Without any kind of (force) feedback, I think the normal keyboard paradigm sucks, even if it allows using multiple fingers at once.
Maybe they should make a kind of transparent rubber mat that one can overlay onto a screen, where the rubber mat contains small tangible edges, so that you can feel where each key is.
This is exactly why Google NaCl (Native Client) is such a good idea. We could have one single binary format. Every webdeveloper could choose his own rendering engine, and send it along with his/her HTML. With proper caching (and sharing) of course. In fact, you could view a rendering engine as a "shared library" that you reference from your HTML code. The program that lets this work all together (e.g. NaCl) is then the commodity item you are talking about.
The whole TLD domain thing is seriously wrong and outdated, I think. I mean take the country codes... they have in many cases nothing to do with the actual country in which the servers are located. For example, "yousend.it" is an italian website?
TLD's are just a form of artificial scarcity. And this is a bad thing.
Why not let us just choose the names we want to choose.
You mean implement a new language beside javascript? Do you have any idea how many people/research groups are working on new languages every day? Many problem-domains requires different types of language.
Let's just give them all a chance to do something useful on the web.
And besides, it is not mandatory to use NaCl in your browser. You could just develop for javascript if you prefer.
Virtual machines have come a long way and do not give a big performance penalty. Internally, a virtual machine can recompile machine instructions (just like a compiler "recompiles" its intermediate language into final code).
The power of this lies in the fact that you can now use *any* language you like. This is really necessary, as web applications are becoming bigger and bigger, and need a more sophisticated language than javascript (for example, javascript lacks even basic type checking).
On the other hand, I think Tcl is a step backwards w.r.t. javascript. At least javascript has closures, which are tremendously useful for interactive programs.
You can run x86 code on any machine in a virtual machine... in that respect this effort may still be considered architecture-independent. Also, you can re-compile x86 code to any other architecture, of course (but that is what an efficient virtual machine would actually do, I suppose).
But it would be so much cooler if also the rendering engine could be implemented natively, with perhaps only the graphics part handled through some standard API like OpenGL. Web developers could then just link-in their favorite rendering engine, e.g., webkit or gecko, without being dependent on broken web standards.
They have one thing in common. They are both keeping PhD's from doing more valuable research (medicine, fundamental physics, etc.), just to sell some ads and marginally improve joe sixpack's user experience. How are they doing it? Well, I think these companies are playing psychological tricks (through the media) to make their employees work for them, for example by making them feel like rockstar programmers, while they could be true heroes in different fields.
Having "the perfect user experience" is absolutely something which is useful, but please don't take our best people to work on that.
I think their programming models are getting more and more outdated, considering DHTML is becoming a better environment for application deployment every day.
Dumping is not considered unlawful everywhere, but it certainly is anti-competitive. Ok, so maybe gmail may pay for itself by now (this definitely has not been the case when they started), youtube certainly is operating at a loss.
If you're still not convinced, let's assume that you are the owner of a game development studio. Suddenly, microsoft comes along, and with the money they earned on OSes and office software, they can afford to give away games on a large scale. And suddenly you are out of business. Under normal circumstances, when a corporation pushes another corporation out of business, this can be viewed as ''evolutionary forces at work''. But here this is definitely not the case, because these divisions of microsoft are clearly unrelated. It is an anomaly in the system, and this is exactly what governments should protect against.
Of course what Google is doing right now is evil in an anti-competitive sense: it is "selling" some of their products at a price point that is below the net price. For example, their free gmail service is subsidized by their search products, and these products are largely unrelated. I'm not sure about the US, but in many countries, such "dumping" of products would be considered illegal.
The dumping of products has another negative side-effect, and this is that people are giving up their rights. For example, they are giving up privacy, and they have nobody to complain to if something does not properly work, or, for example, if they lose all their data.
Google might have the slogan "do no evil", but considering the above facts, Microsoft is really not all too bad. I certainly have to agree with the parent that their business model is more honest, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Without any kind of (force) feedback, I think the normal keyboard paradigm sucks, even if it allows using multiple fingers at once.
Maybe they should make a kind of transparent rubber mat that one can overlay onto a screen, where the rubber mat contains small tangible edges, so that you can feel where each key is.
Keyboards should also be sensitive to the application being used.
For example, if I'm using "vi", i'd like to have a big Escape key, and it should recognize the commands specific for this editor.
Maybe virtual keyboards should be assimilated by editors.
I guess the global namespace is getting full, and no more good names are left.
You can also put it this way:
Watching TV series is like living other people's lives.
At least with social media we are living our own lives again...
