Another issue where having the Royalty makes a difference is division of responsibilities. Right now, and pretty much since Lincoln, we've had a president who is both chief executive, military chief, and the top morale officer of the country. When disasters happen, the president usually has to take time from those first two jobs to go make a presence at the disaster site.
The British Prime Minister rarely has to do this. The Royalty can dispatch a member, including the Queen herself, instead and allow the PM to continue to do their job of reacting to the incident internally and politically.
Its actually a good system, I think, but not one that America could ever evolve (back) into.
Here's the frustrating thing. I've talked to so many self-proclaimed "Democrats" who have plenty of good ideas, but don't seem to cohesively and logically put all of it together.
"No, I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -- Will Rogers, sometime in the early 1950s.
Would have been cool to see some actual Cylons. Those long nailed versions were on the screen for a very short time and weren't very cool.
Yeah...when the Cylons became "human", all I could feel were the same bad feelings I had in 1988's War of the Worlds series where thanks to radiation, the Martians could take over the bodies of humans to blend in to our crowds and take us over from within......which is really just a writer's cop-out for the fact that effects make-up, puppetry, and/or tin-suits are expensive for TV, and it is cheaper to just pay cheesey soap-opera actors than to bother with believable "aliens" or machines as evil.
and before you go painting me an idiot again, i meant "512K" when i typed "512meg". The original macs had 128K with the ability to upgrade to half a meg only.
NO, the exact opposite you clods (and that includes the 2 jackasses that called my post "overrated"). Back in the early 80s, when the Mac was stealing just about everything Xerox PARC had done, Steve Jobs decided to NOT steal the ethernet networking concept that PARC was also doing (Metcalf was a PARCer as well before taking his technology to found 3COM). At the time, as paraphrased by Cringely in Accidental Empires, Jobs "still didn't think that workers needed umbilical cords to their copmpanies" (my bad on the spelling first time 'round).
Jobs only relented, and Appletalk was born, when it was realized that companies couldn't afford to give every user their own laser printer, so he let Appletalk be created in order to share the printer. That it was also useful for sharing files was a side-effect, it was never Jobs's intention. Appletalk was NOT in the first Mac design, even if it ended up in the first model roleout. (For that matter, the ability to upgrade early Mac memory to 512meg was done against Jobs's orders).
As for today, you utterly misread it. The first gen iMac, and all the Jobs models that have come out since, are the exact opposide of what the first Mac was. Instead of a limited networking ability, and relying on built-in floppy discs, the Macs today have no internal periferals outside of the hard drive and cdrom, and have extensive and very easy to use networking built right into the system. They're intended from the beginning to be networked machines, and sharing data by floppy (or zip or firewire/usb pen-disks or cdroms) is secondary to getting the machine to network.
In other words, Jobs did a complete 180 on whether or not networking was important. In the early 80s when he visited PARC, networking was akin to corporate slavery; this idea that you couldn't work without the company being able to look at your work was wrong for the rebelious image Jobs wanted to keep in people's minds about the Mac vs. the "business" machine of IBM. Today, Jobs knows that the network comes first.
But he can now say that safely because the network is now an open Internet, and not the private big-brother corporate networks he feared would take over...or at least wanted US to fear would take over.
Its called a non-compete clause and its usually written into every employer-employee contract, or into any layoff or termination order. It basically says that the employee upon leaving the company for whatever reason will not go to work for a new company in direct competition with the old. Thus, upon leaving my company whose main customer in bidding contracts is Department A in some government field, I can't directly go to work for any other company whose main customer is also Department A without giving my old company bosses a call to see if its ok with them, else much of what's in my head would be treated as trade secrets and proprietary IP that I wouldn't be able to use.
There's only a limit to what degree its enforceable. Non-compete clauses can't prevent someone from getting a job at all, or they're illegal. Some states have them illegal entirely. Generally, a "good-faith" effort to get a job outside of the industry in question is enough to appease a judge should you end up working for a competitor to the old company in the end. But when, for example, Microsoft hired away a bunch of Borland IDE developers to work on Visual Studio, it really came down to the lawyers and the money, at which point Borland knew they didn't have enough money to beat Microsoft at it and keep the ex-Borland people from working in the Visual Studio division.
