Well, I thought the claims of iPhone being too expensive was because they were comparing the iPhone with the cel phone, when they should compare it with the PDA. However, I didn't know third party apps were barred. Consequently, the skeptics are right, the iPhone IS too expensive for a phone that can't do what phone-PDA platform can do in that regard. I won't be buying an iPhone, my next device will probably be a Treo. And, I won't have to change providers...
My first thought about this was the possibility that the Bush administration, pissed about leaks, may have pressured the intelligence community to do something about it, and such a honeypot setup one of their solutions because it could increase their ability to locate the sources of such leaks. The idea being, that if it becomes well known as a place to host leaks, potential leakers would make sure they get their info in and in the process expose themselves.
Then I thought about it a little more-- if that were the case, it would be a BIG mistake. They would end up having to host gobs uninteresting to them and not-illegal but uncomfortable, controversial or litigious information and/or deal with lawsuits galore-- it would end up far more trouble than it's worth in that regard. In any event it is no doubt going to be a lawyer magnet. If the site actually survives, the spooks would do better to just tap their systems and let someone else stick their necks out.
Also, the temptation to post some made up inflammatory crap will be irresistable for many yahoos, and you'll start seeing all manner of liable and paranoid theories appear-- the Protocols of the Elders of...
The iPhone isn't a cell phone. At the very least, it's an iPod that can make phone calls, certainly an amalgam of portable devices only one of which is a phone. Comparing it to a vanilla cell phone is a spurious exercise. At the very least you should be comparing it to a PDA. A Treo is ~$500 from Verizon, which would be a better comparison if a Treo was even remotely as sexy as the iPhone...
If you don't know what's wrong with X, then you're part of the problem.
Flying windows around the screen very fast or in 3D, isn't what anyone but windowing software developers care about. What needs to be exceedingly fast is how it performs from the application and then user's point of view and how easy it is to program that application. And how easy is it to tie things like scanners and realtime vidcap devices into it. If the answer isn't "lots BETTER than OS X or DirectX," then it's short of the mark.
It'll take more than a few government agencies getting behind ODF and Linux, especially when they choose to do so for cost or freedom reasons, and not because they think that Gnome or KDE is "better." In mundane office situations it can be marginally "good enough," but that's not enough to start a worldwide mass exodus.
I'm talking about cellphones, not PDAs. Verizon has allowed a little more freedom in PDAs. Cellphones however, are locked down-- no J2ME/J2EE apps, only Verizon-approved (and signed) BREW apps.
The best thing the iPhone is going to do for the market is force carriers like Verizon to get off their duff and compete with phones that offer better access and NOT nickel-&-dime for every ringtone, mp3, text message or THIRD PARTY APPLICATION. The biggest problem with Verizon IMHO, is that you can't install your own apps-- there's no such thing as a "homebrew" or "freeware" app on a Verizon phone because the app has to be digitally signed for BREW and that costs a minimum of $400, and there's no guarantee that Verizon might nix it if they think it competes with one of their own apps. I'm not sure, but the Treo might support Java apps which gives you one entry, but only with an $$$ data plan.
What remains to be seen with the iPhone, is how much is it other than the initial cost of the phone? What kind of plan do you need to use these new features-- what's the monthly?
At any rate, I hope the iPhone takes off like the iPod-- serious competition in the wireless market is a Real Good Thing(TM) IMHO, and Steve Jobs is about as good a candidate as their could be for converting that little bit of market pressure into a freight train...
Of course the performance allowed by vanilla X is so godawful, that to get any decent performance at all requires "extensions" to X that basically ignore X architecture and are essentially hacks to provide high performance that wasn't even considered in the decade X was invented.
Exactly, and IMHO is primarily why Linux is yet to be taken seriously by anyone but fanboys on the desktop...
From Yourdon to Xtreme, every few years comes along another fad diet purportedly designed to "fix" the "software development problem." In fact, these things are really designed to sell books.
Managers, under pressure to make things better and who don't have any idea how, naturally gravitate to these fad diets and reorganize their departments to attempt to conform and gain the advantage these diets promise. This will often have the effect of making the problem worse, pissing off developers, adding additional constraints that impede development by attempting to pigeonhole their round-peg developers into the square-holes of the "perfect" software organizational structure.
