I wrote a hackish Greasemonkey script to do something similar last year that just did it on the fly. Also tried to get a simple measure of how much was spam just by searching for simple keywords in the edit records.
I'd like to revisit the idea some time, because I'm sure you can also capture more details about the nature of editing (ie, how often are different parts edited, what keywords get added and removed most frequently, how many people are involved or is it just a revert war between two stubborn editors...) within a useful visualisation.
That's assuming that the best engineering decision is constant over time. Often the biggest messes are a result of a long sequence of people making the best decision at each stage.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote this story about a man who had an accident that left him unable to forget anything. He ended up living the rest of his life in a darkened room, unable to cope with the deluge of detail the outside world had for him, and unable to file the memories he had accumulated and put them in a context in his mind.
Funes, the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887. . . .
That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.
Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.
My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.
I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.
He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironi
I don't see any feasible means of removing the profitability of fraudulently gaining a login to a bank account. So you give them false login details. No fuss to them, their software will try it and it's no cost to them if it doesn't work. The best of them are actually modified proxies so that you can actually log in and see your own accounts (or see a perfectly normal legit page), and once you log out they go in and plunder the accounts.
You could take the bad approach of limiting what you could do with your bank online, like saying there's a mandatory extended waiting period on all transactions to bank accounts you haven't transacted with before. I think the only solution to phishing revolves around strengthening authentication and identification measures, and the improvement of user interfaces (ie, modifying the location bar so the user@url trick doesn't convince anyone) so that users will learn to actually pay attention to them. This could be used to help browsers support that. I see this as a strengthening of identification measures for a sector of businesses with which lives can be ruined if there's a mistake in identification. It's a problem with no silver bullet, but it requires a combination of both offensive (as you call for) and defensive measures (as this is).
That doesn't at all address the class of phishing scams that put up a fake copy of the site in question. Banks are usually the subject of such phishing attacks; throw up a copy of their site on a plausible-sounding URL, send out an email saying their account may have been compromised and they need to check, and when they enter their username and password you try the username and password at the real bank site, and make whatever transactions you want. That's the class that this TLD is aimed at preventing. Ideally I imagine the banks as a collective introducing it with public advertising campaigns to ensure the user looks for a.bank when they do their banking.
Is it perfect? Foolproof? Not by any means. But it'd be a good step.
Mondrian is also the name of an experimental functional language for the.NET platform written by Nigel Perry.
It's also a Haskell dialect described in this 1997 paper.
I really don't think it's anything worth getting worked up over. This is an inhouse program that was started as a side-project and is unlikely to be released (if at all) for quite some time, I think it's quite likely he just picked the name since it already had a Google-fied logo (they've used that before for their frontpage on (the artist) Mondrian's birthday).
I can't speak for other objects, but I do recall reading that they deliberately lessened the gravity for grenades to let them arc higher for a better visual effect.
I mentioned communism only as a traditional anti-capitalist concept, to illustrate the fact that that is a domain that open source doesn't cover. That is why I called it an orthogonal concept. It can exist alongside capitalism without trouble. And FWIW, I'm not even in the same hemisphere as the US.
But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems...[Snip]
This doesn't follow at all. Capitalism doesn't enter into what free software/OS addresses. It fixes the flaws of other development, maintenance and distribution processes, independent of the way resources are allocated to these tasks.
Evidence: the existence of closed-source freeware, where opensourcing it wouldn't make a revenue difference because there is no revenue in the first place, and it's all done for credit.
If you want to correctly frame this, then you have to separate the two domains at work here. Free software doesn't "fix the flaws of capitalist systems", rather what happens is that capitalism has adopted the new offerings in the adjacent domain of software development, and is doing what capitalism always does: determining resource allocation via the market's demand.
I don't think I've ever seen someone substitute "proprietary" with "capitalist" like that before. What are you implying? Blender has a little red book?
Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.
By "Tesco buyer", they don't mean a normal retailer customer, but one of the Tesco employees who is responsible for buying stock to put on Tesco shelves. If they don't like the book cover, then it's not going to go on Tesco shelves.
Be fair. The "More information" section is pretty standard copy for a press release format. Most press releases take that approach. If users want a more technical detailing of the problem, a media release isn't the place.
Scoble complains, Slashdot obeys?
