In the UK it is illegal to hide tax charges when prices are quoted. Prices quoted by vendors have to include all applicable taxes.
That meant that back in England for my mobile phone bill my talk plan was advertised as 25 pounds per month, and that's exactly what I paid.
I'm now living in Canada, and my mobile talk plan was advertised as $60 per month for two phones. Not bad, except the actual bill comes in at about $100 per month. Just like in the USA there's a whole load of surcharges and taxes that aren't included in the quoted price.
It really annoys me that when I see a price quoted I don't know what the actual price will be. It gets really confusing since there's variable rates of tax that apply.
Pricing without quoting what the actual price will be seems like very deceptive business practice to me. It creates a bad impression, since it seems like businesses are out to con you.
Apple's making inroads into the server space, and high performance computing. Remember, the third fastest computer in the world is based on Apple XServes.
Besides XServe in the hardware arena there's XSan. As for software WebObjects, XGrid, and the QuickTime Streaming Server are also all pretty important technologies, and the second two are free. Mac OS X is also a pretty rhobust OS too, and the Server version offers good compatibility with Windows as well as other Unixes. This little lot makes for some pretty descent back-end servers.
It seems to me that Apple have very little need right now to buy in much more server technology. Sun doesn't have all that much to offer them.
Partering with MS is one of the worst decisions a company can make.
Yes, but this is the SUN deal we're talking about here. When they partnered with Microsoft they got a couple of billion dollars and a fairly broad agreement cross-licensing patented technologies. Sure, many other companies have suffered by partnering with Microsoft, but there's been quite a few companies that have benefitted, at least in the short to medium term.
Apple did OK partnering with Microsoft a few years back and did not suffer from it. They got assurances about the future of Office and IE, as well as a chunk of cash (although nowhere near as much as SUN). If SUN hadn't gone down this partnership route they'd still be feeding their lawyers a big chunk of cash and would still have no assurances about Java on Windows. There's no reason to think that Sun can't make an MS partnership work.
Every time we have an article on Slashdot that involves DRM technology we always get the following cry:
> STOP USING DRM!! IT'S FLAWED LOGIC THAT WON'T WORK!!!
The reason for this cry is simple - DRM uses encryption to protect data, and for that data to be usable at some stage it must be decrypted. There is therefore a weak point in every DRM system where unencrypted data can be obtained, and thus every DRM system is flawed.
Now this is unarguably true, and very truely inelligent person that has ever looked into DRM will realise this. That actually includes record company executives...
DRM should not be looked upon as providing absolute security, rather it should be considered to be more akin to putting a padlock and chain on a bicycle. If you're the legal owner of the bike then you have the key to the padlock. A set of bolt cutters though can easily cut through the chain.
Now if you're not the owner of the bike then it's illegal to take it whether it's been padlocked or not. The padlock is there as a deterant to ensure that the bike is not taken by a casual opportunist thief - only a real criminal would take a padlocked bike. The padlock is not a magic solution against theft and only a fool would think it was intended as such.
Firstly as the parent poster correctly writes to produce a colour epaper display you don't actually need overlapping colours, and the right approach would indeed be CMYK. However to compensate for a lack of pixel overlap you need a higher resolution.
Whilst colour printing does involve overprinting it does not need it, since the eye gets fooled by things printed close to each other, which is the same principle as CRTs and LCDs. In printing a colour can either be "on" or "off" - there's no way to get a printing press to print a shade of black, or cyan, or any other colour. You compensate for this either by halftoning or using spot colours. Spot colours allow for only a single additional colour to be used. Halftoning is a technique of producing a patern of dots very close to each other to fool the eye into seeing a shade.
From what I understand this Sony display is capable of displaying four shades of gray. The reality of this is that it's not really showing gray, but rather not fully turning around a black pixel, so only a proportion of the black side of the pixel is shown. This works because each pixel on an epaper display is basically a ball which is white one side and black on the other. What they're doing sounds pretty smart to me, and provides some compensation for the relatively low resolution of their dislay. Yes, the resolution at 170ppi is higher than CRTs and LCDs, but it's way lower than the 300dpi our laser printers were putting out 15 years ago.
For a decent colour epaper display you'd need clusters of four pixels in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. You would need a significantly higher resolution to get a good display out of this, even with the greyscale technology Sony seems to have.
