I was at the protest. I saw it pre-announced on/. and decided to show up. Sadly, from the world's perspective, it becomes what was reported.
In some of the media, the SCO signs are shown larger than life. In reality, they were 1. devoid of intelligent comment, 2. quite small, 3. sitting off to the side on SCO property for most of the time. They were mostly insignificant except for to those taking pictures. If individual pictures had been taken of the protester signs, there were 10 good protester signs for every stupid SCO sign, and real stakeholders/protesters circulating them.
It WAS obviously a waste of time to protest in front of SCO for any significant amount of time, and after the first hour the protesters went to a very busy nearby intersection and carried on their protest in complete absence of SCO, and brought hundreds to some degree of awareness of the issues surrounding the case, and what a bunch of scum-sucking lawyers in their community with no technical merit were trying to do to community-developed free software.
Maybe Utah is not unique in giving the establishment much better press than they deserve. Maybe we bring it upon ourselves. I could not say. But regardless, I will be there again next week.
1. It is a dilema how to rely on Windows drivers without dropping most of the formatting guts of the Word Processor, redesigningfeatures at best, and having to consider dropping them if there just was no windows driver support? It was a dilema, and another point of control for Microsoft, to be able to keep the Windows drivers always compatible with Word's needs.
2. Pete Peterson is not the founder nor a significant owner of WordPerfect other than as tie breaker. He was a high-profile person who exerted much control and therefore bore significant blame as seen by many, not that he didn't have his heart in it.
3. Gold or beta were all the hackneyed versions, much to the dismay of OS/2 platform developers.
MS got where they are today by pretending to embrace what they do not control and then destroying and creating as much incompatibility as possible with what they previously embraced.
Windows did not win on technical superiority, but on marketing battles, which IBM would not have had to fight with Microsoft as a friend instead of as a sudden enemy.
We can look at errors made by IBM supposedly accelerating the split as Sun did with Java, but the outcome was inevitable, and the mistake was cooperating with Microsoft and believing that they are there to help any other companies besides themselves become long-term successful, a mistake that companies continue to make over and over today underestimating the tactics of Microsoft (the other common mistake was in a market leader not sufficiently opening the standards before losing control to Microsoft, which we could talk about for quite a while, too).
See my other reply on why the betaed OS/2 version sucked -- it was a mangled version of the Windows version that didn't run as well as IBM's compatibility, not the real OS/2 version.
You are right that OS/2's Windows support helped kill OS/2, although in this case, you got the Windows version one way or the other because WordPerfect could not afford the resources for the now-completely-split code base.
I do not know all the details, but I suspect there is sufficient counterargument to the argument that "Microsoft dropped support for OS/2 before any 32-bit version was released", for a variety of reasons including prerelease PM development kits, early impressions and perhaps assertions that the two environments would be able to run PM code, trying to figure out what was really happening, etc.
You do not product management, let alone discard years of work and reorient your development teams to work in a crippled Windows environment overnight, let alone release a product. The misdirected pursuit of OS/2 was deadly. Almost Perfectgives some indication of this, although I would not credit Pete Peterson for really good grasp or account of things.
And if you don't believe this, look at the pattern that nearly repeated itself with WordPerfect for Linux.
1. You have a very good native WordPerfect 8 product that is the result of a dozen years of careful tailoring for Unix. Despite signs of aging, it is an amazing product.
2. You have Corel who is not committed enough to continue to pay the Unix experts or maintain the code base discarding the Linux code base and using the Windows code base via Wine, and the result is something I think most users of WordPerfect 8 would never accept as an improvement, being marketed as WordPerfect 9 and 10 for Linux.
There were two different versions of WordPerfect for OS/2.
1. The one developed directly for OS/2
2. The one later developed from the Windows Version after all the resources were frantically/belatedly swung in behind the Windows version using some kind of portability kit to run the Windows code on OS/2 getting all the disadvantages of the Windows version sucked back into OS/2. Yes, clearly that version sucked as bad as the crippled Windows version because at that point it was the Windows version.
Guess which one was publicly betaed? The latter. Through misinformation, Microsoft had split the code base, and it was deemed far too expensive to maintain two code bases, especially now that Microsoft did a180 degree turn on OS/2, even if that meant a bad product for OS/2, since there weren't enough users left there after Microsoft's about-face, not based upon quality of Windows, but only their control of it.
