When I worked at Sony a few years back, pre-SDMI, one of the things I worked on was the technology for electronic content distribution. I was the tech liaison between Sony Corporation of America (SCA), Sony Music (SMEI), Warner Music Group (WMG), IBM (tech and business groups), and Sony research labs in Japan (aka "Tokyo").
Aside from the (questionable) joy of explaining cryptography to suits and explaining licensing requirements to geeks (Harry Fox helps throw a real monkey wrench in there, administering rights for song-writers), one of the things that came up time and time again was anti-trust issues.
SMEI and WMG were well-aware that together they represented about 30% of the market (they split that up, flip-flopping every year over who has the most based on who had bigger hits). Their expectation was that a joint venture between them would attract BMG, Universal, EMI and whoever was number six at the time. Then independents would simply have to fish or cut bait and join up as well.
Everyone was very careful to avoid using words and phrases like "controlling", "domination", etc. at least in written materials. People would verbally joke that they needed to make sure those words weren't written down, in case they ever got subpoena'ed for anti-trust, but everyone knew that the objective was making the HBO of electronic music distribution. You see, they recognized that HBO had the movie companies by the short and curlies as far as cable distribution of films went, and didn't want the same to happen to them in a new media distribution - the film companies have been worrying about this for themselves for electronic distribution for a couple of years now.
Of course, Napster beat them to it, so they beat on Napster legally. One of the funniest things about the timing of these things for me was SDMI being announced just after MP3 hit the cover of Time Magazine, when I'd been working on it for years prior. And of course they got the DMCA passed in the meantime, making cracking even the stupidest of copy control schemes illegal. Of course, every crypto expert they talked to at the time (myself included) emphasized that no scheme was foolproof and you should be sure to design the system to minimize damage in the case of a crack. Being powerful executives with lobbyists on retainer, a legal solution was obvious.
So, all in all, I'm pleasantly amused that the music companies got just a bit too eager and slipped in one phrase too many.....
Loompanics Unlimited, that sterling source of all that They don't want you to know, has a section of books on these kinds of things. My favorite is this one. I want a decommissioned nuclear submarine I can berth at Manhattan! Then I can live "in" the East Village (where I live now - been interesting) and get away from it all.
Let me just start by letting everyone know I live (and am currently typing this) from Manhattan.
Me too. East 11th Street between First and Second Avenues. For those readers not so intimately familiar with Manhattan geography, that puts me a couple miles, perhaps, from the WTC (takes about 30 minutes to walk there). It also put my apartment inside the neighborhood Rudy Giuliani closed in the wake of the WTC attack.
I used to dislike cops. THey harassed me, the were disrespectful to me, and messed with my friends.
I had no such direct personal beef with cops. I'm white. Aside from tattoos (pretty common in my neighborhood), I don't especially stand out as a trouble-maker. I had severe reservations on police behavior, based on ethical profiling, the spurious War on Drugs, and other abuses, but this wasn't based on anything police did to me personally.
I take it all back. All of it.
I don't. I'm more scared of cops than ever before. Perhaps you live in a part of Manhattan where didn't have to show a police officer your ID simply to take a right turn on 14th street to walk home. The prospect of police being given that kind of power at all is terrifying.
I have a new respect for all police in New York City since the attacks on the world trade center. They, along with the firemen all risked thier lives to help get people out of the buildings as quickly as they could. But, as you know, the building collapsed, trapping thousands (literally) of New York's finest men and women, who selflessly gave thier lives to help the rest of us.
I'm reminded instead of a scene in Ashes of Victory by David Weber. This is the latest in the Honor Harrington series of sci-fi novels. Honor has recently broken out of the worst prison planet known, taking more than 400,000 prisoners with her. Starting out imprisoned herself, with no access to equipment other than two shuttlecraft and short her own left arm and left eye. The Queen of Manticore (Honor's boss) and her Prime Minister want to give Honor the highest award for valor that she can.
Honor declines. Because everything she did was her duty. It was her job. It was amazing and heroic and spectacular, but it was nothing more and nothing less than her duty required of her. It was her duty to escape if she could. It was her duty to help subordinates if she could. So she did.
I don't mean to denigrate or reduce in any way, shape, or form, the efforts rescuers have put into the WTC situation. But bluntly, the police and fireworkers did exactly what they were supposed to. They risked their lives, but that's what they signed up for. For a while, police recruiting posters in New York had a line to the effect of "Most people wouldn't take this job for a million dollars. Some do it for a lot less."
Their heroic actions in rescue efforts doesn't mitigate or excuse abuses or crimes of the past. Does pulling a corpse out of the rubble make it okay for a cop to shoot a black man whose "gun" was his wallet?
Now, when I see a police man on the street, I smile at him. He is ensuring my safety, and the safety of others.
I smile too, but only out of self-defense. No reason to give them a reason to harass me.
Now, its our turn. Sure, the government may have "demonized" us before. But times are fundamentally different now.
Not in the way you mean, they aren't. Terrorists have been around for a long time. Robin Hood was a terrorist. The fact that "weapons" of mass destruction are a heck of a lot nastier now doesn't change the ethical basis of terrorism and how to deal with it.
No, the way times might be different now is that Bush has what many people consider legitimate cause to impose the equivalent of martial law, all with Senate and Congressional approval and encouragement. The Office of Homeland Security is a name worthy of George Orwell and Stalin. When I was young, I read 1984. Then I lived through the year and chuckled at the Apple ads spoofing IBM as Big Brother. Remember those t-shirts about "Win95=Mac84"?
George Bush 2001 = Big Brother 1984 is too scary to let me sleep comfortably. And the ATA and the Office of Homeland Security help make it possible.
Don't think the death of bin Laden will be anything more than proof that Big Brother Loves You. There will always be terrorists and if terrorists justify totalitarianism in the Land of the Free, that totalitarianism will only go away with revolution. No Senator ever got re-elected for repealing anything except Prohibition. Today's politicians (or their handlers) understand bread and circuses too well for that. Just a couple of months ago, Bush was bribing most citizens with $300 checks.
I'm getting a little heated now, so I'm gonna shut up. But the logic is there. Look at the history and expansion of the War on Drugs and the potential for the War on Terrorism is, well, terrifying.
Missing the Point - Not About Making Money
on
PS2 As PC
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· Score: 2
I'd like to think that one of the last things I did when leaving Sony a year and a half ago was to plant this bee in management's bonnet. Maybe I did for U.S. management, but too often Japan doesn't listen to the U.S. so I doubt I was actually that influential - but it's nice to dream:-)
What most people are missing about the Linux PS2 as a Wintel killer is that it has very little to do with an immediate business model and very much to do with unseating a powerful marketplace player (Microsoft). Jackson's identification of the "application barrier to entry" was right on the money.
A PS2 that can run Linux instantly beats any PC on cost of software alone. Note that this is a marketing perspective, not a detailed technical one. Sure, MS Office might be better than Star Office, but Star Office is free, not ~$500.
