Yes. In fact, you can do this sort of thing using Damian Conway's Parse::RecDescent module, which lets you parse a linear input (like say any file or string) into a tree structure on which you can do arbitrary manipulation. -- including HTML/XML parsing, handling balanced parens, or yes your VBScript quoting example.
Parse::RecDescent is available for the 5.x series (I think it's part of the core download for 5.8, and was optional for 5.6, but am not 100% sure about that), but it seems like it's going to become a more core component when 6 arrives. If you want to be able to do this stuff, look into it -- you don't have to wait for Perl6 to start using this. It's available now, and it's *great*.:)
AS TotM noted, tabs are just one way to represent a Multiple Document Interface. My personal preference for getting to this is not with tabs in the Mozilla / Excel vein, but drawers in the Mail.app / Calculator.app vein. With a hierarchical display of sections like open windows, bookmarks. history pages, etc, and (ultra wish list) with page thumbnails as icons), you could get a much richer interface than the simple row of buttons that you get in these hip modern browsers. If Safari ever moves to a MDI style (or at least, the option for such a style), my hope is that drawers end up being the way to get there.
Yes! Thank you, that's exactly the one I was trying to think of. Poking around on the closest Windows box (a laptop running Win2kPro), there doesn't seem to be a rawrite.exe file under the %SYSTEMROOT% directory, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. Oh well, I've got Cygwin anyway so the point is moot here.
This is at least partly inaccurate: if you install Cygwin then you can also install DD on a Windows machine. Moreover, I know that even without Cygwin there are ways to do this with native DOS tools -- I know this because the first time I installed Linux, the RedHat documentation described how to write a disc image to the floppy drive from a DOS prompt. I want to say the DOS equivalent was actually something like "dd.exe", but it's been years now and, running "which dd" from a Cygwin shell just gives the POSIX dd that Cygwin itself installed, masking any system version that may also exist.
As for the loopback trick, that I don't know about. Someone cleverer than me might be able to do this within the Cygwin environment (or some other way?) but I have no idea where to even start...
On Apple's X11 list, it has been stated that X11.app's QuartzWM is going to remain closed-source and proprietary. That's all their code and they're going to keep it to themselves, as is their right. On the other hand, the extensions made to the xfree86 codebase have been offered back to the community under the same licensing terms as the rest of that project.
I haven't yet read the patent carefully (just skimmed the first page or so), but the company I used to work for, SkillCheck, has been doing this for something like a decade now. Does that count? At the time I left the company (well over a year ago, so please don't take this as me speaking for them in any way), the intent wasn't for their tests to be put on the open internet, but rather for a LAN oriented setup -- but even still, it was possible to deliver tests over HTTP to a web browser. Surely that will count as prior art, right?
If the patent requires "making a test and posting the test online...for potential test takers", as the CrainTech article suggests, then SkillCheck (&/or one or more of their competitors) was doing that commercially well before 1999. From a quick skim of their patent, it looks like all you need is any client-server arrangement where you've got one server running a database & test logic while at the same time you can do tests & test management from the client end. Quoting just the patent abstract:
A method of making a tests, assessments, surveys and lesson plans with images and sound files and posting them on-line for potential users. Questions are input by a test-maker and then the questions are compiled into a test by a host system and posted on-line for potential test-takers. The compiled test may be placed in a directory for access by the test-takers, the directory preferably having a plurality of categories corresponding to different types of tests and the compiled test is placed in the appropriate category. For ease in administration, a just-made test is placed into a temporary category so that it may be later reviewed (by the proprietor of the host system) and placed in the most appropriate category.
Maybe I'm dense but where's the clever part in all of this?
That CT article doesn't exactly paint this company in a positive light -- look at what they're trying to do: (a) not use their patent, but force companies to sign up as licensees & live off the rent from that; (b) squat on the test.com domain until someone finds it valuable enough to buy from them; (c) sell off their assets to one of the companies that they're trying to strongarm with the patent, granting them their domain name, software, and any other assets. Yuck -- if only we could count on this getting laughed out of court if they ever try to pursue it.
Actually, I would argue that both applications *and* networks need a reasonable level of security, not just one or the other. "Like warm winter clothing, security is best when applied in layers." If you just open one port for httpd but allow two different kinds of activity to go on through that channel, then that's really not much better than if you had allowed each service to run over the more traditional ports -- you still have two services to attend to, plust the added complexity of having to channel one through the other.
I would argue that this cannot be a net gain in your favor, so like I say -- if you want to open a service, you're best off by doing so directly rather than mucking around with switching ports, running shells through CGI, etc. Each of those transitions is a new potential point of failure that needs to be managed, and I don't see the point of taking on that challenge.
This is a bad idea for the same reasons that routing all traffic through port 80 to get past firewalls is a bad idea. There is a great benefit in knowing that a given port or protocol will have certain properties & not others, and piggybacking other protocols through that channel disrupts & diminishes that benefit. If you want to allow your users access to service X, then give it to them plainly rather than screwing around with things like this. If your ISP prohibits shell access, they aren't just doing it to be mean -- they're trying to protect both themselves & you from negligent or malicious users (and if you yourself happen to be negligent or malicious then this is all the more important, but I know that you're a skilled & benevolent hacker -- this kind of policy is aimed at those other people *wink*).
As others have said, there are so many ways this could be abused, either willfully or by accident. You can make the situation a little bit better by restricting this service to HTTPS sites, certain users or IPs, etc -- but why bother reinventing the wheel when, in the form of SSH (or even Telnet), this is a more or less solved problem?
I do not see this as a good idea for general Geocities styled simple CGI site hosting. It might be useful in certain restricted environments -- your server's co-location facility only allows port 80, but you have VPN access & can usefully tunnel in this way -- but any example I can think of (like the one I just wrote) is pretty contrived & probably full of holes. It is a pretty clever engineering hack, but not one that should probably be released into the wild -- it addresses the wrong problem in the wrong way, albeit cleverly.
Of course, there was already a kind of contingency plan for this:
Cash-strapped Russia wants to mothball space station: press
MOSCOW (AFP) Sep 25, 2002
A top Russian space official has proposed temporarily shutting down the International Space Station (ISS) because the cash-strapped country can no longer pay its bills, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday.
Now the US may also have reason to want to mothball ISS...
Interesting -- each incident happened at a 17 year interval. Does that suggest that, provided that appropriate safety corrections are put into place after today, that we can expect not to have another incident until 2020?
There's a pattern going back at least as far as Abraham Lincoln where any president elected in a year ending in a zero (that is, every 20 years -- 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920...) has died or nearly died in office, either of natural causes or by attempted or successful assassination. Just to cite examples off the top of my head -- Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy were all assassinated, Roosevelt died of natural causes, and assassination attempts were made on Reagan and Bush II.
