Heh, yeah well you could say that too, but actually I was thinking more along the lines of "gee, isn't it strange to have this high quality system now being reconfigured to run as an emulation of itself"? (Granted, I wouldn't call Office "high quality" by any stretch of the imagination, but you get the idea.) I realize that some problem sets are so massively parallel that they could be more easily attacked by a massively parallel computing system (Beowulf clusters, SETI distributed computing, etc), but I've always kind of seen these strategies as a way around the fact that the high end stuff is so expensive & thus inaccessible. I find it amusing that the makers of the high end stuff are now going after the people that are trying to emulate them....
A quick skim over some of the higher rated comments shows a common thread -- a lot of people are concerned that moving to x86 would be to abandon the superior Apple hardware and to embrace a lot of crappy legacy stuff. Could Apple not do what BeOS does, by saying "yeah, you can run it on a regular x86 box, but you have to have at least x for a graphics card, at least y for audio, and at least z for the $whatever.
That way, you can support the platform without supporting all the cruft that has built up over the years. I can almost see Apple defending their hardware (and the higher prices for it) by saying something to the effect of "yeah, you can run OSX on PC hardware, but you need at least a PIII / 1.2 gHz or equivalent processor, 196 mb of ram, a DVD burner...", etc -- just make the requirements so high that it would be a relatively expensive kit anyway, so it wouldn't hurt G3 based sales that badly, and it would avoid a lot of the legacy issue.
Haven't you noticed that PBS runs ads before & after every show?
Oh yeah, I realize that. I listen to a lot more NPR than I watch PBS, but same deal -- before & after each show they'll have a blurb about "funding is provided by Allaire, enabling blah blah blah" type stuff.
Apparently this report was saying that such advertisments may begin to go further now, with more mainstream-esque ads every five minutes just like or normal for-profit commercial broadcasters. That, and it suggested that the BBC has not run any ads to date (I can't confirm that part, but I understand that people have to pay to subscribe, something like cable TV here in the US), but may soon begin to. (The latter point was really the central point of the report).
I'm of at least two minds about it all. On one hand, it's nice to have a broadcast organization, and particularly a news organization, that is as independent as possible, and I know that's a fragile thing to have. IIRC, NPR caught some flack a year or two ago for it's mild coverage of corruption & fraud at Archer Daniels Midland company, because ADM was a huge supporter of NPR news. A lot of the supporters, at least for the local station (WBUR Boston), are of the new media / new economy variety (Allaire, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, et al), and it makes me wonder how critically they can cover those that are paying their bills. (In the same way that ABC has suppressed negative reports about Disney now.). On the other hand, people don't want their tax dollars paying for this, and money from pledge drives never seems to be enough, so what can they do? Personally, I'm all for 100% public (aka government) funding, but I realize I'm probably of the minority opinion on that one...
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you... just one word.
Andy Grove: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Andy Grove: Yes, sir I am.
Mr. McGuire: "Plastics."
Well, it's a computery site so I figured a computery name would be appropriate. I was surprised to find it untaken & that was that. *shrug*.
For those that don't know about him (I've always assumed most people here would), he was in a lot of ways the first computer scientist, having designed & built the first computational devices as we know them today (i.e. something more advanced than, say, an abacus). Interestingly now, but fittingly for a Victorian inventor, they operated purely mechanically, without any of the transistors or other electronic components that are now synonymous with computers. Nonetheless, they were designed to do the same basic functions that a modern computer does, and (yes) it may well have been able to run the Linux kernel.:)
I find it fitting that his assistant, Ada Lovelace, was the first programmer. It's nice to know that the field had an even 50-50 gender parity at one point, and hopefully it could again in the future. In the meantime, however, we'll make the most of the sausage party....
Wow, NPR's Marketplace is talking about this on the news right now. It seems that the BBC, PBS, and NPR are all considering the same issue now -- can a public broadcaster turn around & start running ads, considering that they've built their public reputation on public money. Interesting question.....
The thing is, you write as if your audience were readers of, say, Salon or Atlantic Monthly, when actually it's more like the audience of some weird hybrid between a Unix system administrator's journal and, say, Mad Magazine. You keep writing all this leisurely high level analysis of the subculture as you see it, and the readers either don't get it or don't agree.
It's not that you're wrong in your anthropological analysis, or that the typical Slashdot reader isn't interested in that sort of thing (e.g. consider what a manifesto "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" has been), but that readers either don't see things enough that way that they would want to want to read about it all the time, or they don't look at things in such a high level way and it's annoying to hear some member-of-the-staff-no-less pundit babbling about it all the time.
But to hell with those readers, right?
Having an in-house essayist isn't such a bad thing. It's a nice tradition to be a part of -- we could do a whole lot worse than to have a Thomas Paine around, right? As long as there isn't too much "mountains out of molehills" stuff in your essays, there (hopefully) won't be so much "tempest in a teapot" reactionism to what you have to say.