A Linux distro for the PS2 can be realistically sold for $20, and make a profit because your "developer costs" are mainly the costs to create nice skins and a Sony look-n-feel and configure everything "out of the box." Sell it at the more usual $50 for a PS2 game and you're going to town. Half the price of WinDoze, ten times the functionality (remember, it comes with the marketing equivalent of MS Office).
You've now smashed the application barrier to entry and made money doing it. You can run every PS1 and PS2 game, and many of these are titles consumers already own. You can play DVDs and CDs. And it replaces that new PC you were thinking about. And there's thousands of apps available that will run as soon as someone does a./configure; make install.
Does this make sense for Sony? Damn straight. One of the things Sony worries about all the time is "What do we do about Microsoft?" Anyone in new business development at Sony at least considers that question on every new business concept they consider. Get rid of Microsoft's hegemony and you've opened up a door for massive new revenue streams, even if you lost money doing it. The fact that you can make money means it's stupid not to do it.
First off, something very like this happens, though generally with less technological mediation than suggested by a P2P system. It's called a union sometimes (a word that many of the Libertarians of Slashdot would find ugly). And sometimes it's called a coalition. When bigger companies do it (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) it gets called a cartel. A couple of years back, it was called "B2B portals" or "vertical portals". Often, those were organized by distributors and not retail outlets, but that's just a matter of where you lie in the capitalist food chain - I'm blanking on the site name right now, but some commerce sites try to bring "quantity discounts" to individual consumers by letting them group together to buy in bulk.
As a concept, this has been floating around for years, even in technological form (and decades, even centuries, in purely people forms). Read Negroponte from five years back - his favorite example was lots of people getting together to buy cars in bulk.
Now, be that as it may, this isn't a case of a "small matter of programming." It's a classic political Prisoner's Dilemma. If I tell the customer here in my store "Go get it elsewhere," how can I be sure that "elsewhere" will do the same thing in return? Capitalism rewards treachery. Treachery is most often a short term game, and capitalism makes it extremely easy to favor the short-term and screw the long term. Peer-to-peer doesn't do anything to remove a retailer's unease about sending a customer to another store. They'd sooner try to keep the customer by placing an order for the customer right then and there (and pretty much any media store (book, record, video, etc) will do that).
First off, I agree - OpenGL would be a place to start, except for printing and text. This is where Berlin starts, after all.
Postscript/PDF is pretty unwieldy, from what i have seen,
I'm curious as to what you find unwieldy.
Is it just the postfix notation that PostScript uses (i.e., 4 5 + instead of 4 + 5)? That's certainly irritating, unless you're used to a postfix calculator. But I didn't find it any more irritating than using prefix notation in Lisp or Scheme or the mix of prefix (for functions) and infix (for math) in C, C++, and Java.
Or is it the low-level nature of it? Good use of procedures (in PostScript) or objects (in Quartz) helps tremendously there. I know one guy who wrote a ray tracer in PostScript! He had to limit the data size, but only because (at the time - 1991) he couldn't find a printer with enough RAM:-)
Certainly, PostScript is no more low level than OpenGL. In some ways, it is higher (PDF/Quartz even more so - check out the color model). I'll admit that PDF's tendency to use one-letter commands is dense, but it isn't really meant for human consumption. Quartz is an API, so it has full words for method names.
but is obviously quite flexible with good typography support, which is the biggest missing element in all the others.
Absolutely - and it's been that way for years. Ten years ago, researchers at Xerox PARC (Card, Mackinlay, Robertson) were doing 3D info visualization and pointed out poor text support as one of their biggest problems. And nothing much has changed.
I have actually used NeWS myself and found it to be quite nice. In fact, the story I heard was that X was created because Sun wouldn't license NeWS to any other workstation vendors! Andy van Dam, Certified Graphics God at Brown University, explained his disgust with Sun's attitude on NeWS (likening it to Xerox's idiocy in not disseminating windowing in general and leaving it to the Mac). He said he told Sun that they had a "bullet train", but because of their licensing attitudes, every other vendor was teaming up behind a "steam locomotive" called X.:-)
Some of the features that were nice in NeWS (aside from general 3rd-gen coolness like, oh floating point coordinates, and the pure niftyness of sending PostScript over Ethernet for drawing:-) included its object model (the PostScript dialect in NeWS was object-oriented!), its support for pre-emptive threading, and arbitrarily shaped windows (in the eighties!). All in all it was a nice piece of work.
Yet another example of superior technology dying for business reasons.
Try Meyer, T., Blair, D., and Conner, D. B."WAXweb: Toward Dynamic MOO-based VRML", Proceedings VRML 95. It talks about adding VRML to a MOO, which covers the client-server topology, as well as 3D. The MOO itself provided all the chat you could want. Since the MOO could track when objects moved from room to room, and people were just objects, and the MOO could spit out VRML to correspond to objects, you had simple 3D avatars and such.
The Worlds, Inc. people almost certainly knew about this, as Tom Meyer, one of the authors, was on the VRML Advisory Group, and I'm pretty certain someone from Worlds, Inc. was on the VAG, too. This was also at the first VRML conference, in 1995. And WAXweb was one of the very first (if not the first) sites to serve VRML over the World-Wide Web.
And Stephenson's Snowcrash was all over the VRML community at that time. Everyone knew that what they wanted to do was implement the Black Sun - the bar where Hiro demonstrates his abilities as a "hacker." In fact, one of the VRML start-ups was called Black Sun.
You can go back even farther to check out Lucas's Habitat system, back in the eighties. Actually, now that I think of it, I remember hearing at the time that Worlds was planning on patenting some of this stuff - my boss at the time was Andy van Dam, one of the leading lights of computer graphics, who scoffed at the prospect of Worlds patenting anything so obvious. Andy and Tom were both all over that stuff, as they were instrumental in establishing the VRML Consortium.
Actually, wouldn't it be fun if someone actually did patent patents? No seriously, hear me out. Like the "Instant Post-Modern Paper" that's been running around for years, load it with enough important-sounding gobbledy gook that you can get it by a patent clerk....
Hmmm.
A System to Distribute and Protect Intellectual Property? Or maybe, maybe, A System to Validate Uniqueness and Protect Duplication? Or perhaps we should put the clerks in place, like, A Multi-User Intellectual Property Protection System. Heck, that sounds like SDMI.....
Having said that, UML is one of the tools in the good O-O programmer's toolbox.
Absolutely. So is rapid prototyping, which is generally pretty antithetical to the approach taken by most formal OOA/D systems (or formal structured design, etc). They have different uses.
If you're building something mission-critical that is well-understood, getting it right the first time is crucial and benefits greatly from detailed design. Building a banking system? UML is a good idea. Bugs lose billions of dollars.
If you're doing something researchy or with a poorly defined specification, a few rounds of rapid prototyping can be immensely useful. As a research programmer in user interfaces, I found rapid prototyping to be extremely useful. You don't always know what will work well before hand because much of it is so "squishy" and not amenable to formal analysis.
Anyone who always uses only one or the other is either handling a narrow category of problems or is making more work for themselves than they need to. Me, I'm lazy.
It's not a magic bullet that will enable you to solve every problem in a generic fashion that will work all of the time.
