ESR, once more, is publicity-whoring on a subject he either knows nothing about, or chooses to be deliberately ignorant of. Anybriefperusal of theJavascene will uncover an enormous amount of Open Source work going on, some of it very high quality. (And much less so, of course, but that's the same all over).
What ESR really means is that there's a lack of adoption of Java from Unix/C programmers. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Java is Open Source or not, and everything to do with the perception amongst such programmers (whether deserved or not), of the Java language itself. People don't choose Perl, Python or Ruby over Java because the former are open source. People choose them because they prefer using the scripting languages.
I have this feeling that Scott McNealy isn't sitting there thinking "Damn, I guess if we totally cede control over this language, all those Unix nerds who hate Java anyway are going to drop their copies of Python and come rushing to embrace us!"
"Why Spend $2199 on a Propreitry hardware when I can get a Cheap $600 Linux box running Mandrake."
When you first get into Linux, everything is cool and exciting. Linux's inconsistencies, the plethora of weird and wonderful configuration files, the ever-changing procession of desktop environments, all of this is a challenge. It's something new to learn. You feel you're expanding your horizons.
Skip to about ten years after my first Linux installation, and the novelty has decidedly worn off. I just don't find it very interesting any more to have to think too much about my computer. The time I spend thinking about my computer is time I could be spending thinking about the things I want to do with that computer. I think JWZ summed it up when he said: 'If you made a Venn diagram, there would be two non-overlapping circles, one of which was labeled, "Times when I am truly happy" and the other of which was labeled, "Times when I am logged in as root, holding a cable, or have the case open."'
My 17" flat-panel iMac was the second-best computer investment I've ever made (with the best being my 15" TiBook). The iMac doesn't waste any space, it's incredibly quiet, it looks great, and it's several orders of magnitude less frustrating to deal with every day than my succession of Linux boxen. As someone who works with computers, I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of the damn things every day, and I consider the "luxury" spending to make that a more enjoyable and productive experience to be very, very well worth it.
If you want to save the money, if it's not a priority for you, that's entirely your prerogative. Just don't stand outside the window of the restaurant, munching your cheeseburger and muttering "Fillet steak? Who'd waste money on that?"
Charles Miller
It's NEW and DANGEROUS because it's the INTERNET!
on
The Rise of Cyber Bullying
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Come on. I read through the whole article and didn't see a single thing that didn't happen when I went to school, pre-Internet. Or, for that matter, I didn't read anything that I didn't hear from my parents' stories about when they went to school.
The article spent four fifths of its copy trying to make out that teasing and gossip-spreading were something novel and Internet-age. Yeah, sure. Before text-messages, kids just had no way of insulting or passing information to each other. Certainly, no schoolgirl has ever been teased about her clothes, or boy about his sexuality, before the age of the Dark, Nasty Internet.
Sure, the "instant-on" thing is new, but really, kids will do exactly what adults do when they want to get away from unwanted IMs: go invisible, or register a second screen-name that only their friends know.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but it's not a new problem. I abhor lazy journalism that finds sensationalism in dressing up something as old as time (pornography, bullying, copying music) in Internet clothes, just because it's easier to scare people that way.
"What advantages does it have over already-existing FastIR? You don't have to aim it. That's it."
That's a pretty convenient advantage. I've got an Ericsson T610, and the Bluetooth is getting a lot of work around chez Carlfish in a way that the IR capabilities of my previous phone never did.
It means I can synch my address book and calendar with the phone when it's charging on the other side of the room. It means I can send emails or SMS's from my Powerbook while on the road without having to get the phone out of my pocket. Small conveniences, yes, but conveniences nonetheless. Why should I feck around with IR and line-of-sight when I can just use RF?
I'd turn the question around. Everything you can do with FastIR, you can do with Bluetooth, and you don't have to aim it. Two technologies that do the same thing, one more conveniently than the other. So what's FastIR got that will save it from obselescence? Given the growing consumer awareness of the Bluetooth brand, and the facts that Bluetooth is now pretty much a standard for new mobile devices, and a USB Bluetooth receiver costs peanuts, I think you're backing the wrong one here.