The hard thing about Trade Secrets is actually proving that the specific violation occurred by the specific individual. Trade secrets aren't protected in the same way as copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Coincidental development, or coming up with the same idea without referencing the original, isn't a violation of Trade Secrets laws in the way that it could be a violation of the "big three" IP protections.
Well, the difference is that "Life after Worldcom" and "Life after SCO" may (if we're blessed with poetic justice) include an OZ-like documentary of life in prison...
...can be found over at Big Finish productions, where for their 50th Doctor Who CD (nicely enough being released this month), they united pretty much every single actor who's played on their shows so far, including the last 4 doctors, most of their respective companions including their "new" companions they've added to keep some variety into the show, Nick Courtney as the Brig, John Leeson as K9, and a whole bunch of others, for a 3-CD story.
There's a wonderful set of pictures from the recording sessions available. Yes, the various doctors are getting old, and only McGann could probably reprise his role on screen...but on the radio/audio, the voice and your memories and imagination make it all work.
except that until pippin is seen through the palantir, and thus put in mortal danger, he doesn't even need to go to gondor w/ gandalf in the first place...he may as well have stayed with merry.
the point of the wrap-up with Sauruman is to get the Palantir into Aragorn's hands (so he can assert his kingship and buy time for Frodo/Sam), and also for Pippen to see into and thus be forced to separate off with Gandalf (a line implied by the trailer so far...but then again, lines between aragorn and gandalf in the trailer for two towers ended up cut and into the SE dvd instead). Wormtongue has to get pissy about it all and throw the damn thing out the window!
if they weren't gonna do that sequence at all, then (aside from making the fan-boys go "oh cool, they put it in there") why bother mentioning the damned thing in the first film in the first place?
Dave Thomas and Rock Moranis, who started the MacKenzie brothers thing on Second City back in the late 70s. I know them well; I used the character names for recognition purposes.
Its one of several cases in recent film history where classic "teams" have been reunited to play different characters. The Grumpy Old Men pair of films reunited Matthow and Lemon, A Mighty Wind reunited the Spinal Tap three, etc...Disney's done this once or twice before, but I can't recall when right now.
Well, it doesn't change all the time in "2-D" but it DOES change. Disney has a fantastic package called "Deep Canvas" that does most of the work for generating the 3-D backgrounds while appearing like 2-D space. Its used heavily in Tarzan, Atlantis, and Treasure Planet (where they added the ability to "move" parts of the background around). It allows the background people to "paint" directly into the computer the complete 3-D picture, by painting onto geometric solids with the stylus.
meanwhile, a skeleton-graphics outline of the shapes are sent to the 2-D animators to draw onto, with those outlines removed by the cleanup crew before going into the computer for the final mix down. The computer has already replaced the "ink-and-paint" department, and the "multi-plane camera" of Disney's history; there are no "cels" anymore.
Machines now are fast enough, over their 1997 Tarzan-era counterparts, to render Deep Canvas's work at run-time, as opposed to having to do overnight rendering sessions and see the finished product the next day. This means that effectively Deep Canvas can now be used for pretty much ALL the sets, whether the background will move or not, because the biggest time constraint (rendering) is now a non-issue.
However, what you will get, IMHO, when the 2-D people start using the computer more directly is a lot of scanning. They'll still draw the roughs onto paper, scan them into the computer, then manipulate their 3-D character model to what they already drew. It may actually be the trick to get 3-D to move "properly".
One of the biggest problems with (Disney Feature Style) 2-D animation is the characters move around too much, compared to real life. One of the biggest problems with (Pixar/Dreamworks) 3-D animation is the characters move around too little, compared to real life.
So by having 2-D people drawing on paper, scanning into the computer, you'll get 3-D models that move too much. Have them runthrough and slow things down a little, and the balance between the two (making "perfect" 3D) may finally be achieved.
