The lawyer will tell you: "I recommend you take this down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
If you ask the lawyer "well, do I have any fair-use grounds for keeping it up?" the lawyer will still give you the same answer "I recommend you take it down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
If you ask the lawyer "if it goes to court what are my chances of winning?" the lawyer will still give you the same answer "We won't know until it goes to court; I recommend you take it down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
The lawyer's job is NOT to evaluate your best course of action that balances your wishes to keep the material with your wishes not to be sued. The lawyer will only do two things: (1) advise you to minimize your risks; (2) represent you if you keep the material up.
After consulting the lawyer on this question, you'll be none the wiser but you'll be poorer.
Attack were? My command was "Attack my target", i.e. attack the thing under currently under the crosshairs. Abbreviate to just "Attack" since if you don't specify a target then it defaults to your crosshairs.
Go where? You'd could scroll your crosshairs to their destination and say "Go". Or say "Go south / north / to base / out of range"
Follow which path? -- that's something that mouse/keyboard isn't much fun at. The ctrl+clicking to spell out a path is tedious.
Distinguish between left/right? "Tanks on left, attack. Tanks on right, run away." But really, with a mouse and keyboard, how would you select all the tanks on the left of the screen while not selecting the other unit-kinds?
Voice has a lot more modes of composition. Here are some different things you could naturally and easily select: "All healthy tanks", "All damaged tanks", "All damaged units", "All damaged units on left of screen", "All airborne units", "All artillery", "All units", "All units in range of generator", "All fast units", "All idle units on left of screen", "All damaged idle airborne units on left of screen."
Mouse and keyboard just have a very limited number of modes of composition: click, ctrl+click, shift+click, keyboard shortcut to select group, drag-rectangle, shift+drag, ctrl+drag. There aren't many, and they don't compose as flexibly.
As to why it's not more common? I'm sure that PS2/xbox didn't have the power to do it. PS3/xbox360 might just be powerful enough. But I think it's been slow to take off because RTS is a genre of imitation rather than innovation.
"No way to control these games with a controller with the same precision and speed that a mouse would afford" ?
Sure there is!
Mouse and keyboard are horribly limiting interfaces for RTSs. All that stuff about dragging a selection rectangle, assigning keyboard shortcuts to groups, selecting units onscreen,... It's a mess.
Imagine a voice-controller interfaces. "All tanks, attack target". "Grenadiers on screen, retreat." "Large factory, build tanks then missiles."
These games can make do with a tiny vocabulary -- and the technology for voice recognition with a tiny vocabulary is already there.
I've been using Server2008 x64 on my t61p laptop since it first came out.
It's great! It feels zippier than Vista. It has a smaller install footprint. (actually even wireless isn't installed by default: you have to add it manually). It's been completely rock-solid.
I even use Hyper-V when giving demos at conferences. (unfortunately Hyper-V doesn't cooperate with wireless and disables sleep/hibernate, so I can't use it routinely.)
Agreed. Here at Microsoft it's not uncommon to see a single solution containing sub-projects in two or more of F#, IronPython, C# and Visual Basic.
What's nice is that the object model is shared by all of them: objects, fields, methods, interfaces, inheritance in any language is directly accessible from all the others.
I use each language for its particular strengths -- F# for the rapid prototyping, parsing, maths. Python just for awesomeness. VB or C# for serious big systems. And as you say VB especially for XML literals.
I've also switched my personal web-services from Debian/Apache/PHP or Python over to OpenSuse/Apache/Mono/VB. Call me old-fashioned, but I just found them easier to get right with strong typing.
You would be able to if Gecko or Webkit or someone decided to expose the appropriate interface (i.e. make Gecko implement IWebBrowser2). I assume that's what the Wine folk have done. I'm not aware of anyone having released the same for Windows.
Visual Studio has a great javascript IDE. It provides statement completion, syntax checking, and intellisense. It's debugging experience is great too (step over, step into, hover over variables to evaluate them at tooltip, type evaluation expressions interactively while the code is paused,...)
function f() {
var x = new MyObject1();
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for MyObject1
x = "hello";
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for strings }
The intellisense does flow analysis so that even if a variable changes type mid-way through some lines of code, then it still shows the right thing.
The intellisense figures out the types of libraries you throw at it.