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The post in question:
Interesting that Slashdot hasn't linked to the Ballmer thing yesterday. Maybe they belong to the Andrew Orlowski "we-must-not-link-to-or-acknowledge-Scoble" school of reporting. Heh.
What's fun is that Ballmer, in the interview yesterday, took a swipe at open source and IBM and Oracle. Surely that'd be worth getting the Slashdotters all riled up.
He got a lot of comments pointing out the interview was content-free, a spin job, and otherwise of generally no interest to the discerning crowd here. How pleased I was to see Scoble's shot go amiss.
And then I refresh the front-page here:-(. Come on editors, even the interviewer semi-admits this as being a troll-piece in a/. context.
It's quite possible Google have an inhouse Javascript formatter to replace variable names with single and double character names when the time comes to go public with the code, just to save on bandwidth.
I think the writing award for HL2 was entirely deserved. The HL2 writing and storyboarding was very much done respecting the rule of "Show, don't tell". Most of the HL2 story isn't told in dialogue. It isn't forced upon the player via cut-scenes. This is tremendously important in a first person perspective, because suddenly switching into a cut-scene (ala Doom 3) is a great way of breaking player immersion and the illusion that you are Gordon Freeman.
Yes the Mossman betrayal was foreseeable from the E3 demo more than a year before the game was even released. Yes there were lots of tired dialogue and plot chunks. But this was true for the original Half-Life. HL2 won the award because the story in a game is far greater than just the plot and dialogue. In an interactive environment, how you tell it makes all the difference in the world.
It's true. WordPerfect has been a favourite of lawyers for a long time. I asked my father about it once (him being a lawyer and all) and he said it was because the indentation in WP was easier to get right for legal formats. Reading the other replies to the parent, I see there's a lot of other reasons too.
You were misled by the OP, but RTFA please.
The press release said they're expanding their relationship that's already existed for 20 years. Not that they're announcing a 20 year partnership.
No, the artifacts as you describe them were a bug, plain and simple, because the AIs weren't thinking enough.
The issue was that with those prototype agents, if they couldn't see an enemy in front of them, they would run forward on the assumption that they would eventually encounter one.
The developers forgot about this when they spawned the armies with soldiers facing random directions. Many of them spawned facing away from the battle, therefore wouldn't see an enemy, hence they ran.
Agreed, small chunks are better. Thats why breaking up the original suite was a good idea. But a framework is just a collection of small pieces. Firefox for instance may still just be shipped with what is essentially just a wrapper for the networking and the layout modules. In fact, frameworking like that would probably require factoring the existing code into even smaller discrete chunks. If people want to be able to run a thin client application that uses the mozilla framework, then it could run off and download the relevant XPIs (which you would keep very small) by itself as it needs to.
As an example, at the moment MPlayer is undergoing a major redesign led by Arpi in the form of MPlayer G2. It too is much more of a framework than MPlayer is, but in terms of monolithicism and bloatedness, its better in every way.
I'm seeing a lot of comments in reply to this article advocating that the mozilla foundation stick to making web browsers, a task that it now admittedly does very well. Follow the Unix philosophy, small programs that do one thing and do it well.
I agree with the philosophy, and agree with what the foundation has done in starting the firefox/thunderbird fork.
But I feel the issue isn't as simple as some fellow/.ers are saying it is, and the longterm prospects are definitely interesting. The key topics mentioned in this slideshow (SVG, XUL, XBL, Eclipse plugin, scripting language integration) are all focussed around the central issue of what the words 'web application' are going to mean in the future.
Think back to several years ago in the dark ages of IE4.0 sheer dominance, when you were hard pressed to find an online banking service that would permit your alternate browser inside without you having to spoof a UA string. Microsoft had defined the standards that the web developers had been using, and we suffered for having a just standards compliant browser set.
We are now at a lull in the web application development market, at least from the client side. Sure on the server side the battle wages ever on, but the front end is pretty sown up. But it won't remain that way. Nothing like that does in this industry.
This is a proposal to start heading the mozilla project in the direction of a web development framework. Extending the front end possibilities, and giving developers the tools to close the gaps between web applications and thin client applications.
Microsoft is heading in this direction. Rumours are that the next major IE that will ship with longhorn will have a framework similar to this idea, with complete integration between the HTML forms and the windows.form components Microsoft is working on. If we stay statically focussed on supporting just the W3C standards, which don't extend to something as encompassing as an application framework, then Microsoft will be allowed to take the iniative again.
