What we're seeing is the end of Microsoft--not as a company, but as the monolithic OS vendor that they've been for years. It's much like IBM in the 1980s. IBM went from the monolithic vendor of PCs to a company that had to compete with the "IBM compatible" clones. The reasons are the same in both cases:
Corporate Culture: IBM, like Microsoft, had the "IBM way" of doing things. They had a corporate culture that stifled real innovation and was all about maintaining revenue streams above all. They weren't willing to take risks, they weren't willing to sell products at less cost, and they were all about promoting their own ecosystem. Just like Microsoft. There have been plenty of rumblings about the way in which Microsoft is becoming a less and less hospitable place to work, and the erosion of the corporate culture is one of the biggest signs of a failing company.
Erosion of Markets: Microsoft depends on a Microsoft ecosystem. Windows on the server, Vista on the desktop, Windows Mobile, SharePoint, etc. The second there becomes a viable alternative to anything, they lose revenue. If people don't upgrade to Vista, they lose revenue. If people stay with Office 2003 rather than Office 2007, they lose revenue. Don't even get them started on Linux servers, Macs, or iPhones. Microsoft's real biggest competitor, though, is Microsoft. The reason why they're moving to a subscription model is because they have to keep people on the upgrade cycle. If their old stuff works well enough that people don't need Vista, 2008, and the latest Windows Server, they lose their chief revenue stream. That's the wall they're running into today.
Stronger Competition: The iPhone is set to eat Windows Mobile's lunch. Macs are taking the educational market back. Linux is gaining more and more acceptance. Firefox has taken browser share from IE. Why pay $100 for a Windows license for a device like a $299 eeePC? As computing becomes a commodity, Windows loses relevance. The rise of the web has taken 15 years to start breaking the MS stranglehold, but it's doing what we said it would back then. You don't need Windows to use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, or Gmail. Every web app challenges Microsoft's OS dominance. If those web apps run on commodity UNIX servers, even more so. Microsoft is competing for the market space of 5 and 10 years ago, while Google and Apple are creating their own market spaces where Microsoft isn't dominant.
This doesn't mean that Microsoft will go away, but it does mean that their days of dominance are over. The OS market will fragment, and we're already seeing that happen now. It isn't nearly as quick as some had predicted, but it is happening. Microsoft won't go out of business any time soon--but they can forget about being the only player that really matters anymore. It's the business cycle in action, and this was bound to happen sooner or later.
There's a huge hole in your argument. You have a right under the First Amendment to free speech. The government
Your employer however, can damn well fire you for speaking out. CNN is a news outlet. Ostensibly they're supposed to be present unbiased and fair reports on events. If you have a producer who is indicating his own biases, that makes it a hell of a lot harder to say that those biases aren't coming out in the finished product.
This isn't some act of government repression, this is a private employer deciding to fire someone because he said things that could harm their reputation. There's a whole world of difference between the actions of a private employer and the actions of the state.
The DVD has the single most awesome DVD extra ever -- an entire half-hour episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad (with commercials). It's worth watching just to see the 30th century commercials...
I'm still waiting for the Season 1 DVD box set with all 365 episodes myself...
Would a suit based on the assumption that an overflight by a UAV be considered a warrantless search work against the authorities?
The short answer is no. It's been tried.
There was a case called California v. Ciraolo which dealt with exactly such an issue. The police used a helicopter to look down onto someone's property to search for marijuana plants. The defendant argued that it was a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Court said that so long as the police are in navigable airspace it's no different than them looking at the front of your house from the street.
I wouldn't advise shooting down any police aircraft either... the federal government would likely not be very happy with you, since regulation of airspace is a function of the federal government...
Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" was not at all happy about the rumors:
Would someone go to that site, and suggest to those people there, that "City" and all its elements EXCEPT specific Star Trek characters, belong to Harlan Ellison--author of that much-lauded episode--by terms of the Separation of Rights clause of the Writers Guild's Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), and if Mr. Abrams--with whom I'm currently on strike--or anyone else, at Paramount or elsewhere, thinks they're going to use MY creations--whether the City, the Guardians, Sister Edith Keeler, or any other elements CREATED BY HARLAN ELLISON...they had damned well better lose the unilateral arrogance, get in touch with me, or my agent, Marty Shapiro, and be prepared to pay for the privilege of mining the lode I own.
Thank you, and thank Peter David, who just called to alert me, as have you, Mark, to yet another gimmegimme grab by Paramount and the Star trek francchise that makes billions, but withholds recognition or recompense to the artists who labored in that vein.
Yr. Pal, Harlan
So either Abrams didn't get clearance, or the rumors aren't true. From what we know of Leonard Nimoy's involvement, I'd guess that it's the former rather than the latter. So either Abrams will have to pay Ellison off, or production will have to shut down since the WGA strike precludes any changes to the script.
This could really throw a monkey wrench into everything...
Not to bash you, but that's exactly the attitude we need to fight.
For the average user, Linux is not ready. You can't play a DVD without installing extra software. You can't play an MP3 without installing a codec. Adding new hardware can require you get get a new kernel. Yes, some of those problems are due to things like stupid licensing issues which aren't the fault of Linux. But there should be no excuse for patching a kernel to get a piece of hardware to work.
The only way to succeed is to rethink Linux -- not technically, but culturally. The "year of desktop Linux" has been every year for the past 10 years -- and Linux still doesn't have broad success. The reason is less about technology than it is about a culture of consistently trying to cover up the faults in Linux.
Let's be honest. Ubuntu is a great distro, IMHO the best out there. Compiz Fusion is a brilliant piece of software that lets Linux do the things that OS X and Vista do, and sometimes better. At the same time, it's still too hard to do the things that Mossberg writes about. You shouldn't need a kernel patch for Synaptics touchpads. A typical user should never have to know that the CLI exists, no less hunt down obscure packages.
The second someone says "RTFA" or "download Automatix" or "patch the kernel" they've stopped being an effective advocate for Linux. That's the culture we have to fight. We have to actually listen to users and accept that Linux has got a lot of great things going for it but it also has a lot of major flaws that keep it marginalized.
Linux will achieve market success the day that someone can use Linux without ever once thinking about the kernel, or compiling software, or reading HOWTOs. When Linux "just works" then Linux can effectively compete.
That day isn't going to come until we as a community stop making excuses and start realizing that we have a set of real-world problems -- problems that we can solve -- but only if we're willing to accept that there's a tradeoff between being a technology fan's OS and an OS that works for the general population. That means having a much greater willingness to find fault and being much more proactive about providing users with a quality experience.