Whether or not this actually means anything is a matter of opinion. I just think it's one of those funny coincidences, but people more into numerology, gammatria, and grand conspiracy theories may be more likely to suspect something deeper. In any case, to go with the 20 year presidential fatality cycle, we now have established a 17 year NASA fatality cycle. draw what conclusions you will.
Yes, Python is a target language, as are PHP and Ruby. I understand that there have also been toy implementations of languages like Scheme & Forth on top of Parrot as well -- I don't know much about language design, but apparently those were good proof of concept languages early on. In addition, there is work underway on a mod_parrot Apache modules which would allow any Parrot capable language to run with Apache the way that mod_perl can today.
Parrot support seems likely to catch on because the plan is for Perl6 to run on top of it, and chances are very good that Perl6 will be adopted pretty widely in time. If other target languages have enough faith in Parrot to embrace it as well, then even better, but Perl alone should be strong enough to guarantee widespread distribution in due course. And everyone knows that all the current [by then "legacy"] code is going to have to be supported somehow, so backwards compatibility in one form or another is a very strong possibility -- which means that the problems Apache2 is having hopefully won't be so bad for Perl6. Hopefully.
The problem between now and then is that the three main Perl6 developers -- Larry Wall (language designer), Damian Conway (co-language designer & evangelist), and Dan Sugalski (low level implementation, including Parrot) -- are all out of work right now. They're all in the unfortunate position of being ridiculously over-qualified for most Perl hacker jobs, and finding an employer that would be willing to sponsor them to do Perl6 development right now is proving to be tricky. If anyone could give a hand to these guys, they and their families would appreciate it today, and the whole Perl community would appreciate it in the long term -- having them focusing on paying the bills kind of forces Perl6 to wait...:(
Playing with fire
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Heh, I remember these. My sophomore year of college, several of my friends got into building potato guns. They'd all build their different guns and fire them out the window of one of the dorms, where they could arc through the air & land in a soccer field a quarter of a mile away -- scaring the bejezus out of anyone that happened to be walking around in the process:-)
Building the things was pretty simple -- all you need is a strong tube, a projectile, propellant, and an ignition system. As others in this thread have mentioned, my friends' ignition of choice was the ignitor from old BBG grills. This worked fairly well -- you actually get a trigger to work with -- but they always seemed to break down after a while, so the design had to be built such that you could swap out the ignitition every now and then.
That is how Jeff burned his damn face off:-)
See, like I say, everyone would just sit around in their dorm, building these guns and preparing their next shots. Jeff was about to shoot his when, wouldn't you know it, the ignition jammed. Bummer. So as usual, he unscrewed the back to get at the ignition to check on it. Unwisely, this involved taking a look into the ignition chamber to see -- well, the back end of a potato & some invisible ether.
Did I mention that? I guess not -- their propellant of choice was ether. I have no idea where they got the stuff, but damn it was good for making a nice little controlled explosion. Or in this case, uncontrolled explosion.
So anyway, there Jeff was staring into the back end of the gun, when somehow he bumped the trigger.
And it went off.
And the ether exploded.
Remember how when you were a little kid, and you liked playing with the garden hose in the summer, but your evil older brother (that would be me:-) would hide around the corner pinching off the flow, and you'd get confused and look into the hose trying to find the water -- and just at that very moment that bastard of an older brother would uncrimp the hose and blast you in the face?
This was a lot like that, but with fire instead of water.
So anyway, there Jeff sits, with a ball of fire around his head, and well you get the idea. I wasn't actually there when this happened -- I was back at my dorm, probably cowering under the bed from my psycho buddies (or reading email more likely...). But Jeff was my roommate and, about five minutes after the incident, Jeff comes staggering back to the room. He has no eyebrows -- just white molten lumps where they used to be. He has no eyelashes. Or rather, he does have some remnants of eyelashes, but they are half an inch long each and there is is a six inch line across the front of his hairless brow. And exactly in the middle of his (now apparently sunburned) forehead is a bright red circle -- as if someone had thrown a tennis ball, dripping with paint, really hard at the middle of his forehead.
Jeff took a little nap at that point. He woke up a day or two later, ordered some pizza, ate, and went back to sleep. He slept for most of the next several days, it took a couple of weeks for the tennis ball spot to fade away, and it took a month or more for the hair to grow back. He wore a hat a lot those days, IIRC:-)
So, let this be a lesson to you spud projectionists -- the back end of the gun is just as dangerous as the front!
Hi. I said nothing about monopolies, whether or not the integration qualities I cite in Safari are in any way unique (I agree, they aren't), whether or not what they are doing is "anti-competitive" (I have no opinion on this angle and so did not comment on it), etc. Please chill out, re-read the post & the thread if necessary, and try to re-evaluate if I was *really* trying to be as antagonistic as your reply suggests.
Someone said that Safari isn't "integrated" with OSX, at least not yet. I argue that if you break down what is meant by integration -- that each system component is "tightly coupled" with others while at the same time, you also have "loose cohesion" -- any given component can be pulled out without too much pain -- I think we'd agree that Safari meets both of these criteria. This has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, anti-trust, or competition. This is good software engineering. One has nothing to do with the other.
Damn you people are testy about this stuff -- I don't even disagree with you but make a separate point and everyone seems to be painting me as some kind of Microsoft apologist.
Note to self: be more precise in the future so as not to lead to silliness like this thread...:-)
Sorry for the double-post -- accidently clicked submit, and there was a big typo in there. I'd delete the first one if I could...:-(
Expanding on your examples, the general rule seems to be that anything that all people *need* to get by -- clothing, supermarket food, medicine, and newspapers & magazines [<-- in order to be an informed member of society]-- are not subject to the sales tax. Anything that you can elect to buy or not buy -- most consumer goods, prepared foods (think of it as paying a tax on the service, not the food itself), books & other media, etc -- are subject to the 5% tax. It's not exactly progressive, but it does have some of the same logic of progressive luxury taxes.
Also, as leviramsey writes above, this isn't anything new. My impression (I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, though both my dad & my fiance are accountants so I'm not *totally* talking out of my ass here:-) is that it has always been expected that Massachusetts residents would pay state sales taxes on out-of-state purchases, but this is generally unenforceable.
There are situations where you can't get around the tax though -- we recently went shopping in New Hampshire, partly because the item we were looking for was on sale, but also partly because NH doesn't have a sales tax. The salesman told us that if we picked up the item on site then we could buy it without paying the tax, but if it needed to be delivered into Massachusetts then they were required to collect the tax. I'm sure that many border-town retailers have to be able to handle this sort of thing.