However it has its limitations. I often have many many windows open at the same time - right now I've probably got 40 windows open, and whilst Expose lets me see the whole lot they end up being really tiny and difficult to see.
Now if Expose pushed all windows onto the inside of a sphere and let me look around at them all it would be truely fantastic since all the windows would be shown at a more reasonable size.
This Sphere XP looks like a very interesting idea to me. Since Apple uses OpenGL for its window drawing adding similar features to Mac OS X should be quite possible for them to do. I hope they do something similar.
Microsoft's anti-trust fine imposed by the EU was, at least in part, based on their income.
However there are rules to limit the proportion of fine vs. income. Additionally this policy does not bear in mind the amount of cash the company has in the bank.
From what I have gathered GNUstep only implements a subset of the Cocoa API - not surprising since Apple is constantly updating Cocoa.
Additionally most reports about GNUstep are that it is very difficult to install...
Ideally I'd like to be able to install GNUstep on my Mac and have it integrated with XCode so that I could compile versions of my apps for other platforms.
Whilst I disagree with the original posters assertion that crypto is nothing but an expensive feel-good technology, he does make a good point, although arguably he did not put it forward very well. The point is that electronic cryptography can be defeated, no matter how sophisticated the scheme is.
The most effective means of defeating any electronic security system is not through technology but violence. A baseball bat is more effective than a computer program if you want to unlock encrypted data. How? Kidnap the person with the key (or access to it) and threaten to break their legs with the bat unless they reveal what you want. Most people will crack with just the threat being made.
Cameras may be more ubiquitous in the UK, but I would not say that they are really more accepted. Additionally there are laws in the UK to protect the privacy of individuals.
There are, I believe, more cameras in the UK than in the US despite the fact that the UK has less than a fifth of the population, but remember this footage came from New York, not London. This tells us something about the respective societies. I'm not sure what exactly.
I would say it's not quite as simple as either everything from security cameras should be available or nothing. The main use of these cameras is to spot crime - if footage of crimes in progress is not allowed to be disseminated then where is the value of these cameras?
"Hookers and drug dealers in the new GTA? Will Rockstar Games go to any length to get attention from sex-starved teenagers? "
This is of course exactly the kind of sensationalistic journalism that our modern news outlets love to put out.
The thing that I like about this one though is the implications in the second sentence, especially when coupled with footage of girls in the mall. Sure this implies that Rockstar are evil for trying to attract teens. It also implies that there's something wrong with the teens, that their lives are so empty that they are attracted to these games, especially by using footage of teens hanging in a mall - a totally worthless activity if ever there was one.
The implied solution is fairly clear to me - teens should be having sex. It would get them out of the malls, and they wouldn't be playing evil games like GTA.
It's not necessarily the Finder displaying this trojan application the same as an MP3 file. In fact I'd expect that the Finder is displaying the correct icon for the app.
How could you have a classic-style application that looks like an MP3 file? Simply copy the standard MP3 icon out of iTunes and put it into the resource fork of the app as it's icon.
There is no simple, convenient way I see of solving this problem without enforcing that all applications should have a ".app" suffix. This policy would be OK for new apps but would create big legacy problems.
I'm a Mac user with a Korean girlfriend, and whilst she's pretty happy that she can use my OS in Korean she often has problems accessing web sites.
The site she seems to spend most time at is daum.net. This site often fails to render correctly - the front page is generally OK, but many bits are slightly screwy. She used to access it through public Internet kiosks though running Opera on Windows, which was a real rendering nightmare.
For reading news and accessing her email it's OK, but for anything more than that Daum seems to require a Windows only plug-in. This is for simple things like accessing a chat room (which should be a simple Java applet) and viewing comic strips (which could be in Flash format, or even JPGs). For discussion boards they require you to read a two character code from a graphic and type it in to ensure it's not a bot posting to the board, but even with exactly the right characters entered it fails to recognise them.
The reliance on Windows only plug-ins seems prevalent amongst Korean web sites. This is probably in part a reflection of the fact that they have had ubiquitous broadband for quite some time now and developers cater for the most common option first. It also seems like poor planning to me, since there have usually been cross-platform solutions for many years.
At a really simple level some web sites also fail to identify that they are written in Korean, so they get rendered with strange Roman characters. Easily fixed by picking the appropriate language encoding in the browser, but easily fixed too by the web master mmaking sure their server correctly tags their web pages.
Both of us usually use Safari - MS Internet Explorer generally gives an even worse experience.