The problem that Linux has is that it's written by wildly disparate groups of people with different ideas about how an OS should work from a user perspective. The strength of Linux is that it's written by wildly disparate groups of people with different ideas about how an OS should work from a technical perspective.
It's perfectly possible to make a UNIX OS be usable by the masses -- Apple's done that with OS X. The difference is that Apple "cheats" -- they only support a certain range of hardware, all of which is a known quantity to them. They're not dealing with the issues of a Frankencomputer made from whatever bits of hardware happen to show up.
The only way to get Linux as a mass-use OS is to user test the living hell out of it. That means a continual process of refactoring so that the user never has to view the command line unless they really want to. That means making sure that every application follows a consistent HIG. That means that the first person who says something along the lines of "RTFA" gets canned.
What matters isn't technical excellence, but a culture of usability. The Linux subculture is still based around the hacker ethics -- and that's why Linux remains an OS primarily for people who enjoy compiling programs and manipulating settings. That has to change. The culture needs to be one of taking a critical look at every stage in the process and presenting the user with a set of simple and consistent choices that let people use their computers rather than worrying about getting their machine in a usable state. Ubuntu's leaning in that direction, but they still have a long way to go.
The problem is that changing a culture is a hell of a lot harder than just writing software. A culture in which people are expected to navigate the Internet looking for answers will keep Linux marginalized. A culture that says "this problem is too complicated and needs to be simplified so that the average user gets it" is a culture that can take Linux to the mainstream. Not only that, but it encourages technical development as well -- a good number of the reasons for unnecessary complexity is because there are unnecessary complications in the way a piece of code works. At the end of the day, a solution that's simple for the user is often simple at the code level as well.
I've been using Linux for a decade now, and Ubuntu is a great distro -- but it still isn't enough. The only way that Linux will get mainstream acceptance is when Linux developers start consciously thinking about the overall user experience. It isn't the code that's the problem, it's the culture, and looking for technological solutions to cultural problems doesn't work -- just look at what Microsoft is trying to do with its current strategy.
Frankly, the biggest problem the Star Trek franchise has is its own fans.
There's a big difference between being respectful of a story and hamstringing yourself to meet some fanboy's idea of "canon." There are long and drawn-out discussions all the time in Trek fandom about how this one inconsequential element of some story doesn't mesh with years of backstory which is itself internally inconsistent. They can't seem to let go of these whiny nitpicks.
Look at the new Battlestar Galactica -- Ronald D. Moore took the old BSG "canon" and completely ignored it. He realized that from a storytelling standpoint it would be too limiting to bother sticking with the old story -- after the destruction of nearly every human being, going to a "casino planet" is a betrayal of what could be an incredible storyline. RDM took the essence of what BSG was -- humanity is on the run against an insidious and implacable enemy and reduced it to its essentials. The result is infinitely better than what came before.
I hope J.J. Abrams has the pure chutzpah to do just that with Star Trek. Reinvent the franchise. Give it new life. Change things around and craft a story that can attract a new generation of fans rather than appealing to the people who spend all their life studying the minutiae of the shows.
At its core, Star Trek is Horatio Hornblower in space -- a valiant young captain and his intrepid crew going out an exploring a new frontier. The new film should be true to that spirit, but if J.J. Abrams just sticks to what comes before, he's passing up on an artistic opportunity.
I've been a fan of Star Trek all my life, but the franchise grew stale and repetitive. This is the chance to give it new life, and in order to do that J.J. Abrams will have to royally piss off a lot of Star Trek fans who indignantly demand that the series match their vision of what Star Trek should be. If he does it right, a whole lot of Trekkers will be calling for his head, but the franchise will (dare I say it), live long and prosper after years of neglect.
As part of reinstating the Shuttle fleet, didn't NASA put a repair kit onboard for just this type of thing? If they say it's not a big deal I'd have to believe them, it's probably a very common occurrence. However, how hard can it be to go EVA and trowel in some space-spackle just to cover their butts?
It involves an astronaut going EVA, attached to a long boom. They then have to apply the material to the gouge, without knocking holes in the rest of the Shuttle tiles. The boom tends to move around a bit, and the underside of the Shuttle is surprisingly easy to damage. If the poor guy doing the EVA smacks into the bottom of the Shuttle, it could cause even more damage.
So it's about as hard as applying glue to a crack on a delicate porcelain vase while danging from a rope 200 feet in the air. It's not impossible, but it's very difficult.
In this section the President specifically states that he is aware that the U.S. Citizens affected by this may have Constitutional rights that this order violates. However, because of the ongoing (6+ years now) "National Emergency" said rights are nullified in the interests of efficiency.
No, it doesn't. It states that the government does not have to provide notice of an attachment before it's done. It doesn't take away any property rights than those people may have, nor does it prevent them from seeking a court order against the attachment.
So basically what he's doing is selectivly removing consitutional rights by executive order because the present circumstances, in his opinion alone, demand it.
No, because Congress passed the IEEPA, the Executive has had the power to make attachments against property in a time of emergency. If there's been any abridgment of constitutional rights, it's under the IEEPA, not this document. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has already had a chance to declare the IEEPA unconstitutional, and in an 8-1 decision declined to do so. (Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654 (1981))
He's explicitly and clearly attacking our rights because he says that he feels its necessary, no oversight, no checks, no balances, nothing.
Other than the prior approval of Congress, and the the fact that nothing in this Order prevents someone from filing suit against the government.
If this is accepted it means that any president at any time can strip legal rights from U.S. Citizens, even if those rights are literally embedded in the Constitution just because he wants to. This means that the rule of law, the rule of the Constitution, is null and void.
The legal term for a line like this is "getting one's panties bunched up in a knot." The IEEPA is the relevant law here, and it's already been examined by the Supreme Court. Again, if this is such a blow to the Constitution, what specific clause of the Fifth Amendment is being violated?
They explicitly grant themselves the right to expand this power to anyone else they wish to. That is, the proactive seizure could be handed over to the DEA, the IRS, the ATF, etc if they feel necessary. No future executive order, no public record, will be necessary. Anyone up for proactive seizure of property because you may have cheated on your taxes? Keep in mind that the no fly list includes a large number of people who have committed the crime of having the same or similar sounding names as 'bad' people and no mechanism exists to get them removed from the list. How'd you like to have your house and money taken because you look kind of like a bad person only to have no means of picking back up because that's someone else's department?
