It's too bad TFA doesn't say what kind of mini-PCI card. He probably bought some generic made-in-god-knows-where card from JustDeals or somewhere like that. Now, I'm an opponent of the direction "Trusted Computing" is going, but in this case there's something to be said for a manufacturer locking out shitty peripherals so they don't kill your system. It saves them one more support headache. Apple does the same thing. Sure, lot's of us Mac-heads bitch about it (myself included sometimes), but at the end of the day we can always brag about how plug-and-play Macs are. It looks as though PC manufacturers are following in footsteps of Apple again.
Aside from the fact that this would-be patent dealt with chimeric technologies, this case was a particularly interesting one because the filer, Stuart Newman, sought the patent to block others from creating the technology. By denying him the patent on said terms (that it is too close to a human), he won -- sort of. This means that other companies cannot patent such processes if they "discover" them, but at the same time he cannot block the creation of "chimaera", which was his original purpose.
At the time he filed the patent, the head of the USPTO held a press conference and stated that he would be denying the patent on ethical terms, ground on which the USPTO is not supposed to tread. In actuality, I've heard that he was under pressure from industry, specifically two companies in the business of chimeric technologies (I can't remember their names, but one is located in MA, I believe). In any case, the fact that he was denied a patent is good -- other people/companies cannot patent similar creations. On the other hand, his loss is bad -- other people/companies can feel free to create chimaeras.
What happens to other publicly displayed works of art? Also, wasn't this payed for by the people of Chicago and thus now owned by the taxpayers? Shouldn't it be up to them to decide how to enforce/not enforce the copyright? Essentially, this is like Ford telling people not to take pictures of their own cars because the designers (read: the company) still own the copyright to the design.
Certainly this was written to get a bit of attention, but in a way he's just foreshadowing what happens to most businesses, especially those that grow as large as Microsoft has. A brief look through history will confirm this.
AT&T is a good example. Although they were "broken" by an anti-trust suit, they actually volunteered to spin off the Baby Bells as a concession. In their minds, networking and computers were the future. In a way, AT&T had it all going for them. They ditched the tedious Baby Bell system to jump headfirst into a sector that absolutely exploded. Tons of people thought AT&T was the unstoppable 800 lb. gorilla that once it entered the computing/networking segment, it would just dominate it. History, however, has proved us wrong and now AT&T is about to be consumed by one of its children in an odd sort of Darwinist/Oedipal freak of the market economy.
Now, I'm not saying MS will tank tomorrow or even five years from now. What I am saying is that there's always something that destabilizes the status quo. It could be something that they don't see coming; it could even be something they see coming but can't properly react to. In any case, the inevitable will happen and MS will fall. Some day.
After launching Sunbird for the first time on Mac OS X (1.0.3.7), it quit (like Firefox often does on a first run) and informed me that any old extensions I had would be deleted. Fine, as I don't have any Sunbird extensions. Then it relaunched automatically (again, like Firefox) but then "unexpectedly quit". I tried relaunching it only to have the icon appear momentarily in my Dock and then disappear. Again. And again. I've tried ejecting the disk image, but it can't because it's "in use".
Repeated trips to 'ps -ax | grep Sunbird' reveals that Sunbird is caught in a nice little loop that spawns a new PID and then kills it each time it appears in my Dock. By the time I try to kill it, it's already killed itself and grabbed a new PID. Thankfully, Apple has included 'killall' and my problem is over.
Obviously this is an early beta, but I was hoping it was going to be more stable than this. I seem to remember Thunderbird being pretty stable at 0.2 At least I have faith that things will settle down in a few point releases.
P.S. I know, I know. . . submit a bug report. Don't worry.
Personally, I'm hoping that Nintendo has a winner on their hands with the Revolution. I've always been a fan of the kinds of games that get released on the Nintendo consoles. They tend to be unique and wonderfully playable. Some may complain that the titles tend towards the younger demographics, but I think that many of them are playable and, most importantly, fun at all ages. Their games tend to be unique whereas PS and Xbox tend to have their catalog dominated by titles that mimic (or are direct ports) of PC games. Sure, the GC has it's share of ported titles, but it also has a ton of exclusives that absolutely rock. Plus, it helps that I've always preferred Nintendo controllers to any others.