The patch "renders several IE vulns obselete". Most software vendors release patches for their software, and it's nice to see Microsoft continue to do so. That's not really news, though. The news is that the service that tells us what vulnerabilities remain has gone.
That releasing a patch removes the need to know about the outstanding vulnerabilities is simply nonsense.
Which IE vulnerabilities are rendered obselete by the patch? Which remain? "Several" is not "all". It's quite likely not even "most". Which ones are still there? Well, suddenly pivx aren't going to tell us.
Reformat and reinstall is a pretty standard response to a root-level system compromise. It also serves as a rather effective deterrent to users who might want to delay installing patches in the future.
The command-line exploit for the hole was available several weeks before the Blaster worm came out. I demo'd it in the office by breaking into my Boss's workstation (Yes, while he was watching over my shoulder). Compile the exploit on a Linux box, run it against a remote NT host, up comes a nice command-shell with Administrator access.
While the Blaster worm itself is pretty easy to get rid of, the RPC/DCOM bug is a remotely-compromiseable hole that gives you Administrator privileges. As such, it's quite possible that vulnerable machines could have been backdoored by something other than the worm (or by some rare variant of the worm) in the process.
A Blaster-infected machine was wide open for long enough for the virus to catch it. At that point, you have no idea what malware could have be installed. You're pretty sure it's "just" the regular worm, and the standard removal instructions are all you need, but how sure is that? Network security want to be completely sure that their network doesn't become a home of a few thousand more DDOS drones.
In my judgement MIT security may be being a little paranoid, but if you work in network security, you're paranoid by definition anyway.
I apologise for fudging the issue somewhat (i.e. not explaining what "considerable GNU-ness" means) in order to make the post sensationalised enough for Slashdot to post. I cite the greater good that this will hopefully increase awareness of the obligations created under the LGPL.
Most people believe that using an LGPL library does not place any additional obligations on the person using it, so long as they don't modify the library itself. Section 6 contradicts that popular belief. Similarly, people might quite reasonably believe that using a late-binding language is a way out of being considered "linked" to the library.
Charles Miller
(Who didn't know half of this himself until it all hit the fan in the last day)
Not quite. Section 6 doesn't apply the whole LGPL. It just means that you have to provide an offer valid for three years to supply the source-code for the LGPL'd library your application relies on. If your application is available for download, you need to make the LGPL'd library source available for download from the same site.
You must also provide sufficient source to allow people to use your code with a modified version of the library.
The general "nerd on the street" understanding of the LGPL is that so long as you don't make any changes to an LGPL Library, then making use of that library doesn't place your own code under any further obligation.
Section 6 contradicts that understanding. However, Java programmers have generally believed that Section 6 does not apply to them, because Java is a late-binding language. The LGPL talks about "linking executables", but Java doesn't perform the linking step until runtime, supposedly freeing Java of the Section 6 responsibilities to give an offer (valid for three years) to distribute the LGPL'd library source themselves, plus anything you would need to make the app work with a modified version of the library.
The advice that Section 6 actually _Does_ apply to late-binding languages places a significant burden on projects making use of LGPL'd libraries that until now they didn't think they had to meet.
...Because your other hand is just so busy when you're using the mouse.
When I'm using the mouse, one of my hands has left the keyboard. The other is still sitting near the command/option/control keys anyway. Which essentially gives me four mouse buttons, although only three of them have well-defined semantics.
Speaking as a decade-long Windows user who "switched", it took me about two weeks to get used to a single-button mouse without having to think, and now I have no real inclination to buy a multi-button replacement. On the other hand, I'd probably think differently if I played games.
Welcome to the 80/20 rule. 80% of the bandwidth is used by 20% of the users, and 50% is being used by the top 10% of users. (Or it could be the top 5%. I did the sums back when I worked at an ISP, but my memory of these things is hazy now) Now, a little mathematics. You rewrite your user contracts to target the top 10%, and they leave.