Read the finding more carefully.
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He independently created the song "My Sweet Lord", but the authors of the song "He's So Fine" sued and prevailed, saying Harrison copied the song.
That is not my reading of the document you linked to:
"With all the evidence pointing out the similarities between the two songs, the judge said it was "perfectly obvious . . . the two songs are virtually identical". The judge was convinced that neither Harrison nor Preston consciously set out to appropriate the melody of HSF for their own use, but such was not a defense."
"Harrison conceded that he had heard HSF prior to writing MSL, and therefore, his subconscious knew the combination of sounds he put to the words of MSL would work, because they had already done so. Terming what occurred as subconscious plagiarism, the judge found that the case should be re-set for a trial on the issue of damages."
According to this finding and admission, the work was not independently developed, but was copied from the original, even if subconsciously.
Re:They help, and they hurt.
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As far as the scientific debate goes, I think the people who are protesting "gene patents" et cetera would really have no negative opinion if they had discovered and patented them first.
Maybe George Washington would have behaved like the George III had he been born as royalty in England. And maybe RMS would like proprietary software if he controlled the software market like Bill Gates does.
The interesting hypotheticals, which may be true, are part of the question of how much of a blank slate individuals are only acting on circumstances. RMS would have probably been successful pursuing proprietary software long before he was successful doing free sofware, most citizens in United States would have easily gone along with crowning their own King George after General Washington got their independence, and I have to think that a large number of scientists see the evils of some applications of the patent system whether or not they have good ideas (may be actually hindered or discouraged by the current system) and are not just expressing sour grapes.
To me there seem o be a significant number of people who have better social and group conscience and vision than others, and there is more than the jungle environment which makes some value lasting contribution to society above the flawed arguments about rewarding innovation.
Re:They help, and they hurt.
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There is much more than that. It causes a patent holder with a toe hold on a monopolized item to cling to old technology instead of opening up to new technology they do not monopolize. While this happens even without patents, patents aggravate the occurance. This seems to be particularly true in drug companies. The case has been made that much less innovative research is being done by companies more worried about their control of patents than making people well.
WordPerfect had been told for years by Microsoft that OS/2 was the future for corporate work. They had a great OS/2 version representing a much larger investment with much fewer framework problems, but which ultimately didn't have enough potential market to even justify release of a final supported version after Microsoft pulled the fast one shifting from OS/2 to Windows for corporate use forcing app developers to use greatly-degraded facilities, which Microsoft had been practicing at a bit longer.
Having to suddenly deal with all the Microsoft "innovations" of Win 16 resulted in a result that was, by comparison with Microsoft's efforts, crap. Sure, Microsoft was better at dealing with the sudden shift and limitations of their own monstrosity (or perhaps you would like to be using it today). This is characteristic of Microsoft's strategy of adding bumps to the road for other developers, leveraging their control of the OS against applications developers.
I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones, with simple indexing and serching capabilities. The simpler cell-phone is what I really always have in-hand with good connectivity when I would like to read. Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books or widespread connectivity.
Ha anyone done this? It should be popular and not too resource-intensive.
Hand helds don't have an option for setting integration time. You need fancy, expensive receivers for that. Or, you can roll your own, which isn't as hard as it sounds.
How is this different from what every Garmin I have ever used does when you tell it to take time to use averaging to get a more-accurate position, which it does until interrupted?
I do not doubt that Microsoft engineers have worked hard, due to the competition Samba was giving them, and made a number of improvements to their servers. In the absence of competition, I suspect that they actually are not served by good performance because the more servers you run the more money they get, unless advanced licensing evens that out based upon number of licenses.
So we have one benchmark that is probably somewhat legitimate for the exact thing it measures, but performance (ignoring all other questions that might be asked about which is "better") has so many different variables, etc. that the question begs for many more independent test results (other hardware and tests of total throughput, for example are two variables of a long list).
I haven't read one of their licenses in the last five years or so since I stopped using their products. Do they permit true independents to benchmark their products and publish results without permission, or are the only benchmarks we will ever see ones where Microsoft knows they win?