The problem is, just like food diets, there does not exist a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. However, that does not deter the interest and saleability of a one-size-fits-all solution, even one that does not actually work as advertised-- and an author can always explain away the failures by an "incorrect" application of the solution for one reason or another.
There's at least one factor though, that must be in place in a succesful project, at least according to the manager's definition of "successful" which is usually more related to "on time" than "feature complete"-- the developers must produce, manage and own their own schedules. A developer working to a schedule externally imposed will feel too little responsibility to meet it, while a developer working to their own schedule will be personally invested in it enough to feel the need to work harder when necessary to retain their own credibility.
A far better motivator is, "you said it would take you three weeks," than, "if you don't get it done in three weeks your fired," or even, "if you get it done in three weeks you'll get a bonus." While the second approach may seem to work in the short run, it will often have the side effect of increasing turnover via the reduction of morale when the imposed schedules are unrealistic (as they often are). And the third approach may do the same, depending on the effects the pressures have on the developer and to what extent money outweighs them. But the first approach involves a developer's own integrity in the motivation, who only has themself to blame if the schedule was overly optimistic.
Be cautious however, of attempting to convice a developer that he can do it faster than their initial estimate by suggesting that some optimistic scenarios are likely. Quite the contrary, a good manager should insure that the more junior developer has considered some possible unforseen events, in order to assist the less-experienced developer in developing realistic schedules for himself. And a cautious manager will actually add additional padding to a developer's schedule to make up for the unforseen that even the experienced developer may not have considered, further enhancing the likelyhood that the ultimate target release will be met. I know some managers for example, that will routinely take a developer's schedule and multiply it by 2-- and I can say it makes it a great place to work with little turnover-- developers feel that there is usually enough time available to do a good job, are invested in the process and proud of the (often) quality results.
Blacklists are like closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped, it's a fundamentally flawed concept. By the time a spam source ends up on a blacklist any spammer worth its salt has already moved on. Combined with the tendency for false positives, it's a cure that's worse than the disease. A "smart" spam filter like SpamBayes is better, but it's not perfect either, and you'll have to keep it in training-- not so easy if you're trying to filter for a whole shop and not just your own personal email. At least a local algorithmic filter allows you to correct false positives more quickly than does a blacklist-- with a blacklist the only quick solution to a false positive problem is to stop using it.
It only contradicts it if you actually think you're a bad teacher and consequently feel the need to cover up stories like this by going after YouTube...
Just another typical shoot-the-messenger knee-jerk like the recent flap about the Saddam video-- they're not actually pissed that Saddam's execution was botched up, they're only pissed because someone leaked a video that reveals that it was.
The teacher's aren't pissed that the window was broken, they're pissed because someone "leaked" a video that reveals their charges as uncontrollable little hellions. A broken window doesn't actually make a teacher look bad, it's out-of-control students that make a teacher look bad. So, the teachers are choosing to shoot the messenger rather than address what role they may have in the problem.
Actually, it's the very fact they're pressuring the legislature to control YouTube that is actually making the teachers look bad-- not only are their kids hellions, their chosen approach to addressing the problem is to censor YouTube so it can't undermine their ability to claim that discipline is improving...
A lot of new age yahoos have taken this "conscious observer" argument (out of ignorance of what science actually has to say about QP) and are using it to claim that QP proves all kinds of voodoo beliefs, such as you make you're own reality, etc.. Such claims are baseless, but they do help sell a lot of books and public speaking tours, and various herbs and crystals, if not also more than a few paintings of dolphins, whales, butterflys and unicorns...
But a nondeterministic universe does not guarantee that Free Will exists, nor does a deterministic universe necessarily prohibit it (assuming you can even unambiguously define Free Will).
Actually, no-- one argument is that "free will" is an epiphenomenon in a deterministic universe.