Fact is, I've been annoyed by some of your rants myself, but now that I think about it, I think you have the job pretty much any Slashdot regular would love to have -- Ranter-In-Chief. After all, isn't that what Slashdot is all about?
Incidently, it was nice to hear you on The Connection last week. I was hoping the show would have been linked to Slashdot, but oh well. I think this audience could do for some exposure to that kind of reasoned discussion forum...
Actually, the Florida recount was smacked down by 5-4, not 7-2, because the US supreme court was all wishy washy, first asking to Florida court not to impose a standard (as that would be unconstitutional), and then penalize it (and the people of Florida, and the rest of the country and the world, but playing nicely into the hands of the SNL writers for the next few years) because the Florida court, as instructed, did not impose a standard. Well duh...
The fact is, the Florida court was letting the local agencies involved determine their own standards because that was exactly the US court told them to do. Allowing dimpled chads would have been just fine, and the US court even said as much, but it first halted the count that Saturday and then, Monday night, said "yeah okay you can keep counting but you have to have it done by the day we have arbitrarily decided is really important, which happens to be in 90 minutes. Good luck fellas...".
Bullshit.
I can't beging to count the dirty things that went on in this election, and though I'm a bit more sympathetic with the side that lost, I'm not about to say that their hands are any cleaner. This had nothing to do with upholding democracy or any such high minded claptrap. This was a matter of the rich white guy with the highest placed friends getting what he & his friends wanted. Democracy? No. An elected president? Hardly.
You republicans were pissed at the failure of Clinton to win a majority vote, well lookee here -- your boy got neither a majority not a plurality, and if his cronies had allowed the counting process to finish naturally, they would not be sitting on the throne today. Support el presidente if you want to, but I'm disgusted by the whole farce of it, and can't wait for the bastards to get thrown out of there...
No, the other guy (I didn't support him either:) was elected by the majority of the people in all 50 states, almost definitely including Florida. The doubt about the true outcome of the race will never be known, but I know without any question that the way George II acceded to the office, by a 5-4 endorsement of the supreme court, is completely without precedent in this country, and most definitely not how we go about choosing our presidents. Call this guy whatever you want ("moron" works for me:), but he has not earned the title that has been bestowed upon him, and I refuse to give him the honor of the name "mister president". He simply is not that.
I realize that early electors were appointed by the legislatures, but that isn't what happened this year. You must have been watching Rush instead of the news, or you would have saw that whole thing about the supreme court appointing him. It was big news, I'm surprised you missed it...
No, he *isn't* my president. Presidents are elected, so that rules out Dubyuh here. He's a king, or a prime minister maybe, but the term president, as we've known it for 200+ years now, does not apply.
And if you think about it (which, we both know, you wouldn't:), shouting "I'd like to kill the King" is as likely to get someone in trouble as shouting "I'd like to kill the president", so I'm not really sure what your little game would prove. I'd ask you to explain, but it's funnier for me to just undercut you & walk away. So ner.
You are a fag
Feeling a bit insecure in our sexuality, are we private? There there, no one's gonna ask so you don't have to tell.
In other news, Microsoft has announced that they are going to be porting all their software to Wine.:
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 29, 2001-- Global software leader Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) today announced plans to offer "Wine" Linux SuperOffice® systems -- highly-robust versions of their current desktop productivity software that combine blazing problem-solving speed with increasingly popular data stability, attractive price-performance and the popular Linux operating system.
The product line will be formally launched in coming months and is scheduled to begin shipping in the mid-2001 timeframe. The company has received an early order agreement from ApplixWare and expects to announce multiple orders by the time of the product launch. Financial terms were not none of your damn business.
``The Microsoft SuperOffice Series targets the need for clusters with higher capability than those available in the market today,'' said Microsoft Chairman and CEO Steve Ballmer. ``Organizations around the world have told us they want the advanced capabilities of our Office productivity suite to be re-architected using leading COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) Windows Emulation technologies. This is an attractive revenue growth opportunity for us.'' The Microsoft P2C2E(TM) (Process Too Complicated To Explain) system holds the world record for sustained computer reliability and was named 2000 ``Super Duper Computer Product of the Year'' by someone or other.
``Starting in mid-2001 and continuing over the next two years, we plan to phase in unrivaled capabilities that enable customers in academia, government and industry to advance the boundaries of marketing and management while better managing their large, tedious workloads,'' said Willy Gates, software architect for the Microsoft SuperOffice series. ``We will combine Microsoft's Innovative (make sure you get that word -- innovative -- that's very important -- EYE ENN ENN OH VEE AY TEE EYE VEE EE) Windows-oriented architecture, proven Unicode client operating environment and advanced system software with Wine, the latest Windows-on-Windows emulation technology from those bastard godless open source poopieheads, and the highly scalable Gbberish.NET client-interconnect network from VapoCom''
Gates said targeted capabilities include:
Superior sustained performance on Win32 based Intel computing environments working on various problem sizes and workloads, made possible by marrying the high-availability Microsoft SuperOffice architecture with our current Intel based clients -- based on the world's most commonly available 32-bit processor -- and API's ``network aware'' Windows facility.
