VHS won because JVC's licensing fees to hardware manufacturers were much lower than Sony's. This not only was for the consumer playback equipment, but also for the production systems (dubbers, recorders, cameras, etc).
The ironic thing is that Beta was/is still used in professional (i.e., TV stations, etc) environments, because of its better technical specifications and higher resolution. Compare local TV advertisements on latenight TV. You can tell the ones recorded on VHS vs Sony...
...so it's like the PS2/Xbox thing all over again. PS2 played DVD's out of the box (using one of the controllers as the "remote"). XBox required extra kit (included a remote control at the very least). When I got my PS2 (I pre-ordered it...), there were a couple of 3rd-party PS2 DVD remotes available, so I got one of those, as the Sony DVD remote wasn't in wide supply. Sure, the PS2 as a DVD player kind of sucks (at least the firmware in the PS2 I have gets the voice track out of synch with the lips after about 1/2 hr into a movie, but it does do progressive scan output if you have the component output adapter...), at the time a Progressive Scan DVD player cost too much, so for me the two-birds-with-one-stone rule applied just fine.
Now, if I choose to get one, the PS3 will be able to play HD DVDs, and the XBox3 won't. Smart move, Microsoft...
My fear with Sony's hardware and movie divisions is the conflict of interest when it comes to the RIAA and MPAA.
Now, what if the BitTorrent authors sue HBO under DMCA. In this case, it would appear that HBO has "reverse engineered" BitTorrent to interfere with BitTorrent's actions and circumvent legitimate things in BitTorrent. Hmm...
...but once you've released it in one place, it's out in the wild. Demanding complete control over it is about as meaningless in the end as an author who is miffed by the movie company that completely butchers their works that have been ported to movie (ala Stephen King [several stories], Peter Veerhouven [Starship Troopers], ad nauseum). It's a nice thought in theory, but it falls apart more or less once it gets into the wild.
But it's not your property. If you take it from me without compensation, you've stolen something from me. Just because it doesn't involve physical goods, theft is still theft.
I'll bite. If it's an idea, once the world knows about it, it ain't yours. It is nice that we try to attribute back to the originator of the idea, but it's not property, unless you're making and selling them, too. But, like 99.99999% of all ideas, someone else actually manufactures the idea into a real, plausible item. They (might) pay you a license fee, they may not.
If it was theft, it would be legally defined as theft. Theft involves property, whether real or chattel.
Instead, what you think is "theft" is called various other things: copyright abuse, trademark infringement, etc. You still have your ideas, but someone else has either similarly come up with the idea independently of you or...is reappropriating your idea. For someone to actually steal your idea, they'd need to deprive you of it in a physical sense. Which seems to me to be a targeted zapping of brain neurons, or just a blunt trauma injury to your head (but then you'll have far more problems than remembering your ideas...if you can even think that far ahead).
Just ask Citrix about how nice it is dealing with Microsoft and MS respecting others' ideas.
I'd say that the Tablet PC is just a rehash of MS' Pen code from Win 3.1 days, which is what kind of did in Go, so, no, no innovation there. All the Windows for Pen was a touch-screen API. Palm made the pocket formfactor work. Apple made a go [sic] of the small handwriting recognition notekeeper with the Newton.
MS licensed SMS from NetIQ... MS colicensed SQL Server from Sybase, way back in NT 3.5 days, and eventually forked it about SQL Server version 6.0. CLR? OK, let's allow other languages to "compile" to the JVM, eh, Sun? Let's not even think about the USCD p-code system... SQLCLR? What about Java JRE embedded in Oracle? Exchange? Hmm... Lotus Notes. GroupWise. CHMS (if you have worked in US military hospitals, you know full well about CHMS... but I would posit that it is internally what Exchange wishes it could be. Yes, I know about how shitty everyone who uses it thinks it is...). WinFS? Oracle did this first, InternetFileSystem (iFS). MTS...didn't they kind of steal that idea from IBM? ActiveDirectory is MSified Kerberos. Terminal Services, better ask Citrix how they feel about that one...
for one reckon VS.Net 2005 Team System Oooo...Delphi Enterprise. Hmm... been this way since at least Delphi 5. Remote debugging, too.
