I must agree. That replacement exist. It's call SVG and Java.
The only problem I see with an SVG/Java solution is the lack of video streaming. Right now it's only possible via Quicktime For Java, and the Java Media Framework. From what I've read the Java Media Framework is not held in high regard, and there seem to be rumblings that Apple is unofficially dropping Quicktime For Java (if anyone knows something different, please correct me).
In any case Flash video has become extremely important, with Youtube being the obvious example. This is an issue that would have to be resolved at some point if Java was going to be the main vehicle.
Someone at Apache, IBM, or Sun announce that they are going to introduce a truely cross platform, open source, and Free alternative to Silverlight and Flash.
Just off the top of my head there's SVG as a potential format. I think a standard exists for turning XML into binary or hexadecimal (WBXML? WBML? I can't remember what it was called) for optimization. After that you need a set of tools to make content development easy. I suppose you could look towards OpenLaszlo for a model on the programming end. In other words, JavaScript + XML compiling to SVG (it's more complex and so shouldn't be dealt with directly) and then to the optimized form. InkScape, if it's mature enough, could be used for the actual graphical assets. I have no idea what could replace Flash's embedded video, but this might be a good opportunity for the Theora codec (if it ever gets out of alpha).
You're right that there would need to be a big push by a powerful entity, though. It's a matter of visibility plus follow-through, I think.
Anyway the point is that she claimed she needed a mac to do her job, but every piece of software she used was available on the PC and the real problem was that she was phobic. She couldn't bend her mind around putting her pinky on the control key instead of the command key or something like that, or maybe she just believed her friends who told her the PC was for games. Now I have to deal with the mac, which is the only mac in the whole damned organization.
I'm the only Mac user in my company as well. It leads to some interesting discussions with IT since the IT crew is mostly Windows-savvy.
Getting back to your point, though, I can't imagine a designer such as you've described surviving in some of the places I've worked. I can get away with being primarily a print designer because there's always a need to sales materials, brochures, ads, etc. I could never get away with being Mac-only. All the industry-standard tools are cross-platform (Mac/Windows, anyway) and quirks notwithstanding, both platforms do what they need to do to get the job done. (I hope my experience isn't unusual...)
"The Mac itself, the nature of the Mac, how it works and how it looks, is actually more conducive to the creative mindset. But those same things have also created a religious factor where the typical 'creative'--they can't even touch a PC keyboard. I'm being actually serious," says Christian Anschuetz, executive vice president and CIO of Publicis Groupe, which is based in Paris.
I haven't finished the article yet, but while I can believe this mindset being prevalent in years past, but I don't think I've met any designer in the past 5 years or so with such an anti-PC attitude. I've worked on a mac since my freshman year in college, but still had no problem sitting down and doing design work on a PC. And this was over a 2 year period. Using CorelDraw because my employer was Canadian and apparently Corel is a Canadian company.
Likewise, I've met plenty of PC users who are willing to sit down with a Mac if that's what the job requires. I just don't think this idea of "He's creative so he HAS to use a Mac" is valid anymore. You do the job with the tools you have. At my current job, once the IT dept. found out that I was going to be hired they immediately went out and bought a Mac. If I had been asked I would have said I could work in either platform. It doesn't matter as long as I have the tools to get the job done.
Sure, PC and Mac users like to make jabs at each other every now and again, but the few times I've met hard core Mac/PC users, they've been jackasses who weren't nearly as productive as they'd like to believe.
I'm aware of a project called myStep, which is supposed to shoehorn the GNUstep application framework set into mobile devices. It's basically an Open Source effort to create a Mac-like interface for mobile devices. I don't know what they're doing with the 800, but I know the Nokia 770 was a target they were shooting for.
Developers seem to speak well of OpenStep APIs (Mac OS X/GNUstep), so if myStep is refined enough, maybe it could be a good avenue for introducing apps for mobile devices as you were suggesting.
Print designer here (mostly). The company I currently work for may actually be locked away from Microsoft's products. And that's a real irony considering I'm the only Mac user in the entire company.
