Only in fantasy-land has SQL implemented "write once, run anywhere". You hint at this problem yourself where you say "with a few mods, it works on nearly any relational database".
Whilst there is an SQL standard, implementations of SQL vary massively. Professionally I've used SQL-Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite - all have profound differences, and moving anything beyond absolutely trivial SQL code from one to another requires rewriting the query. We're talking about a language here where major implementations don't even agree on string concatenation syntax...
Every SQL implementation has it's customisations and variations from the standard. It's almost impossible to write any kind of decent SQL code without making use of these custom variations, and thus ruining the portability of the SQL code.
Arguably what is being stolen in the case of 'piracy' is not the digital media itself but instead the money that should have been paid for the media.
The problem with digital media is that it's free to duplicate data, and thus there's no replication costs involved. If one looks only ever at the media there's clearly no deprivation of property involved. However that's not really what copyright is about.
Copyright is about granting and restricting the right to make copies of a work. The intent was to encourage authors to produce new works, by helping to ensure they'd get paid for the works they had produced. The laws were introduced because it was felt that it was too easy to make copies, even though at that time the cost to make copies was high.
The fact that copying is easier and cheaper now than ever doesn't significantly change the arguments involved for or against the existence of copyright laws. (There remain significant up-front costs involved in producing media, and these costs need to be recouped.) It can make a powerful argument in favour of lower digital media prices.
Obviously the current duration of copyrights are ridiculous. Any duration exceeding half of the average expected lifetime of the author is clearly patently absurd. This is why the original laws when formed were for 7 years with an optional 7 year extension - durations that I'm inclined to think should still be perfectly acceptable today.
Quite what effect the fact that making copies is free should have on the duration of copyrights is another question. Copyright durations were already stupidly excessively long before digital media arrived.
My experience is that DLNA and AirPlay do two very different things.
I have equipment that does DLNA. My TV does it, my desktop computer, my PS3. From my TV, I can browse the DLNA server running on my desktop computer, look through folders and files, and pick something to play - although it usually won't play because the codec/container support in my TV is lousy. Playing things on my PS3 is usually more successful.
I also have equipment that does AirPlay. On my iPhone I can choose to send the audio or video I'm playing to my AppleTV. I can also choose to send audio from iTunes on my PC to a set of remote speakers connected to my amp.
None of my DLNA equipment lets me play out media to a remote device. That may or may not be a feature in the DLNA specifications, but it's certainly not supported in the equipment I have. DLNA, in practice with the equipment I have, is a request-based client-server architecture. AirPlay is essentially push-based.
There is a fundamental difference between what DLNA and AirPlay are doing.
Accomplish something while you still can, just as Ilya did.
Value your mental health.
Working flat-out at all costs to accomplish something can be extremely detrimental to both your physical and mental health. The line between sane and insane is much narrower than many imagine. Whilst you may write some cool code, what use is that if you end up losing your sanity, or worse your life?
Of course what's daft about this is that there seems to be no evidence that the ShenWei SW-3 is a Loongson/Godson chip. There is nothing to be found on what the instruction set of the CPU is, and no evidence that it implements the MIPS instruction set - any googling for that only brings you back to this story.
There is some speculation that the ShenWei's CPUs were "inspired" by the DEC Alpha. Quite what that means is anyone's guess. Again, there is very little evidence to be found on this subject, just a blog posting or two.
This seems like a case of lousy, biased, reporting.
Why would Loongson/Godson be reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha? It implements the MIPS instruction set, not Alpha. Wouldn't it have been easier for them to reverse-engineer a MIPS chip? Doesn't the evidence seem to indicate that it's a genuinely independent implementation of MIPS?
The only source of this speculation I have found is just the extremetech article that has been linked to. My googling is showing nothing else to back this up.
Whilst it's almost certainly true that there are more devices running Linux than any Apple OS, I'm not really sure whether you can say that the success of Linux is because of Stallman, or in spite of him.
The GNU Project started in 1984 with the stated intention of producing a free operating system. For the kernel part of that project, Hurd, progress has been very slow. GNU/Hurd is the operating system that Stallman set out to build at the GNU project. Even today Hurd remains far from viable for production use.
The Linux kernel is not a product of the GNU Project, it just (eventually) adopted the GPL and remains independent of the GNU Project. Free software and open source had existed before the GNU project began. Without Stallman and GNU, Linus would likely have still released Linux as open source.