It seems to me that Korean web masters are both very lazy and are indeed, as the parent post suggested, owned by Microsoft.
If a record company films a person downloading a file with the cameras rolling to gain evidence of copyright violation then unless the record company plans to prosecute the downloader they have the implicit consent of the record company to make a copy of that file. Thus there is no violation.
Another catch 22.
Also to my way of thinking it is the downloader who is potentially the real violator, since they are the ones that are making a copy of a file. Even then the downloader could potentially have the right to own a copy of the file if they already owned a CD containing that file. However I am not a lawyer. It seems to me though that if you can't prosecute somebody for selling a knife that gets used to stab someone then why should you be able to prosecute somebody for making music files available? In the case of the knife the seller could not know that the intent of the buyer was illegal. How can a sharer know that the intent of a downloader is illegal?
As well as being unfair to Microsoft, it would not be possible to force them to open source Windows.
Don't forget, Windows is a very big and complicated piece of software. It includes a whole load of technologies and techniques that Microsoft has licensed from other companies and are covered by patents. The code is confidential because it can't be anything but, and that's also why their source-level licenses require people to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Had Microsoft developed Windows all by themselves though forcing them to open the whole lot would be a great idea.
The best we can hope for is to force them to completely open their APIs and file formats.
Don't forget that your average new user would have absolutely no idea what "Firefox" or "Galeon" is. They could be just about anything, as could "Mozilla" and "Konqueror". In fact they all sound like game titles.
Apple is just as bad with "Safari", although in most other areas they're better with "Mail", "iTunes", "iChat" etc.
Microsoft on the other hand has "Internet Explorer" which kind of makes sense for a web browser, but "Outlook Express" doesn't make much sense to me as an email program.
There's plenty of examples of applications with duff names that don't really match what they do which all serves to make computers seem strange and complicated to the uninitiated. Whilst we may all know they're not really that complicated they look complicated which puts people off.
Default choices are most definitely a good thing. Providing users with a limited set of options presented in a plain and clear manner is also a good thing, but defaults are generally better.
Advanced options are fine, but for about 95% of users they're useless, and the remaining 5% will only want to use them rarely. Why expose the 95% to needless complexity when it will only alienate them?
It's similar to the old RISC vs CISC debate - in a CISC instruction set about 5% of the instructions were used 95% of the time. The RISC people saw this as a big opportunity and concentrated on doing that 5% really well, and sure enough their initial chips were much faster than their CISC equivalents.
Microsoft built a time limited playback feature into an earlier version of the Windows Media format. I remember getting a small software program a few weeks after it was announced that created an unrestricted version of the same file. I expect the same will happen again - they are just hoping the big music guys won't remember how quickly they got hacked last time.
There will always be ways around this kind of thing anyway. As I'm sure many people have mentioned there's good old fashioned analogue recording, which when you have fairly decent equipment gives you results close to the original digital source.
Another alternative is a virtual sound card driver that outputs sound to disc or routes it through to another application.
I've been getting really hacked off with trying to read discussions on Slashdot only to be presented with a massive load of "Funny" comments that were anything but. It makes me wonder about the sense of humour of those people that moderate these comments up.
If only I'd found out about this feature earlier I could have saved myself a lot of time.
It is entirely irrelevant if the majority of people using MOD chips are doing so to play illegally copied games, rather than backups of legally owned material, or foreign region software.
You should have the right to protect your investment i.e. play backups rather than risk damaging expensive originals. This is not the exclusive domain of people protecting their games from their children either.
Region locking is also a dubious practice and amounts to an effort to control markets. In business areas outside the entertainment industry this kind of market manipulation is often considered illegal and monopolistic.
Watch it. Read the opening credits. I'm pretty certain this is where they all get it from.
Apple used to be one of the Llama companies too in their Newton days - Llama references popped up all over the place because almost all of the Newton team were big Monty Python fans.
Apple users display no more of a "scarry cult group-think mentality" than your average bunch of Linux users.
To say that all Apple has ever done is slap a candy coloured wrapper on stuff shows a real lack of insight and knowledge. You're probably one of those that dismisses Apple's efforts in creating a decent windowing system, and ignores the fact that at the time only Xerox had done that in the labs on computers that cost much more than $10,000, and their windows couldn't overlap and didn't automatically redraw. No, Xerox had done a WIMP system before, so Apple clearly could not innovate in that area. Please!
