And war it is â" but a war of words, not bullets. A war in which that side wins, which best serves the needs of its customers. A war in which both sides agree that their ultimate objective is to make the world a better place through better technology. A war that benefits everyone (although some more than others). Thatâ(TM)s the kind of war I want to fight â" and thatâ(TM)s the kind of war I mean to win.
That's so typical of MS employees. They can say the most astonishing things, and somehow link it all back to "doing what's best for the customer", Kevin Bacon style. They collectively tell themselves, and therefore believe, that they are there to serve the customer, and that they are the best because they do what the customer needs and wants.
The reality is far, far different of course. It's rare (but not unheard of) for one of their employees to make the mental leap between the hordes of people who hate them, and the idea that maybe they are actually working exclusively for the profit of their shareholders and executives as opposed to "making the world a better place through technology".
Unfortunately there are no open source viewers that I'm aware of that implement the full SWF spec, much like SVG in fact.
The presence of a free-as-in-beer player which sucks, but doesn't quite suck enough, means that most developer time is targetted on more pressing problems. That does screw people on non-x86 architectures, non-Linux operating systems and so on, not to mention that the plugin has a tendancy to freeze my browser but while there are more pressing things that need to get done, I doubt we'll see 100% complete free Flash/SVG implementations any time soon.
Plus, by its very nature, even though the format is open any free decoder would be one step behind the official one, as the specs are not hammered out in a public forum but are just released with each new version of Flash. Still, much better than no specs at all! Macromedia have done everything I'd have wanted, and graciously - the ball is in our court now.
While the Wine developers might or might not do this, there would be nothing illegal about working on Wine, provided you didn't do the obvious things like cutting and pasting large chunks of code.
Right. Unfortunately distinctions like legality or illegality have little meaning when the mismatch is as great as a corporation vs the individual. People simply can't take the risk of a legally groundless but nonetheless devastating lawsuit.
Well acme looks a bit like emacs, ie tile based. And Linux has already stolen the proc filing system from Plan9, I guess some more could be brought across in concept, if not in code.
If it's one of the viral types I don't want to accidently look at any of the code for obvious reasons.
The reasons aren't obvious. I've seen this myth before, notably from Microsoft employees. The idea that you can be "infected" by simply looking at GPLd code is nonsense. The GPL explicitly covers only derived works of the code. If you looked at a GPLd algorithm and reimplemented it, somebody would have a hell of a time arguing in court that it was "derived". This is doubly the case for the vast majority of GPLd code, which is written by people who don't have huge piles of cash and who probably have a disdain for the legal system as well.
The idea that some random geek, or even a big company, is going to sue you on a legal platform as wobbly as "judge, he looked at it, so the rest of his work is clearly based on ours" is somewhere slightly above absolute zero and in any case applies just as equally to proprietary code, as the case of SCO shows.
Ironically, proprietary code is generally far more "infectious". I work on Wine - if I were to have seen the Windows code, I would be immediately banned from working on it, indeed, probably I'd be banned from working on most GPLd code. The EULA for Windows is extremely vague about such things, and Microsoft have armies of lawyers and it's quite feasable for them to sue me or others on a virtually non-existant legal basis. The reverse is not true.
I see that this post has been marked as a troll. I'm not sure it was, but this FUD should not be propogated any further regardless.
I can't believe (well actually I can) he got modded down! It's a very real possibility. The whole "Apple will ship 970 based machines RSN" thing appears to be the product of rumour and speculation. Nothing interesting happening is certainly possible, and it's worth having somebody point that out. But it tells Mac users things they don't want to hear. Too bad.
Apple can quite happily continue for several years taking losses, given the amount of money they have.
You think their shareholders would like that? You think they'd just sit back and say, "well they aren't making any profit, but that's OK cos they have a cash pile to burn through"? I don't think they would.
In fact, they're a profitable company, so that isn't an issue.
Depends how you define profitable. As pointed out elsewhere, their cash pile has declined by over a billion dollars, despite the company being "profitable".
they're going to ship the 970s some time this year
Is that actually confirmed? By Apple? Or is it just people assuming that they must do, it's so obvious? Well I'm not saying they won't, but putting rumour as fact is not good.