You have to ask yourself, can a completely deterministic computer be programmed to behave in a fashion that is indistinguishable from a non-deterministic system at some level of complexity? If the answer is yes, then the universe can be deterministic and you can have free will. And before you say that a deterministic computer can't do it, note that the whole reason computer scientists are able to make use of pseudorandom number generators is that at the level they are utilzing them they are "good enough" to get the job done. Similarly, determinism may be able to produce a pseudo-nondeterminism that is "good enough" to implement Free Will...
Sure, if you replay the entire sequence you end up with the exact same answer in a deterministic universe, but that doesn't mean that there cannot exist characteristics that are indistinguishable from those produced by nondeterministic means, including Free Will.
Then again, if you look to the philosophers, you'll find that the very definition of Free Will has some problems, in any sort of universe...
- The X Windows foundation
- The lack of a diverse array of superfriendly, fast end-user applications and games that you can buy for Linux off-the-shelf at OfficeMax, Staples and OfficeDepot
- The X Windows foundation
- The lack of more closely integrated OpenGL with both the window manager and the graphics card driver
- The X Windows foundation
And, oh, did I mention "The X Windows foundation?"
Face it, in order for Linux to become the next Desktop "phenomenon," it can't do just as well as Microsoft XP/Vista, it must be notably BETTER. However, it will never be as long as it is tied to X. X is great when you want graphics over a network, but it will always be mediocre used for a desktop. A successful Linux desktop must be next generation, not last generation.
You want success in the Linux Desktop? Save X for the "Remote Desktop" features when you want to login over a network, and get behind building a high-performance bleeding edge desktop built on something more like DirectFB. A successful Linux Desktop GUI has to really push the envelope, and it just ain't doin' that right now.
Sure, X can be enhanced with "work around" features to bypass TCP/IP when the client and server are both in the same box, but not without performance cost compared to something like an XBox or a Playstation II, which is the kind of GUI performance you need to at least appear to be "next generation" in comparison with XP/Vista...
I actually spent a couple of years using Linux as my primary desktop at home but I don't anymore, as I ended up dual booting into W2K and then ended up spending all of my time in W2K running the apps and even developing some OpenGL programs, because the performance was so much better. As much as I hate Microsoft, even W2K beats out KDE and Gnome on the two factors that are the most important-- graphic application availability, and performance. You can't get the former instantly, that's sure, but you can't get it AT ALL unless you've got the latter...
Oh, and BTW-- I have been using Vista lately, IMHO it really IS just a warmed over XP. They added UAC (privilege tokens), added a few other security elements here and there, changed the interface graphics a bit, and moved things around and reorganized the menus so it looks different (such as moving search to inside start menu), but otherwise it seems just about the same. The new IE interface seems worse, and the new Windows Explorer interface is horrible.
Sattelite latency would make it useless to me-- I suppose it may be fine for web surfing or streaming audio/video, but I work from home via a VPN where telnet and remote desktop connections would be intolerably slow.
I would like to move "way out in the sticks" myself though, as long as I can get a high-speed and low-latency internet connection.
So we argue over how verbose node borders need be. '{ }' pairs would be advantageous when considering machine processing efficiency and network bandwidth. Yes, true, but deep hierarchies would look to us humans like bad non-refactored LISP programs.
Exactly, which should tell you that it's a bad non-refactored encoding.
XML is sort of like unrolling loops in code. In code however, there can be a good excuse-- performance. So--- Easier to parse? Easier to generate? Easier to read? Better for performance? Better data compression? Just what exactly, is XML's excuse?
Now I get it-- it's harder to implement. Just the thing market-protecting monopolist corporations need most to slow down the competition and delay interoperability...
Besides, she can always make up the lost revenues in concert.
I was about to mod this funny, as a parody of common arguments in favor of music piracy that did elicit a chuckle. However, a couple of important differences did occur to me:
Book publishers aren't quite so notorious about first paying an advance to the writer and then using creative accounting schemes to insure that is about all the writer will ever get out of them after that.
Books aren't so dependent on radio play, critical exposure for music that is completely and unfairly controlled by payola. "If payola is illegal, only criminals will get radio play"...
