*grin* (leaps out brandishing plans)
on
3D Window Manager
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· Score: 2
Cool- this almost exactly duplicates some funky graphics I did long long ago on the Apple IIgs. There was some sort of program that let you 'perspective' and composite bitmaps. Using it to invent weird interfaces seemed like a glimpse of a weird future (don't think I'd read William Gibson by then, but that was the gist of it really) Now somebody is making it actually happen. I say, cool:) no way will I want to use it, but come on, just as an art project this rules. Let's see it with Enlightenment, with windows that are 'panes' with the window borders and widgets being actual 3d shapes. _that_ would be very cool. As for useful 3d, I'm with the person who observed that layering of windows was like 3d. I'd also note that all my favorite xterms have some feature for changing font size- and since they are terms and assume a fixed size, they scale all over and take up more or less of the screen, and THAT is where real useful 3d effects will come in, and THAT is something you can't usefully do on Windows or Mac or indeed with GUI-toolkit Linux, and the only thing it's really missing is the presence of fonts like Flyspeck 4 or whatever, to allow 'distant' xterms to be made to look really distant. I'd suggest Flyspeck 1. Each letter is one pixel:) naturally, you can't read a thing, but who here _hasn't_ put a window with some laggy but active content like an idly IRC channel, into the background, and kept half an eye on it for signs of _movement_? Also, if you had some system log with colored text for messages, and it was in Flyspeck 1, you'd say 'Wait a sec, that's a red line! Better look at what that sentence says'. All this can be done _now_ with normal, existing X terms and WMs. My suggestion would be Window Maker with titlebar and resizebar turned off so the 'window' was just a simple rect- ideally you could have a WM that drew the titlebar to scale with the resizing xterm, perhaps fading it into the background by assigning lower contrast text and background colors to give a sense of distance. In this way you would have a fully 3Desque _CLI_ environment with vastly greater capability to display text on the screen, at anything from large readable letters to tiny semi-obscured letters to greeked text where the information is in the motion of the blocks of text, or in the color of the greeked text. And it's all available now and needs only a bit of integration to get together.:) And now I've told you (almost) all of my secrets- for I'm plotting a window manager _too_;) so wish me luck. My goal is to make a totally, relentlessly CLI-esque environment that's pretty enough to compare with E (mostly through background pictures and having the actual text windows blend attractively), can contain orders of magnitude more information than your usual X desktop, and is commonsense enough to compare with a Mac regarding the moving and adjusting of windows. Wish me luck, and I hope to have concept pictures up pretty soon! The really rough part will be writing the window manager, though I am quite willing to restrict everything to _only_ color xtermland and not make any provisions for supporting GUI toolkits at all. Why not be radical? Somebody else (hah, everybody else) will look after the GUI toolkit users:)
furrfu. Comparing PB to Macs is absurd. If you seriously believe that, why not put your money where your mouth is and set yourself up as a Mac (better yet- iMac!) hardware technician! Go ahead, there ought to be _tons_ of money in it if they are so much like Packard Bells;) Heavily proprietary != Packard Bell. PB is what you get when you _combine_ heavily proprietary with absolute crap:) Macs are what you get when you combine heavily proprietary with usually not crap:)
Personally I'd _want_ the plane to act as a big weathervane, and you'd better believe I'd keep the cockpit totally untouched- not even display screens. Well, maybe sit a CRT in front of the window and it'd be my desk:) *typing to slashdot as the huge jet slowly swoops around to a northeasterly heading* hey, I'd put it on a mountaintop, especially to get good winds:) and leave all the wings and stuff intact. It'd be a giant live-in artwork:) actually, a Lear would do as well. At the other extreme, imagine years from now when the 747s are all being decommissioned? The other point, brought up by a slashdot poster, about the missile silos, is very interesting. One wonders if there are any undeveloped silos around since that company seems hellbent on turning them into tatty redwood luxury homes;) however, there are some _damn_ good reasons for building an underground house, and it doesn't have to withstand a nuclear hit for it to still be a good idea. Heating costs are incredibly cheap even in the harshest winter as the ambient temperature is a bit below 60, _always_. Same with summer- heat? What heat? And there's another thing- nothing gets through the earth. Not RF, not sound, nothing. So you run a wire if you want to use your TV- but if you want the total opposite of ambient noise, this is it- an underground house is so silent it can be disturbing, takes some getting used to. Think hobbit-hole for some of the positive aspects- also, there are some unusual building techniques that could be used in this situation. For more information on underground houses check out TAB book #1172:) Thanks, Slashdot, this article kicks arse!:)
Does it really make any sense to paint 'internet politics' as if it was some sort of libertarian populist outburst, when the reality of the matter is that those voluble, libertarian technogeeks are basically all _employees_ and don't vote? I'm not claiming this is 100%, but I am suggesting this is a mere smokescreen for a power grab by corporate influence. Suggesting that this in any way represents libertarian geeks, or is at all likely to increase their influence, is absurd... We're looking at same-old same-old with a new mask. The mask is US. We're the lie. We look very inspiring, but we aren't the ones in control. The reality is the ever-increasing influence of large commercial interests, and this is largely incompatible with small business and with the success of individuals. It's a zero-sum game unless the corporations can invent not only a process for producing more consumers, but also a way for them to have jobs. Frankly we're better off _not_ having 'The Internet Era' take political control. It's not us, it's big business as usual only with even less responsibility than usual, less honesty than usual... the last people you'd want bribing senators. It's all very well when (for self interest) they want to open crypto, or fight net-content restrictions, but what are you gonna do when they boost IP law to give patents even more teeth, get government rules for software development which corporations could trivially pass (paperwork and fees for being allowed to code) but which would be a barrier for individuals, or ban or restrict Linux on trumped-up grounds? Personally, I'd like to see those concepts _stay_ paranoid fantasies. This is the Internet Era and paranoid fantasies seem to have a nasty tendency of turning quietly real when tech corporations are involved. I'd prefer that we don't have a government variation of the RealNetworks espionage story, or of Microsoft's insane business practices and accounting fantasies. The government does enough of that nonsense all by itself and does not need help...