& SQL 2005 are gonna kick some serious butt. Nah. People will realize just how stupid it is writing stored procedures in.Net langs, just like most Oracle developers still write PL/SQL code, not Java stored procs. It'll make non SQL Server developers feel slightly more comfortable, but it will make it even easier for DBAs to say, "well, figure it out yourself."
(Ajax support and ongoing ORM systems are gonna be the icing on the cake.) Ruby on Rails.
a lot of the stuff in this software has gotta be their own ideas/solutions
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft would be far better off saying that they're the "BASF" of software development: "We don't come up with the ideas, we just market the hell out of them so you think we did". Of course, we wouldn't have AJAX if some other non-MS brains realized how powerful XmlHTTPRequest actually is...
Sure, some of the guts are actually worthy of respect, even back in Win 9x days (read: "Undocumented Windows 95").
US and EU are about on par. The real balance of power, population-wise, is obviously in China (2+ billion) and India (close to, if not over, 1 billion). At some point, they will want/need to start throwing those numbers around...
I wonder if he means a database-oriented filesystem? There's no real reason to stop there... system and application configuration data in a database would be great.
I think it's a cop out to say that you're just following the U.N. standards.
National Geographic used to do just this on their various maps inserted into the mag. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were shown to be countries, for example, not SSRs. Burma used to be shown as...well...Burma, not Myanmar.
1. Lack of self-explaining software. This isn't restricted to only Linux. How do you expect an accounting application to be "self-explaining"? Sure, QuickBooks is "self-explaining", if you write a lot of checks. As has been shown in the past, computer-based analogies to physical devices or methods works for about 15 seconds (unless you like your Faxmodem driver that pops up a virtual fax machine when you send or receive a fax).
2. Application installation. This is a nasty one. Yes, it could be done better. But since Windows 2000, how many "installer standards" has MS come up with? Can they not make up their minds? Right now, to install.Net 2.0 Beta, I had to install Windows Installer 3.0. ??? Now, if InnoSetup could be ported to Linux, that would be cool.
3. Hardware support. Well, this sounds like a binary driver issue, not a Kernel issue. Right in-line with people who bought printers with their new Windows XP computers, where either the printer driver disk did not have an XP driver (you had to d/l it), the XP driver blue-screened the computer. Even better were those who had just bought printers before they "upgraded" to XP, only to find out that NO driver was ever going to be released for their printer for XP.
4. The community. Setting up a network share? There are more than enough docs on-line that walk through how to do it. In reality, editing a text file like/etc/fstab is FAR, FAR safer than messing around in the Registry. It is really no worse to do 'nano/etc/fstab' than it is to do Start->Run, Notepad c:\windows\system\win.ini ever was. Sure, right-click on a folder, and selecting "Share..." is pretty easy, but remember, you only have 26 drive letters available to use (and at least 3 of them are already allocated).
RegEdit fools you if you think it is a nice graphical editing tool, as do most of the Windows system management tools.
Linux desktops *DO* work. In fact, I'm using LiteStep (with no extensions to it, really) on Win2K right now, because Explorer.exe just sucks too much. I rarely reboot, so I can live with slower Windows startup due to LiteStep.
"Full House" sucked. It's tragicomedy now thinking about it and the 'Olson Twins'. It's right up there with the kids of "Different Strokes", how screwed up Michael Landon's personal life was in contrast to his personna from "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bonanza", and even Bob Rivers' secret life.
Joe Scharf is a civilian contractor working for a three-letter agency, one that isn't published in the Congressional Record. One of his talents is that he's probably the best RPV pilot ever. He was picked when someone noticed him playing "Stargate: Defender" in an obscure mall arcade outside Augusta, GA. Only he was playing it with his eyes closed...for hours.
One of the new things brought on-line recently was that Predators are now armed with Hellfire laser-guided missiles.
His bosses have him "flying" a Predator around some non-descript valley in SW Asia. Word has it that a couple of cars will be coming through the area sometime tonite. The vehicles are supposed to have one of the main IED and bomb vest makers in the region, someone that has Mossad, US, Thai, Indonesian and other police agencies wanting...badly.
