No, this would not make copying Microsoft software legal, because most Microsoft software is covered by patents
I'm not convinced. You can't patent "a graphical user interface which presents applications in their own 'window'" because *everyone* does those (and even if they didn't, MS doesn't have prior art). So in theory, if you binned copyright laws then you could steal MS's code for that since it's not patentable.
The problem is that requiring the use of patents instead of copyrights breeds a monopolistic environment: Say I write an image viewer. The only way I could protect my code without copyrights would be to patent it. Lets assume that there isn't any prior art and I can patent my image viewer - suddenly I have the monopoly on image viewers because it is illegal for anyone else to write an image viewer even if it's coded completely independently from scratch because they would be infringing my patent.
Now, I own a company with the monopoly on image viewers and anyone who needs one has to buy it off me... what motivation do I have to improve the product? I mean, everyone who needs an image viewer already pays me lots of money for it so what do I get out of expending the time and money to improve it? It's not like there's any competition who might be doing a better job than me and put me out of business.
I can also charge whatever I want because there's no competition to bring down the price.
This, of course, affects opensource developers just as much: you can't develop an opensource competetor to a closed product and if your project is not patentable then you can't protect it at all - some big company can come along and steal your code with none of the inherent GPL style protections.
This is a very bad idea - patents are for *ideas*, copyrights are for the actual code.
I'm not sure I even get the point of a digital SLR. With film, the main advantage of an SLR is the split optical path behind the single lens that lets you see through the viewfinder exactly what's exposing the film, regardless of what lens you're using. Digitals have LCD screens that show you exactly what's falling on the sensor, thereby accomplishing the same thing.
The whole point of having an SLR is the same in both cases - you get to see exactly what will be exposed.
Yes, ok, digi cams have LCD screens... you usually can't see them at all in bright sunlight and you can't hold the cam anywhere near as steady when holding it far enough from your face to see the LCD.
A lot of "prosumer" cams have an electronic viewfinder - essentially a small LCD screen behind a viewfinder lens (I have this on my HP850). These have some significant disadvantages:
1. In dark conditions you can't see anything through the viewfinder or LCD because the CCD isn't sensitive enough to give you an image in a decent time-frame (think about the conditions where you might take a 10 or 15 second exposure - how could the electronic viewfinder possibly get an image at 4 frames a second?). So you're basically shooting blind.
2. The resolution is pretty poor - important if you're manually focussing because you really can't tell if the picture is in focus or not
3. Colour reproduction is terrible - good luck trying to set up your polariser correctly. (For me it's mostly guess work)
4. There is a significant lag between what's happening in the real world and what appears on the viewfinder or LCD. This only gets worse in poor lighting conditions (at it's worst the lag is about 500ms on my camera). Not really a problem when you're taking photos of people, but it's a real issue when taking photos of anything thats fast moving. i.e. I quite often do photography of powerboat races - I have to work around the view finder lag by learning to keep both eyes open while taking photos. I look through the viewfinder with my right eye to frame the shot whilest at the same time looking at the real scene to see what's actually happening. If something spectacular happens then by the time it appears in the EVF, even on a bright sunny day, it's too late to press the shutter release.
5. Certainly on my camera, the picture on the viewfinder and LCD screen freezes up whilest the auto-focus is using the image from the CCD, which makes autofocussing on moving objects difficult since you can't track them easilly whilest the focus is doing it's thing.
Of course, there is the other important point that SLRs are considered more "professional" and so usually come along with the professional features such as super-fast focusing, manual modes, burst mode, etc.
Well, not necessarilly - you can increase the CCD size, but that increases the cost (the really high-end 12MP and more cameras have 35mm sensors, which is very expensive but solves the noise problem)
In that case, Joe Public is being screwed by his own ignorance.
I think that was my original point.:)
Still, I find it more desirable than keeping prints/negatives as my only copy because they don't preserve perfectly and I can't transfer them digitally perfectly to another medium before the first medium fails
Absolutely. IMHO the memory manufacturers need to start producing some cheap write-once memory cards which _will_ last for decades. I'm sure it's doable.
can't imagine that a TV would be acceptable unless I only had a 1/4 MP camera.