Let's face it, GNU is nothing without Linux, and vice-versa...
As for the rest of the laundry list, Safari's engine, WebKit, did indeed start as a branch of KDE's KHTML but KDE is not GNU (although they do use the LGPL as one of their licenses). The Mac's user interface is not, and never has been, descended from X (again, X is not GNU, and does not use a GNU-originated license). Also whilst Android does use some GNU components, the most important parts of the system, i.e. the Linux kernel and the Dalvik VM, aren't of GNU origin (Dalvik uses an Apache license).
The assertion that RISC OS would have gone to pre-emptive multitasking as soon as the hardware permitted it simply isn't backed up by the facts.
Acorn went through many generations of ARM processors in their computers, from the ARM 2 through to the StrongARM. Acorn themselves had two different operating systems running on ARM chips that featured pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection in the form of ARX (which got canned before the first Archimedes was launched) and RISCiX (their Unix variant that was sold commercially). The hardware permitted it, Acorn just failed to deliver such features in their mainstream OS.
In the final days of Acorn they announced yet another OS that would have featured pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protection, and QoS features, to be called Galileo. Whilst it was not made clear, and no technical details of any significance were ever released, this seemed to be a different and separate OS development to RISC OS, and likely would not have been compatible.
Dude, the Apollo program ran until 1972. That's ten whole years before 1982. The Apollo Applications program, which included Skylab, finished up in 1975. Unless Michener was a very, very, slow writer or sat on his finished manuscript for 7 years his novel wasn't written during the final years of Apollo.
Thing is though, some members of the demo scene have been doing really impressive things with particle-based rendering systems over the past few years.
To see what can be done, you should check out the demos "Ceasefire (All falls down)" and "Numb Res" by CNCD & Fairlight. They both make very heavy use of particle-based rendering engines - the latter features a rather long section of real-time particle-bsed computational fluid dynamics simulation - the kind of stuff that one tends to think is the domain of pre-rendering on super-computers. When I saw it my mind got conclusively blown.
Slashdot's codebase often feels like a joke to me. My own pet peeve is the discussion threshold slider - it's numbers are *never* correct. Right now on a different browser tab a discussion is saying there's "10 Full, 3 Abbreviated" - whereas it's actually displaying 7 full, and 0 abbreviated. Another is telling me "16 Full, 0 Abbreviated" - that one has the abbreviated count right, but there's only 6 comments visible. The numbers are often so wildly out that they're completely meaningless.
If they can't even manage to do basic counting, I fear there's bugger all chance they'll manage to do unicode any time soon.
OS X and iOS do share quite a lot of their codebase, but there are some very significant differences. They are most definitely not "basically the same operating system". Most importantly at the UI level, OS X applications are written using Cocoa, and iOS apps using Cocoa Touch. The Cocoa Touch API is fundamentally different from Cocoa - it omits many of the UI classes (and controls) that Cocoa contains, and adopts a significantly different approach in a number of areas.
It's certainly not the case today that one can write once and run on both iOS and OS X. It's very difficult right now to incorporate iPad software into Lion, because the UI layer is fundamentally different. The UI has to be completely rewritten.
Besides the UI level there are other very significant differences up and down the rest of the software stack. iOS can be thought of as a stripped down, streamlined, and rebuilt OS X. Many of OS X's features (under-the-hood APIs) have been, and remain, missing from iOS. Gradually those features are being ported over - as each progressive iOS version comes, the gap between the two narrows. The difference at the UI layer though is likely to remain.
Short term, yes, an iOS-based IDE isn't going to fly.
Long term, say on a machine running iOS 7 and a 20-inch screen (or larger), why not? Such a device would likely have multiple CPU cores, and pack considerably more processing punch than the iMac I had been developing on that I recently retired.
As I see it, screen size is really the main limiting factor. The second limitation on iOS devices right now is the lack of support for fine-detail input, which could be resolved by adding in support for an optional stylus.
Except you can't reboot a universe like Doctor Who, because they did not reboot the universe.
The new series that started a few years back is the exact same universe that Doctor Who has always been in. Every previous generation (including Paul McGann's 8th Doctor who only had one on-screen outing) is still there, and the entire prior history of The Doctor remains. All of the previous regenerations have appeared on-screen in the new series, and plenty of references have been made to events in The Doctor's past. (Technically they did reboot the universe in a recent-ish story in the new Doctor Who series, but that was a plot device.)