So, applying this to internet transactions isn't a new thing, just a new application of an old thing. My dad could explain this better than I can, but it seems like (at least in theory) nearly all states structure their sales tax laws such that you just have to pay a tax to the state you reside in. (That's why catalogs & mail-order offers usually say something like "residents of AA, BB, and CC must pay sales tax" -- those are the states where they have a physical presence; for others it's assumed that the consumer will be honest & pay the same sales tax manually.)
The obvious problem with that is that most people don't report out-of-state purchases that they owe on, but at the same time most retailers don't report out-of-state purchases that they over-collected; my hunch is that as long as these two sides roughly cancel out the tax won't ever be widely enforced, but it's no big deal in that case. The exception is things like big ticket items, catalog purchases, and now internet sales -- mainly because all of these are easier to account for systematically, if the will is there to do it. It sounds like the only twist here is that MA is starting to ask people to start doing that.
Really though, we all knew this was coming, especially now with many state budgets in the red after years of prosperity. MA is doing particularly badly right now, but I know it's not the only one and probably not even the worst off. If internet sales taxes are inevitable this doesn't seem like the worst way to tip our toes in the pool...
Expanding on your examples, the general rule seems to be that anything that all people *need* to get by -- clothing, supermarket food, medicine, and newspapers & magazines [Also, as leviramsey writes above, this isn't anything new. My impression (I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, though both my dad & my fiance are accountants so I'm not *totally* talking out of my ass here:-) is that it has always been expected that Massachusetts residents would pay state sales taxes on out-of-state purchases, but this is generally unenforceable.
There are situations where you can't get around the tax though -- we recently went shopping in New Hampshire, partly because the item we were looking for was on sale, but also partly because NH doesn't have a sales tax. The salesman told us that if we picked up the item on site then we could buy it without paying the tax, but if it needed to be delivered into Massachusetts then they were required to collect the tax. I'm sure that many border-town retailers have to be able to handle this sort of thing.
So, applying this to internet transactions isn't a new thing, just a new application of an old thing. My dad could explain this better than I can, but it seems like (at least in theory) nearly all states structure their sales tax laws such that you just have to pay a tax to the state you reside in. (That's why catalogs & mail-order offers usually say something like "residents of AA, BB, and CC must pay sales tax" -- those are the states where they have a physical presence; for others it's assumed that the consumer will be honest & pay the same sales tax manually.)
The obvious problem with that is that most people don't report out-of-state purchases that they owe on, but at the same time most retailers don't report out-of-state purchases that they over-collected; my hunch is that as long as these two sides roughly cancel out the tax won't ever be widely enforced, but it's no big deal in that case. The exception is things like big ticket items, catalog purchases, and now internet sales -- mainly because all of these are easier to account for systematically, if the will is there to do it. It sounds like the only twist here is that MA is starting to ask people to start doing that.
Really though, we all knew this was coming, especially now with many state budgets in the red after years of prosperity. MA is doing particularly badly right now, but I know it's not the only one and probably not even the worst off. If internet sales taxes are inevitable this doesn't seem like the worst way to tip our toes in the pool...
I realized that the original commenter probably was using the definition of 'integration' that everyone else here is using, but my point has been that if you think of it in terms of cohesion/coupling (I'm not pulling that out of my ass, that's textbook software engineering kind of stuff) then Safari is already pretty well "integrated" -- even if not in the antitrust abusive manner that many of the others are banging on about.
Look at Be's role in the whole MS antitrust saga. You can make a pretty strong case that Microsoft's tactics drove BeOS out of the market, even though it was a very high quality product.
The Justice Department didn't overlook this -- the interviewed Be's CEO Jean-Loius Gassee & asked him to testify about Microsoft's practices at trial. And he was happy to do so, but there was just one thing: Justice wanted him to talk about how the integration between IE and Windows had harmed BeOS, but Gassee didn't feel particularly worried about that -- in fact, he thought that it was a pretty good idea [1]. He was more worried about how Microsoft's situational enforcement of OEM contracts prevented manufacturers like Hitachi from shipping a computer that could dual boot with BeOS: Be and Hitachi entered into just such an arrangement, but when Microsoft found out about it they were furious, and told Hitachi that any attempt to advertise BeOS alongside Windows -- mentioning it on the packaging, in the documentation, in ads, on the machine itself, etc -- would be a violation & so termination of Hitachi's contracts with Microsoft. As a result, Hitachi ended up shipping laptops that could dual-boot Win98 and BeOS out of the box, but if you bought that machine without somehow knowing that feature in advance (from a third party, presumably), you probably never would have figured out why half of your hard drive was unavailable after you booted up Windows.
*That* I object to. Knee-jerk reactions against integration as a feature of good software engineering seems a little silly to me. Accuse me of picking semantic nits if you want to (and obviously, you do:), but in that case I no longer feel that "integration" was ever the real problem, and I don't see how it's a problem with Safari today.
[1] And so do I, and from my reading of what Apple is up to now with Safari, they seem to think integrating the web browser with the operating system is a pretty good idea too.
Really I think the burden of proof is on you. If I drag Safari to the Trash it will be as if Safari never existed.
Excuse me? I'm arguing that Apple has with Safari aimed for & for the most part achieved tight coupling (system components work well together, including in this case Safari with the rest of the system) and loose cohesion (components are not interdependent and so can be arbitrarily swapped out or removed). To refute this, you're telling me that you can delete Safari. I know that. I agree with that. In fact, you're parroting half of my argument back at me while steadfastly ignoring the other part. SO what's this burden of proof crap?;)
I think what you -- and several of the other posters -- are arguing is how heavily embedded Safari is or isn't in the OS. I'm not talking about that. That can play into the coupling/cohesion idea, but it's really not the same thing.
The only integration is that Safari looks like an iApp and it accesses the same features provided to 3rd party browsers.
And that, if you'll put the flame thrower back down, is more or less all I was getting at in the first place.
Did I touch a nerve or something? Sheesh. As Frankie wrote elsewhere in this thread, Apple is not a convicted abusive monopolist, and WebCore is LGPL. And as an anonymous coward noted, the other core technologies that Safari integrates with -- the open source Rendezvous API, the LDAP based AddressBook, etc -- are all generally open & libre. So when I talk about Safari being integrated, I'm talking about how this semi-open source application interfaces with these other open protocols in the system. That to me is integration. When I talk about Safari being integrated, I'm talking about how this application brings with it a web engine that can be embedded by any other application on the system, just like Rendezvous etc can. That to me is also integration. Not only that, it's obvious integration.