As you said, we all borrow ideas from each other, and I agree, there should be no shame in that at all. Indeed as far as I can see Linux is almost nothing but ideas copied from elsewhere - even the idea of giving all the code away isn't new.
The issue here though is that sometimes ideas are genuinely innovative, and that's why we have patents. In this particular case, having read the patent application, I would say that the claim is dubious and relies greatly on prior art. The patent is essentially a claim on the heirarchy order used in the iPod UI. The claims of the parent poster though that Slashdot is full of moaners complaining about people making money and trying to protect their inventions is, I would say, unfortunately mostly true.
Sure some Mac users think that because they have a Mac they're cooler than other computer owners. Some Linux users think that because they run Linux they're smarter than Windows people. You know what though? It's all bullshit.
Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I just thought I'd say that I don't seem to be able to get access to any nasa.gov sites at the moment. All of them are giving me a DNS error. Frustrating, since we've had a couple of interesting NASA related stories today.
I'm wondering if other people are having similar problems.
Yet another language turns up that claims its virtual parents are SmallTalk, Lisp, and Self...
It would seem that Apple may have had it right ten years ago when they made NewtonScript, the native language of their Newton computers, since that language too claimed SmalllTalk, Lisp and Self as its antecedents.
Having had a brief look though at the documentation for Slate, and yesterdays Prothon, I can't help but feel that Apple did a much better job with NewtonScript and the Newton environment. NewtonScript seems to me to be much more mature and better thought out than these two examples.
As for comments that I read here about prototype-based languages not being suitable for application development and are effectively only the domain of accademics, I say bullshit. Class-based programming really isn't the only method of OO development, and prototypes can be equally effective. Many thousands of applications were written for the Newton, and they all used NewtonScript and its prototype-based object model. Prototypes can usually be used in a very similar way to classes, and most class-like behaviour can easily be simulated.
If you're interested in finding out more about how NewtonScript worked and functioned there reference manual can be found here: http://www.unna.org/unna/development/docume ntation/NewtonScriptProgramLanguage.pdf For a discussion of prototype vs. class based programming consult Appendix C of the NewtonScript reference manual.
Why did people reinvent everything that had been around for years in GNUstep for Gnome and KDE? Simple. GNUstep simply got rejected because it's language is Objective-C, rather than C++.
Personally I found C++ to be the most difficult language I've ever learnt - mastering it is very difficult, and I can therefore understand why a C++ programmer may be reluctant to try to learn another C-based language. However the simple reality of Objective-C is that it's a really easy language to learn, especially if you already know C++.
Naturally a big part of the "it's not C++" argument also comes down to use of existing C++ source code. Historically this was a problem, but Objective-C++ solves this.
I have never used GNUstep, but I program on Mac OS X in Objective-C and Cocoa (the latest version of the API GNUstep was based on). It's a complete delight and is by far the most advanced desktop API I have ever encountered. With Apple's tools and the Cocoa API you can make a web browser without writing any code at all - you just need to draw out the user interface. A rich text editor which supports graphics, fonts, search/replace, and spell checking, takes only four lines of code; two for loading, two for saving.
It's a shame GNUstep fell by the wayside - things could have been so much better.
There are a number of comments here which suggest that Asimov would be spinning in his grave if he saw this movie...
Unless these people have worked on the movie and read the screenplay I do not understand how they can make that judgement right now. Sure, there are a few bits in the trailer that show some kind of fight going on involving robots, but that's not entirely inconsistent with the three laws. Many of Asimov's robot stories were concerned with situations where the actions of a robot seemed to break the laws of robotics and sometimes people did get hurt.
All we really have right now is a trailer and a brief interview-type bit with Will Smith and the director. From that we can see in a few very brief clips that some robots run amok, and we hear from Will Smith that some robots malfunction. From what I remember reading Asimov this is all still fairly consistent.
What all the naysayers need to bear in mind right now is that all of the footage we've been shown has been put together by marketing people. Most if not all of them will have no idea about the original material and will not have read Asimov. All they have to go on is the footage they've got of the movie. The writer and director rarely have much imput into what goes into this stuff.
I'm not saying that this movie is going to be consistent with Asimov. What I'm saying is that right now it's too early to tell for sure. We'll see in July.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK it is illegal to hide tax charges when prices are quoted. Prices quoted by vendors have to include all applicable taxes.