At best, this is an attempt to refocus upon what XUL was originally a vision of, just done right this time. At worst, its an attempt to think long term and make sure we aren't taken by surprise when Longhorn ships with a new beast of an IE. We need a framework like this, and I see noone in the opensource world in a better position to do this than the mozilla project.
I don't think the RIAA is going to launch any international lawsuits.
I would've said so too, but the head of the NZ eqivalent of the RIAA was just interviewed on the radio here, and he said that if/as soon as they start winning the suits filed in America, they'll start a barrage of several hundred down here, and not just the big swappers, but some random little guys as well.
There have been many people already in this story claiming Halflife's success was based upon its modability, and Valve's support for developers in doing so. And going by sales fuelled by Counterstrike and the other mods, that argument would have some merit.
But if you take that argument, then shouldn't UT2K3 be selling in absolute droves? Its marketing campaign focussed a lot on its extreme modablity, to the point where Epic packaged a customized Maya with it, for mod makers. They were driven by the Counterstrike phenomen in doing this.
But in a store the other day, I saw a Halflife pack selling for more than UT2K3 was. The difference between the two is that Halflife the game had incredible appeal because it really was a revolutionary game. UT2K3 wasn't. Lots of people therefore bought HL. This meant it generated large market share. And *that* is what gets a good mod. There's little point in modding a game to distribute if noone else has the game. So with the wide HL userbase, it made itself a very attractive medium for mods.
Yes HL sales were fuelled by CS and co, but that's not what started the avalanche. I'm sure Valve are acutely aware of this.
Metal Storm is another group working on weapons like this. Instead of using lasers to ignite the propellant, they use electrical impulses travelling down the barrel. The rest of the mechanism is functionally the same.
However, they seem to be focussing on it from a wider view, with hand held weapons being only a part of the lineup of prototypes.
From the looks of it, this type of 'solid state' firing mechanism is going to be pervading much of the military in the forthcoming years.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a hackish Greasemonkey script to do something similar last year that just did it on the fly. Also tried to get a simple measure of how much was spam just by searching for simple keywords in the edit records.
I'd like to revisit the idea some time, because I'm sure you can also capture more details about the nature of editing (ie, how often are different parts edited, what keywords get added and removed most frequently, how many people are involved or is it just a revert war between two stubborn editors...) within a useful visualisation.
That's assuming that the best engineering decision is constant over time. Often the biggest messes are a result of a long sequence of people making the best decision at each stage.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote this story about a man who had an accident that left him unable to forget anything. He ended up living the rest of his life in a darkened room, unable to cope with the deluge of detail the outside world had for him, and unable to file the memories he had accumulated and put them in a context in his mind.
Funes, the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887. . . .
That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.
Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.
My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.
I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.
He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironi
I don't see any feasible means of removing the profitability of fraudulently gaining a login to a bank account. So you give them false login details. No fuss to them, their software will try it and it's no cost to them if it doesn't work. The best of them are actually modified proxies so that you can actually log in and see your own accounts (or see a perfectly normal legit page), and once you log out they go in and plunder the accounts.
You could take the bad approach of limiting what you could do with your bank online, like saying there's a mandatory extended waiting period on all transactions to bank accounts you haven't transacted with before. I think the only solution to phishing revolves around strengthening authentication and identification measures, and the improvement of user interfaces (ie, modifying the location bar so the user@url trick doesn't convince anyone) so that users will learn to actually pay attention to them. This could be used to help browsers support that. I see this as a strengthening of identification measures for a sector of businesses with which lives can be ruined if there's a mistake in identification. It's a problem with no silver bullet, but it requires a combination of both offensive (as you call for) and defensive measures (as this is).
That doesn't at all address the class of phishing scams that put up a fake copy of the site in question. Banks are usually the subject of such phishing attacks; throw up a copy of their site on a plausible-sounding URL, send out an email saying their account may have been compromised and they need to check, and when they enter their username and password you try the username and password at the real bank site, and make whatever transactions you want. That's the class that this TLD is aimed at preventing. Ideally I imagine the banks as a collective introducing it with public advertising campaigns to ensure the user looks for a .bank when they do their banking.
Is it perfect? Foolproof? Not by any means. But it'd be a good step.