Doctor Who restarted the series, rather than doing a universe reboot. In doing so they left out a sizeable chunk of time in The Doctor's life, leaving us with legends of a great time war. The only type of "reboot" that Doctor Who had was a production reboot where they've re-thought how to present stories.
Rebooting a universe in a series by definition means throwing away the original canon to free the writers from the shackles of the past. IMHO that's not always a bad thing. I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I love that they've rebooted that universe, since IMHO it really needed it. The next-gen timeline had become absurd, what with Voyager becoming an über-ship, and the over-use time-travel. Whilst I know some people got upset, I personally thought that the manner of the reboot in Star Trek was very respectful of the original canon.
Skylon is effectively a development of the HOTOL spaceplane project that was proposed by Rolls Royce and BAE way back in 1986, and was cancelled by the UK government in 1988 - I'm not sure where this 1982 date you mention fits in.
From what I understand the funding for this project has, since then, been very minimal, and only comparatively recently have they managed to attract the attention of ESA. From what I've read ESA only got involved because some real tangible hardware has been produced by Reaction Engines.
That real tangible hardware is in the form of coolers. That's arguably the most difficult part of their engine design, and the part that had doomed the HOTOL project. ESA seems to think that Reaction Engines are making good progress and that nothing about the SABRE engine, on which Skylon relies, is unachievable. So there is some more to this than concept art and promises.
One minor thing to note about iLife is that the boxed version also includes iWeb and iDVD, neither of which are available on the Mac app store. Whether or not those two apps (which didn't get updated for iLife '11) are worth the £19 price difference is open for debate.
One of the great things about higher frame rates is that when compressed you don't actually need to use any more bandwidth than lower frame rate equivalents. As an added benefit you also get higher quality images with less compression artefacts.
Why's that?
Video compression is mostly all about finding differences between frames. The more frames you have per second, the less the differences between those frames will be. The higher the frame rate the better, since the faster you go the smaller and less complex the deltas become. You can compress those deltas more than you would for a lower frame rate too, since whatever artefacts may result will get smoothed out much faster with subsequent deltas.
(OK, it's not quite that simple - you need minor changes in codec specs to allow for less frequent keyframes in your bitstream to ensure their overhead doesn't become too onerous.)
The sweet spot turns out to be at 600fps. Why? Because at that frame rate you can trivially pull-down the standard frame rates of 24fps, 25fps, 50fps and 60fps by just taking every 25th, 24th, 12th and 10th frames. 300fps obviously also works fine if you're only worried about broadcast TV, and this tech exists now and is in use (although it is expensive and rare). Some TV cameras at the recent winter olympics were 300fps devices which they used for slow motion replays.
For similar reasons, 1080i tends to deliver worse results than 1080p at the same bitrate, since interlacing makes the frame deltas more complex. This is part of the reason why sports broadcasters tend to favour 720p over 1080i - the video compresses better, and looks much better as a result.
Whilst I do agree with the sentiment that X Factor is criminal, you're facts aren't quite straight here.
Susan Boyle was a product of Britain's Got Talent. (She didn't win that show either - she was the runner up - a dance troupe beat her.) A show that clearly demonstrated that there's vanishingly little talent in the British population.
As for this year's winner of X Factor, what a freaking drip he is. "Wet" doesn't even begin to describe him. He's a show-tune singer, singing a show-tune and grannies like him. A "pop star" he is not, and never will be. This time next year he'll be doing musical theatre and his label will have dropped him. Everyone will have forgotten about him, much like almost every other X Factor/Pop Idol/American Idol/generic-talent-show winners.
There definitely should be a law against this kind of thing. For starters, I personally would have walked straight out of that Yamaha shop.
Windows95's taskbar was essentially a copy of Acorn's icon bar which first appeared in their Arthur operating system in 1987, and was refined in RISC OS 2 which came out in 1989.
Apple's dock (as it's called) is merely a development of the NextStep dock which has been around since 1989.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem though is that whilst it's easy to remember the name "The Pirate Bay", it's very hard to remember it's IP address.
Only in fantasy-land has SQL implemented "write once, run anywhere". You hint at this problem yourself where you say "with a few mods, it works on nearly any relational database".
Whilst there is an SQL standard, implementations of SQL vary massively. Professionally I've used SQL-Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite - all have profound differences, and moving anything beyond absolutely trivial SQL code from one to another requires rewriting the query. We're talking about a language here where major implementations don't even agree on string concatenation syntax...