Suddenly you have effectively twice as much bandwidth for your remaining users as before. With decreased expansion costs and increased service-levels for your remaining customers, you could quite easily profit from your customers "voting with their feet".
I bet the cable companies are just shaking in their boots over your threat to leave.
Flat-rate pricing is a myth. It does far more damage to the Internet than it heals, since the need to artificially prevent people from fully utilising their connections without charging them more is is the cause of stupid rules like "You can't run a server and we'll cycle your IP occasionally" that really do impact on user freedom.
Once upon a time, Sun wrote a sample application, called PetStore, as a demonstration of various capabilities of the J2EE platform, and various techniques that might be helpful when writing J2EE applications. As such, it was deliberately over-engineered. A tiny shopping site doesn't need all the techniques they threw at it, it was just a context in which to deliver examples of coding pratices that might be useful in other situations. It was example code.
Speed wasn't a goal. Keeping the LOC low was counter-productive to an application which is basically an example of different coding techniques.
Microsoft saw this, and realised they had a cheap marketing opportunity. By rewriting the Pet Store in.NET, with completely different goals (speed and low LOC), they could score points just by issuing press releases. It's the marketing equivalent of saying "Hey! Our car is smaller and faster than your truck!" It's true, but meaningless.
No matter that it was an apples to oranges comparison. No matter that the Pet Store could be rewritten in Java using Open Source frameworks with about the same number of LOC by one guy in his spare time. This is marketing, not reality.
Yes, the prequels sucked. Yes, the "midichlorian" thing was annoying because it replaces something that was comfortingly mystical: "I can feel the Force is strong in this one" with trek-like technobabble. "Oooh, his midichlorian count is off the scale!"
However, the idea that sensitivity to the Force ran in your family was pretty apparent throughout the first series. Even in the first Star Wars, you're left with the idea that Luke gets his ability in the Force from his father. It gets clearer towards the end of the trilogy. Think of Yoda's last words - "There is another Skywalker", or Luke talking to Leia in ROTJ: "The Force is strong in my family." All TPM did was take an idea that was already there (Force sensitivity runs in bloodlines) and over-explains it until it becomes dull.
I really hope you were trolling. I'll bite anyway.
The Australian Constitution does not guarantee us any freedoms at all. If you read it, it's all about how power is divided between the State and Federal governments and the Governor General. There's no Bill of Rights, no guarantees of anything for the citizens save the right to vote in elections. Australian governments can pass any oppressive legislation they want.
We do have a pretty lame kind of freedom of speech, but you won't find it anywhere in the constitution. That's because the High Court invented it out of nowhere in the late 80's. It was an interesting case - the government of the day tried to pass a law restricting spending on political advertisements, the TV companies sued, and a one-judge majority in the High Court decided that we had a "freedom of political speech" implied in the constitution. In other words, "It's not there, but it should be so we'll pretend it is." The logic they used was tenuous to say the least.
Being a High Court decision, and a narrow majority, it could be overruled any time.
So there's no wonder we have more phone-taps than the USA. They have constitutional protection against unreasonable search, all we have is a Common Law doctrine of evidence that will mostly (but not always) suppress evidence that was illegally obtained.
Charles Miller
(Who isn't a lawyer, but did pass Constitutional Law before he dropped out of University to become a programmer)
It's a pretty radical change. You're thinking like a programmer, "Oh, it's just an interface element, it can be drawn anywhere", not a UI designer.
When you have a menu-bar at the top of the screen, it's general to the entire application. When you put a menu-bar in a window, it's specific to the contents of that window. Thus, you have to start worrying about what goes where, and in what context, and your application becomes hideously inconsistent.
