current situation. That it would make web applications vastly easier to use would be a very positive side-effect.
It's not whether they're "relevant" or not, it's that they're only the leader in marketshare. In everything else, they're followers.
And frankly, it's hard to see where they'll go from here. Sure, they can keep flogging the installed base of Windows PCs and turn out a new version every few years, but for how long?
Microsoft has been the Alexander of the IT world; they've pillaged and they've conquered, and now they pretty much own it all. What do you do then, when your forward momentum has been the thing sustaining you for so long?
Vast corporate empires like the one they're now sitting on have always, in the past, fallen eventually. So it's not a question of 'will Microsoft blow it?,' it's a question of when it'll happen. Particularly given the way that today's stock markets are focused on short-term gains and profitability (which Microsoft has delivered admirably, during its expansion), any slowdown puts them in a somewhat precarious position.
IBM hung onto the top dog mantle in technology for almost a generation, so I think it's entirely possible that Microsoft will last longer than that. But right now, they have to realize that they're at the very top -- meaning there's nowhere to go but down.
Just wondering, since you seem to be familar with Google Office (nee Writely), how does it handle Word's styles?
A heavily-formatted Word document can be hell on Earth to manage if it's not done carefully through styles; if you've just manually formatted things and not used styles, changing the size of every section header in a long specification document can really make you want to stab someone.
Can you use styles in Writely/GOffice? Or is it just like formatting emails in GMail, where it's basically "select text, apply formatting, rinse, repeat" over and over?
Web apps have a lot of drawbacks and I'm unlikely to use them myself, but that does not mean Web applications don't have some real advantages as well. In fact, this sort of a program may be ideal for use by K-12 schools. Personally, I think we'll eventually move to hybrid applications that, like e-mail, have a Web client and a regular client so that we can have the advantages of both.
Agreed. There's also the maintainance issue. Rather than having to try and keep disk images with all the application software constant, if you're doing web-delivered applications, you just have to keep the server going. The client machines are just web kiosks; you could easily run it off of a CD, Flash, or some form of read-only storage so that a reboot would basically be just like a re-image. The skill level to do that is substantially less than what's required to manage applications on today's machines.
Assuming your school had a fast enough backhaul to some centralized location (like a datacenter for an entire school district or city) then you could have all the applications for thousands of students on a handful of servers, managed by a single highly skilled person.
The advantages to having centralized applications served out over a network are obvious. This all should have happened before now, but (IMO) Microsoft discourages it through the way it licenses Terminal Services and Citrix; there's not much of a cost savings unless you're delivering some very expensive per-seat application that way, because of the licensing fees. If you look at what most of these AJAX apps do, it's functionally similar to a Citrix-delivered app. Not in terms of how it works, obviously, but in terms of what it does.
With AJAX, we're finally seeing the promise of network-delivered applications that people have been talking about for so long, but which has never happened because of Microsoft's licensing structure on Citrix, or the unpopularity or impracticality of other remote-delivery systems (remote xserver, etc.).
That's particularly odd when you consider that saying "pee-dee-eff" has three times the syllables of "scan," which is essentially saying the same thing.
I do like those high-speed sheet-fed scanners though. More than anything else, those things have let me throw out a ton of files and paperwork that I was keeping around "just because." I just wish we had better OCR software...
Depends on how often you use computers other than your own.
If you're constantly floating between multiple computers, then the ability to just sit down at a browser, type your L/P, and have all your documents presented to you is a real "killer feature." One that might completely outweigh any limitations of importing and exporting.
As people get more computers -- a whole lot of what I'd call 'average people' now have more than one (at least one work computer and another personal computer) -- this becomes more valuable. Plus, you don't have to deal with backups of your work (though you probably still should), and if your computer gets hosed, you can just nuke it or replace the whole thing. Computers become just these modular, interchangable, anonymous frontends to your work, which is all online.
Plus, the ability to collaborate online with others is a nice plus that you can't do very easily with desktop applications; instead of emailing documents back and forth to other people and trying to keep the versions straight, you just put it up on Goffice and let everyone red-line it.
