"Let's all just keep our current computers" is only a good idea if we start doing it now. Because they'll let us wear the leash, but it'll only get tight when we are wearing it all the way, that meaning: We'll all be using DRM chips and software when they decide to restrict stuff.
Right now, we won't even notice when we buy such things.
I think it is very interesting seeing many of you doubting the existence of a "Marklar" product.
As Apple must be really disappointed with the PowerPC performance (at least I am), with PCs reaching the 3rd Gigahertz... it (Apple) must have a backup plan for its platform. They already use IDE, DDR, PCI and so on, what makes the machine so much cheaper because of the common technology.
The question is:
Is it a good idea to break compatibility with our own not-very-old platform, making our current customers and programmers angry because of the yet-one-more processor change, but giving them cheaper and more powerful machines?
What are they going to say now? "My machine is faster because it has an Apple sticker on it"? Of course, they would still have machines designed entirely from the bottom up, with no need to support legacy stuff... but it would still be dificult to convince people that buy iMacs.
Have you guys ever asked the marketing guys their opinion on this???
...they can rewrite it.
Maybe better, this time...
But, truly... any programmer in this world can tell that either the code is modifiable to fit any need, or it is a complete piece of cr*p over which you have no control and you don't know sh*t about what's written in it...
You have the code, you can modify it as you wish. Easy as that. If they can't do it, open the source and the comunity will.
So, they can't remove IE and MP, but they can replace the filesystem with a OO-DB-like engine? Oh yeah, that's much easier!!! Because IE and MP is so needed by the OS because without it HOW COULD YOU DISPLAY YOUR FOLDERS AS WEB PAGES??? And play movies from them? Can't do! Can't be!
The deal is not whether or not they have it in Windows, it's whether or not they'll make it available to other apps, to be reused...
Actually, you may end up with a much better keyboard!
If you use a cushioned surface, I don't think you'd get painful fingers. Just don't punch the table! _touch_ it...
Besides, with a laser printed keyboard, I could change the key designs the way I want. "Hey, I'm in the mood for a ergo-keyboard now! Separate and twist'em keys!"
Or even an expanded keyboard, with as many extra keys as you wish. Sliders. BIG buttons. Piano-keys. Whatever!
Thats not entirely fair... LaTeX makes 95% of what I want to do easier and faster than plain TeX... but for that last 5%, LaTeX makes me want to punch things. LaTeX=easy, TeX=flexible).
This should be:
LaTeX = Flexible... it stretches well, at least!
Like I said, maybe. But I'll answser to you, so we can keep the discussion going... Think of today, not 100 years back. Think outside the academic environment. Think of an innovative idea. Doesn't the common sense tell you "sell it" or "make profit"? Where did all of companies come from? At&T, IBM, Apple, MS, (your list here)... ONLY IF I didn't have the guts to carry on my ideas, or knew I couldn't do it without being smashed by the big guys... only then I wouldn't make a profit of it? Imagine that... getting paid to do stuff I like! (I suppose that if you had an innovative idea, you actually do like the subject) Whoa, Nelly!
Maybe people with innovative ideas are not willing to give them out for free, building new businesses and selling them instead. Maybe a deep change needs a such a critical mass of programers only available thru paying cash, and not by convinving people around to work on your ideas. Maybe...