It's not quite that simple. We have customers; OS has users. When OS comes up with a truly innovative UI or design or program, people celebrate.
How does this differ from what I said? Microsoft owns the market, and would rather keep disruptions to a minimum, rather than point their masses in new directions that they may not control as well. It would be possible for a company with billions of dollars to provide both a stable UI and new innovative features, were they so motivated.
Is pre-emptive Windows with a flat 32-bit address space an innovation? Is a language environment built on a VM and less-complete libraries an innovation? Only when seen as a tool for keeping a grasp on power. COM is/was a horrible thing, as was their non-preemptive segmented programming model, setting back state of the art by many years, but all of these things, before Microsoft was forced to have an alternative, were strongly opposed and argued against by Microsoft until it reached the point that they had to do something different from the monstrously-bad ideas that dominated within Microsoft for so many years.
Microsoft is certainly not the only company to behave this way. It is a common pattern, although as Microsoft takes all established domains away from the original innovators, Microsoft becomes the centralized anti-innovation counterweight. If anything, this is more evident in Microsoft Office and other non-OS products. Their "innovations" were part of competitors products as much as 10 years ago, because these ideas are proven and safe now and the innovating companies mostly defunct.
When MS comes up with something new, people don't upgrade. We have millions of customers that have never heard of Linux (insert your own joke), millions that don't read Slashdot, millions that want about as much uncertainty in their software as they want in their televisions. Actually, less, if possible. No matter how good the new UI is, it's new, and therefore inferior. There's a resistance to change that might not be evident among the alpha geek herd.
It is more the market dominance than the details of the UI that make people choose Microsoft, which was evident when Apple or others had the better established UIs, and former DOS users chose Windows and even many Apple users have been forced into Windows because they learn to use whatever is there, however flawed. Millions of users had to relearn to use Microsoft replacements over the original UIs, and still look back with fond memories to products that served their needs better.
Which is no excuse for why new, innovative UIs aren't coming out of the OS community (although there's plenty of non-UI innovation). The only thing holding OSers back is that they, too, know users won't switch if they have to learn something new, so they're trying to create an environment as identical to Windows as possible.
My wife and kids, none of them tech experts, use Linux because it is there, and although they complain when they have to use a Windows machine that lacks some UI and other features, they use whatever is there very effectively. It is all about market control. There is not that much relearning involved, however much Microsoft would like to have people locked in to what they learned. They also use Mac OSX without too many major adjustments. UIs which were made to be used are not that difficult to use. It is a lame excuse that people will not learn to use a better UI or even just different UIs when that is what they find on the desktop. And the UI is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovation.
All very sad, if you ask me. If the change doesn't start with the alpha-geeks, we're going to be using the same window model for some 30 years.
Just like we would all still be programming in C++ had it been left up to Microsoft, not that they do not have people able to produce something like Java, as was demonstrated after Java took lots of mindshare.
The biggest threat to innovation in the present environment is Microsoft's ability to put anyone out of business that threatens their established model through innovation.
Microsoft is full of very smart, creative developers. What prevents them from releasing innovative stuff is the business model -- what does it do for Microsoft to let loose wild elements into a software environment they already own.
The free software movement allows these ideas to survive the poor motivations of the corporations.
If AOL goes out of business tomorrow or decides that they are no longer well served by expending resources on developing a browser, it becomes obvious that the browser they developed has a life of its own, unlike the best innovative code I have seen at most companies, which never sees the light of day because they were clueless about how to build a business model out of it.
It is still a tiny minority of code by commercial developers that has been permitted to see the light of day as free software, but it has been quite positive and to a certain extent innovative, at least when compared with the commercial alternatives that have actually been released.
When it says "Life + 70", that is life of the corporation which took out the copyright, which may be infinite, right?
Resemblence between programmable DNA and Java
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I found particularly enlightening the apparent similarity between Java applets and programmable DNA:
"Eventually, the goal is to produce genetic 'applets', little programs you could download into a cell simply by sticking DNA into it, the way you download Java applets from the Internet," says Timothy Gardner, a bioengineer at Boston University.
While it would have been better if it resembled something better supported in open source, it is a relief that it is not modelled after the patent-encumbered CLI-based models and that it is Internet-based rather than based on an AOL keyword.