*Disclaimer: I would not call myself a Nintendo fanboy. I just bought a GameCube last year (my first console), but have played my friends' PS2s and Xboxes ad nauseam.
Huge is almost an understatement. Current freeways are nearly insurmountable barriers to wildlife movement. This would be a complete atrocity.
If anyone is looking for a somewhat similar study done on man-made barriers, take a look into wildlife studies done in Australia on the dingo-proof fence. Kangaroo densities on the dingo-proofed side are staggeringly high while very normal on the dingo-populated side. This may seem well and good, but such an imbalance will inevitably lead to a population overshoot that will bring kangaroos deeper into urban areas and be a breeding ground for a host of diseases (think chronic wasting disease in deer in the Midwest).
The Trans Texas highway is sure to have an equally large impact, if not larger. It'll be like the Berlin wall for wildlife.
The Mac OS X port is certainly coming along nicely. Just the fact that it uses Aqua widgets is a Good Thing, but it still has a long way to go in the picky world of Mac users. I'm not saying they haven't put any effort into it (because they certainly have -- just look at the splash screen and the disk image background along with the general Aqua appearance). It's just that a lot of Mac users are really, really, really picky when it comes to how their apps look and behave. Hell, look at Firefox. It's come a long way with the look and feel, but there are still a ton of people who complain that the web page widgets aren't OS native.
Here's what I've noticed in AbiWord 2.2 so far. The buttons look very 10.0 and there is still some issues with ghosting or artifacting (whatever you want to call it) as you move the tabs across the rulers. The save dialog boxes aren't sheets. The formatting toolbar has some issues with dual monitors (it puts the styles menu on my secondary screen when the pull-down is close to the edge of the primary). Also, the toolbars must be treated as windows themselves, because clicking on the menu bar disables many of the menu options, making me think the document window isn't completely "active". On the positive, I'm glad there are live resizing windows and a good preferences interface. It's closer, but there's still a bit of polish to put on it before Mac users accept it with open arms.
This just goes to show that not all hope is lost in participatory government. I know I get frustrated at times with how much clout corporations have in government operations, but every now and again I get a little glimmer of hope.
As I've been monitoring the discussions of the 650 at TreoCentral (I'm thinking about getting one myself when the GSM version comes out), I couldn't help but thinking that PalmSource and PalmOne seem to be in a position very similar to Apple a few years ago. I know, they're two separate companies where Apple was (and is) one and their new OS is actually off the ground, but bear with me.
A few years ago, Palm/PalmSource probably realized that their OS wasn't going to cut it in the New World of modern computing. They were making the transition from 68k processors to the StrongARM/Xscale series much like Apple made the switch from 68k to PowerPC. All arguments aside, I'd say this was the right thing to do for both companies, but it left them in a bit of a predicament -- legacy code. The only option for both companies was to develop an emulation system so the old could be run on the new. They both work really quite well, but everyone knows you can't run on a hack forever. The time to break with the old had come.
So, Palm decided to start developing Cobalt and Apple started to develop Copland. Preemptive multitasking, protected memory, better multimedia handling -- the calls to arms were the same. Yet where Apple failed with Copland, Palm didn't. Sort of.
Copland was a nightmare. Years of legacy code had turned the Mac OS into a bunch of spaghetti and for some reason the Copland developers thought they could use that spaghetti and bake a tieramisu. It didn't work. Drained of billions of dollars sunk into development, Apple started shopping around in 1996. They looked at BeOS (to what degree of seriousness is a matter of debate) and NeXT and some others, thankfully settling on NeXT. Palm, too, had likely started from the bottom up, found themselves a bit stuck, and then stumbled across the devalued Be, Inc. Purchasing Be, they gained huge strides in the multimedia area and were on their way. They also created PACE, an emulation environment similar to Classic in our beloved Mac OS X, for all that legacy code.
Cobalt should be a runaway success like Mac OS X is. But it's not. You could say that Cobalt is like Mac OS X when it was new. Everybody thought it had great promise, but even Apple was afraid to use it because it just wasn't finished. Now, I'm not sure how "unfinished" Cobalt is at this point, but it could be in the same boat. There are also issues of licensing fees (which I hear are significantly higher for Cobalt compared to Garnet) that cause the analogy to break down a bit, but for the most part it holds.