Oh, what is this, Joe thinks. It's cars. OK, imagery seems to match descriptions. I have authorization to fire. Oh, wait. They're stopping. Are those kids getting out of the car? Well, screw them. They picked the wrong daddy tonite. Fire-1, Fire-2. Car destroyed. Allah Akbar.
Now, how "responsible" is Joe if it just happened that the cars he blew up were just some random family going to a family clan dinner? What if Joe was told that the bomb maker's handlers essentially created the intelligence in order to create a public relations nightmare? What if someone in the Agencies were actually initiating a coup against the President, or a particular Supreme Court Justice, or whatever, and Joe actually was flying the Predator over central Pennsylvania, and everything about it was a fabricated hoax?
Any parallels to Ender's world and Hitler's Germany were also made about the society in "Starship Troopers" (the book, not the movie).
When I've had too much caffeine, nothing puts me to sleep more than cracking to a random page of a "literary" work, like "The Great Gatsby", "Pride and Prejudice", "Tale of Two Cities", etc.
I'm of the impression that those who like "great literature" also enjoy sitting around listening to the grandfather clock tick...tock...tick...tock...and take great joy when it finally rings its bells, once an hour or so.
My (former) 1991 MR-2T had a recall issued on the steering wheel because it was alleged that it was too stiff. Although it hadn't happened yet, it was feared that in a crash, an unrestrained driver's head could be seriously injured when his head hit the wheel (despite the airbag). It actually hadn't happened at that point.
There are several recalls issued on different cars because of engineering defects that may not have actually manifested themselves at the time of the recall.
Recall costs car makers (and dealers...) lots of $$$.
So, yes, the group probably should have been kept as a class, if the OS were a car...
As far as free software...and suing... It's hard to sue something that has been given away for free. There's that whole contractural obligation, lack of consideration, and the only thing holding it up is the license, which will clearly say, "this software is released as-is, and is not warranted for any use whatsoever". And then throw in, "it's a work-in-progress". Those phrases do have some legal weight to them.
Whereas, car recalls are issued because a handful of people are affected by a material car defect, yet hundreds of thousands of vehicles get subjected to the recall., which are fixed free at dealerships...
Sometimes the recalls are even *proactive*, in other words, someone makes a good case that something *could* happen, but hasn't yet happened, and the problem is averted free of charge to the car owner...
"my hard drive crashed at home, and I lost my work" doesn't fly, either. Nor does "my floppy/CDRW got crunched in my backpack" or any other serveral student "disaster" scenarios.
Of course, the irony is that MS initially deployed the XmlHttpRequest() entity in IE, that AJAX so very much depends on...
In the code for the mail list frame in GMail, is this line (but it doesn't appear to show on the page...):
D(["ft","Use <a href="http://desktop.google.com/" target=_blank style=color:#0000CC><b>Google Desktop</b></a> to access your Gmail messages even when you're offline."]
...so Google probably has figured out the "local document cache" so you can edit locally w/o being hooked up to the net. The only question then is merging changes back on the server when connected back on it...
Look at nuclear energy, for example. It's a powerful source of energy but the same technology is used to make nuclear weapons.
The same theory is used for all three (fission power, fission bombs, fusion bombs), but not the same technology, otherwise wouldn't we have fusion reactors by now? There isn't really any technology in neutron fission chain reaction. Moderating the reaction, well, yes, there is technology there.
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MOO3? You can do better than that... (Galactic Civilizations, for one).
VHS won because JVC's licensing fees to hardware manufacturers were much lower than Sony's. This not only was for the consumer playback equipment, but also for the production systems (dubbers, recorders, cameras, etc).
The ironic thing is that Beta was/is still used in professional (i.e., TV stations, etc) environments, because of its better technical specifications and higher resolution. Compare local TV advertisements on latenight TV. You can tell the ones recorded on VHS vs Sony...