Given the inequities in music produciton, distribution and compensation, the only truly ethical method of aquiring music is to do two things 1) don't listen to music on the radio, and 2) pirate the music you want, then send a check for what you would have paid directly to the artist. If the artist determines the publisher/distributor has been dealing fairly, let the artist then choose to send the publisher/distributor their cut, rather than the other way around.
I look forward to a day where service providers are simple common carriers-- you simply pay for the bandwidth, not for how you will apply it. Service providers monitoring traffic for certain "types" is a security and privacy violation, IMHO. All traffic should be encrypted and/or otherwise cloaked end-to-end so providers CAN'T tell what it is, period. How I use my bandwidth is MY business and MY business ONLY.
It's not dominant that makes Microsoft bad, it's dominant, abusive and anti-competetive. -- that, and throw in the inability to get software anywhere near right on the first (and sometimes the second, third and fourth...) -- that makes Microsoft bad.
I think this comment pretty much hits the nail on the head. Microsoft has clearly chosen to cheat instead of figure out how to compete. It may actually be because they recognize their inability to get software anywhere near right, that they must cheat or they will lose. Not a big statement of confidence in their own ability to produce good products. If Microsoft was a person, I'd say they have pretty low self esteem, and are sociopathic in their methods of dealing with that.
On the other hand, the inability to produce a well designed product is primarily localized to their OS products-- Word, Excel, SQL Server and many other of their products aren't bad, actually. In fact, I'm inclined to think that it is Word, not Windows that made Microsoft a success-- Word was there at a time when people did not buy an OS because they were locked into it or because it was a standard, but because it ran the software you needed, and virtually every business needs word processing. Essentially, word processing is a huge piece of why businesses bought computers for the first time. Word did a decent job of it, and IMHO is the product that made Microsoft what it is today. Windows and it's forerunners, including DOS have been hacked-together kludges since day 1. DOS wasn't really even an OS, just a complicated loader with very crude scripting capabilities, yet even today they're still using essentially the same darn thing as the CLI in Vista.
Microsoft's OS designers are apparently unable to see the forest for the trees, always making things much more complicated instead of simpler. The need to drag a long and nefarious history of backward compatibility is really a weak excuse, while it is a challenge-- it's obviously not a challenge that others haven't been able to deal with without necessarily evolving their products into bigger and bigger evolving kludges. If you read some of the histories of the development of NT, you'll see that Microsoft didn't really even have a QA department until very late in the game, and Microsoft seems to prefer to reinvent the wheel rather than gain from other's experience, where at this point such "working in a vacuum" has become part of the corporate culture-- seen as a virtue that can be leveraged towards some kind of lock-in based on incompatibility.
What Microsoft contributes to the software industry is primarily, tech job security (more and more expertise is needed to sort out and work around the complicated design messes they make), and increased hardware sales (due to every new version of the OS needing significantly more resources). Computer dealers LOVE the Microsoft OS, as it significantly drives the sale of hardware upgrades.
I've got an Air Mouse, and this thing (soap) looks to me to be easier to use. I found the Air Mouse has a distinct tendency to either oversteer or understeer, depending on various circumstances.
Because it is directly connected to the shift in the outer "hull" relative to the inner "soap bar," rather than simply the motion of waving your hand around in the air-- allowing you to wave your hand around independent of the control motions of the device, it appears to me to be quite a bit more effective than the Air Mouse.
Nice concise video as well-- clear demonstration of the use of the device, then a quick tutorial on how to make one.
I just tried it, selected Windows 2K english, per selected platform. It instantly pops up a CMD window with a wget error:
Starting download (v. 3.02)
Copying Microsoft registry console tool...
Downloading Microsoft ifmember tool...
Can't timestamp and not clobber old files at the same time.
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...
ERROR: Download failure.
Press any key to continue . ..
Looking at the components it's not clear if there's an erroneous parameter passed to wget or something, as several things are less then obvious-- what the error means, exactly what wget command it's trying to run, etc.. No log file in sight... Not looking good...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I thought the claims of iPhone being too expensive was because they were comparing the iPhone with the cel phone, when they should compare it with the PDA. However, I didn't know third party apps were barred. Consequently, the skeptics are right, the iPhone IS too expensive for a phone that can't do what phone-PDA platform can do in that regard. I won't be buying an iPhone, my next device will probably be a Treo. And, I won't have to change providers...