Again, you have no clue what the hell you're talking about.
The statutory authorization for this is the IEEPA, 50 USC 1701. Unless cheating on your taxes becomes a national emergency, then this doesn't apply to you. Again, you haven't read the law, and you're making ignorant and hysterical arguments that only make people who have legitimate concerns look like flakes.
The last thing this country needs is a bunch of boys crying "WOLF!" (or in this case "FASCIST!") so that by the time something really threatening to the Republic comes along, people have already been conditioned to not pay attention.
What this does is basically set up the same situation that already has happened once.
In 1979, after the fall of the Pahlavi government in Iran, banks started putting attachments on Iranian property and assets in the United States. One of the creditors to the Iranians was a company called Dames & Moore, who were (ironically enough) working on an Iranian nuclear power plant.
As part of the settlement agreement that released the US hostages, the Carter Administration agreed to nullify all attachments and settle all disputes through a joint US-Iranian tribunal with the assets being held in escrow by the Bank of England. Dames & Moore sued the Carter Administration, arguing that the nullification of those attachments was a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
The Supreme Court, in Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654 (1981) disagreed in an 8-1 decision.
Because the President's action in nullifying the attachments and ordering the transfer of the assets was taken pursuant to specific congressional authorization, it is "supported by the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation, and the burden of persuasion would rest heavily upon any who might attack it." Youngstown, 343 U.S., at 637 (Jackson, J., concurring). Under the circumstances of this case, we cannot say that petitioner has sustained that heavy burden. A contrary ruling would mean that the Federal Government as a whole lacked the power exercised by the President, see id., at 636-637, and that we are not prepared to say.
The IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) gives the President the right to seize property in cases of emergency like a war or the Iranian hostage crisis. There's no Fifth Amendment violation because there has already been due process -- Congress already passed the IEEPA and gave the President the power to do this. Then-Justice Rehnquist's citation to Youngstown is important here, because Youngstown is the case which states when a President should be broadly allowed to act and when he or she should be constrained. The most deference is given in cases where a President is acting in accordance with Congress, because two branches of government have already agreed.
President Bush is following the IEEPA, just applying it more specifically to Iraq. It has already been invoked for al-Qaeda in an Executive Order on September 17, 2001. Basically, if the Fifth Amendment was "overturned", it was overturned by the IEEPA, not by this Executive Order.
Furthermore, a US citizen or resident alien would still have the right to judicial remedy against any attachment under the Fifth. They might not win unless the courts determine that there is no rational basis for such a seizure, but they have the remedy nonetheless. (As did Dames & Moore back then.)
In short, the Fifth does not prevent the government from seizing property, it prevents the government from seizing property without due process. Due process was given when Congress and the President signed the IEEPA -- a bill that was made law long before President Bush came into office. Someone who has rights under the Constitution still have the right to judicially combat any seizure.
This is an hysterical argument being made by someone who has no understanding of law. This kind of shameless trolling doesn't belong on Slashdot -- if I wanted to read hysterical left-wing rants, I'd start reading Digg...
Ballmer is going to be throwing a lot of chairs today...
Safari for Windows is the biggest threat to IE ever. The reason is simple: it's going to be bundled with iTunes. If Apple really wanted to kick Microsoft in the balls, they'd make the iTunes installer put Safari as the default browser -- or give it as an option during the install (with the default being yes, natch). That means suddenly, everyone who buys an iPod ends up using Safari as their default browser instead of IE. If Safari transparently migrates over their bookmarks and settings, a lot of those people, if not the majority, would be likely to stuck with Safari.
It's the same "bundling" that got IE as the majority browser used against Microsoft for a change. All of a sudden, WebKit is the platform for web development on Macs, PCs, and the iPhone. That would would definitely cause a lot of heartburn in Redmond.
Apple has a chance to give Microsoft a major kick in the balls... the question is whether they'll go that route or not. They're doing exactly what Microsoft has always wanted to do -- dominate an entire ecosystem from desktops to laptops to mobile to the television. This is what Bill Gates has been trying to do for the past 20 years, and Apple has done it in just about 5. It's an incredibly smart move on Apple's part, and a major blow to Microsoft's hegemonic ambitions.
Not only is this plan feasible, but a terrorist had already detonated such a device on board an aircraft. In 1995 Philippines Airlines Flight 434 was the target of a bomb left by al-Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Youssef on an earlier leg of the flight. The bomb cut Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami in half, and ripped through the passenger compartment into the cargo hold. The aircraft lost primary and backup hydraulic controls and had to be flown in via throttles -- a difficult and dangerous maneuver.
Not only that, but the bomb that Youssef left on board that flight was one tenth the power of the bombs he intended to detonate as part of Operation Bojinka. The argument that such a weapon is not feasible is itself more FUD. It is quite possible, and it has been done before. Al-Qaeda operatives are trained in explosives, and they knew exactly what was doing.
Yes, there's a good chance of killing yourself while mixing such a bomb, but I rather doubt that any of the plotters of this attack had any qualms about killing themselves in the process.
The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide.
But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.
"All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe," explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. "Think of it like compound interest."
Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but "the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away," Cornish said. That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that -- 156 billion light-years -- is the diameter. That's based on a view going 90 percent of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.
Basically, a light-year is a lot longer than it was back in the time when the universe was young. You can travel faster than the speed of light if space-time is distorted. You just can't travel faster than light in "normal" space.
(And no, I'm not a physicist, nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. YMMV (literally, in this case!))
Windows + OSS is a good combination. The more people use OSS applications, the less tied they are to Microsoft and proprietary data formats. Advocates of OSS need to realize that many people will never switch their operating system to Linux or even OS X, and so trying to push Linux will meet much more resistance than saying "here, just install this application that's free and doesn't require you to change everything about how you use your computer."
The big challenge is making OSS apps better than their commercial counterparts. Some get this right - Audacity is a great app for sound editing that combines a relatively friendly UI with solid features. 7Zip is just as easy as WinZIP and less intrusive. But not all of them do - OpenOffice is great, but it's much slower than MS Office. Many OSS projects are much slower than normal Windows programs, and use toolkits like GTK which are nice for cross-platform development but look like canned ass on Windows. (And that's coming from someone who uses GTK all the time.)
