North Korea isn't significantly darker on that image, proportionally, than Australia, for instance. Does that mean most Australians don't have power? No, it means most Australians live in one of half a dozen very small geographical areas, and most of the rest of the continent is wilderness with roughly the same population density as the moon.
So yeah, there's other information you have to have in order to interpret the map correctly.
Extended support only covers security issues (and even then only ones that Microsoft deems important). Feature enhancements are not forthcoming. (IE9, for instance, will probably not be available for WinXP.)
You can use IPv6 now, as long as you don't care about being able to communicate with anyone *else*, that is (since everyone else is using IPv4). IPv6 is available, but nobody has any motivation to use it in the real world, because nobody else is using it yet, so there's nobody to talk to.
You want IPv6? You can *have* it. (Just don't expect the rest of the world to join you.)
They only care about servers that get significant traffic ("public servers"). Low-traffic services, such as the kind you set up for your own personal use, generally fly under the radar. I have two (an ssh service and an http service), and Time Warner has never said anything to me about them.
> My only concerns would be towards people hosting > services, even if they only host a gaming server.
We already have this concern with widespread dynamically-allocated addresses (via DHCP), and we already have the solution: depending on your ISP, the cost for a static IPv4 address ranges from "you just have to actually ask for it" up to a few bucks a month. I don't see any reason why that should change, just because the default setup is a non-public address instead of a dynamic public one.
The whole thing is a non-issue. There are *always* going to be more available public IPv4 addresses than are actually needed. The only reason unallocated ones are running short now is because they were given out pretty much for *free*, which creates artificial scarcity. Public IPv4 addresses will be very affordable for the forseeable future, but they won't be completely free of charge for much longer, because anything free gets snapped up by people who don't actually have any real use for it.
IPv6 would eventually run into this as well, because people would be like, "Hey, I can have my own personal "Class AA" range of network addresses, whatever that means? Sure, give me the biggest size available! Why not? I mean, I know I only have the one computer and the one handheld device to network together, but so what? Give me a full-sized range for me, and another full-sized range for my nickname-alias here, in case I want to be a sock puppet!" Any finite resource that you give out for free is going to run out eventually. Start charging ten or fifteen bucks per address per year, and suddenly a lot of people who don't actually have any real use for a public address decide they can live with NAT.
Could have fooled me. The stats for my employer's site for 2010Q3 show Windows XP market share 8.7 times as high as IE6, or more than twice as high as IE6 and IE7 combined.
IE8, on the other hand, has more usage share than Vista and Seven combined. (Some of our users don't live on what you would necessarily call the bleeding edge, so XP is still the single most heavily represented OS, although it's starting to decline, and Seven is starting to put in a bit of a showing now.)
IE8 uptake has been *much* faster than IE7 uptake was, at least among our users. I attribute this to the much higher penetration of SP2 now as compared to three years ago -- a lot of the people who had OEM installs of the early versions of Windows XP have replaced those old computers now. There are still LOTS of Windows XP systems out there, but most of them have SP2 (or higher). SP2 turns on automatic updates by default, which means people are a whole lot more likely to get the browser upgraded some time before Los Angeles freezes over.
The stats from my employer's site, for example, show IE6 falling, over the course of the last couple of years, from 18% to 15% to 12% to 7% to 5%. IE7, meanwhile, fell from 40% to 38% to 20% to 17% to 14%. These exact figures are probably not representative of the world as a whole (most of our patrons live in a relatively small geographical area), but the downward trend is unmistakable. IE6 market share is shrinking, fast, and IE7 is following. (And no, this is not a high-tech area where everyone lives on the bleeding edge. Quite the reverse, if anything.)
IE8, of course, is on the increase, which is what you'd expect for the latest stable-release version. People do occasionally upgrade, after all, especially when it's released in the automatic updates.
> Similar to, if not quite as stupid, as voting for Bush.
Oh. In other words you just disagree with his politics and like to overstate things.