That meant that back in England for my mobile phone bill my talk plan was advertised as 25 pounds per month, and that's exactly what I paid.
I'm now living in Canada, and my mobile talk plan was advertised as $60 per month for two phones. Not bad, except the actual bill comes in at about $100 per month. Just like in the USA there's a whole load of surcharges and taxes that aren't included in the quoted price.
It really annoys me that when I see a price quoted I don't know what the actual price will be. It gets really confusing since there's variable rates of tax that apply.
Pricing without quoting what the actual price will be seems like very deceptive business practice to me. It creates a bad impression, since it seems like businesses are out to con you.
Apple's making inroads into the server space, and high performance computing. Remember, the third fastest computer in the world is based on Apple XServes.
Besides XServe in the hardware arena there's XSan. As for software WebObjects, XGrid, and the QuickTime Streaming Server are also all pretty important technologies, and the second two are free. Mac OS X is also a pretty rhobust OS too, and the Server version offers good compatibility with Windows as well as other Unixes. This little lot makes for some pretty descent back-end servers.
It seems to me that Apple have very little need right now to buy in much more server technology. Sun doesn't have all that much to offer them.
Yes, but this is the SUN deal we're talking about here. When they partnered with Microsoft they got a couple of billion dollars and a fairly broad agreement cross-licensing patented technologies. Sure, many other companies have suffered by partnering with Microsoft, but there's been quite a few companies that have benefitted, at least in the short to medium term.
Apple did OK partnering with Microsoft a few years back and did not suffer from it. They got assurances about the future of Office and IE, as well as a chunk of cash (although nowhere near as much as SUN). If SUN hadn't gone down this partnership route they'd still be feeding their lawyers a big chunk of cash and would still have no assurances about Java on Windows. There's no reason to think that Sun can't make an MS partnership work.
Every time we have an article on Slashdot that involves DRM technology we always get the following cry:
> STOP USING DRM!! IT'S FLAWED LOGIC THAT WON'T WORK!!!
The reason for this cry is simple - DRM uses encryption to protect data, and for that data to be usable at some stage it must be decrypted. There is therefore a weak point in every DRM system where unencrypted data can be obtained, and thus every DRM system is flawed.
Now this is unarguably true, and very truely inelligent person that has ever looked into DRM will realise this. That actually includes record company executives...
DRM should not be looked upon as providing absolute security, rather it should be considered to be more akin to putting a padlock and chain on a bicycle. If you're the legal owner of the bike then you have the key to the padlock. A set of bolt cutters though can easily cut through the chain.
Now if you're not the owner of the bike then it's illegal to take it whether it's been padlocked or not. The padlock is there as a deterant to ensure that the bike is not taken by a casual opportunist thief - only a real criminal would take a padlocked bike. The padlock is not a magic solution against theft and only a fool would think it was intended as such.
DRM serves the same purpose for data.
Two points...
Firstly as the parent poster correctly writes to produce a colour epaper display you don't actually need overlapping colours, and the right approach would indeed be CMYK. However to compensate for a lack of pixel overlap you need a higher resolution.
Whilst colour printing does involve overprinting it does not need it, since the eye gets fooled by things printed close to each other, which is the same principle as CRTs and LCDs. In printing a colour can either be "on" or "off" - there's no way to get a printing press to print a shade of black, or cyan, or any other colour. You compensate for this either by halftoning or using spot colours. Spot colours allow for only a single additional colour to be used. Halftoning is a technique of producing a patern of dots very close to each other to fool the eye into seeing a shade.
From what I understand this Sony display is capable of displaying four shades of gray. The reality of this is that it's not really showing gray, but rather not fully turning around a black pixel, so only a proportion of the black side of the pixel is shown. This works because each pixel on an epaper display is basically a ball which is white one side and black on the other. What they're doing sounds pretty smart to me, and provides some compensation for the relatively low resolution of their dislay. Yes, the resolution at 170ppi is higher than CRTs and LCDs, but it's way lower than the 300dpi our laser printers were putting out 15 years ago.
For a decent colour epaper display you'd need clusters of four pixels in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. You would need a significantly higher resolution to get a good display out of this, even with the greyscale technology Sony seems to have.
I too love Expose and couldn't live without it.
However it has its limitations. I often have many many windows open at the same time - right now I've probably got 40 windows open, and whilst Expose lets me see the whole lot they end up being really tiny and difficult to see.