You don't need to drag out treason, there are lots of other Federal capital crimes. As I recall, if you traffic in a large enough quantity of drugs, it can earn you the needle, among many other things. (Here is a list, if you're interested; be aware it's an anti-death-penalty site.) Some examples: Murder committed by the use of a firearm during a crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime; Murder of a Federal judge or law enforcement official; Trafficking in large quantities of drugs; Attempting, authorizing or advising the killing of any officer, juror, or witness in cases involving a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, regardless of whether such killing actually occurs.
Not sure how many people are executed by the Federal government every year, but I bet there are a few.
So even if you're in a "no death penalty" state like West Virginia or Maine, you could still do something that would get you executed, by virtue of it being a Federal crime.
Letting someone do something s/he loves while in prison, will sort of defeat the purpose of prison, i.e. make them wish they hadn't committed a crime.
That's assuming you think that's the purpose of prison.
Personally I'm more of the school of thought where prison is where you put people that are just too dangerous to be allowed out and running around. Might as well let them do something useful while they're there.
Even if Reiser did kill his wife, it's a bit ridiculous to compound that loss to society by then not letting him do what he's apparently very good at (designing file systems) just because we don't want him to "enjoy it." Who cares whether he enjoys it or not, the point it that society gets more from him this way than if we just locked him up and threw away the key.
Obviously, this assumes he's guilty, which I have no reason to think one way or the other about.
Well that particular CC license would be particularly bad (actually I don't know what it would be good for, might as well just say "All Rights Reserved" and save space), but there are others that would be fine.
Creative Commons ShareAlike is GFDL compatible, at least according to WikiMedia. Or heck, why not just use the GFDL itself?
The reason not to use the GPL on something like this is because there's not a clear separation between "source" and "binary" like there would be for a programming project; there's just the work itself, and other derivative works. Thus a whole lot of the GPL would be redundant.
If true that's almost creepier, since it suggests that in addition to just scanning the message for content and looking for some simple strings ("http://", "google", "youtube") that it's actually following the link and analyzing the content at the end of it.
I guess the test would be to find a link that's blocked, and a link that's allowed; then put each one into a TinyURL and see if the same rules apply, or if they're both rejected or both accepted.
I agree with some other people though, based on other things that Yahoo has done, this seems like a provision that was probably originally implemented to stop the spread of spam and malware, not necessarily for any nefarious purpose. However, it's overly broad and IMO they'd be better without it, both for their own good and so as not to aggravate their users.
I'm not sure that you're correct to call them a "common carrier." That term has a specific meaning under both traditional common law, and as used in U.S. law, and to my knowledge, ISPs -- much less network operators -- have been considered "common carriers" by neither. At least, so far. I think that you could come up with a very good argument for doing so, but I'm not sure it's been done by a court.
However, as "Online Service Providers" (OSPs) computer communication networks are given certain 'Safe Harbor' provisions under the DMCA and the Communications Decency Act, which I believe Yahoo Messenger probably qualifies for. The requirements are spelled out in 512(c)(1)(A)(1) of the DMCA, aka the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act." Wikipedia has a nice summary here.
It would seem to me anyway, that Yahoo could be eliminating their OCILLA/Safe Harbor examption, by weaking their plausible case for not having knowledge of infringing activity. It certainly doesn't seem like it's good for them to have any knowledge of what's being transmitted; just pass the bits and be done with it.
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Well, it's all depending on your sense of scale.
The propagation velocity of an electrical charge down a conductive wire is a significant fraction of the speed of light. In most cases, this might as well be the speed of light, because it's so much faster than anything else that we do, or work with. (The current doesn't actually flow at the speed of light, because not all the electrons are moving in a straight line down the wire. So even though the electrons are moving at the speed of light, the net velocity of the charge is some fraction thereof.) Something sticks in my mind about electricity usually propagating at around 0.3c, but I can't substantiate that.
However, light travels down a fiber optic cable at, unsurprisingly, the speed of light. This can be anywhere up to 3x faster than a signal moving down a conductive cable, depending on the properties of the fiber and the cable.
So while light is significantly faster than electricity, for all practical purposes today, they're both "really, really fast;" the limitations to data capacity arise for other reasons, mostly related to bandwidth, and not because of the time that the signal takes moving down the wire.
Not to put words in his mouth, but I think Google is providing that "network is the computer" concept when it provides web-delivered applications that replace things currently done on the desktop. E.g., Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Writely, etc. In those cases, you're moving the application into the datacenter instead of the end-user's PC, so it's a net centralization and not decentralization, but to the user it seems as though "the network is the computer."