Even though this place is a Microsoft shop through and through, we work with an outside ad agency that's Mac all the way. As the company's graphic designer, my software choices are based on whatever the ad agency is using at a given time. If the agency uses QuarkXpress, so that's what I use (I prefer InDesign). If the agency upgrades an application or the operating system, so do I. If they don't, I don't. As a matter of fact, I just got upgraded to Tiger last week because we found out the agency had moved to Stuffit v11, whereas we were on Stuffit v9 (we didn't know about the upgrade until problems starting coming up). Since Stuffit 11 required Tiger, I got the OS upgrade on top of the application upgrade.
I don't know how many other companies operate like this, but I can't imagine we're the only ones.
(on the other hand... I used to work for a direct mail company that would probably embrace MS design tools with open arms just because it's MS...)
That reminds me of something that happened to my brother in high school. He was taking a test in math class, and of course had to solve an equation as part of the test. Naturally he also had to show how he solved it. As far as any of us know there wasn't a restriction as to methodology, or anything like that. He didn't have to solve it in a specific way, he just had to solve it.
Anyway, he solves it in a way that is completely unlike the related methodology presented in the textbook. The teacher decides to count that against him, so he passes the test with a lower score than he would otherwise. I can't remember specific details since this was over ten years ago, but I do remember everyone shaking their heads over it.
Even if the death of the CD and record industry comes, there will always be stadiums/concerts/etcetera that have to be filled. Artists of greater talent (or popularity) will fill the bigger venues, as it is now, and make their money this way. You have not really explained why this will die - people will always want to go to events.
I'd like to add to this in a couple of ways. First, a lot of musicians make money creating or licensing out incidental music. That is, music for commercials, film, television, games, and other projects. I recall listening to a segment on KPCC (public radio, LA) regarding this very topic. It seems the band Men at Work licensed out one of their songs for about $10k for a commercial. I don't know if the band itself is still around, but their songs continue to generate revenue to this day.
This brings me to the second point. I have an acquaintance who is a musician, and has taken a few classes in the business and business history of the music industry. He's convinced the RIAA and it's members will be not be going away, but will simply morph into something new. He's convinced the labels will eventually strip down into purely marketing and PR companies (dropping the actual recording and distribution parts of the business). These companies will make money by finding bands that they can bend into making endorsement deals with, say, Coca-Cola, or whomever. They take control of the band's behavior and public image, and make money by selling their name to whatever company is willing to pay.
I think we're seeing something related to this now. Can't remember if I saw this on Slashdot or not, but I remember reading something about how labels are now looking for bands that are adept in getting their name out so that they can capitalize on an already-established name that they can then push into something more profitable(for the label).
Similarly, when stinkers like Lesbian Gangster Yoga with Ben Affleck come out, the movie theatre is going to be pretty much empty anyway...
I don't know about that. I think I'd be first in line to see Lesbian Gangsters killing Ben Affleck with Yoga...
Re:Dink Smallwood
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The irony is if the movie hadn't gone public domain, no one would have ever seen it...
I was under the impression that the reason the copyright had not been renewed was because the film was so universally panned when in theatres that it was considered worthless and forgotten about. The networks grabbed it, aired it to death, and it became the cultural mainstay it is today, as you mentioned.
In any case, I've been told that the screenplay is still copyrighted, so you can present the movie all you want, but you have to replace the actual spoken words and implied plot. Presumably the networks made a deal to get around this once the studios brought it up.
These are actually pretty powerful terms, and it's important to have a common vocabulary that can be used when bringing together managers from varying fields like sales, IT, operations, finance, etc.
Every business, industry, or culture has it's own set of words or phrases. The question comes down to whether or not these words and phrases can be isolated and put into a reference. Geeks have the Jargon File, for example. Does a reference exist for business slang? If it does, I'd love to check it out; at my place of work, we have terminology the origin of which completely mystifies me. For example, when you go to a website and click a button, it's not a button but a "monument". You don't navigate a website, you "drill down". I don't get assignments, I'm "tasked". I don't work with someone on a project, we "work interactively". Salespeople don't maintain relationships with clients, they "touch them".
If this terminology is standard, great, but I've never heard people refer to things like this before I came to the company I worked at now. How they came up with some of it is beyond me (especially the web stuff). I should have asked by now, but they keep me too busy to waste time finding out.
In high school, we had a Procrastinator's Club. Every week the school newspaper would have an announcement that the weekly meeting of the club was put off to the following week. About a month and a half later the school administrators figured out the joke and put a stop to it.