...so it's like the PS2/Xbox thing all over again. PS2 played DVD's out of the box (using one of the controllers as the "remote"). XBox required extra kit (included a remote control at the very least). When I got my PS2 (I pre-ordered it...), there were a couple of 3rd-party PS2 DVD remotes available, so I got one of those, as the Sony DVD remote wasn't in wide supply. Sure, the PS2 as a DVD player kind of sucks (at least the firmware in the PS2 I have gets the voice track out of synch with the lips after about 1/2 hr into a movie, but it does do progressive scan output if you have the component output adapter...), at the time a Progressive Scan DVD player cost too much, so for me the two-birds-with-one-stone rule applied just fine.
Now, if I choose to get one, the PS3 will be able to play HD DVDs, and the XBox3 won't. Smart move, Microsoft...
My fear with Sony's hardware and movie divisions is the conflict of interest when it comes to the RIAA and MPAA.
Now, what if the BitTorrent authors sue HBO under DMCA. In this case, it would appear that HBO has "reverse engineered" BitTorrent to interfere with BitTorrent's actions and circumvent legitimate things in BitTorrent. Hmm...
...but once you've released it in one place, it's out in the wild. Demanding complete control over it is about as meaningless in the end as an author who is miffed by the movie company that completely butchers their works that have been ported to movie (ala Stephen King [several stories], Peter Veerhouven [Starship Troopers], ad nauseum). It's a nice thought in theory, but it falls apart more or less once it gets into the wild.
But it's not your property. If you take it from me without compensation, you've stolen something from me. Just because it doesn't involve physical goods, theft is still theft.
I'll bite. If it's an idea, once the world knows about it, it ain't yours. It is nice that we try to attribute back to the originator of the idea, but it's not property, unless you're making and selling them, too. But, like 99.99999% of all ideas, someone else actually manufactures the idea into a real, plausible item. They (might) pay you a license fee, they may not.
If it was theft, it would be legally defined as theft. Theft involves property, whether real or chattel.
Instead, what you think is "theft" is called various other things: copyright abuse, trademark infringement, etc. You still have your ideas, but someone else has either similarly come up with the idea independently of you or...is reappropriating your idea. For someone to actually steal your idea, they'd need to deprive you of it in a physical sense. Which seems to me to be a targeted zapping of brain neurons, or just a blunt trauma injury to your head (but then you'll have far more problems than remembering your ideas...if you can even think that far ahead).
Just ask Citrix about how nice it is dealing with Microsoft and MS respecting others' ideas.
I'd say that the Tablet PC is just a rehash of MS' Pen code from Win 3.1 days, which is what kind of did in Go, so, no, no innovation there. All the Windows for Pen was a touch-screen API. Palm made the pocket formfactor work. Apple made a go [sic] of the small handwriting recognition notekeeper with the Newton.
MS licensed SMS from NetIQ...
.Net langs, just like most Oracle developers still write PL/SQL code, not Java stored procs. It'll make non SQL Server developers feel slightly more comfortable, but it will make it even easier for DBAs to say, "well, figure it out yourself."
MS colicensed SQL Server from Sybase, way back in NT 3.5 days, and eventually forked it about SQL Server version 6.0.
CLR? OK, let's allow other languages to "compile" to the JVM, eh, Sun? Let's not even think about the USCD p-code system...
SQLCLR? What about Java JRE embedded in Oracle?
Exchange? Hmm... Lotus Notes. GroupWise. CHMS (if you have worked in US military hospitals, you know full well about CHMS... but I would posit that it is internally what Exchange wishes it could be. Yes, I know about how shitty everyone who uses it thinks it is...).
WinFS? Oracle did this first, InternetFileSystem (iFS).
MTS...didn't they kind of steal that idea from IBM?
ActiveDirectory is MSified Kerberos.
Terminal Services, better ask Citrix how they feel about that one...
for one reckon VS.Net 2005 Team System Oooo...Delphi Enterprise. Hmm... been this way since at least Delphi 5. Remote debugging, too.
