KDE is built on components, but the language it is based on (C++) has no built-in support for components. You know, the kind of component support Microsoft built into C# based on many years experience with COM-like systems and their limitations.
That means that it is a lot harder to build component-based applications in the KDE environment than in an environment based on a language that has such support.
But, sadly, your response seems pretty typical of the KDE crowd: you don't even appreciate the issue and label anybody who disagrees with you a "troll".
Microsoft is moving to C#/CLR. Apple's latest desktop is based on Objective-C and Java. Objective-C, C#, and Java have compelling advantages for developing large, component based software systems, foremost reflection, garbage collection, and (for C# and Java) runtime safety. Yet, the KDE effort is still largely based on C++, with little indication that there is any move to a more powerful runtime and more high-level language.
It's amazing how far KDE has gotten in a few years. But the industry is moving on to different technologies, technologies that greatly simplify applications programming. What is KDE doing?
Microsoft is already technologically much more cutting edge than KDE: they are moving towards a safe, reflective runtime and a higher-level language with a built-in component model. KDE is still based on a language and runtime with virtually no built-in support for components.
The forefront of desktop technology is happening with Java (OSX, pure Java) and C# (Windows); C and C++-based efforts are widely deployed (Windows, KDE, Gnome), but they are already falling behind.
I started using Perl4 years ago. It was a very useful tool when there wasn't much else available on UNIX. It also seemed like its design was trying to poke some fun at the oddball collection of tools like awk, shell, and sed, that UNIX users were using. Perl4 was already pretty baroque. Perl4 was not really a full-featured modern programming language but a scripting tool.
Perl5 tried to fix a lot of Perl4's limitations and turn it into a modern programming language, but the end result is rather iffy. It's a language with a bizarre object system grafted on top of the module system and lots of syntactic and semantic pitfalls for the unwary. Still, Perl5 has great libraries and a fast implementation, and I knew most of the weird features from Perl4. So I still use it, particularly when it has a library that does something I need.
With Perl6, the fun seems completely gone, and the endeavor just seems bizarre. Does a language really need a -//=- operator (I'm not making this up) for default-assignment-that-only-interprets-undef-as-u ndefined, as opposed to the existing ||= operator, default-assignment-that-treats-undef-0-and-the-emp ty-string-as-undefined?
My enthusiasm for Perl5 was already dampened, although I have probably written thousands of Perl5 scripts and CGI scripts over the years. But I think with Perl6, I'm going to jump ship. Perl isn't the only game in town anymore, and several other scripting languages now also have good libraries and are widely used.
I have worked on compute-intensive software for years, both on free and on commercial UNIX systems, and I don't see the point. GNU C/C++ is a decent compiler. Usually, between algorithmic improvements, profiling, hand-tuning a few inner loops, and using optimized libraries (BLAS, 3D graphics, etc.), I have found I can get pretty close to machine performance. Furthermore, supposedly "high performance" C/C++ compilers require a bevvy of non-standard flags and keywords to optimize a lot of C/C++ code because C/C++ semantics inhibit many optimizations. On the other hand, running a compiler that is not the main compiler on the platform in question is often a major headache.
There is, of course, some market for C/C++ compilers that promise to do much better, as there is a market for a lot of things that promise "to make life easier". So, someone may buy this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I also note that your benchmarks don't show any comparisons with GNU C/C++.
If I could actually order one, I would. But lots of nifty Linux-based devices have been announced (Sharp's PDA, HP's Linux Jornada, Yopy, etc.), and they just don't seem to be making it to market. I believe that this thing exists and ships when I see it.
SCSI is better than IDE, but it is really aging technology as well. FireWire is altogether more convenient, hot pluggable, and probably cheaper as well.
Currently, to many lawyers and judges, MAPS probably looks like an obscure, deeply technical means by which some group of people is "preventing" another group of people from getting mail.
But these people understand the concept of a "web page". If, instead, something like MAPS were based on a list of domain names found on web pages, I think people would have a much harder time "shutting it down". After all, it would be human readable speech, and if people mine that data for their E-mail programs, well, so be it.