Every SQL implementation has it's customisations and variations from the standard. It's almost impossible to write any kind of decent SQL code without making use of these custom variations, and thus ruining the portability of the SQL code.
Arguably what is being stolen in the case of 'piracy' is not the digital media itself but instead the money that should have been paid for the media.
The problem with digital media is that it's free to duplicate data, and thus there's no replication costs involved. If one looks only ever at the media there's clearly no deprivation of property involved. However that's not really what copyright is about.
Copyright is about granting and restricting the right to make copies of a work. The intent was to encourage authors to produce new works, by helping to ensure they'd get paid for the works they had produced. The laws were introduced because it was felt that it was too easy to make copies, even though at that time the cost to make copies was high.
The fact that copying is easier and cheaper now than ever doesn't significantly change the arguments involved for or against the existence of copyright laws. (There remain significant up-front costs involved in producing media, and these costs need to be recouped.) It can make a powerful argument in favour of lower digital media prices.
Obviously the current duration of copyrights are ridiculous. Any duration exceeding half of the average expected lifetime of the author is clearly patently absurd. This is why the original laws when formed were for 7 years with an optional 7 year extension - durations that I'm inclined to think should still be perfectly acceptable today.
Quite what effect the fact that making copies is free should have on the duration of copyrights is another question. Copyright durations were already stupidly excessively long before digital media arrived.
My experience is that DLNA and AirPlay do two very different things.
I have equipment that does DLNA. My TV does it, my desktop computer, my PS3. From my TV, I can browse the DLNA server running on my desktop computer, look through folders and files, and pick something to play - although it usually won't play because the codec/container support in my TV is lousy. Playing things on my PS3 is usually more successful.
I also have equipment that does AirPlay. On my iPhone I can choose to send the audio or video I'm playing to my AppleTV. I can also choose to send audio from iTunes on my PC to a set of remote speakers connected to my amp.
None of my DLNA equipment lets me play out media to a remote device. That may or may not be a feature in the DLNA specifications, but it's certainly not supported in the equipment I have. DLNA, in practice with the equipment I have, is a request-based client-server architecture. AirPlay is essentially push-based.
There is a fundamental difference between what DLNA and AirPlay are doing.
Value your health. Value your safety.
Accomplish something while you still can, just as Ilya did.
Value your mental health.
Working flat-out at all costs to accomplish something can be extremely detrimental to both your physical and mental health. The line between sane and insane is much narrower than many imagine. Whilst you may write some cool code, what use is that if you end up losing your sanity, or worse your life?
Of course what's daft about this is that there seems to be no evidence that the ShenWei SW-3 is a Loongson/Godson chip. There is nothing to be found on what the instruction set of the CPU is, and no evidence that it implements the MIPS instruction set - any googling for that only brings you back to this story.
There is some speculation that the ShenWei's CPUs were "inspired" by the DEC Alpha. Quite what that means is anyone's guess. Again, there is very little evidence to be found on this subject, just a blog posting or two.
This seems like a case of lousy, biased, reporting.
Why would Loongson/Godson be reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha? It implements the MIPS instruction set, not Alpha. Wouldn't it have been easier for them to reverse-engineer a MIPS chip? Doesn't the evidence seem to indicate that it's a genuinely independent implementation of MIPS?
The only source of this speculation I have found is just the extremetech article that has been linked to. My googling is showing nothing else to back this up.
Whilst it's almost certainly true that there are more devices running Linux than any Apple OS, I'm not really sure whether you can say that the success of Linux is because of Stallman, or in spite of him.
The GNU Project started in 1984 with the stated intention of producing a free operating system. For the kernel part of that project, Hurd, progress has been very slow. GNU/Hurd is the operating system that Stallman set out to build at the GNU project. Even today Hurd remains far from viable for production use.
The Linux kernel is not a product of the GNU Project, it just (eventually) adopted the GPL and remains independent of the GNU Project. Free software and open source had existed before the GNU project began. Without Stallman and GNU, Linus would likely have still released Linux as open source.
Let's face it, GNU is nothing without Linux, and vice-versa...
As for the rest of the laundry list, Safari's engine, WebKit, did indeed start as a branch of KDE's KHTML but KDE is not GNU (although they do use the LGPL as one of their licenses). The Mac's user interface is not, and never has been, descended from X (again, X is not GNU, and does not use a GNU-originated license). Also whilst Android does use some GNU components, the most important parts of the system, i.e. the Linux kernel and the Dalvik VM, aren't of GNU origin (Dalvik uses an Apache license).