So in the end, Palm OS 5 is starting to look a lot like Mac OS 9. It works well, but man does it have its problems. Adoption of Cobalt will be key, but PalmSource needs something killer to drive that. It's a shame for PalmSource/PalmOne that they didn't pick up Dominic Giampaolo with the Be acquisition, but I'm also a Mac user and I'm sure glad he's on our team now.
"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
So does it work or not? Here's my translation: "iTunes will now launch under WINE. Do not expect to listen to your music, burn CDs, sync with the iPod easily, or in short, do anything iTunes does."
Seriously though, I applaud their effort. It's just that saying iTunes works under WINE when it doesn't really work all that well is a bit of false advertising. If it gets more programmers on the bandwagon, good for them, but I'd hate to see people get turned off by (what sounds to be) a bad experience.
"As someone replied earlier, this is a new paradigm in app management: the top menu controls the application, and the window menu controls the window."
Actually, this behavior is not a new paradigm as it has been a feature of the Mac OS back before it was Mac OS -- all the way back to The Beginning.
There are a few reasons for this behavior, but the most important one is that in good UI design, each widget should serve a clear purpose. On a Mac, the "close window" widget closes windows and that's it (unless the app has only one possible window). Aside from making the app appear to "launch" faster, it's a cleaner UI implementation that leaves little room for ambiguity. Plus, lets say you are downloading a big file in your web browser but don't want the display or the Dock cluttered with windows. On the Mac, you can close all the windows but still not quit the browser and keep the download active and out of sight.
"The OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
Unfortunately, the report sounds like a recommendation. Just because you recommend Linux to someone doesn't mean they will use it. Especially if that someone is a large government body that has the speed of a banana slug.
This did already happen, two years ago I believe, to Diebold ATMs. When it did, I called Wells Fargo (my bank) and asked them what brand of ATMs they use. I got the old, "Why would you want to know that?" question edged with a fair amount of suspicion. I explained that I didn't want an ATM that I used often to be compromised by a virus. I was forwarded to the manager. He ended up giving me a runaround about how Wells Fargo guarantees all transactions on their ATMs and any fraudulent use is refunded. No straight answer on whether they used Diebold ATMs with Windows.
Of course, I went to a few of the ATMs I used and checked them out. All Diebolds. I'm not sure if they were running Windows, but I can assume so. Why would the bank give me such a hard time about who supplied their ATMs? Obviously it wasn't that difficult to just go and find out. It makes me a bit weary that they're trying to implement security through secrecy (let alone secrecy that's not that secret). Plus, being a customer I feel like I have the right to know how my money is handled and what possibilities there are for it being stolen.
Actually, I don't think it will because Apple has realized that people don't want to have to use the small devices they carry around to organize their data -- they want their computers to do that, with their large screens and easy input methods. Having the iPod Photo sync with iPhoto (or whatever else), you can sort your pictures into albums before putting them on your iPod, just like playlists. That way, you can go right to the album you want to share and present a slideshow right away. No need to sort or sift.
I think what Raskin has painted himself into a bit of a corner. He insists that interfaces need to further adapt to people, but he has failed to realize that people can adapt to interfaces. Your comment about the WWW brought this to mind. The web may not have the best interface (often it's downright terrible), but people have adapted to this new method of navigation and are quite comfortable with it.
Jef is seeking to create an interface that works the way his brain works. It's like a UNIX guy I know. His desktop is highly customized and very efficient -- for him. The more I read about Raskin, the more I think he's looking to make things more efficient for himself, not necessarily everyone else.
"Just after AMD's announcement, AnandTech posted this article to help consumers choose between Intel and AMD."
So if by consumers, you mean people that read/. and hardware sites and not the general public, then yes?
Slashdot Mirror
Creepy Ruxpin.
It's too bad TFA doesn't say what kind of mini-PCI card. He probably bought some generic made-in-god-knows-where card from JustDeals or somewhere like that. Now, I'm an opponent of the direction "Trusted Computing" is going, but in this case there's something to be said for a manufacturer locking out shitty peripherals so they don't kill your system. It saves them one more support headache. Apple does the same thing. Sure, lot's of us Mac-heads bitch about it (myself included sometimes), but at the end of the day we can always brag about how plug-and-play Macs are. It looks as though PC manufacturers are following in footsteps of Apple again.
