Backwards compatibility would be a nice thing if X-Box had a large library of games worth playing. By all indications (casual player opinion to raw numbers) there are very few games worth playing now let alone years from now. Cutting that string might sting for a little bit everyone will quickly forget the crappy games on X-Box for X-Box 2 games.
The thing I see burning many X-Box fans is X-Box Live. If you can't take the hardware forward people are forced to buy new X-Box Live for XB2? Not to mention the hardware in general was a very nice thing to make backwards compatible. The arcade stick I had for PS1 works for PS2. XB1 hardware would have to abandoned for XB2.
To each their own. X-Box clearly isn't selling in their proper configuration so changing the system fundementals is probably a good idea. However that also has problems so be set for the bumpy ride.
Sure they could have debugged this on Eart...if they ever saw the need to test fully loading the rover's memory with spaceflight information. The important question is: if this was so obvious to you why aren't you making rovers? Its easy to say "duh!" after the fact isn't it?
There are nearly an infinite number of ways to debug any system (rover, computers, etc.) but sooner or later you have to send it out the door and use it. With a computer you can take it back to the store if it happen to drop it upside down twice and it suddenly stops working (could the store have tested that??). With the rover its a little tricker.
I really hate how people view this bug as a failure where it really was a smashingly successful debug and fix. Clearly its armchair debugging saying "why didn't they test that?" If it was so obvious to you, why weren't you guys banging on NASA's door remind them to check what happens when you operate this thing in that configuration.
So? FreeBSD isn't any more or less vulnerable to erronious claims like SCO leveled at Linux.
An SCO come-lately company can say "We wrote some software, never released the source code to the public yet it somehow got into the BSD core. We demand royalties from anyone who makes money from BSD!!" BSD doesn't give a license to take any code you want, especially code you don't own, to stick into BSD. Neither does GPL. That is a copyright violation which neither license will support.
What SCO is doing has little to do with Linux or the GPL and everything to do with rats trying to weesle money out of companies while draging Open Source through the mud. SCO couldn't create software to compete against Linux or BSD so its suing profitable companies like IBM in an attempt to save themselves. The GPL or BSD offer no more or less protection against these unbased crazy claims.
Maybe I don't understand what your question is about "port whatever flavor of Linux you like to the other camp of BSD" but why? Just to change licenses? The BSD doesn't solve any more issues than GPL when it comes to SCO like behavior. A company can come along and claim that parts of their proprietary software was stolen and place in the FreeBSD core. You'd see all of the same complaints and shouting from the BSD camps wanting to know the exact parts of the offending code and deeply offended about draging everything into the courts.
Recompiling changes nothing. Switching license changes nothing. SCO's complaints are just as weak with either system. In fact isn't SCO flirting with the idea of trying to sue some BSD groups? The BSD teams are in general very supportive of the fight against SCO. Even though philosophies may be different they do regonize how much SCO BS is floating around.
I Hate These Kind of "Helpful Documents"
on
BSD For Linux Users
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you have to explain why something is useful to someone then you are probably targeting the wrong audience.
Happy Linux, Mac, Windows, etc. Users don't need to be told why BSD will make them happier. Frankly an author has to take a wild guess what bugs me about my Linux and Windows machine. They might get it formated like this but a general "What does BSD do well" FAQ is better. Mr Fuller might not know that some of the things he thinks are wrong in Linux I've hacked around or are in the end non-issues.
Free software is about enabling people. Linux and BSD and whatever can and should all exist because neither is "right". A Linux user can learn how to use BSD. A BSD can learn how to use Linux. How come? Its because both are open systems. The implication with "helpful documents" like this is that there is a right or wrong choice to be made which I believe is an idea rooted in bad faith.
After all IIS and Apache both comform to HTTP standards yet one is vulnerable to a set of exploits while the other is vulernable to another set of exploits.
Diversity allows for protection and flexibility in some cases. It also makes it harder to work in an intergrated environment. That is the trade off.
Satelites around Earth are some 75k km closer to the Sun than the rover is. The Sun kilowatt power available at Mars is less than at Earth. Space althought frought with its own environmental hazards (vacuum, radition, etc. ) is not the same as even a weak weather system like Mars. Hardening something to be placed in LEO is one thing. Hardening something to be placed on Mars is something else.
It should also be pointed out that this thing is a hellva lot more complex than any run of the mill satelite around Earth. The fact they are getting 3 months and about half a mile is a miracle in my view.