Conspiracy theorists are, of course, free to conclude that putting MS on the DJ was a move to interfere with the DoJ case, since any hard hit on the price of MS stocks will have a very visible effect on the DJ average, after which the defense will cry "Our society can't afford a negative judgement!" Damn straight! I don't know who is technically in charge of such decisions, but anybody who doesn't believe Microsoft was leaning on the decision as hard as they could... well, believing that MS is oblivious of this sort of thing, unwilling to use it as a weapon, or concerned with the larger issue of society and the markets as a whole, is not 'sensible' or 'levelheaded', but just 'stupid'. OF COURSE that's the idea behind it. MS is now (if I am not mistaken, and I might be) on EVERY major index. Their collapse would _slam_ the economy of the entire world. That's just obvious- where has it become a conspiracy theory to suggest that MS has a stranglehold on the entire US economy, an argument which they themselves have darkly hinted at in their court cases? It's a no-brainer. It would be really stupid to believe this would have no effect on the independence of the markets. Now, when you start asking if this is a _good_ thing, then you can get into arguments. Personally, I think it's extortion- I don't think it is a good thing to hand over control of the economy to a vapor business. MS is that business, and I think it's a particularly bad move to try and have them represented in every index and tie their influence to every nook and corner of the stock market. I'm not even a big fan of the stock market- seems not very productive to me- but even so, this is just not fair. For people who do want to play investor and try to make money just by figuring out who's winning and losing (without actually doing any real work or producing anything), it's absolutely necessary for those people to have somewhere to jump if, say, MS tanks. Which will happen, even the Roman Empire fell- and if MS is ubitiquous, that means that in the peculiar world of the stock market, everybody loses and there is nowhere to turn. If they were just representing the NASDAQ and left the Dow alone, people could dump NASDAQ and jump to the Dow and the economy would rock violently without necessarily collapsing. If MS becomes synonymous with the economy- well, we're already looking at Great Depression-like social statistics for certain age groups, and have been for years. The 80s were a major era for dumping money into retirement funds and making yuppies wealthy while the lower classes got basically hosed. That never changed, and to this day, your average American is hardly in a position to play investor- this whole stock market brouhaha is the toy of the upper class, and the division continues to widen. The lower class (economically) doesn't _have_ money to put into the equation anymore. Well, when the upper economic class is hit, there _is_ no more. _That_ is why those speculating yuppies should be protected, _that_ is why MS's creative accounting and bubble economics must be curtailed. It's like that trickle-down stuff only in a darker twisted form- rather than providing a bounty of wonderfullness for everybody, currently the rich are the only means of _subsistence_ for the poor. Not opportunity, mere survival. It's inequitable, but if you simply hit the rich with, say, a stock market collapse, they will simply tighten their belts, take some losses, and then the economy will really start to _hurt_. Personally, I figure that almost anything is better than that.
The peculiar thing about this is the double standard. There are many people who totally mock and scorn the concept of OSS because to simply donate effort and time to a thing, without expecting compensation, is considered at best stupid, and at worst positively evil and sinful (a point of view that always startles me. Helping others is _bad_?) Yet here we have someone who's weird but sincere, and is also doing what he can like a good little capitalist to increase his wealth and power of influence. _Why_ does this all of a sudden become a fatal PR blunder? I could see OSS-fiends becoming very critical, but what on earth is causing so many people to jump on this point? He's trying to sell himself and his judgement. Isn't that what you're _supposed_ to do? Are you suggesting that he should be doing all this thinking and scheming and writing for _charity_?;)
Absolutely. The trouble is, this is really stupid:) You're absolutely right that small business suffers- not just small business- no matter _who_ you are, you had better be able to spin a line of hype and vapor because 'sound expansion' IS NOT ENOUGH. It used to be a _good_ thing to focus on building businesses and providing value and a going concern that could build on successes and expand to handle more customers well. Now that is actually a bad thing, because the goal has become cashing out and building vapor-business bubbles that are too good to be true- and aren't. Our friend the peculiar accountant has a number of things right, and one of them is the bad effect of this sort of thing. Good companies with honest practices and sustainable expansion are choked off by vapor businesses growing like kudzu vines. In an era where the best way to earn money is to set up a pyramid scheme of options and tax dodges, and where the best way to do business is to outspend and choke your competitors and constantly lie and deceive with vapor and false promises and then make sure you can't be held legally accountable for the fact that you're selling crap products and trying to prevent anyone else from competing with you, is 'The Internet Age' really the right term? Wouldn't 'The Stupid Age' be more apt?
Seems quite plausible to me. This fellow is clearly a geek- so caught up in his theories that he barely notices anything else. He can barely write, and shows a curious emotional detachment and perseverativeness similar to certain Usenet posters. He is not coming off like a serious challenge- he seems like a flake, largely due to his writing style. And yet... the man talks like an insider. I don't see anyone challenging his facts, and they're all over the article- stuff like this:
First of all, Microsoft makes a $250 million investment in WebMD for an 11 percent equity stake and part of the deal is that WebMD commits to $100 million of advertising on MSN network. At the same time, Microsoft agrees to subsidize an equal amount in medical prescriptions for people using WebMD. Of course there are a few other interesting aspects of this transaction, of which I won't address in this report. You have basically bartered a purely paper transaction and current accounting rules will allow you to recognize the entire $100 million as revenues for MSN network, even though you are just "trading checks."
This stuff is _all_ _over_ the article. Being sort of obsessional is normal for an accountant... and in this case the obsessionalness has produced a guy who singlemindedly tracked down seemingly everything Microsoft is doing, without even understanding what he was dealing with. He seems to think that he could expose their total fraud and everybody would go, "Oh! Gee, OK, let's stop doing that, we were wrong!". Stupid- but I don't see how that challenges his assertions, it only challenges his media savvy and understanding of human beings (which I can sympathize with). But this story isn't _about_ human beings, except in that they try to justify themselves- it's about obscure accounting cheats and tricky ways of committing fraud. In that area, this peculiar fellow has convinced me he knows what he's talking about- indeed, it's _all_ he knows- and I share his conclusion- Microsoft is built on accounting fraud, and as it takes over the entire economy (illustrated by its addition to Dow Jones- this fellow doesn't even get into the problems of having _any_ huge stock included on all main indicators- currently, when MS crashes _everything_ will go down, NASDAQ, Dow, you name it...), it poses a risk directly comparable to what happened to the Japanese economy. This is serious stuff, even if it's being hyped by a peculiar fellow who doesn't understand the need to downplay his self-aggrandizement (probably doesn't even understand that's what he's doing, if I read his character correctly). Try and focus on his conclusions (when they don't consist of 'Appoint me to your 401K committee!') because there is a great deal that should be listened to here.
That is a major warning flag for me. People are seriously advocating a push to _one_ _modern_ browser for web use? Like "First one to PNG takes all!"? I can't go along with that and absolutely won't. I used iCab which handles PNGs a bit, but their method of causing versions to 'expire' killed that for me- I won't go back, won't use software they can 'take away again'. I'm currently using Netscape 4.08: I have no intention of subjecting myself to rushed v5 crapware just to chase features. Any push for technology that forces existing working (even in a very loose sense of the term) stuff to be replaced with crapware or monopolyware is not something I'll have anything to do with. Causing that to happen is _worse_ than the LZW patent. I've really had it with switching around stuff. I edit text in an older version of BBEdit Lite- has that become useless with the passage of time? In Linux I'm always using vi, is that deprecated and to be discouraged since there is gNotepad and a bunch of other button-heavy monsters?
