My main complaint was, through a thin veil of sarcasm: "If Opera can run so snappy and fast, why not Mozilla?"
I use opera, and Netscape 4.78, and they do just fine on my "C64-like" hardware.
If you have the best hardware around, then Mozilla works snappy, which is all well and good, but deep down inside developers should be worried about how many cycles are being wasted.
But I guess stuff like that deserves Score 0: Troll:)
you don't mind booting up your older computer at 7am, double-clicking on the Mozilla icon at 9am, going to work, coming home for lunch, click on the location bar around 12:30, entering the URL blindly and returning to work at 1, returning home at 5 and perhaps see the UI refresh by 6:30pm.
By the next morning you might be logged into hotmail.
Seriously, though, they really need to do some streamlining of the user interface for that browser. I'm sure Gecko is a wonderful rendering engine and all that, but the performance gain is totally lost on us Pentium-120mhz users.
The Windows Icons Menus and Programs metaphor has been so successful for the past thirty years because it has such a resonance with the actual internal workings of any multitasking computer.
Each thread has a different window, each file has a seperate icon, etc. There is really not much one can do to improve the metaphor without changing the operating system.
Object oriented filesystems would make content-based retrieval and end-user programming a little easier. You could build a "class" of presentations for various data, and "instances" would be special folder structures with "buttons" or menus on the "browser" to initiate various actions, for example.
Escaping from a windowed interface would actually be a step backwards, as it stands now. Escaping from the Windows User's "No, really, Microsoft invented computing" mindset might help, but that is a slow progression at best.
The best solution using existing technology would be something like X11. Imagine Xwindows, only where your Windowmaker GUI has only Windowmaker widgets, look and feel, and your GNOME GUI has only GNOME widgets, look and feel, even if you're using applications from different GUI interfaces.
While it is nice to say the WIMP metaphor is dead, it is a LOT safer to say there are a lot of well-established implementations of the WIMP GUI that are on their way out, because of pressures from the unwashed masses.
This guy from just outside of Kabul will get another rude, nasty surprise when he figures out that a C64 can't download or play movies from the Internet very well at all. Poor guy, he'll have to wait for them to get released in the video store or something.
I think its time for people to take $50 and make archives of their favorite books, databanks or documents that the government wants banned using that wonderful piece of technology by Xerox.
The Xerox Machine has been used for decades by people who wanted to read a reference or other unborrowable book on their own time, now it will be a handy tool for keeping certain pieces of content available.
Sure, its an inelegant solution, but if enough people do it and make multiple off-site backups in the public domain, the appointed censors that keep passing stupid edicts like this will have to do something REALLY stupid and REALLY public.
Someday soon, whether we like it or not, there will be a web-and-email chip made available. You install this single chip into any device with a screen and network hole, and you have a GUI-based web and email system ready to run.
THAT will be the killer app of the decade, because it allows literally hundreds of new pieces of technology for a fraction of the price. Not just web pads, and camcorders, but web-enabled microwaves, fridge fronts, cars, e-books, boats, watches, etc.
Is great, because deep down inside we really are a plague. We have:
1. Carriers --> the pre-installed masses out there who love the OS and tote it everywhere they can. You can't cure a carrier with the M$ vacciene, because they're stuck with the disease for life, for free, and don't even understand that its a problem, because they typically show none of the symptoms.
2. Infection Vectors --> You can also spot evangelists, who might not be the best users or carriers around, but they sure do love to spread the word, show the symptoms of the "disease" of Linux, and make serious threats to Microsoft's soverignty.
3. Symptoms --> Ranting about Emacs vs. Vi, BSD vs. GNU, wearing funny tee-shirts, or having epileptic fits about free software costing literally nothing at work, at home, during spare time, on dates, etc. People who do not learn to tame these symptoms can end up becoming terminal geeks, even if they are recovering Windows users.
Which is probably why Microsoft sales people have to spot the companies with even a single Linux user, because they KNOW Linux will spread if left untreated.
If you ban sites like http://www.godhatesfags.com from spouting their idiocy, then all kinds of poor saps on usenet will have to make up their own strawmen to shoot down.