What is there to argue about here? Hold frickin' tempest in a teapot batman...
Currently. Will that still be true if/when KHTML & any other aspects of Safari become part of the system libraries? Maybe the Safari interface to those libraries will be easily removeable, but will that mean anything?
Software Update will never require you to run safari to update your other components.
Same objection applies -- the SoftwareUpdate application still seems to do HTTP communication and some kind of extraction of data returned from the web. Okay, so it's not doing real HTML rendering now, but if the library is just waiting to be used then why couldn't it be applied in a future version? (IMO, Microsoft just uses IE for WindowsUpdate just because it's so easy to put that info into a web page rather than having to keep a separate application on every instance of Windows they ship. The fact that Apple came to a different conclusion on this matter isn't very impressive to me one way or the other.).
A better example might be the help system -- that all seems to just be simple HTML rendering, and I don't see any reason that they wouldn't transition this to a KHTML based backend in a future release.
You can (if you wished) write a wrapper for Gecko and drop it in-place for WebCore.
Quite true. So what?
Need I continue?
Could you please? I remain unconvinced. You've given a handful of offhand remarks about how you can route around or remove Safari. That in my opinion doesn't refute the fact that Safari -- especially for a beta release -- is already remarkably integrated into the system, even if in a "loose coupling / tight cohesion" kind of way where, as I say, everything works well together but, as you say, components can still be removed or replaced without too much pain. I don't see any reason not to expect the cohesion among Safari and the rest of the system to get even tighter in post-Beta versions, and it remains an open question whether the loos coupling aspect that you're leaning on will remain part of the picture (though I think we both hope that loose coupling will still work well in future releases).
In what way, and for what reason, do you feel this to be so? What do you mean by "won't integrate it"?
After all, Safari already interfaces with both Rendezvous and AddressBook right in the main interface, and it offers simple gateways to helper applications like StuffIt, Preview, etc. Not only that, but one of the long term goals for Safari seems to be to make the KHTML engine available to third party application developers. If this isn't "integration", what is?
First, as several others have mentioned, go get a copy of Donald Norman's _Design of Everyday Things_ -- it's a fantastic book. The same author also wrote _Things Which Make us Smart_, which I'm borrowing but haven't read yet -- might start it now, now that you've reminded me. Ask again in a couple weeks for a review there...:-) Anyway though, definitely read DoET/PoET -- one of the [many] examples in the book dwells on how surprisingly difficult & non-intuitive thermostats are for most people, so I'm sure that will directly play into what you're looking for (even if maybe superficially).
The other thing would be to consider looking for material on "ergonomics" rather than "user interface", as the terms seem to be desribing the same general concepts but UI seems to be mainly used in software and ergonomics is what people in other fields tend to talk about. I'm not familiar with the standard ergonomic lit/texts (aside from DoET/PoET, which I suppose counts), but there has to be material out there -- people have been studying this stuff for decades at least, and I know it was a hot industrial topic through the past decade or so.
On the other hand, there's Fred Brooks' advice from The Mythical Man-Month: "Plan to throw the first one away. You will anyhow."
Sometimes, it really is easier to treat the first one as a prototype of what you'd really like, and then write that second one correctly, from scratch. Witness Mac Classic -> Mac OSX, Win9x -> WinNT, Perl5 -> Perl6, etc.
A lot of these prominent "next-generation" systems may share ideas & even code from their predecessors, but the essential point with each is that they all represent deliberate jump-cuts from the past. Sometimes it really is easier and better to rewrite something, whether or not you fully grok the original.
The real trick is to design systems well enough that, when someone comes along with better ideas, the framework you provide is robust enough to adapt. Mac Classic, Win9x/DOS, and Perl5 are all too inflexible for future use, though at this point each of them is still useful to certain groups. Their successors, however, are all designed with future expandability in mind, so that the "second system curse" can hopefully be avoided. History will tell if it ended up working in any of these cases...
Because this excellent essay is strong enough to be worth quoting as a whole, I paste The Problem With Music. Apologies for the odd formatting (tables not allowed, even if your data is tabular -- only the staff are allowed to do bad html!:).
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.
Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly. These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave.
Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well. There are several reasons A & R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A & R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it. When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast. By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A & R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.
These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on. The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength. These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.
One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A & R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises [something he did with similar effect to another well-known band], and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A & R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it. The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity. There's this band. They're pretty ordinary, but they're also pretty good, so they've attracted some attention. They're signed to a moderate-sized "independent" label owned by a distribution company, and they have another two albums owed to the label. They're a little ambitious. They'd like to get signed by a major label so they can have some security you know, get some good equipment, tour in a proper tour bus -- nothing fancy, just a little reward for all the hard work. To that end, they got a manager. He knows some of the label guys, and he can shop their next project to all the right people. He takes his cut, sure, but it's only 15%, and if he can get them signed then it's money well spent. Anyways, it doesn't cost them anything if it doesn't work. 15% of nothing isn't much! One day an A & R scout calls them, says he's 'been following them for a while now, and when their manager mentioned them to him, it just "clicked." Would they like to meet with him about the possibility of working out a deal with his label? Wow. Big Break time. They meet the guy, and y'know what -- he's not what they expected from a label guy. He's young and dresses pretty much like the band does. He knows all their favorite bands. He's like one of them. He tells them he wants to go to bat for them, to try to get them everything they want. He says anything is possible with the right attitude.
They conclude the evening by taking home a copy of a deal memo they wrote out and signed on the spot. The A & R guy was full of great ideas, even talked about using a name producer. Butch Vig is out of the question-he wants 100 g's and three points, but they can get Don Fleming for $30,000 plus three points. Even that's a little steep, so maybe they'll go with that guy who used to be in David Letterman's band. He only wants three points. Or they can have just anybody record it (like Warton Tiers, maybe-- cost you 5 or 7 grand] and have Andy Wallace remix it for 4 grand a track plus 2 points. It was a lot to think about. Well, they like this guy and they trust him. Besides, they already signed the deal memo. He must have been serious about wanting them to sign. They break the news to their current label, and the label manager says he wants them to succeed, so they have his blessing. He will need to be compensated, of course, for the remaining albums left on their contract, but he'll work it out with the label himself.