Obviously it's impossible to make perfect intellisense. That'd be turing-complete. But in practice, with the code I tend to write and the libraries I tend to use, it does the right thing often enough.
All these features were in Visual Studio 2008, though not before.
A good part of the browser is *NOT* used for displaying other stuff besides web pages.
IEXPLORE.EXE is the browser. That's used by almost nothing. Almost all applications that use the browser use it by doing ShellExecute("mydoc.html"), which opens the html document in whichever browser the user has selected as default.
MSHTML.DLL is Microsoft's html/javascript rendering engine. All applications that use it, including iexplore.exe and Help, create it by doing CoCreateInstance(CLSID_WebBrowser). It has a very carefully and comprehensively documented API called IWebBrowser, which the other applications use.
If firefox/webkit/opera wished, they could wrap their rendering engines into an object that implements the same IWebBrowser API, and they could register their rendering engine under CLSID_WebBrowser, so that now iexplore.exe and help and everything else would use Firefox/Webkit/Opera. But there'd be little point.
A very small number of applications use the browser itself, i.e. they cause Internet Explorer in particular to pop open, and they manipulate buttons &c. in it. In my experience these are very rare, and are either shoddy or relate specifically to IE-only functionality.
So no, the browser is used by almost nothing else on a Windows machine. Only MSHTML.DLL is normally used.
Bruce missed the one option I think is the most important: public domain. It's not a license and so captures the "giftiness" of the gift licenses better than any of them.
In the past year, I've had my bank write to me on TWO separate occasions to say that some private company accidentally leaked my bank details and, as a safeguard, they were changing my credit card number and subscribing me to a credit-watch service.
I have more trust in the US government than in the US private sector.
Sorry, the post was rude of me. The zooming and dragging looks cool as heck. I just think that your presentation was poor: after watching it I had a good idea of what you hadn't done, but no idea at all about what you had done nor what it was good for (nor even what it was for). Also your repeated "nervous tic" of zooming in on the fish was distracting and didn't add anything.
Conclusion: the name "liqbase" is now in my head, so that next time it's mentioned I'll look into it, but I didn't learn anything here.
That was a very confusing video. What I learned from it: you haven't done some stuff, Zoom Fish!, widgets, Zoom Fish!, behind schedule, zoom, Fish!, widget framework, Fish!
I guess it's a system that lets you zoom in on fish?
Every ethical argument has some unjustifiable assumptions at its base.
"We should maximize the sum of human happiness over time." But why?
"Do unto others as you'd have them do to you." But why?
"Let everyone do their own thing so long as it doesn't impinge on your own happiness." But why?
"Respect the sanctity of human life, from conception through to death." But why?
"Don't punish the innocent." But why?
"All men are created equal." Really? Why do you think that? ('self-evidence' isn't a very solid ground in an argument.)
Utilitarianism and humanism are just as arbitrary as disliking human cloning. Worse, actually, since they so often fool their adherents into thinking that the basis of their morality is rationality.
Alternate browsers are already easy to mix and match.
Any installed software can replace the default action when you click on.html files. Any installed software can replace the default action when you open an attachment of a given mime type. Any installed software can register itself as CLSID_WebBrowser2 so that *EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION* in the entire system who uses an embedded web-rendering control will instead use that alternate installed software.
(Has mozilla bothered to provide a web control which implements IWebBrowser? No. Has Opera? No.) But the APIs and hooks here are entirely open.
The genome means a heck of a lot to human emotions.
Think of the many stories of twins who were separated at birth, raised in ignorance of each other, then are re-united and discover a deeper bond with each other than with anyone else. It doesn't always happen, but it happens often enough to show that there's something going on.
The perception of the genome means a lot to animal emotions.
Think of the finch studies (they're what I've read about in Dawkins' "Extended Phenotype") where a parent bird cares for its offspring in direct proportion to what percentage of the genome the parent thinks this offspring shares.
Think of pretty much the entirety of human history and its obsession with bloodlines, and male sons, and fidelity. Genome needn't matter, but it's a historical fact that it does.
It's true what you wrote that "We *can* love people not in our family". But at the same time the genome has an enormous effect on emotions.
Office2007 has MORE ELEGANT maths than TeX. That's because it does kerning based on quadrants (e.g. \Gamma_2 sees that there's a lot of whitespace in the lower-right quadrant of \Gamma and so shifts the 2 closer). TeX only does it based on left/right space, and you have to do manual tweaking to get it looking right e.g. as in the LaTeX logo.