Oh but of course like the poor poster who started this thread I have questioned the strength of Apple, which is clearly flamebait. Or overrated of course. Don't forget moderators, if you use overrated, you don't have to get metamoderated!;-)
He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's.
You do? I never have.... ALL distros I have ever used that set up a KDE or GNOME desktop for you, have a web browser, normally Mozilla/Konqueror.
Personally I snarfed the Ximian artwork/theme and stuck with my RH9 desktop. It does everything I need, and is pretty well organised. Nonetheless, for business I would definately consider it, if only for the integrated OO and printing work.
Yeah, that was amusing. Especially as if you look at the relevant bug, you can see that the first mention of Mac IE was past the 200th comment. The idea originally came from emacs. Basic research apparently isn't necessary.
KHTML on Linux uses a combination of FreeType to render the fonts, fontconfig to select and find the correct font files, and XRENDER to draw the actual glyphs. It works pretty well, and Linux AA is of a very high quality, even with the autohinter.
The text rendering engine is abstracted by Qt. For whatever reason Apple decided not to pay for Qt developer licenses and created a set of stubs that map Qt onto MacOS, so the font rendering technology will be the Quartz native. The code they use to draw the actual text is completely different.
Does it use undocumented APIs? It wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for years. I'd note that it's not always due to nefarious evilness, just freezing APIs takes effort and a certain amount of confidance that you got it right. Until an API is frozen Apple/MS' own stuff may well use it anyway, but it's not been documented/exposed in the headers.
The Apple crowd are the ones who produce most of the attractive media anyway.
They do? I thought the whole point was that they consumed the most attractive "media".
Maybe one day I'll stop seeing sites that require IE because of this decision. Is Safari a w3c compliant browser?
Mostly, but then so was IE/Mac. All that has happened here is that one proprietary standards compliant browser has been replaced by another. Not really a huge leap forward for the platform, however at least Safari runs reasonably well.
It also reduces diversity, and sends a powerful message to developers - don't bother trying to compete with Apple, because they'll bundle it with the OS and their fiercely loyal customers will use it even when it's not finished yet. That's fine, but it does make it somewhat more "dangerous" to develop for the Mac, especially if you are a small indie developer, as there's no telling what Apple will bundle next. Windows is in the same position of course, though to a lesser extent.
In fact, I switched to a stock Linus 2.4.20 kernel just last night. So far, no problems. Before, my desktop felt like treacle.
I think I might upgrade to 2.4.21, maybe even apply to pre-empt/low-latency patches. I'm feeling adventurous.
My old SuSE 8.0 box, that used 2.4.18, worked just fine, so I think it's something that red hat screwed up. There's a bug in their bugzilla about some people experiencing swap storms so bad it takes 10 minutes for a newline in a shell!
Re:Apple Needs a Little Sun To Grow
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Apple would also gain Java as an Apple supported program and language. It would help better, faster Java come to Linux and OSX.
How did you figure that one out? The Java implementation on Linux is pretty good, the main problem being that they insist you get it from their website and use their installer, which is a pain in the ass. That, and it's not free software so companies like Red Hat won't distribute it. But simply allowing people to package it would sort that out.
The problems they have on Linux are purely legal, and let's face it, if you want to avoid legal problems you definately want to avoid Apple.
Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones
Random offtopic advert for Apple? That'll be +5 Interesting then. Desktop Java is basically dead, what with Apple pushing Objective C for MacOS, Linux using C/C++/scripting languages and Windows moving to.NET, Java has been squeezed out of the market. Other than the streaming server, I can't imagine what you'd do with java integration, especially on mobile phones.
Part of me wonders if we would have progressed beyond a command-line text-only interface by now if it weren't for Microsoft.
Do you really think Microsoft were the only company that could have made the GUI a success? The GUI existed before Gates, before Jobs. They were the first to bring it to the mass market, nothing more.
Does Bill Gates' destruction of the software industry as a cooperative venture justify his creation of the software industry as a profit-making (and therefore STRONGLY developed) entity?
Strongly developed in what way? Economically? Yes. Socially? No.
Now on a totally tangential note, there's one thing that I respect Bill for fully. He has given a LOT of his own personal money to education and charities, and the only reason it's been made public (in the past) is that as Chairman of MS, he's required to divulge his finances to a greater extent than most.