The only thing *really* being lost in all this is the ability of the animators to reflect the "look" of the actors who provide the voices. Ellen DeGeneres's character in Nemo is the closest I've seen 3-D come to doing what Disney does with their 2-D characters, in that aspect. Consider Rourke in Atlantis (James Garner), Victor and Hugo in Hunchback (one definitely looks like Jason Alexander), Danny DeVito's character in Hercules, or even the the two mooses in Brother Bear (who do kinda look a little like Bob & Doug MacKenzie). 3-D character design at present does not allow that kind of control over eye movements to really get the drama or comedy of the original voice performance across, where the best model for that is the voice artist themselves. Exagerations work in 2-D, they don't work in 3-D. As I said, Dory is one of the few times I've been able to "see" the voice actor in the work produced (Shrek's Donkey being the first, but its hard to miss Eddie Murphy, who'd already done voice work before in Mulan). 3-D just doesn't have the "human touch" consistently, IMHO, that well-done 2-D will always have.
One last comment: Is it really necessary to have the background angle move all the time? Its good for action scenes, and sometimes for tense dramatic moments, but it really gets in the way of exposition sequences, and ANY film director will tell you that. Just because you CAN move the background all the time, or even most of the time, doesn't mean you should. Even in 3-D films, they don't do it all the time; set a camera angle (the job of the layout department) and stick to it.
On a side note, I'd give almost anything to have the footage of DeGeneres in the studio during her recording of the "whale song" sequence of Nemo...
Fantasia 2000 is what you'd get, appearance-wise, specifically the Steadfast Tin Soldier bit. There, they had 3-D characters over 2-D backgrounds, but unlike Pixar, the 3D stuff wasn't rendered as "totally" 3D. They did block-shading instead of normal light-shading the way Pixar does theirs, so it still had that aspect of looking 2D.
ok, for the floggin' record, I was speaking figuratively in my use of the word "own". I wasn't talking ownership in a legal sense, but in the figurative sense of a statement like "I *own* you". Having control over derivative works to charge for or prevent their distribution is a form of ownership, in the sense I was talking about.
I'm pretty sure SCO's public statements about the invalidity of the GPL, combined with the GPL's own statements that any disagreement over the terms of GPL-code distribution kicks the whole package back to standard copyright and thus makes SCO's own continued distribution illegal as hell, will make this case a laugher.
Except that the brunt of SCO's claim is that Linux, being a Unix derivative, is really the copyright of SCO (having bought the System V copyrights, or so they claim; Novell says otherwise), so the copyright and licenses can only be decided upon and enforced by SCO.
Now, we all know *THAT* claim is also laughable, but that's the first claim and the actual court case itself, and if that's disproven, the GPL gets no legal test because its irrelevant to that particular issue. It all hinges on the case against IBM and whether or not Linux is decided to be a Unix System V derivative.
If SCO owns Linux, as they claim, they can assert their copyrights and the GPL simply doesn't exist on Linux anymore. Fortunately, the BSD case already set a precident that simple code copying of small modules, violating copyright/licenses or not, doesn't make for ownership of the whole project.
If SCO doesn't own Linux, then the GPL case can get tested, but only in countersuit. SCO's refuting of the GPL is at this point FUD and publicity. When SCO loses the IBM case, and Linux is proven to remain totally the property of Linus, then IBM or the FSF can countersue the GPL violations. But they won't bother, because after that loss, SCO will lose so much stock value the Canopy group (the *real* culpricks here) will sell it all off and run for the hills. There won't be anybody left worth sueing, or any money to be gained from it.
Speaking of said invasion, what has become of YoYoDyne Propulsion's assets, anyways. I'd be interested in seeing what company took advantage of the severe drop in their stock prices after Buckaroo Bonzai "visited" their HQ back in 1984...
then again, it was probably Enron, which is why it still has no value today...stupid monkeyboys...
From what I can gather having read Code Complete and other books from M$ Press is that the serious A-Class players at M$ tend to work in the libraries and languages divisions since 1) languages and libraries were their original product to start with, and 2) the libraries are used in EVERYTHING else, from the OS to Office to these little don't mean a thing until they're integrated into Windows itself projects like UPNP. If they libraries are flawed, EVERYTHING they do, and everything everybody else does, is flawed, and M$ can't afford that. Thus, most A-Class players were working on.NET's internals since that's the next generation of libraries for the development environments to work in.