Mondrian is also the name of an experimental functional language for the .NET platform written by Nigel Perry.
It's also a Haskell dialect described in this 1997 paper.
I really don't think it's anything worth getting worked up over. This is an inhouse program that was started as a side-project and is unlikely to be released (if at all) for quite some time, I think it's quite likely he just picked the name since it already had a Google-fied logo (they've used that before for their frontpage on (the artist) Mondrian's birthday).
V for Vendetta, Planet of the Apes, 2001, and Matrix Revolutions I think.
I can't speak for other objects, but I do recall reading that they deliberately lessened the gravity for grenades to let them arc higher for a better visual effect.
I mentioned communism only as a traditional anti-capitalist concept, to illustrate the fact that that is a domain that open source doesn't cover. That is why I called it an orthogonal concept. It can exist alongside capitalism without trouble. And FWIW, I'm not even in the same hemisphere as the US.
But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems...[Snip]
This doesn't follow at all. Capitalism doesn't enter into what free software/OS addresses. It fixes the flaws of other development, maintenance and distribution processes, independent of the way resources are allocated to these tasks.
Evidence: the existence of closed-source freeware, where opensourcing it wouldn't make a revenue difference because there is no revenue in the first place, and it's all done for credit.
If you want to correctly frame this, then you have to separate the two domains at work here. Free software doesn't "fix the flaws of capitalist systems", rather what happens is that capitalism has adopted the new offerings in the adjacent domain of software development, and is doing what capitalism always does: determining resource allocation via the market's demand.
I don't think I've ever seen someone substitute "proprietary" with "capitalist" like that before. What are you implying? Blender has a little red book?
Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.
Well thank you for the spoiler. Not every country broadcasts its series in sync with the US.
By "Tesco buyer", they don't mean a normal retailer customer, but one of the Tesco employees who is responsible for buying stock to put on Tesco shelves. If they don't like the book cover, then it's not going to go on Tesco shelves.
Be fair. The "More information" section is pretty standard copy for a press release format. Most press releases take that approach. If users want a more technical detailing of the problem, a media release isn't the place.
Well this is annoying. Scoble complained just earlier on his blog that Slashdot hadn't linked to his Ballmer interview.
:-(. Come on editors, even the interviewer semi-admits this as being a troll-piece in a /. context.
The post in question: Interesting that Slashdot hasn't linked to the Ballmer thing yesterday. Maybe they belong to the Andrew Orlowski "we-must-not-link-to-or-acknowledge-Scoble" school of reporting. Heh.
What's fun is that Ballmer, in the interview yesterday, took a swipe at open source and IBM and Oracle. Surely that'd be worth getting the Slashdotters all riled up.
He got a lot of comments pointing out the interview was content-free, a spin job, and otherwise of generally no interest to the discerning crowd here. How pleased I was to see Scoble's shot go amiss.
And then I refresh the front-page here
It's quite possible Google have an inhouse Javascript formatter to replace variable names with single and double character names when the time comes to go public with the code, just to save on bandwidth.
I think the writing award for HL2 was entirely deserved. The HL2 writing and storyboarding was very much done respecting the rule of "Show, don't tell". Most of the HL2 story isn't told in dialogue. It isn't forced upon the player via cut-scenes. This is tremendously important in a first person perspective, because suddenly switching into a cut-scene (ala Doom 3) is a great way of breaking player immersion and the illusion that you are Gordon Freeman.
Yes the Mossman betrayal was foreseeable from the E3 demo more than a year before the game was even released. Yes there were lots of tired dialogue and plot chunks. But this was true for the original Half-Life. HL2 won the award because the story in a game is far greater than just the plot and dialogue. In an interactive environment, how you tell it makes all the difference in the world.
It's true. WordPerfect has been a favourite of lawyers for a long time. I asked my father about it once (him being a lawyer and all) and he said it was because the indentation in WP was easier to get right for legal formats. Reading the other replies to the parent, I see there's a lot of other reasons too.
You were misled by the OP, but RTFA please. The press release said they're expanding their relationship that's already existed for 20 years. Not that they're announcing a 20 year partnership.
No, the artifacts as you describe them were a bug, plain and simple, because the AIs weren't thinking enough. The issue was that with those prototype agents, if they couldn't see an enemy in front of them, they would run forward on the assumption that they would eventually encounter one. The developers forgot about this when they spawned the armies with soldiers facing random directions. Many of them spawned facing away from the battle, therefore wouldn't see an enemy, hence they ran.