Office2007 is unicode throughout, and maths uses the same unicode as the rest of your document, so you don't have to juggle maths fonts awkwardly.
The Office2007 maths syntax is pretty much identical to TeX's (e.g. in the \Gamma_2 example). It renders that syntax into a graphic, like the "preview-latex" emacs plugin whose name I've forgotten.
Where it's weak is in its macro support. It doesn't support \macros with arguments. This means it's fine for conventional maths with conventional notation, but weak for computer science where everyone invents their own notation.
An "add/remove programs" that actually adds programs?
So your proposed solution to the anti-trust action is for Microsoft to become a central channel for distributing and installing third-party software, rather than leaving that to the third parties?
The only example you gave of "DRM getting in the way" was with audio.
(1) It's true that DirectSound no longer offers hardware hardware audio acceleration. That's because the audio drivers run in kernel mode, badly written drivers were one of the major causes of blue-screens, and Vista in any case had a (frankly) awesome new audio stack. (e.g. support for microphone arrays, and automatic balancing for any speaker response curves, e.g. per-application volume setting, e.g. lower latency). If you the programmer don't specifically chose a DRM-protected audio path, then the system won't give you one, simple as that. DRM doesn't get in the way. You have to specifically opt into it if you want it.
(2) DRM doesn't get in the way of programmers at all. If you want to use a different audio stack with direct hardware access, e.g. OpenAL, you're welcome to it.
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A lawyer won't be any use.
The lawyer will tell you: "I recommend you take this down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
If you ask the lawyer "well, do I have any fair-use grounds for keeping it up?" the lawyer will still give you the same answer "I recommend you take it down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
If you ask the lawyer "if it goes to court what are my chances of winning?" the lawyer will still give you the same answer "We won't know until it goes to court; I recommend you take it down to avoid any chance of prosecution."
The lawyer's job is NOT to evaluate your best course of action that balances your wishes to keep the material with your wishes not to be sued. The lawyer will only do two things: (1) advise you to minimize your risks; (2) represent you if you keep the material up.
After consulting the lawyer on this question, you'll be none the wiser but you'll be poorer.
And also...
Correlation is *correlated* with causation!
Attack were? My command was "Attack my target", i.e. attack the thing under currently under the crosshairs. Abbreviate to just "Attack" since if you don't specify a target then it defaults to your crosshairs.
Go where? You'd could scroll your crosshairs to their destination and say "Go". Or say "Go south / north / to base / out of range"
Follow which path? -- that's something that mouse/keyboard isn't much fun at. The ctrl+clicking to spell out a path is tedious.
Distinguish between left/right? "Tanks on left, attack. Tanks on right, run away." But really, with a mouse and keyboard, how would you select all the tanks on the left of the screen while not selecting the other unit-kinds?
Voice has a lot more modes of composition. Here are some different things you could naturally and easily select: "All healthy tanks", "All damaged tanks", "All damaged units", "All damaged units on left of screen", "All airborne units", "All artillery", "All units", "All units in range of generator", "All fast units", "All idle units on left of screen", "All damaged idle airborne units on left of screen."
Mouse and keyboard just have a very limited number of modes of composition: click, ctrl+click, shift+click, keyboard shortcut to select group, drag-rectangle, shift+drag, ctrl+drag. There aren't many, and they don't compose as flexibly.
As to why it's not more common? I'm sure that PS2/xbox didn't have the power to do it. PS3/xbox360 might just be powerful enough. But I think it's been slow to take off because RTS is a genre of imitation rather than innovation.
"No way to control these games with a controller with the same precision and speed that a mouse would afford" ?
Sure there is!
Mouse and keyboard are horribly limiting interfaces for RTSs. All that stuff about dragging a selection rectangle, assigning keyboard shortcuts to groups, selecting units onscreen, ... It's a mess.
Imagine a voice-controller interfaces. "All tanks, attack target". "Grenadiers on screen, retreat." "Large factory, build tanks then missiles."
These games can make do with a tiny vocabulary -- and the technology for voice recognition with a tiny vocabulary is already there.
I've been using Server2008 x64 on my t61p laptop since it first came out.