On the other hand, they got crappy people do to the.NET 1.0 packaging and roll-out, considering that the original release required installing ALL of the documentation onto your HD even for just the run time...there's no reason it needed 1.6 GIG except that *SOMEBODY* stupid got involved along the way...
From an end-user's point of view, it looks like the same old client-server. I disagree with them not calling the browser a "heavyweight client", because it is, even when the webapp isn't using all the bells and whistles of client-side javascript for layout, dynamic layering, and form validation. Its just a generic heavyweight client, not a specialized one, as the protocols are standardized.
But as I was saying, the end-user sees themselves talking to a single server. www.something.com/someapp/... Nothing more. Its pure client-server to them, with a generic client and a URL to find a server. Oh, yeah, and its about as slow as the old client-server systems were 15-20 years ago.
What the article describes is the point of view that there were only two tiers: the application and the database. That's what's changed. The database is accessed by a middleware app that processes the data, then sends it to the client in a form that the client renders to be human-readable. Multiple tiers become possible, when the web app provides a web-service that some other computer program uses to assemble data into the human-readable view, etc.
So things are both what they were, as you imply, and yet utterly different. But its only the implementation that's different, and the article was talking about implementations.
Best Buys are, like all retail stores, reflective of the local store's managers and hiring practices.
The Best Buy in Sterling, VA has been very supportive in the service genre, when compared to the stunned silence I got at the nearby Circuit City and Office Depot. I've gotten less attention at, say the Annapolis, MD store by comparison, but this store in Sterling will have my business until something changes.
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Another issue where having the Royalty makes a difference is division of responsibilities. Right now, and pretty much since Lincoln, we've had a president who is both chief executive, military chief, and the top morale officer of the country. When disasters happen, the president usually has to take time from those first two jobs to go make a presence at the disaster site.
The British Prime Minister rarely has to do this. The Royalty can dispatch a member, including the Queen herself, instead and allow the PM to continue to do their job of reacting to the incident internally and politically.
Its actually a good system, I think, but not one that America could ever evolve (back) into.
Here's the frustrating thing. I've talked to so many self-proclaimed "Democrats" who have plenty of good ideas, but don't seem to cohesively and logically put all of it together.
"No, I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -- Will Rogers, sometime in the early 1950s.
Would have been cool to see some actual Cylons. Those long nailed versions were on the screen for a very short time and weren't very cool.
...which is really just a writer's cop-out for the fact that effects make-up, puppetry, and/or tin-suits are expensive for TV, and it is cheaper to just pay cheesey soap-opera actors than to bother with believable "aliens" or machines as evil.
Yeah...when the Cylons became "human", all I could feel were the same bad feelings I had in 1988's War of the Worlds series where thanks to radiation, the Martians could take over the bodies of humans to blend in to our crowds and take us over from within...
and before you go painting me an idiot again, i meant "512K" when i typed "512meg". The original macs had 128K with the ability to upgrade to half a meg only.
Gee, at the time, that seemed like a lot...
NO, the exact opposite you clods (and that includes the 2 jackasses that called my post "overrated"). Back in the early 80s, when the Mac was stealing just about everything Xerox PARC had done, Steve Jobs decided to NOT steal the ethernet networking concept that PARC was also doing (Metcalf was a PARCer as well before taking his technology to found 3COM). At the time, as paraphrased by Cringely in Accidental Empires, Jobs "still didn't think that workers needed umbilical cords to their copmpanies" (my bad on the spelling first time 'round).
Jobs only relented, and Appletalk was born, when it was realized that companies couldn't afford to give every user their own laser printer, so he let Appletalk be created in order to share the printer. That it was also useful for sharing files was a side-effect, it was never Jobs's intention. Appletalk was NOT in the first Mac design, even if it ended up in the first model roleout. (For that matter, the ability to upgrade early Mac memory to 512meg was done against Jobs's orders).
As for today, you utterly misread it. The first gen iMac, and all the Jobs models that have come out since, are the exact opposide of what the first Mac was. Instead of a limited networking ability, and relying on built-in floppy discs, the Macs today have no internal periferals outside of the hard drive and cdrom, and have extensive and very easy to use networking built right into the system. They're intended from the beginning to be networked machines, and sharing data by floppy (or zip or firewire/usb pen-disks or cdroms) is secondary to getting the machine to network.