Amen, Brother! So Sayeth Fred Brooks. No particular design tool or methodology or anything is the uniform ideal thing. Sure, it's all Turing-complete, but then a hammer will eventually cut a 2x4 board in half by breaking enough wood. The saw is still a better tool. Model-View-Controller works for some applications, but for others it rots
Before anyone jumps on me for dissing MVC, try doing a model-view-controller design for intelligent handwriting recognition like on the Newton or Calligrapher. You've got semantic word recognition (my Newt spells better than I do, and I'm a good speller that routinely ignores spell checkers because my writing generally includes more jargon that the checker doesn't know than mistakes), concurrent ink and recognition that removes ink as the words are recognized and replaces it with formatted text. Shoehorn it into MVC and you'll either get one of the MVC components doing all the work or the bandwidth (API size) between the three MVC components is massive, indicating poor encapsulation and suggesting a different approach to the design should be taken (the "spaghetti of callbacks" problem, rampant in most modern UI toolkits).
At the very least, if one is teaching beginning CS, they should use UML graphs to teach concepts instead of whatever graph notation the professor feels like using.
By coinky-dink, this is exactly what the CS textbook did that I wrote lo these many years ago. Actually, we used OMT, because it was 1994, and Booch and Rumbaugh were still sparring with each other. I imagine that the students in that class were well-prepared when UML came along - they'd been using a similar notation since they learned to program (this was a first-semester textbook).
so all you need to do is decimate all the surfaces to triangles, rotate the figure, sort the surfaces in z-depth order, and dump it to fig format
This is the so-called "Painter's Algorithm," and while it is simple, there is a major gotcha there.
As you've stated it, it assumes that you have no intersecting surfaces. Now if the original poster is doing some sort of mechanical, CAD/M kind of thing, this may in fact apply to the problem, because the model will be constructed to be able to be a physical thing. Anything else and you open yourself up to lots of potential errors.
Getting Painter's right involves checking for intersecting polygons, and splitting the intersecting polygons. Aside from being an expensive operation, it's highly sensitive to floating point errors.
So beware of the simple way out in 3D graphics....
Sony had the billions to spend on lawyers to fight it to the death.
1/2:-)
Marginally more seriously, Sony was, what, twenty, thirty years old at the time (founded in 1949, making a rice steamer, of all things). Lots of stock holders. Lots of existing vested interest. And existing analogies (audio tape) to draw on. And let's face it, TV broadcasters still made their money. They were tossing the content over the transom anyway.
(ital is streetlawyer and bold is either quotes of me or where I get hot under the collar)
"is there some such work which I literally could not produce without something like DeCSS?".
Um, I think you're depending on a too-literal interpretation of "literally" below (sorry - couldn't resist). Sure, lots of time, money, expense, and you don't need DeCSS. But that's analogous to saying "No copy machines, because you can hand-write anything you need". And it ignores the fact that a new medium, a new information technology (like DVD) changes the kinds of information available. There weren't many books running around before the printing press. No novels either. Prose fiction (as opposed to epic poetry) was enabled by the printing press.
The trailer(s) for the film itself
Available on other videotapes. If you're genuine about producing a fair use work, you'll get hold of them.
They may be available, they may not. I can't generally find out without buying or renting the tape and finding out - studios don't tell you what ads are on the tape. So in order to obtain this material any other way, I have to go through a prohibitive amount of work.
Alternate language soundtracks
You can simply record the sound made by your Windows DVD player
The sound made by my what? I'm sorry, I don't do Windows. I'm using a Mac right now, right next to a Linux box I bought when I still worked at Sony that I never booted to Windows - I wiped it first thing. So I must go and buy some proprietary thing or otherwise gain access to it in order to do this? Prohibitive, again.
by conventional means and add it to your fair use work. You don't need a digital-perfect copy for scholarship, satire or parody.
Since when? Ever see an art student painting a copy in a museum? Or a film student at a repertory theater? Scholars always want the best materials to work from. It's the nature of scholarship. Do you expect a paleontologist to study less-than-perfect reproductions of fossils? No, a paleontologist studies the actual fossil if possible and the best reproduction available if not (and may go to the trouble to make a reproduction if one isn't available).
Subtitles, both in other languages and for the hearing impaired
Screenplays are not hard to get hold of in paper form, or on the internet
And often differ from what is actually said in the movie (it's called a "shooting script"). Further, many movies do not have published screenplays (and how many of those Internet scripts are in fact published?). Sure, Taxi Driver and Blue Velvet do, but how about Chicken Run? You may be able to buy it on the streets of New York (like you could buy a video of Phantom Menace the day it was released), but I doubt the street vendors have legal permission.
Soundtracks are often reordered on records or CDs when they're released (if they are released). Director's commentary may be available in an interview, but that isn't keyed to the film the way it is on a DVD.
Fair use exists to ensure that copyright does not stifle free speech. It can't be worked up into a right to have your kewl DVDs available in exactly the form you want. There is no such right.
Start from why copyright (and patents) were created instead: to promote speech, to stimulate discourse (and to promote innovation in the case of patents) by giving you a (temporary) legal monopoly. Fair use came about to make sure that legal monopoly didn't get in its own way, stifling the point of copyright in the first place.
I'm a published author. Addison Wesley mails me a check once a quarter. A small check, but it is a check. Do I want people to be able to copy my book wholesale and resell it without paying me? No. Do I want other authors to be able to build on it without restriction? Damn right I do - it's a textbook and I want people to learn from it. Copyright enabled me to make money from the book, but isn't there to prevent anyone else from building on it.
and all the material you might want to use is available elsewhere.
but in fact, often it isn't. Most DVDs these days include extensive "Added Features!" These typically include:
The trailer(s) for the film itself (never on VHS, only trailers for other films the studio wants you to buy).
Alternate language soundtracks (often never released in the US - I mean, really, "South Park" in French is not on the shelves in Blockbuster in the US (maybe in Quebec, maybe not), but it is on the DVD).
Subtitles, both in other languages and for the hearing impaired (you can verify that line you can't quite hear, and oh, that's [rhythmic farting] during the "Uncle Fucker" song on "South Park").
Director's commentary (never on VHS).
Music-only soundtrack (never on VHS).
Now, add in the features you get on a better DVD release. How many of us bought a DVD player just to see all the groovy stuff they put on "The Matrix" DVD? I mean, you simply can't jump back and forth between behind-the-scenes and released footage on video - it's tape! it's linear!
Okay, I'm clearly getting overwrought:-) Time for some coffee and happy pills.
I'll second that recommendation. Well-written Haskell is a thing of sublime elegance. No, really. It's highly declarative (having no real notion of state - just monads, bits of state you can pass around). And its lazy evaluation enables some wonderfully elegant things, like infinite lists (no, not a function you call to get the next element - it is a list). Short examples often use combinatorial mathematics. Let's take a simple example: factorials:
fib 0 = 0
fib 1 = 1
fib (n+2) = fib n + fib (n+1)
Yes, that's the function definition of factorial.
Looks a lot like the mathematical definition, don't you think?
And no, it doesn't need to check for integer roll-over because integers in Haskell do that intrinsically (i.e., 32 or 64 bit til they roll over, then it goes to an arbitrary precision representation).