This thing could have been made to last 30 months instead of 3 if it had a RTG onboard assuming the weight trade off is good compared to solar panels. But for one reason or another NASA is squimish about putting RTGs on anything "so close" to the Sun.
This rover is much beefier than the previous rover. They'll get good science out of it assume nothing weird happens. I'm sure they will also squeeze out as much as they can with the operational time they got.
When parallelism is introduced you run the risk of "process inversion". If the system runs high enough all of your execution units are working as fast as the slowest process no matter how fast the execution units can run.
The key to this effect is that the slowest execution unit is taking the most time forcing all other execution to wait on it. Other faster execution units must wait for one reason or another so they all appear to be as slow as the slowest.
In software you can try to soften the blow by bumping up the priority on the slower threads as it crosses any critical sections wtih faster threads. In hardware the beast is a lot different. Doing a pure register calculation is fast. Loading a register from a cache is slower. Incuring a cache miss is even worse. If your system is running fast enough to incur many cache misses then it doesn't matter how fast your register operations or how many CPUs are operating: they will start to appear as if they are all operating like they are missing the cache.
CPUs are plenty fast these days. The future problems all seem to be around I/O. There can be N number of execution cores in your system but if there is only 1 "slow" memory bus then your system is going to be restricted hard. Looking into ways to speed up the memory-CPU bus cheaply would be of great use to any parallel system. Far better than figuring out to cram more faster units into the box.
Free speech thrives at UNCENSORED! BBS - http://uncensored.citadel.org
So why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software? Both can and are expressions of thought. Yet one is entirely utilitarian but another is sacred? Both seem secred to me. You can make speech private as well as software too. The important part is you have the choice.
I think RMS is on to something. Too many people overvalue their source. They horde it like a gold ring (My precessssiouss!) when it really isn't that valuable. The software you write today will not survive tomorrow. Code is far more valuable than just to run things. So why bury it behind NDAs and closed systems?
There is also a "higher" level of freedom being missed. It isn't the fact that you can use software that is free: its the fact you have a choice if you want to or not. That is far more important than the free software. The fact that someone or team has made a viable unencumbered piece of software I can chose to use is what makes OSS really special and hopefully the dominate social trend for the next hundred years.
Microsoft enables the user to do this is the problem. So who is the blame? The fool or the one that pushes the fool to do foolish things?
No one on BSD or Linux should be using gaim or any msn look alikes while logged in as a super user. Yet this is normal operating proceedure on XP Home which a majority of "uncontroled" PC have. Its one thing to say "Its your fault for doing something risky with your computer". But I claim "Its MS's fault for allowing them to do it in the first place."
Unix and Unix like systems all put hurdles in the way to stop this kind of maliciousness from happening. MS, a company that is supposed to be sharp and experienced in secure code and behavior, constantly chooses to remove the hurdles. MS wants people to believe that their computer is no more complex than a VCR which is pretty damn far from the truth.
So you will excuse me if I bitch about this and other MS design decisions. I'm not relishing a call from my parents asking why their computer is acting all squirrely.
Many chunks of packet handling code are taken from BSD. Without more solid information the exact linage of this code can not be determined but in general many of the network under pinnings seem to come from BSD.
This is the heart of the problem with SCO. They won't say what code is the problem. Therefore no one knows where it came from. The guts of UnixWare and Linux are complete different so what good is it to copy. You would work more on grafting and gluing things together than just writing it from scratch. The explaination that is more likely is that both UnixWare and Linux IP handling and other things came from BSD.
So here is a challenge to you since you are unwilling to actually name files: Go look at the BSD source tree and do your comparisons there. If the code exists line by line there then SCO has no basis.
So far I'm finding stuff like "...why did RH cripple KDE to be like Gnome?!..." So far it sounds to me like people were miffed that they were touching their prized KDE brand. I haven't found a gtk or gnome project contributor that complained that Gnome was being modified into Bluecurve but that doesn't mean that the complaints don't exist.
With OSS projects, the best thing you can hope for is someone other project picks up the parts and starts modifying. RH along with anyone else can modify the hell out of KDE. If this isn't what KDE wants they need to stop releasing it under the OSS flag.
Once again, I ask why was it such an offense to KDE to modify KDE?