It helps so much more to have these morons right there, where everyone can see, laugh, cry or whatever it is they do when they see such silly sites.
Why support a government that doesn't want its people to feel strong emotions?
Stratospheric ozone is created by bombarding normal, happily breathable O2 mollecules with ultraviolet light, splitting the O2 into a pair of O1's. These O1's eventually bump into another O2 mollecule and create O3. Big woop.
Where there is solar UV light, you'll probably see some ozone popping up. Since the Antarctic Desert is in the dark for a good chunk of the year, you'll discover a not-too-surprising lack in stratospheric ozone over winter and well into the Spring. Also not surprisingly, we have an ozone hole over the north pole.
Over the north pole, of course, there isn't quite as extreme a desert as over the south, and there are more large land masses nearby to carry air better.
Back in the 30s when the first weather measurements were taken in Antarctica they found almost identical levels of UV light hitting them as during a modern winter. Greenies prefer to depend on climactic models rather than empirical evidence these days, however, so their multi-million dollar research is stating the problem is getting bigger, even if someone else's multi-thousand dollar research is saying the opposite.
The ozone hole is the result of too many people putting faith in government, who can't predict the future more than a few weeks down the road, and weather men, who can't predict the future more than a few days down the road, and expecting their government-funded computer models to be able to predict the future years down the road.
If bags are banned, how can chick geeks (of which I'm sure there are a few going to Comdex) possibly bring their purse or handbag in? Will they have to wear a stylish yet goofy-looking fanny pack, or would that count too?
And can't you sneak a gun in under your shirt, or strap a bomb to your chest, or keep a holster inside your jacket? Silly security people. What they SHOULD be doing to increase brand-name recognition is not allow any logos on jackets or tee-shirts unless they can provide a reciept from a Comdex vendor.
Assembling software from reusable pieces requires three things that most software companies don't typically have:
1. Discipline. Your average programmer will have read about various programming methodologies, but skipped past the parts which would make their code an easy-to-reuse template in lieu of fast development time. As with any gamble, you should know at exactly what point you want to quit, have an A-line for version 1.0's feature set, all that jazz.
2. A big code base. Because of step 1, or maybe just a lack of previous projects, one's code base is typically limited to what you can find in a computer science textbook. Having a good database of classes and patterns that have turned out to be useful, and having easy access to this database for the information you need is the difference between a library and a code base.
3. Incremental development. Throwing together a large software project, all at once, and then testing the whole thing is very tempting, and happens more often than most people like to admit. What should be happening is a series of incremental integrations into the final product, with unit tests of each part. Otherwise your large project can become a giant, complex nightmare. Making complex software shouldn't be made quite so complicated.
While making a "software assembly line" takes slightly more work and trouble than your average car assembly line, it has incredible cost savings in the long run.
There's two kinds of anarchy: good anarchy and bad anarchy. Linux and OSS development is good anarchy. People going apeshit during a blackout is bad anarchy.
In good anarchy, people will forge alliances and teams to achieve a goal, for the betterment of all other members. While there might be some centralized control of each team, this is not neccesary, and such short heirarchies are only around long enough to get the job done.
If we took the open source model -- with maneuverable teams and management that works on things for fun or betterment of all -- to, say, industrial development, food production, etc, odds are we'd have a working anarchy there too...
Plus nobody would bother flying planes into an anarchist country's buildings, cuz there's no big evil government to overextend its power, or to launch vast retaliatory actions. Anarchy doesn't need them. Once you infect someone with the idea, they end up infecting others, and have a hard time getting convinced there's a better way:)
Hell, even laypeople can quote the Three Laws of Robotics, and people who haven't even read Robots and Empire can quote the zeroth law.
People who've never read Foundation know about psychohistory, and psychohistory, robotics, etc have become a part of the english language because of Asimov.
So, odds are, he'll be the one remembered a hundred years ago, one way or another.
Katz says that one or two of the fight scenes are first rate. They have people going around drop-kicking themselves and dodging bullets. The commercials didn't pretend this was anything but an action movie, and a pretty brainless one at that, with all kinds of matrix-ripoff eye candy.