If taken to the extreme -- and I'm not sure that it will -- a user might actually use applications which reside in any number of large datacenters. So while there is a lot of centralization, during the course of a day, a single user might request data from several locations. I.e., use GMail from Google's datacenter, then Flickr from Yahoo's, then some Citrix-delivered stuff from a coloed blade system that their company pays for...they're using datacenters, but from their perspective they're less centralized than they were before, when all of their work would be done locally.
So it's sort of as if we're centralizing some things while decentralizing others at the same time.
I agree, but I think at least right now, for every person who's like us, there's some asshole out there who insists on printing out 60+ pages of single-sided PowerPoint slides and distributing them to everyone in the audience at their presentation, because it's "the thing to do." Sure, 90% of them end up in the trash near the door within five minutes of the end, but they do it anyway. Somebody might want them, right? (And this is in an office where everyone -- down to the last clerk and secretary -- has a computer and an email address, and where the presenter probably sent the meeting invite via email and thus has the entire distribution list already.)
Computers made it easier to use up paper thoughtlessly. While going to the Xerox machine and photocopying a 100 page document at least requires you to stand there while it prints, you can print a 100-page Word document pretty much by accident. I know people that make a point of just printing entire 40+ page specification drafts when they only need a page or two, because "it's faster to just print it and pull the pages out later than figure out which I want." There no way they would be that cavalier about it, if printing required more than a "Control-P, Enter", and then picking up the sheaf of output the next time they're headed out to the water cooler.
People aren't logical. People are dumb. People are thoughtless. Computers make being thoughtless easier. When you make something wasteful easier, it happens more often.
Well they think that one OS fits all those needs, so clearly, one filesystem ought to do the job just as poor^D^D^D^D well as Windows.
I don't think you're right at all.
You're assuming that children are "naturally" good, and require training to kill. I see no evidence for this. If it seems like children are naturally one way or the other, it's because we consider it normal to train them that way. I.e., we train children that hurting other people is wrong and bad, and that they should consider the feelings of others -- this seems "normal" to us. Children don't automatically realize that "other people have feelings, too," and you'd realize this if you spent some time around pre-schoolers.
If one kid wants a toy that some other kid has, and he hasn't been taught to think about others' feelings, he'll just walk up and take the toy from the other kid. But if someone does that to them, they'll get upset. That the other kid doesn't like it when they take the toy away from them, is not obvious. This is why you spend a lot of time trying to get kids to think about situations from somebody else's perspective. E.g.: "Tommy, would you like it if Joey punched you in the face? No? Well, then you shouldn't punch Joey in the face, because he doesn't like it either." That type of reasoning is pretty high-level. Unless you point out to them that they've done something wrong, a child won't feel bad about stealing another kid's toy or shoving them, they'll just go about their business and not think twice about it.
Without social conditioning, I don't think children would necessarily even realize that other people have feelings. More likely, they'd just determine a cause and effect which would discourage them from hurting people bigger than them, like animals do. My cat knows not to bite the dog, because if it does, the dog will really maul the shit out of it -- the cat doesn't (at least, I doubt it does) have any moral impulses about whether hurting the dog is a good thing or not, it just knows not to do it. In the absence of high-level social conditioning, I think that's what human children would probably operate according to if left totally to their own devices. (And you can see a little of this in the rare cases of children raised by animals, particularly social ones like wolves.)
So I think you're engaging in a whole lot of normalization. I think it's a mistake to think of any type of high-level social behavior as "natural." What seems 'natural' to us is a result of the social conditions that we think of as normal. Our "true nature," if you relied on our hardware alone, and tossed out all the programming we receive as we're growing up from our social structures, is probably not anything like what I think you're imagining it to be. In all honesty, it would probably be a lot closer to a pack of wolves with some very advanced language abilities, than any recognizable human society.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
I know of a supermax prison where the inmates do car washing and detailing (it's a good deal, too -- $3 for a hand wash and $11 for an interior detail; only you have to clean every single weaponizable object out of your car first). Not sure where the money goes, whether the prison takes all of it or whether they split it with the inmates or what. I see no reason why the prison shouldn't just take it all, unless they're trying to teach some sort of a lesson about economics. (Although I think most criminals get the "money is good" aspect.) After a certain amount of time in prison I think most people would work for free just to relieve the boredom.