Superior workplace capabilities, including high availability (cold starts, lukewarm performance, warm feelings, and hot tempers); global checkpoint/restart (in the event of a system interrupt, deletes all users' work and abruptly ends jobs, forcing an angry recovery); global resource mis-management; secure socket layer based network security coming Real Soon Now to even the lowliest customer sizes (thousands of processors); more or less efficient job scheduling (ok not really but who's gonna notice?), low prioritization, creative accounting, and some other gibberish that this reporter stopped writing down because he knew you would have stopped reading by now.
Etc. Boy, some projects are just screaming to be born, aren't they?
So far as I can tell this is an operating systems company and an applications company.
Obviously the OS company is better off with a strong server OS than if just the strong desktop OS but I don't see how the split between that company and the applications company becomes (even partially) irrelevant.
Well, the first principle that this kind of speculation starts from is that, whatever else may be said about Microsoft (evil, incompetent, etc;), they Aren't Stupid. They may assume that they're going to win the case -- especially with the new King we've appointed -- but they also know that victory is not assured, and it's best to plan for all contingencies.
So, things like.NET are best examined in the light of the anti-trust case, and you have to ask why they're doing this, and how they can expect to gain from it, both in terms of the status quo (one monolithic organization) and in the possible future scenario (two companies, one apps, one OSs).
If MS were to be split up, it's not clear to me which side would get which components of the.NET architecture, though some guesses seem reasonable. It seems to me that they want a network-server based API for developing distributable object components, or applets by a new name. Most likely, the OS company would get to own the platform on which these services would run. On the other hand, the applications division could very likely end up with the toolkit for developing on this API, as well as the major.NET enabled software that they'll have by then -- the 2004 edition of the Office suite, IE7, etc. Maybe network services like MSN would go with the OS division, on the grounds that they would be the vehicle for delivering content that the other side makes. Who knows, it's probably too early to speculate.
In any event, the overall picture is that MS are doing with their products & services just what my software engineering classes said should be done with any complex system: they are decoupling the individual aspects of what they do (packaging the various functionalities into more or less atomic units) while ensuring that the components are tightly cohesive with each other (thus you have a vibrant collection of object that work flawlessly together). As a result, you could take each of the decoupled components of what is now Microsoft, spin it off into an autonomous company, and it will still effectively behave as if it were still part of the whole. Likewise, it will become more possible for the splinter companies to play to other platforms (.NET for Linux) without any great harm, because the control environment will be more decentralized anyway. Rather than having 100% control over the home PC market, they may have 65% control over PCs, servers, palmtops, etc. Right now they're the big fish in a medium-sized pond; afterwards they'll grow into the big fish in a series of ponds. Or something -- the analogy is rather harder to convey than I thought it would be before I started typing...:)
In any event, it seems unquestionable to me that, like a good chess player, MS are thinking ahead here and coming up for contingency plans for a post monopolistic world. I believe they are working with the assumption that, as one company or as a cluster of companies, they still want to retain control over the digital market, and.NET gives them a possible way to do that with or without a breakup. I can't guess all the facets of how this might pan out, but the general picture of it seems very clear to me, and I think the details will work themselves out over time.
I really can't see how.NET can be seen any other way, especially considering things like the recent settlement with Sun and, of course, the antitrust case.
When Java was first introduced by Sun, Microsoft understandably saw it as a threat, because it suggested a network architecture where Java servers (most all of them surely running Solaris) would distribute executable content to clients running any platform at all, including but not limited to Windows. Microsoft understood that to allow this would be to allow Sun control over the server realm, while they would have at most a (perhaps considerable) slice of the client realm. They understood that, in a highly networked world, having control only over the client was irrelevant, especially considering that the distribution executables were not limited to their client.
Now, five or ten years later, Microsoft is finally reaching the position that Sun was in back then, in that they finally have a more or less respectable server OS, and can finally begin the move to a more server-centric network architecture. Now, like Sun with Java, they are able to create a scenario in which they can control the servers and thus the rules of the game. Programs running off.NET servers may well be able to run on other platforms (e.g. a Linux version might not be out of the question, and Mac support seems pretty likely to me; the fact that they happen to control the most common client platform is just icing on the cake for them now), but they'll control the market and make their money off the server.
This is why they were willing to settle with Sun on pretty unfavorable terms, and this is why the outcome of the antitrust case may become at least partially irrelevant. Microsoft has adopted the tactics of their enemy, and are using those tactics in an attempt to win the next battle, as they choose for it to be fought.
I dunno, maybe. I'm new to Apple hardware, having gotten my first machine -- a bondi blue iMac with a 233 g3 chip (completely first generation iMac hardware, as near as I can tell) -- from ebay last fall. I wanted to upgrade the ram so it would run OSX at something beyond a snail's pace and was thwarted three times: three times I took the damn thing apart (way more complicated than it should be), three times I dug my way to the ram socket, and three times did I discover that the ram I had purchased didn't fit for one reason or another (wrong length, then wrong pin count, then wrong alignment of the notch on the chip).
