Before any bashes it as being a flash in the pan, watch the demo and see the framework that it provides and how natural it is to build webapps on top of. Truly an interesting language for the web.
I look at it the other way - because 90+% of all languages and especially extensions like RonR *are* fads, I'm looking for reasons to believe that it isn't. Unfortunately, the actual quality of said product is nearly irrelevant. The better question is who's adopting it, and for RonR, I'm not seeing any heavyweights taking on significantly. Ajax is another matter.
Just another example of why we need stricter trade controls. If a US company is selling technology specifically designed to censor the public or if they provide technical support to achieve such an end, they should be fined, and if the offense continues, dissolved. Of course there needs to be clearly defined limits on what constitutes such things, but it needs to be done.
So we should further expand our tendency to mix values with trade policy? No thanks, we do too much of that already. We're not the world's mommy.
Last, but not least, do not support the Windows-monopoly by being the virus/spyware-janitor for all your Windows-friends. It's quite relieving not having to bother *at all* with the Windows-viruses/spyware. Let them fix their own mess if they choose to take the lazy way and go with the monopoly. Don't be the one who makes it easy for them to use Windows!
Tough to do that without alienating friends. However, if one stops using Windows, then within a few years one simply won't know *how* to deal witht those problems. These days, I can honestly say I don't know how to fix your Windows machine anymore.
Depends on how you see it. The Internet is based on a collaboration between everyone. If the collaboration "falls apart" because of a disagreement, then the Internet "falls appart".
Yeah, it's the passiveness that I don't think is strictly accurate. I guess technically if I smash a window with a hammer it "fell apart," but I think it would be more accurate to state that some asshole broke it. Kind of like now, with the EC threating to break the internet.
Ahhh, but they will only break it for their own users and servers in their own country. The issue here is that this is a pissing contest and we have the keys. Sorry but it is true. It will be interesting to watch some of these countries fall from the 'net though.
The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.
Just to restate - the internet's not going to "fall apart" on it's own. They're planning on breaking it. The terminology they use makes it sound like the network's fragile and about to break. That's not the case.
Except that regular people don't go out and hire an academic research scientist, like they do a lawyer, so there is no free market at work there. Academic research is a public good just like roads, mass transit, and parks. Some things don't happen without government sponsorship, and fundamental science, by and large, is one of them.
Try running "X -configure" sometime - that's much easier in most cases than building an xf86config by hand (or running xf86config, which was essentially the same thing).
Cool, I'll try that. For some reason, I've always had luck with XF86Config, so I've never bothered looking for other ways. I presume this is an xorg thing? Those guys kick ass.
Never mind what a pain it was to download Slack on about seven million floppy disks...:)
X and sound are hardware issues. It depends strongly on the way you buy hardware.
Not in this case. Knoppix autodetected my hardware; Slackware didn't try. Do I care? Not much. I set it up myeslf, recompiled the kernel, edited the xorg.conf, and away we go.
I should have been more specific. Linux supports the hardware (between the kernel for sound and xorg.conf for X). Slackware doesn't spend effort bothering to autodetect them. It assumes you can do that yourself. I'm mostly OK with that assessment.
I first installed Slackware circa 1995 - things like X and sound didn't really "just work"
I most recently installed slackware three months ago, and things like X and sound still don't "just work." But that's Slack - it's for people who know how they need to set up their box, and *really* don't want their Linux distro getting in the way of them doing that. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Red Hat.
I find their use of transparencies quite ugly, actually. But, at least the giant Fischer Price red X to close button seems to be gone.
I actually didn't mind the transparency. Any color scheme that's more muted than the XP crap is better. Like you said, the Fisher Price colors. Let's see - nuclear green, electric blue, and the most garish red on the face of the planet. Let's throw those together, see how it looks.
Good God, who designed that interface?
On the plus side, it looks like they've reduced the size of window bars and the task bar, as all were gi-normous in XP.
Then again, I'm on OS X, so I find having menu bars on the program windows ugly, anymore. It took me a while to get used to the menu is always at the top of the screen that OS X uses, but I find it is less clutter, more use of space for the app now, though.
Same here on all counts. I go back and forth between Mac and Linux, though, so I'm used to both.
Who actually started this tabbed bowsing thing? I thought Opera had tabs before Firefox?
The better question is what mod thought that this flamebait would actually be "Interesting" to discuss for the 2342343th time. Crixus, if you haven't seen this topic enough to make you sick, then you must have taken a 2-year leave of absence from slashdot (which doesn't sound like a bad idea).