At any rate, I'm all about getting the maximum amount of work we can get from incarcerated people. Since apparently we have a labor shortage in this country -- as evidenced by the outsourcing we do, and the arguments for allowing immigration -- there's no reason why we ought not have criminals do those jobs that Americans aren't doing already.
And if a particular prisoner is good at something marketable, and allowing them to do it doesn't present a risk to society (i.e., he can do it from within the prison without communicating with anyone), all the better. Society is still protected from the criminal element, and gets some useful work done.
Better than just having them sit around and pump iron all day and think of new and amusing ways to sodomize each other, which seems to be the current situation.
Couldn't they prohibit you from doing this, though?
Say they somehow incorporate the public key of the "Microsoft Uber-Master Root Certificate" into the kernel itself, which itself can't be modified. Then, only 'root' certificates which have been signed by Microsoft are allowed to be used.
So that way, the only person who can sign drivers is Microsoft, and the only valid root certs are those approved by Microsoft. No unsigned drivers, and no self-signed certificates or "illegal" CAs.
Remind me why Microsoft would want to support your silly peasant filesystems, and not just make it that much harder to use an OS besides Windows?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Agreed.
What's really too bad is that they're not open-sourcing Eudora as it exists today, so that Thunderbird could benefit from the last 15-odd years of experience that they have. That's the direction that it sounds like things need to go in.
Instead, they're going to throw all that away in favor of TBird's codebase, which is apparently unstable and generally a mess, and then open-source that. Well great; it'll just be Thunderbird with a Eudora-like interface on it, and Eudora's interface wasn't great shakes to begin with. Basically this is "we need to kill Eudora, but we don't want to piss off our users -- how can we get them to switch to Thunderbird without realizing they're switching to Thunderbird?"
Kind of a sad end for a venerable program, although better than just totally killing it, I suppose. Maybe some parts of Eudora's extant codebase will be merged with TBird's and released in the process, so it won't be a total duplicated effort.
Damn right they do. Seven bits should be good enough for anybody.
The only party that can do so would be Tucows, who registered Spamhaus.
.org TLD. If Tucows wanted to pull the spamhaus.org domain, they'd basically just be submitting a request to PIR anyway, so it would seem like the most direct route if you wanted to go after the domain, would be to order the registry to do it.
.com and .net, PIR has .org, EduCause has .edu) can be forced at any time to deep-six a domain, it basically means that the entire non-country-coded internet is part of U.S. court jurisdiction. While I think that's preferable to it being, say, under Chinese or Iranian jurisdiction, I can imagine it might not please a lot of people in other countries to know that if they don't defend themselves in a U.S. court, their domain can be killed if it's in one of the top-level (non-cc) TLDs.
Actually I think the party that could actually do so would be the Public Interest Registry, who maintain the
That's where things really get dangerous in my mind. If the TLD organizations (there are different ones for the various TLDs, VeriSign has
I think the likely choices are either Tucows (as the registrar) or the Public Interest Registry, who is the actual maintainance organization for the .org TLD.
I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.
Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?
It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?
The problem is that the whole concept of tabbed windows isn't well integrated into the rest of the Mac UI philosophy. Frankly it's not much better in Windows.
... but I think we're getting close to needing an update.
If you have a bunch of stacked browser windows, everything works peachy on OS X, just like you described. Cmd-Tab cycles through applications, and then Cmd-` goes through the windows. This is because the OS is designed with the idea of a "window" as its most basic unit. Each window is owned by an application and has one task going on in it. This has been the way of things since the MultiFinder in MacOS 6
Unfortunately, since tabs are part of the application and not really handled by the OS, there's no universal command for cycling through them. In some applications (e.g. Adium), you use Command-[left/right arrow]; in other applications (Firefox) it's different. I don't even know if there's a hotkey for cycling through tabs in Safari -- I hope there is, but that I just haven't found it yet.
At any rate, I think tabs are something where the application developers and users latched onto a useful feature, which the operating system UI designers never really counted on.
What needs to happen is that the OS' windowing system itself needs to implement tabbing, instead of leaving it to each application to do differently. Think of the neat stuff you could do -- any window could become a tab in any other window, maybe by just dragging one window's title bar into another. So you could have a Finder tab going inside of a Safari "window," or vice versa. Want to break a tab off into a separate window? You could do that, too. Individual tabs could be independently reduced to the Dock, and expanded back up into their parent windows, or their own, or into different windows.