You've mentioned isolated occurances that for some reason slipped through the cracks of the safeguards put in place by the constitution. Those occurances are dealt with and measures are taken to make sure that they never happen again. Can you say that for the former Soviet Union?
Please show the measures that are taken to make sure that these things never hapen again. The Patriot Act, perhaps? The imprisonment of lots of people they picked up off the streets and carting them off to Cuba with no formal charges or right to trial or attorneys?
The tough-for-freedom image has been replaced by one of wimps who are not willing to live with risks inherent in a free society. Security has become more important than freedom and presumption of innocence.
Since so many of these acts are already in direct violation of the constitution, I do not see it as slipping through the cracks, but rather the political process is producing more and more cracks. Any "measures" taken seem weaker than the constitution was originally before it became so battered. It is ultimately the stupidity of the US citizen that allows this to occur. The cure for stupidity is enslavement, which we are seeing on many fronts.
The US has been doing these and many worse things for centuries. While the nature of the violations changes from one generation to the next, they do not become less common, unfortunately.
Sure other countries have done terrible things in their past, too. Back to the topic of freedom on the internet, ss it presently exists, Russia did not lead the charge to make it illegal to use your own ideas in a work. Russia did not imprison any foreigners for having written code in a foreign country that decrypts ebooks. There are many other measures taken to protect the special rights of corporations and supress individual rights, that are only adopted in other countries by example and with great pressure by the US government in behalf of the mega corporations. If there were any vindication on the recent issues, Ashcroft and his henchmen would be in jail, but as we all know, they are just off doing worse things now.
You can not hate a business for being a business. It's like hating a wall for being a wall.
There was every reason to hate the Berlin Wall (among others) for the oppression it represented. Of course, after the Berlin Wall came down, many Germans were saying "build it back, three meters higher", just as old-time internet users felt overrun when the internet became generally available. In a similar vein, Microsoft as a monopolistic business is the result of very oppressive practices that persist because we tolerate or encourage them.
All businesses are not equal, any more than all people are equal. While I do not hate a person for being a person and trying to survive, I may greatly detest and oppose one like Sadaam the who's tactics, though very effective, are oppressive. Microsoft does not have to be as oppressive as it is, any more than we have to tolerate cancer cells within the body that would destroy much good.
If all corporations were as oppressive as Microsoft, it would be a good reason to call for the end of corporations. Such corporations in the past have certainly led to revolutions trying to do just that. If in our system, such oppressive corporations are the only ones that can survive, then something needs to be done about that. Or perhaps you think civilization is too unnatural to be worthwhile.
And all agreements are not equal. I have complained myself in the past about GPL, but over time, it seems more and more reasonable, and Microsoft's agreements are demonstrated as less and less reasonable. It is quite obvious to me analyzing in totality what is produced under Microsoft EULAs versus under GPL.
If you log into the sprintpcs web site using a PC browser, you can send a real SMS (no browser required to receive) that is delivered well to the phone. All that is missing is the reasonable WAP interface to properly send one. Most of the other UI in the phone is browser based, anyway.
I believe it was stated in one of the media, however, that most of the Iraqi wells are not positive pressure. This significantly increases the chance the wells will be permanently destroyed by a fire, or so said a talking head.
This is a case of one person claiming to speak for every last person "inside Iraq".
As much as I am against the war under the present so-called justifications and sympathize with this blogger, I have to think this oft-repeated sentiment is wrong, that "No one inside Iraq is for war".
While this would be technically wrong just on the fact that there have been American special forces "inside Iraq" for some time who clearly want the war, I think this would be true on broader segments. Start with segments of Kurd populations or others who are not particularly in harms way, who have been protected by nofly zones or other actions, do not have freedom to make blogs, and are probably in favor of the war, however much of a minority this may be, etc. Such universality of opinion is only what you get when it is being claimed by a usurper of public opinion, such as Sadaam frequently claims.
XML isn't intended for web pages. That's what you missed:
Clearly it IS intended for web pages. The only future of HTML at W3C is XML-based. The only modular form of markup today that allows combination of web standards in a web page is XML.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at the protest. I saw it pre-announced on /. and decided to show up. Sadly, from the world's perspective, it becomes what was reported.