Yeah, but remember where that money came from. It's good that he's not establishing a dynasty - he's too smart for that. However, I still can't respect him no matter how much money he gives away, as in some ways, that money simply was not his to start with.
Without the dirt, money-grubbing, and sliminess that MS stands for, we probably wouldn't be nearly as far along on the development curve
Maybe - but really, which would you prefer? I for one would rather be a few years behind the technology curve and live in the kind of society that encourages sharing, than having the technology we have available today but having all the associated garbage from MS, SCO and the like.
Oh, yeah, Gates is smart. Got to hand it to him. He's not stupid. But that, by itself, is meaningless. I don't perceive being smart as being any more worthy of respect than being attractive, or being wealthy, or being fluent in 8 languages. It's what you do with those assets that matters. Gates hasn't used his smartness well. He used it selfishly in fact. Though I appreciate his business acumen, I don't think I could ever respect him for it.
Why not? Choices make the world a better place. Lindows isn't Debian. Lindows isn't Red Hat. Lindows is Lindows.
But do they know that? Most people have a hard enough time adapting to the idea that your computer doesn't have to run Windows - the concept of a competitor that is many yet one at the same time is almost certainly going to lose quite a lot of people. I still see references to "Linux 9" on tech support sites.
No. It's not what I want anyway. I want to see Windows be entirely eliminated.
You might think that's a bit extreme. I don't - I'm under no illusions about our friends in Redmond. You think after over a decade of monopoly gained by breaking the law and then getting away with it, they are just going to say, "oh look! a competitor! we'd better start competing fairly then".
No, they aren't. Despite what their marketing guys think, "focus on the customer" isn't going to turn their company around - it's too far gone for that, almost certainly. Microsoft have never played by the rules of the market before, why should they now? In short, they are too dangerous to keep around, history has rammed this lesson through our skulls time and time again.
There are other considerations as well. I think the world would be better if our computing industry were based on free software. It would increase the free flow of ideas, code and would increase innovation. There are selfish reasons as well - I think I can do better for myself helping people solve their problems by using free software than sitting in the offices of a huge company reinventing the wheel day after day for a living, because the cost to pay me to work around stupid bugs in Internet Explorer is lower than saying no to Microsoft.
So in summary, I don't think the world would be a better place if Linux and Windows (or MacOS) shared market share equally. I don't think that's good enough. They'd always be looking for a way to cheat the system, to get the upper hand, to kill Linux and let things return to the status quo. It's too dangerous. Windows and the tactics and ethos it represents must go, and then if Microsoft can survive without them - then maybe I'll look on them lowering prices as merely the workings of the free market.
Anyway. Rant over. I'm pissed, because I ran the numbers and judging from what MS have said lately I don't think IE, and by extension the web, is going to move forward technologically until about 2010 at the earliest, probably more like a decade from now (factor in upgrade times to longhorn, even assuming best case and IE actually improves in that period). I'm sick of seeing them try to wipe out cool stuff. It has to end, completely.
Determining how Jabber performs this magic is left as an exercise for the reader.
That's a bit harsh, considering that all the popular Jabber servers were blocked from ICQ and AIM years ago (i remember when ours was), and the MSN transport is as far as I know, unmaintained.
I used Jabber as an inter-IM solution for a long time, but eventually gave up and just use Gaim instead. Simpler. I still use Jabber, I'm in the unusual position of knowing a lot of people who use it, so it's imperative that I have a connection to it.
Jabber has 3 problems right now:
1) Lack of people on it, the whole network effects problem.
2) Lack of killer features. After all these years they are finally getting the basics nailed, stuff like file transfer. Though this ties into point 3. Jabber really needs some unique features not found elsewhere to convince people to use it... I'd like to do really sweet integration with the Linux desktop at some point but it hasn't happened yet.
3) Lack of quality clients. On Linux this is being rapidly solved by Gaim (though it's not there yet), and on Windows RhymBox is excellent with its only real problem being that it's pure Jabber - great for work, not so great for home. Sure it supports transports, but like I said, they are a somewhat failed experiment.... too easy to block, and it's easier to get better integration through client side code.
Debian testing is just fine for most production servers
Huh? I thought testing didn't get any security updates. I know whenever I've asked, I've been told that wherever you are in Debian-land, you don't want to be in testing.