When the menu-bar is in the application, you still need the top-of-screen menu for things like the Apple Menu, the clock, and the system menu items like the volume/network controls (all of which are system-specific, not application specific). Thus you get a "Which menu?" confusion. For an example of this, run a Java application under OS X. (There's an option in OS X Java apps to move window menu bars up to the top of the screen, but in most Java apps that doesn't work because of problem #1)
Most Mac applications are designed so that they can be accessed from the menu-bar when there are no windows open. Moving the menu into the windows would defeat this (or at least make it inconsistent as the menu pops up magically to the top of the screen when the last window closes)
It's very, very easy to get used to the new menu-bar position. I was a Windows user for ten years before I got my Powerbook, and I got used to the menus in about two days.
A User Interface is like a language. Every customiseable variant on the UI is a dialect of that language. Imagine you are writing a book, and you have to make it easy to translate into two dialects (English-Menubarian, and English-Windowmenuan). You have to do more work, and you have to avoid using any concept that won't translate cleanly into both dialects. A customiseable UI actually reduces the available expressiveness of applications, because it has to cater to, and be useable in, every dialect.
Originally, AIM users were all AOL accounts. Now, AIM users are either AOL accounts or.Mac accounts. The system had to be changed to cater for this. No conspiracies, no black helicopters, just the standard lag you'll get if you're using a reverse-engineered client instead of the official one.
This isn't the death of Fire, or Trillian any more than all the other changes to Oscar were. The third-party clients will reverse-engineer the changed protocol within a week, Trillian users will download (yet another copy of) aim.dll, and we'll all be happy again. Meanwhile, the idea that AOL would force-upgrade all of its legitimate users just to annoy Trillian users for a week is pretty ludicrous.
I used Omniweb for a while, and was sufficiently unimpressed to not register it. Don't drink the Cocoa kool-aid. (On the other hand, I did pay for Omnigraffle and OmniOutliner, because they're both way cool.)
Omniweb's support for modern standards is well below-par, especially when it comes to CSS selectors, and the CSS2 box-model. This causes it to render CSS2-based sites really, really badly. It may render the majority of the web correctly, but that's because the majority of the web has been painstakingly designed to render correctly in Netscape 4.
Even worse, Omniweb _pretends_ that it understands CSS, causing it to not degrade gracefully when it meets markup that it either doesn't understand, or misinterprets. Which makes a lot of pages that have perfectly good HTML unreadable.
The more we support browsers with crappy standards support, the more we force web designers to make stupid concessions for dumb browsers.
If RealNames was as useful outside the USA as its founder suggests, then the company would not have gone under as soon as Microsoft ended the deal.
If there was consumer demand for their services, RealNames could survive by distributing a browser plugin that hooks into the RealNames naming service. Something like the Google Toolbar would have worked perfectly. Those people who are apparently now sitting around crying because RealNames has gone out of business would instead be rushing to download the new plugin and it'd be business as usual.
But RealNames business plan wasn't based on being a useful service, it was based on being a part of Internet Explorer. Any business that bases its entire business model on a single contract with a single company is doomed. Any business that bases its entire business model on a contract with a company as well-known for looking out for number one as Microsoft is doubly doomed.
I tend to print important documentation. Printed documents are:
Easier to read, at least until monitor resolution increases a great deal. Also, I find back-lit screens much harder on the eyes. You can generally read paper documents at about twice the speed you read screens, I believe.
More ergonomic. You can hold them at any angle that feels comfortable.
More flexible. It's easier to attach notes to them, fold them, tape them up on the wall so anyone can see them as they pass, or write "This is all a load of crap" on them in big red marker pen if you disagree.
More convenient. You can read them on the train home from work without investing in a reader. You can take them into a meeting. You can hand them to the guy at the next desk in a tenth of the time it'd take him to load the document himself.
More insistent. If you leave printed documentation on someone's desk, they're more likely to read it than if you stick it on the fileserver.
Point 1. Mono was recently relicensed from LGPL to the MIT X11 License. This means that it is possible to sell proprietary forks of Mono without the permission of the contributing developers.
Point 2. Only small parts of the.NET libraries are standards, and available to be cloned by the free Mono. The remainder are technologies that must be licensed from Microsoft.
Point 3. Ximian need a long-term way to make money.