It may be "standard laptop ram", but no major store in Eastern Massachusetts seems to be able to provide it, and I'm told that my only avenue is specialty shops that might have it in stock. Bleargh. On the other hand, the OS is nice, if quirky...
My understanding is that Java isn't the only language that can be run on the standard JVM that comes with most browsers. The best example of this is JPython -- an implementation of Python written for the Java virtual machine. I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it takes normal Python code and generates Java-esque bytecode from it that can be run on the JVM. There are also efforts underway to port Perl to the JVM, but I'm not sure what the status of that effort is (something for Perl 6.0? I'm not sure at the moment...).
You don't really make clear what you're trying to do or what your problem with the standard Java applet scheme is, so it's hard to be much more helpful than this. If you just want to make applets without using Java (I don't care for the language myself, as it happens) then something like this might help you. If on the other hand you want a more fundamental change, circumventing applets altogether, then it doesn't really matter what language you're writing them in. In that case, then some of the other suggestions (Flash, Quicktime, etc) may be more appropriate for you.
Actually, it seems that there is a Solaris version, and possibly HP-UX as well. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp and view products for Solaris &/or HP-UX. I see version 5 editions of IE & Outlook Express for both operating systems.
So, the question from there is will a binary executable for one of those run on Linux, or is WINE emulation a more productive route to try?
As for the ActiveX stuff, yeah, that's bullshit. But just don't use it & you're mostly okay (as a user, disable it and as a developer, avoid it). IE really is a good browser, especially the 5.0 version on Mac, which renders pages beautifully and seems pretty standards-friendly to me (decent CSS & XML support, etc). Mozilla is a hog, and while I'd love to see it do well, I just can't afford to let it have all my ram & disc space, only to crash all the time & have an ugly interface besides. I'm terribly disappointed in it. IE, I reluctantly have to say, is just plain better, and it's probably more available than you realize.
ISTR, based on reading (a year or so ago) the findings of fact in the MS case, that AOL is locked into a contract that obliges them to maintain IE as their browser for a span several years. That term might be up in a year or two, but in any event I think they're bound to it at the moment. In that light whether or not IE is better or worse than Mozilla isn't really relevant...
I think we more agree than disagree. I'm not trying to say that there isn't anything revolutionary out there -- it's just that what's available for the mass market is, in most fundamental ways, only incrementally better than was was available a couple of decades ago. It is a definite evolution to a better status quo, but the revolutionary stuff on the drawing borards has, for the most part, remained on the drawing boards. I realize there are lots of reasons for this, and I'm not saying that's good or bad per se.
What I object to is this "rah rah, new good, old bad" mentality, which fails to recognize just how similar what we have now is to what we had not so long ago. There are new & great things now, just as there are old & great things now -- mainly because the old & new are coming from the same lineage, mostly. Some rare things do not have much of that lineage, and are truly revolutionary and often wonderful. But this can be said of few if any of the 'new' things, and I get annoyed when people suggest otherwise. That's all...
Yeah, games like those are pretty good, though I never got into them until fairly recently -- the last year or so. I should see if I can find a Palm version of Rogue -- it seems like it ought to be small enough...
...lots of valid points about how cars today are still better engineered than they used to be...
Fair enough. But...they still run on petroleum gasoline, don't they? The better ones might not use quite as much of it, and they might burn it a bit more cleanly, but certainly we're not seeing any real, fundamental progress there. Where are the solar cars? The electric cars? The fuel cells?
There's lots of interesting tech that just isn't being applied. You're right, the progress has been evolutionary, and that's exactly the problem. I think we need some revolutionary design in the auto (& computer, & game) industry(ies), and we just don't have it. That's not for such revolutionary tools being available -- they are -- but they somehow don't make it to market, and what we as regular people have available for purchase is not, I reiterate, anything fundamentally better than what was available a generation ago. Incrementally better, yeah, I'll give you that. But not fundamentally.
And somebody else in this thread said that I got old...
:)
What you're essentially saying is that you object to progress in video games.
Nah. I'm saying that there are different kinds of progress. Yes, we have shinier chrome now, but fundamentally they aren't doing anything much more fundamentally new & progressive. It's like the auto industry -- we can make some mighty fancy looking cars now, but they still all go 65 mph down the highway.
Newer doesn't necessarily mean better. Sometimes it does, sure (BeOS!:), but often newer is just used as a euphemism for "more", and honestly doesn't do any more for us than the old version did. I think this is more true for games than any other area I can think of at the moment.Sometimes the new version of the status quo is very satisfying -- I'm having fun with Pokemon on my new Game Boy, for example. But often, the old things that we remember, are in fact remembered because they were so good in the first place.
Like "Citizen Kane" for example:). I'll take it over "The Matrix" (just to pick a recent movie) any day. That's not to say that there's not any good movies now -- David Fincher, the Coen Bros etc are making real classics -- but some of the old stuff is time-tested and just as fresh as ever. I like that.
Computer games are an evolving form of expression that are destined to be the first true new art form of the 21st century.