Now if Expose pushed all windows onto the inside of a sphere and let me look around at them all it would be truely fantastic since all the windows would be shown at a more reasonable size.
This Sphere XP looks like a very interesting idea to me. Since Apple uses OpenGL for its window drawing adding similar features to Mac OS X should be quite possible for them to do. I hope they do something similar.
Steve
Yes, sometimes fines are based on income.
Microsoft's anti-trust fine imposed by the EU was, at least in part, based on their income.
However there are rules to limit the proportion of fine vs. income. Additionally this policy does not bear in mind the amount of cash the company has in the bank.
From what I have gathered GNUstep only implements a subset of the Cocoa API - not surprising since Apple is constantly updating Cocoa.
Additionally most reports about GNUstep are that it is very difficult to install...
Ideally I'd like to be able to install GNUstep on my Mac and have it integrated with XCode so that I could compile versions of my apps for other platforms.
Whilst I disagree with the original posters assertion that crypto is nothing but an expensive feel-good technology, he does make a good point, although arguably he did not put it forward very well. The point is that electronic cryptography can be defeated, no matter how sophisticated the scheme is.
The most effective means of defeating any electronic security system is not through technology but violence. A baseball bat is more effective than a computer program if you want to unlock encrypted data. How? Kidnap the person with the key (or access to it) and threaten to break their legs with the bat unless they reveal what you want. Most people will crack with just the threat being made.
Cameras may be more ubiquitous in the UK, but I would not say that they are really more accepted. Additionally there are laws in the UK to protect the privacy of individuals.
There are, I believe, more cameras in the UK than in the US despite the fact that the UK has less than a fifth of the population, but remember this footage came from New York, not London. This tells us something about the respective societies. I'm not sure what exactly.
I would say it's not quite as simple as either everything from security cameras should be available or nothing. The main use of these cameras is to spot crime - if footage of crimes in progress is not allowed to be disseminated then where is the value of these cameras?
"Hookers and drug dealers in the new GTA? Will Rockstar Games go to any length to get attention from sex-starved teenagers? "
This is of course exactly the kind of sensationalistic journalism that our modern news outlets love to put out.
The thing that I like about this one though is the implications in the second sentence, especially when coupled with footage of girls in the mall. Sure this implies that Rockstar are evil for trying to attract teens. It also implies that there's something wrong with the teens, that their lives are so empty that they are attracted to these games, especially by using footage of teens hanging in a mall - a totally worthless activity if ever there was one.
The implied solution is fairly clear to me - teens should be having sex. It would get them out of the malls, and they wouldn't be playing evil games like GTA.
The news outlets would of course love this.
OK, I admit it, I'm stirring shit here.
It's not necessarily the Finder displaying this trojan application the same as an MP3 file. In fact I'd expect that the Finder is displaying the correct icon for the app.
How could you have a classic-style application that looks like an MP3 file? Simply copy the standard MP3 icon out of iTunes and put it into the resource fork of the app as it's icon.
There is no simple, convenient way I see of solving this problem without enforcing that all applications should have a ".app" suffix. This policy would be OK for new apps but would create big legacy problems.
I'm a Mac user with a Korean girlfriend, and whilst she's pretty happy that she can use my OS in Korean she often has problems accessing web sites.
The site she seems to spend most time at is daum.net. This site often fails to render correctly - the front page is generally OK, but many bits are slightly screwy. She used to access it through public Internet kiosks though running Opera on Windows, which was a real rendering nightmare.
For reading news and accessing her email it's OK, but for anything more than that Daum seems to require a Windows only plug-in. This is for simple things like accessing a chat room (which should be a simple Java applet) and viewing comic strips (which could be in Flash format, or even JPGs). For discussion boards they require you to read a two character code from a graphic and type it in to ensure it's not a bot posting to the board, but even with exactly the right characters entered it fails to recognise them.
The reliance on Windows only plug-ins seems prevalent amongst Korean web sites. This is probably in part a reflection of the fact that they have had ubiquitous broadband for quite some time now and developers cater for the most common option first. It also seems like poor planning to me, since there have usually been cross-platform solutions for many years.
At a really simple level some web sites also fail to identify that they are written in Korean, so they get rendered with strange Roman characters. Easily fixed by picking the appropriate language encoding in the browser, but easily fixed too by the web master mmaking sure their server correctly tags their web pages.
Both of us usually use Safari - MS Internet Explorer generally gives an even worse experience.