Actually, you'd be surprised - you're not sitting right close to the TV so it looks quite good. (However, I'm in the UK so I feed a RGB signal directly into a PAL TV - the quality is a lot better than you'd get from sticking a composite video signal through an NTSC telly).
I have to mention software, too. gqview. I haven't found any Windows software that even comes close
Yes, I agree entirely. Gqview is excellent and I was quite dissapointed that Fedora 3 doesn't bundle it so I had to go and reinstall it myself after upgrading. Of course I don't use Windows at all so I don't have any problems with finding software for that.:)
About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.
I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.
Anyone know anything about "printing" digital shots to slides? Care to educate me?
I'm sure you can get it done (probably quite expensive since it'll be specialised) but TBH I'm not sure it's worthwhile since you're not going to gain anything over using a digital projector.
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly.
I've had discs become unreadable from both TDK branded discs (about 1.50ukp each 5 or 6 years ago) and POS cheap discs. It is not very many but a few.. however, if that few contains important data you have no other copy of, you're screwed (and I guess this is exactly the situation joe public is in). The bigger deal is probably that you just don't know which are going to fail, and unless you check them regularly you probably won't find out which are failing very quickly.
These days I use POS cheap discs for my backups coz they only have to last until the next backup is taken.
This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.
With respect, thats only 8 years which isn't long in the grand scheme of things. Printed photos are still not bad (a bit faded) after 50 - 100 years - all evidence I've seen suggests that even the best CD-Rs won't last anywhere near that long.
It's funny how an entire feature can be so insightful about digital cameras, and totally leave out suggestions about photo printers. Quality in prints now is limited to printer quality, not image resolution, if I am not mistaken.
One thing that worries me about non-techies using digital cameras is that they don't seem to give any thought to the safety of their photos (the same applies to other sensitive data - it just seems to be assumed by people who aren't in the know that their data is automatically completely safe, nomatter what they do with it). They seem to do several things with them:
1. get them printed professionally (no problems here, but what do they do with the digital copies incase they want a reprint? Remember that the digital version is the equivalent of 35mm negatives) 2. print them on their inkjet (questionable longevity - photos may well fade quite quickly unless you're using a really top quality printer) 3. Stick them on CD-R (Urk - I've got stacks of CD-Rs that are bitrotten after only a few years - these poor sods are going to come back to their photos in 10 years to find them unrecoverable!).
My personal solution to this problem has been to store my photos on my hard drive and make regular write-once backups of the whole lot onto optical media. I have been asked for my opinion on the storage of long lasting data such as photos a number of times so I eventually wrote a short article on the subject so I could refer people to it when asked. (Comments and insight welcome)
I would suggest going with 3.2M unless you need to print larger than 8x10, anything higher is just for bragging rights.
I'd disagree here (depending on what you're doing). Assuming you have a good lens that can actually use the resolution, more megapixels means there is greater scope for cropping and enlarging the shot in postprocessing.
I use a HP Photosmart 850 (4MP, 300mm lens + 1.7x teleconverter on the front) - there have been times when I've been standing in gale force winds trying to take photos of windsurfers and power boat racers without a tripod - very difficult to frame the shot in that kind of wind when you've got the equivalent of a 510mm lens on the front. If I'd got a 8 - 12MP camera then I could've ditched the teleconverter and just shot with the plain 300mm lens, then framed the shot and cropped it in postprocessing when the wind isn't trying to ruin my aim.
However, it seems like these days (especially at the lower end of the market) there is too much emphasis on megapixels - the manufacturers push out shiny 4MP cameras and everyone buys them because they think that the more pixels the better, but often the optics on those cameras are so poor that the images are not really any better than you'd get out of a 2 or 3MP camera.
Still, though, even I recognize that in order to truly see a photo, you need to print it.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you. When I was a kid my familly used to take slides and every so often we'd all sit down, get the projector and screen out and have a slide show. Then everyone switched over to prints, which admittedly are more convenient but I'm not convinced are better - there's something nice about seeing the photos blown up on the big screen.
So when I show my digitals I show them on the TV - IMHO they look much better on a 28" screen than as little prints. If you've got a video projector you can even go back to the Good Old Days(tm) of showing them on a nice big screen.
The only stuff I've had printed was printed so I could frame it and hang it on a wall.