In some of the media, the SCO signs are shown larger than life. In reality, they were 1. devoid of intelligent comment, 2. quite small, 3. sitting off to the side on SCO property for most of the time. They were mostly insignificant except for to those taking pictures. If individual pictures had been taken of the protester signs, there were 10 good protester signs for every stupid SCO sign, and real stakeholders/protesters circulating them.
It WAS obviously a waste of time to protest in front of SCO for any significant amount of time, and after the first hour the protesters went to a very busy nearby intersection and carried on their protest in complete absence of SCO, and brought hundreds to some degree of awareness of the issues surrounding the case, and what a bunch of scum-sucking lawyers in their community with no technical merit were trying to do to community-developed free software.
Maybe Utah is not unique in giving the establishment much better press than they deserve. Maybe we bring it upon ourselves. I could not say. But regardless, I will be there again next week.
for the record:
1. It is a dilema how to rely on Windows drivers without dropping most of the formatting guts of the Word Processor, redesigningfeatures at best, and having to consider dropping them if there just was no windows driver support? It was a dilema, and another point of control for Microsoft, to be able to keep the Windows drivers always compatible with Word's needs.
2. Pete Peterson is not the founder nor a significant owner of WordPerfect other than as tie breaker. He was a high-profile person who exerted much control and therefore bore significant blame as seen by many, not that he didn't have his heart in it.
3. Gold or beta were all the hackneyed versions, much to the dismay of OS/2 platform developers.
MS got where they are today by pretending to embrace what they do not control and then destroying and creating as much incompatibility as possible with what they previously embraced.
Windows did not win on technical superiority, but on marketing battles, which IBM would not have had to fight with Microsoft as a friend instead of as a sudden enemy.
We can look at errors made by IBM supposedly accelerating the split as Sun did with Java, but the outcome was inevitable, and the mistake was cooperating with Microsoft and believing that they are there to help any other companies besides themselves become long-term successful, a mistake that companies continue to make over and over today underestimating the tactics of Microsoft (the other common mistake was in a market leader not sufficiently opening the standards before losing control to Microsoft, which we could talk about for quite a while, too).
See my other reply on why the betaed OS/2 version sucked -- it was a mangled version of the Windows version that didn't run as well as IBM's compatibility, not the real OS/2 version.
You are right that OS/2's Windows support helped kill OS/2, although in this case, you got the Windows version one way or the other because WordPerfect could not afford the resources for the now-completely-split code base.
I do not know all the details, but I suspect there is sufficient counterargument to the argument that "Microsoft dropped support for OS/2 before any 32-bit version was released", for a variety of reasons including prerelease PM development kits, early impressions and perhaps assertions that the two environments would be able to run PM code, trying to figure out what was really happening, etc.
You do not product management, let alone discard years of work and reorient your development teams to work in a crippled Windows environment overnight, let alone release a product. The misdirected pursuit of OS/2 was deadly. Almost Perfectgives some indication of this, although I would not credit Pete Peterson for really good grasp or account of things.
And if you don't believe this, look at the pattern that nearly repeated itself with WordPerfect for Linux.
1. You have a very good native WordPerfect 8 product that is the result of a dozen years of careful tailoring for Unix. Despite signs of aging, it is an amazing product.
2. You have Corel who is not committed enough to continue to pay the Unix experts or maintain the code base discarding the Linux code base and using the Windows code base via Wine, and the result is something I think most users of WordPerfect 8 would never accept as an improvement, being marketed as WordPerfect 9 and 10 for Linux.
There were two different versions of WordPerfect for OS/2.
1. The one developed directly for OS/2
2. The one later developed from the Windows Version after all the resources were frantically/belatedly swung in behind the Windows version using some kind of portability kit to run the Windows code on OS/2 getting all the disadvantages of the Windows version sucked back into OS/2. Yes, clearly that version sucked as bad as the crippled Windows version because at that point it was the Windows version.
Guess which one was publicly betaed? The latter. Through misinformation, Microsoft had split the code base, and it was deemed far too expensive to maintain two code bases, especially now that Microsoft did a180 degree turn on OS/2, even if that meant a bad product for OS/2, since there weren't enough users left there after Microsoft's about-face, not based upon quality of Windows, but only their control of it.