The assertion that RISC OS would have gone to pre-emptive multitasking as soon as the hardware permitted it simply isn't backed up by the facts.
Acorn went through many generations of ARM processors in their computers, from the ARM 2 through to the StrongARM. Acorn themselves had two different operating systems running on ARM chips that featured pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection in the form of ARX (which got canned before the first Archimedes was launched) and RISCiX (their Unix variant that was sold commercially). The hardware permitted it, Acorn just failed to deliver such features in their mainstream OS.
In the final days of Acorn they announced yet another OS that would have featured pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protection, and QoS features, to be called Galileo. Whilst it was not made clear, and no technical details of any significance were ever released, this seemed to be a different and separate OS development to RISC OS, and likely would not have been compatible.
Dude, the Apollo program ran until 1972. That's ten whole years before 1982. The Apollo Applications program, which included Skylab, finished up in 1975. Unless Michener was a very, very, slow writer or sat on his finished manuscript for 7 years his novel wasn't written during the final years of Apollo.
I do get your skepticism...
Thing is though, some members of the demo scene have been doing really impressive things with particle-based rendering systems over the past few years.
To see what can be done, you should check out the demos "Ceasefire (All falls down)" and "Numb Res" by CNCD & Fairlight. They both make very heavy use of particle-based rendering engines - the latter features a rather long section of real-time particle-bsed computational fluid dynamics simulation - the kind of stuff that one tends to think is the domain of pre-rendering on super-computers. When I saw it my mind got conclusively blown.
If you want to read about it check out the blog of their lead graphics developer/researcher.
Agreed entirely.
Slashdot's codebase often feels like a joke to me. My own pet peeve is the discussion threshold slider - it's numbers are *never* correct. Right now on a different browser tab a discussion is saying there's "10 Full, 3 Abbreviated" - whereas it's actually displaying 7 full, and 0 abbreviated. Another is telling me "16 Full, 0 Abbreviated" - that one has the abbreviated count right, but there's only 6 comments visible. The numbers are often so wildly out that they're completely meaningless.
If they can't even manage to do basic counting, I fear there's bugger all chance they'll manage to do unicode any time soon.
Sorry dude, but you're a bit off in your facts.
OS X and iOS do share quite a lot of their codebase, but there are some very significant differences. They are most definitely not "basically the same operating system". Most importantly at the UI level, OS X applications are written using Cocoa, and iOS apps using Cocoa Touch. The Cocoa Touch API is fundamentally different from Cocoa - it omits many of the UI classes (and controls) that Cocoa contains, and adopts a significantly different approach in a number of areas.
It's certainly not the case today that one can write once and run on both iOS and OS X. It's very difficult right now to incorporate iPad software into Lion, because the UI layer is fundamentally different. The UI has to be completely rewritten.
Besides the UI level there are other very significant differences up and down the rest of the software stack. iOS can be thought of as a stripped down, streamlined, and rebuilt OS X. Many of OS X's features (under-the-hood APIs) have been, and remain, missing from iOS. Gradually those features are being ported over - as each progressive iOS version comes, the gap between the two narrows. The difference at the UI layer though is likely to remain.
Short term, yes, an iOS-based IDE isn't going to fly.
Long term, say on a machine running iOS 7 and a 20-inch screen (or larger), why not? Such a device would likely have multiple CPU cores, and pack considerably more processing punch than the iMac I had been developing on that I recently retired.
As I see it, screen size is really the main limiting factor. The second limitation on iOS devices right now is the lack of support for fine-detail input, which could be resolved by adding in support for an optional stylus.
Except you can't reboot a universe like Doctor Who, because they did not reboot the universe.
The new series that started a few years back is the exact same universe that Doctor Who has always been in. Every previous generation (including Paul McGann's 8th Doctor who only had one on-screen outing) is still there, and the entire prior history of The Doctor remains. All of the previous regenerations have appeared on-screen in the new series, and plenty of references have been made to events in The Doctor's past. (Technically they did reboot the universe in a recent-ish story in the new Doctor Who series, but that was a plot device.)
Doctor Who restarted the series, rather than doing a universe reboot. In doing so they left out a sizeable chunk of time in The Doctor's life, leaving us with legends of a great time war. The only type of "reboot" that Doctor Who had was a production reboot where they've re-thought how to present stories.