Hmmm... I guess need Exchange to read email on my wireless phone. Guess I'll have to tell my people that they can't send emails to me any longer because we use Sendmail as our MTA.
This is a pretty good point, and relevant where I work as well. I work for a relatively small company. This company, however, has a significant sales staff; some work directly for the company and some belong to companies that are essentially hired out by us. Everyone that does sales has some form of wireless email access. It used to be the blackberry, but the IT staff have issued out Treos recently. They apparently have a solution that allows them to do a wireless email solution that integrates with whatever Windows system they have set up (this is an exclusively Windows place. I'm the only Mac guy there.)
Not only do all the sales staff have wireless email, the engineering and production heads have been issued Treos as well. I don't know what an open source solution would be, but wireless email is pretty much one of the major lifeblood veins where I work.
Re:the C. P. Snow Divide of Sciences and Humanitie
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 1
How could he have experienced Mac without *nix? Has he been living under a rock for the last 5 years?
This was between 2003 and 2004. Apple had only begun proving itself with OS X. That wouldn't have mattered, though. This guy was so completely within the Windows mindset, he wouldn't have noticed that OS X had a Unix underpinning.
We had received our first Linux box sometime in late 2003. We had to get contractors to come in because he couldn't figure out the command line (when he learned about the "apropos" command, he thought it was a really neat idea).
I don't think he ever really learned command-line Unix. We just kept bringing in people one at a time to take care of the Linux box. He really wanted to be more of a manager; he didn't want to know how to do it, he just wanted to be able to tell people what to do. Unfortunately, although I left in mid-2004, I'd wager it's still just him maintaining everything with some poor guy ocassionally brought in to maintain the Linux box.
Re:the C. P. Snow Divide of Sciences and Humanitie
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What's interesting about your experience is that I've experienced exactly the opposite myself. I suspect this is because I've mostly been around small to medium sized businesses, and you're talking about large corporations. Still...
I currently work for a manufacturer of restaurant equipment. Not counting the folks that actually build the machines, I'd guess we have roughly a hundred employees in the form of executives, engineers, etc. Total Microsoft shop. I am literally the only person with a non-Windows machine-a dual processor G5 Mac. Reportedly, when the head of IT heard that a Mac was going to be brought in, he slammed his fist on his desk and proclaimed that nobody was going to be hired just to maintain one Mac. The folks in the IT dept. then informed me that if anything happened to my machine, they would not help me.
Prior to this, I had worked in a small mom-and-pop advertising company. Roughly between four and eight employees depending on who had left at what time. One computer guy, and all machines were Windows. This guy had been a Mac person, but for some reason converted. It was practically pavlovian. If you mentioned either "Apple" or "Mac" at any time, he'd immediately say "Man, I hate the Mac!". Once he proclaimed that Windows was easier to use and just generally let it be known that the Mac was inferior to any Redmond product. He had no experience with *nix-based systems. We had people come and go for that one, but that's a different story.
While there's hardly and hard research any analysis going on here, my point is that Microsoft seems to have achieved a perfect two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they've won over the small-to-medium businesses who pay out little per business, but are more numerous, and they've locked in the larger corporations who are fewer in number, but pay much more. The corporations hate the lock-in, but are constrained by a number of factors, not the least of which is previously trained admins coming up from the smaller business ranks.
As I stated, no hard research and analysis, but if it were true, it'd be pretty damn impressive. From a business standpoint at least.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but I had heard once that Edison employed several people just to dream up ideas for products. If he liked the idea, he'd go out and patent it as soon as possible.
The more I hear about Edison, the less inspiring he appears to be. Wasn't he the one that electrocuted animals to disprove the theories of Nikola Tesla?
What if you wrote a bridge in C connecting the Obj-C runtime to Java's JNI interface? I believe there's some information on the Obj-C runtime (apple's implementation, the gnu imp differs) at Apple's Developer Site. Do a search for the Objective-C Runtime Reference.
I know the Java JNI interface has a much larger set of functions and types to deal with, so that could impact the feasibility of the idea, but Apple's runtime seems fairly simple.
Maybe when Apple stops using PowerPC, another company will come along and start putting these chips in desktop machines (are there any already?)
Genesi comes to mind. They're using PowerPCs from Freescale, although I can't remember if Freescale and IBM are manufacturing independantly or are basically pulling from the same pool of processors. I think there are other desktop PPC manufacturers around, but no other name pops into mind just now.