That's a fair point, one I thought about before posting... no, I don't work for any competing FS teams and like I said, I want ReiserFS to suceed, the new filing system concepts he's working on are just too cool to miss out on.
I don't know how much detail you want anyway. All I was told is that the potential for nasty deadlocks is almost built in to the design... I pointed out that this was surely a property of the implementation, not design. But apparently not.
Of course this is 2nd hand advice, and I believe the person who originally said that was in fact a FS designer. So maybe there were some sour grapes there.
Slashdot Mirror
That's so typical of MS employees. They can say the most astonishing things, and somehow link it all back to "doing what's best for the customer", Kevin Bacon style. They collectively tell themselves, and therefore believe, that they are there to serve the customer, and that they are the best because they do what the customer needs and wants.
The reality is far, far different of course. It's rare (but not unheard of) for one of their employees to make the mental leap between the hordes of people who hate them, and the idea that maybe they are actually working exclusively for the profit of their shareholders and executives as opposed to "making the world a better place through technology".
The presence of a free-as-in-beer player which sucks, but doesn't quite suck enough, means that most developer time is targetted on more pressing problems. That does screw people on non-x86 architectures, non-Linux operating systems and so on, not to mention that the plugin has a tendancy to freeze my browser but while there are more pressing things that need to get done, I doubt we'll see 100% complete free Flash/SVG implementations any time soon.
Plus, by its very nature, even though the format is open any free decoder would be one step behind the official one, as the specs are not hammered out in a public forum but are just released with each new version of Flash. Still, much better than no specs at all! Macromedia have done everything I'd have wanted, and graciously - the ball is in our court now.
Right. Unfortunately distinctions like legality or illegality have little meaning when the mismatch is as great as a corporation vs the individual. People simply can't take the risk of a legally groundless but nonetheless devastating lawsuit.
Well acme looks a bit like emacs, ie tile based. And Linux has already stolen the proc filing system from Plan9, I guess some more could be brought across in concept, if not in code.
The reasons aren't obvious. I've seen this myth before, notably from Microsoft employees. The idea that you can be "infected" by simply looking at GPLd code is nonsense. The GPL explicitly covers only derived works of the code. If you looked at a GPLd algorithm and reimplemented it, somebody would have a hell of a time arguing in court that it was "derived". This is doubly the case for the vast majority of GPLd code, which is written by people who don't have huge piles of cash and who probably have a disdain for the legal system as well.
The idea that some random geek, or even a big company, is going to sue you on a legal platform as wobbly as "judge, he looked at it, so the rest of his work is clearly based on ours" is somewhere slightly above absolute zero and in any case applies just as equally to proprietary code, as the case of SCO shows.
Ironically, proprietary code is generally far more "infectious". I work on Wine - if I were to have seen the Windows code, I would be immediately banned from working on it, indeed, probably I'd be banned from working on most GPLd code. The EULA for Windows is extremely vague about such things, and Microsoft have armies of lawyers and it's quite feasable for them to sue me or others on a virtually non-existant legal basis. The reverse is not true.
I see that this post has been marked as a troll. I'm not sure it was, but this FUD should not be propogated any further regardless.
I can't believe (well actually I can) he got modded down! It's a very real possibility. The whole "Apple will ship 970 based machines RSN" thing appears to be the product of rumour and speculation. Nothing interesting happening is certainly possible, and it's worth having somebody point that out. But it tells Mac users things they don't want to hear. Too bad.
Apple can quite happily continue for several years taking losses, given the amount of money they have.
You think their shareholders would like that? You think they'd just sit back and say, "well they aren't making any profit, but that's OK cos they have a cash pile to burn through"? I don't think they would.
In fact, they're a profitable company, so that isn't an issue.
Depends how you define profitable. As pointed out elsewhere, their cash pile has declined by over a billion dollars, despite the company being "profitable".
they're going to ship the 970s some time this year
Is that actually confirmed? By Apple? Or is it just people assuming that they must do, it's so obvious? Well I'm not saying they won't, but putting rumour as fact is not good.
Oh but of course like the poor poster who started this thread I have questioned the strength of Apple, which is clearly flamebait. Or overrated of course. Don't forget moderators, if you use overrated, you don't have to get metamoderated! ;-)
You do? I never have.... ALL distros I have ever used that set up a KDE or GNOME desktop for you, have a web browser, normally Mozilla/Konqueror.