Examples> fact 20
2432902008176640000
Examples>
Another classic example is an infinite list of prime numbers using a modulo sieve:
primes:: Integral a => [a]
primes = map head (iterate sieve [2..])
sieve (p:xs) = [ x | x<-xs, x `rem` p/= 0 ]
The first line is an explicit type declaration saying "primes is a list of things conforming to the class Integral." I leave the rest as an exercise in reading uncommented code:-) except to note that "[2..]" is the infinite list of numbers starting at 2 (you can do finite ones, too, like [2..20]), and [x | x<-xs, some boolean expression of x] is the list of all x such that x is an element of xs and the boolean expr is true.
Now, just in case you think Haskell is only used for dense mathematical expressions, note that it comes with literate programming functionality built in. And the Haskell Home Page has some examples of some quite meaty real-world examples.
Actually, I did speak in terms of dollars. I pointed out that the competing product cost $50,000 per CPU and only added features we didn't need for at least a year. For whatever reason, that wasn't enough. It didn't help that management couldn't decide between me and the VP of Tech who came from NBC and was a Microsoft guy - first thing he wanted to do when he arrived was install Microsoft Exchange and make everyone use Outlook (this was a company of about twenty people at the time - I managed to make some observations on the security risks and put the kibosh on that!)
I spent three years as a suit at this small media and electronics conglomerate, so I thought I had an idea of how to talk the talk and walk the walk when it came to the big dinero. I still don't entirely understand it - I managed to explain the cost-benefit analysis to their assistants, but they just wouldn't hear it.
That was why I made that semi-joke about an OReilly panel on talking to suits - even when you know the lingo, it doesn't always work. I'd hope that a bunch of smart geeks would have enough ware stories to at least tell others the traps....
At my last salaried job, a now-dead start-up called Novix Media, I told them to simply use Slash for the first release of their big twenty-something-site-that-never-was.
Of course, top management, which included typical old-media folks like Michael Berman (the man who brought us George magazine along with the late John-John), insisted on paying a consulting firm millions of dollars instead.
So I showed them what it could do. I brought in my old Sony VAIO Superslim laptop, a creaky old machine with all of 32 MB of RAM and a 200MHz Pentium (I'd wiped the drive and installed SuSE after one too many lock-ups by WinDoze). Mind you, the "executive assistants" had better machines. Of course, it ran Slash like a champ.
That convinced them enough to buy a modest Linux server, but they still went to Vancouver on a boondoggle to talk to a consulting firm (see the scathing article by Will Leitch in Ironminds for more on that - thank the goddess Will didn't see fit to mention me by name:-) which they then decided wasn't worth the time. So they staff up, but still don't deploy.... They wanted to look at Oracle and Vignette.... which would have done most of what Slash and a CVS server would do at a hundred times the cost (no, not infinite - I'm counting staff time to install Slash and CVS:-)
Go figure. Maybe I should propose a panel at the O'Reilly convention on the cluelessness of management, except of course it would be preaching to the choir.....
Well, the rumors on the new PowerBook were dead on. Even so, the machine is impressive - a lot of stuff in a small space. And elegant - executives will happily tote this around when they wouldn't touch a lime green iBook.
The price cuts were also no big surprise - of course the audience cheered, but the press had been giving Apple a beating for the past month or so about soft sales. "Soft Sales? Price Cut!" Apple had already been doing it in the form of rebates.
Even March for OS X was no surprise - CNET called it "late", but that's pretty much what people have been expecting.
One of the reasons (IMNSHO) the Palm does so many of the things that the Newton does is that many Newton engineers went to Palm when the Newton was on the rocks at Apple. The Palm UI is more suited to a pen than, say, Windoze CE which mistakenly tries to be too much like Windoze.
The Palm is clearly an incredibly useful tool - so many people use it. I don't think it is the be-all and end-all of pen UIs, though. My favorite comment on this one is the following:
The Palm is the right size when you're
not using it. The Newton is the right size when you are.
The Newton is big, yes. But taking notes in a meeting on a Palm is a bit like taking notes on a Post-It. Sure, you can do it, but nobody does it by choice. Taking notes on a Newton is more like taking notes on a steno pad - quite reasonable, though many people prefer a full-size pad of paper (the thought of a tablet-sized Newton makes me drool, but it will never be).
Both I and the earlier poster suggested looking at the Newton OS as an example for directions in pen user interfaces. Despite the presence of many Newton features in the Palm, the Newton still has more, and more powerful implementations of the ones the Palm has. It is still a good example of where to go in pen UIs as Moore's Law continues to bring price down for a given performance.
Let's take one example - handwriting recognition.
Grafitti only succeeded (again, IMNSHO) because of marketing. After the early Newton debacle with handwriting, claiming "100% accuracy" went a long way towards tooting Grafitti's horn. Is it a better user interface? I think not - writing on a Newton is like writing on paper, only you can edit and format the text, either immediately, or later. It makes for an immediately usable UI (very low learning curve) that doesn't hamper power users. Of course, Grafitti wasn't originally designed for the use to which it is being put now. When PARC first came up with the approach of a different alphabet for single pen strokes, it was intended to be used on a pager display. Something even smaller than a Palm, where you never expected to enter more than a few characters, e.g., a "yes", "no", or maybe a phone number. Using Grafitti to write has the same indirectness problems of using a mouse to draw - you can do it, but anyone who's drawn on a touch-sensitive LCD knows you get better drawing there than with a mouse (I can manage to write my name with a mouse, but most people can't).
As with much open source stuff, there's too much of a tendency to settle with duplicating the status quo. I'd suggest trying for something better.
I just haven't seen anything that beats the PalmOS yet in terms of ease of use, ease of programming, and breadth of applications.
Anyone designing handheld UIs could do worse than to take a look at Newton OS 2.0. Yes, the Newton MessagePad 2000 or 2100 is bigger than a Palm device, but keep in mind that this is now five-year-old hardware. The earlier Newtons, like the 130, ran on a 33MHz ARM, i.e., not a heck of a lot better than the DragonBalls in the current Palm. Even the 2000 uses a 166MHz StrongARM. So anything you can do on a Newton is most likely feasible on today's handhelds.
So what does the Newton OS do that's so nice?
Pen usage is integral. None of this menu-bar wannabe WinDoze stuff.
Full handwriting recognition. Yeah, Doonesbury spoofed the hell out of it when it first came out, but for five years it's been a better speller than I am. Like QPE, it uses dictionary lookup, though without the "ticker" QPE uses. Frankly, the ticker seems distracting - Newton groks full cursive, and it's easier to simply keep writing the word. If it chooses the wrong one, double-tap on the word, and a menu appears of alternatives (along with options for character-by-character recognition (good for names and acronyms) and access to keyboard or per-letter writing space).
Customizable abbreviations. I write "mtg" and it expands to "meeting". You can write "mt" or "foo" and it will expand to "meeting" if you want. This further obviates the ticker.
Full use of the screen - you can write anywhere at any time, so no need for silkscreen Grafitti space, or even a pop-up writing area (like on Windoze). Where you write is where it shows up. If you want to write someplace in particular, tap where you want, and a caret cursor shows up. Then write anywhere and text shows up at the cursor.
