MS has tried to replace open standards before, eg: their attempt to replace HTML with "blackbird", javascript with VBscript, java with activeX and dot-net. Their success has ranged from at best sharing the top spot (dot-net and the windows media formats) to utter dismal rout (VBscript only gets used on intranets, and blackbird, who even remembers that?). There has never been an open internet standard fully supplanted by MS's closed one.
You think they'd learn, and quit wasting their time.
The absence of "goto myfunc(param);" makes implementing coroutines or tail calls un-necessarily hard when using C (or compiling to C). There is no valid reason for a very-low-level language to hide features available from assembler.
Okay, so, jedi have some excuse to be toned like Bruce Lee, because they do martial arts and jumping around all the time, or at least they have to practise to keep their hand in. But seems to me there's no particular reason why your average SW citizen has to look "hollywood". If anything, ordinaryness made the characters a tad more believable.
Three hundred dollars (or local equivalent) is a lot of money to some people. Like eg: very poor people in the third world. The ability to run modern-but-simple productivity apps (and write their own) on seriously antiquated hardware might well make their day. Sort of "simputer" ad hoc. Not to mention, Linux skills might well be worth serious (local) money.
1) be good 2) be novel 3) get on the various webcomic lists 4) you will get readers
The most common fault of webcomics is an utter lack of #1 or #2. Most webcomics are sloppily drawn, plotless, lacking any characterization beyond stereotypes, and using hur-hur sarcasm, nonsense, and gross-out as a substitute for humor. And they all have the same damn "wacky flatmates" formula.
Amongst this dross, even moderate quality stands out and gets noticed.
This has the same problems as any other introspective UI (eg: Squeak), no matter how revolutionary - that it misses the primary point of computer software nowadays. Modern computers run seperately developed software tools, not one big do-everything app. For each of these tools, form follows function. If you shoehorn an MP3 player and a spreadsheet into the same UI paradigm, at least one of them is going to look like an ugly hack. Equally importantly, you'd kill off UI innovation. It's an irony that Archie would have precluded its own development.
From my own experience I find PDFs ideal for long documentation and ebooks. Their advantage is precisely the paper metaphor that your linked article opposes. Specifically:
Once I have the PDF, I have the whole PDF. Corollary: I can make it available for offline use just by saving a copy.
The content once obtained won't alter without my permission.
The content is at the maximum level of quality (paper printout equivalent). It is not limited by the capabilities of a standard designed to render gracefully on lesser platforms. I can still filter the quality down if needed eg: via PDF to text converters. But if viewing it on screen or printout, I don't miss any details.
The parts of the documentation are spatially arranged, which allows me to remember my place, or to remember where to look up any particular topic. Also, I can browse spatially as in a book. A PDF has equivalents of "flipping the pages" and "reading forward/back a chapter" that websites generally don't.
These are advantages only for a particular use, long and/or detailed reading matter, but in that field they rightly outcompete HTML.
...for the same reason you don't fear the bacterial equivalent. Fuel energy is scarce, as are vital resources, so the search for food takes up approximately 100% of a small organism's time and effort.
For nano to be useful it will either have to be in a food-rich environment (eg: inside the human body) or else plug into the power socket in the wall. Grey goo (were such a thing invented) would munch through the power cord, and just stop.
The 1st amendment is about freedom of speech, which congress may not abridge, period. Any damn thing you want to say, no ifs ands or buts. So, all the crap about commercial and political speech has basically been tacked on illegally afterward, by a politically compliant judiciary, to allow the FedGov to "regulate" far beyond its defined remit.
BTW, free speech isn't a right because of the constitution - it's in the constitution because it's a right! (Oh, and guns likewise, might as well mention while I'm already up on the soapbox;-)
The free market can generate monopolistic behaviour, like "tying", but in each case it represents an opportunity to undercut the monopolist and capture the market for those consumers who are being bullied.
Eg: if telcos tie DSL to voice, there is an opportunity for outsiders to market alternative broadband technologies such as direct-connected ethernet or subscriber wireless.
Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, parially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist.
This is a generalization of: if you run a tested app on an untested configuration, it's no longer properly tested! That's just common sense.
Do your finance in OO.o spreadsheet or in GnuCash, or boot across to Windows. Doing it under emulation (a known-incomplete emulation, even!) is just stupid.
Big Brother empties the pockets of working folk and kindly pays on their behalf for your education, and then you go whining when he expects favours in return?
You know, in the USA unlike in some socialist pestholes, there exist a few genuine private universities. They don't take handouts, so they don't have to take shit from the feds. You fancy being treated like a customer, not like the product? You know what they say: you get what you pay for.