I can name a company that uses noncompete clauses and has repeatedly won in court when they were challenged. It's Mackay Envelope, run by the book-writing cool guy Harvey Mackay, and he explains exactly why that is: here's how it works. First of all, the Mackay noncompete is justifiable- it's for salesmen, and sales is such a personal occupation that one salesman can walk out of a company with basically the whole future of the company. Mackay did this to start his own envelope company, and vowed never to let anybody do it to _him_. As he put it, if he'd backed a truck up to the factory and taken every envelope in the place he'd have done his previous employer less damage- he took their _future_, 'cos he wanted to be an envelope king:) Secondly, the way Mackay gets around this problem with his contracts is simple- his noncompete clauses are incredibly fair and reasonable. A new salesman is given a bunch of accounts to take over and service when the salesman starts the job. Those names are written in the contract, and the guy can't take those with him when he leaves. Also, a large percentage of the customers are within the county Mackay operates in- the guy can't walk away with the customers _within_ the county for one year, after which it's open season. Outside the county, there are no rules. The whole arrangement is designed to make it perfectly reasonable for a departing envelope salesman to continue making a living, even for the company's archrival, even still selling envelopes. The customers the guy can't walk away with are specified. The area where the noncompete agreement protects Mackay is intentionally very limited- _one_ county in size. All this adds up to one fact- in order to have a problem with this agreement, a saleman would have to be trying very hard to hose Mackay. And that's been tried, and Mackay won in court, apparently several times, and was right to do so because what was being asked was quite reasonable and it wouldn't have been too hard to comply. Real companies do require noncompete clauses. The wrong guy walking out could really hose a company, and it's not like anybody these days is so fat and happy that they can ignore being hosed and having tons of clients taken away. The trick is, of all the noncompete clauses, most of them _are_ crap. The ones that are not crap are the ones which are really very reasonable: "You can't take the clients I handed you when you started, for a year. You can't go after the guy across the street for a year, go down the street some. After a year, go nuts, if I can't keep the client that long I don't deserve it..." and that's how to do it. As for the why to do it- Harvey Mackay started being an illustrious envelope tycoon (;) ) by walking off with most of the clients for a whole company, essentially killing them. As for the time constraint- that's a smokescreen though it is a valid concern. Read the statement: he was forbidden to work with 'an on-line service whose "primary business is to provide information technology professionals with a directory of third-party technology, software, or developer resources," an "on-line reference library" or an on-line store whose primary purpose is to "sell or distribute third-party software or product uses for Internet site or software development."' That's WAY TOO BROAD! Way way too broad. Forget 'internet time', this is the noncompete equivalent of those stupid patents. If it had been more sharply defined and less of a sweeping generalisation, the year duration might have even held up. I'd suggest narrowing it to _specific_ IT professionals, or to only 'sell Internet site development software' (basically, a noncompete saying 'For a year, do not work for a site created to serve webmasters'), or even geographical or computer-platform limits. As it is, that agreement seems vaguely specific, but to be a good noncompete agreement it has to be _painfully_ specific, protecting only the absolute heart of the business and only the most critical clients, and even then you're better off if you can specify particular ones, not _classes_ of client. But instead, it's "Thou shalt not work for anybody selling access to information, or software, or web tools, or telling people where they are!" *furrfu*. This has little to do with 'internet time'. The whole noncompete agreement is fatally broad. Again, it has to be _really_ specific. "Thou shalt not try to woo away Fred, or Bob, or Harold for a year, so we can get a head start 'cause we gave you those accounts in the first place. Also, don't work for a company that steals our mission statement, trademarks, and mailing list." _That_ would be a slamdunk. Who'd argue with that?
No, not for my NT server to reboot. That's how long it took for my old powermac to quit Netscape, shut down PPP, reboot, start up PPP, launch Netscape, dial in, load Slashdot, load this page and return to where I was reading:) For some reason I find this whole discussion insanely amusing:) oh, and I have a Mac Classic in the bedroom as a cheap notepad/xterm for my shell account, and it boots in twelve seconds (not much to boot). Steve Jobs once threw a fit at Apple developers, getting them to make the Macintosh boot faster. "Twenty seconds??? There are X million customers! If you waste a single second you're wasting time equal to X many entire lives! Are you ready to waste that many lives to your laziness???" (not a quote, just paraphrase). Maybe we ought to send him to Redmond to yell at some people. I guess the Microsofties don't mind the toll of lives they waste;) "So what? They're only customers."
I know this- I personally write free software on MacOS, as that's what I know and it's convenient. I know that RMS dislikes this. However, I don't care, because I don't let him define the meaning of the GPL, just the words. To me, it looks like this: RMS has defined the most stringent form of a sort of licensing known as 'free' or 'open', and it is not the actual code that is significant, it is the process of doing it. I don't intend to buy into the fallacy that I can't share unless everybody I work with shares with _me_... I can be dependent on lots of people, Apple, Adobe, whoever, and have no power or freedom with their code at all. That doesn't change the fact that _I!_ release free software- and, significantly, that I GPL it. This is the result: I may be dependent on other vendors, but in my software writing I deny them the use of what I've created unless they are ready to play by the same rules, and I share with anyone playing by the same rules as I am. That's why I don't find it unusual or strange being a Mac OSS programmer, or mind the relative scarcity of other Mac OSS programmers. It's not about what's in it for _me_. It's not about me pretending to have the ability to extort other people to release and share code. I simply understand very clearly exactly WHO I'm willing to share with, and who I'm not- and the GPL is exactly what I need, even with its various faults. It's not about whether I can force my whole environment to be nice- it's whether I can cooperate only with those ready to be nice, and just deal with the others in whatever way I must. The GPL gives me the power to discriminate in this manner. If someone wants me to support (by using) a piece of proprietary software, they have to convince me it's worth the price, and even then, they can't touch any of my stuff unless they do it on my terms. I am not the victim of proprietary code- if it breaks it breaks, nobody expects much of software nowadays. Proprietary code does not need a total war against it to succumb to entropy, it does that all by itself...
I don't think so. MS doesn't have comparable physical assets- their valuation is so overinflated even Steve Ballmer admits it (!), so they couldn't possibly buy anything as big as Sony without risking a collapse of the bubble. It's not reasonable.
The definition of 'distribution' (as Bruce found for us) being 'transfer from one legal entity to another'. And that's why a corporation can fork and have its programmers developing GPLed source under NDAs- but at the same time it means that as soon as the binaries get out to ANYBODY not legally part of the corporation, the source must follow. I think this suggests that open betas grant full rights to recipients under the GPL, and that it is possible that closed betas may not- the exact point of concern is whether a beta tester is legally part of the corporation, or not. They would have to be part of the corporation, legally, in order to be subject to any sort of NDA over GPLed stuff. This also makes internal testing totally controllable, always insisting that the recipients be part of the corporation and under NDAs. As soon as the binaries or source get into the hands of someone who isn't part of the corporation, the source must be forthcoming and the recipient has full rights under the GPL. Not a bad compromise really:) it'll be interesting to see who tries to grab momentary advantage by building up a head of steam behind secret development.
To be specific, though it is possible (if you're a corporation) to not only fork anything GPLed but also have big teams of programmers working on it full tilt without disclosing their information, when the product is released they _do_ have to release the information. It's possible to maintain such a fork in 'no cooperation' mode indefinitely, but at a very crippling cost- to keep it under total control you'd have to be changing things radically enough that no outside influences would be relevant. Otherwise things would converge. Particularly with regard to the Linux kernel, even a _hostile_ attempt to fork it and take over control is a losing game, requiring a really large amount of effort for a very unimpressive return. Yes, if you're a corporation you can devote more resources to a private development than individuals can, but then you have to release source (and not obfuscated, either) and this makes it difficult to use this mechanism for more than hit-and-run marketing games.