Red Hat's goal with "Bluecurve" is to provide a "user experience" that was indestingushable between Gnome and KDE. To do this you have to throw out all of the K-isms. Its not Konquer or Galeon or Mozilla...its a Web Browser.
I never understood what the issue behind this was. RH took KDE and Gnome and extended it into a blended environment. The Gnome team was fine with that. However the KDE took offense? I don't get it.
Linux and other OSS projects are open by their nature. If someone wants to come along and inspect it they can whether or they have alterior motives or not.
The "O" means "Open" for a good reason. The spirit of OSS is sharing and learning with everyone. This includes Microsoft. If they can learn how to stop making overly complex software that can never seem to quite work from inspecting BSD and Linux then so be it. Linux and BSD have nothing to hide. That sounds like a strength, not a weakness for MS to exploit.
There is no sure thing in security but there is a simple step to make things a bit more reliable for logging.
If you really have a serious system where you want detailed logs you keep the logs for that system off that machine. Sure the machine that is logging could have been comprimized as well but that is twice as much work. Now you have to hack the machine but also the logger to erase the intrusion event.
In fact one of the things I've seen done is that events are logged on the machine and the logger. The idea was to provide not only redundant logging but also provide a front for hackers. A hacker would see the local logs and be too busy doctoring up those logs to check to see if there is an external logger.
In any event, the logging Gentoo did looks complete enough. They claim only 20 users did a sync against the server during the hour it was online and comprized.
1. Many developers see a problem (the itch to scratch). 2. Many developers implement a solution. 3. A miracle happens where the best solution is chosen by users to standardize against.
The problem is that the best for you is not the same for the best for me or them. Every software system is standardized against itself so standarization isn't a problem. The problem is the human condition. You'll never get a group of people to agree what the best solution to a free formed problem could be.
The best example of this is in the good old KDE vs Gnome. You will never get both camps to say that either way is the best approach since both designs offers their own pros and cons. So why should either camp abandon their approach? Besides, standardization won't give them any more than what they have now.
IMHO, this is not a problem. There is little value in having Gnome and KDE merge by standards on things that are clearly not standardizable. A search for "the standard" is not a magic cure all fix. After all everything is standard on Windows yet there are many problems. The best any group of developers can do is make their system as sane yet as compatible with other components as possible. Its the differences that keep groups learning from each other. Why kill that with an empty standarzation process?
There are number of movies like speghetti westerns that I've seen that are in Japanese. The grand point is that the Japanese like watching things in Japanese. For some odd reason its bad for Americans to watch things in English? *shrug*
ps. Fansubs are the only way to watch shows? Ibegtodiffer. Of course no one ever thinks about watching it off the air raw. ^_^
Not for a cable channel that wants to target the 18-24 segement anyway. Adult Swim shows are some of the highest rated stuff floating around cable even though they are dubbed. Going sub is a giant risk since the ratings indicate that there are more now more than just Anime fans watching the block of programming.
In Japan they have plenty of US movies and TV shows but are they subtitled? The Japanese like hearing things in their native language which is why its in Japanese in the first place. On this side of the Pacific, the US Anime Industry has advanced pretty far. The quality of scripts have gone up since translators have access to even more material than they used to (including the production staff!!!). The quality of actors has gone up since it has been shown you can make money acting. There really is no reason to ask for a sub unless you really really really want to her you favorite actress. The casual and non-fan viewers are definately not interested in that.
I like raw shows as much as any hardcore fan but people have to realize there are many more people out there than the hardcore otaku fandom. Getting causual and non-fans to sit down and watch subtitled material is hard. Having people watch Robin and SAC is great! Its better than having these shows sit only in Anime fandom obscurity.
What makes you think the "terrorists" don't use Microsoft Windows or write email to each other through their hotmail accounts? Its by far the most common desktop system around so how in the world would a sneaky terrorist avoid using it?
Microsoft "enables" terrorists just as much as anything else. Heck it could be even dirtier since money changed hands but in the end thats silly logic.
One of the great reasons for MS to buy up Virtual PC is that they can now virtualize old environments. I am doing a little hand waving, but why do they need to maintain backwards compatibility if another piece of software can do that for them?
Gaiman makes a great point of Blogs! Instead of going through their agent/publisist releasing a statement "Mr. Gaiman enjoyed working with Terry Prachett" Gaiman can now just fire up his blog and write it there instead. Its more personal since it comes directly from him and it is exactly what he wants to say instead of having his agent/publisist insisting on changing the content.