He independently created the song "My Sweet Lord", but the authors of the song "He's So Fine" sued and prevailed, saying Harrison copied the song.
That is not my reading of the document you linked to:
"With all the evidence pointing out the similarities between the two songs, the judge said it was "perfectly obvious . . . the two songs are virtually identical". The judge was convinced that neither Harrison nor Preston consciously set out to appropriate the melody of HSF for their own use, but such was not a defense."
"Harrison conceded that he had heard HSF prior to writing MSL, and therefore, his subconscious knew the combination of sounds he put to the words of MSL would work, because they had already done so. Terming what occurred as subconscious plagiarism, the judge found that the case should be re-set for a trial on the issue of damages."
According to this finding and admission, the work was not independently developed, but was copied from the original, even if subconsciously.
As far as the scientific debate goes, I think the people who are protesting "gene patents" et cetera would really have no negative opinion if they had discovered and patented them first.
Maybe George Washington would have behaved like the George III had he been born as royalty in England. And maybe RMS would like proprietary software if he controlled the software market like Bill Gates does.
The interesting hypotheticals, which may be true, are part of the question of how much of a blank slate individuals are only acting on circumstances. RMS would have probably been successful pursuing proprietary software long before he was successful doing free sofware, most citizens in United States would have easily gone along with crowning their own King George after General Washington got their independence, and I have to think that a large number of scientists see the evils of some applications of the patent system whether or not they have good ideas (may be actually hindered or discouraged by the current system) and are not just expressing sour grapes.
To me there seem o be a significant number of people who have better social and group conscience and vision than others, and there is more than the jungle environment which makes some value lasting contribution to society above the flawed arguments about rewarding innovation.
There is much more than that. It causes a patent holder with a toe hold on a monopolized item to cling to old technology instead of opening up to new technology they do not monopolize. While this happens even without patents, patents aggravate the occurance. This seems to be particularly true in drug companies. The case has been made that much less innovative research is being done by companies more worried about their control of patents than making people well.
WordPerfect had been told for years by Microsoft that OS/2 was the future for corporate work. They had a great OS/2 version representing a much larger investment with much fewer framework problems, but which ultimately didn't have enough potential market to even justify release of a final supported version after Microsoft pulled the fast one shifting from OS/2 to Windows for corporate use forcing app developers to use greatly-degraded facilities, which Microsoft had been practicing at a bit longer.
Having to suddenly deal with all the Microsoft "innovations" of Win 16 resulted in a result that was, by comparison with Microsoft's efforts, crap. Sure, Microsoft was better at dealing with the sudden shift and limitations of their own monstrosity (or perhaps you would like to be using it today). This is characteristic of Microsoft's strategy of adding bumps to the road for other developers, leveraging their control of the OS against applications developers.
Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books
I meant to keep lots of whole books.
Is Project Gutenberg and a Palm Pilot.
I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones, with simple indexing and serching capabilities. The simpler cell-phone is what I really always have in-hand with good connectivity when I would like to read. Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books or widespread connectivity.
Ha anyone done this? It should be popular and not too resource-intensive.
Hand helds don't have an option for setting integration time. You need fancy, expensive receivers for that. Or, you can roll your own, which isn't as hard as it sounds.
How is this different from what every Garmin I have ever used does when you tell it to take time to use averaging to get a more-accurate position, which it does until interrupted?
I do not doubt that Microsoft engineers have worked hard, due to the competition Samba was giving them, and made a number of improvements to their servers. In the absence of competition, I suspect that they actually are not served by good performance because the more servers you run the more money they get, unless advanced licensing evens that out based upon number of licenses.
So we have one benchmark that is probably somewhat legitimate for the exact thing it measures, but performance (ignoring all other questions that might be asked about which is "better") has so many different variables, etc. that the question begs for many more independent test results (other hardware and tests of total throughput, for example are two variables of a long list).
I haven't read one of their licenses in the last five years or so since I stopped using their products. Do they permit true independents to benchmark their products and publish results without permission, or are the only benchmarks we will ever see ones where Microsoft knows they win?
It's not quite that simple. We have customers; OS has users. When OS comes up with a truly innovative UI or design or program, people celebrate.