Sub Pop made millions from selling off Nirvana, and Twin Tone hasn't done bad either: 50 grand for the Babes and 60 grand for the Poster Children-- without having to sell a single additional record. It'll be something modest. The new label doesn't mind, so long as it's recoupable out of royalties. Well, they get the final contract, and it's not quite what they expected. They figure it's better to be safe than sorry and they turn it over to a lawyer--one who says he's experienced in entertainment law and he hammers out a few bugs. They're still not sure about it, but the lawyer says he's seen a lot of contracts, and theirs is pretty good. They'll be great royalty: 13% [less a 1O% packaging deduction]. Wasn't it Buffalo Tom that were only getting 12% less 10? Whatever. The old label only wants 50 grand, an no points. Hell, Sub Pop got 3 points when they let Nirvana go. They're signed for four years, with options on each year, for a total of over a million dollars! That's a lot of money in any man's English. The first year's advance alone is $250,000. Just think about it, a quarter million, just for being in a rock band! Their manager thinks it's a great deal, especially the large advance. Besides, he knows a publishing company that will take the band on if they get signed, and even give them an advance of 20 grand, so they'll be making that money too. The manager says publishing is pretty mysterious, and nobody really knows where all the money comes from, but the lawyer can look that contract over too. Hell, it's free money. Their booking agent is excited about the band signing to a major. He says they can maybe average $1,000 or $2,000 a night from now on. That's enough to justify a five week tour, and with tour support, they can use a proper crew, buy some good equipment and even get a tour bus! Buses are pretty expensive, but if you figure in the price of a hotel room for everybody In the band and crew, they're actually about the same cost. Some bands like Therapy? and Sloan and Stereolab use buses on their tours even when they're getting paid only a couple hundred bucks a night, and this tour should earn at least a grand or two every night. It'll be worth it. The band will be more comfortable and will play better.
The agent says a band on a major label can get a merchandising company to pay them an advance on T-shirt sales! ridiculous! There's a gold mine here! The lawyer Should look over the merchandising contract, just to be safe. They get drunk at the signing party. Polaroids are taken and everybody looks thrilled. The label picked them up in a limo. They decided to go with the producer who used to be in Letterman's band. He had these technicians come in and tune the drums for them and tweak their amps and guitars. He had a guy bring in a slew of expensive old "vintage" microphones. Boy, were they "warm." He even had a guy come in and check the phase of all the equipment in the control room! Boy, was he professional. He used a bunch of equipment on them and by the end of it, they all agreed that it sounded very "punchy," yet "warm." All that hard work paid off. With the help of a video, the album went like hotcakes! They sold a quarter million copies! Here is the math that will explain just how fucked they are: These figures are representative of amounts that appear in record contracts daily. There's no need to skew the figures to make the scenario look bad, since real-life examples more than abound. Income is bold [and italicized], expenses are not.
The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
Record company:
$ 710,000
Producer:
$ 90,000
Manager:
$ 51,000
Studio:
$ 52,500
Previous label:
$ 50,000
Agent:
$ 7,500
Lawyer:
$ 12,000
Band member net income each:
$ 4,031.25
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
Steve Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana's "In Utero".
I love that essay. A cousin of mine is a fairly successful rock musician in various bands here in Boston, and as much as I'd love to see his bands really take off, reading this essay makes me very glad that that hasn't happened yet. Sad, really, but it seems like the only way to really "make it" is to go the Fugazi styled DIY route so that the industry can't fuck you over...
Re:Why can't we have legal restrictions on spam?
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
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· Score: 4, Informative
Please take a look at my notes on last week's spam conference, and in particular the Jon Praed notes (near the end; two speakers came after him).
Praed argued, very eloquoently & persuasively (hey, he's a lawyer:) that there are laws on the books banning spam in nearly every state. All you have to do is find a way to bring those laws to your assistance. In particular, note that:
Ever have a hard time tracking down a spammer? Ever have one that spoofed message headers? Gee, that sounds like fraud, doesn't it? Indeed it does -- much or even all spam can be considered as fraud, and as such you can attack it from that angle anywhere in the country.
Laws are pending in various jurisdictions to outlaw spammers' bulk mail software. The catch here is that there is a lot of legitimate bulk mail software that can be abused -- think majordomo, MailMan, etc -- so any laws crafted will have to include clauses that protect legitimate use of such software while banning UCE somehow. Watch for this to develop over time.
Suggestion: if you get spam that mentions a trademarked product (Viagra, pirated copies of well known software, etc), forward the message to the holder of that trademark. They will almost always be keenly interested in this abuse of their trade name, and will take it upon themselves to go after the spammer.
If you are in the habit of reporting spam to an organization like SpamCop, do so as quickly as possible: spammers are getting in the habit of leaving their ads up long enough for recipients to respond to, but pulling them down before investigators get a chance to scrutinize anything. The faster these groups can analyze the sources of spam, the better the chances of getting all the way back to the source.
Final and most important point: the precedent set by the Verizon vs. Ralsky case was very valuable to anti-spam efforts. First, that spam prosecution can be carried out in the jurisdiction that the harm occurred, not where the person doing harm was when causing it. So if California has anti-spam laws, they can potentially be used no matter where the spammer lives. Praed practices law in Virginia, so I'm assuming that their laws are amenable to this kind of application. Second point: ignorance about an ISPs acceptable use policies (AUP) are no defence in court -- certain etiquette standards have emerged over time, and it is assumed that the sender of UCE has to be aware of these standards. As a result, if your ISP has an AUP that forbids UCE, this can be a tangible protection for you in court. This is very good news!
As a lawyer that has successfully prosecuted a number of spammers, Praed was able to talk about all of this with some authority. He cautioned everyone though that laws will never eradicate spam -- as he put it, "people still rob banks since that's where the money is". But legislation & prosecution can still be a very valuable tool in fighting spam, and an important supplement to things like better mail filters. This is a big problem, and is going to need a variety of tiered solutions to control it.
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Parse::RecDescent is available for the 5.x series (I think it's part of the core download for 5.8, and was optional for 5.6, but am not 100% sure about that), but it seems like it's going to become a more core component when 6 arrives. If you want to be able to do this stuff, look into it -- you don't have to wait for Perl6 to start using this. It's available now, and it's *great*. :)
AS TotM noted, tabs are just one way to represent a Multiple Document Interface. My personal preference for getting to this is not with tabs in the Mozilla / Excel vein, but drawers in the Mail.app / Calculator.app vein. With a hierarchical display of sections like open windows, bookmarks. history pages, etc, and (ultra wish list) with page thumbnails as icons), you could get a much richer interface than the simple row of buttons that you get in these hip modern browsers. If Safari ever moves to a MDI style (or at least, the option for such a style), my hope is that drawers end up being the way to get there.
Yes! Thank you, that's exactly the one I was trying to think of. Poking around on the closest Windows box (a laptop running Win2kPro), there doesn't seem to be a rawrite.exe file under the %SYSTEMROOT% directory, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough. Oh well, I've got Cygwin anyway so the point is moot here.