This is pretty clearly designed to test the effect of different copy protection methods and to see whether labeling hurts sales in the short run.
Let's hope this CD shows up disproportionately on file sharing services (it's still easy to convert it into MP3 using analog) to drive the message home to the music industry that this kind of effort is pointless. (If you like, you can also run out in protest and buy a few dozen non-copy-protected NSync CDs, but I wouldn't recommend it.)
Look at when it was filed. 1992. Very very few people were even thinking about the idea of pausing live TV back then.
I'm pretty sure more than one person thought of the idea then. I'd be surprised if you couldn't even find published suggestions for this feature, perhaps in fiction, television, and/or vision papers. Digital video had been available on UNIX workstations for more than a decade, and people were actively using it in research. Places like the MIT Media Lab were already dreaming up the television of the future.
In fact, with digital video, it is completely natural and expected that you can access a video file while its tail end is being recorded. One of the first things you naturally try is something like "record_video > file & sleep 3; play_video file", and if your player is suitably robust and your I/O system suitably fast and/or buffered, this will just work and give you the ability to pause live video. If it doesn't work, people will quickly figure out that they need a faster disk or bigger buffer.
This patent is on something that seems astounding when you think "tapes", but something you don't even think twice about when working with digital video. Unfortunately, a lot of patents are like that. Now, a specific, non-obvious, cost effective of doing this with a tape or analog disk-based recorder might have been an interesting patent.
I completely agree with your point about squatting and a requirement to defend, however.
The question ought to be "given this problem, can an engineer familiar with digital audio/video easily come up with a solution for solving it", and I bet most people skilled in the art would be able to. And since this kind of buffering is a standard, widely used technique in many areas, someone skilled in the art should have been. In fact, many people clearly did think of the application of this technique to radio and video independently.
What the patent is actually on is a market niche and a gamble: someone paid several thousand dollars betting that this market niche would become lucrative enough within the lifetime of the patent to recoup the cost. It's like a big gambling parlor.
How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work???? I haven't been involved in the project, but I would really like to hear some feedback to why nobody can open freaking word documents. The TRUTH.. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".
Word format not only is a complex binary format requiring documentation at multiple levels, it has significant undocumented portions. Worse yet, it allows executable content which can call on a lot of Windows-specific facilities. MS Word format really does suck, and that's not an accident: Microsoft likes it that way. The implications for users aren't good, though: vendor lock-in, viruses, and data that becomes inaccessible in a few years are only some of the problems resulting from the way MS Word stores its documents.
Well, strictly speaking, a few light-minutes away, in a long-lasting, gravity confined, stable reactor called "the sun". It's easy to harness the energy, both for growing things and for heating and electricity.
OTOH, whether terrestrial fusion reactors make sense is debatable. Fusion reactors still generate large amounts of radioactive waste. Whether they are any safer than fission reactors also remains to be seen. If we want unsafe, waste-producing energy, however, we still have plenty of fissionable materials for hundreds of years to come, so why bother with fusion?
As I have heard history told, E-mail systems were in use before 1971. E-mail is said to have started by people leaving files for each other in various places on a time sharing system. Then, to make this easier, various scripts and clients were created.
Tomlinson apparently was the first to send E-mail via the Internet (or any network?), and he is said to actually have adapted a time sharing mail program to do this.
The source to lcc is easier to understand (and hack), and lcc is easier to install from source. gcc is a nice compiler, but no compiler (and no software system) can be everything to everyone; sometimes, being small and simple is better.
At $300, I'd buy one. If it ran Linux, I'd pay a little more (although the fact that it runs Java rather than WinCE is a plus). At $1000, I'd rather have a laptop or one of the upcoming Tablet PCs (running Linux).
By the time you enter college, you are old enough to take responsibility for your education: which courses do you want to take, what kind of knowledge will help you, what kind of things interst you.