& SQL 2005 are gonna kick some serious butt. Nah. People will realize just how stupid it is writing stored procedures in
(Ajax support and ongoing ORM systems are gonna be the icing on the cake.) Ruby on Rails.
a lot of the stuff in this software has gotta be their own ideas/solutions
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft would be far better off saying that they're the "BASF" of software development: "We don't come up with the ideas, we just market the hell out of them so you think we did". Of course, we wouldn't have AJAX if some other non-MS brains realized how powerful XmlHTTPRequest actually is...
Sure, some of the guts are actually worthy of respect, even back in Win 9x days (read: "Undocumented Windows 95").
It's like selling bibles in bagdad. ...yet, it doesn't stop the sand-pounders that are evangelicals and other Christian proselytizers.
The World Wide Web, for instance, was a European creation.
Yes, it's a protocol, that runs on the Internet.
US and EU are about on par. The real balance of power, population-wise, is obviously in China (2+ billion) and India (close to, if not over, 1 billion). At some point, they will want/need to start throwing those numbers around...
I wonder if he means a database-oriented filesystem? There's no real reason to stop there... system and application configuration data in a database would be great.
Yeah. Like Windows' Registry?
You mean, like Norm Chomsky and US-international politics?
Or, more like Jane Fonda or Charley Sheen (or even the Dixie Chicks)?
I think it's a cop out to say that you're just following the U.N. standards.
National Geographic used to do just this on their various maps inserted into the mag. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were shown to be countries, for example, not SSRs. Burma used to be shown as...well...Burma, not Myanmar.
Maybe they still do, too.
1. Lack of self-explaining software.
.Net 2.0 Beta, I had to install Windows Installer 3.0. ??? Now, if InnoSetup could be ported to Linux, that would be cool.
/etc/fstab is FAR, FAR safer than messing around in the Registry. It is really no worse to do 'nano /etc/fstab' than it is to do Start->Run, Notepad c:\windows\system\win.ini ever was. Sure, right-click on a folder, and selecting "Share..." is pretty easy, but remember, you only have 26 drive letters available to use (and at least 3 of them are already allocated).
This isn't restricted to only Linux. How do you expect an accounting application to be "self-explaining"? Sure, QuickBooks is "self-explaining", if you write a lot of checks. As has been shown in the past, computer-based analogies to physical devices or methods works for about 15 seconds (unless you like your Faxmodem driver that pops up a virtual fax machine when you send or receive a fax).
2. Application installation. This is a nasty one.
Yes, it could be done better. But since Windows 2000, how many "installer standards" has MS come up with? Can they not make up their minds? Right now, to install
3. Hardware support.
Well, this sounds like a binary driver issue, not a Kernel issue. Right in-line with people who bought printers with their new Windows XP computers, where either the printer driver disk did not have an XP driver (you had to d/l it), the XP driver blue-screened the computer. Even better were those who had just bought printers before they "upgraded" to XP, only to find out that NO driver was ever going to be released for their printer for XP.
4. The community.
Setting up a network share? There are more than enough docs on-line that walk through how to do it. In reality, editing a text file like
RegEdit fools you if you think it is a nice graphical editing tool, as do most of the Windows system management tools.
Linux desktops *DO* work. In fact, I'm using LiteStep (with no extensions to it, really) on Win2K right now, because Explorer.exe just sucks too much. I rarely reboot, so I can live with slower Windows startup due to LiteStep.
"Full House" sucked. It's tragicomedy now thinking about it and the 'Olson Twins'. It's right up there with the kids of "Different Strokes", how screwed up Michael Landon's personal life was in contrast to his personna from "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bonanza", and even Bob Rivers' secret life.
Joe Scharf is a civilian contractor working for a three-letter agency, one that isn't published in the Congressional Record. One of his talents is that he's probably the best RPV pilot ever. He was picked when someone noticed him playing "Stargate: Defender" in an obscure mall arcade outside Augusta, GA. Only he was playing it with his eyes closed...for hours.
One of the new things brought on-line recently was that Predators are now armed with Hellfire laser-guided missiles.
His bosses have him "flying" a Predator around some non-descript valley in SW Asia. Word has it that a couple of cars will be coming through the area sometime tonite. The vehicles are supposed to have one of the main IED and bomb vest makers in the region, someone that has Mossad, US, Thai, Indonesian and other police agencies wanting...badly.