In other words, Jobs did a complete 180 on whether or not networking was important. In the early 80s when he visited PARC, networking was akin to corporate slavery; this idea that you couldn't work without the company being able to look at your work was wrong for the rebelious image Jobs wanted to keep in people's minds about the Mac vs. the "business" machine of IBM. Today, Jobs knows that the network comes first.
But he can now say that safely because the network is now an open Internet, and not the private big-brother corporate networks he feared would take over...or at least wanted US to fear would take over.
"Nobody needs an imbilicul cord to their company." on why the Mac didn't have networking built-in.
Now, of course, the Mac has no perifs and can only exist by connecting to a network unless you plug in external devices...
Its called a non-compete clause and its usually written into every employer-employee contract, or into any layoff or termination order. It basically says that the employee upon leaving the company for whatever reason will not go to work for a new company in direct competition with the old. Thus, upon leaving my company whose main customer in bidding contracts is Department A in some government field, I can't directly go to work for any other company whose main customer is also Department A without giving my old company bosses a call to see if its ok with them, else much of what's in my head would be treated as trade secrets and proprietary IP that I wouldn't be able to use.
There's only a limit to what degree its enforceable. Non-compete clauses can't prevent someone from getting a job at all, or they're illegal. Some states have them illegal entirely. Generally, a "good-faith" effort to get a job outside of the industry in question is enough to appease a judge should you end up working for a competitor to the old company in the end. But when, for example, Microsoft hired away a bunch of Borland IDE developers to work on Visual Studio, it really came down to the lawyers and the money, at which point Borland knew they didn't have enough money to beat Microsoft at it and keep the ex-Borland people from working in the Visual Studio division.
The hard thing about Trade Secrets is actually proving that the specific violation occurred by the specific individual. Trade secrets aren't protected in the same way as copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Coincidental development, or coming up with the same idea without referencing the original, isn't a violation of Trade Secrets laws in the way that it could be a violation of the "big three" IP protections.
Well, the difference is that "Life after Worldcom" and "Life after SCO" may (if we're blessed with poetic justice) include an OZ-like documentary of life in prison...
as long as you don't actually have to *look* at him...damn, but he's gotten old recently...
...can be found over at Big Finish productions, where for their 50th Doctor Who CD (nicely enough being released this month), they united pretty much every single actor who's played on their shows so far, including the last 4 doctors, most of their respective companions including their "new" companions they've added to keep some variety into the show, Nick Courtney as the Brig, John Leeson as K9, and a whole bunch of others, for a 3-CD story.
There's a wonderful set of pictures from the recording sessions available. Yes, the various doctors are getting old, and only McGann could probably reprise his role on screen...but on the radio/audio, the voice and your memories and imagination make it all work.
except that until pippin is seen through the palantir, and thus put in mortal danger, he doesn't even need to go to gondor w/ gandalf in the first place...he may as well have stayed with merry.
*book-based spoiler ahead*
what about the fucking palantir????
the point of the wrap-up with Sauruman is to get the Palantir into Aragorn's hands (so he can assert his kingship and buy time for Frodo/Sam), and also for Pippen to see into and thus be forced to separate off with Gandalf (a line implied by the trailer so far...but then again, lines between aragorn and gandalf in the trailer for two towers ended up cut and into the SE dvd instead). Wormtongue has to get pissy about it all and throw the damn thing out the window!
if they weren't gonna do that sequence at all, then (aside from making the fan-boys go "oh cool, they put it in there") why bother mentioning the damned thing in the first film in the first place?
sheesh
no, probably because on her shows (both the sitcom and the talk show), and on stage for comedy concerts, she's wearing a ton of stage makeup...
where? the "visual commentary" section? that's the only part i haven't had the chance (trans: time) to see...
Dave Thomas and Rock Moranis, who started the MacKenzie brothers thing on Second City back in the late 70s. I know them well; I used the character names for recognition purposes.