As for the loopback trick, that I don't know about. Someone cleverer than me might be able to do this within the Cygwin environment (or some other way?) but I have no idea where to even start...
On Apple's X11 list, it has been stated that X11.app's QuartzWM is going to remain closed-source and proprietary. That's all their code and they're going to keep it to themselves, as is their right. On the other hand, the extensions made to the xfree86 codebase have been offered back to the community under the same licensing terms as the rest of that project.
If the patent requires "making a test and posting the test online...for potential test takers", as the CrainTech article suggests, then SkillCheck (&/or one or more of their competitors) was doing that commercially well before 1999. From a quick skim of their patent, it looks like all you need is any client-server arrangement where you've got one server running a database & test logic while at the same time you can do tests & test management from the client end. Quoting just the patent abstract:
Maybe I'm dense but where's the clever part in all of this?
That CT article doesn't exactly paint this company in a positive light -- look at what they're trying to do: (a) not use their patent, but force companies to sign up as licensees & live off the rent from that; (b) squat on the test.com domain until someone finds it valuable enough to buy from them; (c) sell off their assets to one of the companies that they're trying to strongarm with the patent, granting them their domain name, software, and any other assets. Yuck -- if only we could count on this getting laughed out of court if they ever try to pursue it.
I would argue that this cannot be a net gain in your favor, so like I say -- if you want to open a service, you're best off by doing so directly rather than mucking around with switching ports, running shells through CGI, etc. Each of those transitions is a new potential point of failure that needs to be managed, and I don't see the point of taking on that challenge.
As others have said, there are so many ways this could be abused, either willfully or by accident. You can make the situation a little bit better by restricting this service to HTTPS sites, certain users or IPs, etc -- but why bother reinventing the wheel when, in the form of SSH (or even Telnet), this is a more or less solved problem?
I do not see this as a good idea for general Geocities styled simple CGI site hosting. It might be useful in certain restricted environments -- your server's co-location facility only allows port 80, but you have VPN access & can usefully tunnel in this way -- but any example I can think of (like the one I just wrote) is pretty contrived & probably full of holes. It is a pretty clever engineering hack, but not one that should probably be released into the wild -- it addresses the wrong problem in the wrong way, albeit cleverly.
guilty as charged -- mea culpa.
Okay, brainfart, trying to hard to see patterns...
Now the US may also have reason to want to mothball ISS...
There's a pattern going back at least as far as Abraham Lincoln where any president elected in a year ending in a zero (that is, every 20 years -- 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920...) has died or nearly died in office, either of natural causes or by attempted or successful assassination. Just to cite examples off the top of my head -- Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy were all assassinated, Roosevelt died of natural causes, and assassination attempts were made on Reagan and Bush II.
Whether or not this actually means anything is a matter of opinion. I just think it's one of those funny coincidences, but people more into numerology, gammatria, and grand conspiracy theories may be more likely to suspect something deeper. In any case, to go with the 20 year presidential fatality cycle, we now have established a 17 year NASA fatality cycle. draw what conclusions you will.
Parrot support seems likely to catch on because the plan is for Perl6 to run on top of it, and chances are very good that Perl6 will be adopted pretty widely in time. If other target languages have enough faith in Parrot to embrace it as well, then even better, but Perl alone should be strong enough to guarantee widespread distribution in due course. And everyone knows that all the current [by then "legacy"] code is going to have to be supported somehow, so backwards compatibility in one form or another is a very strong possibility -- which means that the problems Apache2 is having hopefully won't be so bad for Perl6. Hopefully.
The problem between now and then is that the three main Perl6 developers -- Larry Wall (language designer), Damian Conway (co-language designer & evangelist), and Dan Sugalski (low level implementation, including Parrot) -- are all out of work right now. They're all in the unfortunate position of being ridiculously over-qualified for most Perl hacker jobs, and finding an employer that would be willing to sponsor them to do Perl6 development right now is proving to be tricky. If anyone could give a hand to these guys, they and their families would appreciate it today, and the whole Perl community would appreciate it in the long term -- having them focusing on paying the bills kind of forces Perl6 to wait... :(
Building the things was pretty simple -- all you need is a strong tube, a projectile, propellant, and an ignition system. As others in this thread have mentioned, my friends' ignition of choice was the ignitor from old BBG grills. This worked fairly well -- you actually get a trigger to work with -- but they always seemed to break down after a while, so the design had to be built such that you could swap out the ignitition every now and then.
That is how Jeff burned his damn face off :-)
See, like I say, everyone would just sit around in their dorm, building these guns and preparing their next shots. Jeff was about to shoot his when, wouldn't you know it, the ignition jammed. Bummer. So as usual, he unscrewed the back to get at the ignition to check on it. Unwisely, this involved taking a look into the ignition chamber to see -- well, the back end of a potato & some invisible ether.
Did I mention that? I guess not -- their propellant of choice was ether. I have no idea where they got the stuff, but damn it was good for making a nice little controlled explosion. Or in this case, uncontrolled explosion.
So anyway, there Jeff was staring into the back end of the gun, when somehow he bumped the trigger.
And it went off.
And the ether exploded.
Remember how when you were a little kid, and you liked playing with the garden hose in the summer, but your evil older brother (that would be me :-) would hide around the corner pinching off the flow, and you'd get confused and look into the hose trying to find the water -- and just at that very moment that bastard of an older brother would uncrimp the hose and blast you in the face?
This was a lot like that, but with fire instead of water.
So anyway, there Jeff sits, with a ball of fire around his head, and well you get the idea. I wasn't actually there when this happened -- I was back at my dorm, probably cowering under the bed from my psycho buddies (or reading email more likely...). But Jeff was my roommate and, about five minutes after the incident, Jeff comes staggering back to the room. He has no eyebrows -- just white molten lumps where they used to be. He has no eyelashes. Or rather, he does have some remnants of eyelashes, but they are half an inch long each and there is is a six inch line across the front of his hairless brow. And exactly in the middle of his (now apparently sunburned) forehead is a bright red circle -- as if someone had thrown a tennis ball, dripping with paint, really hard at the middle of his forehead.
Jeff took a little nap at that point. He woke up a day or two later, ordered some pizza, ate, and went back to sleep. He slept for most of the next several days, it took a couple of weeks for the tennis ball spot to fade away, and it took a month or more for the hair to grow back. He wore a hat a lot those days, IIRC :-)
So, let this be a lesson to you spud projectionists -- the back end of the gun is just as dangerous as the front!