Still, though, with digital the standard for what actually gets printed is allowed to go up a whole bunch.
I find there are 2 main advantages of digital photography: 1. You're not paying for every shot 2. you can see the results immediately (first on the little LCD as soon as you took the photo to give you some idea of what it's like and then as soon as you get home you can view it properly)
Both of those advantages combine to make me feel less restricted - when I used film I would see something nice and take a photo of it. Now when I see something nice I take several photos, trying different things for each. Some of the photos won't be very good and maybe the _proportion_ of good shots goes down, but the _quantity_ of good shots goes up.
I feel the same way about those people who are selfish enough to think that babies have an off button that their parents can just hit whenever they have to fly.
It's called Duck Tape... or sticking them in the hold luggage...:)
First, engine and wind noise provide natural noise masking. It will only be the few closest people that you'd be able to hear talking
Or, they'll just speak a lot louder because of the noise...
I can't remember the last time I went on a flight and didn't hear a phone accidentally ring in flight
I suspect there's a big difference between a brief transmission while it rings and a dozen people yapping away for the entire flight.
And finally, a huge number of people bring on laptops and although they might not be actively attached to a wireless connection, the computers are still sitting there probing the airwaves looking for connection points
1. The laptop doesn't actually need to actively probe for networks, it can just listen for an access point broadcasting it's BSSID (unless it's trying to find an ad-hoc network). 2. 802.11 will usually be transmitting at under 100mW (probably 35mW actually on most hardware), a GSM phone will transmit at up to about 4W.
And if you choose to make your product have a compatible licence, you actually get an added advantage of being able to cut and paste large sections of code.
This would strike me as a Bad Thing actually - yes, it makes your life easier if you can just cut and paste someone else's code, but remember that you're also likely to be cutting and pasting bugs and security holes. I for one would prefer to have several browsers with different security holes rather than several browsers with the same security holes.
As far as bugs go, this was very thought provoking. My hope is that the bugs get fixed due to the nature of open source. Firefox follows standards. If the bug breaks the standard, then it will be fixed. Because of the open source nature of firefox, the more important the bug, the sooner it gets fixed.
I think this is a problem if you have a dominent browser though - take a minor rendering bug as an example. It's not important so may remain unfixed for months (there are such bugs in FireFox). So web developers start to work around it, breaking browsers that don't have the bug. Suddenly all browsers have to implement the bug so that pages render correctly. At the moment it's not such a huge issue because there are no dominent complient browsers, but I fear that if we get one then this will become an issue.
If you validate against firefox instead of against the standard then your pages could well get broken in future versions.
Unforuntately this is exactly what a lot of web developers do - check it works in IE and that's it, even if it breaks every rule in the standard. This is why I think XHTML will be a Good Thing if it gets adopted in the main stream (at least you can guarantee that the web developers are producing parseable code). I don't know about you, but if I was a clueless manager employing a web developer and I got warnings about the code being complete crap when I visited the new site he designed, I wouldn't be paying him.
A future in which you cannot use a browser without XUL support would be just as bad as one in which you cannot use a browser without ActiveX support.
The difference here is that ActiveX is closed, XUL is open. The _biggest_ problem with ActiveX being required to surf a web site is that it's not available (and likely never will be available) for non-windows platforms. This essentially means I have to buy a whole new machine and install windows on it _just_ to view a silly ActiveX website. Needless to say I don't and just wouldn't visit any site that requires ActiveX.
What's wrong with a monoculture if 1) anyone can improve upon the product in question and 2) anyone can adopt those improvements to produce compatible products?
Whilest these may be valid arguements in a true monoculture, please remember that the web browser market _isn't_ a true monoculture - there is always the minority browsers (e.g. browsers to run on mobile phones, etc). If you declare a product to be the dominant browser and everyone else can copy the changes made to that browser, everyone else is always playing catch-up.
I also think that if you declare a bit of software to be "the standard" then any bugs therein will become "standard" and need to be duplicated in other browsers in order to remain compatable.
Microsoft wouldn't screw their main proponents (developers, developers...) by dropping IE
I think that web developers would be far from screwed if IE vanished off the face of the planet - have you any idea how difficult it is to get stuff to work in IE (especially any technology newer than 7 years old or so)?