Oh brother, see now that's the kind of nonsense that I have a hard time dealing with. Creative, expressive, takes a lot of work to make yeah yeah yeah I can accept all that. But Art Form? As in "John Carmack is the next John Coltrane"? I don't think so, personally. It's not that I don't notice, it's that I'm not impressed & therefore I don't really care. Time will tell, however, and you may be right. I doubt it though.
You can have your Carmacks & Quakes & PS2s, and I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots. You take the high road, I'll take the low, etc.
Some of us like simplicity, and see it as a virtue. Some of us hate flashy modern games like Quake & it's derivatives. It's not really that one is so much better or worse than the other, but a matter of preference. In the same mold, some people might like playing checkers, go fish, "Chutes & Ladders," while others prefer chess, go, and "Axis & Allies". No big deal.
Personally, I feel like a lot of the modern games designers have become so drunk with the technological progress available that they've forgotten how to make the things simple & fun. I'll take Pac-Man & Tetris & the old wire-frame Star Wars over Diablo and whatever the big game of the week is this week -- any day.
Obviously, it isn't the graphics that make these games appealing, and you're glossing things over to call them all single player (you never had "Combat" as a kid, did you?) but it's flat out dismissive to ignore the game play. A lot of those old games, aware of the weak graphics, were smart enough to put game play ahead of anything else.
Personally, I got off the video game wagon when all my friends knew the dozens of moves for Mortal Kombat, and I just didn't care. I wanted Double Dragon back, or Gauntlet. "Red Warrior needs food badly!" Hell yeah, that's about as much as I want to think in my games. It's supposed to be fun & escapist, not intricate nonsense...
Or a different variation -- whenever I got a telemarker's call while I was in college, I'd put them on hold & forward the call to the campus police department. Not many of them called back...
Then of course there's the Seinfeld response: "Gee, I'm kind of busy right now. Tell you what -- why don't you give me your home number, and I'll call you while you're having dinner, and we can talk all about it." Strangely enough, they never seem to take to that idea. Can't imagine why...:)
My understanding is that it's called bulk mail for a reason. The mailing organization pays a fee $x that will allow them to send a certain quantity of mail $k. If you affix postage to a given return mailing, that mailing isn't deducted from the quantity the mailer has arranged to pay for, thus they can effectively send more of them.
In some cases, I'm sympathetic to this. I'm willing to pay the postage for a little indie record label, or an underground political candidate, etc. I'm much less interested in helping out a for-profit company, and would never chip in on mass mail companies.
It drives me nuts that the various utilities companies (phone, gas, electric, etc) all make you pay the postage on the bills now. I realize that the cumulative cost of covering this themselves would probably be fairly significant, but hell, they could just invisibly add 25 or 50 cents to each bill & I don't think anyone would notice or mind too much. You're sending them money anyway, after all... ugh.
Easy -- you've saved up the vacation time -- use it. Go to Tahiti. Go to Paris. Hell, sit on the couch & watch re-runs of "Hee-Haw" for two weeks. Whatever floats your boat.
Whatever you do, don't answer any calls or (e)mails from your company.
Period.
This company needs a backup for you, pronto, and if they don't realize that already, and if you can't explain that to them (I'm assuming you've tried explaining it to them), then going two weeks without you will make them realize.
Chances are pretty good that by the time you get back, the new kid will already have a week-long crash course in the system. Walk them through it & be glad that your present for coming back is an eager new assistant to help you with your work duties...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, yeah well you could say that too, but actually I was thinking more along the lines of "gee, isn't it strange to have this high quality system now being reconfigured to run as an emulation of itself"? (Granted, I wouldn't call Office "high quality" by any stretch of the imagination, but you get the idea.) I realize that some problem sets are so massively parallel that they could be more easily attacked by a massively parallel computing system (Beowulf clusters, SETI distributed computing, etc), but I've always kind of seen these strategies as a way around the fact that the high end stuff is so expensive & thus inaccessible. I find it amusing that the makers of the high end stuff are now going after the people that are trying to emulate them....
That way, you can support the platform without supporting all the cruft that has built up over the years. I can almost see Apple defending their hardware (and the higher prices for it) by saying something to the effect of "yeah, you can run OSX on PC hardware, but you need at least a PIII / 1.2 gHz or equivalent processor, 196 mb of ram, a DVD burner...", etc -- just make the requirements so high that it would be a relatively expensive kit anyway, so it wouldn't hurt G3 based sales that badly, and it would avoid a lot of the legacy issue.
Oh yeah, I realize that. I listen to a lot more NPR than I watch PBS, but same deal -- before & after each show they'll have a blurb about "funding is provided by Allaire, enabling blah blah blah" type stuff.
Apparently this report was saying that such advertisments may begin to go further now, with more mainstream-esque ads every five minutes just like or normal for-profit commercial broadcasters. That, and it suggested that the BBC has not run any ads to date (I can't confirm that part, but I understand that people have to pay to subscribe, something like cable TV here in the US), but may soon begin to. (The latter point was really the central point of the report).