It is my considered opinion that Bush, while not great, was nonetheless a significantly better President than his successor. This is particularly true of the most recent Bush, who, although he did stubbornly insist on certain things (particularly with regard to the military undertaking in the Middle East, which was unpopular and arguably unnecessary), notably *didn't* try to out-stupid all the boneheaded economic moves of every other major world leader in history combined. Bush did not, for instance, try to restore faith in the economy by deliberately expanding the already quite large federal deficit to previously unimagined levels, with nothing whatsoever to show for it, watch the effort backfire (as every rational person predicted it would do), and conclude that somehow he just didn't do _enough_ completely insane deficit spending and even more of that was just what the doctor ordered.
The word "member" has a couple of different meanings. It can mean "someone whose name is listed on an official membership role", but it can also just mean "one person who happens to be part of the group".
> How is it a 'shameless' abuse to do something nice for an old veteran?
Bear in mind, the person who wrote that sentence basically admitted to hanging out on/b/ (the most infamous section of 4chan) quite a bit over a fairly protracted amount of time (relatively speaking). *Obviously* his moral compass is going deviate somewhat from traditional values.
And technically, it is "abuse" in the literal sense -- using something for other than its intended or conventional purpose. I don't think/b/ was intended to be used, and I *know* it isn't conventionally used, to organize nice birthday parties for veterans. As for "shameless", anybody who has an ounce of shame wouldn't be hanging out on/b/ in the first place, so.
Still, the fact that he thought to string together those two words ("shameless abuse") says a lot about how he tends to think (which is typical of 4chan users if the other things they've been known to perpetrate are any indication).
> But a country that elects the likes of Berlousconi has deeply rooted problems.
Name a country that doesn't.
(Just saying. I actually don't know much about Berlousconi in particular, perhaps because the finer points of Italian politics are not my primary area of study right now.)
As for the attacks on Scientology supposedly proving goodness because anything that attacks evil must be good, meh. I certainly have no great admiration for Scientology, but attacking people isn't a good thing to do. The ancient Assyrians were basically distilled evil in human form, the most infamously cruel society ever to grace the planet, and Nebuchadnezzar attacked them, so he must be good, right? In fact, he was a pretty evil guy on the whole. He threatened to chop large segments of society into small pieces whenever somebody couldn't deliver on one of his projects as fast as he liked. He did behead people on a regular basis, without checking too closely to see whether they'd actually done anything wrong. That's not very smurfy.
Evil is evil, even if the other guy is pretty bad too and, indeed, even if the other guy is worse. When misguided Christians (and I use the term loosely here) get together and attack an evil organization (like, say, a facility dedicated to killing children), the entire world calls them hypocrites at best, and usually rather worse -- and rightly so. Attacking and harming people is wrong. Even if what *they're* doing is wrong too, attacking them is still bad.
(By "attack" here, I'm not talking about polemics. Telling people they're wrong is protected speech in this country, and sometimes it's absolutely what they need to hear, even if they don't think so. And yes, people are sometimes a little more frank and tactless than would be strictly necessary, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actual attacks.)
> while they might be mostly rude, crude, and immature, they're not -evil-.
They're typically not just rude, crude, and immature but also selfish and frequently vindictive. Perhaps that's not evil in the most extreme James Bond (or comic book) "Ve are goink to build a giant doomsday device in space to destroy the population of the entire planet, Bwa-hahaha-ha" sense, but it's not what I'd exactly call "made of pure righteousness" either.
You forgot Rakudo Star. Until a few weeks ago, an actual complete, convenient, and usable release of Perl6 was not generally expected until several YEARS after the release of DNF.
Now we're just waiting for Emacs to ship with reasonable key bindings (like, ctrl-x and ctrl-c and ctrl-v for clipboard operations, and ctrl-a for select all) by default out of the box. That, and the seven-year Middle-East peace treaty that allows the third temple to be built.
Yes. Don't you watch the news? We're skipping the winter months this year. Some guy in Congress claims it will make people feel better and give the economy the boost it needs to pull out of the slump. Also, the government is going to spend a lot more tax money that they haven't collected yet. That's supposed to help too. Whee.