Now, you do need to be good at your job to make a decent living, so you need to do well in your specialization. Whether a "well-rounded" education is feasible and useful to you depends on many factors. Do you have the time or do you need to study a lot for your main subject? Do you even have an interested in other subjects (many people are happy engineers with only a technical hobby, and there is nothing wrong with that)? Do you expect to attend lots of cocktail parties in your life where you need to engage in erudite conversation on a variety of topics? You can think of other considerations yourself.
So, requiring "well-roundedness" is probably a mistake, but offering people the opportunity to take courses beyond their subject if it interests them is probably a good idea. Choose your college accordingly. My college had a general education requirement, which I knew would waste 25% of my academic schedule (I would have picked my own humanities subjects if I had been allowed to), but the school was good enough to make up for this otherwise pretty serious defect in their curriculum.
The SGI displays you are comparing the Apple displays to are several year old designs; of course, Apple's displays are better, as are many other LCD monitors on the market. In fact, the 17" PC LCD I'm sitting at has a better contrast ratio than any of the Apple LCDs and costs around $630. The Apple LCD monitors are beautiful designs, but you still pay a premium for the brand, style, convenience, and the non-standard connectors.
This isn't a question of someone not understanding of how PayPal works, this is a question of someone understanding how PayPal works and concluding that its conditions are unsuitable for P2P transactions.
The point is whether or not individuals in P2P transactions should be exposed to the risk of a buyer backing out of a transaction by abusing the credit card system. Businesses have large enough volume to absorb those risks, individuals don't. Furthermore, because individuals traditionally don't take credit cards in P2P transactions, there are no protection mechanisms (your suggestion of "prosecuting" them is obviously impractical).
There are many traditional payment methods by which the seller is not exposed to the risk of the buyer backing out after having received the product. If PayPal can't figure out a way to provide similar protections to its customers in P2P transactions, then maybe PayPal really isn't the right payment method for many P2P transactions.
yes well, I ripped this off from mackido.com (mmm, flamey goodness)
I'm not sure what you are trying to show. Almost every item on your list was invented at institutions other than either Microsoft or Apple, often decades earlier. Apple copied a lot of other people's technology and put it on the Mac on premium priced hardware, and Microsoft copied a lot of other people's technology and put it on Windows once PC hardware caught up.
Microsoft didn't need to copy from Apple, they just copied from the same people Apple had copied from.
Some of the most highly visible and successful applications on MacOS (QuickTime client, Finder) and Windows (Office, VC++, various media applications) violate the UI guidelines of those platforms in numerous ways. If users minded "inconsistent" UIs, they wouldn't choose to put so many different applications with inconsistent UIs on their desktops, under Windows, MacOS, or X11.
And when it comes to Mozilla, you have lots of choices for UIs--the Mozilla engine embeds easily in other UIs, as Galeon, Skipstone, and QtZilla have shown.
The law is designed such that if companies want to stop a few people from taking advantage of their work, they have to stop everyone.
That's the same lame excuse that comes up again and again, and it's false. If Apple claims protection under trademark law, yes, they need to enforce their trademark, but they can still license it to whoever they want to. If Apple claims protection under copyright law, they can enforce as selectively as they like without losing their copyright.
Whether Apple actually has rights under either trademark or copyright law to gumdrop-based, colorful interfaces really has never been tested. So far, it's all just hot air and lots of expensive lawyers.
If Apple actually believes that their UI is better, rather than just their graphics, they should probably be happy about projects adopting an Aqua look for their projects: the more applications look like native Mac applications ported to other platform, the more mainstream MacOS X will appear. Furthermore, Apple could let some projects use their look and still draw the line at an Aqua look for Microsoft Windows.
In any case, it's not worth worrying about. Aqua looks slick, but there are lots of nice looking themes, many of them more usable than Aqua. Rather than trying to clone Aqua, perhaps it would be better to port more free themes to MacOS X and give it a fresh, non-Apple look.
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That means that it is a lot harder to build component-based applications in the KDE environment than in an environment based on a language that has such support.