I'm of at least two minds about it all. On one hand, it's nice to have a broadcast organization, and particularly a news organization, that is as independent as possible, and I know that's a fragile thing to have. IIRC, NPR caught some flack a year or two ago for it's mild coverage of corruption & fraud at Archer Daniels Midland company, because ADM was a huge supporter of NPR news. A lot of the supporters, at least for the local station (WBUR Boston), are of the new media / new economy variety (Allaire, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, et al), and it makes me wonder how critically they can cover those that are paying their bills. (In the same way that ABC has suppressed negative reports about Disney now.). On the other hand, people don't want their tax dollars paying for this, and money from pledge drives never seems to be enough, so what can they do? Personally, I'm all for 100% public (aka government) funding, but I realize I'm probably of the minority opinion on that one...
Heh...
For those that don't know about him (I've always assumed most people here would), he was in a lot of ways the first computer scientist, having designed & built the first computational devices as we know them today (i.e. something more advanced than, say, an abacus). Interestingly now, but fittingly for a Victorian inventor, they operated purely mechanically, without any of the transistors or other electronic components that are now synonymous with computers. Nonetheless, they were designed to do the same basic functions that a modern computer does, and (yes) it may well have been able to run the Linux kernel. :)
I find it fitting that his assistant, Ada Lovelace, was the first programmer. It's nice to know that the field had an even 50-50 gender parity at one point, and hopefully it could again in the future. In the meantime, however, we'll make the most of the sausage party....
Wow, NPR's Marketplace is talking about this on the news right now. It seems that the BBC, PBS, and NPR are all considering the same issue now -- can a public broadcaster turn around & start running ads, considering that they've built their public reputation on public money. Interesting question.....
The thing is, you write as if your audience were readers of, say, Salon or Atlantic Monthly, when actually it's more like the audience of some weird hybrid between a Unix system administrator's journal and, say, Mad Magazine. You keep writing all this leisurely high level analysis of the subculture as you see it, and the readers either don't get it or don't agree.
It's not that you're wrong in your anthropological analysis, or that the typical Slashdot reader isn't interested in that sort of thing (e.g. consider what a manifesto "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" has been), but that readers either don't see things enough that way that they would want to want to read about it all the time, or they don't look at things in such a high level way and it's annoying to hear some member-of-the-staff-no-less pundit babbling about it all the time.
But to hell with those readers, right?
Having an in-house essayist isn't such a bad thing. It's a nice tradition to be a part of -- we could do a whole lot worse than to have a Thomas Paine around, right? As long as there isn't too much "mountains out of molehills" stuff in your essays, there (hopefully) won't be so much "tempest in a teapot" reactionism to what you have to say.
Fact is, I've been annoyed by some of your rants myself, but now that I think about it, I think you have the job pretty much any Slashdot regular would love to have -- Ranter-In-Chief. After all, isn't that what Slashdot is all about?
Incidently, it was nice to hear you on The Connection last week. I was hoping the show would have been linked to Slashdot, but oh well. I think this audience could do for some exposure to that kind of reasoned discussion forum...
The fact is, the Florida court was letting the local agencies involved determine their own standards because that was exactly the US court told them to do. Allowing dimpled chads would have been just fine, and the US court even said as much, but it first halted the count that Saturday and then, Monday night, said "yeah okay you can keep counting but you have to have it done by the day we have arbitrarily decided is really important, which happens to be in 90 minutes. Good luck fellas...".
Bullshit.
I can't beging to count the dirty things that went on in this election, and though I'm a bit more sympathetic with the side that lost, I'm not about to say that their hands are any cleaner. This had nothing to do with upholding democracy or any such high minded claptrap. This was a matter of the rich white guy with the highest placed friends getting what he & his friends wanted. Democracy? No. An elected president? Hardly.
You republicans were pissed at the failure of Clinton to win a majority vote, well lookee here -- your boy got neither a majority not a plurality, and if his cronies had allowed the counting process to finish naturally, they would not be sitting on the throne today. Support el presidente if you want to, but I'm disgusted by the whole farce of it, and can't wait for the bastards to get thrown out of there...
I realize that early electors were appointed by the legislatures, but that isn't what happened this year. You must have been watching Rush instead of the news, or you would have saw that whole thing about the supreme court appointing him. It was big news, I'm surprised you missed it...
No, he *isn't* my president. Presidents are elected, so that rules out Dubyuh here. He's a king, or a prime minister maybe, but the term president, as we've known it for 200+ years now, does not apply.
And if you think about it (which, we both know, you wouldn't :), shouting "I'd like to kill the King" is as likely to get someone in trouble as shouting "I'd like to kill the president", so I'm not really sure what your little game would prove. I'd ask you to explain, but it's funnier for me to just undercut you & walk away. So ner.
Feeling a bit insecure in our sexuality, are we private? There there, no one's gonna ask so you don't have to tell.