Conclusion. When GNOME is based on Mono, Ximian will start licensing the additional libraries from Microsoft, and incorporating them into a proprietary "Mono-Enhanced" (Duo?). Mono-Enhanced will be binary compatible with Mono, so you can plug it directly into your GNOME desktop. Users will need Mono-Enhanced in order to interoperate with most.NET services, since they're all running on Windows boxes that have the full Microsoft.NET implementation.
Microsoft will have pulled a massive embrace and extend on GNOME, through Ximian. Way to go, Miguel.:)
Slashdot Mirror
ESR, once more, is publicity-whoring on a subject he either knows nothing about, or chooses to be deliberately ignorant of. Any brief perusal of the Java scene will uncover an enormous amount of Open Source work going on, some of it very high quality. (And much less so, of course, but that's the same all over).
What ESR really means is that there's a lack of adoption of Java from Unix/C programmers. This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Java is Open Source or not, and everything to do with the perception amongst such programmers (whether deserved or not), of the Java language itself. People don't choose Perl, Python or Ruby over Java because the former are open source. People choose them because they prefer using the scripting languages.
I have this feeling that Scott McNealy isn't sitting there thinking "Damn, I guess if we totally cede control over this language, all those Unix nerds who hate Java anyway are going to drop their copies of Python and come rushing to embrace us!"
Charles Miller
"Why Spend $2199 on a Propreitry hardware when I can get a Cheap $600 Linux box running Mandrake."
When you first get into Linux, everything is cool and exciting. Linux's inconsistencies, the plethora of weird and wonderful configuration files, the ever-changing procession of desktop environments, all of this is a challenge. It's something new to learn. You feel you're expanding your horizons.
Skip to about ten years after my first Linux installation, and the novelty has decidedly worn off. I just don't find it very interesting any more to have to think too much about my computer. The time I spend thinking about my computer is time I could be spending thinking about the things I want to do with that computer. I think JWZ summed it up when he said: 'If you made a Venn diagram, there would be two non-overlapping circles, one of which was labeled, "Times when I am truly happy" and the other of which was labeled, "Times when I am logged in as root, holding a cable, or have the case open."'
My 17" flat-panel iMac was the second-best computer investment I've ever made (with the best being my 15" TiBook). The iMac doesn't waste any space, it's incredibly quiet, it looks great, and it's several orders of magnitude less frustrating to deal with every day than my succession of Linux boxen. As someone who works with computers, I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of the damn things every day, and I consider the "luxury" spending to make that a more enjoyable and productive experience to be very, very well worth it.
If you want to save the money, if it's not a priority for you, that's entirely your prerogative. Just don't stand outside the window of the restaurant, munching your cheeseburger and muttering "Fillet steak? Who'd waste money on that?"
Charles Miller
Come on. I read through the whole article and didn't see a single thing that didn't happen when I went to school, pre-Internet. Or, for that matter, I didn't read anything that I didn't hear from my parents' stories about when they went to school.
The article spent four fifths of its copy trying to make out that teasing and gossip-spreading were something novel and Internet-age. Yeah, sure. Before text-messages, kids just had no way of insulting or passing information to each other. Certainly, no schoolgirl has ever been teased about her clothes, or boy about his sexuality, before the age of the Dark, Nasty Internet.
Children are vicious. They learn the need to establish a social hierarchy long before they learn empathy. Paul Graham covers this phenomenon quite effectively in one of his essays.
Sure, the "instant-on" thing is new, but really, kids will do exactly what adults do when they want to get away from unwanted IMs: go invisible, or register a second screen-name that only their friends know.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but it's not a new problem. I abhor lazy journalism that finds sensationalism in dressing up something as old as time (pornography, bullying, copying music) in Internet clothes, just because it's easier to scare people that way.
Charles Miller
Three acronyms:
YHBT, YHL, HAND.
(Unfortunately, posting acronyms doesn't seem to be permitted by Slashdot's bozo filter, so I have to include some filler text here.)
That's a pretty convenient advantage. I've got an Ericsson T610, and the Bluetooth is getting a lot of work around chez Carlfish in a way that the IR capabilities of my previous phone never did.