It seems to me that Korean web masters are both very lazy and are indeed, as the parent post suggested, owned by Microsoft.
OK, interesting example, but it's flawed.
If a record company films a person downloading a file with the cameras rolling to gain evidence of copyright violation then unless the record company plans to prosecute the downloader they have the implicit consent of the record company to make a copy of that file. Thus there is no violation.
Another catch 22.
Also to my way of thinking it is the downloader who is potentially the real violator, since they are the ones that are making a copy of a file. Even then the downloader could potentially have the right to own a copy of the file if they already owned a CD containing that file. However I am not a lawyer. It seems to me though that if you can't prosecute somebody for selling a knife that gets used to stab someone then why should you be able to prosecute somebody for making music files available? In the case of the knife the seller could not know that the intent of the buyer was illegal. How can a sharer know that the intent of a downloader is illegal?
As well as being unfair to Microsoft, it would not be possible to force them to open source Windows.
Don't forget, Windows is a very big and complicated piece of software. It includes a whole load of technologies and techniques that Microsoft has licensed from other companies and are covered by patents. The code is confidential because it can't be anything but, and that's also why their source-level licenses require people to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Had Microsoft developed Windows all by themselves though forcing them to open the whole lot would be a great idea.
The best we can hope for is to force them to completely open their APIs and file formats.
Don't forget that your average new user would have absolutely no idea what "Firefox" or "Galeon" is. They could be just about anything, as could "Mozilla" and "Konqueror". In fact they all sound like game titles.
Apple is just as bad with "Safari", although in most other areas they're better with "Mail", "iTunes", "iChat" etc.
Microsoft on the other hand has "Internet Explorer" which kind of makes sense for a web browser, but "Outlook Express" doesn't make much sense to me as an email program.
There's plenty of examples of applications with duff names that don't really match what they do which all serves to make computers seem strange and complicated to the uninitiated. Whilst we may all know they're not really that complicated they look complicated which puts people off.
Default choices are most definitely a good thing. Providing users with a limited set of options presented in a plain and clear manner is also a good thing, but defaults are generally better.
Advanced options are fine, but for about 95% of users they're useless, and the remaining 5% will only want to use them rarely. Why expose the 95% to needless complexity when it will only alienate them?
It's similar to the old RISC vs CISC debate - in a CISC instruction set about 5% of the instructions were used 95% of the time. The RISC people saw this as a big opportunity and concentrated on doing that 5% really well, and sure enough their initial chips were much faster than their CISC equivalents.
Microsoft built a time limited playback feature into an earlier version of the Windows Media format. I remember getting a small software program a few weeks after it was announced that created an unrestricted version of the same file. I expect the same will happen again - they are just hoping the big music guys won't remember how quickly they got hacked last time.
There will always be ways around this kind of thing anyway. As I'm sure many people have mentioned there's good old fashioned analogue recording, which when you have fairly decent equipment gives you results close to the original digital source.
Another alternative is a virtual sound card driver that outputs sound to disc or routes it through to another application.
Supersweet!
I've been getting really hacked off with trying to read discussions on Slashdot only to be presented with a massive load of "Funny" comments that were anything but. It makes me wonder about the sense of humour of those people that moderate these comments up.
If only I'd found out about this feature earlier I could have saved myself a lot of time.
It is entirely irrelevant if the majority of people using MOD chips are doing so to play illegally copied games, rather than backups of legally owned material, or foreign region software.
You should have the right to protect your investment i.e. play backups rather than risk damaging expensive originals. This is not the exclusive domain of people protecting their games from their children either.
Region locking is also a dubious practice and amounts to an effort to control markets. In business areas outside the entertainment industry this kind of market manipulation is often considered illegal and monopolistic.
Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.
Watch it. Read the opening credits. I'm pretty certain this is where they all get it from.
Apple used to be one of the Llama companies too in their Newton days - Llama references popped up all over the place because almost all of the Newton team were big Monty Python fans.
Oh boo hoo!
Apple users display no more of a "scarry cult group-think mentality" than your average bunch of Linux users.
To say that all Apple has ever done is slap a candy coloured wrapper on stuff shows a real lack of insight and knowledge. You're probably one of those that dismisses Apple's efforts in creating a decent windowing system, and ignores the fact that at the time only Xerox had done that in the labs on computers that cost much more than $10,000, and their windows couldn't overlap and didn't automatically redraw. No, Xerox had done a WIMP system before, so Apple clearly could not innovate in that area. Please!