I don't think this SQL solution helps in anything. If you think it right, the benefits you get by this solution could be had by usage of much more elegant solutions. Think of memory usage, when looking for better performance. HUGE. I'd really suggest all of you to read Reiser's article. And take a look at BeFS and HFS. It is true that our current filesystem layouts are a little outdated. No proper handling of metadata. (Ok, I may be mistaken on this one). BUT... we are truly missing a way to be descriptive of the file's content. The file's internal structure should be controlled by the OS. Actually, I believe that the whole memory management system should be done this way, with transparency for the app, between objects in memory or disk. If you do it this way, the OS could present us the information without the usage of an app. You could actually have "visual plug-ins" to visualize data in any custom way it fancys you. Think of XML, transformations, MathML, and any standard markup language you can think of. Imagine a (html?) table showing being shown as a chart. And written by you, in an easily scriptable language. We've got so many of them, we'd only need to enable these languages to easily retrieve information from the objects, that is: known structure. And dig this: standard way to point to any object, in any computer. Hey... objects in a O-R DBMS all have an id. Just extend this id to the whole machine, and add another part to identify the machine. Hmmmm... "gimme object 1234@computer1.mycompany.com"... You I think this looks beautiful, don't you? And I also think it's pretty easy to implement. Think iNodes. iTunes. Oops. Sorry, offtopic (this is supposed to be a joke. Laugh now) We could also go down to being able to point to a specific part of the file, if the file's structure is known. Now you should think of HTML tags, like SPAN and A and DIV... Got it? If we can put all these things together, as an standard way to organize stuff, taken care by an OS API... we'd have a very nice way to do things we already do in the Windows world, such as embedding an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document. But... in a very extensive way. Self-explanatory too, if we also send the description of the file's structure. Point is: you get free from the FS tree, so you can organize stuff your own way, and never loosing track of files, as the pointers will keep valid. With ability to add metadata, you could add better ways to organize, too. We'd already be free from the tree, wouldn't we? There is also the option to build a layer over the FS, leaving the design we have today to the apps, and bringing this higher level concept to the user only. This way we could also make it portable, enabling installation over ext2, Reiser, NTFS, or whatever the user happens to have, without the need for a repartitioning trouble. Does anybody out there want to help in this revolution? I haven't the time to code these wonders!;) The possibilities are so many it makes my head spin every time I think too much about it...
Viruses have nothing to do with it, as I am NOT talking about executable code (au contraire, the more flexibility you have built-in, the less code you need). And you already get SPAM tagged to your MP3's. Sometimes even as 2secs of a "Downloaded from XYZ" jingle. You don't need what I propose to get crap. What I want is the ability to make anything "pointable", and "embeddable". With no additional steps (Zip) or loss of organization. I have thousands of files in my disk, from many different sources, projects, and in many different formats. How do I find THAT picture I am looking for? Or my MP3? Ask the OS to FIND it for me? Ha! Edit the tags without the need of an extra app? Yeah, right! Can you use your "Search folders/files" to get the phone of that client of yours? And his picture, so you don't confuse him with someone else? Can you integrate all you media needs without getting a new app? Or losing data when you switch your Address Book from Outlook to Eudora? Hmmmmm. Fileformats: needed because we have no such standard way to organize stuff. We need a way to add metadate to files, without extra apps, but directly telling your FS to do so. I share the opinion that the more metadata you add to a file, easier it is to find it. Just do a "find all MP3 that I got from john@hotmail", or "find everything related to slashdot.com I got in the last month" and you should get no more than a couple choices. It should be THAT easy, but not any messy. Shamefully it'll only gain momentum when somebody come up with some code ready for usage.