Comprehensive use of editing gestures -
capitalize, lowercase, delete (scrub out, like you're using an eraser, only it figures it out automatically without needing to flip the pen or select "eraser mode"), select (tap and hold, option to then highlight by drawing through selection or circling it), split word, merge words, cut, copy, and paste, a visible clipboard that doesn't get in the way (and a freeware option to enable as many clipboards as you want - you can finally swap using cut-n-paste).
Comprehensive data sharing between applications. Your datebook knows about names in your address book, and so does your email reader, your printer, and your fax.
Esthetically pleasing layout that still uses minimal screen real estate. Next to the Newton, the Palm (and Windoze) simply looks bad. Nice touches ranging from good choice of line widths, to choosing when icons don't need a border, even if they work like a button (and the reduction in visual noise really matters on a palmtop), to the smallest "scrollbars" out there (and knowing when not to use scrollbars).
Clever reasonable assumptions. When I write "Lunch with Pam", I tap the lightbulb. Up pops a meeting slip, saying it is for "Lunch", with a time set to 12noon for either today or tomorrow (depending on what time of day it is when I write it), with "Pam" chosen from my address book (and a pop-up menu to choose from multiple Pams). "Call Dave", "Find John", "Remember to fix the sink" (a to-do on your calendar), "Meet with Susan next week", all work.
Finally, an extensible object model like you wouldn't believe. You can customize everything, from adding new kinds of stationary to your notepad (and the stationary can be "smart," e.g., graph paper) to adding menus or buttons to existing apps to replacing existing apps, etc. etc.
So QPE developers, go check out the Newton OS and rip it off as much as you can.
A class on encryption would reasonably have both demonstrations of decryption and assignments in performing decryption. As the first widely used consumer encryption format, not cracking DVD in a class on encryption would be a serious lack. DeCSS itself would be used in an assignment to crack DVD as a benchmark to compare students' work to. I.e., to get a good grade, you have to do it faster than DeCSS, clearer, maybe accounting for reasonable future extensions to CSS and so forth. Makes a great first assignment, especially in a low-level course.
In an encryption course, CSS is an excellent case study in the weakness of low-bit keys and the fallibility of security through "obscurity". It's also a good example of the tradeoffs inherent in encryption:
security vs convenience. Greater security requires less convenience and vice versa.
cost vs robustness. Greater robustness costs more to produce. CSS is a solution designed to be as low cost as possible while still satisfying the MPAA.
obscurity vs cryptographic strength. A simple algorithm may be "secure" while obscure, but will fail compared to a more complex one with mathematically provable cryptographic strength.
In fact, I'd be really surprised if cryptography courses aren't covering it already.
First off, FrameMaker is an excellent product - I've never seen anything that really compares to it. I've written a 700+ pp. textbook with it, and am in the process of writing a 250+ pp. business plan with it. I've used it for years and years. It's not a word processor, though it can be used as one. Here's some of the things that are unique:
Strong support for multi-file documents, including cross references, indices and tables of contents. Other programs claim to have this, but Frame works on thousand page beasts.
WYSIWYG structured editing. Start with a good template, and the document practically formats itself, and not in the hare-brained "I know what you're doing better than you do" approach of Word.
Major features found in all word processing programs (spell check, full editing, capitalization, etc.)
Default keybindings that emulate Emacs:-)
Math support as good as TeX. TeX may format slightly better (maybe), but Frame will also do things like evaluate expressions for you. What other "word processor" can do matrix multiplication? Oh, and WYSIWYG, of course, with keyboard shortcuts that mimic TeX. Type 2^10 or (a^2+b^2)/c^2=1 while in a math frame, and get what you expect.
Input and output of documents in a wide variety of formats - Word, WordPerfect, etc.
That being said, who buys FrameMaker? It is almost never the individual user - O'Reilly authors being a possible exception (they have Frame templates for their Nutshell books that authors can download). It is largely IT managers at large technology corporations - Frame is suited for manuals and such, and its licensing server is designed for large installations (e.g., it supports x many licenses, and only lets x instances run at any one time, no matter how many desktops you have). These people are generally conservative about changing things. If they've got Solaris installed, they won't change unless they have to. These people are not going to Linux yet, unless the company itself is one of the Linux vendors.
So, Adobe sees that IT managers aren't going in droves to their beta program, just these crazy penguins from/., and concludes that the time is not right.
I'd have to say I agree with your top-level point:
The current wave of devices with embedded Linux as their operating system is going to be a relatively short-lived one
IMHO. Not because Linux is particularly bad for this sort of thing, more because Linux isn't particularly good for this sort
of thing.
but not your specific reasons for it.
The fact is that no matter how hard you try to cut Linux down it's still too bloated for a device that doesn't require the full functionality that a modern OS provides.
First off, Linux isn't especially "modern" - it's a macrokernel version of Unix - a basic approach that has been around longer than I've been alive. Second, the kind of features you mention below are in fact immensely useful for small devices. I'll hit each in turn.
What need does my camera have for pre-emptive multitasking....
These kinds of devices are first and foremost interactive. Pre-emptive multi-tasking enables actions that require immediate response (e.g., user feedback, handling time-critical things like battery management) to happen regardless of whether someone writing application software followed guidelines or not. If this thing is running my car, you're damned tootin' I don't want some random piece of software to lock it up. Even if it's running my watch, I don't want that.
or virtual memory?
As a solution for providing staged memory, virtual memory could be incredibly useful in a small device where memory and power and such are at a premium - it would be great to be able to punt off some of the stack to low-power, slow, SRAM while high-power DRAM is dealing with a tight inner loop for pen feedback or phone protocols.
When is my wristwatch going to need a stable threading model or SMP support?
First, stable: When did your wristwatch last crash? Now, threading: I don't know about you but my watch does more than one thing. It's a multi-timezone deal, but also has a stopwatch (that runs whether or not it is visible), an alarm (ditto), and an address book. Now, given the way chips are often priced, might two cheap chips be more cost-effective than one bigger chip? Quite possibly.
The answer to these questions is of course, they don't. A small, dedicated operating system is easily able to handle
controlling these devices, and in a much more compact and efficient manner.
This is a rephrase of the old "assembly vs high-level" argument. Will you be able to do something smaller and more compact? Sure. But you'll make sacrifices elsewhere in time to market, flexibility, support, etc.
Just as Linux is having trouble scaling up
to big iron, it has trouble scaling down to small devices.
What do you mean by "big iron"? I certainly would not consider myself a Linux zealot (I happen to conceptually favor microkernels), but a massive Beowulf cluster seems pretty "big" and "iron" to me. Is Linux the best solution for supercomputing? Probably not, but it certainly works.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the (questionable) joy of explaining cryptography to suits and explaining licensing requirements to geeks (Harry Fox helps throw a real monkey wrench in there, administering rights for song-writers), one of the things that came up time and time again was anti-trust issues.