What exactly is the problem?
When I go to a movie, I typically like to see the kind of content that was in the movie trailer. For example, Life, a depressing movie about prison guards, was NOT a good movie, because they made it out to be a comedy in the trailer, and left everyone bewildered, drawing the wrong crowd.
The One doesn't appear to be pulling any of that bullshit. Instead, they're saying outright: "This is a Jet Li action movie. Do not come for drama or deep insights about the future." That way, hopefully, they're advertising to the right crowd.
If you're going to review a movie, you might aswell judge it based upon what kind of movie it is, not how well it fits the slant you like to write about all the time.
Why doesn't the Linux/OSS community come up with an embedded, tiny-ass Linux hard drive like the iPod, with some simple GUI-and-pen based features, a 6 or 20 gig drive, firewire and not much else. We could greatly increase the establishment of Linux by having it up for sale to desktop users, and M$ won't be able to make quips about usability anymore.
Of course, having Linux in just another file server is nice too, I guess.
If you were to give a present-day person a time machine, he'd be totally wowed by all the possibilities that opened up before him. He would probably take over the world pretty freaking quickly.
If you were to give everyone on the planet a time machine, all at the same time, nobody would be able to take over the world.
The same can be said about computers, nanotech, giant robot spiders of doom, any technology that has a single source or a single user can give its wielder great power. Give it to everyone and they'll be able to handle the grey or red goo problems on their own time.
Nanotech will start out like the atom bomb, automobile, cotton gin or the microwave oven. First only an elite few will have this great labour-saving device, but after a while, everyone will.
Governments, when their powers reach a certain critical mass, expand those powers until they collapse in on themselves. The United States and Russia, through the Cold War, extended their powers to incredible lengths, both domestically and externally.
The USSR, whose domestic controls grew faster and stricter as time went on, collapsed first, leaving America as the "winner" of that "war." Unfortunately, it also left America with the impression that the federal government -- whose domestic control was supposed to be limited -- should enjoy unlimited power in "extreme" circumstances. It didn't take long for circumstances to present themselves, or be manufactured by one cause or another.
Eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, we'll experience a collapse like the USSR did, and a shrinking of government back to the essentials, like serving the people, providing freedom and justice for all, and maybe even protecting the innocent.
Even if they stopped developing it, made it illegal in the lower 48 states, systematically jailed or impounded Slackware users or fed us to ravenous wolves, I'd not stop using this distro. It has everything I want on the CD, plenty of office suites and window managers, no shortage of development tools, and a small/fast enough footprint to still work on an i386 with 16 megs of RAM. That's not half bad for software I started using six years ago.
Lacking really ultra-advanced package management has never been much of a problem either. While the setup programs weren't quite as "saleable" as the pretty GUI frontends, they were colorful, used an easy-to-follow menu system, and gave a very detailed description of what they were doing, when, at all times. Compare that to, say, the Corel setup wizard, which kept crapping out on even slightly non-standard hardware.
From the way that paragraph was worded, it raises a few red flags without worrying what "harm" might be. If you catch your kid reading material that MIGHT be harmful to SOMEONE ELSE's kid, you aren't supposed to deal with it the same way you'd deal with your kid picking up The Joy Of Sex from the library or the bookshelf in your room.
Instead, you sue them, and don't need to produce any evidence that your kid specifically was hurt. In other words, Third Party Syndrome is yet again getting passed as law.
I'm actually kind of curious how long data stored in a network can last. Sure, its reliable as hell for the "important" stuff, but what about historical photographs?
One great thing about photos is its cheaper to make a digital copy of a photo than to make an analog copy of a digital image. You can store a semi-permanent, lossy piece of data in a permanent, moving but lossless form and make infinite copies without any degredation.
The really "important" analog photos WILL be stored digitally, whether we like it or not, and the really "cool" digital photos will end up in billboards. How many millions of digital or paralell copies of that National Geographic picture of the girl with the nifty eyes are out there, both digitally and in analog?