But the point is that rather than leaving tabbing up to each application to do a little differently, Apple needs to step in and provide a guideline as to what the best practice is, and make it easy to implement universally.
IMO, rather than having the "window" being the base unit of UI design, the tab needs to become that. Today's "window" needs to become a looser concept -- call it a "frame." A frame is just a variable-size, resizable object that holds tabs; if it only has one tab in it, then the tab itself isn't shown and it looks like a window does today. The frame isn't owned by any application; applications instead create tabs in frames. So if an application instance crashes, all of its tabs would close, but any other tabs in the same frame would be unaffected. The menu bar would change contexts as the user switched from one tab to another, rather from one frame/window to another as it does now.
Tabs are a really useful invention, and frankly I think the concept should be broadened. Word processing and many other activities could each benefit from tabbing, and the user would get a coherent and cohesive interface for manipulating and working with tabs, that would save them time and confusion over the current situation. That it would make web applications vastly easier to use would be a very positive side-effect.
It's not whether they're "relevant" or not, it's that they're only the leader in marketshare. In everything else, they're followers.
And frankly, it's hard to see where they'll go from here. Sure, they can keep flogging the installed base of Windows PCs and turn out a new version every few years, but for how long?
Microsoft has been the Alexander of the IT world; they've pillaged and they've conquered, and now they pretty much own it all. What do you do then, when your forward momentum has been the thing sustaining you for so long?
Vast corporate empires like the one they're now sitting on have always, in the past, fallen eventually. So it's not a question of 'will Microsoft blow it?,' it's a question of when it'll happen. Particularly given the way that today's stock markets are focused on short-term gains and profitability (which Microsoft has delivered admirably, during its expansion), any slowdown puts them in a somewhat precarious position.
IBM hung onto the top dog mantle in technology for almost a generation, so I think it's entirely possible that Microsoft will last longer than that. But right now, they have to realize that they're at the very top -- meaning there's nowhere to go but down.
Just wondering, since you seem to be familar with Google Office (nee Writely), how does it handle Word's styles?
A heavily-formatted Word document can be hell on Earth to manage if it's not done carefully through styles; if you've just manually formatted things and not used styles, changing the size of every section header in a long specification document can really make you want to stab someone.
Can you use styles in Writely/GOffice? Or is it just like formatting emails in GMail, where it's basically "select text, apply formatting, rinse, repeat" over and over?
Web apps have a lot of drawbacks and I'm unlikely to use them myself, but that does not mean Web applications don't have some real advantages as well. In fact, this sort of a program may be ideal for use by K-12 schools. Personally, I think we'll eventually move to hybrid applications that, like e-mail, have a Web client and a regular client so that we can have the advantages of both.
Agreed. There's also the maintainance issue. Rather than having to try and keep disk images with all the application software constant, if you're doing web-delivered applications, you just have to keep the server going. The client machines are just web kiosks; you could easily run it off of a CD, Flash, or some form of read-only storage so that a reboot would basically be just like a re-image. The skill level to do that is substantially less than what's required to manage applications on today's machines.
Assuming your school had a fast enough backhaul to some centralized location (like a datacenter for an entire school district or city) then you could have all the applications for thousands of students on a handful of servers, managed by a single highly skilled person.
The advantages to having centralized applications served out over a network are obvious. This all should have happened before now, but (IMO) Microsoft discourages it through the way it licenses Terminal Services and Citrix; there's not much of a cost savings unless you're delivering some very expensive per-seat application that way, because of the licensing fees. If you look at what most of these AJAX apps do, it's functionally similar to a Citrix-delivered app. Not in terms of how it works, obviously, but in terms of what it does.
With AJAX, we're finally seeing the promise of network-delivered applications that people have been talking about for so long, but which has never happened because of Microsoft's licensing structure on Citrix, or the unpopularity or impracticality of other remote-delivery systems (remote xserver, etc.).
That's particularly odd when you consider that saying "pee-dee-eff" has three times the syllables of "scan," which is essentially saying the same thing.
I do like those high-speed sheet-fed scanners though. More than anything else, those things have let me throw out a ton of files and paperwork that I was keeping around "just because." I just wish we had better OCR software...