SMEI and WMG were well-aware that together they represented about 30% of the market (they split that up, flip-flopping every year over who has the most based on who had bigger hits). Their expectation was that a joint venture between them would attract BMG, Universal, EMI and whoever was number six at the time. Then independents would simply have to fish or cut bait and join up as well.
Everyone was very careful to avoid using words and phrases like "controlling", "domination", etc. at least in written materials. People would verbally joke that they needed to make sure those words weren't written down, in case they ever got subpoena'ed for anti-trust, but everyone knew that the objective was making the HBO of electronic music distribution. You see, they recognized that HBO had the movie companies by the short and curlies as far as cable distribution of films went, and didn't want the same to happen to them in a new media distribution - the film companies have been worrying about this for themselves for electronic distribution for a couple of years now.
Of course, Napster beat them to it, so they beat on Napster legally. One of the funniest things about the timing of these things for me was SDMI being announced just after MP3 hit the cover of Time Magazine, when I'd been working on it for years prior. And of course they got the DMCA passed in the meantime, making cracking even the stupidest of copy control schemes illegal. Of course, every crypto expert they talked to at the time (myself included) emphasized that no scheme was foolproof and you should be sure to design the system to minimize damage in the case of a crack. Being powerful executives with lobbyists on retainer, a legal solution was obvious.
So, all in all, I'm pleasantly amused that the music companies got just a bit too eager and slipped in one phrase too many.....
Loompanics Unlimited, that sterling source of all that They don't want you to know, has a section of books on these kinds of things. My favorite is this one. I want a decommissioned nuclear submarine I can berth at Manhattan! Then I can live "in" the East Village (where I live now - been interesting) and get away from it all.
Honor declines. Because everything she did was her duty. It was her job. It was amazing and heroic and spectacular, but it was nothing more and nothing less than her duty required of her. It was her duty to escape if she could. It was her duty to help subordinates if she could. So she did.
I don't mean to denigrate or reduce in any way, shape, or form, the efforts rescuers have put into the WTC situation. But bluntly, the police and fireworkers did exactly what they were supposed to. They risked their lives, but that's what they signed up for. For a while, police recruiting posters in New York had a line to the effect of "Most people wouldn't take this job for a million dollars. Some do it for a lot less."
Their heroic actions in rescue efforts doesn't mitigate or excuse abuses or crimes of the past. Does pulling a corpse out of the rubble make it okay for a cop to shoot a black man whose "gun" was his wallet?
I smile too, but only out of self-defense. No reason to give them a reason to harass me. Not in the way you mean, they aren't. Terrorists have been around for a long time. Robin Hood was a terrorist. The fact that "weapons" of mass destruction are a heck of a lot nastier now doesn't change the ethical basis of terrorism and how to deal with it.No, the way times might be different now is that Bush has what many people consider legitimate cause to impose the equivalent of martial law, all with Senate and Congressional approval and encouragement. The Office of Homeland Security is a name worthy of George Orwell and Stalin. When I was young, I read 1984. Then I lived through the year and chuckled at the Apple ads spoofing IBM as Big Brother. Remember those t-shirts about "Win95=Mac84"? George Bush 2001 = Big Brother 1984 is too scary to let me sleep comfortably. And the ATA and the Office of Homeland Security help make it possible.
Don't think the death of bin Laden will be anything more than proof that Big Brother Loves You. There will always be terrorists and if terrorists justify totalitarianism in the Land of the Free, that totalitarianism will only go away with revolution. No Senator ever got re-elected for repealing anything except Prohibition. Today's politicians (or their handlers) understand bread and circuses too well for that. Just a couple of months ago, Bush was bribing most citizens with $300 checks.
I'm getting a little heated now, so I'm gonna shut up. But the logic is there. Look at the history and expansion of the War on Drugs and the potential for the War on Terrorism is, well, terrifying.
Brook Conner, aka nellardo
What most people are missing about the Linux PS2 as a Wintel killer is that it has very little to do with an immediate business model and very much to do with unseating a powerful marketplace player (Microsoft). Jackson's identification of the "application barrier to entry" was right on the money.
- A PS2 that can run Linux instantly beats any PC on cost of software alone. Note that this is a marketing perspective, not a detailed technical one. Sure, MS Office might be better than Star Office, but Star Office is free, not ~$500.
- A Linux distro for the PS2 can be realistically sold for $20, and make a profit because your "developer costs" are mainly the costs to create nice skins and a Sony look-n-feel and configure everything "out of the box." Sell it at the more usual $50 for a PS2 game and you're going to town. Half the price of WinDoze, ten times the functionality (remember, it comes with the marketing equivalent of MS Office).
- You've now smashed the application barrier to entry and made money doing it. You can run every PS1 and PS2 game, and many of these are titles consumers already own. You can play DVDs and CDs. And it replaces that new PC you were thinking about. And there's thousands of apps available that will run as soon as someone does a
./configure; make install.
Does this make sense for Sony? Damn straight. One of the things Sony worries about all the time is "What do we do about Microsoft?" Anyone in new business development at Sony at least considers that question on every new business concept they consider. Get rid of Microsoft's hegemony and you've opened up a door for massive new revenue streams, even if you lost money doing it. The fact that you can make money means it's stupid not to do it.-----
As a concept, this has been floating around for years, even in technological form (and decades, even centuries, in purely people forms). Read Negroponte from five years back - his favorite example was lots of people getting together to buy cars in bulk.
Now, be that as it may, this isn't a case of a "small matter of programming." It's a classic political Prisoner's Dilemma. If I tell the customer here in my store "Go get it elsewhere," how can I be sure that "elsewhere" will do the same thing in return? Capitalism rewards treachery. Treachery is most often a short term game, and capitalism makes it extremely easy to favor the short-term and screw the long term. Peer-to-peer doesn't do anything to remove a retailer's unease about sending a customer to another store. They'd sooner try to keep the customer by placing an order for the customer right then and there (and pretty much any media store (book, record, video, etc) will do that).
-----
Is it just the postfix notation that PostScript uses (i.e., 4 5 + instead of 4 + 5)? That's certainly irritating, unless you're used to a postfix calculator. But I didn't find it any more irritating than using prefix notation in Lisp or Scheme or the mix of prefix (for functions) and infix (for math) in C, C++, and Java.
Or is it the low-level nature of it? Good use of procedures (in PostScript) or objects (in Quartz) helps tremendously there. I know one guy who wrote a ray tracer in PostScript! He had to limit the data size, but only because (at the time - 1991) he couldn't find a printer with enough RAM :-)
Certainly, PostScript is no more low level than OpenGL. In some ways, it is higher (PDF/Quartz even more so - check out the color model). I'll admit that PDF's tendency to use one-letter commands is dense, but it isn't really meant for human consumption. Quartz is an API, so it has full words for method names.
Absolutely - and it's been that way for years. Ten years ago, researchers at Xerox PARC (Card, Mackinlay, Robertson) were doing 3D info visualization and pointed out poor text support as one of their biggest problems. And nothing much has changed.-----
Some of the features that were nice in NeWS (aside from general 3rd-gen coolness like, oh floating point coordinates, and the pure niftyness of sending PostScript over Ethernet for drawing :-) included its object model (the PostScript dialect in NeWS was object-oriented!), its support for pre-emptive threading, and arbitrarily shaped windows (in the eighties!). All in all it was a nice piece of work.