There will always be "classic" content stored digitally, and the really useful, frequently archived and valuable information will be preserved more efficiently than ever before. We'll even be storing the really meaty things for archaeology. Surely some personal home pages will be mirrored or just plain stick around for long enough. In three hundred years web archaeologists might dig up a picture of Suzie and her dog on a crappy yellow-on-white HTML page.
Why not do what TV stations and big production companies do to store large quantities of footage: make a big library of digital recordings. I know the restrictions are 640x480x16, but why not go with 720x480x32 instead? Because its digital, you can get lossless recall through firewire in any halfway decent video camera, and backups to hard drives for compression, editing and analysis is pretty easy.
Why set up a high-tech solution for a low-tech problem?
Now that closed source companies are starting to really restrict what end users can do, and what they can see, and what licensing they will even give out to people, it'll be a lot easier for open source organizations to really shine.
While everyone else is adding restrictions, we should be in a mad dash to catch up where the closed source versions are leaving off, increasing public acceptance of how convenient and useful open source products are compared to the rest of the software industry.
CSS people are actually giving OSS people the opportunity to be BETTER, not just feature-equal! Yaaaay:)
Great, but without libraries, using a ~900k executable, I can do an http interface, download a web page, parse it for content, then save that content to a file. Perl without libraries can't do that without worrying about the actual http protocol, meaning rebol saves people from having to reuse big blocks of code.
For beginning users, this ease of use is important because it frees them to do more creative things, faster, and easier.
Having an OpenRebol, however, would be very very nice, just for more advanced users who want to roll their own rebol or rebol like substance, with better features.
If it weren't for rebol I wouldn't have a 25 line script to grab the stock market closes every day from yahoo.com. If you want to get batches of web pages and parse them for useful information, use rebol. It rocks.
If it were more widely accepted, rebol would make a really sweet web language, too, allowing more control over the interface, with less garbage in the page's source code.
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My main complaint was, through a thin veil of sarcasm: "If Opera can run so snappy and fast, why not Mozilla?"
:)
I use opera, and Netscape 4.78, and they do just fine on my "C64-like" hardware.
If you have the best hardware around, then Mozilla works snappy, which is all well and good, but deep down inside developers should be worried about how many cycles are being wasted.
But I guess stuff like that deserves Score 0: Troll
you don't mind booting up your older computer at 7am, double-clicking on the Mozilla icon at 9am, going to work, coming home for lunch, click on the location bar around 12:30, entering the URL blindly and returning to work at 1, returning home at 5 and perhaps see the UI refresh by 6:30pm.
By the next morning you might be logged into hotmail.
Seriously, though, they really need to do some streamlining of the user interface for that browser. I'm sure Gecko is a wonderful rendering engine and all that, but the performance gain is totally lost on us Pentium-120mhz users.
The Windows Icons Menus and Programs metaphor has been so successful for the past thirty years because it has such a resonance with the actual internal workings of any multitasking computer.
Each thread has a different window, each file has a seperate icon, etc. There is really not much one can do to improve the metaphor without changing the operating system.
Object oriented filesystems would make content-based retrieval and end-user programming a little easier. You could build a "class" of presentations for various data, and "instances" would be special folder structures with "buttons" or menus on the "browser" to initiate various actions, for example.
Escaping from a windowed interface would actually be a step backwards, as it stands now. Escaping from the Windows User's "No, really, Microsoft invented computing" mindset might help, but that is a slow progression at best.
The best solution using existing technology would be something like X11. Imagine Xwindows, only where your Windowmaker GUI has only Windowmaker widgets, look and feel, and your GNOME GUI has only GNOME widgets, look and feel, even if you're using applications from different GUI interfaces.
While it is nice to say the WIMP metaphor is dead, it is a LOT safer to say there are a lot of well-established implementations of the WIMP GUI that are on their way out, because of pressures from the unwashed masses.
This guy from just outside of Kabul will get another rude, nasty surprise when he figures out that a C64 can't download or play movies from the Internet very well at all. Poor guy, he'll have to wait for them to get released in the video store or something.