I am one of those who is actually working on the EGNOS ground segment (something like the USA's WAAS). The current system test bed is designed to create a position-delta to feed with the GPS signal to make positioning more exact.
I noticed that the EGNOS launch (i.e. end of the test phase) has been pushed back to the new year (it used to be listed as the start of 2004 Q4). The ESA site seems reasonably void of a more specific schedule - are you aware if any specific launch date is currently planned for the service, or is it currently just "some time in 2005 Q1"?
AOL obviously doesn't release their server software, but the client software allows you to connect to any server/port you like. So, you can choose your own provider, and since part of the AIM protocol is open (Oscar? I think?), you could do your own server.
But then you are cut off from the rest of the network, whereas a decentralised protocol such as Jabber allows everyone to run their own servers whilest remaining part of the network.
And guess what? That account can be suspended by AOL! Of course, the same is true not only for AIM, but for every other network out there.
Wrong - if you're on the Jabber network then only your server administrator can suspend your account... and if you happen to run your own server then.. well:)
Am having to seperate conversations with the same guy (FireFury03) in two seperate threads and you just happened to get in the middle of it... I thought he had just AC'd a response..
FWIW, I never post as an AC because I believe my posts are actually worth something.
But, once again, this has nothing to do with the protocol...
I agree that this incident was an administrative cock-up, but I'm saying that the design is flawed by the fact that the user's are not given the chance to choose their AIM service provider (or indeed run their own server) - if the user decides that AOL are not competent enough to run the server they have no choice but to switch to a different IM network (which is often not easy given that everyone you speak to is probably only on a single network)
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No, this would not make copying Microsoft software legal, because most Microsoft software is covered by patents
I'm not convinced. You can't patent "a graphical user interface which presents applications in their own 'window'" because *everyone* does those (and even if they didn't, MS doesn't have prior art). So in theory, if you binned copyright laws then you could steal MS's code for that since it's not patentable.
The problem is that requiring the use of patents instead of copyrights breeds a monopolistic environment: Say I write an image viewer. The only way I could protect my code without copyrights would be to patent it. Lets assume that there isn't any prior art and I can patent my image viewer - suddenly I have the monopoly on image viewers because it is illegal for anyone else to write an image viewer even if it's coded completely independently from scratch because they would be infringing my patent.
Now, I own a company with the monopoly on image viewers and anyone who needs one has to buy it off me... what motivation do I have to improve the product? I mean, everyone who needs an image viewer already pays me lots of money for it so what do I get out of expending the time and money to improve it? It's not like there's any competition who might be doing a better job than me and put me out of business.
I can also charge whatever I want because there's no competition to bring down the price.
This, of course, affects opensource developers just as much: you can't develop an opensource competetor to a closed product and if your project is not patentable then you can't protect it at all - some big company can come along and steal your code with none of the inherent GPL style protections.
This is a very bad idea - patents are for *ideas*, copyrights are for the actual code.
If it can be covered up then it's not a very serious bug. Why spend money fixing bugs that aren't a big deal?
Or maybe it's a serious bug that just hasn't been exploited yet?
I'm not sure I even get the point of a digital SLR. With film, the main advantage of an SLR is the split optical path behind the single lens that lets you see through the viewfinder exactly what's exposing the film, regardless of what lens you're using. Digitals have LCD screens that show you exactly what's falling on the sensor, thereby accomplishing the same thing.
The whole point of having an SLR is the same in both cases - you get to see exactly what will be exposed.
Yes, ok, digi cams have LCD screens... you usually can't see them at all in bright sunlight and you can't hold the cam anywhere near as steady when holding it far enough from your face to see the LCD.
A lot of "prosumer" cams have an electronic viewfinder - essentially a small LCD screen behind a viewfinder lens (I have this on my HP850). These have some significant disadvantages:
1. In dark conditions you can't see anything through the viewfinder or LCD because the CCD isn't sensitive enough to give you an image in a decent time-frame (think about the conditions where you might take a 10 or 15 second exposure - how could the electronic viewfinder possibly get an image at 4 frames a second?). So you're basically shooting blind.