The problem with comparing art and events from the 20th Century is that they haven't weathered the cruelest judge of all: Time.
Mozart and Shakespeare didn't create in a vacuum. There were other composers, playwrites, and poets running around during their days yet their material not only survives but thrives. It is because their ideas captured a timeless quality. How do you measure that on recent creations?
It seems slightly unfair to say that the world is in decline just because we don't have 12 Shaekspeares turning out hundreds of "MacBeths". It is just too soon to call that judgement. In 100 Years Frank Lloyd Wright might reveared as Leonardo da Vinci.
Devices like phones, PDAs, and (heaven forbid) toasters don't want to talk to NATs: they want to talk to the Internet. NATs represent a layer of transformation that is easy but not absolutely transparent.
Although NAT works for extendable, generic computing platforms, like your desktop, it is cumbersome to have simple devices that want to connect to the Internet have to worry if they are really connected or behind any number of NAT layers. After all how does your cellphone with its own SMTP/Web server tell the NAT (which they there could be any number between it and the Internet) to open a port so it can receive data?
The real answer is the expandsion of the IP pool and intelegent routing found in IPV6.
I don't know anything about French law or what the basis for this could be, but what is the problem with providing ads along with search results? Is it some anti-competitive thing? Google by far has the least intrusive ad scheme for a generic search engine.
More importantly, how will this effect Froogle? A generic search engine provide by Google tuned for finding stuff to buy. How does French law work with this?
I believe the work on the CLR and compiler and associated tools are a good thing. If MS is unwilling to port the runtime environment to other platforms but it seems easy enough to cleanly reverse engineer then by all means it should be done.
However, I always felt the work on the class libraries walks on a bit shakier ground. It isn't so much that the clean room reverse engineering isn't good. I wonder if there is real value to it. Is it better to rewrite System.Web.UI or implement a new compelling set of classes?
My dream is that instead of people seeing Mono as a gateway for MS to get into Linux, I see it as the opposite: great applications being opened to Windows. Take Evolution or Pan or whatever your favorite X application, port it to a.Net widget library and you now run on both Linux and Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Backwards compatibility would be a nice thing if X-Box had a large library of games worth playing. By all indications (casual player opinion to raw numbers) there are very few games worth playing now let alone years from now. Cutting that string might sting for a little bit everyone will quickly forget the crappy games on X-Box for X-Box 2 games.
The thing I see burning many X-Box fans is X-Box Live. If you can't take the hardware forward people are forced to buy new X-Box Live for XB2? Not to mention the hardware in general was a very nice thing to make backwards compatible. The arcade stick I had for PS1 works for PS2. XB1 hardware would have to abandoned for XB2.
To each their own. X-Box clearly isn't selling in their proper configuration so changing the system fundementals is probably a good idea. However that also has problems so be set for the bumpy ride.
Sure they could have debugged this on Eart...if they ever saw the need to test fully loading the rover's memory with spaceflight information. The important question is: if this was so obvious to you why aren't you making rovers? Its easy to say "duh!" after the fact isn't it?
There are nearly an infinite number of ways to debug any system (rover, computers, etc.) but sooner or later you have to send it out the door and use it. With a computer you can take it back to the store if it happen to drop it upside down twice and it suddenly stops working (could the store have tested that??). With the rover its a little tricker.
I really hate how people view this bug as a failure where it really was a smashingly successful debug and fix. Clearly its armchair debugging saying "why didn't they test that?" If it was so obvious to you, why weren't you guys banging on NASA's door remind them to check what happens when you operate this thing in that configuration.
So? FreeBSD isn't any more or less vulnerable to erronious claims like SCO leveled at Linux.
An SCO come-lately company can say "We wrote some software, never released the source code to the public yet it somehow got into the BSD core. We demand royalties from anyone who makes money from BSD!!" BSD doesn't give a license to take any code you want, especially code you don't own, to stick into BSD. Neither does GPL. That is a copyright violation which neither license will support.
What SCO is doing has little to do with Linux or the GPL and everything to do with rats trying to weesle money out of companies while draging Open Source through the mud. SCO couldn't create software to compete against Linux or BSD so its suing profitable companies like IBM in an attempt to save themselves. The GPL or BSD offer no more or less protection against these unbased crazy claims.