I would agree that people could WANT big machines. But is there a better way to make software available, other than through networks? With proper installers, such as apt... Tell me why I'd want CD's! You look bound to the idea that network computers can ONLY get data from the network. Besides the fact that a fast (100Mbps) network could actually be good enough for a no-disk design, you could also have a disk to "cache" applications. No worries about instalation. Let the admin (pick any ISP) fix stuff for you, without charging the "visit". Let other people back you stuff up, because YOU DON'T. Safer, easier. Other than that plug-n-play feature the net gives you... it does not restrict the rest of your platform. People should stop thinking of the network computer as a Web+Mail+Java terminal. There's much more to it! We actually need a new way to distribute apps, keeping them enclosed in security boxes so they don't mess up the client machine. (Other than Java, of course)
I meant email adress, but... The point is: YOU CAN'T. No matter what you want to attach together, you need a hack, such as ID3, putting files together in a directory or ZIPing stuff. USERS don't have access to "tagging" to the files themselves. I know HFS and BFS could do something like it... but if I want to use Linux, for instance. CAN I MANIPULATE MY INFORMATION THE WAY I WAN'T? Not really. I'd say we need that level of abstraction I was talking about, so we could do this "hyper-linking" anywhere, with any piece of information, over ANY filesystem. OR... database. Ideas? (I got some, but better not post here... don't want to be too Offtopic)
I don't know about you guys, but I've seen users get completely lost when installing software, or looking for that.doc file he saved somewhere, or even trying to add a music to a winamp playlist. Well, I'm an experienced user and would say "you dumb***, drag that outta the floppy's window to the playlist and it's done" but hey... they have no clue about how the GUI works! Say what you want, but for users who only touch the comp. once a week or less, and can't even program that video they have for years already... ALL the options we have as OS (Yeah, I know MacOSX) suck. Bad. When are we doing to put a level of abstraction between that lousy filesystem design (in the user's point of view) so we can really add INFORMATION where we want? Can I add a note to my DivX;-) file? Nope. File design doesn't allow it. What if I wanted an email attached to an MP3? Nope. Can't. If we learned something with Apple's iTunes, iPhoto, iWhatever, we'd see they KEEP THE USER FAR AWAY FROM THE FS, while not completely locking the user away from it. Beautiful, huh? So why are we still insisting in making a WINDOWS CLONE out of our GUIs??? I know this reply floats around a bunch of topics, but they all end up in the same question: DOES THE SOFTWARE SERVES US WELL, EASILY? CAN IT DO WHAT I WANT/NEED??? "Hack that directory tree!!!"
What-if situation: 1)Spammer tries do relay 2)Host detects spammer 3)Host starts sending messages to all IPs in traceroute, asking to block that from:spammer+to:myself+port:25 combination 4)Spammer blocked
Is this THAT difficult to implement? A firewalling-on-demand? Maybe I'm missing the security issue here... (if I'm just wasting a patent possibility, let me know) If this is possible, wouldn't it save lot's of bandwidth? Any thoughts?
Slashdot Mirror
swap the lines. hm?
The camera doesn't point to the side the earpiece is. It's on the BACK of the camera...
Maybe AMD should release TWO versions: one WITH Palladium, one WITHOUT. Linux users, please, a step forward!
"Let's all just keep our current computers" is only a good idea if we start doing it now. Because they'll let us wear the leash, but it'll only get tight when we are wearing it all the way, that meaning: We'll all be using DRM chips and software when they decide to restrict stuff. Right now, we won't even notice when we buy such things.
I think it is very interesting seeing many of you doubting the existence of a "Marklar" product. As Apple must be really disappointed with the PowerPC performance (at least I am), with PCs reaching the 3rd Gigahertz... it (Apple) must have a backup plan for its platform. They already use IDE, DDR, PCI and so on, what makes the machine so much cheaper because of the common technology. The question is: Is it a good idea to break compatibility with our own not-very-old platform, making our current customers and programmers angry because of the yet-one-more processor change, but giving them cheaper and more powerful machines? What are they going to say now? "My machine is faster because it has an Apple sticker on it"? Of course, they would still have machines designed entirely from the bottom up, with no need to support legacy stuff... but it would still be dificult to convince people that buy iMacs. Have you guys ever asked the marketing guys their opinion on this???
...they can rewrite it. Maybe better, this time... But, truly... any programmer in this world can tell that either the code is modifiable to fit any need, or it is a complete piece of cr*p over which you have no control and you don't know sh*t about what's written in it... You have the code, you can modify it as you wish. Easy as that. If they can't do it, open the source and the comunity will.
So, they can't remove IE and MP, but they can replace the filesystem with a OO-DB-like engine? Oh yeah, that's much easier!!! Because IE and MP is so needed by the OS because without it HOW COULD YOU DISPLAY YOUR FOLDERS AS WEB PAGES??? And play movies from them? Can't do! Can't be! The deal is not whether or not they have it in Windows, it's whether or not they'll make it available to other apps, to be reused...
How long would it take to reverse engineer the "program"? The whole process? Ok, bets are running and I say 12 days.
Just in case you like watching videos better than looking at pictures...