Yet another example of superior technology dying for business reasons.
-----
The Worlds, Inc. people almost certainly knew about this, as Tom Meyer, one of the authors, was on the VRML Advisory Group, and I'm pretty certain someone from Worlds, Inc. was on the VAG, too. This was also at the first VRML conference, in 1995. And WAXweb was one of the very first (if not the first) sites to serve VRML over the World-Wide Web.
And Stephenson's Snowcrash was all over the VRML community at that time. Everyone knew that what they wanted to do was implement the Black Sun - the bar where Hiro demonstrates his abilities as a "hacker." In fact, one of the VRML start-ups was called Black Sun.
You can go back even farther to check out Lucas's Habitat system, back in the eighties. Actually, now that I think of it, I remember hearing at the time that Worlds was planning on patenting some of this stuff - my boss at the time was Andy van Dam, one of the leading lights of computer graphics, who scoffed at the prospect of Worlds patenting anything so obvious. Andy and Tom were both all over that stuff, as they were instrumental in establishing the VRML Consortium.
Hmmm.
A System to Distribute and Protect Intellectual Property? Or maybe, maybe, A System to Validate Uniqueness and Protect Duplication? Or perhaps we should put the clerks in place, like, A Multi-User Intellectual Property Protection System. Heck, that sounds like SDMI.....
- If you're building something mission-critical that is well-understood, getting it right the first time is crucial and benefits greatly from detailed design. Building a banking system? UML is a good idea. Bugs lose billions of dollars.
- If you're doing something researchy or with a poorly defined specification, a few rounds of rapid prototyping can be immensely useful. As a research programmer in user interfaces, I found rapid prototyping to be extremely useful. You don't always know what will work well before hand because much of it is so "squishy" and not amenable to formal analysis.
Anyone who always uses only one or the other is either handling a narrow category of problems or is making more work for themselves than they need to. Me, I'm lazy. Amen, Brother! So Sayeth Fred Brooks. No particular design tool or methodology or anything is the uniform ideal thing. Sure, it's all Turing-complete, but then a hammer will eventually cut a 2x4 board in half by breaking enough wood. The saw is still a better tool. Model-View-Controller works for some applications, but for others it rotsBefore anyone jumps on me for dissing MVC, try doing a model-view-controller design for intelligent handwriting recognition like on the Newton or Calligrapher. You've got semantic word recognition (my Newt spells better than I do, and I'm a good speller that routinely ignores spell checkers because my writing generally includes more jargon that the checker doesn't know than mistakes), concurrent ink and recognition that removes ink as the words are recognized and replaces it with formatted text. Shoehorn it into MVC and you'll either get one of the MVC components doing all the work or the bandwidth (API size) between the three MVC components is massive, indicating poor encapsulation and suggesting a different approach to the design should be taken (the "spaghetti of callbacks" problem, rampant in most modern UI toolkits).
By coinky-dink, this is exactly what the CS textbook did that I wrote lo these many years ago. Actually, we used OMT, because it was 1994, and Booch and Rumbaugh were still sparring with each other. I imagine that the students in that class were well-prepared when UML came along - they'd been using a similar notation since they learned to program (this was a first-semester textbook).As you've stated it, it assumes that you have no intersecting surfaces. Now if the original poster is doing some sort of mechanical, CAD/M kind of thing, this may in fact apply to the problem, because the model will be constructed to be able to be a physical thing. Anything else and you open yourself up to lots of potential errors.
Getting Painter's right involves checking for intersecting polygons, and splitting the intersecting polygons. Aside from being an expensive operation, it's highly sensitive to floating point errors.
So beware of the simple way out in 3D graphics....
1/2 :-)
Marginally more seriously, Sony was, what, twenty, thirty years old at the time (founded in 1949, making a rice steamer, of all things). Lots of stock holders. Lots of existing vested interest. And existing analogies (audio tape) to draw on. And let's face it, TV broadcasters still made their money. They were tossing the content over the transom anyway.
Soundtracks are often reordered on records or CDs when they're released (if they are released). Director's commentary may be available in an interview, but that isn't keyed to the film the way it is on a DVD.
Start from why copyright (and patents) were created instead: to promote speech, to stimulate discourse (and to promote innovation in the case of patents) by giving you a (temporary) legal monopoly. Fair use came about to make sure that legal monopoly didn't get in its own way, stifling the point of copyright in the first place.I'm a published author. Addison Wesley mails me a check once a quarter. A small check, but it is a check. Do I want people to be able to copy my book wholesale and resell it without paying me? No. Do I want other authors to be able to build on it without restriction? Damn right I do - it's a textbook and I want people to learn from it. Copyright enabled me to make money from the book, but isn't there to prevent anyone else from building on it.
- The trailer(s) for the film itself (never on VHS, only trailers for other films the studio wants you to buy).
- Alternate language soundtracks (often never released in the US - I mean, really, "South Park" in French is not on the shelves in Blockbuster in the US (maybe in Quebec, maybe not), but it is on the DVD).
- Subtitles, both in other languages and for the hearing impaired (you can verify that line you can't quite hear, and oh, that's [rhythmic farting] during the "Uncle Fucker" song on "South Park").
- Director's commentary (never on VHS).
- Music-only soundtrack (never on VHS).
Now, add in the features you get on a better DVD release. How many of us bought a DVD player just to see all the groovy stuff they put on "The Matrix" DVD? I mean, you simply can't jump back and forth between behind-the-scenes and released footage on video - it's tape! it's linear!Okay, I'm clearly getting overwrought :-) Time for some coffee and happy pills.
Now, just in case you think Haskell is only used for dense mathematical expressions, note that it comes with literate programming functionality built in. And the Haskell Home Page has some examples of some quite meaty real-world examples.
I spent three years as a suit at this small media and electronics conglomerate, so I thought I had an idea of how to talk the talk and walk the walk when it came to the big dinero. I still don't entirely understand it - I managed to explain the cost-benefit analysis to their assistants, but they just wouldn't hear it.
That was why I made that semi-joke about an OReilly panel on talking to suits - even when you know the lingo, it doesn't always work. I'd hope that a bunch of smart geeks would have enough ware stories to at least tell others the traps....
Of course, top management, which included typical old-media folks like Michael Berman (the man who brought us George magazine along with the late John-John), insisted on paying a consulting firm millions of dollars instead.
So I showed them what it could do. I brought in my old Sony VAIO Superslim laptop, a creaky old machine with all of 32 MB of RAM and a 200MHz Pentium (I'd wiped the drive and installed SuSE after one too many lock-ups by WinDoze). Mind you, the "executive assistants" had better machines. Of course, it ran Slash like a champ.
That convinced them enough to buy a modest Linux server, but they still went to Vancouver on a boondoggle to talk to a consulting firm (see the scathing article by Will Leitch in Ironminds for more on that - thank the goddess Will didn't see fit to mention me by name :-) which they then decided wasn't worth the time. So they staff up, but still don't deploy.... They wanted to look at Oracle and Vignette.... which would have done most of what Slash and a CVS server would do at a hundred times the cost (no, not infinite - I'm counting staff time to install Slash and CVS :-)
Go figure. Maybe I should propose a panel at the O'Reilly convention on the cluelessness of management, except of course it would be preaching to the choir.....