Someone said that Safari isn't "integrated" with OSX, at least not yet. I argue that if you break down what is meant by integration -- that each system component is "tightly coupled" with others while at the same time, you also have "loose cohesion" -- any given component can be pulled out without too much pain -- I think we'd agree that Safari meets both of these criteria. This has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, anti-trust, or competition. This is good software engineering. One has nothing to do with the other.
Damn you people are testy about this stuff -- I don't even disagree with you but make a separate point and everyone seems to be painting me as some kind of Microsoft apologist.
Note to self: be more precise in the future so as not to lead to silliness like this thread... :-)
Expanding on your examples, the general rule seems to be that anything that all people *need* to get by -- clothing, supermarket food, medicine, and newspapers & magazines [<-- in order to be an informed member of society]-- are not subject to the sales tax. Anything that you can elect to buy or not buy -- most consumer goods, prepared foods (think of it as paying a tax on the service, not the food itself), books & other media, etc -- are subject to the 5% tax. It's not exactly progressive, but it does have some of the same logic of progressive luxury taxes.
Also, as leviramsey writes above, this isn't anything new. My impression (I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, though both my dad & my fiance are accountants so I'm not *totally* talking out of my ass here :-) is that it has always been expected that Massachusetts residents would pay state sales taxes on out-of-state purchases, but this is generally unenforceable.
There are situations where you can't get around the tax though -- we recently went shopping in New Hampshire, partly because the item we were looking for was on sale, but also partly because NH doesn't have a sales tax. The salesman told us that if we picked up the item on site then we could buy it without paying the tax, but if it needed to be delivered into Massachusetts then they were required to collect the tax. I'm sure that many border-town retailers have to be able to handle this sort of thing.
So, applying this to internet transactions isn't a new thing, just a new application of an old thing. My dad could explain this better than I can, but it seems like (at least in theory) nearly all states structure their sales tax laws such that you just have to pay a tax to the state you reside in. (That's why catalogs & mail-order offers usually say something like "residents of AA, BB, and CC must pay sales tax" -- those are the states where they have a physical presence; for others it's assumed that the consumer will be honest & pay the same sales tax manually.)
The obvious problem with that is that most people don't report out-of-state purchases that they owe on, but at the same time most retailers don't report out-of-state purchases that they over-collected; my hunch is that as long as these two sides roughly cancel out the tax won't ever be widely enforced, but it's no big deal in that case. The exception is things like big ticket items, catalog purchases, and now internet sales -- mainly because all of these are easier to account for systematically, if the will is there to do it. It sounds like the only twist here is that MA is starting to ask people to start doing that.
Really though, we all knew this was coming, especially now with many state budgets in the red after years of prosperity. MA is doing particularly badly right now, but I know it's not the only one and probably not even the worst off. If internet sales taxes are inevitable this doesn't seem like the worst way to tip our toes in the pool...
There are situations where you can't get around the tax though -- we recently went shopping in New Hampshire, partly because the item we were looking for was on sale, but also partly because NH doesn't have a sales tax. The salesman told us that if we picked up the item on site then we could buy it without paying the tax, but if it needed to be delivered into Massachusetts then they were required to collect the tax. I'm sure that many border-town retailers have to be able to handle this sort of thing.
So, applying this to internet transactions isn't a new thing, just a new application of an old thing. My dad could explain this better than I can, but it seems like (at least in theory) nearly all states structure their sales tax laws such that you just have to pay a tax to the state you reside in. (That's why catalogs & mail-order offers usually say something like "residents of AA, BB, and CC must pay sales tax" -- those are the states where they have a physical presence; for others it's assumed that the consumer will be honest & pay the same sales tax manually.)
The obvious problem with that is that most people don't report out-of-state purchases that they owe on, but at the same time most retailers don't report out-of-state purchases that they over-collected; my hunch is that as long as these two sides roughly cancel out the tax won't ever be widely enforced, but it's no big deal in that case. The exception is things like big ticket items, catalog purchases, and now internet sales -- mainly because all of these are easier to account for systematically, if the will is there to do it. It sounds like the only twist here is that MA is starting to ask people to start doing that.
Really though, we all knew this was coming, especially now with many state budgets in the red after years of prosperity. MA is doing particularly badly right now, but I know it's not the only one and probably not even the worst off. If internet sales taxes are inevitable this doesn't seem like the worst way to tip our toes in the pool...
I realized that the original commenter probably was using the definition of 'integration' that everyone else here is using, but my point has been that if you think of it in terms of cohesion/coupling (I'm not pulling that out of my ass, that's textbook software engineering kind of stuff) then Safari is already pretty well "integrated" -- even if not in the antitrust abusive manner that many of the others are banging on about.
Look at Be's role in the whole MS antitrust saga. You can make a pretty strong case that Microsoft's tactics drove BeOS out of the market, even though it was a very high quality product.
The Justice Department didn't overlook this -- the interviewed Be's CEO Jean-Loius Gassee & asked him to testify about Microsoft's practices at trial. And he was happy to do so, but there was just one thing: Justice wanted him to talk about how the integration between IE and Windows had harmed BeOS, but Gassee didn't feel particularly worried about that -- in fact, he thought that it was a pretty good idea [1]. He was more worried about how Microsoft's situational enforcement of OEM contracts prevented manufacturers like Hitachi from shipping a computer that could dual boot with BeOS: Be and Hitachi entered into just such an arrangement, but when Microsoft found out about it they were furious, and told Hitachi that any attempt to advertise BeOS alongside Windows -- mentioning it on the packaging, in the documentation, in ads, on the machine itself, etc -- would be a violation & so termination of Hitachi's contracts with Microsoft. As a result, Hitachi ended up shipping laptops that could dual-boot Win98 and BeOS out of the box, but if you bought that machine without somehow knowing that feature in advance (from a third party, presumably), you probably never would have figured out why half of your hard drive was unavailable after you booted up Windows.
*That* I object to. Knee-jerk reactions against integration as a feature of good software engineering seems a little silly to me. Accuse me of picking semantic nits if you want to (and obviously, you do :), but in that case I no longer feel that "integration" was ever the real problem, and I don't see how it's a problem with Safari today.
[1] And so do I, and from my reading of what Apple is up to now with Safari, they seem to think integrating the web browser with the operating system is a pretty good idea too.
Excuse me? I'm arguing that Apple has with Safari aimed for & for the most part achieved tight coupling (system components work well together, including in this case Safari with the rest of the system) and loose cohesion (components are not interdependent and so can be arbitrarily swapped out or removed). To refute this, you're telling me that you can delete Safari. I know that. I agree with that. In fact, you're parroting half of my argument back at me while steadfastly ignoring the other part. SO what's this burden of proof crap? ;)
I think what you -- and several of the other posters -- are arguing is how heavily embedded Safari is or isn't in the OS. I'm not talking about that. That can play into the coupling/cohesion idea, but it's really not the same thing.