Well, obviously. He didn't most any detailed methodology, or even any information about what controls he u sed. How is anybody supposed to set up an identical experiment in another lab?
Just store each message in a file. Each "mail folder" is a directory. Gnus calls this arrangement "nnml", and Courier calls it "Maildir". I don't know what other software calls it, but it's difficult to imagine any reasonably-capable software not supporting it, because it's so obvious and straightforward.
There are several advantages to this arrangement. The big two are 1) it's hard to beat for compatibility and 2) for searching and indexing and stuff you can use standard utilities such as are made to operate on any kind of (text) file. (As for threading, your mail reader should be able to handle that. Once you find the file with one of the messages you're after you know its subject and message ID and stuff, so finding the thread in the mail reader is easy.)
The one disadvantage is that you have to choose whether to put it all on a FAT filesystem (for maximum operating system compatibility) and suffer the performance disadvantages thereof (which are considerable when an individual folder contains many thousands of files; not as bad as with IMAP, but still very noticeable). Of course, moving/copying from one filesystem to another is only as problematic as copying any other kind of files around, so if you decide to use NTFS today (which has reasonable read/write support in Windows and Linux) and later decide to use an OS that doesn't have read/write NTFS support, you can just copy the files over to UFS or whatever at that time. Boot an OS that has both filesystems (Knoppix, for instance), cp -r --preserve=all blah blah blah, and leave it running while you go to work or something.
Well, Rakudo Star came out a few weeks ago, and apart from the inexplicably weird choice of name it's basically the first ready-for-actual-use Perl 6 release we've been waiting for ever since the Apocalypse articles started coming out some ten years ago. Honestly, for a while there I wasn't sure whether Perl 6 or Duke Nukem Forever would come out first, but now that Rakudo Star is out, DNF can't be far behind!
Cell phones didn't become practical for normal people until the mid to late nineties. That's pretty recent, considering cellphones existed, theoretically, some fifteen years earlier. In some parts of the country it was even later. Around here, cellphones were basically useless as recently as 2005, because you pretty much had to climb a TV antenna tower to get usable reception. I used to routinely hang up on anyone who tried to call me using a cellphone. The static on the "bad" phones in the Sprint commercials was nowhere near as bad as what I heard when cellphone users called. It's gotten a lot better in the last five years, and the meanwhile sound quality of land lines has declined considerably (Verizon has basically stopped maintaining them, probably because they want everyone to switch over to cellphone$), but you can still hear the difference: it's still harder to hear someone on a cell phone than on a regular phone.
I didn't start seeing *children* routinely carrying around cellphones until sometime in the last ten years.
FWIW, you weren't quite one of the last holdouts. I still know several people who refuse to have a cell phone. Come to think of it, I'm one of those people. One of my goals in life is to some day live in a house with *no* phones, but until then, I at least don't carry one of the blessed things around with me all the bleeding time. There's a phone at the office, so if the call is work-related, people can call me when I'm on duty. Friends and family can get off their duffs and actually stop by if they want to chat, or of course there's email.
To my knowledge, there was only really ever one person who had confidence in Mono in the first place, and that was the lead developer. Nobody rational ever wanted anything to do with that nightmare. Embrace Microsoft's proprietary design, be extended into incompatibility at their whim, and get extinguished whenever they feel like it? No thanks.
Mono is a classic textbook example of "solution in search of a problem". Everything *useful* that.Net provides was already present several years earlier in other open-source development platforms. The *only* things that.Net ever offered us were lock-in and integration (with Microsoft's platform strategy), and if we wanted those things we'd be using Microsoft's own implementation, not Mono.
The patent problems are just the gravy on the cake. The real issue with Mono is that we Do Not Want It.
Digital photography has been around for a while, but it didn't really become *practical* until the last ten years, when cameras that ordinary mortals can afford got image sensors good enough to take a picture under normal lighting conditions that can be cropped a bit and still have enough resolution for print and enough color quality to be substitutable for a 35mm photo for everyday purposes. Being able to save on film by taking pictures that weren't actually usable, with a camera that cost as much as a year's supply of film, was of dubious utility.