Firefox got the balance of features and UI right - and that's why millions of people have Firefox as their first foray into the world of open source. The more people who see open source as a viable alternative, the more tractions it will get, and the more viable it will be for people to switch to Linux as their OS.
However, that's going to require OSS to start thinking about polish - making applications that Grandma can use. It's not impossible, but a lot of OSS projects need to concentrate on making applications that work well and look decent on Windows - even if we don't particularly care for the platform or the company that makes it.
Just A Variation On A Theme
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Prey Review
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Prey is one of the better FPS games to come out recently. Unfortunately that's like saying someone is the best ukelele player in Fargo.
We've seen just about every possible variation there is to the FPS theme, and the portal bit helps make Prey different, but what we don't really have is a game that really draws people in. The original Half Life did that. HL2 also did well in that regard. The problem is with the real lack of innovation in the genre - at the core the difference between Prey and every other alien shoot-em-up is a few tweaks in gameplay mechanics.
The FPS genre is starting to get played out, and while Prey is a noble effort, it just isn't enough. The AI just isn't challenging enough, and the portals and other gameplay additions keep the game from being a failure, but they're not enough to make it memorable.
I wish I had some magic solution for what would renovate the FPS genre, but I really don't. Better AI would certainly help, and more interesting art direction would also differentiate games from each other (why does every game that uses the Doom 3 engine look the same?). FPS titles seem to be losing their "spark" and maybe some creative title will create a new wave of innovation in the genre, and while Prey makes an admirable attempt to bring some new life into the genre, what makes it innovative tends to get overwhelmed by what makes it look and play like every other title in the genre.
No company would kill off a profitable product line just to spite their opposition. Undoubtedly ATI's deal with Apple is profitable, and just because Apple uses Intel processors doesn't mean that such a transaction is any less profitable than it was before.
Companies don't act in that way, they look out for their bottom line. Unless there's something that would cause that business to become less profitable, ATI is unlikely to give up the block of sales they get from Apple. Is it better to cede that entire block of sales to the competition just because they don't use AMD processors? You don't win in business by reducing your sales, and having ATI graphics cards in Apples gives AMD/ATI a foothold in a very profitable market. It makes no business sense to give that up.
I don't know about any of those titles, but StarCraft runs reasonably well, except for occasional problems with the sound cutting out.
In general, anything that doesn't require any hardware accelerated graphics should run fine, so games that have a software rendering option should be playable under Parallels. However, YMMV.
I've come to the conclusion that the biggest reason for why the Mac is a more secure platform isn't because of technology, but because the Mac userbase tends to be a lot more savvy than the Windows userbase.
I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of Windows malware comes not from the inherent insecurity of the Windows platform but from users doing dumb things. Someone who installs some stupid little weather applet and gets infected with spyware got infected not because of a flaw in the system, but because they didn't bother to determine whether or not the source of their software was credible or not. Even if they got a prompt like Vista and OS X present they'll still authorize the program. There's no patch that can be applied to a system to prevent stupid users from mucking it up.
We all benefit from the fact that the Mac community has zero tolerance for vulnerabilities. Not just zero tolerance for security exploits, but zero tolerance for vulnerabilities. In fact, there is zero tolerance in the Mac community for crapware of any kind.
If some "freeware" software for the Mac surreptitiously installed some sort of adware/spyware/crapware, there'd be reports all over the Mac web within days. Uninstallation instructions would be posted (and thus made available to all via Google), and the developer who shipped the app would be excoriated.
Zero tolerance, on the part of the user community, is the only policy that can work.
It's similar to the "broken windows" theory of urban decay, which holds that if a single window is left unrepaired in a building, in fairly short order, the remaining windows in the building will be broken. Fixing windows as soon as they are broken sends a message: that vandalism will not be tolerated. But not fixing windows also sends a message: that vandalism is acceptable. Worse, once a problem such as vandalism starts, if left unchecked, it flourishes.
Macs are more secure because Mac users have a much tougher stance towards crapware. Mac users tend to be much more technically proficient than the average. If that "zero-tolerance" policy changes, I'm not so sure we'll see an increase in the amount of malware targeting Macs.
OS X does a great job of providing technical barriers against malware, but nothing can prevent malware that uses social engineering to do its work. Mac users are safer because they choose to be - but if you get a group of users who have no awareness of security and will blindly execute anything they come across, even if the system specifically tells them not to, that could change very quickly.
I use both a Mac and Ubuntu. I have an iBook G4 (soon to be a MacBook) and an iMac Core Duo. My home server is an Athlon system running Ubuntu, and it also serves as a development workstation. I've a decently useful application under Linux, and I work with Linux daily. I've got feet in both worlds.
Ubuntu is hands down the best Linux distro I've ever used. It's definitely moving in the right direction. It has a great packaging system, it's got much more polish than other distros, and it can even be loaded with some decent eye candy. Of all the Linux distros I've used, it's the best by quite a distance.
That being said, Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. It's closer than before, but there are a lot of things necessary to make it work. Apple has a reputation for having things Just Work. Linux has a reptutation for having things work once you've futzed around with the config files, recompiled your kernel, read a few HOWTOs and smashed your head against the wall. Is it getting better? Absolutely. Is it there yet, no?
APT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's great for updating your system, but installing third-party software doesn't always go so smoothly. OS X's app bundles are much easier for the average Joe or Jane to understand. Again, NeXTSTEP had this years ago, but Linux doesn't have this.
XGL is nice. It's still not as nice as Apple's GUI. A lot of what differentiates Apple from the rest is the sense of polish. Technologies like XGL and Cairo rendering provide the right infrastructure - but there isn't a distro that puts them all together in an attractive and polished way.
Open file formats? There's nothing preventing you from backing up your music to plain old MP3, and your photos are still JPEGS. There's also nothing preventing someone from using non-Apple software. The only DRM you have to use with Apple is the DRM that protects the OS, and that's nowhere near as harmful as Microsoft's WGA malware.
Apple is skyrocketing now because they have the right mix of hardware and software to create a well-polished and functional user experience. The Ubuntu team is doing a great job of moving Ubuntu in the right direction, and each new release makes progress.
What's important to note is that competition makes everyone stronger. Ubuntu is trying to play catch-up with OS X. Apple is using some great open-source technologies. Apple probably isn't worried about a handful of geeks, but if it inspires Apple to be more open and Ubuntu to be more polished we all win.