It means I can synch my address book and calendar with the phone when it's charging on the other side of the room. It means I can send emails or SMS's from my Powerbook while on the road without having to get the phone out of my pocket. Small conveniences, yes, but conveniences nonetheless. Why should I feck around with IR and line-of-sight when I can just use RF?
I'd turn the question around. Everything you can do with FastIR, you can do with Bluetooth, and you don't have to aim it. Two technologies that do the same thing, one more conveniently than the other. So what's FastIR got that will save it from obselescence? Given the growing consumer awareness of the Bluetooth brand, and the facts that Bluetooth is now pretty much a standard for new mobile devices, and a USB Bluetooth receiver costs peanuts, I think you're backing the wrong one here.
Charles Miller
The patch "renders several IE vulns obselete". Most software vendors release patches for their software, and it's nice to see Microsoft continue to do so. That's not really news, though. The news is that the service that tells us what vulnerabilities remain has gone.
That releasing a patch removes the need to know about the outstanding vulnerabilities is simply nonsense.
Which IE vulnerabilities are rendered obselete by the patch? Which remain? "Several" is not "all". It's quite likely not even "most". Which ones are still there? Well, suddenly pivx aren't going to tell us.
It's dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Charles Miller
Charles Miller
Reformat and reinstall is a pretty standard response to a root-level system compromise. It also serves as a rather effective deterrent to users who might want to delay installing patches in the future.
The command-line exploit for the hole was available several weeks before the Blaster worm came out. I demo'd it in the office by breaking into my Boss's workstation (Yes, while he was watching over my shoulder). Compile the exploit on a Linux box, run it against a remote NT host, up comes a nice command-shell with Administrator access.
While the Blaster worm itself is pretty easy to get rid of, the RPC/DCOM bug is a remotely-compromiseable hole that gives you Administrator privileges. As such, it's quite possible that vulnerable machines could have been backdoored by something other than the worm (or by some rare variant of the worm) in the process.
A Blaster-infected machine was wide open for long enough for the virus to catch it. At that point, you have no idea what malware could have be installed. You're pretty sure it's "just" the regular worm, and the standard removal instructions are all you need, but how sure is that? Network security want to be completely sure that their network doesn't become a home of a few thousand more DDOS drones.
In my judgement MIT security may be being a little paranoid, but if you work in network security, you're paranoid by definition anyway.
Charles Miller
I apologise for fudging the issue somewhat (i.e. not explaining what "considerable GNU-ness" means) in order to make the post sensationalised enough for Slashdot to post. I cite the greater good that this will hopefully increase awareness of the obligations created under the LGPL.
Most people believe that using an LGPL library does not place any additional obligations on the person using it, so long as they don't modify the library itself. Section 6 contradicts that popular belief. Similarly, people might quite reasonably believe that using a late-binding language is a way out of being considered "linked" to the library.
Charles Miller
(Who didn't know half of this himself until it all hit the fan in the last day)
Not quite. Section 6 doesn't apply the whole LGPL. It just means that you have to provide an offer valid for three years to supply the source-code for the LGPL'd library your application relies on. If your application is available for download, you need to make the LGPL'd library source available for download from the same site.
You must also provide sufficient source to allow people to use your code with a modified version of the library.
Charles Miller
The general "nerd on the street" understanding of the LGPL is that so long as you don't make any changes to an LGPL Library, then making use of that library doesn't place your own code under any further obligation.
Section 6 contradicts that understanding. However, Java programmers have generally believed that Section 6 does not apply to them, because Java is a late-binding language. The LGPL talks about "linking executables", but Java doesn't perform the linking step until runtime, supposedly freeing Java of the Section 6 responsibilities to give an offer (valid for three years) to distribute the LGPL'd library source themselves, plus anything you would need to make the app work with a modified version of the library.
The advice that Section 6 actually _Does_ apply to late-binding languages places a significant burden on projects making use of LGPL'd libraries that until now they didn't think they had to meet.