My first thought about this was the possibility that the Bush administration, pissed about leaks, may have pressured the intelligence community to do something about it, and such a honeypot setup one of their solutions because it could increase their ability to locate the sources of such leaks. The idea being, that if it becomes well known as a place to host leaks, potential leakers would make sure they get their info in and in the process expose themselves.
...
Then I thought about it a little more-- if that were the case, it would be a BIG mistake. They would end up having to host gobs uninteresting to them and not-illegal but uncomfortable, controversial or litigious information and/or deal with lawsuits galore-- it would end up far more trouble than it's worth in that regard. In any event it is no doubt going to be a lawyer magnet. If the site actually survives, the spooks would do better to just tap their systems and let someone else stick their necks out.
Also, the temptation to post some made up inflammatory crap will be irresistable for many yahoos, and you'll start seeing all manner of liable and paranoid theories appear-- the Protocols of the Elders of
The iPhone isn't a cell phone. At the very least, it's an iPod that can make phone calls, certainly an amalgam of portable devices only one of which is a phone. Comparing it to a vanilla cell phone is a spurious exercise. At the very least you should be comparing it to a PDA. A Treo is ~$500 from Verizon, which would be a better comparison if a Treo was even remotely as sexy as the iPhone...
If you don't know what's wrong with X, then you're part of the problem.
Flying windows around the screen very fast or in 3D, isn't what anyone but windowing software developers care about. What needs to be exceedingly fast is how it performs from the application and then user's point of view and how easy it is to program that application. And how easy is it to tie things like scanners and realtime vidcap devices into it. If the answer isn't "lots BETTER than OS X or DirectX," then it's short of the mark.
It'll take more than a few government agencies getting behind ODF and Linux, especially when they choose to do so for cost or freedom reasons, and not because they think that Gnome or KDE is "better." In mundane office situations it can be marginally "good enough," but that's not enough to start a worldwide mass exodus.
I'm talking about cellphones, not PDAs. Verizon has allowed a little more freedom in PDAs. Cellphones however, are locked down-- no J2ME/J2EE apps, only Verizon-approved (and signed) BREW apps.
The best thing the iPhone is going to do for the market is force carriers like Verizon to get off their duff and compete with phones that offer better access and NOT nickel-&-dime for every ringtone, mp3, text message or THIRD PARTY APPLICATION. The biggest problem with Verizon IMHO, is that you can't install your own apps-- there's no such thing as a "homebrew" or "freeware" app on a Verizon phone because the app has to be digitally signed for BREW and that costs a minimum of $400, and there's no guarantee that Verizon might nix it if they think it competes with one of their own apps. I'm not sure, but the Treo might support Java apps which gives you one entry, but only with an $$$ data plan.
What remains to be seen with the iPhone, is how much is it other than the initial cost of the phone? What kind of plan do you need to use these new features-- what's the monthly?
At any rate, I hope the iPhone takes off like the iPod-- serious competition in the wireless market is a Real Good Thing(TM) IMHO, and Steve Jobs is about as good a candidate as their could be for converting that little bit of market pressure into a freight train...
Of course the performance allowed by vanilla X is so godawful, that to get any decent performance at all requires "extensions" to X that basically ignore X architecture and are essentially hacks to provide high performance that wasn't even considered in the decade X was invented.
Exactly, and IMHO is primarily why Linux is yet to be taken seriously by anyone but fanboys on the desktop...
From Yourdon to Xtreme, every few years comes along another fad diet purportedly designed to "fix" the "software development problem." In fact, these things are really designed to sell books.
Managers, under pressure to make things better and who don't have any idea how, naturally gravitate to these fad diets and reorganize their departments to attempt to conform and gain the advantage these diets promise. This will often have the effect of making the problem worse, pissing off developers, adding additional constraints that impede development by attempting to pigeonhole their round-peg developers into the square-holes of the "perfect" software organizational structure.