By the same token, cellphones have been around rather longer than many people realize, but they weren't really *practical* until a few years ago when reception coverage finally reached the point where you could actually take the phone on a car trip and expect to be able to make a call if you stopped for some reason at some random place along the way. Being able to make a call from anywhere in the world as long as it's downtown Chicago didn't really offer any major advantages over a land line, even if you happened to live or work where there was coverage.
> My film prof claimed it was essentially a western:)
I'd be interested in hearing the arguments for how exactly it qualifies as a western. Aside from a couple of things in the one scene (at the bar in the spaceport), I'm not aware of any other western-genre elements. Which character would be the "sheriff"? Who's threatening or trying to take someone's ranch? Where's the posse? I don't see it. Westerns are a fairly narrow and specialized genre (in which setting is perhaps the most important single element), and I'm not seeing a lot of similarities to Star Wars.
It's not sci-fi, either, though. You'll note that nowhere in Star Wars does anyone ever bother to explain any of the technology, nor does how any of it works ever ever have any plot significance. The technology is just part of the setting. The story is not about the science or the technology. Not at all.
It's about an oppressive government and a rebel alliance and a boy who loses his family and goes off to join the war and finds out the bad guy is his father. It's an adventure story, or a war story, or something. A case could be made for fantasy, as the whole force/Jedi thing is basically a fantasy element, and has some real significance to the story -- certainly more than any of the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
> ... attached to the phone's
> camera lens. All
> calibrated to give image
You have significantly
overestimated the useful
resolution of cellphone
camera sensors.
It doesn't, by itself.
North Korea isn't significantly darker on that image, proportionally, than Australia, for instance. Does that mean most Australians don't have power? No, it means most Australians live in one of half a dozen very small geographical areas, and most of the rest of the continent is wilderness with roughly the same population density as the moon.
So yeah, there's other information you have to have in order to interpret the map correctly.
Extended support only covers security issues (and even then only ones that Microsoft deems important). Feature enhancements are not forthcoming. (IE9, for instance, will probably not be available for WinXP.)
> Give us ip6.
You can use IPv6 now, as long as you don't care about being able to communicate with anyone *else*, that is (since everyone else is using IPv4). IPv6 is available, but nobody has any motivation to use it in the real world, because nobody else is using it yet, so there's nobody to talk to.
You want IPv6? You can *have* it. (Just don't expect the rest of the world to join you.)
They only care about servers that get significant traffic ("public servers"). Low-traffic services, such as the kind you set up for your own personal use, generally fly under the radar. I have two (an ssh service and an http service), and Time Warner has never said anything to me about them.
> My only concerns would be towards people hosting
> services, even if they only host a gaming server.
We already have this concern with widespread dynamically-allocated addresses (via DHCP), and we already have the solution: depending on your ISP, the cost for a static IPv4 address ranges from "you just have to actually ask for it" up to a few bucks a month. I don't see any reason why that should change, just because the default setup is a non-public address instead of a dynamic public one.
The whole thing is a non-issue. There are *always* going to be more available public IPv4 addresses than are actually needed. The only reason unallocated ones are running short now is because they were given out pretty much for *free*, which creates artificial scarcity. Public IPv4 addresses will be very affordable for the forseeable future, but they won't be completely free of charge for much longer, because anything free gets snapped up by people who don't actually have any real use for it.
IPv6 would eventually run into this as well, because people would be like, "Hey, I can have my own personal "Class AA" range of network addresses, whatever that means? Sure, give me the biggest size available! Why not? I mean, I know I only have the one computer and the one handheld device to network together, but so what? Give me a full-sized range for me, and another full-sized range for my nickname-alias here, in case I want to be a sock puppet!" Any finite resource that you give out for free is going to run out eventually. Start charging ten or fifteen bucks per address per year, and suddenly a lot of people who don't actually have any real use for a public address decide they can live with NAT.