Maybe I don't understand what your question is about "port whatever flavor of Linux you like to the other camp of BSD" but why? Just to change licenses? The BSD doesn't solve any more issues than GPL when it comes to SCO like behavior. A company can come along and claim that parts of their proprietary software was stolen and place in the FreeBSD core. You'd see all of the same complaints and shouting from the BSD camps wanting to know the exact parts of the offending code and deeply offended about draging everything into the courts.
Recompiling changes nothing. Switching license changes nothing. SCO's complaints are just as weak with either system. In fact isn't SCO flirting with the idea of trying to sue some BSD groups? The BSD teams are in general very supportive of the fight against SCO. Even though philosophies may be different they do regonize how much SCO BS is floating around.
If you have to explain why something is useful to someone then you are probably targeting the wrong audience.
Happy Linux, Mac, Windows, etc. Users don't need to be told why BSD will make them happier. Frankly an author has to take a wild guess what bugs me about my Linux and Windows machine. They might get it formated like this but a general "What does BSD do well" FAQ is better. Mr Fuller might not know that some of the things he thinks are wrong in Linux I've hacked around or are in the end non-issues.
Free software is about enabling people. Linux and BSD and whatever can and should all exist because neither is "right". A Linux user can learn how to use BSD. A BSD can learn how to use Linux. How come? Its because both are open systems. The implication with "helpful documents" like this is that there is a right or wrong choice to be made which I believe is an idea rooted in bad faith.
After all IIS and Apache both comform to HTTP standards yet one is vulnerable to a set of exploits while the other is vulernable to another set of exploits.
Diversity allows for protection and flexibility in some cases. It also makes it harder to work in an intergrated environment. That is the trade off.
Satelites around Earth are some 75k km closer to the Sun than the rover is. The Sun kilowatt power available at Mars is less than at Earth. Space althought frought with its own environmental hazards (vacuum, radition, etc. ) is not the same as even a weak weather system like Mars. Hardening something to be placed in LEO is one thing. Hardening something to be placed on Mars is something else.
It should also be pointed out that this thing is a hellva lot more complex than any run of the mill satelite around Earth. The fact they are getting 3 months and about half a mile is a miracle in my view.
This thing could have been made to last 30 months instead of 3 if it had a RTG onboard assuming the weight trade off is good compared to solar panels. But for one reason or another NASA is squimish about putting RTGs on anything "so close" to the Sun.
This rover is much beefier than the previous rover. They'll get good science out of it assume nothing weird happens. I'm sure they will also squeeze out as much as they can with the operational time they got.
When parallelism is introduced you run the risk of "process inversion". If the system runs high enough all of your execution units are working as fast as the slowest process no matter how fast the execution units can run.
The key to this effect is that the slowest execution unit is taking the most time forcing all other execution to wait on it. Other faster execution units must wait for one reason or another so they all appear to be as slow as the slowest.
In software you can try to soften the blow by bumping up the priority on the slower threads as it crosses any critical sections wtih faster threads. In hardware the beast is a lot different. Doing a pure register calculation is fast. Loading a register from a cache is slower. Incuring a cache miss is even worse. If your system is running fast enough to incur many cache misses then it doesn't matter how fast your register operations or how many CPUs are operating: they will start to appear as if they are all operating like they are missing the cache.
CPUs are plenty fast these days. The future problems all seem to be around I/O. There can be N number of execution cores in your system but if there is only 1 "slow" memory bus then your system is going to be restricted hard. Looking into ways to speed up the memory-CPU bus cheaply would be of great use to any parallel system. Far better than figuring out to cram more faster units into the box.
I was amused to find this in your signature:
Free speech thrives at UNCENSORED! BBS - http://uncensored.citadel.org
So why should we care about Free Speech but not Free Software? Both can and are expressions of thought. Yet one is entirely utilitarian but another is sacred? Both seem secred to me. You can make speech private as well as software too. The important part is you have the choice.
I think RMS is on to something. Too many people overvalue their source. They horde it like a gold ring (My precessssiouss!) when it really isn't that valuable. The software you write today will not survive tomorrow. Code is far more valuable than just to run things. So why bury it behind NDAs and closed systems?
There is also a "higher" level of freedom being missed. It isn't the fact that you can use software that is free: its the fact you have a choice if you want to or not. That is far more important than the free software. The fact that someone or team has made a viable unencumbered piece of software I can chose to use is what makes OSS really special and hopefully the dominate social trend for the next hundred years.