The problem is, just like food diets, there does not exist a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. However, that does not deter the interest and saleability of a one-size-fits-all solution, even one that does not actually work as advertised-- and an author can always explain away the failures by an "incorrect" application of the solution for one reason or another.
There's at least one factor though, that must be in place in a succesful project, at least according to the manager's definition of "successful" which is usually more related to "on time" than "feature complete"-- the developers must produce, manage and own their own schedules. A developer working to a schedule externally imposed will feel too little responsibility to meet it, while a developer working to their own schedule will be personally invested in it enough to feel the need to work harder when necessary to retain their own credibility.
A far better motivator is, "you said it would take you three weeks," than, "if you don't get it done in three weeks your fired," or even, "if you get it done in three weeks you'll get a bonus." While the second approach may seem to work in the short run, it will often have the side effect of increasing turnover via the reduction of morale when the imposed schedules are unrealistic (as they often are). And the third approach may do the same, depending on the effects the pressures have on the developer and to what extent money outweighs them. But the first approach involves a developer's own integrity in the motivation, who only has themself to blame if the schedule was overly optimistic.
Be cautious however, of attempting to convice a developer that he can do it faster than their initial estimate by suggesting that some optimistic scenarios are likely. Quite the contrary, a good manager should insure that the more junior developer has considered some possible unforseen events, in order to assist the less-experienced developer in developing realistic schedules for himself. And a cautious manager will actually add additional padding to a developer's schedule to make up for the unforseen that even the experienced developer may not have considered, further enhancing the likelyhood that the ultimate target release will be met. I know some managers for example, that will routinely take a developer's schedule and multiply it by 2-- and I can say it makes it a great place to work with little turnover-- developers feel that there is usually enough time available to do a good job, are invested in the process and proud of the (often) quality results.
Blacklists are like closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped, it's a fundamentally flawed concept. By the time a spam source ends up on a blacklist any spammer worth its salt has already moved on. Combined with the tendency for false positives, it's a cure that's worse than the disease. A "smart" spam filter like SpamBayes is better, but it's not perfect either, and you'll have to keep it in training-- not so easy if you're trying to filter for a whole shop and not just your own personal email. At least a local algorithmic filter allows you to correct false positives more quickly than does a blacklist-- with a blacklist the only quick solution to a false positive problem is to stop using it.
Story about two kids who died imitating the Saddam execution video.
Or perhaps, more grist for the Darwin Awards...
Competition to post the most egregious vandalism videos on YouTube starts in 5... 4... 3...
It only contradicts it if you actually think you're a bad teacher and consequently feel the need to cover up stories like this by going after YouTube...
I'm a HUMAN BEING...
No, really!
-- (alms for the lameness filter)
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
Because they're trying to pretend they've been doing a good job with education and discipline.
Just another typical shoot-the-messenger knee-jerk like the recent flap about the Saddam video-- they're not actually pissed that Saddam's execution was botched up, they're only pissed because someone leaked a video that reveals that it was.
The teacher's aren't pissed that the window was broken, they're pissed because someone "leaked" a video that reveals their charges as uncontrollable little hellions. A broken window doesn't actually make a teacher look bad, it's out-of-control students that make a teacher look bad. So, the teachers are choosing to shoot the messenger rather than address what role they may have in the problem.
Actually, it's the very fact they're pressuring the legislature to control YouTube that is actually making the teachers look bad-- not only are their kids hellions, their chosen approach to addressing the problem is to censor YouTube so it can't undermine their ability to claim that discipline is improving...
A lot of new age yahoos have taken this "conscious observer" argument (out of ignorance of what science actually has to say about QP) and are using it to claim that QP proves all kinds of voodoo beliefs, such as you make you're own reality, etc.. Such claims are baseless, but they do help sell a lot of books and public speaking tours, and various herbs and crystals, if not also more than a few paintings of dolphins, whales, butterflys and unicorns...
But a nondeterministic universe does not guarantee that Free Will exists, nor does a deterministic universe necessarily prohibit it (assuming you can even unambiguously define Free Will).
Actually, no-- one argument is that "free will" is an epiphenomenon in a deterministic universe.