It's great! It feels zippier than Vista. It has a smaller install footprint. (actually even wireless isn't installed by default: you have to add it manually). It's been completely rock-solid.
I even use Hyper-V when giving demos at conferences. (unfortunately Hyper-V doesn't cooperate with wireless and disables sleep/hibernate, so I can't use it routinely.)
Agreed. Here at Microsoft it's not uncommon to see a single solution containing sub-projects in two or more of F#, IronPython, C# and Visual Basic.
What's nice is that the object model is shared by all of them: objects, fields, methods, interfaces, inheritance in any language is directly accessible from all the others.
I use each language for its particular strengths -- F# for the rapid prototyping, parsing, maths. Python just for awesomeness. VB or C# for serious big systems. And as you say VB especially for XML literals.
I've also switched my personal web-services from Debian/Apache/PHP or Python over to OpenSuse/Apache/Mono/VB. Call me old-fashioned, but I just found them easier to get right with strong typing.
You would be able to if Gecko or Webkit or someone decided to expose the appropriate interface (i.e. make Gecko implement IWebBrowser2). I assume that's what the Wine folk have done. I'm not aware of anyone having released the same for Windows.
Visual Studio has a great javascript IDE. It provides statement completion, syntax checking, and intellisense. It's debugging experience is great too (step over, step into, hover over variables to evaluate them at tooltip, type evaluation expressions interactively while the code is paused, ...)
function f()
{
var x = new MyObject1();
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for MyObject1
x = "hello";
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for strings
}
The intellisense does flow analysis so that even if a variable changes type mid-way through some lines of code, then it still shows the right thing.
The intellisense figures out the types of libraries you throw at it.
Obviously it's impossible to make perfect intellisense. That'd be turing-complete. But in practice, with the code I tend to write and the libraries I tend to use, it does the right thing often enough.
All these features were in Visual Studio 2008, though not before.
A good part of the browser is *NOT* used for displaying other stuff besides web pages.
IEXPLORE.EXE is the browser. That's used by almost nothing. Almost all applications that use the browser use it by doing ShellExecute("mydoc.html"), which opens the html document in whichever browser the user has selected as default.
MSHTML.DLL is Microsoft's html/javascript rendering engine. All applications that use it, including iexplore.exe and Help, create it by doing CoCreateInstance(CLSID_WebBrowser). It has a very carefully and comprehensively documented API called IWebBrowser, which the other applications use.
If firefox/webkit/opera wished, they could wrap their rendering engines into an object that implements the same IWebBrowser API, and they could register their rendering engine under CLSID_WebBrowser, so that now iexplore.exe and help and everything else would use Firefox/Webkit/Opera. But there'd be little point.
A very small number of applications use the browser itself, i.e. they cause Internet Explorer in particular to pop open, and they manipulate buttons &c. in it. In my experience these are very rare, and are either shoddy or relate specifically to IE-only functionality.
So no, the browser is used by almost nothing else on a Windows machine. Only MSHTML.DLL is normally used.
Bruce missed the one option I think is the most important: public domain. It's not a license and so captures the "giftiness" of the gift licenses better than any of them.
In the past year, I've had my bank write to me on TWO separate occasions to say that some private company accidentally leaked my bank details and, as a safeguard, they were changing my credit card number and subscribing me to a credit-watch service.
I have more trust in the US government than in the US private sector.
Sorry, the post was rude of me. The zooming and dragging looks cool as heck. I just think that your presentation was poor: after watching it I had a good idea of what you hadn't done, but no idea at all about what you had done nor what it was good for (nor even what it was for). Also your repeated "nervous tic" of zooming in on the fish was distracting and didn't add anything.
Conclusion: the name "liqbase" is now in my head, so that next time it's mentioned I'll look into it, but I didn't learn anything here.
That was a very confusing video. What I learned from it: you haven't done some stuff, Zoom Fish!, widgets, Zoom Fish!, behind schedule, zoom, Fish!, widget framework, Fish!
I guess it's a system that lets you zoom in on fish?
We call ourselves a "capitalist" society where the individual has the power and the choice.
A "democracy" is one in which each individual has equal power and choice. Contrast to "capitalism" where each dollar has equal power.
The great big unjustified bit there is: "why on earth should we care about the survival of our alleles?"
i.e. there's no connection, not even a hint of a connection, from "it is thus" to "we ought to be thus".