2. The resolution is pretty poor - important if you're manually focussing because you really can't tell if the picture is in focus or not
3. Colour reproduction is terrible - good luck trying to set up your polariser correctly. (For me it's mostly guess work)
4. There is a significant lag between what's happening in the real world and what appears on the viewfinder or LCD. This only gets worse in poor lighting conditions (at it's worst the lag is about 500ms on my camera). Not really a problem when you're taking photos of people, but it's a real issue when taking photos of anything thats fast moving. i.e. I quite often do photography of powerboat races - I have to work around the view finder lag by learning to keep both eyes open while taking photos. I look through the viewfinder with my right eye to frame the shot whilest at the same time looking at the real scene to see what's actually happening. If something spectacular happens then by the time it appears in the EVF, even on a bright sunny day, it's too late to press the shutter release.
5. Certainly on my camera, the picture on the viewfinder and LCD screen freezes up whilest the auto-focus is using the image from the CCD, which makes autofocussing on moving objects difficult since you can't track them easilly whilest the focus is doing it's thing.
Of course, there is the other important point that SLRs are considered more "professional" and so usually come along with the professional features such as super-fast focusing, manual modes, burst mode, etc.
Also, more pixels == smaller pixels.
Well, not necessarilly - you can increase the CCD size, but that increases the cost (the really high-end 12MP and more cameras have 35mm sensors, which is very expensive but solves the noise problem)
In that case, Joe Public is being screwed by his own ignorance.
:)
I think that was my original point.
Still, I find it more desirable than keeping prints/negatives as my only copy because they don't preserve perfectly and I can't transfer them digitally perfectly to another medium before the first medium fails
Absolutely. IMHO the memory manufacturers need to start producing some cheap write-once memory cards which _will_ last for decades. I'm sure it's doable.
can't imagine that a TV would be acceptable unless I only had a 1/4 MP camera.
:)
Actually, you'd be surprised - you're not sitting right close to the TV so it looks quite good. (However, I'm in the UK so I feed a RGB signal directly into a PAL TV - the quality is a lot better than you'd get from sticking a composite video signal through an NTSC telly).
I have to mention software, too. gqview. I haven't found any Windows software that even comes close
Yes, I agree entirely. Gqview is excellent and I was quite dissapointed that Fedora 3 doesn't bundle it so I had to go and reinstall it myself after upgrading. Of course I don't use Windows at all so I don't have any problems with finding software for that.
About 2 years ago I bought a HP Photosmart 850 - one of the better prosumer cameras at the time (prices have come down lots and better cameras have appeared in the affordable price ranges now - if I was buying a new camera now I'd be seriously considering an EOS 300D). Up until then I'd not been into photography much, using a APS compact camera.
The HP850 really opened things up for me and I now enjoy taking anything from landscapes to nature to motorsport and other cool stuff
I certainly don't pretend to be good, and often look at professional photos and wonder what they're doing that makes them so much better than mine, but I certainly enjoy doing it.
Anyone know anything about "printing" digital shots to slides? Care to educate me?
I'm sure you can get it done (probably quite expensive since it'll be specialised) but TBH I'm not sure it's worthwhile since you're not going to gain anything over using a digital projector.
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly.
I've had discs become unreadable from both TDK branded discs (about 1.50ukp each 5 or 6 years ago) and POS cheap discs. It is not very many but a few.. however, if that few contains important data you have no other copy of, you're screwed (and I guess this is exactly the situation joe public is in). The bigger deal is probably that you just don't know which are going to fail, and unless you check them regularly you probably won't find out which are failing very quickly.
These days I use POS cheap discs for my backups coz they only have to last until the next backup is taken.
This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.
With respect, thats only 8 years which isn't long in the grand scheme of things. Printed photos are still not bad (a bit faded) after 50 - 100 years - all evidence I've seen suggests that even the best CD-Rs won't last anywhere near that long.
It's funny how an entire feature can be so insightful about digital cameras, and totally leave out suggestions about photo printers. Quality in prints now is limited to printer quality, not image resolution, if I am not mistaken.
One thing that worries me about non-techies using digital cameras is that they don't seem to give any thought to the safety of their photos (the same applies to other sensitive data - it just seems to be assumed by people who aren't in the know that their data is automatically completely safe, nomatter what they do with it). They seem to do several things with them:
1. get them printed professionally (no problems here, but what do they do with the digital copies incase they want a reprint? Remember that the digital version is the equivalent of 35mm negatives)
2. print them on their inkjet (questionable longevity - photos may well fade quite quickly unless you're using a really top quality printer)
3. Stick them on CD-R (Urk - I've got stacks of CD-Rs that are bitrotten after only a few years - these poor sods are going to come back to their photos in 10 years to find them unrecoverable!).