The problem will solve itself.
> IE6 won't die until XP dies
Could have fooled me. The stats for my employer's site for 2010Q3 show Windows XP market share 8.7 times as high as IE6, or more than twice as high as IE6 and IE7 combined.
IE8, on the other hand, has more usage share than Vista and Seven combined. (Some of our users don't live on what you would necessarily call the bleeding edge, so XP is still the single most heavily represented OS, although it's starting to decline, and Seven is starting to put in a bit of a showing now.)
IE8 uptake has been *much* faster than IE7 uptake was, at least among our users. I attribute this to the much higher penetration of SP2 now as compared to three years ago -- a lot of the people who had OEM installs of the early versions of Windows XP have replaced those old computers now. There are still LOTS of Windows XP systems out there, but most of them have SP2 (or higher). SP2 turns on automatic updates by default, which means people are a whole lot more likely to get the browser upgraded some time before Los Angeles freezes over.
> The fraction is quite large unfortunately.
It's falling. Rapidly.
The stats from my employer's site, for example, show IE6 falling, over the course of the last couple of years, from 18% to 15% to 12% to 7% to 5%. IE7, meanwhile, fell from 40% to 38% to 20% to 17% to 14%. These exact figures are probably not representative of the world as a whole (most of our patrons live in a relatively small geographical area), but the downward trend is unmistakable. IE6 market share is shrinking, fast, and IE7 is following. (And no, this is not a high-tech area where everyone lives on the bleeding edge. Quite the reverse, if anything.)
IE8, of course, is on the increase, which is what you'd expect for the latest stable-release version. People do occasionally upgrade, after all, especially when it's released in the automatic updates.
Large-area heating can be very affordable, if you have the entire perimeter (in three dimensions) well insulated.
A lot of homes, especially older homes, have rather poor insulation, though.
> Similar to, if not quite as stupid, as voting for Bush.
Oh. In other words you just disagree with his politics and like to overstate things.
It is my considered opinion that Bush, while not great, was nonetheless a significantly better President than his successor. This is particularly true of the most recent Bush, who, although he did stubbornly insist on certain things (particularly with regard to the military undertaking in the Middle East, which was unpopular and arguably unnecessary), notably *didn't* try to out-stupid all the boneheaded economic moves of every other major world leader in history combined. Bush did not, for instance, try to restore faith in the economy by deliberately expanding the already quite large federal deficit to previously unimagined levels, with nothing whatsoever to show for it, watch the effort backfire (as every rational person predicted it would do), and conclude that somehow he just didn't do _enough_ completely insane deficit spending and even more of that was just what the doctor ordered.
The word "member" has a couple of different meanings. It can mean "someone whose name is listed on an official membership role", but it can also just mean "one person who happens to be part of the group".
> As someone who's been on the internet longer then any of you old or new fags
Is that a gopher user I sense?
> And notice how I'm not posting anonymous? unlike you,
> i'm not scared to stand behind what I say
Oh, usenet. Right.
> How is it a 'shameless' abuse to do something nice for an old veteran?
/b/ (the most infamous section of 4chan) quite a bit over a fairly protracted amount of time (relatively speaking). *Obviously* his moral compass is going deviate somewhat from traditional values.
/b/ was intended to be used, and I *know* it isn't conventionally used, to organize nice birthday parties for veterans. As for "shameless", anybody who has an ounce of shame wouldn't be hanging out on /b/ in the first place, so.
Bear in mind, the person who wrote that sentence basically admitted to hanging out on
And technically, it is "abuse" in the literal sense -- using something for other than its intended or conventional purpose. I don't think
Still, the fact that he thought to string together those two words ("shameless abuse") says a lot about how he tends to think (which is typical of 4chan users if the other things they've been known to perpetrate are any indication).
> But a country that elects the likes of Berlousconi has deeply rooted problems.
Name a country that doesn't.