Personally I snarfed the Ximian artwork/theme and stuck with my RH9 desktop. It does everything I need, and is pretty well organised. Nonetheless, for business I would definately consider it, if only for the integrated OO and printing work.
Yeah, that was amusing. Especially as if you look at the relevant bug, you can see that the first mention of Mac IE was past the 200th comment. The idea originally came from emacs. Basic research apparently isn't necessary.
Too many sites require Internet Explorer on windows to work.
IE for Mac was pretty standards compliant actually, and didn't have any of the ActiveX goo that IE6 has.
How will my Mom feel when she can't check her mutual funds using her Macintosh because the browser isn't compatible?
Well that would have happened anyway, if (for instance) the bank used ActiveX or some other piece of magic voodoo.
Is this an example of a development community unwittingly aiding and abetting Microsoft's abuse of monopoly power?
I don't really understand how you reached that conclusion.
The text rendering engine is abstracted by Qt. For whatever reason Apple decided not to pay for Qt developer licenses and created a set of stubs that map Qt onto MacOS, so the font rendering technology will be the Quartz native. The code they use to draw the actual text is completely different.
Does it use undocumented APIs? It wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for years. I'd note that it's not always due to nefarious evilness, just freezing APIs takes effort and a certain amount of confidance that you got it right. Until an API is frozen Apple/MS' own stuff may well use it anyway, but it's not been documented/exposed in the headers.
They do? I thought the whole point was that they consumed the most attractive "media".
Maybe one day I'll stop seeing sites that require IE because of this decision. Is Safari a w3c compliant browser?
Mostly, but then so was IE/Mac. All that has happened here is that one proprietary standards compliant browser has been replaced by another. Not really a huge leap forward for the platform, however at least Safari runs reasonably well. It also reduces diversity, and sends a powerful message to developers - don't bother trying to compete with Apple, because they'll bundle it with the OS and their fiercely loyal customers will use it even when it's not finished yet. That's fine, but it does make it somewhat more "dangerous" to develop for the Mac, especially if you are a small indie developer, as there's no telling what Apple will bundle next. Windows is in the same position of course, though to a lesser extent.
In fact, I switched to a stock Linus 2.4.20 kernel just last night. So far, no problems. Before, my desktop felt like treacle.
I think I might upgrade to 2.4.21, maybe even apply to pre-empt/low-latency patches. I'm feeling adventurous.
My old SuSE 8.0 box, that used 2.4.18, worked just fine, so I think it's something that red hat screwed up. There's a bug in their bugzilla about some people experiencing swap storms so bad it takes 10 minutes for a newline in a shell!
How did you figure that one out? The Java implementation on Linux is pretty good, the main problem being that they insist you get it from their website and use their installer, which is a pain in the ass. That, and it's not free software so companies like Red Hat won't distribute it. But simply allowing people to package it would sort that out.
The problems they have on Linux are purely legal, and let's face it, if you want to avoid legal problems you definately want to avoid Apple.
Java could be more tightly integrated into Quicktime and thus into mobile phones
Random offtopic advert for Apple? That'll be +5 Interesting then. Desktop Java is basically dead, what with Apple pushing Objective C for MacOS, Linux using C/C++/scripting languages and Windows moving to .NET, Java has been squeezed out of the market. Other than the streaming server, I can't imagine what you'd do with java integration, especially on mobile phones.
Not if you slashdot the tracker or the .torrent file host
Do you really think Microsoft were the only company that could have made the GUI a success? The GUI existed before Gates, before Jobs. They were the first to bring it to the mass market, nothing more. Does Bill Gates' destruction of the software industry as a cooperative venture justify his creation of the software industry as a profit-making (and therefore STRONGLY developed) entity?
Strongly developed in what way? Economically? Yes. Socially? No.
Now on a totally tangential note, there's one thing that I respect Bill for fully. He has given a LOT of his own personal money to education and charities, and the only reason it's been made public (in the past) is that as Chairman of MS, he's required to divulge his finances to a greater extent than most.
Yeah, but remember where that money came from. It's good that he's not establishing a dynasty - he's too smart for that. However, I still can't respect him no matter how much money he gives away, as in some ways, that money simply was not his to start with.