I think its time for people to take $50 and make archives of their favorite books, databanks or documents that the government wants banned using that wonderful piece of technology by Xerox.
The Xerox Machine has been used for decades by people who wanted to read a reference or other unborrowable book on their own time, now it will be a handy tool for keeping certain pieces of content available.
Sure, its an inelegant solution, but if enough people do it and make multiple off-site backups in the public domain, the appointed censors that keep passing stupid edicts like this will have to do something REALLY stupid and REALLY public.
Someday soon, whether we like it or not, there will be a web-and-email chip made available. You install this single chip into any device with a screen and network hole, and you have a GUI-based web and email system ready to run.
THAT will be the killer app of the decade, because it allows literally hundreds of new pieces of technology for a fraction of the price. Not just web pads, and camcorders, but web-enabled microwaves, fridge fronts, cars, e-books, boats, watches, etc.
Globalism is:
1. Putting all your eggs in one basket.
2. Trying for harmony when everyone sings the same tune.
3. Letting everyone make the same mistakes, all at once.
4. Making sure the free market never decides anything.
5. Saying "Businesses have been a discriminated minority for too long."
6. Trying to disprove the myth that humanity doesn't scale.
Is great, because deep down inside we really are a plague. We have:
1. Carriers --> the pre-installed masses out there who love the OS and tote it everywhere they can. You can't cure a carrier with the M$ vacciene, because they're stuck with the disease for life, for free, and don't even understand that its a problem, because they typically show none of the symptoms.
2. Infection Vectors --> You can also spot evangelists, who might not be the best users or carriers around, but they sure do love to spread the word, show the symptoms of the "disease" of Linux, and make serious threats to Microsoft's soverignty.
3. Symptoms --> Ranting about Emacs vs. Vi, BSD vs. GNU, wearing funny tee-shirts, or having epileptic fits about free software costing literally nothing at work, at home, during spare time, on dates, etc. People who do not learn to tame these symptoms can end up becoming terminal geeks, even if they are recovering Windows users.
Which is probably why Microsoft sales people have to spot the companies with even a single Linux user, because they KNOW Linux will spread if left untreated.
If you ban sites like http://www.godhatesfags.com from spouting their idiocy, then all kinds of poor saps on usenet will have to make up their own strawmen to shoot down.
It helps so much more to have these morons right there, where everyone can see, laugh, cry or whatever it is they do when they see such silly sites.
Why support a government that doesn't want its people to feel strong emotions?
Ok, here's the deal:
Stratospheric ozone is created by bombarding normal, happily breathable O2 mollecules with ultraviolet light, splitting the O2 into a pair of O1's. These O1's eventually bump into another O2 mollecule and create O3. Big woop.
Where there is solar UV light, you'll probably see some ozone popping up. Since the Antarctic Desert is in the dark for a good chunk of the year, you'll discover a not-too-surprising lack in stratospheric ozone over winter and well into the Spring. Also not surprisingly, we have an ozone hole over the north pole.
Over the north pole, of course, there isn't quite as extreme a desert as over the south, and there are more large land masses nearby to carry air better.
Back in the 30s when the first weather measurements were taken in Antarctica they found almost identical levels of UV light hitting them as during a modern winter. Greenies prefer to depend on climactic models rather than empirical evidence these days, however, so their multi-million dollar research is stating the problem is getting bigger, even if someone else's multi-thousand dollar research is saying the opposite.
The ozone hole is the result of too many people putting faith in government, who can't predict the future more than a few weeks down the road, and weather men, who can't predict the future more than a few days down the road, and expecting their government-funded computer models to be able to predict the future years down the road.
If bags are banned, how can chick geeks (of which I'm sure there are a few going to Comdex) possibly bring their purse or handbag in? Will they have to wear a stylish yet goofy-looking fanny pack, or would that count too?
And can't you sneak a gun in under your shirt, or strap a bomb to your chest, or keep a holster inside your jacket? Silly security people. What they SHOULD be doing to increase brand-name recognition is not allow any logos on jackets or tee-shirts unless they can provide a reciept from a Comdex vendor.