News at 11: Opera had tabs before firefox. But first, we'll go to breaking news indicating vi is much better than emacs.
Why is it that Vista is all about the user interface? Transperencey and tabbed browsing is just a part of the GUI and could be included in XP just like that. I want to know about the OS. There is one slightly amusing thing in the screenshots though. He's chatting with someone named Ryan|Topside Porn
Dunno about that. To my knowledge, they are implementing a completely new graphics engine. Yes, you *could* kludge together a bunch of crap and release it as a SP, but that's not a fantastic idea. Also, if they're going to do a fair amount of work, I'm sure they expect to acutally *sell* it.
Additionally, there's a small company in Cupertino who seems to believe that focusing primarily on the user interface isn't a bad idea. I'm not saying MS is doing it *well* necessarily, and there's a lot more to a UI than lickable graphics, but if they actually do care about the UI for once that would not be a bad thing.
Don't know how Vista's going to be from a usability standpoint (obviously), but at least it's not ass ugly like XP. That's at least one improvement.
Whatever, their product groups may do, from speaking to some guys from Microsoft Research at a recent conference and from other sources, they hire lots of PhDs and are doing blue-sky research esp. in the bio-computing area
Huh. That's...interesting. Just wondering, what do they call bio-computing (I can think of a few things that come under that heading, potentially).
The stats I'd seens showed that, percentage-wise, Google had more PhD's, though that still has them losing the overall numbers game obviously even if that's true.
I'm interested though - if MS does have all these researchers, where are the cool results? Is the problem that they have one creative group of people doing cool research, another group doing production, and no way to connect the two? Because I've gotta say, I've never seen MS come out with anything particularly clever, either as a finished product or even a feature of a product.
It's usually poor management that forces the product to be out the door 6 months before it's ready. Either keep your job and release a buggy product or stick to your guns and get fired. I think it should be the company, not the individual developer held accountable. How the company handles things internally is up to them.
Yep. First, it's the company selling the product - not the developer. If a company wants a developer to accept that kind of risk, they better be paying him enormously for the risk.
I hope this clown also doesn't expect this for free - if he wants software to be guaranteed, then the companies selling that software will of course have to build that into the price. You don't get that sort of thing without paying for it. Which you could do now, of course - if you contract out some software, and you want maintenance for it, you pay for that. Nothing's stopping that sort of contract now.
That's the philosphy difference. MS doesn't hire PhD's in the quantities that Google or IBM do. MS doesn't devote people to "blue sky" kinds of problems on the order that Google and definitely IBM do. SO that's why, in my opinion, you don't see MS come up with anything earth shattering. It's just not their thing.
Of course, looking at it cynically, MS just uses the rest of the world as their R&D department. Somebody comes up with an idea, MS buys it, steals it, copies it, or does the old "embrace and extend" on it.
What is their real complaint?! Please enlighten me!
They don't get to feed their overinflated sense of self-importance. That's the complaint. They're threatening to tank the internet - which runs fine right now - over their desire to play politics.
I went through the same thing during my big MUD/MUSH phase back in the early 90's...14+ hours online every day of the week, and I was losing weight because I was forgetting to eat. But you know what? Somehow, I survived, and I didn't need some scary nurse wrapping my head in neo-bondage gear to do it.
People get over smoking, drinking, and heroin on their own too. Some people. Others need help.
Please read the article. A large apature speaker (focused array) can make a small apature spike of pressure.
Good God, I know that. I was agreeing with the poster - if you *don't* use an array, and produce a *uniform* energy dispersal without constructive interference, the energy required to get a uniform field up to the required energy density would be enormous.
And it's more like interference fringes than a magnifying glass.
I'd tend to agree. Not only that, I can't imagine that it would be remotely possible to use regular acoustics to accomplish the effect, as you'd have to get the entire area loud enough to detonate the torpedo. Just wouldn't have the energy density.
I don't think NTP is trying to kill the wireless email business. After all, NTP has no real products or sales. NTP just wants cash for its patents (assuming the patents are valid, which is a different story entirely).
Well, they've shut Blackberry's email capability down. That's already more damage they've caused than benefit. Wanting to "cash in" off of the work of others is exactly the sort of thing the patent system is supposed to discourage.
In short, patent squatters are bad for everyone. They don't invent anything that someone else doesn't also invent (by definition, or they never have a defendent). They never attempt to actually bring anything to market. They're just leeches.
...was there no preventative measures in place to protet the irreplaceable memorabilia?!
Would have been tough, I imagine. I mean, sprinklers would have caused about as much damage. And I doubt anyone considered specially designing a special fireproof storage room for the purpose.