And that, if you'll put the flame thrower back down, is more or less all I was getting at in the first place.
Did I touch a nerve or something? Sheesh. As Frankie wrote elsewhere in this thread, Apple is not a convicted abusive monopolist, and WebCore is LGPL. And as an anonymous coward noted, the other core technologies that Safari integrates with -- the open source Rendezvous API, the LDAP based AddressBook, etc -- are all generally open & libre. So when I talk about Safari being integrated, I'm talking about how this semi-open source application interfaces with these other open protocols in the system. That to me is integration. When I talk about Safari being integrated, I'm talking about how this application brings with it a web engine that can be embedded by any other application on the system, just like Rendezvous etc can. That to me is also integration. Not only that, it's obvious integration.
What is there to argue about here? Hold frickin' tempest in a teapot batman...
Currently. Will that still be true if/when KHTML & any other aspects of Safari become part of the system libraries? Maybe the Safari interface to those libraries will be easily removeable, but will that mean anything?
Same objection applies -- the SoftwareUpdate application still seems to do HTTP communication and some kind of extraction of data returned from the web. Okay, so it's not doing real HTML rendering now, but if the library is just waiting to be used then why couldn't it be applied in a future version? (IMO, Microsoft just uses IE for WindowsUpdate just because it's so easy to put that info into a web page rather than having to keep a separate application on every instance of Windows they ship. The fact that Apple came to a different conclusion on this matter isn't very impressive to me one way or the other.).
A better example might be the help system -- that all seems to just be simple HTML rendering, and I don't see any reason that they wouldn't transition this to a KHTML based backend in a future release.
Quite true. So what?
Could you please? I remain unconvinced. You've given a handful of offhand remarks about how you can route around or remove Safari. That in my opinion doesn't refute the fact that Safari -- especially for a beta release -- is already remarkably integrated into the system, even if in a "loose coupling / tight cohesion" kind of way where, as I say, everything works well together but, as you say, components can still be removed or replaced without too much pain. I don't see any reason not to expect the cohesion among Safari and the rest of the system to get even tighter in post-Beta versions, and it remains an open question whether the loos coupling aspect that you're leaning on will remain part of the picture (though I think we both hope that loose coupling will still work well in future releases).
In what way, and for what reason, do you feel this to be so? What do you mean by "won't integrate it"?
After all, Safari already interfaces with both Rendezvous and AddressBook right in the main interface, and it offers simple gateways to helper applications like StuffIt, Preview, etc. Not only that, but one of the long term goals for Safari seems to be to make the KHTML engine available to third party application developers. If this isn't "integration", what is?
The other thing would be to consider looking for material on "ergonomics" rather than "user interface", as the terms seem to be desribing the same general concepts but UI seems to be mainly used in software and ergonomics is what people in other fields tend to talk about. I'm not familiar with the standard ergonomic lit/texts (aside from DoET/PoET, which I suppose counts), but there has to be material out there -- people have been studying this stuff for decades at least, and I know it was a hot industrial topic through the past decade or so.
Sometimes, it really is easier to treat the first one as a prototype of what you'd really like, and then write that second one correctly, from scratch. Witness Mac Classic -> Mac OSX, Win9x -> WinNT, Perl5 -> Perl6, etc.
A lot of these prominent "next-generation" systems may share ideas & even code from their predecessors, but the essential point with each is that they all represent deliberate jump-cuts from the past. Sometimes it really is easier and better to rewrite something, whether or not you fully grok the original.
The real trick is to design systems well enough that, when someone comes along with better ideas, the framework you provide is robust enough to adapt. Mac Classic, Win9x/DOS, and Perl5 are all too inflexible for future use, though at this point each of them is still useful to certain groups. Their successors, however, are all designed with future expandability in mind, so that the "second system curse" can hopefully be avoided. History will tell if it ended up working in any of these cases...
Because this excellent essay is strong enough to be worth quoting as a whole, I paste The Problem With Music. Apologies for the odd formatting (tables not allowed, even if your data is tabular -- only the staff are allowed to do bad html! :).
Manager's cut:
Legal fees:
Recording Budget:
Producer's advance:
Studio fee:
Drum Amp, Mic and Phase "Doctors":
Recording tape:
Equipment rental:
Cartage and Transportation:
Lodgings while in studio:
Catering:
Mastering:
Tape copies, reference CDs, shipping tapes, misc. expenses:
Video budget:
Cameras:
Crew:
Processing and transfers:
Off-line:
On-line editing:
Catering:
Stage and construction:
Copies, couriers, transportation:
Director's fee:
Album Artwork:
Promotional photo shoot and duplication:
Band fund:
New fancy professional drum kit:
New fancy professional guitars [2]:
New fancy professional guitar amp rigs [2]:
New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar:
New fancy rack of lights bass amp:
Rehearsal space rental:
Big blowout party for their friends:
Tour expense [5 weeks]:
Bus:
Crew [3]:
Food and per diems:
Fuel:
Consumable supplies:
Wardrobe:
Promotion:
Tour gross income:
Agent's cut:
Manager's cut:
Merchandising advance:
Manager's cut:
Lawyer's fee:
Publishing advance:
Manager's cut:
Lawyer's fee:
Record sales:
Gross retail revenue Royalty:
Less advance:
Producer's points:
Promotional budget:
Recoupable buyout from previous label:
+++++++++
Record company income:
+++++++++
The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
Steve Albini is an independent and corporate rock record producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana's "In Utero".
I love that essay. A cousin of mine is a fairly successful rock musician in various bands here in Boston, and as much as I'd love to see his bands really take off, reading this essay makes me very glad that that hasn't happened yet. Sad, really, but it seems like the only way to really "make it" is to go the Fugazi styled DIY route so that the industry can't fuck you over...
Praed argued, very eloquoently & persuasively (hey, he's a lawyer :) that there are laws on the books banning spam in nearly every state. All you have to do is find a way to bring those laws to your assistance. In particular, note that:
As a lawyer that has successfully prosecuted a number of spammers, Praed was able to talk about all of this with some authority. He cautioned everyone though that laws will never eradicate spam -- as he put it, "people still rob banks since that's where the money is". But legislation & prosecution can still be a very valuable tool in fighting spam, and an important supplement to things like better mail filters. This is a big problem, and is going to need a variety of tiered solutions to control it.