But, sadly, your response seems pretty typical of the KDE crowd: you don't even appreciate the issue and label anybody who disagrees with you a "troll".
It's amazing how far KDE has gotten in a few years. But the industry is moving on to different technologies, technologies that greatly simplify applications programming. What is KDE doing?
The forefront of desktop technology is happening with Java (OSX, pure Java) and C# (Windows); C and C++-based efforts are widely deployed (Windows, KDE, Gnome), but they are already falling behind.
Perl5 tried to fix a lot of Perl4's limitations and turn it into a modern programming language, but the end result is rather iffy. It's a language with a bizarre object system grafted on top of the module system and lots of syntactic and semantic pitfalls for the unwary. Still, Perl5 has great libraries and a fast implementation, and I knew most of the weird features from Perl4. So I still use it, particularly when it has a library that does something I need.
With Perl6, the fun seems completely gone, and the endeavor just seems bizarre. Does a language really need a -//=- operator (I'm not making this up) for default-assignment-that-only-interprets-undef-as-u ndefined, as opposed to the existing ||= operator, default-assignment-that-treats-undef-0-and-the-emp ty-string-as-undefined?
My enthusiasm for Perl5 was already dampened, although I have probably written thousands of Perl5 scripts and CGI scripts over the years. But I think with Perl6, I'm going to jump ship. Perl isn't the only game in town anymore, and several other scripting languages now also have good libraries and are widely used.
There is, of course, some market for C/C++ compilers that promise to do much better, as there is a market for a lot of things that promise "to make life easier". So, someone may buy this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I also note that your benchmarks don't show any comparisons with GNU C/C++.
The Matrix was a pretty nice movie. A sequel will almost certainly be worse.
If I could actually order one, I would. But lots of nifty Linux-based devices have been announced (Sharp's PDA, HP's Linux Jornada, Yopy, etc.), and they just don't seem to be making it to market. I believe that this thing exists and ships when I see it.
SCSI is better than IDE, but it is really aging technology as well. FireWire is altogether more convenient, hot pluggable, and probably cheaper as well.
But these people understand the concept of a "web page". If, instead, something like MAPS were based on a list of domain names found on web pages, I think people would have a much harder time "shutting it down". After all, it would be human readable speech, and if people mine that data for their E-mail programs, well, so be it.
Let's hope this CD shows up disproportionately on file sharing services (it's still easy to convert it into MP3 using analog) to drive the message home to the music industry that this kind of effort is pointless. (If you like, you can also run out in protest and buy a few dozen non-copy-protected NSync CDs, but I wouldn't recommend it.)
I'm pretty sure more than one person thought of the idea then. I'd be surprised if you couldn't even find published suggestions for this feature, perhaps in fiction, television, and/or vision papers. Digital video had been available on UNIX workstations for more than a decade, and people were actively using it in research. Places like the MIT Media Lab were already dreaming up the television of the future.
In fact, with digital video, it is completely natural and expected that you can access a video file while its tail end is being recorded. One of the first things you naturally try is something like "record_video > file & sleep 3; play_video file", and if your player is suitably robust and your I/O system suitably fast and/or buffered, this will just work and give you the ability to pause live video. If it doesn't work, people will quickly figure out that they need a faster disk or bigger buffer.
This patent is on something that seems astounding when you think "tapes", but something you don't even think twice about when working with digital video. Unfortunately, a lot of patents are like that. Now, a specific, non-obvious, cost effective of doing this with a tape or analog disk-based recorder might have been an interesting patent.
I completely agree with your point about squatting and a requirement to defend, however.
What the patent is actually on is a market niche and a gamble: someone paid several thousand dollars betting that this market niche would become lucrative enough within the lifetime of the patent to recoup the cost. It's like a big gambling parlor.
Word format not only is a complex binary format requiring documentation at multiple levels, it has significant undocumented portions. Worse yet, it allows executable content which can call on a lot of Windows-specific facilities. MS Word format really does suck, and that's not an accident: Microsoft likes it that way. The implications for users aren't good, though: vendor lock-in, viruses, and data that becomes inaccessible in a few years are only some of the problems resulting from the way MS Word stores its documents.