The whole point of patents is to keep the big companies from steamrolling the little guy who comes up with a great idea. I'd prefer we kept it that way.
Nope. The idea of patents is to protect innovators so they can provide something for teh public good in an environment that gives them the opportunity to do so. If you're a little guy inventor and you patent something, and you can't commercialize on it, you either sell it off or you do nothing with it. If your sole idea is to patent something that someone else will come up with anyway with the idea of suing them when they actually do something with it, you're a leech. In that situation, you are exactly the problem and precisely the kind of useless part of the invention process that we're trying to get rid of here.
In other words, if you can't play with the big boys, get out of the way.
Note that the "you" there is general, not you specifically of course.
I know, I'll license my idea out to companies and they can manufacture it for me. Under your model, I would not be allowed to do this "restrictive" process. You'd rather it be outlawed. I've heard that Leer invented the 8-Track tape; and becuase he could not afford to do anything with it, he sold the patent for the player and licensed the patent for manufacture of the tapes.
No, that's not the idea. The idea (at least as I see it) is that patents should be a shade more like trademarks - you should at least have to make an effort to commercialize the patent to be able to keep it. That would certainly include selling said patent - if you can't commercialize, sell it to someone who can.
The question is, what's the point of the patent system? In a healthy environment, patents stimulate innovation by providing a system of reward for the person who puts in the research and development, so they get to recoup investment and get a reward for their risk. The point is not to *stifle* innovation by allowing people to squat on patents so they can stop companies from implementing an idea.
So we need a way to stop the bad without the good. I think a requirement to demonstrate attempted commercialization would work. That would eliminate IP holding companies - they'd have to establish R&D departments or sell.
Slashdot Mirror
I look at it the other way - because 90+% of all languages and especially extensions like RonR *are* fads, I'm looking for reasons to believe that it isn't. Unfortunately, the actual quality of said product is nearly irrelevant. The better question is who's adopting it, and for RonR, I'm not seeing any heavyweights taking on significantly. Ajax is another matter.
So we should further expand our tendency to mix values with trade policy? No thanks, we do too much of that already. We're not the world's mommy.
Tough to do that without alienating friends. However, if one stops using Windows, then within a few years one simply won't know *how* to deal witht those problems. These days, I can honestly say I don't know how to fix your Windows machine anymore.
Yeah, it's the passiveness that I don't think is strictly accurate. I guess technically if I smash a window with a hammer it "fell apart," but I think it would be more accurate to state that some asshole broke it. Kind of like now, with the EC threating to break the internet.
Hey, is that Nelson I hear?
Ha HA!
Just to restate - the internet's not going to "fall apart" on it's own. They're planning on breaking it. The terminology they use makes it sound like the network's fragile and about to break. That's not the case.
Except that regular people don't go out and hire an academic research scientist, like they do a lawyer, so there is no free market at work there. Academic research is a public good just like roads, mass transit, and parks. Some things don't happen without government sponsorship, and fundamental science, by and large, is one of them.
Cool, I'll try that. For some reason, I've always had luck with XF86Config, so I've never bothered looking for other ways. I presume this is an xorg thing? Those guys kick ass.
Never mind what a pain it was to download Slack on about seven million floppy disks... :)
Do I even want to ask why you did that? :)
Not in this case. Knoppix autodetected my hardware; Slackware didn't try. Do I care? Not much. I set it up myeslf, recompiled the kernel, edited the xorg.conf, and away we go.
I should have been more specific. Linux supports the hardware (between the kernel for sound and xorg.conf for X). Slackware doesn't spend effort bothering to autodetect them. It assumes you can do that yourself. I'm mostly OK with that assessment.
I most recently installed slackware three months ago, and things like X and sound still don't "just work." But that's Slack - it's for people who know how they need to set up their box, and *really* don't want their Linux distro getting in the way of them doing that. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Red Hat.
I actually didn't mind the transparency. Any color scheme that's more muted than the XP crap is better. Like you said, the Fisher Price colors. Let's see - nuclear green, electric blue, and the most garish red on the face of the planet. Let's throw those together, see how it looks.
Good God, who designed that interface?
On the plus side, it looks like they've reduced the size of window bars and the task bar, as all were gi-normous in XP.
Then again, I'm on OS X, so I find having menu bars on the program windows ugly, anymore. It took me a while to get used to the menu is always at the top of the screen that OS X uses, but I find it is less clutter, more use of space for the app now, though.
Same here on all counts. I go back and forth between Mac and Linux, though, so I'm used to both.