...Because your other hand is just so busy when you're using the mouse.
When I'm using the mouse, one of my hands has left the keyboard. The other is still sitting near the command/option/control keys anyway. Which essentially gives me four mouse buttons, although only three of them have well-defined semantics.
Speaking as a decade-long Windows user who "switched", it took me about two weeks to get used to a single-button mouse without having to think, and now I have no real inclination to buy a multi-button replacement. On the other hand, I'd probably think differently if I played games.
Welcome to the 80/20 rule. 80% of the bandwidth is used by 20% of the users, and 50% is being used by the top 10% of users. (Or it could be the top 5%. I did the sums back when I worked at an ISP, but my memory of these things is hazy now) Now, a little mathematics. You rewrite your user contracts to target the top 10%, and they leave.
Suddenly you have effectively twice as much bandwidth for your remaining users as before. With decreased expansion costs and increased service-levels for your remaining customers, you could quite easily profit from your customers "voting with their feet".
I bet the cable companies are just shaking in their boots over your threat to leave.
Flat-rate pricing is a myth. It does far more damage to the Internet than it heals, since the need to artificially prevent people from fully utilising their connections without charging them more is is the cause of stupid rules like "You can't run a server and we'll cycle your IP occasionally" that really do impact on user freedom.
Charles Miller
Here's the basic story.
Once upon a time, Sun wrote a sample application, called PetStore, as a demonstration of various capabilities of the J2EE platform, and various techniques that might be helpful when writing J2EE applications. As such, it was deliberately over-engineered. A tiny shopping site doesn't need all the techniques they threw at it, it was just a context in which to deliver examples of coding pratices that might be useful in other situations. It was example code.
Speed wasn't a goal. Keeping the LOC low was counter-productive to an application which is basically an example of different coding techniques.
Microsoft saw this, and realised they had a cheap marketing opportunity. By rewriting the Pet Store in .NET, with completely different goals (speed and low LOC), they could score points just by issuing press releases. It's the marketing equivalent of saying "Hey! Our car is smaller and faster than your truck!" It's true, but meaningless.
No matter that it was an apples to oranges comparison. No matter that the Pet Store could be rewritten in Java using Open Source frameworks with about the same number of LOC by one guy in his spare time. This is marketing, not reality.
Charles Miller
Headline, six months from now:
This misconception annoys me.
Yes, the prequels sucked. Yes, the "midichlorian" thing was annoying because it replaces something that was comfortingly mystical: "I can feel the Force is strong in this one" with trek-like technobabble. "Oooh, his midichlorian count is off the scale!"
However, the idea that sensitivity to the Force ran in your family was pretty apparent throughout the first series. Even in the first Star Wars, you're left with the idea that Luke gets his ability in the Force from his father. It gets clearer towards the end of the trilogy. Think of Yoda's last words - "There is another Skywalker", or Luke talking to Leia in ROTJ: "The Force is strong in my family." All TPM did was take an idea that was already there (Force sensitivity runs in bloodlines) and over-explains it until it becomes dull.
Charles Miller
I really hope you were trolling. I'll bite anyway.
The Australian Constitution does not guarantee us any freedoms at all. If you read it, it's all about how power is divided between the State and Federal governments and the Governor General. There's no Bill of Rights, no guarantees of anything for the citizens save the right to vote in elections. Australian governments can pass any oppressive legislation they want.
We do have a pretty lame kind of freedom of speech, but you won't find it anywhere in the constitution. That's because the High Court invented it out of nowhere in the late 80's. It was an interesting case - the government of the day tried to pass a law restricting spending on political advertisements, the TV companies sued, and a one-judge majority in the High Court decided that we had a "freedom of political speech" implied in the constitution. In other words, "It's not there, but it should be so we'll pretend it is." The logic they used was tenuous to say the least.
Being a High Court decision, and a narrow majority, it could be overruled any time.
So there's no wonder we have more phone-taps than the USA. They have constitutional protection against unreasonable search, all we have is a Common Law doctrine of evidence that will mostly (but not always) suppress evidence that was illegally obtained.