Dictionary attacks mean sod-all when the passphrase is nothing that might appear in any dictionary (including one compiled from your correspondence and other public clues such as browsing history and Amazon purchases).
Supposing one gave them the benefit of the doubt... "smart search inside documents using the metadata in popular file formats, and natural language content parsing" is really something of an obvious next step, given the state of the art. As is prebuilding the indexes and using them for type-ahead find. It's quite possible they both invented it.
I assume that by "problem we don't have" you mean the idea of a single binary that runs everywhere, and your ideal solution is to build CPU-specific binaries from (open|free) source.
Obviously you haven't given it enough thought.
First off, there is no such thing as one source that compiles for every CPU. What you get is meta-source that preprocesses into various different programs, for each architecture and OS. All the different outputs need to be tested seperately. But it gets worse, since the assumptions underlying each OS are dissimilar enough that "cross platform" is really hard. Big, impressive projects like apache and postgresql have wrestled with cross platform - and won, but at no small cost in time and effort. It is not merely a matter of "configure; make all". Most CPU-compiled programs don't even make the effort, they are doomed to running only under posix (or windows, or mac, or whatever).
Second, you lose the ability to migrate your programs unchanged with full functionality across eg: the upcoming 32bit => 64bit i386 CPU changeover. Or across totally different CPUs. This could well be very important if business depends on the predictable running of those programs. It's also pertinent from an open hardware perspective. Compiled binaries are vendor lock-in on the CPU. Even if you're willing to suck it up and assume a CPU, time is against you - CPU architectures predictably change. Likewise OSes.
Third, you lose the ability to have code that actually exchanges runnables across platforms or with strangers on unknown machines. "Applets" could not have been done with compiled code.
And of course fourth, you waste disk space, time and intellectual effort grubbing around compiling source code when all you likely want is binaries that work.
I use Amazon.co.uk's DVD rental system. Very nice selection of films, and because the cost per month is fixed, I can basically treat Amazon as my personal DVD library. I actually prefer it to pirating - physical DVDs are more convenient and they aren't messily compressed down to a postage stamp size.
Since I could rip DVDs, the "rights management" is physical (have to return the disk) but not digital. But why would I rip a DVD and waste disk space keeping a copy, when I could just pick it up again the next time I felt inclined? Thus their "rights management" of DVD borrowing and return makes sense. I never lose freedoms. I gain convenience. It would be a viable business model even if copyright ceased to exist.
DRM by contrast both requires me to go to the bother of downloading, and then locks me out of the very bits I've downloaded. It is absolutely based around reducing freedoms. It's as though someone were to sell me food which disappears from my stomach after five minutes, requiring me to eat again. Economists call this "rent seeking", an attempt to charge money for nothing. Not only is this profoundly anti-natural in an adaptive, inventive free market, it's also a recipe for conflict of interest between seller and customer - exactly the opposite of a healthy business relationship!
This is a natural consequence of trying to make a thing behave like what it isn't. Rental is a mechanism for making temporary use of physical objects. Data is not physical and "renting data" is semantic garble. The copyright holders are basically trying to impose a contradiction: "information and not-information". As a result, every form of DRM must eventually lean on government force to impose compliance. It's not a business model - in the end it's nothing more than a Mafia-style extortion racket. "Gotta pay the Family if you wanna work in this town", same thing.
You leftish types who dislike the free market, be happy that one exists. It's the free market that will sweep this nonsense aside.
Loads of people are saying "copyright overrides the later contract". True enough, but IM(NL)O it's more complicated, namely: the code you wrote is GPL-infected, BUT you are also in breach of your own contract for letting it get infected. You could probably be sued for the money "lost" when GPL'd code proves unsaleable.
A contract to do something contains by implication, a duty to avoid knowingly putting yourself into a legal armlock which would force you to break the contract.
Might not these sorts of game's audio UI be backported to the real world? Suppose for example, a car which had audio-linked radar sensors, audio blips and beeps for the indicators, drumbeat for speedometer, etc. Then the blind could drive in regular traffic...
Downloading of movies, legal and otherwise, won't kill DVDs. If anything, the trend most likely to smash the status quo is amazon.co.uk's DVD rental by post.
I suspect that a large number of people buy DVDs because that's the only way to get at the full choice (not just what's on the local Blockbuster's shelves). They only want to watch the film once or twice and afterward the expensive bought DVD is dead weight. Widespread and easy rental by post could easily collapse most of the DVD purchase market. It could also reduce downloading. Why wait three days for a torrent of a DVD-rip to complete, and tolerate the inferior viewing experience, when you could recieve a posted DVD in one day and watch it in comfort?