How does this differ from what I said? Microsoft owns the market, and would rather keep disruptions to a minimum, rather than point their masses in new directions that they may not control as well. It would be possible for a company with billions of dollars to provide both a stable UI and new innovative features, were they so motivated.
Is pre-emptive Windows with a flat 32-bit address space an innovation? Is a language environment built on a VM and less-complete libraries an innovation? Only when seen as a tool for keeping a grasp on power. COM is/was a horrible thing, as was their non-preemptive segmented programming model, setting back state of the art by many years, but all of these things, before Microsoft was forced to have an alternative, were strongly opposed and argued against by Microsoft until it reached the point that they had to do something different from the monstrously-bad ideas that dominated within Microsoft for so many years.
Microsoft is certainly not the only company to behave this way. It is a common pattern, although as Microsoft takes all established domains away from the original innovators, Microsoft becomes the centralized anti-innovation counterweight. If anything, this is more evident in Microsoft Office and other non-OS products. Their "innovations" were part of competitors products as much as 10 years ago, because these ideas are proven and safe now and the innovating companies mostly defunct.
When MS comes up with something new, people don't upgrade. We have millions of customers that have never heard of Linux (insert your own joke), millions that don't read Slashdot, millions that want about as much uncertainty in their software as they want in their televisions. Actually, less, if possible. No matter how good the new UI is, it's new, and therefore inferior. There's a resistance to change that might not be evident among the alpha geek herd.
It is more the market dominance than the details of the UI that make people choose Microsoft, which was evident when Apple or others had the better established UIs, and former DOS users chose Windows and even many Apple users have been forced into Windows because they learn to use whatever is there, however flawed. Millions of users had to relearn to use Microsoft replacements over the original UIs, and still look back with fond memories to products that served their needs better.
Which is no excuse for why new, innovative UIs aren't coming out of the OS community (although there's plenty of non-UI innovation). The only thing holding OSers back is that they, too, know users won't switch if they have to learn something new, so they're trying to create an environment as identical to Windows as possible.
My wife and kids, none of them tech experts, use Linux because it is there, and although they complain when they have to use a Windows machine that lacks some UI and other features, they use whatever is there very effectively. It is all about market control. There is not that much relearning involved, however much Microsoft would like to have people locked in to what they learned. They also use Mac OSX without too many major adjustments. UIs which were made to be used are not that difficult to use. It is a lame excuse that people will not learn to use a better UI or even just different UIs when that is what they find on the desktop. And the UI is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovation.
All very sad, if you ask me. If the change doesn't start with the alpha-geeks, we're going to be using the same window model for some 30 years.
Just like we would all still be programming in C++ had it been left up to Microsoft, not that they do not have people able to produce something like Java, as was demonstrated after Java took lots of mindshare.
The biggest threat to innovation in the present environment is Microsoft's ability to put anyone out of business that threatens their established model through innovation.
Nonsense yourself.
Microsoft is full of very smart, creative developers. What prevents them from releasing innovative stuff is the business model -- what does it do for Microsoft to let loose wild elements into a software environment they already own.
The free software movement allows these ideas to survive the poor motivations of the corporations.
If AOL goes out of business tomorrow or decides that they are no longer well served by expending resources on developing a browser, it becomes obvious that the browser they developed has a life of its own, unlike the best innovative code I have seen at most companies, which never sees the light of day because they were clueless about how to build a business model out of it.
It is still a tiny minority of code by commercial developers that has been permitted to see the light of day as free software, but it has been quite positive and to a certain extent innovative, at least when compared with the commercial alternatives that have actually been released.
When it says "Life + 70", that is life of the corporation which took out the copyright, which may be infinite, right?
I found particularly enlightening the apparent similarity between Java applets and programmable DNA:
"Eventually, the goal is to produce genetic 'applets', little programs you could download into a cell simply by sticking DNA into it, the way you download Java applets from the Internet," says Timothy Gardner, a bioengineer at Boston University.
While it would have been better if it resembled something better supported in open source, it is a relief that it is not modelled after the patent-encumbered CLI-based models and that it is Internet-based rather than based on an AOL keyword.
You've mentioned isolated occurances that for some reason slipped through the cracks of the safeguards put in place by the constitution. Those occurances are dealt with and measures are taken to make sure that they never happen again. Can you say that for the former Soviet Union?