Maybe - but really, which would you prefer? I for one would rather be a few years behind the technology curve and live in the kind of society that encourages sharing, than having the technology we have available today but having all the associated garbage from MS, SCO and the like.
Oh, yeah, Gates is smart. Got to hand it to him. He's not stupid. But that, by itself, is meaningless. I don't perceive being smart as being any more worthy of respect than being attractive, or being wealthy, or being fluent in 8 languages. It's what you do with those assets that matters. Gates hasn't used his smartness well. He used it selfishly in fact. Though I appreciate his business acumen, I don't think I could ever respect him for it.
Sure it can. Just tick the "solid archive" box.
Not to mention that Lindows and "Liunx" are listed as different operating systems.
But do they know that? Most people have a hard enough time adapting to the idea that your computer doesn't have to run Windows - the concept of a competitor that is many yet one at the same time is almost certainly going to lose quite a lot of people. I still see references to "Linux 9" on tech support sites.
The survey is linked to from the article... here
No. It's not what I want anyway. I want to see Windows be entirely eliminated.
You might think that's a bit extreme. I don't - I'm under no illusions about our friends in Redmond. You think after over a decade of monopoly gained by breaking the law and then getting away with it, they are just going to say, "oh look! a competitor! we'd better start competing fairly then".
No, they aren't. Despite what their marketing guys think, "focus on the customer" isn't going to turn their company around - it's too far gone for that, almost certainly. Microsoft have never played by the rules of the market before, why should they now? In short, they are too dangerous to keep around, history has rammed this lesson through our skulls time and time again.
There are other considerations as well. I think the world would be better if our computing industry were based on free software. It would increase the free flow of ideas, code and would increase innovation. There are selfish reasons as well - I think I can do better for myself helping people solve their problems by using free software than sitting in the offices of a huge company reinventing the wheel day after day for a living, because the cost to pay me to work around stupid bugs in Internet Explorer is lower than saying no to Microsoft.
So in summary, I don't think the world would be a better place if Linux and Windows (or MacOS) shared market share equally. I don't think that's good enough. They'd always be looking for a way to cheat the system, to get the upper hand, to kill Linux and let things return to the status quo. It's too dangerous. Windows and the tactics and ethos it represents must go, and then if Microsoft can survive without them - then maybe I'll look on them lowering prices as merely the workings of the free market.
Anyway. Rant over. I'm pissed, because I ran the numbers and judging from what MS have said lately I don't think IE, and by extension the web, is going to move forward technologically until about 2010 at the earliest, probably more like a decade from now (factor in upgrade times to longhorn, even assuming best case and IE actually improves in that period). I'm sick of seeing them try to wipe out cool stuff. It has to end, completely.
That's a bit harsh, considering that all the popular Jabber servers were blocked from ICQ and AIM years ago (i remember when ours was), and the MSN transport is as far as I know, unmaintained.
I used Jabber as an inter-IM solution for a long time, but eventually gave up and just use Gaim instead. Simpler. I still use Jabber, I'm in the unusual position of knowing a lot of people who use it, so it's imperative that I have a connection to it.
Jabber has 3 problems right now:
1) Lack of people on it, the whole network effects problem.
2) Lack of killer features. After all these years they are finally getting the basics nailed, stuff like file transfer. Though this ties into point 3. Jabber really needs some unique features not found elsewhere to convince people to use it... I'd like to do really sweet integration with the Linux desktop at some point but it hasn't happened yet.
3) Lack of quality clients. On Linux this is being rapidly solved by Gaim (though it's not there yet), and on Windows RhymBox is excellent with its only real problem being that it's pure Jabber - great for work, not so great for home. Sure it supports transports, but like I said, they are a somewhat failed experiment.... too easy to block, and it's easier to get better integration through client side code.
RhymBox?
Huh? I thought testing didn't get any security updates. I know whenever I've asked, I've been told that wherever you are in Debian-land, you don't want to be in testing.
I don't know how much detail you want anyway. All I was told is that the potential for nasty deadlocks is almost built in to the design... I pointed out that this was surely a property of the implementation, not design. But apparently not.
Of course this is 2nd hand advice, and I believe the person who originally said that was in fact a FS designer. So maybe there were some sour grapes there.