Aside from the fact that this would-be patent dealt with chimeric technologies, this case was a particularly interesting one because the filer, Stuart Newman, sought the patent to block others from creating the technology. By denying him the patent on said terms (that it is too close to a human), he won -- sort of. This means that other companies cannot patent such processes if they "discover" them, but at the same time he cannot block the creation of "chimaera", which was his original purpose.
At the time he filed the patent, the head of the USPTO held a press conference and stated that he would be denying the patent on ethical terms, ground on which the USPTO is not supposed to tread. In actuality, I've heard that he was under pressure from industry, specifically two companies in the business of chimeric technologies (I can't remember their names, but one is located in MA, I believe). In any case, the fact that he was denied a patent is good -- other people/companies cannot patent similar creations. On the other hand, his loss is bad -- other people/companies can feel free to create chimaeras.
What happens to other publicly displayed works of art? Also, wasn't this payed for by the people of Chicago and thus now owned by the taxpayers? Shouldn't it be up to them to decide how to enforce/not enforce the copyright? Essentially, this is like Ford telling people not to take pictures of their own cars because the designers (read: the company) still own the copyright to the design.
Appalling.
Certainly this was written to get a bit of attention, but in a way he's just foreshadowing what happens to most businesses, especially those that grow as large as Microsoft has. A brief look through history will confirm this.
AT&T is a good example. Although they were "broken" by an anti-trust suit, they actually volunteered to spin off the Baby Bells as a concession. In their minds, networking and computers were the future. In a way, AT&T had it all going for them. They ditched the tedious Baby Bell system to jump headfirst into a sector that absolutely exploded. Tons of people thought AT&T was the unstoppable 800 lb. gorilla that once it entered the computing/networking segment, it would just dominate it. History, however, has proved us wrong and now AT&T is about to be consumed by one of its children in an odd sort of Darwinist/Oedipal freak of the market economy.
Now, I'm not saying MS will tank tomorrow or even five years from now. What I am saying is that there's always something that destabilizes the status quo. It could be something that they don't see coming; it could even be something they see coming but can't properly react to. In any case, the inevitable will happen and MS will fall. Some day.
After launching Sunbird for the first time on Mac OS X (1.0.3.7), it quit (like Firefox often does on a first run) and informed me that any old extensions I had would be deleted. Fine, as I don't have any Sunbird extensions. Then it relaunched automatically (again, like Firefox) but then "unexpectedly quit". I tried relaunching it only to have the icon appear momentarily in my Dock and then disappear. Again. And again. I've tried ejecting the disk image, but it can't because it's "in use".
Repeated trips to 'ps -ax | grep Sunbird' reveals that Sunbird is caught in a nice little loop that spawns a new PID and then kills it each time it appears in my Dock. By the time I try to kill it, it's already killed itself and grabbed a new PID. Thankfully, Apple has included 'killall' and my problem is over.
Obviously this is an early beta, but I was hoping it was going to be more stable than this. I seem to remember Thunderbird being pretty stable at 0.2 At least I have faith that things will settle down in a few point releases.
P.S. I know, I know. . . submit a bug report. Don't worry.
Personally, I'm hoping that Nintendo has a winner on their hands with the Revolution. I've always been a fan of the kinds of games that get released on the Nintendo consoles. They tend to be unique and wonderfully playable. Some may complain that the titles tend towards the younger demographics, but I think that many of them are playable and, most importantly, fun at all ages. Their games tend to be unique whereas PS and Xbox tend to have their catalog dominated by titles that mimic (or are direct ports) of PC games. Sure, the GC has it's share of ported titles, but it also has a ton of exclusives that absolutely rock. Plus, it helps that I've always preferred Nintendo controllers to any others.
*Disclaimer: I would not call myself a Nintendo fanboy. I just bought a GameCube last year (my first console), but have played my friends' PS2s and Xboxes ad nauseam.
. . . and got caught by the fever.