I admit not knowing much about Java technology, but wasn't it designed as a layer of abstraction? What would prevent the placing of DRM at a layer that Java won't allow you to access, and then only expose access to specific APIs that you want developers to use? (in addition to the java libraries of course. )
Not only Haskell, the same things have been said of Forth, Lisp, and (if I recall correctly) Smalltalk. I'm sure there are plenty of languages out there that either can be used to create new domain specific languages, or else are extensible enough by design that they can be tranformed into a domain specific state (Forth and Lisp come immediately to mind).
I suppose if you wanted to go that way, you could also say that languages in general are fairlly extensible if you start coding some parts in assembly to get whatever features you want. Can't see that being time-efficient or portable, though.
Anyone intereseted in writing interactive fiction or non-fiction might be interested in "Writing For Interactive Media" by Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberely. Here's a link.
It goes over the various techniques by which one can develop interactive media, and what one should think about when doing so (design techniques, multiple plots, characters, interactive screenwriting, and other issues). I think it provides a good foundation with which to approach most forms of interactive writing.
I think more people who are java programmers should be trying Python for smaller programs, cause I was able to pump small programs out much faster than with Java.
I think this point is interesting. Paul Graham makes a big deal about why he doesn't think much of Java, and it all seems to go back to the big/small issue. For example, in his essay on how he put together the Yahoo stores using Lisp, he mentioned that interpreted languages (or at least languages that can be both interpreted and compiled like Lisp) are better because they let you do things incrementally, as opposed to languages such as C/Java/etc, which force you to do the whole project all at once(I'm generalizing his statements here, but that seemed to be the gist of it).
My point is this: Graham seems to really like the "small is better" approach, for which interpreted languages really shine. For larger projects, Java/C++/etc. would (might?) be more appropriate, but for Graham's projects and ideas, not really relevant.
Every once in a while, Graham comes out with something that seems to get Java users up in arms, but it's entirely possible he's operating from point-of-view that involves projects that Java wasn't really designed for to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
I must agree. That replacement exist. It's call SVG and Java.
The only problem I see with an SVG/Java solution is the lack of video streaming. Right now it's only possible via Quicktime For Java, and the Java Media Framework. From what I've read the Java Media Framework is not held in high regard, and there seem to be rumblings that Apple is unofficially dropping Quicktime For Java (if anyone knows something different, please correct me).
In any case Flash video has become extremely important, with Youtube being the obvious example. This is an issue that would have to be resolved at some point if Java was going to be the main vehicle.
Someone at Apache, IBM, or Sun announce that they are going to introduce a truely cross platform, open source, and Free alternative to Silverlight and Flash.
Just off the top of my head there's SVG as a potential format. I think a standard exists for turning XML into binary or hexadecimal (WBXML? WBML? I can't remember what it was called) for optimization. After that you need a set of tools to make content development easy. I suppose you could look towards OpenLaszlo for a model on the programming end. In other words, JavaScript + XML compiling to SVG (it's more complex and so shouldn't be dealt with directly) and then to the optimized form. InkScape, if it's mature enough, could be used for the actual graphical assets. I have no idea what could replace Flash's embedded video, but this might be a good opportunity for the Theora codec (if it ever gets out of alpha).
You're right that there would need to be a big push by a powerful entity, though. It's a matter of visibility plus follow-through, I think.
Anyway the point is that she claimed she needed a mac to do her job, but every piece of software she used was available on the PC and the real problem was that she was phobic. She couldn't bend her mind around putting her pinky on the control key instead of the command key or something like that, or maybe she just believed her friends who told her the PC was for games. Now I have to deal with the mac, which is the only mac in the whole damned organization.
I'm the only Mac user in my company as well. It leads to some interesting discussions with IT since the IT crew is mostly Windows-savvy.
Getting back to your point, though, I can't imagine a designer such as you've described surviving in some of the places I've worked. I can get away with being primarily a print designer because there's always a need to sales materials, brochures, ads, etc. I could never get away with being Mac-only. All the industry-standard tools are cross-platform (Mac/Windows, anyway) and quirks notwithstanding, both platforms do what they need to do to get the job done. (I hope my experience isn't unusual...)