OTOH, whether terrestrial fusion reactors make sense is debatable. Fusion reactors still generate large amounts of radioactive waste. Whether they are any safer than fission reactors also remains to be seen. If we want unsafe, waste-producing energy, however, we still have plenty of fissionable materials for hundreds of years to come, so why bother with fusion?
Tomlinson apparently was the first to send E-mail via the Internet (or any network?), and he is said to actually have adapted a time sharing mail program to do this.
The source to lcc is easier to understand (and hack), and lcc is easier to install from source. gcc is a nice compiler, but no compiler (and no software system) can be everything to everyone; sometimes, being small and simple is better.
At $300, I'd buy one. If it ran Linux, I'd pay a little more (although the fact that it runs Java rather than WinCE is a plus). At $1000, I'd rather have a laptop or one of the upcoming Tablet PCs (running Linux).
Now, you do need to be good at your job to make a decent living, so you need to do well in your specialization. Whether a "well-rounded" education is feasible and useful to you depends on many factors. Do you have the time or do you need to study a lot for your main subject? Do you even have an interested in other subjects (many people are happy engineers with only a technical hobby, and there is nothing wrong with that)? Do you expect to attend lots of cocktail parties in your life where you need to engage in erudite conversation on a variety of topics? You can think of other considerations yourself.
So, requiring "well-roundedness" is probably a mistake, but offering people the opportunity to take courses beyond their subject if it interests them is probably a good idea. Choose your college accordingly. My college had a general education requirement, which I knew would waste 25% of my academic schedule (I would have picked my own humanities subjects if I had been allowed to), but the school was good enough to make up for this otherwise pretty serious defect in their curriculum.
The SGI displays you are comparing the Apple displays to are several year old designs; of course, Apple's displays are better, as are many other LCD monitors on the market. In fact, the 17" PC LCD I'm sitting at has a better contrast ratio than any of the Apple LCDs and costs around $630. The Apple LCD monitors are beautiful designs, but you still pay a premium for the brand, style, convenience, and the non-standard connectors.
Probably because lcc is much smaller, easier to understand, and easier to install on Windows systems.
The point is whether or not individuals in P2P transactions should be exposed to the risk of a buyer backing out of a transaction by abusing the credit card system. Businesses have large enough volume to absorb those risks, individuals don't. Furthermore, because individuals traditionally don't take credit cards in P2P transactions, there are no protection mechanisms (your suggestion of "prosecuting" them is obviously impractical).
There are many traditional payment methods by which the seller is not exposed to the risk of the buyer backing out after having received the product. If PayPal can't figure out a way to provide similar protections to its customers in P2P transactions, then maybe PayPal really isn't the right payment method for many P2P transactions.
I'm not sure what you are trying to show. Almost every item on your list was invented at institutions other than either Microsoft or Apple, often decades earlier. Apple copied a lot of other people's technology and put it on the Mac on premium priced hardware, and Microsoft copied a lot of other people's technology and put it on Windows once PC hardware caught up.
Microsoft didn't need to copy from Apple, they just copied from the same people Apple had copied from.
And when it comes to Mozilla, you have lots of choices for UIs--the Mozilla engine embeds easily in other UIs, as Galeon, Skipstone, and QtZilla have shown.
That's the same lame excuse that comes up again and again, and it's false. If Apple claims protection under trademark law, yes, they need to enforce their trademark, but they can still license it to whoever they want to. If Apple claims protection under copyright law, they can enforce as selectively as they like without losing their copyright.
Whether Apple actually has rights under either trademark or copyright law to gumdrop-based, colorful interfaces really has never been tested. So far, it's all just hot air and lots of expensive lawyers.
In any case, it's not worth worrying about. Aqua looks slick, but there are lots of nice looking themes, many of them more usable than Aqua. Rather than trying to clone Aqua, perhaps it would be better to port more free themes to MacOS X and give it a fresh, non-Apple look.