You have to ask yourself, can a completely deterministic computer be programmed to behave in a fashion that is indistinguishable from a non-deterministic system at some level of complexity? If the answer is yes, then the universe can be deterministic and you can have free will. And before you say that a deterministic computer can't do it, note that the whole reason computer scientists are able to make use of pseudorandom number generators is that at the level they are utilzing them they are "good enough" to get the job done. Similarly, determinism may be able to produce a pseudo-nondeterminism that is "good enough" to implement Free Will...
Sure, if you replay the entire sequence you end up with the exact same answer in a deterministic universe, but that doesn't mean that there cannot exist characteristics that are indistinguishable from those produced by nondeterministic means, including Free Will.
Then again, if you look to the philosophers, you'll find that the very definition of Free Will has some problems, in any sort of universe...
- The X Windows foundation
- The lack of a diverse array of superfriendly, fast end-user applications and games that you can buy for Linux off-the-shelf at OfficeMax, Staples and OfficeDepot
- The X Windows foundation
- The lack of more closely integrated OpenGL with both the window manager and the graphics card driver
- The X Windows foundation
And, oh, did I mention "The X Windows foundation?"
Face it, in order for Linux to become the next Desktop "phenomenon," it can't do just as well as Microsoft XP/Vista, it must be notably BETTER. However, it will never be as long as it is tied to X. X is great when you want graphics over a network, but it will always be mediocre used for a desktop. A successful Linux desktop must be next generation, not last generation.
You want success in the Linux Desktop? Save X for the "Remote Desktop" features when you want to login over a network, and get behind building a high-performance bleeding edge desktop built on something more like DirectFB. A successful Linux Desktop GUI has to really push the envelope, and it just ain't doin' that right now.
Sure, X can be enhanced with "work around" features to bypass TCP/IP when the client and server are both in the same box, but not without performance cost compared to something like an XBox or a Playstation II, which is the kind of GUI performance you need to at least appear to be "next generation" in comparison with XP/Vista...
I actually spent a couple of years using Linux as my primary desktop at home but I don't anymore, as I ended up dual booting into W2K and then ended up spending all of my time in W2K running the apps and even developing some OpenGL programs, because the performance was so much better. As much as I hate Microsoft, even W2K beats out KDE and Gnome on the two factors that are the most important-- graphic application availability, and performance. You can't get the former instantly, that's sure, but you can't get it AT ALL unless you've got the latter...
Oh, and BTW-- I have been using Vista lately, IMHO it really IS just a warmed over XP. They added UAC (privilege tokens), added a few other security elements here and there, changed the interface graphics a bit, and moved things around and reorganized the menus so it looks different (such as moving search to inside start menu), but otherwise it seems just about the same. The new IE interface seems worse, and the new Windows Explorer interface is horrible.
Sattelite latency would make it useless to me-- I suppose it may be fine for web surfing or streaming audio/video, but I work from home via a VPN where telnet and remote desktop connections would be intolerably slow.
I would like to move "way out in the sticks" myself though, as long as I can get a high-speed and low-latency internet connection.
So we argue over how verbose node borders need be. '{ }' pairs would be advantageous when considering machine processing efficiency and network bandwidth. Yes, true, but deep hierarchies would look to us humans like bad non-refactored LISP programs.
Exactly, which should tell you that it's a bad non-refactored encoding.
XML is sort of like unrolling loops in code. In code however, there can be a good excuse-- performance. So--- Easier to parse? Easier to generate? Easier to read? Better for performance? Better data compression? Just what exactly, is XML's excuse?
Now I get it-- it's harder to implement. Just the thing market-protecting monopolist corporations need most to slow down the competition and delay interoperability...
Yes, and where XML really shines is in turning a 1M record database query from 30MB of text into 150MB of text...
Besides, she can always make up the lost revenues in concert.
I was about to mod this funny, as a parody of common arguments in favor of music piracy that did elicit a chuckle. However, a couple of important differences did occur to me:
Book publishers aren't quite so notorious about first paying an advance to the writer and then using creative accounting schemes to insure that is about all the writer will ever get out of them after that.
Books aren't so dependent on radio play, critical exposure for music that is completely and unfairly controlled by payola. "If payola is illegal, only criminals will get radio play"...