Assembling software from reusable pieces requires three things that most software companies don't typically have:
1. Discipline. Your average programmer will have read about various programming methodologies, but skipped past the parts which would make their code an easy-to-reuse template in lieu of fast development time. As with any gamble, you should know at exactly what point you want to quit, have an A-line for version 1.0's feature set, all that jazz.
2. A big code base. Because of step 1, or maybe just a lack of previous projects, one's code base is typically limited to what you can find in a computer science textbook. Having a good database of classes and patterns that have turned out to be useful, and having easy access to this database for the information you need is the difference between a library and a code base.
3. Incremental development. Throwing together a large software project, all at once, and then testing the whole thing is very tempting, and happens more often than most people like to admit. What should be happening is a series of incremental integrations into the final product, with unit tests of each part. Otherwise your large project can become a giant, complex nightmare. Making complex software shouldn't be made quite so complicated.
While making a "software assembly line" takes slightly more work and trouble than your average car assembly line, it has incredible cost savings in the long run.
There's two kinds of anarchy: good anarchy and bad anarchy. Linux and OSS development is good anarchy. People going apeshit during a blackout is bad anarchy.
:)
In good anarchy, people will forge alliances and teams to achieve a goal, for the betterment of all other members. While there might be some centralized control of each team, this is not neccesary, and such short heirarchies are only around long enough to get the job done.
If we took the open source model -- with maneuverable teams and management that works on things for fun or betterment of all -- to, say, industrial development, food production, etc, odds are we'd have a working anarchy there too...
Plus nobody would bother flying planes into an anarchist country's buildings, cuz there's no big evil government to overextend its power, or to launch vast retaliatory actions. Anarchy doesn't need them. Once you infect someone with the idea, they end up infecting others, and have a hard time getting convinced there's a better way
Hell, even laypeople can quote the Three Laws of Robotics, and people who haven't even read Robots and Empire can quote the zeroth law.
People who've never read Foundation know about psychohistory, and psychohistory, robotics, etc have become a part of the english language because of Asimov.
So, odds are, he'll be the one remembered a hundred years ago, one way or another.
Ok,
Katz says that one or two of the fight scenes are first rate. They have people going around drop-kicking themselves and dodging bullets. The commercials didn't pretend this was anything but an action movie, and a pretty brainless one at that, with all kinds of matrix-ripoff eye candy.
What exactly is the problem?
When I go to a movie, I typically like to see the kind of content that was in the movie trailer. For example, Life, a depressing movie about prison guards, was NOT a good movie, because they made it out to be a comedy in the trailer, and left everyone bewildered, drawing the wrong crowd.
The One doesn't appear to be pulling any of that bullshit. Instead, they're saying outright: "This is a Jet Li action movie. Do not come for drama or deep insights about the future." That way, hopefully, they're advertising to the right crowd.
If you're going to review a movie, you might aswell judge it based upon what kind of movie it is, not how well it fits the slant you like to write about all the time.
Why doesn't the Linux/OSS community come up with an embedded, tiny-ass Linux hard drive like the iPod, with some simple GUI-and-pen based features, a 6 or 20 gig drive, firewire and not much else. We could greatly increase the establishment of Linux by having it up for sale to desktop users, and M$ won't be able to make quips about usability anymore.
Of course, having Linux in just another file server is nice too, I guess.
If you were to give a present-day person a time machine, he'd be totally wowed by all the possibilities that opened up before him. He would probably take over the world pretty freaking quickly.
If you were to give everyone on the planet a time machine, all at the same time, nobody would be able to take over the world.
The same can be said about computers, nanotech, giant robot spiders of doom, any technology that has a single source or a single user can give its wielder great power. Give it to everyone and they'll be able to handle the grey or red goo problems on their own time.
Nanotech will start out like the atom bomb, automobile, cotton gin or the microwave oven. First only an elite few will have this great labour-saving device, but after a while, everyone will.
Governments, when their powers reach a certain critical mass, expand those powers until they collapse in on themselves. The United States and Russia, through the Cold War, extended their powers to incredible lengths, both domestically and externally.