Let's focus on things that we know exist when talking about ethics. Otherwise we can't really have a meaningful discussion.
Ethics doesn't exist. End of discussion.
Every ethical argument has some unjustifiable assumptions at its base.
"We should maximize the sum of human happiness over time." But why?
"Do unto others as you'd have them do to you." But why?
"Let everyone do their own thing so long as it doesn't impinge on your own happiness." But why?
"Respect the sanctity of human life, from conception through to death." But why?
"Don't punish the innocent." But why?
"All men are created equal." Really? Why do you think that? ('self-evidence' isn't a very solid ground in an argument.)
Utilitarianism and humanism are just as arbitrary as disliking human cloning. Worse, actually, since they so often fool their adherents into thinking that the basis of their morality is rationality.
Alternate browsers are already easy to mix and match.
Any installed software can replace the default action when you click on .html files. Any installed software can replace the default action when you open an attachment of a given mime type. Any installed software can register itself as CLSID_WebBrowser2 so that *EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION* in the entire system who uses an embedded web-rendering control will instead use that alternate installed software.
(Has mozilla bothered to provide a web control which implements IWebBrowser? No. Has Opera? No.) But the APIs and hooks here are entirely open.
The genome means a heck of a lot to human emotions.
Think of the many stories of twins who were separated at birth, raised in ignorance of each other, then are re-united and discover a deeper bond with each other than with anyone else. It doesn't always happen, but it happens often enough to show that there's something going on.
The perception of the genome means a lot to animal emotions.
Think of the finch studies (they're what I've read about in Dawkins' "Extended Phenotype") where a parent bird cares for its offspring in direct proportion to what percentage of the genome the parent thinks this offspring shares.
Think of pretty much the entirety of human history and its obsession with bloodlines, and male sons, and fidelity. Genome needn't matter, but it's a historical fact that it does.
It's true what you wrote that "We *can* love people not in our family". But at the same time the genome has an enormous effect on emotions.
Is there any consensus or are there usability-studies that support your claim that the ribbon is great?
(I have no opinion on it. I'm just curious. I haven't seen either yet.)
And the answer in Mark's case, unfortunately, was "buggy flash player from Adobe and buggy DVD-mastering software from Roxio".
This seems like a problem that can't be solved for any operating system.
Office2007 has MORE ELEGANT maths than TeX. That's because it does kerning based on quadrants (e.g. \Gamma_2 sees that there's a lot of whitespace in the lower-right quadrant of \Gamma and so shifts the 2 closer). TeX only does it based on left/right space, and you have to do manual tweaking to get it looking right e.g. as in the LaTeX logo.
Office2007 is unicode throughout, and maths uses the same unicode as the rest of your document, so you don't have to juggle maths fonts awkwardly.
The Office2007 maths syntax is pretty much identical to TeX's (e.g. in the \Gamma_2 example). It renders that syntax into a graphic, like the "preview-latex" emacs plugin whose name I've forgotten.
Where it's weak is in its macro support. It doesn't support \macros with arguments. This means it's fine for conventional maths with conventional notation, but weak for computer science where everyone invents their own notation.
An "add/remove programs" that actually adds programs?
So your proposed solution to the anti-trust action is for Microsoft to become a central channel for distributing and installing third-party software, rather than leaving that to the third parties?
Seems like that would be even more anti-trust.
Another way to install a new font in Vista:
(1) Start menu, type in the word "font", hit Enter
(2) right-click, "Install New Font"
I guess this requires you to know about right-click, which many people don't think of.
The only example you gave of "DRM getting in the way" was with audio.
(1) It's true that DirectSound no longer offers hardware hardware audio acceleration. That's because the audio drivers run in kernel mode, badly written drivers were one of the major causes of blue-screens, and Vista in any case had a (frankly) awesome new audio stack. (e.g. support for microphone arrays, and automatic balancing for any speaker response curves, e.g. per-application volume setting, e.g. lower latency). If you the programmer don't specifically chose a DRM-protected audio path, then the system won't give you one, simple as that. DRM doesn't get in the way. You have to specifically opt into it if you want it.
(2) DRM doesn't get in the way of programmers at all. If you want to use a different audio stack with direct hardware access, e.g. OpenAL, you're welcome to it.