Given the inequities in music produciton, distribution and compensation, the only truly ethical method of aquiring music is to do two things 1) don't listen to music on the radio, and 2) pirate the music you want, then send a check for what you would have paid directly to the artist. If the artist determines the publisher/distributor has been dealing fairly, let the artist then choose to send the publisher/distributor their cut, rather than the other way around.
I look forward to a day where service providers are simple common carriers-- you simply pay for the bandwidth, not for how you will apply it. Service providers monitoring traffic for certain "types" is a security and privacy violation, IMHO. All traffic should be encrypted and/or otherwise cloaked end-to-end so providers CAN'T tell what it is, period. How I use my bandwidth is MY business and MY business ONLY.
It's not dominant that makes Microsoft bad, it's dominant, abusive and anti-competetive. -- that, and throw in the inability to get software anywhere near right on the first (and sometimes the second, third and fourth ...) -- that makes Microsoft bad.
I think this comment pretty much hits the nail on the head. Microsoft has clearly chosen to cheat instead of figure out how to compete. It may actually be because they recognize their inability to get software anywhere near right, that they must cheat or they will lose. Not a big statement of confidence in their own ability to produce good products. If Microsoft was a person, I'd say they have pretty low self esteem, and are sociopathic in their methods of dealing with that.
On the other hand, the inability to produce a well designed product is primarily localized to their OS products-- Word, Excel, SQL Server and many other of their products aren't bad, actually. In fact, I'm inclined to think that it is Word, not Windows that made Microsoft a success-- Word was there at a time when people did not buy an OS because they were locked into it or because it was a standard, but because it ran the software you needed, and virtually every business needs word processing. Essentially, word processing is a huge piece of why businesses bought computers for the first time. Word did a decent job of it, and IMHO is the product that made Microsoft what it is today. Windows and it's forerunners, including DOS have been hacked-together kludges since day 1. DOS wasn't really even an OS, just a complicated loader with very crude scripting capabilities, yet even today they're still using essentially the same darn thing as the CLI in Vista.
Microsoft's OS designers are apparently unable to see the forest for the trees, always making things much more complicated instead of simpler. The need to drag a long and nefarious history of backward compatibility is really a weak excuse, while it is a challenge-- it's obviously not a challenge that others haven't been able to deal with without necessarily evolving their products into bigger and bigger evolving kludges. If you read some of the histories of the development of NT, you'll see that Microsoft didn't really even have a QA department until very late in the game, and Microsoft seems to prefer to reinvent the wheel rather than gain from other's experience, where at this point such "working in a vacuum" has become part of the corporate culture-- seen as a virtue that can be leveraged towards some kind of lock-in based on incompatibility.
What Microsoft contributes to the software industry is primarily, tech job security (more and more expertise is needed to sort out and work around the complicated design messes they make), and increased hardware sales (due to every new version of the OS needing significantly more resources). Computer dealers LOVE the Microsoft OS, as it significantly drives the sale of hardware upgrades.
I've got an Air Mouse, and this thing (soap) looks to me to be easier to use. I found the Air Mouse has a distinct tendency to either oversteer or understeer, depending on various circumstances.
Because it is directly connected to the shift in the outer "hull" relative to the inner "soap bar," rather than simply the motion of waving your hand around in the air-- allowing you to wave your hand around independent of the control motions of the device, it appears to me to be quite a bit more effective than the Air Mouse.
Nice concise video as well-- clear demonstration of the use of the device, then a quick tutorial on how to make one.
Real nice job, IMHO....
I just tried it, selected Windows 2K english, per selected platform. It instantly pops up a CMD window with a wget error:
.
Starting download (v. 3.02)
Copying Microsoft registry console tool...
Downloading Microsoft ifmember tool...
Can't timestamp and not clobber old files at the same time.
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...
ERROR: Download failure.
Press any key to continue . .
Looking at the components it's not clear if there's an erroneous parameter passed to wget or something, as several things are less then obvious-- what the error means, exactly what wget command it's trying to run, etc.. No log file in sight... Not looking good...