(Just saying. I actually don't know much about Berlousconi in particular, perhaps because the finer points of Italian politics are not my primary area of study right now.)
Interesting spin, but it's just that: spin.
As for the attacks on Scientology supposedly proving goodness because anything that attacks evil must be good, meh. I certainly have no great admiration for Scientology, but attacking people isn't a good thing to do. The ancient Assyrians were basically distilled evil in human form, the most infamously cruel society ever to grace the planet, and Nebuchadnezzar attacked them, so he must be good, right? In fact, he was a pretty evil guy on the whole. He threatened to chop large segments of society into small pieces whenever somebody couldn't deliver on one of his projects as fast as he liked. He did behead people on a regular basis, without checking too closely to see whether they'd actually done anything wrong. That's not very smurfy.
Evil is evil, even if the other guy is pretty bad too and, indeed, even if the other guy is worse. When misguided Christians (and I use the term loosely here) get together and attack an evil organization (like, say, a facility dedicated to killing children), the entire world calls them hypocrites at best, and usually rather worse -- and rightly so. Attacking and harming people is wrong. Even if what *they're* doing is wrong too, attacking them is still bad.
(By "attack" here, I'm not talking about polemics. Telling people they're wrong is protected speech in this country, and sometimes it's absolutely what they need to hear, even if they don't think so. And yes, people are sometimes a little more frank and tactless than would be strictly necessary, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actual attacks.)
> while they might be mostly rude, crude, and immature, they're not -evil-.
They're typically not just rude, crude, and immature but also selfish and frequently vindictive. Perhaps that's not evil in the most extreme James Bond (or comic book) "Ve are goink to build a giant doomsday device in space to destroy the population of the entire planet, Bwa-hahaha-ha" sense, but it's not what I'd exactly call "made of pure righteousness" either.
You forgot Rakudo Star. Until a few weeks ago, an actual complete, convenient, and usable release of Perl6 was not generally expected until several YEARS after the release of DNF.
Now we're just waiting for Emacs to ship with reasonable key bindings (like, ctrl-x and ctrl-c and ctrl-v for clipboard operations, and ctrl-a for select all) by default out of the box. That, and the seven-year Middle-East peace treaty that allows the third temple to be built.
Yes. Don't you watch the news? We're skipping the winter months this year. Some guy in Congress claims it will make people feel better and give the economy the boost it needs to pull out of the slump. Also, the government is going to spend a lot more tax money that they haven't collected yet. That's supposed to help too. Whee.
> I am unable to reproduce your results.
Well, obviously. He didn't most any detailed methodology, or even any information about what controls he u sed. How is anybody supposed to set up an identical experiment in another lab?
Just store each message in a file. Each "mail folder" is a directory. Gnus calls this arrangement "nnml", and Courier calls it "Maildir". I don't know what other software calls it, but it's difficult to imagine any reasonably-capable software not supporting it, because it's so obvious and straightforward.
There are several advantages to this arrangement. The big two are 1) it's hard to beat for compatibility and 2) for searching and indexing and stuff you can use standard utilities such as are made to operate on any kind of (text) file. (As for threading, your mail reader should be able to handle that. Once you find the file with one of the messages you're after you know its subject and message ID and stuff, so finding the thread in the mail reader is easy.)
The one disadvantage is that you have to choose whether to put it all on a FAT filesystem (for maximum operating system compatibility) and suffer the performance disadvantages thereof (which are considerable when an individual folder contains many thousands of files; not as bad as with IMAP, but still very noticeable). Of course, moving/copying from one filesystem to another is only as problematic as copying any other kind of files around, so if you decide to use NTFS today (which has reasonable read/write support in Windows and Linux) and later decide to use an OS that doesn't have read/write NTFS support, you can just copy the files over to UFS or whatever at that time. Boot an OS that has both filesystems (Knoppix, for instance), cp -r --preserve=all blah blah blah, and leave it running while you go to work or something.