After all, my domain (a.com, even though more and more I'm doing free software now) was taken from my original name for my recording studio. The name? airwindows.com. You tell me a certain entity isn't going to consider everything with those latter seven letters their property... I'm depending on (1) apathy, and (2) my right to sit on the name as it is MY trademark dammit, and I registered the domain over a year ago and have been using the name in business since 1994. There's no way I can possibly take anything to court, so if I do get trouble my only option is to make publicity. I just hope that is never, ever necessary.
He's better known for calling for adults to sneak underage kids into R rated movies:P as for your suggestion, it's unrealistic. Adults do not establish the high school pecking order! Teenagers do that ALL BY THEMSELVES. I could see establishing 'havens' for subgroups that are picked on, the Chess Club or Computer Club etc. (and you'd damn well better be ready to include the Football Team in that, or you're a hypocrite- anyone thinking those jock kids are immune from insecurity is just stupid... they are human too, and they too are suffering adolescence) However, I've not seen Jon Katz implying any such thing- he seems to insist that you have to get all the teenagers to appreciate and celebrate each other, and that is ludicrous. The obvious counterexample was Haight-Ashbury, which I don't think Jon dares to bring up- it is a powerful mystique that seems to give credence to his simplistic calls for unity, but what people overlook is that the heyday of Haight-Ashbury was predominantly tourist teenagers from suburbia, that the movers and shakers of it were manipulative hustlers, and that by 1970 it had disintegrated into streetfights and drug killings- something the modern teenager would find more comprehensible. Not unity: diplomacy is what is needed today, the ability to negotiate between the various interests of the people involved in the war zone that is America. Jon is absolutely the worst person imaginable to be put into this role, because he is incapable of seeing past his illusory evil authority figures. What you're seeing, Jon, is badly frightened people, on both sides. If you understood that even for a second you might have a broader mind and be more capable of aiding the people you so dearly want to represent...
Good God, don't encourage him like that! This man speaks for nobody. He's not known for much besides half-baked philosophy and stealing ideas from previous Slashdot articles. He trivialises everything he touches by turning it into mindless hippie rebellion. The real world is a lot more complicated than Katz is willing to admit... this is a guy desperate to fight and weaken authority figures, but what he really wants is to replace them with himself. Even by _suggesting_, "Gee, Jon, looks like you're the voice of the disenfranchised geek!" you're empowering him in a seriously unhelpful way. HE IS NOT. He's just spouting off. If you want to hear the voices of disenfranchised geeks, TALK TO THEM. Not to Katz.
...and who owns the results? Nothing you're saying contradicts what I said, nor am I making out Bell Labs as some sort of ethical wonderland. The only difference is that Bell has/had a deeply ingrained 'service ethic' from when they were a legal monopoly and felt like part of the government, and Microsoft has/had a deeply ingrained shark ethic in which they try to kill everybody else. That's why stuffing MS full of patents and IP is harmful. I never claimed the ivory tower guys were bad people, just that they are not free. They're not. They are kept.
..or does anyone else find it weird and disturbing that script kiddies merrily try to hack vandalised HTML into everything from government sites to the military, but they are supposed to be afraid of _Microsoft_ retribution? What's that about? I would have thought that such people would be more worried about _military_ retribution, or government retribution. Do they know something we don't? If it's a lot of nonsense, why is MSNBC putting it forth as an explanation?
It's that simple. They don't need to take the effort to make good ideas into products as long as they can prevent anyone else from having them. You can depend that they are trying to patent everything they can, and that the patents are certainly not going to the person who had the idea, but to the Company. If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual. The only difference is that MS has more power than most entire countries, more money, and can buy out just about anybody- hence the numbers of brilliant people working at MS without any visible consequences to the MS customer- because you the customer are dirt, and for _your_ applications they make teams of recent college graduates and have them working 90 hours a week or more and sleeping under their desks like trapped animals. _You_ don't get the brilliant ones, oh no! Those are reserved for making patent applications so no competing Brilliant One can offer you anything better than the rubbish you're fed by MS Consumer Level. If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual... and frankly the way these things are set up, that's the only way to go if you're an MS. It maximizes return on human investment and blocks other people's innovation as effectively as possible. If they had to actually bother to benefit the consumer with the good ideas, the Brilliant Ones would be slowed down and not make as many patent proposals. Naturally a bit trickles down anyhow, but there is no reason that has to continue, and ideally for MS, it would stop so ALL the Brilliant Ones' efforts could be solely towards intellectual property with no requirement to do anything with it at all. Now _that_ would be _efficient_. You could own everything in the field of computing in five years if you didn't actually have to produce any of it as products! If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff.
As far as your first behavior, the mouse pointer, MacOS TextEdit APIs do this by default and always have. That's basically every text entry place in every Mac program for every Mac ever made, because custom controls ended up having to duplicate the behavior or look stupid. We LOVE this behavior too, and I can't wait to see it show up in Linux, typing under a pointer is tiresome and obscures what you're typing. The second behavior is no kind of default mac behavior, but there's been a extensions hack for years that does exactly this. It's pretty cool, though doing hacks like that on MacOS isn't a safe thing and can make lotsa crashes if you run the wrong program. I believe it does it by changing the MenuBarHeight value- it's officially a varying value anyhow, because internationalisation requires that some languages get more space to show ideograms or things up there:)
Nobody ever said it was impossible for somebody at Microsoft to come up with something good. It would be absurd to think that mere complete moral decay and evilness precluded the possibility of bright ideas;) What's wrong with this picture? Only that MS will certainly patent the idea and then do everything possible to crush anyone else working in the same area. There are no individuals doing cool things at Microsoft for the very simple reason that to Microsoft they are not individuals but part of The Great Microsoft Irresistible Force, which is dedicated to 100% world domination, as seen in lots of thoughtful quotes on record such as 'We only want a reasonable marketshare. What is reasonable? We think 100% is reasonable.' You simply cannot restrict a pragmatic view to only what these people produce. The true pragmatist has got to look at what they _do_ as well, and ask whether it's worth it to cherry-pick what bright ideas MS does have, at the expense of continually helping them crush everyone else's bright ideas. At what point does this become not worth it? For me that happened some time ago, so I have to be unmoved by reports of MS bright ideas. I _know_ they can have good ideas. They own _people_, literally own the minds of thousands upon thousands of people, some of which did great work on their own before they were assimilated. MS may have only wanted to get such people out of circulation, but why should I or anybody be surprised if such people continue thinking of great things even in captivity? Well-paid captivity, I'll grant. Why not think of who benefits from such ideas? If you only consider utility and convenience and don't consider power, you set yourself up to be exploited, and to whinge later on how you _wanted_ to be exploited because you walked into the situation of your own free will. This is merely rationalization for your lack of foresight- nobody wants to be exploited.