The price cuts were also no big surprise - of course the audience cheered, but the press had been giving Apple a beating for the past month or so about soft sales. "Soft Sales? Price Cut!" Apple had already been doing it in the form of rebates.
Even March for OS X was no surprise - CNET called it "late", but that's pretty much what people have been expecting.
Steve always gives a good show, though.
The Palm is clearly an incredibly useful tool - so many people use it. I don't think it is the be-all and end-all of pen UIs, though. My favorite comment on this one is the following:
The Newton is big, yes. But taking notes in a meeting on a Palm is a bit like taking notes on a Post-It. Sure, you can do it, but nobody does it by choice. Taking notes on a Newton is more like taking notes on a steno pad - quite reasonable, though many people prefer a full-size pad of paper (the thought of a tablet-sized Newton makes me drool, but it will never be).Both I and the earlier poster suggested looking at the Newton OS as an example for directions in pen user interfaces. Despite the presence of many Newton features in the Palm, the Newton still has more, and more powerful implementations of the ones the Palm has. It is still a good example of where to go in pen UIs as Moore's Law continues to bring price down for a given performance.
Let's take one example - handwriting recognition. Grafitti only succeeded (again, IMNSHO) because of marketing. After the early Newton debacle with handwriting, claiming "100% accuracy" went a long way towards tooting Grafitti's horn. Is it a better user interface? I think not - writing on a Newton is like writing on paper, only you can edit and format the text, either immediately, or later. It makes for an immediately usable UI (very low learning curve) that doesn't hamper power users. Of course, Grafitti wasn't originally designed for the use to which it is being put now. When PARC first came up with the approach of a different alphabet for single pen strokes, it was intended to be used on a pager display. Something even smaller than a Palm, where you never expected to enter more than a few characters, e.g., a "yes", "no", or maybe a phone number. Using Grafitti to write has the same indirectness problems of using a mouse to draw - you can do it, but anyone who's drawn on a touch-sensitive LCD knows you get better drawing there than with a mouse (I can manage to write my name with a mouse, but most people can't).
As with much open source stuff, there's too much of a tendency to settle with duplicating the status quo. I'd suggest trying for something better.
So what does the Newton OS do that's so nice?
- Pen usage is integral. None of this menu-bar wannabe WinDoze stuff.
- Full handwriting recognition. Yeah, Doonesbury spoofed the hell out of it when it first came out, but for five years it's been a better speller than I am. Like QPE, it uses dictionary lookup, though without the "ticker" QPE uses. Frankly, the ticker seems distracting - Newton groks full cursive, and it's easier to simply keep writing the word. If it chooses the wrong one, double-tap on the word, and a menu appears of alternatives (along with options for character-by-character recognition (good for names and acronyms) and access to keyboard or per-letter writing space).
- Customizable abbreviations. I write "mtg" and it expands to "meeting". You can write "mt" or "foo" and it will expand to "meeting" if you want. This further obviates the ticker.
- Full use of the screen - you can write anywhere at any time, so no need for silkscreen Grafitti space, or even a pop-up writing area (like on Windoze). Where you write is where it shows up. If you want to write someplace in particular, tap where you want, and a caret cursor shows up. Then write anywhere and text shows up at the cursor.
- Comprehensive use of editing gestures -
capitalize, lowercase, delete (scrub out, like you're using an eraser, only it figures it out automatically without needing to flip the pen or select "eraser mode"), select (tap and hold, option to then highlight by drawing through selection or circling it), split word, merge words, cut, copy, and paste, a visible clipboard that doesn't get in the way (and a freeware option to enable as many clipboards as you want - you can finally swap using cut-n-paste).
- Comprehensive data sharing between applications. Your datebook knows about names in your address book, and so does your email reader, your printer, and your fax.
- Esthetically pleasing layout that still uses minimal screen real estate. Next to the Newton, the Palm (and Windoze) simply looks bad. Nice touches ranging from good choice of line widths, to choosing when icons don't need a border, even if they work like a button (and the reduction in visual noise really matters on a palmtop), to the smallest "scrollbars" out there (and knowing when not to use scrollbars).
- Clever reasonable assumptions. When I write "Lunch with Pam", I tap the lightbulb. Up pops a meeting slip, saying it is for "Lunch", with a time set to 12noon for either today or tomorrow (depending on what time of day it is when I write it), with "Pam" chosen from my address book (and a pop-up menu to choose from multiple Pams). "Call Dave", "Find John", "Remember to fix the sink" (a to-do on your calendar), "Meet with Susan next week", all work.
- Finally, an extensible object model like you wouldn't believe. You can customize everything, from adding new kinds of stationary to your notepad (and the stationary can be "smart," e.g., graph paper) to adding menus or buttons to existing apps to replacing existing apps, etc. etc.
So QPE developers, go check out the Newton OS and rip it off as much as you can.A class on encryption would reasonably have both demonstrations of decryption and assignments in performing decryption. As the first widely used consumer encryption format, not cracking DVD in a class on encryption would be a serious lack. DeCSS itself would be used in an assignment to crack DVD as a benchmark to compare students' work to. I.e., to get a good grade, you have to do it faster than DeCSS, clearer, maybe accounting for reasonable future extensions to CSS and so forth. Makes a great first assignment, especially in a low-level course.
In an encryption course, CSS is an excellent case study in the weakness of low-bit keys and the fallibility of security through "obscurity". It's also a good example of the tradeoffs inherent in encryption:
- security vs convenience. Greater security requires less convenience and vice versa.
- cost vs robustness. Greater robustness costs more to produce. CSS is a solution designed to be as low cost as possible while still satisfying the MPAA.
- obscurity vs cryptographic strength. A simple algorithm may be "secure" while obscure, but will fail compared to a more complex one with mathematically provable cryptographic strength.
In fact, I'd be really surprised if cryptography courses aren't covering it already.First off, FrameMaker is an excellent product - I've never seen anything that really compares to it. I've written a 700+ pp. textbook with it, and am in the process of writing a 250+ pp. business plan with it. I've used it for years and years. It's not a word processor, though it can be used as one. Here's some of the things that are unique:
That being said, who buys FrameMaker? It is almost never the individual user - O'Reilly authors being a possible exception (they have Frame templates for their Nutshell books that authors can download). It is largely IT managers at large technology corporations - Frame is suited for manuals and such, and its licensing server is designed for large installations (e.g., it supports x many licenses, and only lets x instances run at any one time, no matter how many desktops you have). These people are generally conservative about changing things. If they've got Solaris installed, they won't change unless they have to. These people are not going to Linux yet, unless the company itself is one of the Linux vendors.
So, Adobe sees that IT managers aren't going in droves to their beta program, just these crazy penguins from /., and concludes that the time is not right.
Bleah :-(
FYI, STEF is the annual, employees-only gathering of Sony geeks worldwide in Tokyo.