(As a side note I currently develop for Ubuntu by running it under Parallels on OS X - it it's really quite responsive. The reason why I'm investing so much in Apple hardware is because I can run Windows, Ubuntu, Solaris, or damn near any x86 OS on the same hardware with relative ease. Virtualization is a killer app for Apple right now, and Parallels was worth every cent.)
As a disclaimer, I'm a huge fan of Ruby on Rails, and not at all a fan of Java.
The problem with the GWT and other framworks like it as it ignores the reality that browsers today suck. IE's rendering engine is suckier than Monica Lewinsky holding a Dyson at the event horizon of a black hole. Firefox doesn't quite yet pass Acid2, but is as close to a reference platform as one can get. Safari shows promise, but it has a weak JavaScript environment that doesn't support things like ContentEditable. The whole problem is that the GWT assumes a much more stable platform than actually exists.
The real challenge for web application developers is that there are no frameworks (that I know of) that provide for things like fully semantic code, graceful degradation of capabilities, and full separation of content, behavior, and presentation. (For why that separation is important A List Apart has a great article on the subject.) Not even Ruby on Rails gets this right by default.
GWT tries too hard to abstract the actual code that user agents see from the code the programmers create - and that level of abstraction just doesn't work yet. Just like trying to translate a passage in French to English and Japanese with a machine translator, the GWT tries to take Java code and translate it into a mish-mash of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript - and the results are as mangled as one would expect.
Until someone comes along with a framework that creates clean, semantic code with full separation of behavior, presentation, and content, web application developers have to be mindful of their code and do a lot by hand. Frameworks can save time, but they also cause a trade-off in terms of code quality and compatibilty. The GWT goes too far in that balance IMHO, and isn't something I'd use to develop public applications. Like ASP.NET, it's too reliant on abstracting XHTML/CSS/JavaScript from what the programmers deal with, and that always leads to bloated masses of code that frustrate users and hog bandwidth.
However, reviewer Gill Bates wrote in Shill Monthly that Blu-Ray discs are made from a combination of radioactive waste and freshly-shredded mewling kittens. Also Blu-Ray discs can cause cancer in lab rats, and may cause birth defects... retroactively. Furthermore, the HD-DVD version of Serenity features an extended fight scene in which River is dressed like a ninja when she totally flips out and kills people. So there...
In all seriousness, this whole battle is rather pointless. HD content isn't yet a big enough draw to make consumers want to replace their whole movie library. As another poster mentioned, when you're transferring from film you end up encoding a lot of grain and noise that can really play havoc with the compression. Until films (other than Star Wars) are filmed entirely in digital HD, we'll never really see the most of the benefits of HD.
Slashdot Mirror
One would think that there would be some love for us with a preference for a more efficient keyboard layout...
What we're seeing is the end of Microsoft--not as a company, but as the monolithic OS vendor that they've been for years. It's much like IBM in the 1980s. IBM went from the monolithic vendor of PCs to a company that had to compete with the "IBM compatible" clones. The reasons are the same in both cases:
Corporate Culture: IBM, like Microsoft, had the "IBM way" of doing things. They had a corporate culture that stifled real innovation and was all about maintaining revenue streams above all. They weren't willing to take risks, they weren't willing to sell products at less cost, and they were all about promoting their own ecosystem. Just like Microsoft. There have been plenty of rumblings about the way in which Microsoft is becoming a less and less hospitable place to work, and the erosion of the corporate culture is one of the biggest signs of a failing company.
Erosion of Markets: Microsoft depends on a Microsoft ecosystem. Windows on the server, Vista on the desktop, Windows Mobile, SharePoint, etc. The second there becomes a viable alternative to anything, they lose revenue. If people don't upgrade to Vista, they lose revenue. If people stay with Office 2003 rather than Office 2007, they lose revenue. Don't even get them started on Linux servers, Macs, or iPhones. Microsoft's real biggest competitor, though, is Microsoft. The reason why they're moving to a subscription model is because they have to keep people on the upgrade cycle. If their old stuff works well enough that people don't need Vista, 2008, and the latest Windows Server, they lose their chief revenue stream. That's the wall they're running into today.
Stronger Competition: The iPhone is set to eat Windows Mobile's lunch. Macs are taking the educational market back. Linux is gaining more and more acceptance. Firefox has taken browser share from IE. Why pay $100 for a Windows license for a device like a $299 eeePC? As computing becomes a commodity, Windows loses relevance. The rise of the web has taken 15 years to start breaking the MS stranglehold, but it's doing what we said it would back then. You don't need Windows to use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, or Gmail. Every web app challenges Microsoft's OS dominance. If those web apps run on commodity UNIX servers, even more so. Microsoft is competing for the market space of 5 and 10 years ago, while Google and Apple are creating their own market spaces where Microsoft isn't dominant.
This doesn't mean that Microsoft will go away, but it does mean that their days of dominance are over. The OS market will fragment, and we're already seeing that happen now. It isn't nearly as quick as some had predicted, but it is happening. Microsoft won't go out of business any time soon--but they can forget about being the only player that really matters anymore. It's the business cycle in action, and this was bound to happen sooner or later.
There's a huge hole in your argument. You have a right under the First Amendment to free speech. The government
Your employer however, can damn well fire you for speaking out. CNN is a news outlet. Ostensibly they're supposed to be present unbiased and fair reports on events. If you have a producer who is indicating his own biases, that makes it a hell of a lot harder to say that those biases aren't coming out in the finished product.
This isn't some act of government repression, this is a private employer deciding to fire someone because he said things that could harm their reputation. There's a whole world of difference between the actions of a private employer and the actions of the state.
The DVD has the single most awesome DVD extra ever -- an entire half-hour episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad (with commercials). It's worth watching just to see the 30th century commercials...
I'm still waiting for the Season 1 DVD box set with all 365 episodes myself...
The short answer is no. It's been tried.
There was a case called California v. Ciraolo which dealt with exactly such an issue. The police used a helicopter to look down onto someone's property to search for marijuana plants. The defendant argued that it was a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Court said that so long as the police are in navigable airspace it's no different than them looking at the front of your house from the street.
I wouldn't advise shooting down any police aircraft either... the federal government would likely not be very happy with you, since regulation of airspace is a function of the federal government...
Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" was not at all happy about the rumors:
So either Abrams didn't get clearance, or the rumors aren't true. From what we know of Leonard Nimoy's involvement, I'd guess that it's the former rather than the latter. So either Abrams will have to pay Ellison off, or production will have to shut down since the WGA strike precludes any changes to the script.