Microsoft enables the user to do this is the problem. So who is the blame? The fool or the one that pushes the fool to do foolish things?
No one on BSD or Linux should be using gaim or any msn look alikes while logged in as a super user. Yet this is normal operating proceedure on XP Home which a majority of "uncontroled" PC have. Its one thing to say "Its your fault for doing something risky with your computer". But I claim "Its MS's fault for allowing them to do it in the first place."
Unix and Unix like systems all put hurdles in the way to stop this kind of maliciousness from happening. MS, a company that is supposed to be sharp and experienced in secure code and behavior, constantly chooses to remove the hurdles. MS wants people to believe that their computer is no more complex than a VCR which is pretty damn far from the truth.
So you will excuse me if I bitch about this and other MS design decisions. I'm not relishing a call from my parents asking why their computer is acting all squirrely.
Many chunks of packet handling code are taken from BSD. Without more solid information the exact linage of this code can not be determined but in general many of the network under pinnings seem to come from BSD.
This is the heart of the problem with SCO. They won't say what code is the problem. Therefore no one knows where it came from. The guts of UnixWare and Linux are complete different so what good is it to copy. You would work more on grafting and gluing things together than just writing it from scratch. The explaination that is more likely is that both UnixWare and Linux IP handling and other things came from BSD.
So here is a challenge to you since you are unwilling to actually name files: Go look at the BSD source tree and do your comparisons there. If the code exists line by line there then SCO has no basis.
So far I'm finding stuff like "...why did RH cripple KDE to be like Gnome?!..." So far it sounds to me like people were miffed that they were touching their prized KDE brand. I haven't found a gtk or gnome project contributor that complained that Gnome was being modified into Bluecurve but that doesn't mean that the complaints don't exist.
With OSS projects, the best thing you can hope for is someone other project picks up the parts and starts modifying. RH along with anyone else can modify the hell out of KDE. If this isn't what KDE wants they need to stop releasing it under the OSS flag.
Once again, I ask why was it such an offense to KDE to modify KDE?
Red Hat's goal with "Bluecurve" is to provide a "user experience" that was indestingushable between Gnome and KDE. To do this you have to throw out all of the K-isms. Its not Konquer or Galeon or Mozilla...its a Web Browser.
I never understood what the issue behind this was. RH took KDE and Gnome and extended it into a blended environment. The Gnome team was fine with that. However the KDE took offense? I don't get it.
Linux and other OSS projects are open by their nature. If someone wants to come along and inspect it they can whether or they have alterior motives or not.
The "O" means "Open" for a good reason. The spirit of OSS is sharing and learning with everyone. This includes Microsoft. If they can learn how to stop making overly complex software that can never seem to quite work from inspecting BSD and Linux then so be it. Linux and BSD have nothing to hide. That sounds like a strength, not a weakness for MS to exploit.
There is no sure thing in security but there is a simple step to make things a bit more reliable for logging.
If you really have a serious system where you want detailed logs you keep the logs for that system off that machine. Sure the machine that is logging could have been comprimized as well but that is twice as much work. Now you have to hack the machine but also the logger to erase the intrusion event.
In fact one of the things I've seen done is that events are logged on the machine and the logger. The idea was to provide not only redundant logging but also provide a front for hackers. A hacker would see the local logs and be too busy doctoring up those logs to check to see if there is an external logger.
In any event, the logging Gentoo did looks complete enough. They claim only 20 users did a sync against the server during the hour it was online and comprized.
The perfect world OSS situation:
1. Many developers see a problem (the itch to scratch).
2. Many developers implement a solution.
3. A miracle happens where the best solution is chosen by users to standardize against.
The problem is that the best for you is not the same for the best for me or them. Every software system is standardized against itself so standarization isn't a problem. The problem is the human condition. You'll never get a group of people to agree what the best solution to a free formed problem could be.
The best example of this is in the good old KDE vs Gnome. You will never get both camps to say that either way is the best approach since both designs offers their own pros and cons. So why should either camp abandon their approach? Besides, standardization won't give them any more than what they have now.
IMHO, this is not a problem. There is little value in having Gnome and KDE merge by standards on things that are clearly not standardizable. A search for "the standard" is not a magic cure all fix. After all everything is standard on Windows yet there are many problems. The best any group of developers can do is make their system as sane yet as compatible with other components as possible. Its the differences that keep groups learning from each other. Why kill that with an empty standarzation process?