Agreed, small chunks are better. Thats why breaking up the original suite was a good idea. But a framework is just a collection of small pieces. Firefox for instance may still just be shipped with what is essentially just a wrapper for the networking and the layout modules. In fact, frameworking like that would probably require factoring the existing code into even smaller discrete chunks. If people want to be able to run a thin client application that uses the mozilla framework, then it could run off and download the relevant XPIs (which you would keep very small) by itself as it needs to. As an example, at the moment MPlayer is undergoing a major redesign led by Arpi in the form of MPlayer G2. It too is much more of a framework than MPlayer is, but in terms of monolithicism and bloatedness, its better in every way.
I'm seeing a lot of comments in reply to this article advocating that the mozilla foundation stick to making web browsers, a task that it now admittedly does very well. Follow the Unix philosophy, small programs that do one thing and do it well.
I agree with the philosophy, and agree with what the foundation has done in starting the firefox/thunderbird fork.
But I feel the issue isn't as simple as some fellow /.ers are saying it is, and the longterm prospects are definitely interesting. The key topics mentioned in this slideshow (SVG, XUL, XBL, Eclipse plugin, scripting language integration) are all focussed around the central issue of what the words 'web application' are going to mean in the future.
Think back to several years ago in the dark ages of IE4.0 sheer dominance, when you were hard pressed to find an online banking service that would permit your alternate browser inside without you having to spoof a UA string. Microsoft had defined the standards that the web developers had been using, and we suffered for having a just standards compliant browser set.
We are now at a lull in the web application development market, at least from the client side. Sure on the server side the battle wages ever on, but the front end is pretty sown up. But it won't remain that way. Nothing like that does in this industry.
This is a proposal to start heading the mozilla project in the direction of a web development framework. Extending the front end possibilities, and giving developers the tools to close the gaps between web applications and thin client applications.
Microsoft is heading in this direction. Rumours are that the next major IE that will ship with longhorn will have a framework similar to this idea, with complete integration between the HTML forms and the windows.form components Microsoft is working on. If we stay statically focussed on supporting just the W3C standards, which don't extend to something as encompassing as an application framework, then Microsoft will be allowed to take the iniative again.
At best, this is an attempt to refocus upon what XUL was originally a vision of, just done right this time. At worst, its an attempt to think long term and make sure we aren't taken by surprise when Longhorn ships with a new beast of an IE. We need a framework like this, and I see noone in the opensource world in a better position to do this than the mozilla project.
I don't think the RIAA is going to launch any international lawsuits. I would've said so too, but the head of the NZ eqivalent of the RIAA was just interviewed on the radio here, and he said that if/as soon as they start winning the suits filed in America, they'll start a barrage of several hundred down here, and not just the big swappers, but some random little guys as well.
There have been many people already in this story claiming Halflife's success was based upon its modability, and Valve's support for developers in doing so. And going by sales fuelled by Counterstrike and the other mods, that argument would have some merit.
But if you take that argument, then shouldn't UT2K3 be selling in absolute droves? Its marketing campaign focussed a lot on its extreme modablity, to the point where Epic packaged a customized Maya with it, for mod makers. They were driven by the Counterstrike phenomen in doing this.
But in a store the other day, I saw a Halflife pack selling for more than UT2K3 was. The difference between the two is that Halflife the game had incredible appeal because it really was a revolutionary game. UT2K3 wasn't. Lots of people therefore bought HL. This meant it generated large market share. And *that* is what gets a good mod. There's little point in modding a game to distribute if noone else has the game. So with the wide HL userbase, it made itself a very attractive medium for mods.
Yes HL sales were fuelled by CS and co, but that's not what started the avalanche. I'm sure Valve are acutely aware of this.
Metal Storm is another group working on weapons like this. Instead of using lasers to ignite the propellant, they use electrical impulses travelling down the barrel. The rest of the mechanism is functionally the same. However, they seem to be focussing on it from a wider view, with hand held weapons being only a part of the lineup of prototypes. From the looks of it, this type of 'solid state' firing mechanism is going to be pervading much of the military in the forthcoming years.
Linux Journal had an article covering this in its Jan. edition.