My personal solution to this problem has been to store my photos on my hard drive and make regular write-once backups of the whole lot onto optical media. I have been asked for my opinion on the storage of long lasting data such as photos a number of times so I eventually wrote a short article on the subject so I could refer people to it when asked. (Comments and insight welcome)
Many newer cameras have an orientation sensor that records EXIF info so that programs like jhead can automatically rotate them for you
My HP PS850 doesn't even need to be postprocessed - the images come straight off the SD card rotated to the right orientation.
I would suggest going with 3.2M unless you need to print larger than 8x10, anything higher is just for bragging rights.
I'd disagree here (depending on what you're doing). Assuming you have a good lens that can actually use the resolution, more megapixels means there is greater scope for cropping and enlarging the shot in postprocessing.
I use a HP Photosmart 850 (4MP, 300mm lens + 1.7x teleconverter on the front) - there have been times when I've been standing in gale force winds trying to take photos of windsurfers and power boat racers without a tripod - very difficult to frame the shot in that kind of wind when you've got the equivalent of a 510mm lens on the front. If I'd got a 8 - 12MP camera then I could've ditched the teleconverter and just shot with the plain 300mm lens, then framed the shot and cropped it in postprocessing when the wind isn't trying to ruin my aim.
However, it seems like these days (especially at the lower end of the market) there is too much emphasis on megapixels - the manufacturers push out shiny 4MP cameras and everyone buys them because they think that the more pixels the better, but often the optics on those cameras are so poor that the images are not really any better than you'd get out of a 2 or 3MP camera.
Still, though, even I recognize that in order to truly see a photo, you need to print it.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you. When I was a kid my familly used to take slides and every so often we'd all sit down, get the projector and screen out and have a slide show. Then everyone switched over to prints, which admittedly are more convenient but I'm not convinced are better - there's something nice about seeing the photos blown up on the big screen.
So when I show my digitals I show them on the TV - IMHO they look much better on a 28" screen than as little prints. If you've got a video projector you can even go back to the Good Old Days(tm) of showing them on a nice big screen.
The only stuff I've had printed was printed so I could frame it and hang it on a wall.
Still, though, with digital the standard for what actually gets printed is allowed to go up a whole bunch.
I find there are 2 main advantages of digital photography:
1. You're not paying for every shot
2. you can see the results immediately (first on the little LCD as soon as you took the photo to give you some idea of what it's like and then as soon as you get home you can view it properly)
Both of those advantages combine to make me feel less restricted - when I used film I would see something nice and take a photo of it. Now when I see something nice I take several photos, trying different things for each. Some of the photos won't be very good and maybe the _proportion_ of good shots goes down, but the _quantity_ of good shots goes up.
I feel the same way about those people who are selfish enough to think that babies have an off button that their parents can just hit whenever they have to fly.
:)
It's called Duck Tape... or sticking them in the hold luggage...
First, engine and wind noise provide natural noise masking. It will only be the few closest people that you'd be able to hear talking
Or, they'll just speak a lot louder because of the noise...
I can't remember the last time I went on a flight and didn't hear a phone accidentally ring in flight
I suspect there's a big difference between a brief transmission while it rings and a dozen people yapping away for the entire flight.
And finally, a huge number of people bring on laptops and although they might not be actively attached to a wireless connection, the computers are still sitting there probing the airwaves looking for connection points
1. The laptop doesn't actually need to actively probe for networks, it can just listen for an access point broadcasting it's BSSID (unless it's trying to find an ad-hoc network).
2. 802.11 will usually be transmitting at under 100mW (probably 35mW actually on most hardware), a GSM phone will transmit at up to about 4W.
And if you choose to make your product have a compatible licence, you actually get an added advantage of being able to cut and paste large sections of code.
This would strike me as a Bad Thing actually - yes, it makes your life easier if you can just cut and paste someone else's code, but remember that you're also likely to be cutting and pasting bugs and security holes. I for one would prefer to have several browsers with different security holes rather than several browsers with the same security holes.