"The Mac itself, the nature of the Mac, how it works and how it looks, is actually more conducive to the creative mindset. But those same things have also created a religious factor where the typical 'creative'--they can't even touch a PC keyboard. I'm being actually serious," says Christian Anschuetz, executive vice president and CIO of Publicis Groupe, which is based in Paris.
I haven't finished the article yet, but while I can believe this mindset being prevalent in years past, but I don't think I've met any designer in the past 5 years or so with such an anti-PC attitude. I've worked on a mac since my freshman year in college, but still had no problem sitting down and doing design work on a PC. And this was over a 2 year period. Using CorelDraw because my employer was Canadian and apparently Corel is a Canadian company.
Likewise, I've met plenty of PC users who are willing to sit down with a Mac if that's what the job requires. I just don't think this idea of "He's creative so he HAS to use a Mac" is valid anymore. You do the job with the tools you have. At my current job, once the IT dept. found out that I was going to be hired they immediately went out and bought a Mac. If I had been asked I would have said I could work in either platform. It doesn't matter as long as I have the tools to get the job done.
Sure, PC and Mac users like to make jabs at each other every now and again, but the few times I've met hard core Mac/PC users, they've been jackasses who weren't nearly as productive as they'd like to believe.
Anyway, just my thoughts.
I'm aware of a project called myStep, which is supposed to shoehorn the GNUstep application framework set into mobile devices. It's basically an Open Source effort to create a Mac-like interface for mobile devices. I don't know what they're doing with the 800, but I know the Nokia 770 was a target they were shooting for.
Developers seem to speak well of OpenStep APIs (Mac OS X/GNUstep), so if myStep is refined enough, maybe it could be a good avenue for introducing apps for mobile devices as you were suggesting.
Print designer here (mostly). The company I currently work for may actually be locked away from Microsoft's products. And that's a real irony considering I'm the only Mac user in the entire company.
Even though this place is a Microsoft shop through and through, we work with an outside ad agency that's Mac all the way. As the company's graphic designer, my software choices are based on whatever the ad agency is using at a given time. If the agency uses QuarkXpress, so that's what I use (I prefer InDesign). If the agency upgrades an application or the operating system, so do I. If they don't, I don't. As a matter of fact, I just got upgraded to Tiger last week because we found out the agency had moved to Stuffit v11, whereas we were on Stuffit v9 (we didn't know about the upgrade until problems starting coming up). Since Stuffit 11 required Tiger, I got the OS upgrade on top of the application upgrade.
I don't know how many other companies operate like this, but I can't imagine we're the only ones.
(on the other hand... I used to work for a direct mail company that would probably embrace MS design tools with open arms just because it's MS...)
That reminds me of something that happened to my brother in high school. He was taking a test in math class, and of course had to solve an equation as part of the test. Naturally he also had to show how he solved it. As far as any of us know there wasn't a restriction as to methodology, or anything like that. He didn't have to solve it in a specific way, he just had to solve it.
Anyway, he solves it in a way that is completely unlike the related methodology presented in the textbook. The teacher decides to count that against him, so he passes the test with a lower score than he would otherwise. I can't remember specific details since this was over ten years ago, but I do remember everyone shaking their heads over it.
Even if the death of the CD and record industry comes, there will always be stadiums/concerts/etcetera that have to be filled. Artists of greater talent (or popularity) will fill the bigger venues, as it is now, and make their money this way. You have not really explained why this will die - people will always want to go to events.
I'd like to add to this in a couple of ways. First, a lot of musicians make money creating or licensing out incidental music. That is, music for commercials, film, television, games, and other projects. I recall listening to a segment on KPCC (public radio, LA) regarding this very topic. It seems the band Men at Work licensed out one of their songs for about $10k for a commercial. I don't know if the band itself is still around, but their songs continue to generate revenue to this day.
This brings me to the second point. I have an acquaintance who is a musician, and has taken a few classes in the business and business history of the music industry. He's convinced the RIAA and it's members will be not be going away, but will simply morph into something new. He's convinced the labels will eventually strip down into purely marketing and PR companies (dropping the actual recording and distribution parts of the business). These companies will make money by finding bands that they can bend into making endorsement deals with, say, Coca-Cola, or whomever. They take control of the band's behavior and public image, and make money by selling their name to whatever company is willing to pay.