Yes. They are. Though to be fair you have to also consider that they typically pick (if I remember correctly) names of streams and rivers to name the experiments by- apparently there was a Coppermine River or something, so naturally this name they're keeping.
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Cool- this almost exactly duplicates some funky graphics I did long long ago on the Apple IIgs. There was some sort of program that let you 'perspective' and composite bitmaps. Using it to invent weird interfaces seemed like a glimpse of a weird future (don't think I'd read William Gibson by then, but that was the gist of it really) :) no way will I want to use it, but come on, just as an art project this rules. Let's see it with Enlightenment, with windows that are 'panes' with the window borders and widgets being actual 3d shapes. _that_ would be very cool. :) naturally, you can't read a thing, but who here _hasn't_ put a window with some laggy but active content like an idly IRC channel, into the background, and kept half an eye on it for signs of _movement_? Also, if you had some system log with colored text for messages, and it was in Flyspeck 1, you'd say 'Wait a sec, that's a red line! Better look at what that sentence says'. All this can be done _now_ with normal, existing X terms and WMs. My suggestion would be Window Maker with titlebar and resizebar turned off so the 'window' was just a simple rect- ideally you could have a WM that drew the titlebar to scale with the resizing xterm, perhaps fading it into the background by assigning lower contrast text and background colors to give a sense of distance. :) ;) so wish me luck. My goal is to make a totally, relentlessly CLI-esque environment that's pretty enough to compare with E (mostly through background pictures and having the actual text windows blend attractively), can contain orders of magnitude more information than your usual X desktop, and is commonsense enough to compare with a Mac regarding the moving and adjusting of windows. :)
Now somebody is making it actually happen. I say, cool
As for useful 3d, I'm with the person who observed that layering of windows was like 3d. I'd also note that all my favorite xterms have some feature for changing font size- and since they are terms and assume a fixed size, they scale all over and take up more or less of the screen, and THAT is where real useful 3d effects will come in, and THAT is something you can't usefully do on Windows or Mac or indeed with GUI-toolkit Linux, and the only thing it's really missing is the presence of fonts like Flyspeck 4 or whatever, to allow 'distant' xterms to be made to look really distant. I'd suggest Flyspeck 1. Each letter is one pixel
In this way you would have a fully 3Desque _CLI_ environment with vastly greater capability to display text on the screen, at anything from large readable letters to tiny semi-obscured letters to greeked text where the information is in the motion of the blocks of text, or in the color of the greeked text. And it's all available now and needs only a bit of integration to get together.
And now I've told you (almost) all of my secrets- for I'm plotting a window manager _too_
Wish me luck, and I hope to have concept pictures up pretty soon! The really rough part will be writing the window manager, though I am quite willing to restrict everything to _only_ color xtermland and not make any provisions for supporting GUI toolkits at all. Why not be radical? Somebody else (hah, everybody else) will look after the GUI toolkit users
furrfu. Comparing PB to Macs is absurd. If you seriously believe that, why not put your money where your mouth is and set yourself up as a Mac (better yet- iMac!) hardware technician! Go ahead, there ought to be _tons_ of money in it if they are so much like Packard Bells ;) :) Macs are what you get when you combine heavily proprietary with usually not crap :)
Heavily proprietary != Packard Bell. PB is what you get when you _combine_ heavily proprietary with absolute crap
Personally I'd _want_ the plane to act as a big weathervane, and you'd better believe I'd keep the cockpit totally untouched- not even display screens. Well, maybe sit a CRT in front of the window and it'd be my desk :) *typing to slashdot as the huge jet slowly swoops around to a northeasterly heading* hey, I'd put it on a mountaintop, especially to get good winds :) and leave all the wings and stuff intact. It'd be a giant live-in artwork :) actually, a Lear would do as well. At the other extreme, imagine years from now when the 747s are all being decommissioned? ;) however, there are some _damn_ good reasons for building an underground house, and it doesn't have to withstand a nuclear hit for it to still be a good idea. Heating costs are incredibly cheap even in the harshest winter as the ambient temperature is a bit below 60, _always_. Same with summer- heat? What heat? And there's another thing- nothing gets through the earth. Not RF, not sound, nothing. So you run a wire if you want to use your TV- but if you want the total opposite of ambient noise, this is it- an underground house is so silent it can be disturbing, takes some getting used to. Think hobbit-hole for some of the positive aspects- also, there are some unusual building techniques that could be used in this situation. For more information on underground houses check out TAB book #1172 :) :)
The other point, brought up by a slashdot poster, about the missile silos, is very interesting. One wonders if there are any undeveloped silos around since that company seems hellbent on turning them into tatty redwood luxury homes
Thanks, Slashdot, this article kicks arse!
Hee! My _god_ that's funny. And, seemingly, true. So I have a proposed slogan for us all to use...
;)
Linux: For When You Don't Want Your E-Commerce Site Telling Your Customers To Go Away
Does it really make any sense to paint 'internet politics' as if it was some sort of libertarian populist outburst, when the reality of the matter is that those voluble, libertarian technogeeks are basically all _employees_ and don't vote?
I'm not claiming this is 100%, but I am suggesting this is a mere smokescreen for a power grab by corporate influence. Suggesting that this in any way represents libertarian geeks, or is at all likely to increase their influence, is absurd...
We're looking at same-old same-old with a new mask. The mask is US. We're the lie. We look very inspiring, but we aren't the ones in control. The reality is the ever-increasing influence of large commercial interests, and this is largely incompatible with small business and with the success of individuals. It's a zero-sum game unless the corporations can invent not only a process for producing more consumers, but also a way for them to have jobs.
Frankly we're better off _not_ having 'The Internet Era' take political control. It's not us, it's big business as usual only with even less responsibility than usual, less honesty than usual... the last people you'd want bribing senators. It's all very well when (for self interest) they want to open crypto, or fight net-content restrictions, but what are you gonna do when they boost IP law to give patents even more teeth, get government rules for software development which corporations could trivially pass (paperwork and fees for being allowed to code) but which would be a barrier for individuals, or ban or restrict Linux on trumped-up grounds? Personally, I'd like to see those concepts _stay_ paranoid fantasies. This is the Internet Era and paranoid fantasies seem to have a nasty tendency of turning quietly real when tech corporations are involved. I'd prefer that we don't have a government variation of the RealNetworks espionage story, or of Microsoft's insane business practices and accounting fantasies. The government does enough of that nonsense all by itself and does not need help...
Conspiracy theorists are, of course, free to conclude that putting MS on the DJ was a move to interfere with the DoJ case, since any hard hit on the price of MS stocks will have a very visible effect on the DJ average, after which the defense will cry "Our society can't afford a negative judgement!"
Damn straight! I don't know who is technically in charge of such decisions, but anybody who doesn't believe Microsoft was leaning on the decision as hard as they could... well, believing that MS is oblivious of this sort of thing, unwilling to use it as a weapon, or concerned with the larger issue of society and the markets as a whole, is not 'sensible' or 'levelheaded', but just 'stupid'.