Huge is almost an understatement. Current freeways are nearly insurmountable barriers to wildlife movement. This would be a complete atrocity.
If anyone is looking for a somewhat similar study done on man-made barriers, take a look into wildlife studies done in Australia on the dingo-proof fence. Kangaroo densities on the dingo-proofed side are staggeringly high while very normal on the dingo-populated side. This may seem well and good, but such an imbalance will inevitably lead to a population overshoot that will bring kangaroos deeper into urban areas and be a breeding ground for a host of diseases (think chronic wasting disease in deer in the Midwest).
The Trans Texas highway is sure to have an equally large impact, if not larger. It'll be like the Berlin wall for wildlife.
"The five-year agreement will usher NFL fans through the console technology transition with new ideas and innovative game play experiences."
Because monopolies (this is a monopoly of sorts) always lead to innovation.
The Mac OS X port is certainly coming along nicely. Just the fact that it uses Aqua widgets is a Good Thing, but it still has a long way to go in the picky world of Mac users. I'm not saying they haven't put any effort into it (because they certainly have -- just look at the splash screen and the disk image background along with the general Aqua appearance). It's just that a lot of Mac users are really, really, really picky when it comes to how their apps look and behave. Hell, look at Firefox. It's come a long way with the look and feel, but there are still a ton of people who complain that the web page widgets aren't OS native.
Here's what I've noticed in AbiWord 2.2 so far. The buttons look very 10.0 and there is still some issues with ghosting or artifacting (whatever you want to call it) as you move the tabs across the rulers. The save dialog boxes aren't sheets. The formatting toolbar has some issues with dual monitors (it puts the styles menu on my secondary screen when the pull-down is close to the edge of the primary). Also, the toolbars must be treated as windows themselves, because clicking on the menu bar disables many of the menu options, making me think the document window isn't completely "active". On the positive, I'm glad there are live resizing windows and a good preferences interface. It's closer, but there's still a bit of polish to put on it before Mac users accept it with open arms.
This just goes to show that not all hope is lost in participatory government. I know I get frustrated at times with how much clout corporations have in government operations, but every now and again I get a little glimmer of hope.
As I've been monitoring the discussions of the 650 at TreoCentral (I'm thinking about getting one myself when the GSM version comes out), I couldn't help but thinking that PalmSource and PalmOne seem to be in a position very similar to Apple a few years ago. I know, they're two separate companies where Apple was (and is) one and their new OS is actually off the ground, but bear with me.
A few years ago, Palm/PalmSource probably realized that their OS wasn't going to cut it in the New World of modern computing. They were making the transition from 68k processors to the StrongARM/Xscale series much like Apple made the switch from 68k to PowerPC. All arguments aside, I'd say this was the right thing to do for both companies, but it left them in a bit of a predicament -- legacy code. The only option for both companies was to develop an emulation system so the old could be run on the new. They both work really quite well, but everyone knows you can't run on a hack forever. The time to break with the old had come.
So, Palm decided to start developing Cobalt and Apple started to develop Copland. Preemptive multitasking, protected memory, better multimedia handling -- the calls to arms were the same. Yet where Apple failed with Copland, Palm didn't. Sort of.
Copland was a nightmare. Years of legacy code had turned the Mac OS into a bunch of spaghetti and for some reason the Copland developers thought they could use that spaghetti and bake a tieramisu. It didn't work. Drained of billions of dollars sunk into development, Apple started shopping around in 1996. They looked at BeOS (to what degree of seriousness is a matter of debate) and NeXT and some others, thankfully settling on NeXT. Palm, too, had likely started from the bottom up, found themselves a bit stuck, and then stumbled across the devalued Be, Inc. Purchasing Be, they gained huge strides in the multimedia area and were on their way. They also created PACE, an emulation environment similar to Classic in our beloved Mac OS X, for all that legacy code.
Cobalt should be a runaway success like Mac OS X is. But it's not. You could say that Cobalt is like Mac OS X when it was new. Everybody thought it had great promise, but even Apple was afraid to use it because it just wasn't finished. Now, I'm not sure how "unfinished" Cobalt is at this point, but it could be in the same boat. There are also issues of licensing fees (which I hear are significantly higher for Cobalt compared to Garnet) that cause the analogy to break down a bit, but for the most part it holds.