Slashdot Mirror
MS has tried to replace open standards before, eg: their attempt to replace HTML with "blackbird", javascript with VBscript, java with activeX and dot-net. Their success has ranged from at best sharing the top spot (dot-net and the windows media formats) to utter dismal rout (VBscript only gets used on intranets, and blackbird, who even remembers that?). There has never been an open internet standard fully supplanted by MS's closed one.
You think they'd learn, and quit wasting their time.
The absence of "goto myfunc(param);" makes implementing coroutines or tail calls un-necessarily hard when using C (or compiling to C). There is no valid reason for a very-low-level language to hide features available from assembler.
Seriously.
Okay, so, jedi have some excuse to be toned like Bruce Lee, because they do martial arts and jumping around all the time, or at least they have to practise to keep their hand in. But seems to me there's no particular reason why your average SW citizen has to look "hollywood". If anything, ordinaryness made the characters a tad more believable.
Three hundred dollars (or local equivalent) is a lot of money to some people. Like eg: very poor people in the third world. The ability to run modern-but-simple productivity apps (and write their own) on seriously antiquated hardware might well make their day. Sort of "simputer" ad hoc. Not to mention, Linux skills might well be worth serious (local) money.
1) be good
2) be novel
3) get on the various webcomic lists
4) you will get readers
The most common fault of webcomics is an utter lack of #1 or #2. Most webcomics are sloppily drawn, plotless, lacking any characterization beyond stereotypes, and using hur-hur sarcasm, nonsense, and gross-out as a substitute for humor. And they all have the same damn "wacky flatmates" formula.
Amongst this dross, even moderate quality stands out and gets noticed.
This has the same problems as any other introspective UI (eg: Squeak), no matter how revolutionary - that it misses the primary point of computer software nowadays. Modern computers run seperately developed software tools, not one big do-everything app. For each of these tools, form follows function. If you shoehorn an MP3 player and a spreadsheet into the same UI paradigm, at least one of them is going to look like an ugly hack. Equally importantly, you'd kill off UI innovation. It's an irony that Archie would have precluded its own development.
Why would they want a Simputer, when they could get a second hand Pentium box for half the price?
These are advantages only for a particular use, long and/or detailed reading matter, but in that field they rightly outcompete HTML.
(I hear the Klingon translation is also quite good.)
...until you have read him in the original Russian!
(I hear the Klingon translation is also quite good.)
...for the same reason you don't fear the bacterial equivalent. Fuel energy is scarce, as are vital resources, so the search for food takes up approximately 100% of a small organism's time and effort.
For nano to be useful it will either have to be in a food-rich environment (eg: inside the human body) or else plug into the power socket in the wall. Grey goo (were such a thing invented) would munch through the power cord, and just stop.
The 1st amendment is about freedom of speech, which congress may not abridge, period. Any damn thing you want to say, no ifs ands or buts. So, all the crap about commercial and political speech has basically been tacked on illegally afterward, by a politically compliant judiciary, to allow the FedGov to "regulate" far beyond its defined remit.
;-)
BTW, free speech isn't a right because of the constitution - it's in the constitution because it's a right! (Oh, and guns likewise, might as well mention while I'm already up on the soapbox
The free market can generate monopolistic behaviour, like "tying", but in each case it represents an opportunity to undercut the monopolist and capture the market for those consumers who are being bullied.
Eg: if telcos tie DSL to voice, there is an opportunity for outsiders to market alternative broadband technologies such as direct-connected ethernet or subscriber wireless.
Not just incorrect calculations, but incorrect saves, incorrect loads, parially implemented system functions that don't do what the coders expected, harmless dangling pointers in Windows that bite you in Wine, etc etc. Not that I know of any such, but you can't safely assume they don't exist.
This is a generalization of: if you run a tested app on an untested configuration, it's no longer properly tested! That's just common sense.
Do your finance in OO.o spreadsheet or in GnuCash, or boot across to Windows. Doing it under emulation (a known-incomplete emulation, even!) is just stupid.
A finacial app is no use if you can't trust it 100%. Since they tested it on Windows, run it on Windows. Anything else is asking for trouble.
Your game glitches under Wine, it's a hassle. Your finance app glitches, it could get expensive.
There's exactly one: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk.
Big Brother empties the pockets of working folk and kindly pays on their behalf for your education, and then you go whining when he expects favours in return?
You know, in the USA unlike in some socialist pestholes, there exist a few genuine private universities. They don't take handouts, so they don't have to take shit from the feds. You fancy being treated like a customer, not like the product? You know what they say: you get what you pay for.
...a pass PHRASE is for your encrypted hard disk.