I think we're seeing something related to this now. Can't remember if I saw this on Slashdot or not, but I remember reading something about how labels are now looking for bands that are adept in getting their name out so that they can capitalize on an already-established name that they can then push into something more profitable(for the label).
Similarly, when stinkers like Lesbian Gangster Yoga with Ben Affleck come out, the movie theatre is going to be pretty much empty anyway ...
I don't know about that. I think I'd be first in line to see Lesbian Gangsters killing Ben Affleck with Yoga...
The irony is if the movie hadn't gone public domain, no one would have ever seen it...
I was under the impression that the reason the copyright had not been renewed was because the film was so universally panned when in theatres that it was considered worthless and forgotten about. The networks grabbed it, aired it to death, and it became the cultural mainstay it is today, as you mentioned.
In any case, I've been told that the screenplay is still copyrighted, so you can present the movie all you want, but you have to replace the actual spoken words and implied plot. Presumably the networks made a deal to get around this once the studios brought it up.
These are actually pretty powerful terms, and it's important to have a common vocabulary that can be used when bringing together managers from varying fields like sales, IT, operations, finance, etc.
Every business, industry, or culture has it's own set of words or phrases. The question comes down to whether or not these words and phrases can be isolated and put into a reference. Geeks have the Jargon File, for example. Does a reference exist for business slang? If it does, I'd love to check it out; at my place of work, we have terminology the origin of which completely mystifies me. For example, when you go to a website and click a button, it's not a button but a "monument". You don't navigate a website, you "drill down". I don't get assignments, I'm "tasked". I don't work with someone on a project, we "work interactively". Salespeople don't maintain relationships with clients, they "touch them".
If this terminology is standard, great, but I've never heard people refer to things like this before I came to the company I worked at now. How they came up with some of it is beyond me (especially the web stuff). I should have asked by now, but they keep me too busy to waste time finding out.
In high school, we had a Procrastinator's Club. Every week the school newspaper would have an announcement that the weekly meeting of the club was put off to the following week. About a month and a half later the school administrators figured out the joke and put a stop to it.
Who needs wireless email?
Hmmm... I guess need Exchange to read email on my wireless phone. Guess I'll have to tell my people that they can't send emails to me any longer because we use Sendmail as our MTA.
This is a pretty good point, and relevant where I work as well. I work for a relatively small company. This company, however, has a significant sales staff; some work directly for the company and some belong to companies that are essentially hired out by us. Everyone that does sales has some form of wireless email access. It used to be the blackberry, but the IT staff have issued out Treos recently. They apparently have a solution that allows them to do a wireless email solution that integrates with whatever Windows system they have set up (this is an exclusively Windows place. I'm the only Mac guy there.)
Not only do all the sales staff have wireless email, the engineering and production heads have been issued Treos as well. I don't know what an open source solution would be, but wireless email is pretty much one of the major lifeblood veins where I work.
How could he have experienced Mac without *nix? Has he been living under a rock for the last 5 years?
This was between 2003 and 2004. Apple had only begun proving itself with OS X. That wouldn't have mattered, though. This guy was so completely within the Windows mindset, he wouldn't have noticed that OS X had a Unix underpinning.
We had received our first Linux box sometime in late 2003. We had to get contractors to come in because he couldn't figure out the command line (when he learned about the "apropos" command, he thought it was a really neat idea).
I don't think he ever really learned command-line Unix. We just kept bringing in people one at a time to take care of the Linux box. He really wanted to be more of a manager; he didn't want to know how to do it, he just wanted to be able to tell people what to do. Unfortunately, although I left in mid-2004, I'd wager it's still just him maintaining everything with some poor guy ocassionally brought in to maintain the Linux box.
What's interesting about your experience is that I've experienced exactly the opposite myself. I suspect this is because I've mostly been around small to medium sized businesses, and you're talking about large corporations. Still...
I currently work for a manufacturer of restaurant equipment. Not counting the folks that actually build the machines, I'd guess we have roughly a hundred employees in the form of executives, engineers, etc. Total Microsoft shop. I am literally the only person with a non-Windows machine-a dual processor G5 Mac. Reportedly, when the head of IT heard that a Mac was going to be brought in, he slammed his fist on his desk and proclaimed that nobody was going to be hired just to maintain one Mac. The folks in the IT dept. then informed me that if anything happened to my machine, they would not help me.