The USSR, whose domestic controls grew faster and stricter as time went on, collapsed first, leaving America as the "winner" of that "war." Unfortunately, it also left America with the impression that the federal government -- whose domestic control was supposed to be limited -- should enjoy unlimited power in "extreme" circumstances. It didn't take long for circumstances to present themselves, or be manufactured by one cause or another.
Eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, we'll experience a collapse like the USSR did, and a shrinking of government back to the essentials, like serving the people, providing freedom and justice for all, and maybe even protecting the innocent.
Even if they stopped developing it, made it illegal in the lower 48 states, systematically jailed or impounded Slackware users or fed us to ravenous wolves, I'd not stop using this distro. It has everything I want on the CD, plenty of office suites and window managers, no shortage of development tools, and a small/fast enough footprint to still work on an i386 with 16 megs of RAM. That's not half bad for software I started using six years ago.
Lacking really ultra-advanced package management has never been much of a problem either. While the setup programs weren't quite as "saleable" as the pretty GUI frontends, they were colorful, used an easy-to-follow menu system, and gave a very detailed description of what they were doing, when, at all times. Compare that to, say, the Corel setup wizard, which kept crapping out on even slightly non-standard hardware.
From the way that paragraph was worded, it raises a few red flags without worrying what "harm" might be. If you catch your kid reading material that MIGHT be harmful to SOMEONE ELSE's kid, you aren't supposed to deal with it the same way you'd deal with your kid picking up The Joy Of Sex from the library or the bookshelf in your room.
Instead, you sue them, and don't need to produce any evidence that your kid specifically was hurt. In other words, Third Party Syndrome is yet again getting passed as law.
I'm actually kind of curious how long data stored in a network can last. Sure, its reliable as hell for the "important" stuff, but what about historical photographs?
One great thing about photos is its cheaper to make a digital copy of a photo than to make an analog copy of a digital image. You can store a semi-permanent, lossy piece of data in a permanent, moving but lossless form and make infinite copies without any degredation.
The really "important" analog photos WILL be stored digitally, whether we like it or not, and the really "cool" digital photos will end up in billboards. How many millions of digital or paralell copies of that National Geographic picture of the girl with the nifty eyes are out there, both digitally and in analog?
There will always be "classic" content stored digitally, and the really useful, frequently archived and valuable information will be preserved more efficiently than ever before. We'll even be storing the really meaty things for archaeology. Surely some personal home pages will be mirrored or just plain stick around for long enough. In three hundred years web archaeologists might dig up a picture of Suzie and her dog on a crappy yellow-on-white HTML page.
Why not do what TV stations and big production companies do to store large quantities of footage: make a big library of digital recordings. I know the restrictions are 640x480x16, but why not go with 720x480x32 instead? Because its digital, you can get lossless recall through firewire in any halfway decent video camera, and backups to hard drives for compression, editing and analysis is pretty easy.
Why set up a high-tech solution for a low-tech problem?
Now that closed source companies are starting to really restrict what end users can do, and what they can see, and what licensing they will even give out to people, it'll be a lot easier for open source organizations to really shine.
:)
While everyone else is adding restrictions, we should be in a mad dash to catch up where the closed source versions are leaving off, increasing public acceptance of how convenient and useful open source products are compared to the rest of the software industry.
CSS people are actually giving OSS people the opportunity to be BETTER, not just feature-equal! Yaaaay
Great, but without libraries, using a ~900k executable, I can do an http interface, download a web page, parse it for content, then save that content to a file. Perl without libraries can't do that without worrying about the actual http protocol, meaning rebol saves people from having to reuse big blocks of code.
For beginning users, this ease of use is important because it frees them to do more creative things, faster, and easier.
Having an OpenRebol, however, would be very very nice, just for more advanced users who want to roll their own rebol or rebol like substance, with better features.
If it weren't for rebol I wouldn't have a 25 line script to grab the stock market closes every day from yahoo.com. If you want to get batches of web pages and parse them for useful information, use rebol. It rocks.
If it were more widely accepted, rebol would make a really sweet web language, too, allowing more control over the interface, with less garbage in the page's source code.