Rebooting a universe in a series by definition means throwing away the original canon to free the writers from the shackles of the past. IMHO that's not always a bad thing. I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I love that they've rebooted that universe, since IMHO it really needed it. The next-gen timeline had become absurd, what with Voyager becoming an über-ship, and the over-use time-travel. Whilst I know some people got upset, I personally thought that the manner of the reboot in Star Trek was very respectful of the original canon.
Google has said that they'd drop support for h.264 - but the current release versions of Chrome still include support for it.
It remains to be seen when/if they will actually drop support.
Skylon is effectively a development of the HOTOL spaceplane project that was proposed by Rolls Royce and BAE way back in 1986, and was cancelled by the UK government in 1988 - I'm not sure where this 1982 date you mention fits in.
From what I understand the funding for this project has, since then, been very minimal, and only comparatively recently have they managed to attract the attention of ESA. From what I've read ESA only got involved because some real tangible hardware has been produced by Reaction Engines.
That real tangible hardware is in the form of coolers. That's arguably the most difficult part of their engine design, and the part that had doomed the HOTOL project. ESA seems to think that Reaction Engines are making good progress and that nothing about the SABRE engine, on which Skylon relies, is unachievable. So there is some more to this than concept art and promises.
BitCoin "coins" aren't made of metal or allows. IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that particular law doesn't apply.
Safari supports whatever you have codecs for. My copy has been happily playing back Theora videos inside HTML5 video tags for a couple of years.
One minor thing to note about iLife is that the boxed version also includes iWeb and iDVD, neither of which are available on the Mac app store. Whether or not those two apps (which didn't get updated for iLife '11) are worth the £19 price difference is open for debate.
One of the great things about higher frame rates is that when compressed you don't actually need to use any more bandwidth than lower frame rate equivalents. As an added benefit you also get higher quality images with less compression artefacts.
Why's that?
Video compression is mostly all about finding differences between frames. The more frames you have per second, the less the differences between those frames will be. The higher the frame rate the better, since the faster you go the smaller and less complex the deltas become. You can compress those deltas more than you would for a lower frame rate too, since whatever artefacts may result will get smoothed out much faster with subsequent deltas.
(OK, it's not quite that simple - you need minor changes in codec specs to allow for less frequent keyframes in your bitstream to ensure their overhead doesn't become too onerous.)
The sweet spot turns out to be at 600fps. Why? Because at that frame rate you can trivially pull-down the standard frame rates of 24fps, 25fps, 50fps and 60fps by just taking every 25th, 24th, 12th and 10th frames. 300fps obviously also works fine if you're only worried about broadcast TV, and this tech exists now and is in use (although it is expensive and rare). Some TV cameras at the recent winter olympics were 300fps devices which they used for slow motion replays.
For similar reasons, 1080i tends to deliver worse results than 1080p at the same bitrate, since interlacing makes the frame deltas more complex. This is part of the reason why sports broadcasters tend to favour 720p over 1080i - the video compresses better, and looks much better as a result.
Rockstar get most of the way there already since the GTA series is produced in the UK by Brits, and is in English.
If the main character was British, or even maybe just several subsidiary characters, then that should push them over the edge and qualify them.
Whilst I do agree with the sentiment that X Factor is criminal, you're facts aren't quite straight here.
Susan Boyle was a product of Britain's Got Talent. (She didn't win that show either - she was the runner up - a dance troupe beat her.) A show that clearly demonstrated that there's vanishingly little talent in the British population.
As for this year's winner of X Factor, what a freaking drip he is. "Wet" doesn't even begin to describe him. He's a show-tune singer, singing a show-tune and grannies like him. A "pop star" he is not, and never will be. This time next year he'll be doing musical theatre and his label will have dropped him. Everyone will have forgotten about him, much like almost every other X Factor/Pop Idol/American Idol/generic-talent-show winners.
There definitely should be a law against this kind of thing. For starters, I personally would have walked straight out of that Yamaha shop.
Windows95's taskbar was essentially a copy of Acorn's icon bar which first appeared in their Arthur operating system in 1987, and was refined in RISC OS 2 which came out in 1989.
Apple's dock (as it's called) is merely a development of the NextStep dock which has been around since 1989.
There's a petition now to change the name to "Issue 9": http://www.petitiononline.com/gglgoi9/petition.html