The better question is what mod thought that this flamebait would actually be "Interesting" to discuss for the 2342343th time. Crixus, if you haven't seen this topic enough to make you sick, then you must have taken a 2-year leave of absence from slashdot (which doesn't sound like a bad idea).
News at 11: Opera had tabs before firefox. But first, we'll go to breaking news indicating vi is much better than emacs.
Dunno about that. To my knowledge, they are implementing a completely new graphics engine. Yes, you *could* kludge together a bunch of crap and release it as a SP, but that's not a fantastic idea. Also, if they're going to do a fair amount of work, I'm sure they expect to acutally *sell* it.
Additionally, there's a small company in Cupertino who seems to believe that focusing primarily on the user interface isn't a bad idea. I'm not saying MS is doing it *well* necessarily, and there's a lot more to a UI than lickable graphics, but if they actually do care about the UI for once that would not be a bad thing.
Don't know how Vista's going to be from a usability standpoint (obviously), but at least it's not ass ugly like XP. That's at least one improvement.
Huh. That's...interesting. Just wondering, what do they call bio-computing (I can think of a few things that come under that heading, potentially).
The stats I'd seens showed that, percentage-wise, Google had more PhD's, though that still has them losing the overall numbers game obviously even if that's true.
I'm interested though - if MS does have all these researchers, where are the cool results? Is the problem that they have one creative group of people doing cool research, another group doing production, and no way to connect the two? Because I've gotta say, I've never seen MS come out with anything particularly clever, either as a finished product or even a feature of a product.
Yep. First, it's the company selling the product - not the developer. If a company wants a developer to accept that kind of risk, they better be paying him enormously for the risk.
I hope this clown also doesn't expect this for free - if he wants software to be guaranteed, then the companies selling that software will of course have to build that into the price. You don't get that sort of thing without paying for it. Which you could do now, of course - if you contract out some software, and you want maintenance for it, you pay for that. Nothing's stopping that sort of contract now.
Of course, looking at it cynically, MS just uses the rest of the world as their R&D department. Somebody comes up with an idea, MS buys it, steals it, copies it, or does the old "embrace and extend" on it.
They don't get to feed their overinflated sense of self-importance. That's the complaint. They're threatening to tank the internet - which runs fine right now - over their desire to play politics.
People get over smoking, drinking, and heroin on their own too. Some people. Others need help.
Good God, I know that. I was agreeing with the poster - if you *don't* use an array, and produce a *uniform* energy dispersal without constructive interference, the energy required to get a uniform field up to the required energy density would be enormous.
And it's more like interference fringes than a magnifying glass.
Thanks for the explanation. Up until that point, my widdle American brain thought you were talking to a flower. ;)
I'd tend to agree. Not only that, I can't imagine that it would be remotely possible to use regular acoustics to accomplish the effect, as you'd have to get the entire area loud enough to detonate the torpedo. Just wouldn't have the energy density.
Well, they've shut Blackberry's email capability down. That's already more damage they've caused than benefit. Wanting to "cash in" off of the work of others is exactly the sort of thing the patent system is supposed to discourage.
In short, patent squatters are bad for everyone. They don't invent anything that someone else doesn't also invent (by definition, or they never have a defendent). They never attempt to actually bring anything to market. They're just leeches.
Would have been tough, I imagine. I mean, sprinklers would have caused about as much damage. And I doubt anyone considered specially designing a special fireproof storage room for the purpose.
Nope. The idea of patents is to protect innovators so they can provide something for teh public good in an environment that gives them the opportunity to do so. If you're a little guy inventor and you patent something, and you can't commercialize on it, you either sell it off or you do nothing with it. If your sole idea is to patent something that someone else will come up with anyway with the idea of suing them when they actually do something with it, you're a leech. In that situation, you are exactly the problem and precisely the kind of useless part of the invention process that we're trying to get rid of here.
In other words, if you can't play with the big boys, get out of the way.
Note that the "you" there is general, not you specifically of course.
No, that's not the idea. The idea (at least as I see it) is that patents should be a shade more like trademarks - you should at least have to make an effort to commercialize the patent to be able to keep it. That would certainly include selling said patent - if you can't commercialize, sell it to someone who can.
The question is, what's the point of the patent system? In a healthy environment, patents stimulate innovation by providing a system of reward for the person who puts in the research and development, so they get to recoup investment and get a reward for their risk. The point is not to *stifle* innovation by allowing people to squat on patents so they can stop companies from implementing an idea.
So we need a way to stop the bad without the good. I think a requirement to demonstrate attempted commercialization would work. That would eliminate IP holding companies - they'd have to establish R&D departments or sell.