Depends on how often you use computers other than your own.
If you're constantly floating between multiple computers, then the ability to just sit down at a browser, type your L/P, and have all your documents presented to you is a real "killer feature." One that might completely outweigh any limitations of importing and exporting.
As people get more computers -- a whole lot of what I'd call 'average people' now have more than one (at least one work computer and another personal computer) -- this becomes more valuable. Plus, you don't have to deal with backups of your work (though you probably still should), and if your computer gets hosed, you can just nuke it or replace the whole thing. Computers become just these modular, interchangable, anonymous frontends to your work, which is all online.
Plus, the ability to collaborate online with others is a nice plus that you can't do very easily with desktop applications; instead of emailing documents back and forth to other people and trying to keep the versions straight, you just put it up on Goffice and let everyone red-line it.
You don't need to drag out treason, there are lots of other Federal capital crimes. As I recall, if you traffic in a large enough quantity of drugs, it can earn you the needle, among many other things. (Here is a list, if you're interested; be aware it's an anti-death-penalty site.) Some examples: Murder committed by the use of a firearm during a crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime; Murder of a Federal judge or law enforcement official; Trafficking in large quantities of drugs; Attempting, authorizing or advising the killing of any officer, juror, or witness in cases involving a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, regardless of whether such killing actually occurs.
Not sure how many people are executed by the Federal government every year, but I bet there are a few.
So even if you're in a "no death penalty" state like West Virginia or Maine, you could still do something that would get you executed, by virtue of it being a Federal crime.
Letting someone do something s/he loves while in prison, will sort of defeat the purpose of prison, i.e. make them wish they hadn't committed a crime.
That's assuming you think that's the purpose of prison.
Personally I'm more of the school of thought where prison is where you put people that are just too dangerous to be allowed out and running around. Might as well let them do something useful while they're there.
Even if Reiser did kill his wife, it's a bit ridiculous to compound that loss to society by then not letting him do what he's apparently very good at (designing file systems) just because we don't want him to "enjoy it." Who cares whether he enjoys it or not, the point it that society gets more from him this way than if we just locked him up and threw away the key.
Obviously, this assumes he's guilty, which I have no reason to think one way or the other about.
Well that particular CC license would be particularly bad (actually I don't know what it would be good for, might as well just say "All Rights Reserved" and save space), but there are others that would be fine.
Creative Commons ShareAlike is GFDL compatible, at least according to WikiMedia. Or heck, why not just use the GFDL itself?
The reason not to use the GPL on something like this is because there's not a clear separation between "source" and "binary" like there would be for a programming project; there's just the work itself, and other derivative works. Thus a whole lot of the GPL would be redundant.
Yahoo: It's here, it's broken, get used to it.
Yahoo: It's there, it's broken, get used to something else.
...and had to leave the office
Slashdot has an office?
If true that's almost creepier, since it suggests that in addition to just scanning the message for content and looking for some simple strings ("http://", "google", "youtube") that it's actually following the link and analyzing the content at the end of it.
I guess the test would be to find a link that's blocked, and a link that's allowed; then put each one into a TinyURL and see if the same rules apply, or if they're both rejected or both accepted.
I agree with some other people though, based on other things that Yahoo has done, this seems like a provision that was probably originally implemented to stop the spread of spam and malware, not necessarily for any nefarious purpose. However, it's overly broad and IMO they'd be better without it, both for their own good and so as not to aggravate their users.
I'm not sure that you're correct to call them a "common carrier." That term has a specific meaning under both traditional common law, and as used in U.S. law, and to my knowledge, ISPs -- much less network operators -- have been considered "common carriers" by neither. At least, so far. I think that you could come up with a very good argument for doing so, but I'm not sure it's been done by a court.
However, as "Online Service Providers" (OSPs) computer communication networks are given certain 'Safe Harbor' provisions under the DMCA and the Communications Decency Act, which I believe Yahoo Messenger probably qualifies for. The requirements are spelled out in 512(c)(1)(A)(1) of the DMCA, aka the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act." Wikipedia has a nice summary here.
It would seem to me anyway, that Yahoo could be eliminating their OCILLA/Safe Harbor examption, by weaking their plausible case for not having knowledge of infringing activity. It certainly doesn't seem like it's good for them to have any knowledge of what's being transmitted; just pass the bits and be done with it.