This could really throw a monkey wrench into everything...
Not to bash you, but that's exactly the attitude we need to fight.
For the average user, Linux is not ready. You can't play a DVD without installing extra software. You can't play an MP3 without installing a codec. Adding new hardware can require you get get a new kernel. Yes, some of those problems are due to things like stupid licensing issues which aren't the fault of Linux. But there should be no excuse for patching a kernel to get a piece of hardware to work.
The only way to succeed is to rethink Linux -- not technically, but culturally. The "year of desktop Linux" has been every year for the past 10 years -- and Linux still doesn't have broad success. The reason is less about technology than it is about a culture of consistently trying to cover up the faults in Linux.
Let's be honest. Ubuntu is a great distro, IMHO the best out there. Compiz Fusion is a brilliant piece of software that lets Linux do the things that OS X and Vista do, and sometimes better. At the same time, it's still too hard to do the things that Mossberg writes about. You shouldn't need a kernel patch for Synaptics touchpads. A typical user should never have to know that the CLI exists, no less hunt down obscure packages.
The second someone says "RTFA" or "download Automatix" or "patch the kernel" they've stopped being an effective advocate for Linux. That's the culture we have to fight. We have to actually listen to users and accept that Linux has got a lot of great things going for it but it also has a lot of major flaws that keep it marginalized.
Linux will achieve market success the day that someone can use Linux without ever once thinking about the kernel, or compiling software, or reading HOWTOs. When Linux "just works" then Linux can effectively compete.
That day isn't going to come until we as a community stop making excuses and start realizing that we have a set of real-world problems -- problems that we can solve -- but only if we're willing to accept that there's a tradeoff between being a technology fan's OS and an OS that works for the general population. That means having a much greater willingness to find fault and being much more proactive about providing users with a quality experience.
The problem that Linux has is that it's written by wildly disparate groups of people with different ideas about how an OS should work from a user perspective. The strength of Linux is that it's written by wildly disparate groups of people with different ideas about how an OS should work from a technical perspective.
It's perfectly possible to make a UNIX OS be usable by the masses -- Apple's done that with OS X. The difference is that Apple "cheats" -- they only support a certain range of hardware, all of which is a known quantity to them. They're not dealing with the issues of a Frankencomputer made from whatever bits of hardware happen to show up.
The only way to get Linux as a mass-use OS is to user test the living hell out of it. That means a continual process of refactoring so that the user never has to view the command line unless they really want to. That means making sure that every application follows a consistent HIG. That means that the first person who says something along the lines of "RTFA" gets canned.
What matters isn't technical excellence, but a culture of usability. The Linux subculture is still based around the hacker ethics -- and that's why Linux remains an OS primarily for people who enjoy compiling programs and manipulating settings. That has to change. The culture needs to be one of taking a critical look at every stage in the process and presenting the user with a set of simple and consistent choices that let people use their computers rather than worrying about getting their machine in a usable state. Ubuntu's leaning in that direction, but they still have a long way to go.
The problem is that changing a culture is a hell of a lot harder than just writing software. A culture in which people are expected to navigate the Internet looking for answers will keep Linux marginalized. A culture that says "this problem is too complicated and needs to be simplified so that the average user gets it" is a culture that can take Linux to the mainstream. Not only that, but it encourages technical development as well -- a good number of the reasons for unnecessary complexity is because there are unnecessary complications in the way a piece of code works. At the end of the day, a solution that's simple for the user is often simple at the code level as well.
I've been using Linux for a decade now, and Ubuntu is a great distro -- but it still isn't enough. The only way that Linux will get mainstream acceptance is when Linux developers start consciously thinking about the overall user experience. It isn't the code that's the problem, it's the culture, and looking for technological solutions to cultural problems doesn't work -- just look at what Microsoft is trying to do with its current strategy.
Frankly, the biggest problem the Star Trek franchise has is its own fans.
There's a big difference between being respectful of a story and hamstringing yourself to meet some fanboy's idea of "canon." There are long and drawn-out discussions all the time in Trek fandom about how this one inconsequential element of some story doesn't mesh with years of backstory which is itself internally inconsistent. They can't seem to let go of these whiny nitpicks.
Look at the new Battlestar Galactica -- Ronald D. Moore took the old BSG "canon" and completely ignored it. He realized that from a storytelling standpoint it would be too limiting to bother sticking with the old story -- after the destruction of nearly every human being, going to a "casino planet" is a betrayal of what could be an incredible storyline. RDM took the essence of what BSG was -- humanity is on the run against an insidious and implacable enemy and reduced it to its essentials. The result is infinitely better than what came before.
I hope J.J. Abrams has the pure chutzpah to do just that with Star Trek. Reinvent the franchise. Give it new life. Change things around and craft a story that can attract a new generation of fans rather than appealing to the people who spend all their life studying the minutiae of the shows.
At its core, Star Trek is Horatio Hornblower in space -- a valiant young captain and his intrepid crew going out an exploring a new frontier. The new film should be true to that spirit, but if J.J. Abrams just sticks to what comes before, he's passing up on an artistic opportunity.
I've been a fan of Star Trek all my life, but the franchise grew stale and repetitive. This is the chance to give it new life, and in order to do that J.J. Abrams will have to royally piss off a lot of Star Trek fans who indignantly demand that the series match their vision of what Star Trek should be. If he does it right, a whole lot of Trekkers will be calling for his head, but the franchise will (dare I say it), live long and prosper after years of neglect.
The last thing this country needs is a bunch of boys crying "WOLF!" (or in this case "FASCIST!") so that by the time something really threatening to the Republic comes along, people have already been conditioned to not pay attention.
This headline is inflammatory and misleading.
What this does is basically set up the same situation that already has happened once.
In 1979, after the fall of the Pahlavi government in Iran, banks started putting attachments on Iranian property and assets in the United States. One of the creditors to the Iranians was a company called Dames & Moore, who were (ironically enough) working on an Iranian nuclear power plant.
As part of the settlement agreement that released the US hostages, the Carter Administration agreed to nullify all attachments and settle all disputes through a joint US-Iranian tribunal with the assets being held in escrow by the Bank of England. Dames & Moore sued the Carter Administration, arguing that the nullification of those attachments was a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
The Supreme Court, in Dames & Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654 (1981) disagreed in an 8-1 decision.
The IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) gives the President the right to seize property in cases of emergency like a war or the Iranian hostage crisis. There's no Fifth Amendment violation because there has already been due process -- Congress already passed the IEEPA and gave the President the power to do this. Then-Justice Rehnquist's citation to Youngstown is important here, because Youngstown is the case which states when a President should be broadly allowed to act and when he or she should be constrained. The most deference is given in cases where a President is acting in accordance with Congress, because two branches of government have already agreed.
President Bush is following the IEEPA, just applying it more specifically to Iraq. It has already been invoked for al-Qaeda in an Executive Order on September 17, 2001. Basically, if the Fifth Amendment was "overturned", it was overturned by the IEEPA, not by this Executive Order.
Furthermore, a US citizen or resident alien would still have the right to judicial remedy against any attachment under the Fifth. They might not win unless the courts determine that there is no rational basis for such a seizure, but they have the remedy nonetheless. (As did Dames & Moore back then.)
In short, the Fifth does not prevent the government from seizing property, it prevents the government from seizing property without due process. Due process was given when Congress and the President signed the IEEPA -- a bill that was made law long before President Bush came into office. Someone who has rights under the Constitution still have the right to judicially combat any seizure.
This is an hysterical argument being made by someone who has no understanding of law. This kind of shameless trolling doesn't belong on Slashdot -- if I wanted to read hysterical left-wing rants, I'd start reading Digg...
Ballmer is going to be throwing a lot of chairs today...
Safari for Windows is the biggest threat to IE ever. The reason is simple: it's going to be bundled with iTunes. If Apple really wanted to kick Microsoft in the balls, they'd make the iTunes installer put Safari as the default browser -- or give it as an option during the install (with the default being yes, natch). That means suddenly, everyone who buys an iPod ends up using Safari as their default browser instead of IE. If Safari transparently migrates over their bookmarks and settings, a lot of those people, if not the majority, would be likely to stuck with Safari.
It's the same "bundling" that got IE as the majority browser used against Microsoft for a change. All of a sudden, WebKit is the platform for web development on Macs, PCs, and the iPhone. That would would definitely cause a lot of heartburn in Redmond.
Apple has a chance to give Microsoft a major kick in the balls... the question is whether they'll go that route or not. They're doing exactly what Microsoft has always wanted to do -- dominate an entire ecosystem from desktops to laptops to mobile to the television. This is what Bill Gates has been trying to do for the past 20 years, and Apple has done it in just about 5. It's an incredibly smart move on Apple's part, and a major blow to Microsoft's hegemonic ambitions.
Not only is this plan feasible, but a terrorist had already detonated such a device on board an aircraft. In 1995 Philippines Airlines Flight 434 was the target of a bomb left by al-Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Youssef on an earlier leg of the flight. The bomb cut Japanese businessman Haruki Ikegami in half, and ripped through the passenger compartment into the cargo hold. The aircraft lost primary and backup hydraulic controls and had to be flown in via throttles -- a difficult and dangerous maneuver.
Not only that, but the bomb that Youssef left on board that flight was one tenth the power of the bombs he intended to detonate as part of Operation Bojinka. The argument that such a weapon is not feasible is itself more FUD. It is quite possible, and it has been done before. Al-Qaeda operatives are trained in explosives, and they knew exactly what was doing.
Yes, there's a good chance of killing yourself while mixing such a bomb, but I rather doubt that any of the plotters of this attack had any qualms about killing themselves in the process.
One would think that someone who knows what zcat and grep are wouldn't be searching for anything through AOL search to begin with.
SPACE.com has an explanation for why those numbers aren't what one would think:
Basically, a light-year is a lot longer than it was back in the time when the universe was young. You can travel faster than the speed of light if space-time is distorted. You just can't travel faster than light in "normal" space.
(And no, I'm not a physicist, nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. YMMV (literally, in this case!))
Windows + OSS is a good combination. The more people use OSS applications, the less tied they are to Microsoft and proprietary data formats. Advocates of OSS need to realize that many people will never switch their operating system to Linux or even OS X, and so trying to push Linux will meet much more resistance than saying "here, just install this application that's free and doesn't require you to change everything about how you use your computer."
The big challenge is making OSS apps better than their commercial counterparts. Some get this right - Audacity is a great app for sound editing that combines a relatively friendly UI with solid features. 7Zip is just as easy as WinZIP and less intrusive. But not all of them do - OpenOffice is great, but it's much slower than MS Office. Many OSS projects are much slower than normal Windows programs, and use toolkits like GTK which are nice for cross-platform development but look like canned ass on Windows. (And that's coming from someone who uses GTK all the time.)
Firefox got the balance of features and UI right - and that's why millions of people have Firefox as their first foray into the world of open source. The more people who see open source as a viable alternative, the more tractions it will get, and the more viable it will be for people to switch to Linux as their OS.
However, that's going to require OSS to start thinking about polish - making applications that Grandma can use. It's not impossible, but a lot of OSS projects need to concentrate on making applications that work well and look decent on Windows - even if we don't particularly care for the platform or the company that makes it.
Prey is one of the better FPS games to come out recently. Unfortunately that's like saying someone is the best ukelele player in Fargo.
We've seen just about every possible variation there is to the FPS theme, and the portal bit helps make Prey different, but what we don't really have is a game that really draws people in. The original Half Life did that. HL2 also did well in that regard. The problem is with the real lack of innovation in the genre - at the core the difference between Prey and every other alien shoot-em-up is a few tweaks in gameplay mechanics.
The FPS genre is starting to get played out, and while Prey is a noble effort, it just isn't enough. The AI just isn't challenging enough, and the portals and other gameplay additions keep the game from being a failure, but they're not enough to make it memorable.
I wish I had some magic solution for what would renovate the FPS genre, but I really don't. Better AI would certainly help, and more interesting art direction would also differentiate games from each other (why does every game that uses the Doom 3 engine look the same?). FPS titles seem to be losing their "spark" and maybe some creative title will create a new wave of innovation in the genre, and while Prey makes an admirable attempt to bring some new life into the genre, what makes it innovative tends to get overwhelmed by what makes it look and play like every other title in the genre.
Why would AMD do that?
No company would kill off a profitable product line just to spite their opposition. Undoubtedly ATI's deal with Apple is profitable, and just because Apple uses Intel processors doesn't mean that such a transaction is any less profitable than it was before.