So in the end, Palm OS 5 is starting to look a lot like Mac OS 9. It works well, but man does it have its problems. Adoption of Cobalt will be key, but PalmSource needs something killer to drive that. It's a shame for PalmSource/PalmOne that they didn't pick up Dominic Giampaolo with the Be acquisition, but I'm also a Mac user and I'm sure glad he's on our team now.
"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
So does it work or not? Here's my translation: "iTunes will now launch under WINE. Do not expect to listen to your music, burn CDs, sync with the iPod easily, or in short, do anything iTunes does."
Seriously though, I applaud their effort. It's just that saying iTunes works under WINE when it doesn't really work all that well is a bit of false advertising. If it gets more programmers on the bandwagon, good for them, but I'd hate to see people get turned off by (what sounds to be) a bad experience.
As if the internet infecting your computer wasn't enough, Verizon is working on a way to infect you.
1. Exhibit stuff no one has actually made
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!!
Very carefully. That shit's expensive.
"As someone replied earlier, this is a new paradigm in app management: the top menu controls the application, and the window menu controls the window."
Actually, this behavior is not a new paradigm as it has been a feature of the Mac OS back before it was Mac OS -- all the way back to The Beginning.
There are a few reasons for this behavior, but the most important one is that in good UI design, each widget should serve a clear purpose. On a Mac, the "close window" widget closes windows and that's it (unless the app has only one possible window). Aside from making the app appear to "launch" faster, it's a cleaner UI implementation that leaves little room for ambiguity. Plus, lets say you are downloading a big file in your web browser but don't want the display or the Dock cluttered with windows. On the Mac, you can close all the windows but still not quit the browser and keep the download active and out of sight.
"The OGC (the government procurement body) released a report describing Linux as a viable desktop alternative for the majority of government users."
Unfortunately, the report sounds like a recommendation. Just because you recommend Linux to someone doesn't mean they will use it. Especially if that someone is a large government body that has the speed of a banana slug.
This did already happen, two years ago I believe, to Diebold ATMs. When it did, I called Wells Fargo (my bank) and asked them what brand of ATMs they use. I got the old, "Why would you want to know that?" question edged with a fair amount of suspicion. I explained that I didn't want an ATM that I used often to be compromised by a virus. I was forwarded to the manager. He ended up giving me a runaround about how Wells Fargo guarantees all transactions on their ATMs and any fraudulent use is refunded. No straight answer on whether they used Diebold ATMs with Windows.
Of course, I went to a few of the ATMs I used and checked them out. All Diebolds. I'm not sure if they were running Windows, but I can assume so. Why would the bank give me such a hard time about who supplied their ATMs? Obviously it wasn't that difficult to just go and find out. It makes me a bit weary that they're trying to implement security through secrecy (let alone secrecy that's not that secret). Plus, being a customer I feel like I have the right to know how my money is handled and what possibilities there are for it being stolen.
Actually, I don't think it will because Apple has realized that people don't want to have to use the small devices they carry around to organize their data -- they want their computers to do that, with their large screens and easy input methods. Having the iPod Photo sync with iPhoto (or whatever else), you can sort your pictures into albums before putting them on your iPod, just like playlists. That way, you can go right to the album you want to share and present a slideshow right away. No need to sort or sift.
I think what Raskin has painted himself into a bit of a corner. He insists that interfaces need to further adapt to people, but he has failed to realize that people can adapt to interfaces. Your comment about the WWW brought this to mind. The web may not have the best interface (often it's downright terrible), but people have adapted to this new method of navigation and are quite comfortable with it.
Jef is seeking to create an interface that works the way his brain works. It's like a UNIX guy I know. His desktop is highly customized and very efficient -- for him. The more I read about Raskin, the more I think he's looking to make things more efficient for himself, not necessarily everyone else.
Let me be the first to say that I for one welcome our new hacker overlords!
"Just after AMD's announcement, AnandTech posted this article to help consumers choose between Intel and AMD." So if by consumers, you mean people that read /. and hardware sites and not the general public, then yes?
Does the back of the miniature display flash "NERD" for everyone else to see? You know, in case it wasn't obvious.