Prior to this, I had worked in a small mom-and-pop advertising company. Roughly between four and eight employees depending on who had left at what time. One computer guy, and all machines were Windows. This guy had been a Mac person, but for some reason converted. It was practically pavlovian. If you mentioned either "Apple" or "Mac" at any time, he'd immediately say "Man, I hate the Mac!". Once he proclaimed that Windows was easier to use and just generally let it be known that the Mac was inferior to any Redmond product. He had no experience with *nix-based systems. We had people come and go for that one, but that's a different story.
While there's hardly and hard research any analysis going on here, my point is that Microsoft seems to have achieved a perfect two-pronged attack. On the one hand, they've won over the small-to-medium businesses who pay out little per business, but are more numerous, and they've locked in the larger corporations who are fewer in number, but pay much more. The corporations hate the lock-in, but are constrained by a number of factors, not the least of which is previously trained admins coming up from the smaller business ranks.
As I stated, no hard research and analysis, but if it were true, it'd be pretty damn impressive. From a business standpoint at least.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but I had heard once that Edison employed several people just to dream up ideas for products. If he liked the idea, he'd go out and patent it as soon as possible.
The more I hear about Edison, the less inspiring he appears to be. Wasn't he the one that electrocuted animals to disprove the theories of Nikola Tesla?
What if you wrote a bridge in C connecting the Obj-C runtime to Java's JNI interface? I believe there's some information on the Obj-C runtime (apple's implementation, the gnu imp differs) at Apple's Developer Site. Do a search for the Objective-C Runtime Reference.
I know the Java JNI interface has a much larger set of functions and types to deal with, so that could impact the feasibility of the idea, but Apple's runtime seems fairly simple.
Maybe when Apple stops using PowerPC, another company will come along and start putting these chips in desktop machines (are there any already?)
Genesi comes to mind. They're using PowerPCs from Freescale, although I can't remember if Freescale and IBM are manufacturing independantly or are basically pulling from the same pool of processors. I think there are other desktop PPC manufacturers around, but no other name pops into mind just now.
I admit not knowing much about Java technology, but wasn't it designed as a layer of abstraction? What would prevent the placing of DRM at a layer that Java won't allow you to access, and then only expose access to specific APIs that you want developers to use? (in addition to the java libraries of course. )
Erik
Not only Haskell, the same things have been said of Forth, Lisp, and (if I recall correctly) Smalltalk. I'm sure there are plenty of languages out there that either can be used to create new domain specific languages, or else are extensible enough by design that they can be tranformed into a domain specific state (Forth and Lisp come immediately to mind).
I suppose if you wanted to go that way, you could also say that languages in general are fairlly extensible if you start coding some parts in assembly to get whatever features you want. Can't see that being time-efficient or portable, though.
A lot of people here have criticised the use of a Linux CD as a gift. When you add Goatse wallpaper, however, you have the gift that keeps on giving!
Of course, I don't really know what this will do for Linux awareness...
Anyone intereseted in writing interactive fiction or non-fiction might be interested in "Writing For Interactive Media" by Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberely. Here's a link.
It goes over the various techniques by which one can develop interactive media, and what one should think about when doing so (design techniques, multiple plots, characters, interactive screenwriting, and other issues). I think it provides a good foundation with which to approach most forms of interactive writing.
I think more people who are java programmers should be trying Python for smaller programs, cause I was able to pump small programs out much faster than with Java.
I think this point is interesting. Paul Graham makes a big deal about why he doesn't think much of Java, and it all seems to go back to the big/small issue. For example, in his essay on how he put together the Yahoo stores using Lisp, he mentioned that interpreted languages (or at least languages that can be both interpreted and compiled like Lisp) are better because they let you do things incrementally, as opposed to languages such as C/Java/etc, which force you to do the whole project all at once(I'm generalizing his statements here, but that seemed to be the gist of it).
My point is this: Graham seems to really like the "small is better" approach, for which interpreted languages really shine. For larger projects, Java/C++/etc. would (might?) be more appropriate, but for Graham's projects and ideas, not really relevant.
Every once in a while, Graham comes out with something that seems to get Java users up in arms, but it's entirely possible he's operating from point-of-view that involves projects that Java wasn't really designed for to begin with.
Just a curiousity I thought I'd note.