Charles Miller
(Who isn't a lawyer, but did pass Constitutional Law before he dropped out of University to become a programmer)
It's a pretty radical change. You're thinking like a programmer, "Oh, it's just an interface element, it can be drawn anywhere", not a UI designer.
A User Interface is like a language. Every customiseable variant on the UI is a dialect of that language. Imagine you are writing a book, and you have to make it easy to translate into two dialects (English-Menubarian, and English-Windowmenuan). You have to do more work, and you have to avoid using any concept that won't translate cleanly into both dialects. A customiseable UI actually reduces the available expressiveness of applications, because it has to cater to, and be useable in, every dialect.
Originally, AIM users were all AOL accounts. Now, AIM users are either AOL accounts or .Mac accounts. The system had to be changed to cater for this. No conspiracies, no black helicopters, just the standard lag you'll get if you're using a reverse-engineered client instead of the official one.
This isn't the death of Fire, or Trillian any more than all the other changes to Oscar were. The third-party clients will reverse-engineer the changed protocol within a week, Trillian users will download (yet another copy of) aim.dll, and we'll all be happy again. Meanwhile, the idea that AOL would force-upgrade all of its legitimate users just to annoy Trillian users for a week is pretty ludicrous.
Or, as JWZ put it: "___0___ days without an on-site injury!" (sic)
(although I had to un-caps it to get past the lameness filter)
I used Omniweb for a while, and was sufficiently unimpressed to not register it. Don't drink the Cocoa kool-aid. (On the other hand, I did pay for Omnigraffle and OmniOutliner, because they're both way cool.)
Omniweb's support for modern standards is well below-par, especially when it comes to CSS selectors, and the CSS2 box-model. This causes it to render CSS2-based sites really, really badly. It may render the majority of the web correctly, but that's because the majority of the web has been painstakingly designed to render correctly in Netscape 4.
Even worse, Omniweb _pretends_ that it understands CSS, causing it to not degrade gracefully when it meets markup that it either doesn't understand, or misinterprets. Which makes a lot of pages that have perfectly good HTML unreadable.
The more we support browsers with crappy standards support, the more we force web designers to make stupid concessions for dumb browsers.
Charles Miller
If RealNames was as useful outside the USA as its founder suggests, then the company would not have gone under as soon as Microsoft ended the deal.
If there was consumer demand for their services, RealNames could survive by distributing a browser plugin that hooks into the RealNames naming service. Something like the Google Toolbar would have worked perfectly. Those people who are apparently now sitting around crying because RealNames has gone out of business would instead be rushing to download the new plugin and it'd be business as usual.
But RealNames business plan wasn't based on being a useful service, it was based on being a part of Internet Explorer. Any business that bases its entire business model on a single contract with a single company is doomed. Any business that bases its entire business model on a contract with a company as well-known for looking out for number one as Microsoft is doubly doomed.
Charles Miller
I tend to print important documentation. Printed documents are:
Charles Miller
Point 1. Mono was recently relicensed from LGPL to the MIT X11 License. This means that it is possible to sell proprietary forks of Mono without the permission of the contributing developers.
.NET libraries are standards, and available to be cloned by the free Mono. The remainder are technologies that must be licensed from Microsoft.
.NET services, since they're all running on Windows boxes that have the full Microsoft .NET implementation.
:)
Point 2. Only small parts of the
Point 3. Ximian need a long-term way to make money.
Conclusion. When GNOME is based on Mono, Ximian will start licensing the additional libraries from Microsoft, and incorporating them into a proprietary "Mono-Enhanced" (Duo?). Mono-Enhanced will be binary compatible with Mono, so you can plug it directly into your GNOME desktop. Users will need Mono-Enhanced in order to interoperate with most
Microsoft will have pulled a massive embrace and extend on GNOME, through Ximian. Way to go, Miguel.
Charles Miller
According to an IBM study, natively compiled Java isn't much faster (and can in some cases be slower) than bytecode-interpreted Java.