Perhaps they designed it that way, but a programmer left a few debugging lines in the code...
Bill Clinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"
Steve Jobs: Sorry, but your phone proves otherwise.
This is just a minor obstacle.
Think "virtual machines" or "binary code recompilation" or "intermediate languages" or "LLVM".
This is exactly why Google NaCl (Native Client) is such a good idea. We could have one single binary format. Every webdeveloper could choose his own rendering engine, and send it along with his/her HTML. With proper caching (and sharing) of course. In fact, you could view a rendering engine as a "shared library" that you reference from your HTML code. The program that lets this work all together (e.g. NaCl) is then the commodity item you are talking about.
What country does .xxx stand for?
And how can I get there?
The whole TLD domain thing is seriously wrong and outdated, I think. I mean take the country codes... they have in many cases nothing to do with the actual country in which the servers are located. For example, "yousend.it" is an italian website?
TLD's are just a form of artificial scarcity. And this is a bad thing.
Why not let us just choose the names we want to choose.
They could start by disabling the HTTP Referrer header.
I think most people are completely unaware that they are being tracked by it.
I'll be really impressed when they embed a pure functional language like Haskell, and make it interoperate with the DOM.
You mean implement a new language beside javascript? Do you have any idea how many people/research groups are working on new languages every day? Many problem-domains requires different types of language.
Let's just give them all a chance to do something useful on the web.
And besides, it is not mandatory to use NaCl in your browser. You could just develop for javascript if you prefer.
Virtual machines have come a long way and do not give a big performance penalty. Internally, a virtual machine can recompile machine instructions (just like a compiler "recompiles" its intermediate language into final code).
The power of this lies in the fact that you can now use *any* language you like. This is really necessary, as web applications are becoming bigger and bigger, and need a more sophisticated language than javascript (for example, javascript lacks even basic type checking).
On the other hand, I think Tcl is a step backwards w.r.t. javascript. At least javascript has closures, which are tremendously useful for interactive programs.
You can run x86 code on any machine in a virtual machine... in that respect this effort may still be considered architecture-independent. Also, you can re-compile x86 code to any other architecture, of course (but that is what an efficient virtual machine would actually do, I suppose).
But it would be so much cooler if also the rendering engine could be implemented natively, with perhaps only the graphics part handled through some standard API like OpenGL. Web developers could then just link-in their favorite rendering engine, e.g., webkit or gecko, without being dependent on broken web standards.
Hey, I paid $1000 for my computer, and I still have ads... something doesn't add up here.
They have one thing in common. They are both keeping PhD's from doing more valuable research (medicine, fundamental physics, etc.), just to sell some ads and marginally improve joe sixpack's user experience. How are they doing it? Well, I think these companies are playing psychological tricks (through the media) to make their employees work for them, for example by making them feel like rockstar programmers, while they could be true heroes in different fields.
Having "the perfect user experience" is absolutely something which is useful, but please don't take our best people to work on that.
That would require an effort comparable to fixing the entire US patent system, I'm afraid.
I think their programming models are getting more and more outdated, considering DHTML is becoming a better environment for application deployment every day.
On a similar note, you might find this link informative:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/adnauseum.html
Problem is, my cellphone outperforms a VAX in terms of FLOPS, even if it crashes once a week.
Dumping is not considered unlawful everywhere, but it certainly is anti-competitive. Ok, so maybe gmail may pay for itself by now (this definitely has not been the case when they started), youtube certainly is operating at a loss.
You might want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
If you're still not convinced, let's assume that you are the owner of a game development studio. Suddenly, microsoft comes along, and with the money they earned on OSes and office software, they can afford to give away games on a large scale. And suddenly you are out of business. Under normal circumstances, when a corporation pushes another corporation out of business, this can be viewed as ''evolutionary forces at work''. But here this is definitely not the case, because these divisions of microsoft are clearly unrelated. It is an anomaly in the system, and this is exactly what governments should protect against.
Of course what Google is doing right now is evil in an anti-competitive sense: it is "selling" some of their products at a price point that is below the net price. For example, their free gmail service is subsidized by their search products, and these products are largely unrelated. I'm not sure about the US, but in many countries, such "dumping" of products would be considered illegal.
The dumping of products has another negative side-effect, and this is that people are giving up their rights. For example, they are giving up privacy, and they have nobody to complain to if something does not properly work, or, for example, if they lose all their data.
Google might have the slogan "do no evil", but considering the above facts, Microsoft is really not all too bad. I certainly have to agree with the parent that their business model is more honest, at least.
Just wait until a postman copies the code to a package of his own, and just destroys the original package.