OF COURSE that's the idea behind it. MS is now (if I am not mistaken, and I might be) on EVERY major index. Their collapse would _slam_ the economy of the entire world. That's just obvious- where has it become a conspiracy theory to suggest that MS has a stranglehold on the entire US economy, an argument which they themselves have darkly hinted at in their court cases? It's a no-brainer. It would be really stupid to believe this would have no effect on the independence of the markets.
Now, when you start asking if this is a _good_ thing, then you can get into arguments. Personally, I think it's extortion- I don't think it is a good thing to hand over control of the economy to a vapor business. MS is that business, and I think it's a particularly bad move to try and have them represented in every index and tie their influence to every nook and corner of the stock market. I'm not even a big fan of the stock market- seems not very productive to me- but even so, this is just not fair. For people who do want to play investor and try to make money just by figuring out who's winning and losing (without actually doing any real work or producing anything), it's absolutely necessary for those people to have somewhere to jump if, say, MS tanks. Which will happen, even the Roman Empire fell- and if MS is ubitiquous, that means that in the peculiar world of the stock market, everybody loses and there is nowhere to turn. If they were just representing the NASDAQ and left the Dow alone, people could dump NASDAQ and jump to the Dow and the economy would rock violently without necessarily collapsing. If MS becomes synonymous with the economy- well, we're already looking at Great Depression-like social statistics for certain age groups, and have been for years. The 80s were a major era for dumping money into retirement funds and making yuppies wealthy while the lower classes got basically hosed. That never changed, and to this day, your average American is hardly in a position to play investor- this whole stock market brouhaha is the toy of the upper class, and the division continues to widen. The lower class (economically) doesn't _have_ money to put into the equation anymore.
Well, when the upper economic class is hit, there _is_ no more. _That_ is why those speculating yuppies should be protected, _that_ is why MS's creative accounting and bubble economics must be curtailed. It's like that trickle-down stuff only in a darker twisted form- rather than providing a bounty of wonderfullness for everybody, currently the rich are the only means of _subsistence_ for the poor. Not opportunity, mere survival. It's inequitable, but if you simply hit the rich with, say, a stock market collapse, they will simply tighten their belts, take some losses, and then the economy will really start to _hurt_.
Personally, I figure that almost anything is better than that.
The peculiar thing about this is the double standard. There are many people who totally mock and scorn the concept of OSS because to simply donate effort and time to a thing, without expecting compensation, is considered at best stupid, and at worst positively evil and sinful (a point of view that always startles me. Helping others is _bad_?) ;)
Yet here we have someone who's weird but sincere, and is also doing what he can like a good little capitalist to increase his wealth and power of influence. _Why_ does this all of a sudden become a fatal PR blunder? I could see OSS-fiends becoming very critical, but what on earth is causing so many people to jump on this point? He's trying to sell himself and his judgement. Isn't that what you're _supposed_ to do? Are you suggesting that he should be doing all this thinking and scheming and writing for _charity_?
Absolutely. The trouble is, this is really stupid :)
You're absolutely right that small business suffers- not just small business- no matter _who_ you are, you had better be able to spin a line of hype and vapor because 'sound expansion' IS NOT ENOUGH. It used to be a _good_ thing to focus on building businesses and providing value and a going concern that could build on successes and expand to handle more customers well. Now that is actually a bad thing, because the goal has become cashing out and building vapor-business bubbles that are too good to be true- and aren't.
Our friend the peculiar accountant has a number of things right, and one of them is the bad effect of this sort of thing. Good companies with honest practices and sustainable expansion are choked off by vapor businesses growing like kudzu vines. In an era where the best way to earn money is to set up a pyramid scheme of options and tax dodges, and where the best way to do business is to outspend and choke your competitors and constantly lie and deceive with vapor and false promises and then make sure you can't be held legally accountable for the fact that you're selling crap products and trying to prevent anyone else from competing with you, is 'The Internet Age' really the right term? Wouldn't 'The Stupid Age' be more apt?
And yet... the man talks like an insider. I don't see anyone challenging his facts, and they're all over the article- stuff like this: This stuff is _all_ _over_ the article. Being sort of obsessional is normal for an accountant... and in this case the obsessionalness has produced a guy who singlemindedly tracked down seemingly everything Microsoft is doing, without even understanding what he was dealing with. He seems to think that he could expose their total fraud and everybody would go, "Oh! Gee, OK, let's stop doing that, we were wrong!". Stupid- but I don't see how that challenges his assertions, it only challenges his media savvy and understanding of human beings (which I can sympathize with).
But this story isn't _about_ human beings, except in that they try to justify themselves- it's about obscure accounting cheats and tricky ways of committing fraud. In that area, this peculiar fellow has convinced me he knows what he's talking about- indeed, it's _all_ he knows- and I share his conclusion- Microsoft is built on accounting fraud, and as it takes over the entire economy (illustrated by its addition to Dow Jones- this fellow doesn't even get into the problems of having _any_ huge stock included on all main indicators- currently, when MS crashes _everything_ will go down, NASDAQ, Dow, you name it...), it poses a risk directly comparable to what happened to the Japanese economy.
This is serious stuff, even if it's being hyped by a peculiar fellow who doesn't understand the need to downplay his self-aggrandizement (probably doesn't even understand that's what he's doing, if I read his character correctly). Try and focus on his conclusions (when they don't consist of 'Appoint me to your 401K committee!') because there is a great deal that should be listened to here.
That is a major warning flag for me. People are seriously advocating a push to _one_ _modern_ browser for web use? Like "First one to PNG takes all!"? I can't go along with that and absolutely won't. I used iCab which handles PNGs a bit, but their method of causing versions to 'expire' killed that for me- I won't go back, won't use software they can 'take away again'. I'm currently using Netscape 4.08: I have no intention of subjecting myself to rushed v5 crapware just to chase features. Any push for technology that forces existing working (even in a very loose sense of the term) stuff to be replaced with crapware or monopolyware is not something I'll have anything to do with. Causing that to happen is _worse_ than the LZW patent. I've really had it with switching around stuff. I edit text in an older version of BBEdit Lite- has that become useless with the passage of time? In Linux I'm always using vi, is that deprecated and to be discouraged since there is gNotepad and a bunch of other button-heavy monsters?
I can name a company that uses noncompete clauses and has repeatedly won in court when they were challenged. It's Mackay Envelope, run by the book-writing cool guy Harvey Mackay, and he explains exactly why that is: here's how it works. :) ;) ) by walking off with most of the clients for a whole company, essentially killing them.
First of all, the Mackay noncompete is justifiable- it's for salesmen, and sales is such a personal occupation that one salesman can walk out of a company with basically the whole future of the company. Mackay did this to start his own envelope company, and vowed never to let anybody do it to _him_. As he put it, if he'd backed a truck up to the factory and taken every envelope in the place he'd have done his previous employer less damage- he took their _future_, 'cos he wanted to be an envelope king
Secondly, the way Mackay gets around this problem with his contracts is simple- his noncompete clauses are incredibly fair and reasonable. A new salesman is given a bunch of accounts to take over and service when the salesman starts the job. Those names are written in the contract, and the guy can't take those with him when he leaves. Also, a large percentage of the customers are within the county Mackay operates in- the guy can't walk away with the customers _within_ the county for one year, after which it's open season. Outside the county, there are no rules.