Companies don't act in that way, they look out for their bottom line. Unless there's something that would cause that business to become less profitable, ATI is unlikely to give up the block of sales they get from Apple. Is it better to cede that entire block of sales to the competition just because they don't use AMD processors? You don't win in business by reducing your sales, and having ATI graphics cards in Apples gives AMD/ATI a foothold in a very profitable market. It makes no business sense to give that up.
Unfortunately, neither is a Universal Binary...
I don't know about any of those titles, but StarCraft runs reasonably well, except for occasional problems with the sound cutting out.
In general, anything that doesn't require any hardware accelerated graphics should run fine, so games that have a software rendering option should be playable under Parallels. However, YMMV.
I've come to the conclusion that the biggest reason for why the Mac is a more secure platform isn't because of technology, but because the Mac userbase tends to be a lot more savvy than the Windows userbase.
I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of Windows malware comes not from the inherent insecurity of the Windows platform but from users doing dumb things. Someone who installs some stupid little weather applet and gets infected with spyware got infected not because of a flaw in the system, but because they didn't bother to determine whether or not the source of their software was credible or not. Even if they got a prompt like Vista and OS X present they'll still authorize the program. There's no patch that can be applied to a system to prevent stupid users from mucking it up.
John Gruber wrote a really astute article on why Macs don't have the level of malware that one would think they would. If Apple has roughlt 5% marketshare, why isn't 5% of the total malware population targeting Macs? I think he's right when he notes:
Macs are more secure because Mac users have a much tougher stance towards crapware. Mac users tend to be much more technically proficient than the average. If that "zero-tolerance" policy changes, I'm not so sure we'll see an increase in the amount of malware targeting Macs.
OS X does a great job of providing technical barriers against malware, but nothing can prevent malware that uses social engineering to do its work. Mac users are safer because they choose to be - but if you get a group of users who have no awareness of security and will blindly execute anything they come across, even if the system specifically tells them not to, that could change very quickly.
I use both a Mac and Ubuntu. I have an iBook G4 (soon to be a MacBook) and an iMac Core Duo. My home server is an Athlon system running Ubuntu, and it also serves as a development workstation. I've a decently useful application under Linux, and I work with Linux daily. I've got feet in both worlds.
Ubuntu is hands down the best Linux distro I've ever used. It's definitely moving in the right direction. It has a great packaging system, it's got much more polish than other distros, and it can even be loaded with some decent eye candy. Of all the Linux distros I've used, it's the best by quite a distance.
That being said, Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. It's closer than before, but there are a lot of things necessary to make it work. Apple has a reputation for having things Just Work. Linux has a reptutation for having things work once you've futzed around with the config files, recompiled your kernel, read a few HOWTOs and smashed your head against the wall. Is it getting better? Absolutely. Is it there yet, no?
APT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's great for updating your system, but installing third-party software doesn't always go so smoothly. OS X's app bundles are much easier for the average Joe or Jane to understand. Again, NeXTSTEP had this years ago, but Linux doesn't have this.
XGL is nice. It's still not as nice as Apple's GUI. A lot of what differentiates Apple from the rest is the sense of polish. Technologies like XGL and Cairo rendering provide the right infrastructure - but there isn't a distro that puts them all together in an attractive and polished way.
Open file formats? There's nothing preventing you from backing up your music to plain old MP3, and your photos are still JPEGS. There's also nothing preventing someone from using non-Apple software. The only DRM you have to use with Apple is the DRM that protects the OS, and that's nowhere near as harmful as Microsoft's WGA malware.
Apple is skyrocketing now because they have the right mix of hardware and software to create a well-polished and functional user experience. The Ubuntu team is doing a great job of moving Ubuntu in the right direction, and each new release makes progress.
What's important to note is that competition makes everyone stronger. Ubuntu is trying to play catch-up with OS X. Apple is using some great open-source technologies. Apple probably isn't worried about a handful of geeks, but if it inspires Apple to be more open and Ubuntu to be more polished we all win.
(As a side note I currently develop for Ubuntu by running it under Parallels on OS X - it it's really quite responsive. The reason why I'm investing so much in Apple hardware is because I can run Windows, Ubuntu, Solaris, or damn near any x86 OS on the same hardware with relative ease. Virtualization is a killer app for Apple right now, and Parallels was worth every cent.)
As a disclaimer, I'm a huge fan of Ruby on Rails, and not at all a fan of Java.
The problem with the GWT and other framworks like it as it ignores the reality that browsers today suck. IE's rendering engine is suckier than Monica Lewinsky holding a Dyson at the event horizon of a black hole. Firefox doesn't quite yet pass Acid2, but is as close to a reference platform as one can get. Safari shows promise, but it has a weak JavaScript environment that doesn't support things like ContentEditable. The whole problem is that the GWT assumes a much more stable platform than actually exists.
The real challenge for web application developers is that there are no frameworks (that I know of) that provide for things like fully semantic code, graceful degradation of capabilities, and full separation of content, behavior, and presentation. (For why that separation is important A List Apart has a great article on the subject.) Not even Ruby on Rails gets this right by default.
GWT tries too hard to abstract the actual code that user agents see from the code the programmers create - and that level of abstraction just doesn't work yet. Just like trying to translate a passage in French to English and Japanese with a machine translator, the GWT tries to take Java code and translate it into a mish-mash of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript - and the results are as mangled as one would expect.
Until someone comes along with a framework that creates clean, semantic code with full separation of behavior, presentation, and content, web application developers have to be mindful of their code and do a lot by hand. Frameworks can save time, but they also cause a trade-off in terms of code quality and compatibilty. The GWT goes too far in that balance IMHO, and isn't something I'd use to develop public applications. Like ASP.NET, it's too reliant on abstracting XHTML/CSS/JavaScript from what the programmers deal with, and that always leads to bloated masses of code that frustrate users and hog bandwidth.
However, reviewer Gill Bates wrote in Shill Monthly that Blu-Ray discs are made from a combination of radioactive waste and freshly-shredded mewling kittens. Also Blu-Ray discs can cause cancer in lab rats, and may cause birth defects... retroactively. Furthermore, the HD-DVD version of Serenity features an extended fight scene in which River is dressed like a ninja when she totally flips out and kills people. So there...
In all seriousness, this whole battle is rather pointless. HD content isn't yet a big enough draw to make consumers want to replace their whole movie library. As another poster mentioned, when you're transferring from film you end up encoding a lot of grain and noise that can really play havoc with the compression. Until films (other than Star Wars) are filmed entirely in digital HD, we'll never really see the most of the benefits of HD.