Take this movie. Or this TV show.
There are number of movies like speghetti westerns that I've seen that are in Japanese. The grand point is that the Japanese like watching things in Japanese. For some odd reason its bad for Americans to watch things in English? *shrug*
ps. Fansubs are the only way to watch shows? I beg to differ. Of course no one ever thinks about watching it off the air raw. ^_^
Not for a cable channel that wants to target the 18-24 segement anyway. Adult Swim shows are some of the highest rated stuff floating around cable even though they are dubbed. Going sub is a giant risk since the ratings indicate that there are more now more than just Anime fans watching the block of programming.
In Japan they have plenty of US movies and TV shows but are they subtitled? The Japanese like hearing things in their native language which is why its in Japanese in the first place. On this side of the Pacific, the US Anime Industry has advanced pretty far. The quality of scripts have gone up since translators have access to even more material than they used to (including the production staff!!!). The quality of actors has gone up since it has been shown you can make money acting. There really is no reason to ask for a sub unless you really really really want to her you favorite actress. The casual and non-fan viewers are definately not interested in that.
I like raw shows as much as any hardcore fan but people have to realize there are many more people out there than the hardcore otaku fandom. Getting causual and non-fans to sit down and watch subtitled material is hard. Having people watch Robin and SAC is great! Its better than having these shows sit only in Anime fandom obscurity.
What makes you think the "terrorists" don't use Microsoft Windows or write email to each other through their hotmail accounts? Its by far the most common desktop system around so how in the world would a sneaky terrorist avoid using it?
Microsoft "enables" terrorists just as much as anything else. Heck it could be even dirtier since money changed hands but in the end thats silly logic.
One of the great reasons for MS to buy up Virtual PC is that they can now virtualize old environments. I am doing a little hand waving, but why do they need to maintain backwards compatibility if another piece of software can do that for them?
Gaiman makes a great point of Blogs! Instead of going through their agent/publisist releasing a statement "Mr. Gaiman enjoyed working with Terry Prachett" Gaiman can now just fire up his blog and write it there instead. Its more personal since it comes directly from him and it is exactly what he wants to say instead of having his agent/publisist insisting on changing the content.
The problem with comparing art and events from the 20th Century is that they haven't weathered the cruelest judge of all: Time.
Mozart and Shakespeare didn't create in a vacuum. There were other composers, playwrites, and poets running around during their days yet their material not only survives but thrives. It is because their ideas captured a timeless quality. How do you measure that on recent creations?
It seems slightly unfair to say that the world is in decline just because we don't have 12 Shaekspeares turning out hundreds of "MacBeths". It is just too soon to call that judgement. In 100 Years Frank Lloyd Wright might reveared as Leonardo da Vinci.
Devices like phones, PDAs, and (heaven forbid) toasters don't want to talk to NATs: they want to talk to the Internet. NATs represent a layer of transformation that is easy but not absolutely transparent.
Although NAT works for extendable, generic computing platforms, like your desktop, it is cumbersome to have simple devices that want to connect to the Internet have to worry if they are really connected or behind any number of NAT layers. After all how does your cellphone with its own SMTP/Web server tell the NAT (which they there could be any number between it and the Internet) to open a port so it can receive data?
The real answer is the expandsion of the IP pool and intelegent routing found in IPV6.
I don't know anything about French law or what the basis for this could be, but what is the problem with providing ads along with search results? Is it some anti-competitive thing? Google by far has the least intrusive ad scheme for a generic search engine.
More importantly, how will this effect Froogle? A generic search engine provide by Google tuned for finding stuff to buy. How does French law work with this?
I believe the work on the CLR and compiler and associated tools are a good thing. If MS is unwilling to port the runtime environment to other platforms but it seems easy enough to cleanly reverse engineer then by all means it should be done.
.Net widget library and you now run on both Linux and Windows.
However, I always felt the work on the class libraries walks on a bit shakier ground. It isn't so much that the clean room reverse engineering isn't good. I wonder if there is real value to it. Is it better to rewrite System.Web.UI or implement a new compelling set of classes?
My dream is that instead of people seeing Mono as a gateway for MS to get into Linux, I see it as the opposite: great applications being opened to Windows. Take Evolution or Pan or whatever your favorite X application, port it to a