Please show the measures that are taken to make sure that these things never hapen again. The Patriot Act, perhaps? The imprisonment of lots of people they picked up off the streets and carting them off to Cuba with no formal charges or right to trial or attorneys?
The tough-for-freedom image has been replaced by one of wimps who are not willing to live with risks inherent in a free society. Security has become more important than freedom and presumption of innocence.
Since so many of these acts are already in direct violation of the constitution, I do not see it as slipping through the cracks, but rather the political process is producing more and more cracks. Any "measures" taken seem weaker than the constitution was originally before it became so battered. It is ultimately the stupidity of the US citizen that allows this to occur. The cure for stupidity is enslavement, which we are seeing on many fronts.
The US has been doing these and many worse things for centuries. While the nature of the violations changes from one generation to the next, they do not become less common, unfortunately.
Sure other countries have done terrible things in their past, too. Back to the topic of freedom on the internet, ss it presently exists, Russia did not lead the charge to make it illegal to use your own ideas in a work. Russia did not imprison any foreigners for having written code in a foreign country that decrypts ebooks. There are many other measures taken to protect the special rights of corporations and supress individual rights, that are only adopted in other countries by example and with great pressure by the US government in behalf of the mega corporations. If there were any vindication on the recent issues, Ashcroft and his henchmen would be in jail, but as we all know, they are just off doing worse things now.
You can not hate a business for being a business. It's like hating a wall for being a wall.
There was every reason to hate the Berlin Wall (among others) for the oppression it represented. Of course, after the Berlin Wall came down, many Germans were saying "build it back, three meters higher", just as old-time internet users felt overrun when the internet became generally available. In a similar vein, Microsoft as a monopolistic business is the result of very oppressive practices that persist because we tolerate or encourage them.
All businesses are not equal, any more than all people are equal. While I do not hate a person for being a person and trying to survive, I may greatly detest and oppose one like Sadaam the who's tactics, though very effective, are oppressive. Microsoft does not have to be as oppressive as it is, any more than we have to tolerate cancer cells within the body that would destroy much good.
If all corporations were as oppressive as Microsoft, it would be a good reason to call for the end of corporations. Such corporations in the past have certainly led to revolutions trying to do just that. If in our system, such oppressive corporations are the only ones that can survive, then something needs to be done about that. Or perhaps you think civilization is too unnatural to be worthwhile.
And all agreements are not equal. I have complained myself in the past about GPL, but over time, it seems more and more reasonable, and Microsoft's agreements are demonstrated as less and less reasonable. It is quite obvious to me analyzing in totality what is produced under Microsoft EULAs versus under GPL.
10. Transporter buffer patterns of Scotty, etc.
9. Outbound SPAM
8. MP3s
7. RIAA DOS attack
6. Freenet cache
5. Rejected slashdot submissions
4. Cell phone interferance
3. Full Circle Talkback Quality Feedback Agent
2. Blue screen of death
1. EBay outbid notice for ceramic tile
If you log into the sprintpcs web site using a PC browser, you can send a real SMS (no browser required to receive) that is delivered well to the phone. All that is missing is the reasonable WAP interface to properly send one. Most of the other UI in the phone is browser based, anyway.
I believe it was stated in one of the media, however, that most of the Iraqi wells are not positive pressure. This significantly increases the chance the wells will be permanently destroyed by a fire, or so said a talking head.
This is a case of one person claiming to speak for every last person "inside Iraq".
As much as I am against the war under the present so-called justifications and sympathize with this blogger, I have to think this oft-repeated sentiment is wrong, that "No one inside Iraq is for war".
While this would be technically wrong just on the fact that there have been American special forces "inside Iraq" for some time who clearly want the war, I think this would be true on broader segments. Start with segments of Kurd populations or others who are not particularly in harms way, who have been protected by nofly zones or other actions, do not have freedom to make blogs, and are probably in favor of the war, however much of a minority this may be, etc. Such universality of opinion is only what you get when it is being claimed by a usurper of public opinion, such as Sadaam frequently claims.
XML isn't intended for web pages. That's what you missed:
Clearly it IS intended for web pages. The only future of HTML at W3C is XML-based. The only modular form of markup today that allows combination of web standards in a web page is XML.