Well, Rakudo Star came out a few weeks ago, and apart from the inexplicably weird choice of name it's basically the first ready-for-actual-use Perl 6 release we've been waiting for ever since the Apocalypse articles started coming out some ten years ago. Honestly, for a while there I wasn't sure whether Perl 6 or Duke Nukem Forever would come out first, but now that Rakudo Star is out, DNF can't be far behind!
Cell phones didn't become practical for normal people until the mid to late nineties. That's pretty recent, considering cellphones existed, theoretically, some fifteen years earlier. In some parts of the country it was even later. Around here, cellphones were basically useless as recently as 2005, because you pretty much had to climb a TV antenna tower to get usable reception. I used to routinely hang up on anyone who tried to call me using a cellphone. The static on the "bad" phones in the Sprint commercials was nowhere near as bad as what I heard when cellphone users called. It's gotten a lot better in the last five years, and the meanwhile sound quality of land lines has declined considerably (Verizon has basically stopped maintaining them, probably because they want everyone to switch over to cellphone$), but you can still hear the difference: it's still harder to hear someone on a cell phone than on a regular phone.
I didn't start seeing *children* routinely carrying around cellphones until sometime in the last ten years.
FWIW, you weren't quite one of the last holdouts. I still know several people who refuse to have a cell phone. Come to think of it, I'm one of those people. One of my goals in life is to some day live in a house with *no* phones, but until then, I at least don't carry one of the blessed things around with me all the bleeding time. There's a phone at the office, so if the call is work-related, people can call me when I'm on duty. Friends and family can get off their duffs and actually stop by if they want to chat, or of course there's email.
> much like the loss of confidence in mono
.Net provides was already present several years earlier in other open-source development platforms. The *only* things that .Net ever offered us were lock-in and integration (with Microsoft's platform strategy), and if we wanted those things we'd be using Microsoft's own implementation, not Mono.
To my knowledge, there was only really ever one person who had confidence in Mono in the first place, and that was the lead developer. Nobody rational ever wanted anything to do with that nightmare. Embrace Microsoft's proprietary design, be extended into incompatibility at their whim, and get extinguished whenever they feel like it? No thanks.
Mono is a classic textbook example of "solution in search of a problem". Everything *useful* that
The patent problems are just the gravy on the cake. The real issue with Mono is that we Do Not Want It.
Digital photography has been around for a while, but it didn't really become *practical* until the last ten years, when cameras that ordinary mortals can afford got image sensors good enough to take a picture under normal lighting conditions that can be cropped a bit and still have enough resolution for print and enough color quality to be substitutable for a 35mm photo for everyday purposes. Being able to save on film by taking pictures that weren't actually usable, with a camera that cost as much as a year's supply of film, was of dubious utility.
By the same token, cellphones have been around rather longer than many people realize, but they weren't really *practical* until a few years ago when reception coverage finally reached the point where you could actually take the phone on a car trip and expect to be able to make a call if you stopped for some reason at some random place along the way. Being able to make a call from anywhere in the world as long as it's downtown Chicago didn't really offer any major advantages over a land line, even if you happened to live or work where there was coverage.
> My film prof claimed it was essentially a western :)
I'd be interested in hearing the arguments for how exactly it qualifies as a western. Aside from a couple of things in the one scene (at the bar in the spaceport), I'm not aware of any other western-genre elements. Which character would be the "sheriff"? Who's threatening or trying to take someone's ranch? Where's the posse? I don't see it. Westerns are a fairly narrow and specialized genre (in which setting is perhaps the most important single element), and I'm not seeing a lot of similarities to Star Wars.
It's not sci-fi, either, though. You'll note that nowhere in Star Wars does anyone ever bother to explain any of the technology, nor does how any of it works ever ever have any plot significance. The technology is just part of the setting. The story is not about the science or the technology. Not at all.
It's about an oppressive government and a rebel alliance and a boy who loses his family and goes off to join the war and finds out the bad guy is his father. It's an adventure story, or a war story, or something. A case could be made for fantasy, as the whole force/Jedi thing is basically a fantasy element, and has some real significance to the story -- certainly more than any of the technology.