Its one of several cases in recent film history where classic "teams" have been reunited to play different characters. The Grumpy Old Men pair of films reunited Matthow and Lemon, A Mighty Wind reunited the Spinal Tap three, etc...Disney's done this once or twice before, but I can't recall when right now.
Well, it doesn't change all the time in "2-D" but it DOES change. Disney has a fantastic package called "Deep Canvas" that does most of the work for generating the 3-D backgrounds while appearing like 2-D space. Its used heavily in Tarzan, Atlantis, and Treasure Planet (where they added the ability to "move" parts of the background around). It allows the background people to "paint" directly into the computer the complete 3-D picture, by painting onto geometric solids with the stylus.
meanwhile, a skeleton-graphics outline of the shapes are sent to the 2-D animators to draw onto, with those outlines removed by the cleanup crew before going into the computer for the final mix down. The computer has already replaced the "ink-and-paint" department, and the "multi-plane camera" of Disney's history; there are no "cels" anymore.
Machines now are fast enough, over their 1997 Tarzan-era counterparts, to render Deep Canvas's work at run-time, as opposed to having to do overnight rendering sessions and see the finished product the next day. This means that effectively Deep Canvas can now be used for pretty much ALL the sets, whether the background will move or not, because the biggest time constraint (rendering) is now a non-issue.
However, what you will get, IMHO, when the 2-D people start using the computer more directly is a lot of scanning. They'll still draw the roughs onto paper, scan them into the computer, then manipulate their 3-D character model to what they already drew. It may actually be the trick to get 3-D to move "properly".
One of the biggest problems with (Disney Feature Style) 2-D animation is the characters move around too much, compared to real life. One of the biggest problems with (Pixar/Dreamworks) 3-D animation is the characters move around too little, compared to real life.
So by having 2-D people drawing on paper, scanning into the computer, you'll get 3-D models that move too much. Have them runthrough and slow things down a little, and the balance between the two (making "perfect" 3D) may finally be achieved.
The only thing *really* being lost in all this is the ability of the animators to reflect the "look" of the actors who provide the voices. Ellen DeGeneres's character in Nemo is the closest I've seen 3-D come to doing what Disney does with their 2-D characters, in that aspect. Consider Rourke in Atlantis (James Garner), Victor and Hugo in Hunchback (one definitely looks like Jason Alexander), Danny DeVito's character in Hercules, or even the the two mooses in Brother Bear (who do kinda look a little like Bob & Doug MacKenzie). 3-D character design at present does not allow that kind of control over eye movements to really get the drama or comedy of the original voice performance across, where the best model for that is the voice artist themselves. Exagerations work in 2-D, they don't work in 3-D. As I said, Dory is one of the few times I've been able to "see" the voice actor in the work produced (Shrek's Donkey being the first, but its hard to miss Eddie Murphy, who'd already done voice work before in Mulan). 3-D just doesn't have the "human touch" consistently, IMHO, that well-done 2-D will always have.
One last comment: Is it really necessary to have the background angle move all the time? Its good for action scenes, and sometimes for tense dramatic moments, but it really gets in the way of exposition sequences, and ANY film director will tell you that. Just because you CAN move the background all the time, or even most of the time, doesn't mean you should. Even in 3-D films, they don't do it all the time; set a camera angle (the job of the layout department) and stick to it.
On a side note, I'd give almost anything to have the footage of DeGeneres in the studio during her recording of the "whale song" sequence of Nemo...
Fantasia 2000 is what you'd get, appearance-wise, specifically the Steadfast Tin Soldier bit. There, they had 3-D characters over 2-D backgrounds, but unlike Pixar, the 3D stuff wasn't rendered as "totally" 3D. They did block-shading instead of normal light-shading the way Pixar does theirs, so it still had that aspect of looking 2D.
Simonyi still believes only a handful of super/uber geniuses can design software, but once that designs done, a standard office weenie can build it.
He believed that back in PARC, he took that belief to Microsoft where it failed utterly, and still thinks so today.
and he's still wrong.
ok, for the floggin' record, I was speaking figuratively in my use of the word "own". I wasn't talking ownership in a legal sense, but in the figurative sense of a statement like "I *own* you". Having control over derivative works to charge for or prevent their distribution is a form of ownership, in the sense I was talking about.
sheesh, bleein' literalists...