Oh, what is this, Joe thinks. It's cars. OK, imagery seems to match descriptions. I have authorization to fire. Oh, wait. They're stopping. Are those kids getting out of the car? Well, screw them. They picked the wrong daddy tonite. Fire-1, Fire-2. Car destroyed. Allah Akbar.
Now, how "responsible" is Joe if it just happened that the cars he blew up were just some random family going to a family clan dinner? What if Joe was told that the bomb maker's handlers essentially created the intelligence in order to create a public relations nightmare? What if someone in the Agencies were actually initiating a coup against the President, or a particular Supreme Court Justice, or whatever, and Joe actually was flying the Predator over central Pennsylvania, and everything about it was a fabricated hoax?
Any parallels to Ender's world and Hitler's Germany were also made about the society in "Starship Troopers" (the book, not the movie).
When will someone make a "Bolo" movie?
When I've had too much caffeine, nothing puts me to sleep more than cracking to a random page of a "literary" work, like "The Great Gatsby", "Pride and Prejudice", "Tale of Two Cities", etc.
I'm of the impression that those who like "great literature" also enjoy sitting around listening to the grandfather clock tick...tock...tick...tock...and take great joy when it finally rings its bells, once an hour or so.
ow many companies are going to allow any data of any sort outside their environment? Not going to happen.
And yet... how many laptops go on business trips daily, loaded with all sorts of valuable, strategic and important corporate information?
I wonder what Qualcomm lost when its President's laptop was swiped off of a lecture dais...
I will posit that 99% of MS Office users would be just as good off with Works, "home" or "corporate".
Why?
Well, do you even know what a "style" in MS Word, or even better, Excel, is/does?
Funny, though, here's a different case.
My (former) 1991 MR-2T had a recall issued on the steering wheel because it was alleged that it was too stiff. Although it hadn't happened yet, it was feared that in a crash, an unrestrained driver's head could be seriously injured when his head hit the wheel (despite the airbag). It actually hadn't happened at that point.
There are several recalls issued on different cars because of engineering defects that may not have actually manifested themselves at the time of the recall.
Recall costs car makers (and dealers...) lots of $$$.
So, yes, the group probably should have been kept as a class, if the OS were a car...
As far as free software...and suing... It's hard to sue something that has been given away for free. There's that whole contractural obligation, lack of consideration, and the only thing holding it up is the license, which will clearly say, "this software is released as-is, and is not warranted for any use whatsoever". And then throw in, "it's a work-in-progress". Those phrases do have some legal weight to them.
Whereas, car recalls are issued because a handful of people are affected by a material car defect, yet hundreds of thousands of vehicles get subjected to the recall., which are fixed free at dealerships...
Sometimes the recalls are even *proactive*, in other words, someone makes a good case that something *could* happen, but hasn't yet happened, and the problem is averted free of charge to the car owner...
Yes. "Cream and Bastards Rise" and "Little Round Mirrors" are good songs.
5-P's: Poor Planning Prevents Proper Performance.
"my hard drive crashed at home, and I lost my work" doesn't fly, either. Nor does "my floppy/CDRW got crunched in my backpack" or any other serveral student "disaster" scenarios.
Of course, the irony is that MS initially deployed the XmlHttpRequest() entity in IE, that AJAX so very much depends on...
...so Google probably has figured out the "local document cache" so you can edit locally w/o being hooked up to the net. The only question then is merging changes back on the server when connected back on it...
In the code for the mail list frame in GMail, is this line (but it doesn't appear to show on the page...):
D(["ft","Use <a href="http://desktop.google.com/" target=_blank style=color:#0000CC><b>Google Desktop</b></a> to access your Gmail messages even when you're offline."]
Look at nuclear energy, for example. It's a powerful source of energy but the same technology is used to make nuclear weapons.
The same theory is used for all three (fission power, fission bombs, fusion bombs), but not the same technology, otherwise wouldn't we have fusion reactors by now? There isn't really any technology in neutron fission chain reaction. Moderating the reaction, well, yes, there is technology there.