As you said, we all borrow ideas from each other, and I agree, there should be no shame in that at all. Indeed as far as I can see Linux is almost nothing but ideas copied from elsewhere - even the idea of giving all the code away isn't new.
The issue here though is that sometimes ideas are genuinely innovative, and that's why we have patents. In this particular case, having read the patent application, I would say that the claim is dubious and relies greatly on prior art. The patent is essentially a claim on the heirarchy order used in the iPod UI. The claims of the parent poster though that Slashdot is full of moaners complaining about people making money and trying to protect their inventions is, I would say, unfortunately mostly true.
Sure some Mac users think that because they have a Mac they're cooler than other computer owners. Some Linux users think that because they run Linux they're smarter than Windows people. You know what though? It's all bullshit.
Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I just thought I'd say that I don't seem to be able to get access to any nasa.gov sites at the moment. All of them are giving me a DNS error. Frustrating, since we've had a couple of interesting NASA related stories today.
I'm wondering if other people are having similar problems.
Yet another language turns up that claims its virtual parents are SmallTalk, Lisp, and Self...
e ntation /NewtonScriptProgramLanguage.pdf
It would seem that Apple may have had it right ten years ago when they made NewtonScript, the native language of their Newton computers, since that language too claimed SmalllTalk, Lisp and Self as its antecedents.
Having had a brief look though at the documentation for Slate, and yesterdays Prothon, I can't help but feel that Apple did a much better job with NewtonScript and the Newton environment. NewtonScript seems to me to be much more mature and better thought out than these two examples.
As for comments that I read here about prototype-based languages not being suitable for application development and are effectively only the domain of accademics, I say bullshit. Class-based programming really isn't the only method of OO development, and prototypes can be equally effective. Many thousands of applications were written for the Newton, and they all used NewtonScript and its prototype-based object model. Prototypes can usually be used in a very similar way to classes, and most class-like behaviour can easily be simulated.
If you're interested in finding out more about how NewtonScript worked and functioned there reference manual can be found here:
http://www.unna.org/unna/development/docum
For a discussion of prototype vs. class based programming consult Appendix C of the NewtonScript reference manual.
Why did people reinvent everything that had been around for years in GNUstep for Gnome and KDE? Simple. GNUstep simply got rejected because it's language is Objective-C, rather than C++.
Personally I found C++ to be the most difficult language I've ever learnt - mastering it is very difficult, and I can therefore understand why a C++ programmer may be reluctant to try to learn another C-based language. However the simple reality of Objective-C is that it's a really easy language to learn, especially if you already know C++.
Naturally a big part of the "it's not C++" argument also comes down to use of existing C++ source code. Historically this was a problem, but Objective-C++ solves this.
I have never used GNUstep, but I program on Mac OS X in Objective-C and Cocoa (the latest version of the API GNUstep was based on). It's a complete delight and is by far the most advanced desktop API I have ever encountered. With Apple's tools and the Cocoa API you can make a web browser without writing any code at all - you just need to draw out the user interface. A rich text editor which supports graphics, fonts, search/replace, and spell checking, takes only four lines of code; two for loading, two for saving.
It's a shame GNUstep fell by the wayside - things could have been so much better.
Steve
There are a number of comments here which suggest that Asimov would be spinning in his grave if he saw this movie...
Unless these people have worked on the movie and read the screenplay I do not understand how they can make that judgement right now. Sure, there are a few bits in the trailer that show some kind of fight going on involving robots, but that's not entirely inconsistent with the three laws. Many of Asimov's robot stories were concerned with situations where the actions of a robot seemed to break the laws of robotics and sometimes people did get hurt.
All we really have right now is a trailer and a brief interview-type bit with Will Smith and the director. From that we can see in a few very brief clips that some robots run amok, and we hear from Will Smith that some robots malfunction. From what I remember reading Asimov this is all still fairly consistent.
What all the naysayers need to bear in mind right now is that all of the footage we've been shown has been put together by marketing people. Most if not all of them will have no idea about the original material and will not have read Asimov. All they have to go on is the footage they've got of the movie. The writer and director rarely have much imput into what goes into this stuff.
I'm not saying that this movie is going to be consistent with Asimov. What I'm saying is that right now it's too early to tell for sure. We'll see in July.