The whole arrangement is designed to make it perfectly reasonable for a departing envelope salesman to continue making a living, even for the company's archrival, even still selling envelopes. The customers the guy can't walk away with are specified. The area where the noncompete agreement protects Mackay is intentionally very limited- _one_ county in size. All this adds up to one fact- in order to have a problem with this agreement, a saleman would have to be trying very hard to hose Mackay. And that's been tried, and Mackay won in court, apparently several times, and was right to do so because what was being asked was quite reasonable and it wouldn't have been too hard to comply.
Real companies do require noncompete clauses. The wrong guy walking out could really hose a company, and it's not like anybody these days is so fat and happy that they can ignore being hosed and having tons of clients taken away. The trick is, of all the noncompete clauses, most of them _are_ crap. The ones that are not crap are the ones which are really very reasonable: "You can't take the clients I handed you when you started, for a year. You can't go after the guy across the street for a year, go down the street some. After a year, go nuts, if I can't keep the client that long I don't deserve it..." and that's how to do it.
As for the why to do it- Harvey Mackay started being an illustrious envelope tycoon (
As for the time constraint- that's a smokescreen though it is a valid concern. Read the statement: he was forbidden to work with 'an on-line service whose "primary business is to provide information technology professionals with a directory of third-party technology, software, or developer resources," an "on-line reference library" or an on-line store whose primary purpose is to "sell or distribute third-party software or product uses for Internet site or software development."' That's WAY TOO BROAD! Way way too broad. Forget 'internet time', this is the noncompete equivalent of those stupid patents. If it had been more sharply defined and less of a sweeping generalisation, the year duration might have even held up. I'd suggest narrowing it to _specific_ IT professionals, or to only 'sell Internet site development software' (basically, a noncompete saying 'For a year, do not work for a site created to serve webmasters'), or even geographical or computer-platform limits. As it is, that agreement seems vaguely specific, but to be a good noncompete agreement it has to be _painfully_ specific, protecting only the absolute heart of the business and only the most critical clients, and even then you're better off if you can specify particular ones, not _classes_ of client.
But instead, it's "Thou shalt not work for anybody selling access to information, or software, or web tools, or telling people where they are!" *furrfu*. This has little to do with 'internet time'. The whole noncompete agreement is fatally broad.
Again, it has to be _really_ specific. "Thou shalt not try to woo away Fred, or Bob, or Harold for a year, so we can get a head start 'cause we gave you those accounts in the first place. Also, don't work for a company that steals our mission statement, trademarks, and mailing list." _That_ would be a slamdunk. Who'd argue with that?
No, not for my NT server to reboot. :) :) oh, and I have a Mac Classic in the bedroom as a cheap notepad/xterm for my shell account, and it boots in twelve seconds (not much to boot). ;) "So what? They're only customers."
That's how long it took for my old powermac to quit Netscape, shut down PPP, reboot, start up PPP, launch Netscape, dial in, load Slashdot, load this page and return to where I was reading
For some reason I find this whole discussion insanely amusing
Steve Jobs once threw a fit at Apple developers, getting them to make the Macintosh boot faster. "Twenty seconds??? There are X million customers! If you waste a single second you're wasting time equal to X many entire lives! Are you ready to waste that many lives to your laziness???" (not a quote, just paraphrase). Maybe we ought to send him to Redmond to yell at some people. I guess the Microsofties don't mind the toll of lives they waste
I know this- I personally write free software on MacOS, as that's what I know and it's convenient. I know that RMS dislikes this. However, I don't care, because I don't let him define the meaning of the GPL, just the words.
To me, it looks like this: RMS has defined the most stringent form of a sort of licensing known as 'free' or 'open', and it is not the actual code that is significant, it is the process of doing it. I don't intend to buy into the fallacy that I can't share unless everybody I work with shares with _me_... I can be dependent on lots of people, Apple, Adobe, whoever, and have no power or freedom with their code at all. That doesn't change the fact that _I!_ release free software- and, significantly, that I GPL it. This is the result: I may be dependent on other vendors, but in my software writing I deny them the use of what I've created unless they are ready to play by the same rules, and I share with anyone playing by the same rules as I am.
That's why I don't find it unusual or strange being a Mac OSS programmer, or mind the relative scarcity of other Mac OSS programmers. It's not about what's in it for _me_. It's not about me pretending to have the ability to extort other people to release and share code. I simply understand very clearly exactly WHO I'm willing to share with, and who I'm not- and the GPL is exactly what I need, even with its various faults.
It's not about whether I can force my whole environment to be nice- it's whether I can cooperate only with those ready to be nice, and just deal with the others in whatever way I must. The GPL gives me the power to discriminate in this manner. If someone wants me to support (by using) a piece of proprietary software, they have to convince me it's worth the price, and even then, they can't touch any of my stuff unless they do it on my terms. I am not the victim of proprietary code- if it breaks it breaks, nobody expects much of software nowadays. Proprietary code does not need a total war against it to succumb to entropy, it does that all by itself...
I don't think so. MS doesn't have comparable physical assets- their valuation is so overinflated even Steve Ballmer admits it (!), so they couldn't possibly buy anything as big as Sony without risking a collapse of the bubble. It's not reasonable.
The definition of 'distribution' (as Bruce found for us) being 'transfer from one legal entity to another'. :) it'll be interesting to see who tries to grab momentary advantage by building up a head of steam behind secret development.
And that's why a corporation can fork and have its programmers developing GPLed source under NDAs- but at the same time it means that as soon as the binaries get out to ANYBODY not legally part of the corporation, the source must follow.
I think this suggests that open betas grant full rights to recipients under the GPL, and that it is possible that closed betas may not- the exact point of concern is whether a beta tester is legally part of the corporation, or not. They would have to be part of the corporation, legally, in order to be subject to any sort of NDA over GPLed stuff. This also makes internal testing totally controllable, always insisting that the recipients be part of the corporation and under NDAs. As soon as the binaries or source get into the hands of someone who isn't part of the corporation, the source must be forthcoming and the recipient has full rights under the GPL. Not a bad compromise really
To be specific, though it is possible (if you're a corporation) to not only fork anything GPLed but also have big teams of programmers working on it full tilt without disclosing their information, when the product is released they _do_ have to release the information.
It's possible to maintain such a fork in 'no cooperation' mode indefinitely, but at a very crippling cost- to keep it under total control you'd have to be changing things radically enough that no outside influences would be relevant. Otherwise things would converge. Particularly with regard to the Linux kernel, even a _hostile_ attempt to fork it and take over control is a losing game, requiring a really large amount of effort for a very unimpressive return. Yes, if you're a corporation you can devote more resources to a private development than individuals can, but then you have to release source (and not obfuscated, either) and this makes it difficult to use this mechanism for more than hit-and-run marketing games.