Actually, you may end up with a much better keyboard! If you use a cushioned surface, I don't think you'd get painful fingers. Just don't punch the table! _touch_ it... Besides, with a laser printed keyboard, I could change the key designs the way I want. "Hey, I'm in the mood for a ergo-keyboard now! Separate and twist'em keys!" Or even an expanded keyboard, with as many extra keys as you wish. Sliders. BIG buttons. Piano-keys. Whatever!
Thats not entirely fair... LaTeX makes 95% of what I want to do easier and faster than plain TeX... but for that last 5%, LaTeX makes me want to punch things. LaTeX=easy, TeX=flexible).
This should be:
LaTeX = Flexible... it stretches well, at least!
Like I said, maybe.
But I'll answser to you, so we can keep the discussion going...
Think of today, not 100 years back. Think outside the academic environment. Think of an innovative idea. Doesn't the common sense tell you "sell it" or "make profit"? Where did all of companies come from? At&T, IBM, Apple, MS, (your list here)...
ONLY IF I didn't have the guts to carry on my ideas, or knew I couldn't do it without being smashed by the big guys... only then I wouldn't make a profit of it?
Imagine that... getting paid to do stuff I like! (I suppose that if you had an innovative idea, you actually do like the subject)
Whoa, Nelly!
Maybe people with innovative ideas are not willing to give them out for free, building new businesses and selling them instead.
Maybe a deep change needs a such a critical mass of programers only available thru paying cash, and not by convinving people around to work on your ideas.
Maybe...
I don't think this SQL solution helps in anything. If you think it right, the benefits you get by this solution could be had by usage of much more elegant solutions. Think of memory usage, when looking for better performance. HUGE. I'd really suggest all of you to read Reiser's article. And take a look at BeFS and HFS. ;) The possibilities are so many it makes my head spin every time I think too much about it...
It is true that our current filesystem layouts are a little outdated. No proper handling of metadata. (Ok, I may be mistaken on this one). BUT... we are truly missing a way to be descriptive of the file's content. The file's internal structure should be controlled by the OS. Actually, I believe that the whole memory management system should be done this way, with transparency for the app, between objects in memory or disk.
If you do it this way, the OS could present us the information without the usage of an app. You could actually have "visual plug-ins" to visualize data in any custom way it fancys you. Think of XML, transformations, MathML, and any standard markup language you can think of. Imagine a (html?) table showing being shown as a chart. And written by you, in an easily scriptable language. We've got so many of them, we'd only need to enable these languages to easily retrieve information from the objects, that is: known structure.
And dig this: standard way to point to any object, in any computer. Hey... objects in a O-R DBMS all have an id. Just extend this id to the whole machine, and add another part to identify the machine. Hmmmm... "gimme object 1234@computer1.mycompany.com"... You I think this looks beautiful, don't you? And I also think it's pretty easy to implement. Think iNodes. iTunes. Oops. Sorry, offtopic (this is supposed to be a joke. Laugh now) We could also go down to being able to point to a specific part of the file, if the file's structure is known. Now you should think of HTML tags, like SPAN and A and DIV... Got it?
If we can put all these things together, as an standard way to organize stuff, taken care by an OS API... we'd have a very nice way to do things we already do in the Windows world, such as embedding an Excel spreadsheet inside a Word document. But... in a very extensive way. Self-explanatory too, if we also send the description of the file's structure.
Point is: you get free from the FS tree, so you can organize stuff your own way, and never loosing track of files, as the pointers will keep valid. With ability to add metadata, you could add better ways to organize, too. We'd already be free from the tree, wouldn't we?
There is also the option to build a layer over the FS, leaving the design we have today to the apps, and bringing this higher level concept to the user only. This way we could also make it portable, enabling installation over ext2, Reiser, NTFS, or whatever the user happens to have, without the need for a repartitioning trouble.
Does anybody out there want to help in this revolution? I haven't the time to code these wonders!
Viruses have nothing to do with it, as I am NOT talking about executable code (au contraire, the more flexibility you have built-in, the less code you need).
And you already get SPAM tagged to your MP3's. Sometimes even as 2secs of a "Downloaded from XYZ" jingle. You don't need what I propose to get crap.