Dictionary attacks mean sod-all when the passphrase is nothing that might appear in any dictionary (including one compiled from your correspondence and other public clues such as browsing history and Amazon purchases).
Supposing one gave them the benefit of the doubt... "smart search inside documents using the metadata in popular file formats, and natural language content parsing" is really something of an obvious next step, given the state of the art. As is prebuilding the indexes and using them for type-ahead find. It's quite possible they both invented it.
I assume that by "problem we don't have" you mean the idea of a single binary that runs everywhere, and your ideal solution is to build CPU-specific binaries from (open|free) source.
Obviously you haven't given it enough thought.
First off, there is no such thing as one source that compiles for every CPU. What you get is meta-source that preprocesses into various different programs, for each architecture and OS. All the different outputs need to be tested seperately. But it gets worse, since the assumptions underlying each OS are dissimilar enough that "cross platform" is really hard. Big, impressive projects like apache and postgresql have wrestled with cross platform - and won, but at no small cost in time and effort. It is not merely a matter of "configure; make all". Most CPU-compiled programs don't even make the effort, they are doomed to running only under posix (or windows, or mac, or whatever).
Second, you lose the ability to migrate your programs unchanged with full functionality across eg: the upcoming 32bit => 64bit i386 CPU changeover. Or across totally different CPUs. This could well be very important if business depends on the predictable running of those programs. It's also pertinent from an open hardware perspective. Compiled binaries are vendor lock-in on the CPU. Even if you're willing to suck it up and assume a CPU, time is against you - CPU architectures predictably change. Likewise OSes.
Third, you lose the ability to have code that actually exchanges runnables across platforms or with strangers on unknown machines. "Applets" could not have been done with compiled code.
And of course fourth, you waste disk space, time and intellectual effort grubbing around compiling source code when all you likely want is binaries that work.
I use Amazon.co.uk's DVD rental system. Very nice selection of films, and because the cost per month is fixed, I can basically treat Amazon as my personal DVD library. I actually prefer it to pirating - physical DVDs are more convenient and they aren't messily compressed down to a postage stamp size.
Since I could rip DVDs, the "rights management" is physical (have to return the disk) but not digital. But why would I rip a DVD and waste disk space keeping a copy, when I could just pick it up again the next time I felt inclined? Thus their "rights management" of DVD borrowing and return makes sense. I never lose freedoms. I gain convenience. It would be a viable business model even if copyright ceased to exist.
DRM by contrast both requires me to go to the bother of downloading, and then locks me out of the very bits I've downloaded. It is absolutely based around reducing freedoms. It's as though someone were to sell me food which disappears from my stomach after five minutes, requiring me to eat again. Economists call this "rent seeking", an attempt to charge money for nothing. Not only is this profoundly anti-natural in an adaptive, inventive free market, it's also a recipe for conflict of interest between seller and customer - exactly the opposite of a healthy business relationship!
This is a natural consequence of trying to make a thing behave like what it isn't. Rental is a mechanism for making temporary use of physical objects. Data is not physical and "renting data" is semantic garble. The copyright holders are basically trying to impose a contradiction: "information and not-information". As a result, every form of DRM must eventually lean on government force to impose compliance. It's not a business model - in the end it's nothing more than a Mafia-style extortion racket. "Gotta pay the Family if you wanna work in this town", same thing.
You leftish types who dislike the free market, be happy that one exists. It's the free market that will sweep this nonsense aside.
(IANAL, opinion only...)
Loads of people are saying "copyright overrides the later contract". True enough, but IM(NL)O it's more complicated, namely: the code you wrote is GPL-infected, BUT you are also in breach of your own contract for letting it get infected. You could probably be sued for the money "lost" when GPL'd code proves unsaleable.
A contract to do something contains by implication, a duty to avoid knowingly putting yourself into a legal armlock which would force you to break the contract.
Might not these sorts of game's audio UI be backported to the real world? Suppose for example, a car which had audio-linked radar sensors, audio blips and beeps for the indicators, drumbeat for speedometer, etc. Then the blind could drive in regular traffic...
Downloading of movies, legal and otherwise, won't kill DVDs. If anything, the trend most likely to smash the status quo is amazon.co.uk's DVD rental by post.
I suspect that a large number of people buy DVDs because that's the only way to get at the full choice (not just what's on the local Blockbuster's shelves). They only want to watch the film once or twice and afterward the expensive bought DVD is dead weight. Widespread and easy rental by post could easily collapse most of the DVD purchase market. It could also reduce downloading. Why wait three days for a torrent of a DVD-rip to complete, and tolerate the inferior viewing experience, when you could recieve a posted DVD in one day and watch it in comfort?