Well, the first principle that this kind of speculation starts from is that, whatever else may be said about Microsoft (evil, incompetent, etc ;), they Aren't Stupid. They may assume that they're going to win the case -- especially with the new King we've appointed -- but they also know that victory is not assured, and it's best to plan for all contingencies.
So, things like .NET are best examined in the light of the anti-trust case, and you have to ask why they're doing this, and how they can expect to gain from it, both in terms of the status quo (one monolithic organization) and in the possible future scenario (two companies, one apps, one OSs).
If MS were to be split up, it's not clear to me which side would get which components of the .NET architecture, though some guesses seem reasonable. It seems to me that they want a network-server based API for developing distributable object components, or applets by a new name. Most likely, the OS company would get to own the platform on which these services would run. On the other hand, the applications division could very likely end up with the toolkit for developing on this API, as well as the major .NET enabled software that they'll have by then -- the 2004 edition of the Office suite, IE7, etc. Maybe network services like MSN would go with the OS division, on the grounds that they would be the vehicle for delivering content that the other side makes. Who knows, it's probably too early to speculate.
In any event, the overall picture is that MS are doing with their products & services just what my software engineering classes said should be done with any complex system: they are decoupling the individual aspects of what they do (packaging the various functionalities into more or less atomic units) while ensuring that the components are tightly cohesive with each other (thus you have a vibrant collection of object that work flawlessly together). As a result, you could take each of the decoupled components of what is now Microsoft, spin it off into an autonomous company, and it will still effectively behave as if it were still part of the whole. Likewise, it will become more possible for the splinter companies to play to other platforms (.NET for Linux) without any great harm, because the control environment will be more decentralized anyway. Rather than having 100% control over the home PC market, they may have 65% control over PCs, servers, palmtops, etc. Right now they're the big fish in a medium-sized pond; afterwards they'll grow into the big fish in a series of ponds. Or something -- the analogy is rather harder to convey than I thought it would be before I started typing... :)
In any event, it seems unquestionable to me that, like a good chess player, MS are thinking ahead here and coming up for contingency plans for a post monopolistic world. I believe they are working with the assumption that, as one company or as a cluster of companies, they still want to retain control over the digital market, and .NET gives them a possible way to do that with or without a breakup. I can't guess all the facets of how this might pan out, but the general picture of it seems very clear to me, and I think the details will work themselves out over time.
:) </hand waving>
When Java was first introduced by Sun, Microsoft understandably saw it as a threat, because it suggested a network architecture where Java servers (most all of them surely running Solaris) would distribute executable content to clients running any platform at all, including but not limited to Windows. Microsoft understood that to allow this would be to allow Sun control over the server realm, while they would have at most a (perhaps considerable) slice of the client realm. They understood that, in a highly networked world, having control only over the client was irrelevant, especially considering that the distribution executables were not limited to their client.
Now, five or ten years later, Microsoft is finally reaching the position that Sun was in back then, in that they finally have a more or less respectable server OS, and can finally begin the move to a more server-centric network architecture. Now, like Sun with Java, they are able to create a scenario in which they can control the servers and thus the rules of the game. Programs running off .NET servers may well be able to run on other platforms (e.g. a Linux version might not be out of the question, and Mac support seems pretty likely to me; the fact that they happen to control the most common client platform is just icing on the cake for them now), but they'll control the market and make their money off the server.
This is why they were willing to settle with Sun on pretty unfavorable terms, and this is why the outcome of the antitrust case may become at least partially irrelevant. Microsoft has adopted the tactics of their enemy, and are using those tactics in an attempt to win the next battle, as they choose for it to be fought.
It may be "standard laptop ram", but no major store in Eastern Massachusetts seems to be able to provide it, and I'm told that my only avenue is specialty shops that might have it in stock. Bleargh. On the other hand, the OS is nice, if quirky...
You don't really make clear what you're trying to do or what your problem with the standard Java applet scheme is, so it's hard to be much more helpful than this. If you just want to make applets without using Java (I don't care for the language myself, as it happens) then something like this might help you. If on the other hand you want a more fundamental change, circumventing applets altogether, then it doesn't really matter what language you're writing them in. In that case, then some of the other suggestions (Flash, Quicktime, etc) may be more appropriate for you.
Actually, it seems that there is a Solaris version, and possibly HP-UX as well. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp and view products for Solaris &/or HP-UX. I see version 5 editions of IE & Outlook Express for both operating systems.
So, the question from there is will a binary executable for one of those run on Linux, or is WINE emulation a more productive route to try?
As for the ActiveX stuff, yeah, that's bullshit. But just don't use it & you're mostly okay (as a user, disable it and as a developer, avoid it). IE really is a good browser, especially the 5.0 version on Mac, which renders pages beautifully and seems pretty standards-friendly to me (decent CSS & XML support, etc). Mozilla is a hog, and while I'd love to see it do well, I just can't afford to let it have all my ram & disc space, only to crash all the time & have an ugly interface besides. I'm terribly disappointed in it. IE, I reluctantly have to say, is just plain better, and it's probably more available than you realize.