What I want is the ability to make anything "pointable", and "embeddable". With no additional steps (Zip) or loss of organization.
I have thousands of files in my disk, from many different sources, projects, and in many different formats. How do I find THAT picture I am looking for? Or my MP3? Ask the OS to FIND it for me? Ha! Edit the tags without the need of an extra app? Yeah, right! Can you use your "Search folders/files" to get the phone of that client of yours? And his picture, so you don't confuse him with someone else? Can you integrate all you media needs without getting a new app? Or losing data when you switch your Address Book from Outlook to Eudora? Hmmmmm.
Fileformats: needed because we have no such standard way to organize stuff.
We need a way to add metadate to files, without extra apps, but directly telling your FS to do so. I share the opinion that the more metadata you add to a file, easier it is to find it. Just do a "find all MP3 that I got from john@hotmail", or "find everything related to slashdot.com I got in the last month" and you should get no more than a couple choices. It should be THAT easy, but not any messy.
Shamefully it'll only gain momentum when somebody come up with some code ready for usage.
I would agree that people could WANT big machines. But is there a better way to make software available, other than through networks? With proper installers, such as apt... Tell me why I'd want CD's!
You look bound to the idea that network computers can ONLY get data from the network. Besides the fact that a fast (100Mbps) network could actually be good enough for a no-disk design, you could also have a disk to "cache" applications.
No worries about instalation. Let the admin (pick any ISP) fix stuff for you, without charging the "visit". Let other people back you stuff up, because YOU DON'T.
Safer, easier.
Other than that plug-n-play feature the net gives you... it does not restrict the rest of your platform.
People should stop thinking of the network computer as a Web+Mail+Java terminal. There's much more to it! We actually need a new way to distribute apps, keeping them enclosed in security boxes so they don't mess up the client machine. (Other than Java, of course)
I meant email adress, but...
The point is: YOU CAN'T.
No matter what you want to attach together, you need a hack, such as ID3, putting files together in a directory or ZIPing stuff. USERS don't have access to "tagging" to the files themselves.
I know HFS and BFS could do something like it... but if I want to use Linux, for instance. CAN I MANIPULATE MY INFORMATION THE WAY I WAN'T? Not really.
I'd say we need that level of abstraction I was talking about, so we could do this "hyper-linking" anywhere, with any piece of information, over ANY filesystem. OR... database.
Ideas? (I got some, but better not post here... don't want to be too Offtopic)
I don't know about you guys, but I've seen users get completely lost when installing software, or looking for that .doc file he saved somewhere, or even trying to add a music to a winamp playlist.
Well, I'm an experienced user and would say "you dumb***, drag that outta the floppy's window to the playlist and it's done" but hey... they have no clue about how the GUI works!
Say what you want, but for users who only touch the comp. once a week or less, and can't even program that video they have for years already... ALL the options we have as OS (Yeah, I know MacOSX) suck. Bad.
When are we doing to put a level of abstraction between that lousy filesystem design (in the user's point of view) so we can really add INFORMATION where we want? Can I add a note to my DivX;-) file? Nope. File design doesn't allow it. What if I wanted an email attached to an MP3? Nope. Can't.
If we learned something with Apple's iTunes, iPhoto, iWhatever, we'd see they KEEP THE USER FAR AWAY FROM THE FS, while not completely locking the user away from it. Beautiful, huh? So why are we still insisting in making a WINDOWS CLONE out of our GUIs???
I know this reply floats around a bunch of topics, but they all end up in the same question: DOES THE SOFTWARE SERVES US WELL, EASILY? CAN IT DO WHAT I WANT/NEED???
"Hack that directory tree!!!"
What-if situation:
1)Spammer tries do relay
2)Host detects spammer
3)Host starts sending messages to all IPs in traceroute, asking to block that from:spammer+to:myself+port:25 combination
4)Spammer blocked
Is this THAT difficult to implement? A firewalling-on-demand? Maybe I'm missing the security issue here...
(if I'm just wasting a patent possibility, let me know)
If this is possible, wouldn't it save lot's of bandwidth? Any thoughts?