As far as bugs go, this was very thought provoking. My hope is that the bugs get fixed due to the nature of open source. Firefox follows standards. If the bug breaks the standard, then it will be fixed. Because of the open source nature of firefox, the more important the bug, the sooner it gets fixed.
I think this is a problem if you have a dominent browser though - take a minor rendering bug as an example. It's not important so may remain unfixed for months (there are such bugs in FireFox). So web developers start to work around it, breaking browsers that don't have the bug. Suddenly all browsers have to implement the bug so that pages render correctly. At the moment it's not such a huge issue because there are no dominent complient browsers, but I fear that if we get one then this will become an issue.
If you validate against firefox instead of against the standard then your pages could well get broken in future versions.
Unforuntately this is exactly what a lot of web developers do - check it works in IE and that's it, even if it breaks every rule in the standard. This is why I think XHTML will be a Good Thing if it gets adopted in the main stream (at least you can guarantee that the web developers are producing parseable code). I don't know about you, but if I was a clueless manager employing a web developer and I got warnings about the code being complete crap when I visited the new site he designed, I wouldn't be paying him.
A future in which you cannot use a browser without XUL support would be just as bad as one in which you cannot use a browser without ActiveX support.
The difference here is that ActiveX is closed, XUL is open. The _biggest_ problem with ActiveX being required to surf a web site is that it's not available (and likely never will be available) for non-windows platforms. This essentially means I have to buy a whole new machine and install windows on it _just_ to view a silly ActiveX website. Needless to say I don't and just wouldn't visit any site that requires ActiveX.
What's wrong with a monoculture if 1) anyone can improve upon the product in question and 2) anyone can adopt those improvements to produce compatible products?
Whilest these may be valid arguements in a true monoculture, please remember that the web browser market _isn't_ a true monoculture - there is always the minority browsers (e.g. browsers to run on mobile phones, etc). If you declare a product to be the dominant browser and everyone else can copy the changes made to that browser, everyone else is always playing catch-up.
I also think that if you declare a bit of software to be "the standard" then any bugs therein will become "standard" and need to be duplicated in other browsers in order to remain compatable.
Microsoft wouldn't screw their main proponents (developers, developers...) by dropping IE
I think that web developers would be far from screwed if IE vanished off the face of the planet - have you any idea how difficult it is to get stuff to work in IE (especially any technology newer than 7 years old or so)?
I am one of those who is actually working on the EGNOS ground segment (something like the USA's WAAS). The current system test bed is designed to create a position-delta to feed with the GPS signal to make positioning more exact.
I noticed that the EGNOS launch (i.e. end of the test phase) has been pushed back to the new year (it used to be listed as the start of 2004 Q4). The ESA site seems reasonably void of a more specific schedule - are you aware if any specific launch date is currently planned for the service, or is it currently just "some time in 2005 Q1"?
A format that doesn't travel well, long load times, a giagantic screen
Yeah, isn't this the mistake Sega made with the GameGear? Technically superior but too bulky so it lost out to the technologically crappy GameBoy.
AOL obviously doesn't release their server software, but the client software allows you to connect to any server/port you like. So, you can choose your own provider, and since part of the AIM protocol is open (Oscar? I think?), you could do your own server.
But then you are cut off from the rest of the network, whereas a decentralised protocol such as Jabber allows everyone to run their own servers whilest remaining part of the network.
And guess what? That account can be suspended by AOL! Of course, the same is true not only for AIM, but for every other network out there.
:)
Wrong - if you're on the Jabber network then only your server administrator can suspend your account... and if you happen to run your own server then.. well
(This is the way it should be)
Am having to seperate conversations with the same guy (FireFury03) in two seperate threads and you just happened to get in the middle of it... I thought he had just AC'd a response..
FWIW, I never post as an AC because I believe my posts are actually worth something.
But, once again, this has nothing to do with the protocol...
I agree that this incident was an administrative cock-up, but I'm saying that the design is flawed by the fact that the user's are not given the chance to choose their AIM service provider (or indeed run their own server) - if the user decides that AOL are not competent enough to run the server they have no choice but to switch to a different IM network (which is often not easy given that everyone you speak to is probably only on a single network)