ISTR, based on reading (a year or so ago) the findings of fact in the MS case, that AOL is locked into a contract that obliges them to maintain IE as their browser for a span several years. That term might be up in a year or two, but in any event I think they're bound to it at the moment. In that light whether or not IE is better or worse than Mozilla isn't really relevant...
What I object to is this "rah rah, new good, old bad" mentality, which fails to recognize just how similar what we have now is to what we had not so long ago. There are new & great things now, just as there are old & great things now -- mainly because the old & new are coming from the same lineage, mostly. Some rare things do not have much of that lineage, and are truly revolutionary and often wonderful. But this can be said of few if any of the 'new' things, and I get annoyed when people suggest otherwise. That's all...
Yeah, games like those are pretty good, though I never got into them until fairly recently -- the last year or so. I should see if I can find a Palm version of Rogue -- it seems like it ought to be small enough...
Fair enough. But ...they still run on petroleum gasoline, don't they? The better ones might not use quite as much of it, and they might burn it a bit more cleanly, but certainly we're not seeing any real, fundamental progress there. Where are the solar cars? The electric cars? The fuel cells?
There's lots of interesting tech that just isn't being applied. You're right, the progress has been evolutionary, and that's exactly the problem. I think we need some revolutionary design in the auto (& computer, & game) industry(ies), and we just don't have it. That's not for such revolutionary tools being available -- they are -- but they somehow don't make it to market, and what we as regular people have available for purchase is not, I reiterate, anything fundamentally better than what was available a generation ago. Incrementally better, yeah, I'll give you that. But not fundamentally.
:)
Nah. I'm saying that there are different kinds of progress. Yes, we have shinier chrome now, but fundamentally they aren't doing anything much more fundamentally new & progressive. It's like the auto industry -- we can make some mighty fancy looking cars now, but they still all go 65 mph down the highway.
Newer doesn't necessarily mean better. Sometimes it does, sure (BeOS! :), but often newer is just used as a euphemism for "more", and honestly doesn't do any more for us than the old version did. I think this is more true for games than any other area I can think of at the moment.Sometimes the new version of the status quo is very satisfying -- I'm having fun with Pokemon on my new Game Boy, for example. But often, the old things that we remember, are in fact remembered because they were so good in the first place.
Like "Citizen Kane" for example :). I'll take it over "The Matrix" (just to pick a recent movie) any day. That's not to say that there's not any good movies now -- David Fincher, the Coen Bros etc are making real classics -- but some of the old stuff is time-tested and just as fresh as ever. I like that.
Oh brother, see now that's the kind of nonsense that I have a hard time dealing with. Creative, expressive, takes a lot of work to make yeah yeah yeah I can accept all that. But Art Form? As in "John Carmack is the next John Coltrane"? I don't think so, personally. It's not that I don't notice, it's that I'm not impressed & therefore I don't really care. Time will tell, however, and you may be right. I doubt it though.
You can have your Carmacks & Quakes & PS2s, and I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots. You take the high road, I'll take the low, etc.
Personally, I feel like a lot of the modern games designers have become so drunk with the technological progress available that they've forgotten how to make the things simple & fun. I'll take Pac-Man & Tetris & the old wire-frame Star Wars over Diablo and whatever the big game of the week is this week -- any day.
Obviously, it isn't the graphics that make these games appealing, and you're glossing things over to call them all single player (you never had "Combat" as a kid, did you?) but it's flat out dismissive to ignore the game play. A lot of those old games, aware of the weak graphics, were smart enough to put game play ahead of anything else.
Personally, I got off the video game wagon when all my friends knew the dozens of moves for Mortal Kombat, and I just didn't care. I wanted Double Dragon back, or Gauntlet. "Red Warrior needs food badly!" Hell yeah, that's about as much as I want to think in my games. It's supposed to be fun & escapist, not intricate nonsense...
Then of course there's the Seinfeld response: "Gee, I'm kind of busy right now. Tell you what -- why don't you give me your home number, and I'll call you while you're having dinner, and we can talk all about it." Strangely enough, they never seem to take to that idea. Can't imagine why... :)
In some cases, I'm sympathetic to this. I'm willing to pay the postage for a little indie record label, or an underground political candidate, etc. I'm much less interested in helping out a for-profit company, and would never chip in on mass mail companies.
It drives me nuts that the various utilities companies (phone, gas, electric, etc) all make you pay the postage on the bills now. I realize that the cumulative cost of covering this themselves would probably be fairly significant, but hell, they could just invisibly add 25 or 50 cents to each bill & I don't think anyone would notice or mind too much. You're sending them money anyway, after all... ugh.
Whatever you do, don't answer any calls or (e)mails from your company.
Period.
This company needs a backup for you, pronto, and if they don't realize that already, and if you can't explain that to them (I'm assuming you've tried explaining it to them), then going two weeks without you will make them realize.
Chances are pretty good that by the time you get back, the new kid will already have a week-long crash course in the system. Walk them through it & be glad that your present for coming back is an eager new assistant to help you with your work duties... :)