After all, my domain (a .com, even though more and more I'm doing free software now) was taken from my original name for my recording studio.
The name? airwindows.com.
You tell me a certain entity isn't going to consider everything with those latter seven letters their property... I'm depending on (1) apathy, and (2) my right to sit on the name as it is MY trademark dammit, and I registered the domain over a year ago and have been using the name in business since 1994.
There's no way I can possibly take anything to court, so if I do get trouble my only option is to make publicity. I just hope that is never, ever necessary.
He's better known for calling for adults to sneak underage kids into R rated movies :P as for your suggestion, it's unrealistic. Adults do not establish the high school pecking order! Teenagers do that ALL BY THEMSELVES. I could see establishing 'havens' for subgroups that are picked on, the Chess Club or Computer Club etc. (and you'd damn well better be ready to include the Football Team in that, or you're a hypocrite- anyone thinking those jock kids are immune from insecurity is just stupid... they are human too, and they too are suffering adolescence) However, I've not seen Jon Katz implying any such thing- he seems to insist that you have to get all the teenagers to appreciate and celebrate each other, and that is ludicrous.
The obvious counterexample was Haight-Ashbury, which I don't think Jon dares to bring up- it is a powerful mystique that seems to give credence to his simplistic calls for unity, but what people overlook is that the heyday of Haight-Ashbury was predominantly tourist teenagers from suburbia, that the movers and shakers of it were manipulative hustlers, and that by 1970 it had disintegrated into streetfights and drug killings- something the modern teenager would find more comprehensible.
Not unity: diplomacy is what is needed today, the ability to negotiate between the various interests of the people involved in the war zone that is America. Jon is absolutely the worst person imaginable to be put into this role, because he is incapable of seeing past his illusory evil authority figures. What you're seeing, Jon, is badly frightened people, on both sides. If you understood that even for a second you might have a broader mind and be more capable of aiding the people you so dearly want to represent...
Good God, don't encourage him like that! This man speaks for nobody. He's not known for much besides half-baked philosophy and stealing ideas from previous Slashdot articles. He trivialises everything he touches by turning it into mindless hippie rebellion. The real world is a lot more complicated than Katz is willing to admit... this is a guy desperate to fight and weaken authority figures, but what he really wants is to replace them with himself. Even by _suggesting_, "Gee, Jon, looks like you're the voice of the disenfranchised geek!" you're empowering him in a seriously unhelpful way. HE IS NOT. He's just spouting off. If you want to hear the voices of disenfranchised geeks, TALK TO THEM. Not to Katz.
...and who owns the results?
Nothing you're saying contradicts what I said, nor am I making out Bell Labs as some sort of ethical wonderland. The only difference is that Bell has/had a deeply ingrained 'service ethic' from when they were a legal monopoly and felt like part of the government, and Microsoft has/had a deeply ingrained shark ethic in which they try to kill everybody else. That's why stuffing MS full of patents and IP is harmful. I never claimed the ivory tower guys were bad people, just that they are not free. They're not. They are kept.
..or does anyone else find it weird and disturbing that script kiddies merrily try to hack vandalised HTML into everything from government sites to the military, but they are supposed to be afraid of _Microsoft_ retribution? What's that about? I would have thought that such people would be more worried about _military_ retribution, or government retribution. Do they know something we don't? If it's a lot of nonsense, why is MSNBC putting it forth as an explanation?
It's that simple. They don't need to take the effort to make good ideas into products as long as they can prevent anyone else from having them. You can depend that they are trying to patent everything they can, and that the patents are certainly not going to the person who had the idea, but to the Company.
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual. The only difference is that MS has more power than most entire countries, more money, and can buy out just about anybody- hence the numbers of brilliant people working at MS without any visible consequences to the MS customer- because you the customer are dirt, and for _your_ applications they make teams of recent college graduates and have them working 90 hours a week or more and sleeping under their desks like trapped animals. _You_ don't get the brilliant ones, oh no! Those are reserved for making patent applications so no competing Brilliant One can offer you anything better than the rubbish you're fed by MS Consumer Level.
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff, because it's all quite legal and business as usual... and frankly the way these things are set up, that's the only way to go if you're an MS. It maximizes return on human investment and blocks other people's innovation as effectively as possible. If they had to actually bother to benefit the consumer with the good ideas, the Brilliant Ones would be slowed down and not make as many patent proposals. Naturally a bit trickles down anyhow, but there is no reason that has to continue, and ideally for MS, it would stop so ALL the Brilliant Ones' efforts could be solely towards intellectual property with no requirement to do anything with it at all. Now _that_ would be _efficient_. You could own everything in the field of computing in five years if you didn't actually have to produce any of it as products!
If you don't like this, don't buy MS stuff.
As far as your first behavior, the mouse pointer, MacOS TextEdit APIs do this by default and always have. That's basically every text entry place in every Mac program for every Mac ever made, because custom controls ended up having to duplicate the behavior or look stupid. We LOVE this behavior too, and I can't wait to see it show up in Linux, typing under a pointer is tiresome and obscures what you're typing. :)
The second behavior is no kind of default mac behavior, but there's been a extensions hack for years that does exactly this. It's pretty cool, though doing hacks like that on MacOS isn't a safe thing and can make lotsa crashes if you run the wrong program. I believe it does it by changing the MenuBarHeight value- it's officially a varying value anyhow, because internationalisation requires that some languages get more space to show ideograms or things up there
Nobody ever said it was impossible for somebody at Microsoft to come up with something good. It would be absurd to think that mere complete moral decay and evilness precluded the possibility of bright ideas ;)
What's wrong with this picture? Only that MS will certainly patent the idea and then do everything possible to crush anyone else working in the same area. There are no individuals doing cool things at Microsoft for the very simple reason that to Microsoft they are not individuals but part of The Great Microsoft Irresistible Force, which is dedicated to 100% world domination, as seen in lots of thoughtful quotes on record such as 'We only want a reasonable marketshare. What is reasonable? We think 100% is reasonable.'
You simply cannot restrict a pragmatic view to only what these people produce. The true pragmatist has got to look at what they _do_ as well, and ask whether it's worth it to cherry-pick what bright ideas MS does have, at the expense of continually helping them crush everyone else's bright ideas. At what point does this become not worth it? For me that happened some time ago, so I have to be unmoved by reports of MS bright ideas. I _know_ they can have good ideas. They own _people_, literally own the minds of thousands upon thousands of people, some of which did great work on their own before they were assimilated. MS may have only wanted to get such people out of circulation, but why should I or anybody be surprised if such people continue thinking of great things even in captivity? Well-paid captivity, I'll grant. Why not think of who benefits from such ideas? If you only consider utility and convenience and don't consider power, you set yourself up to be exploited, and to whinge later on how you _wanted_ to be exploited because you walked into the situation of your own free will. This is merely rationalization for your lack of foresight- nobody wants to be exploited.
Yes. They are. Though to be fair you have to also consider that they typically pick (if I remember correctly) names of streams and rivers to name the experiments by- apparently there was a Coppermine River or something, so naturally this name they're keeping.