True enough, but who's got the money to do it?
I'm pretty sure SCO's public statements about the invalidity of the GPL, combined with the GPL's own statements that any disagreement over the terms of GPL-code distribution kicks the whole package back to standard copyright and thus makes SCO's own continued distribution illegal as hell, will make this case a laugher.
Except that the brunt of SCO's claim is that Linux, being a Unix derivative, is really the copyright of SCO (having bought the System V copyrights, or so they claim; Novell says otherwise), so the copyright and licenses can only be decided upon and enforced by SCO.
Now, we all know *THAT* claim is also laughable, but that's the first claim and the actual court case itself, and if that's disproven, the GPL gets no legal test because its irrelevant to that particular issue. It all hinges on the case against IBM and whether or not Linux is decided to be a Unix System V derivative.
If SCO owns Linux, as they claim, they can assert their copyrights and the GPL simply doesn't exist on Linux anymore. Fortunately, the BSD case already set a precident that simple code copying of small modules, violating copyright/licenses or not, doesn't make for ownership of the whole project.
If SCO doesn't own Linux, then the GPL case can get tested, but only in countersuit. SCO's refuting of the GPL is at this point FUD and publicity. When SCO loses the IBM case, and Linux is proven to remain totally the property of Linus, then IBM or the FSF can countersue the GPL violations. But they won't bother, because after that loss, SCO will lose so much stock value the Canopy group (the *real* culpricks here) will sell it all off and run for the hills. There won't be anybody left worth sueing, or any money to be gained from it.
Speaking of said invasion, what has become of YoYoDyne Propulsion's assets, anyways. I'd be interested in seeing what company took advantage of the severe drop in their stock prices after Buckaroo Bonzai "visited" their HQ back in 1984...
then again, it was probably Enron, which is why it still has no value today...stupid monkeyboys...
Yeah, its funny, but I'll run with it anyways...
.NET's internals since that's the next generation of libraries for the development environments to work in.
.NET 1.0 packaging and roll-out, considering that the original release required installing ALL of the documentation onto your HD even for just the run time...there's no reason it needed 1.6 GIG except that *SOMEBODY* stupid got involved along the way...
From what I can gather having read Code Complete and other books from M$ Press is that the serious A-Class players at M$ tend to work in the libraries and languages divisions since 1) languages and libraries were their original product to start with, and 2) the libraries are used in EVERYTHING else, from the OS to Office to these little don't mean a thing until they're integrated into Windows itself projects like UPNP. If they libraries are flawed, EVERYTHING they do, and everything everybody else does, is flawed, and M$ can't afford that. Thus, most A-Class players were working on
On the other hand, they got crappy people do to the
Fortunately, 1.1 fixed that particular issue...
From an end-user's point of view, it looks like the same old client-server. I disagree with them not calling the browser a "heavyweight client", because it is, even when the webapp isn't using all the bells and whistles of client-side javascript for layout, dynamic layering, and form validation. Its just a generic heavyweight client, not a specialized one, as the protocols are standardized.
But as I was saying, the end-user sees themselves talking to a single server. www.something.com/someapp/... Nothing more. Its pure client-server to them, with a generic client and a URL to find a server. Oh, yeah, and its about as slow as the old client-server systems were 15-20 years ago.
What the article describes is the point of view that there were only two tiers: the application and the database. That's what's changed. The database is accessed by a middleware app that processes the data, then sends it to the client in a form that the client renders to be human-readable. Multiple tiers become possible, when the web app provides a web-service that some other computer program uses to assemble data into the human-readable view, etc.
So things are both what they were, as you imply, and yet utterly different. But its only the implementation that's different, and the article was talking about implementations.
Best Buys are, like all retail stores, reflective of the local store's managers and hiring practices.
The Best Buy in Sterling, VA has been very supportive in the service genre, when compared to the stunned silence I got at the nearby Circuit City and Office Depot. I've gotten less attention at, say the Annapolis, MD store by comparison, but this store in Sterling will have my business until something changes.