These guys have been making a lot of funny press releases lately, like being involved with the claim that China was proclaiming Linux the "Official OS of China" or their more recent one where they claim to have the patent on any technology that allows remote display of Windows apps on UNIX-like systems.
One can't quite help but suspect these guys might be trying to ride some of the current publicity around Linux, especially that generated by Comdex.
I'd personally wait until Corel makes some sort of announcement themselves before taking this one from GraphOn with anything but a large grain of salt.
So what if they had an auction where Microsoft would get the proceeds from the auction so as to avoid any sort of implication of governmental seizure of property and the however many competing companies who were allowed to bid on it had all mutually agreed that nobody would bid more than $100 just so Microsoft would get screwed and still lose the source code.
Hopefully this will compile under BSD with no- or little modification.
No, it won't. One of the things holding up Blackdown's JDK 1.2 release has been getting Linux' kernel threads into a state that the JDK can deal with. (And incidentally the work on kernel threads is also why Mozilla works best on glibc 2.1 machines and not so well on glibc 2.0 machines...)
BSD's kernel threading mechanism is not at all like Linux's. Not to mention there are many other kernel dependencies in the JDK that needed to be ported to the Linux OS specifically that would bear no resemblance to BSD syscalls.
If porting the JDK were that easy, Blackdown would have just taken Sun's Solaris JDK source (which you can easily get, even if the license sucks) and "typed make and it would have worked."
There are a lot of OS/libc/kernel dependencies inside the JDK that need to be ported specifically to the system. Fortunately, from what little has leaked out of the black box around Blackdown, this little fiasco getting the JDK ported over to Linux has made the JDK code somewhat less platform-dependent.
Can anyone shed some more light on what these guys actually make and why it would be winning some sort of "Best Linux Product" award? At least by what I can find on their website, the only products I can d/l from them require RealPlayer G2 and MSIE, the latter of which not seeming too Linux-friendly to me...
Here is some great info about the Leonids that I've found from the American Meteor Society. The site also has info on all the other metoric events throughout the year.
But doesn't that paragraph imply that Konqueror couldn't be folded into Mozilla, and not vice-versa? If the MPL really means "this is freely available software" then the layout engine should be able to be embedded into other code with little restriction.
It's something of a hassle to get set up (there are a few software dependencies that you might have to get working first) but once it's going, it's unbelievable. It does stuff like real-time text-to-speech that lets you decide to either have the software "speak" the text directly or write it out as a sound file, "pluggable" voice databases so you can plug in your own phoneme samples that the software will speak with, a scheme-based scripting language and all kinds of other nifty things. Oh yeah, and it is distributed under an X11-style license.
It does a remarkably good job of figuring out how to pronounce words. It's obviously computer-generated, but nonetheless very understandable. The pluggable voice databases is possibly the coolest part, but I've not yet put the effort into figuring out how difficult a new database would be to create/set up.
I think somewhere out there is even a Festival script that gets and speaks the latest/. headlines. Now if only we could get a CmdrTaco voice database for it....
Microsoft got into this mess because they ignored the previous ruling against them and the subsequent orders to stop playing nasty. Why does the gov't think they'll have any more luck this time around? Why shouldn't Microsoft simply continue to thumb their collective noses at anyone and everyone that tries to control how they do business and just ignore any orders the gov't might give them? In a worst case situation, what's to stop Microsoft from simply jumping across the border and moving HQ to Vancouver where presumably they would be out of reach of U.S. antitrust laws? In other words, what can the gov't really do to Microsoft to make sure that whatever they get pasted with this time will stick?
I can't think of too many products the Linux community has been looking forward to getting their hands on. I sure hope Corel has stocked up on some extra bandwidth for this release!
Since it's based on Debian, what's the story on mirroring the distro? Is Corel going to want to keep it locked down so that you can only get the "Official" Corel Linux distro from Corel? It makes sense, but I can only imagine what not having a good set of mirrors in place will do to their bandwidth utilization...
If you read down on their "what we are" page, they talk about accepting advertising on their pages and giving teams the opportunity to win prizes acquired through advertising revenue.
Now, perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but sounds too much like a great opportunity for data mining to me. Especially when you consider that a) you will have to register some user information so they can track your computational contribution and that information will of course be attached to all data the client sends back and b) you're never going to see the source code for the client, and since you're probably going to be sending back blocks of funky not-really-decrypted text, sniffing the datastream isn't guaranteed to root out any other information they might have coded up and embedded in that data.
I don't know who these people are, but the fact that they're offering for-pay advertising at the very beginning of the project just doesn't bode well. They might have good intentions, but how far will those last when some advertiser offers a check with lots of zeros in exchange not just for banner space but also for the list of usernames/emails of the people running their client?
If a project is going to ask for information about me, as any distributed computation project is almost certainly going to want to, then they just need to stay out of the whole Advertising for Dollars game, especially in the digital world where it's so hard to see what exactly they're doing with your data.
I guess I gotta ask the required question: "Will you be able to access it from Linux?" Since it *only* contains USB, that's a good question. I hope Compaq "does the Right Thing" and realizes the huge number of mp3 fans on the market who are also Linux fans and at least releases specs, if not an actual API or something.
Now I have to decide between buying one of these things or an empeg! The Empeg is cooler, but this PJbox thing is almost certainly going to be cheaper. (At least, it had better be! If Compaq/whoever is going to try to market a piece of pocket-sized consumer electronics for more than about $300, I imagine they'll have a really tough time moving them off the shelves.)
I suppose I'm just going to have to put in some overtime and get both...
It's difficult though isn't it - you go into a shop - is it the business of that shop to find out what you buy? Is it their business which route you take around it? Is it their business if they can change their shop by looking at how people go around shops in general?
That's a very good analogy, and I think to extend it to the online world, imagine that when you went into any shop, there was a representative from "Bubblekick" who snapped a little GPS-like transciever onto your belt which would send signals to the special "Bubblekick" receiver in this store and recorded how you walked around the store and what products you picked up and looked at.
BUT, you don't get asked if you want to wear the transciever, it simply gets strapped onto you *unless* you go through some kind of annoying processes to let them know you DON'T want it.
Worse yet, it seems that more and more, that "Bubblekick" rep is in EVERY store you go in and now you have to tell the guy for EVERY store you walk into that you don't want to have their stupid little adapter stuck to you if you don't already have one on your belt.
And then, as if that weren't bad enough, you find out that, even though your favorite store has this "Bubblekick" guy standing by the front door ready to track your movements, your store owner doesn't directly get that data at all - it all gets downloaded directly to "Bubblekick" HQ along with all the "Bubblekick" data from every other store (which includes the "Global ID" for your particular "Bubblekick" box) - and the owner of your favorite store has to request to have the data for his/her store sent back so they can make some use of it.
Meanwhile, the "Bubblekick" guys have all the data you have collected for them for EVERY store you've been into and are busy trying to sell it to stores like that place down the street that you don't like because the guy behind the counter is a jerk. So even though you won't give him your business, he's getting a benefit from your own shopping experience, and "Bubblekick" is making a profit from incliuding your shopping experience in the profiles they are selling - all without your permission.
It sounds a lot worse if you take your analogy and translate it into Real Life... People just don't see the invasiveness when it's all done digitally.
Maybe you'd like their shop more if they did look and acted upon it.
It would be more acceptible (and these all semm plainly obvious if you look at them in context of "Real Life" shopping) if:
A) *NOT* having that transceiver strapped onto me was the "default action" taken by the "Bubblekick" representative,
B) I could say that only my favorite store received the data gathered by my browsing there - and that means "Bubblekick" DOES NOT get even a single bit of the data collected at that store- because yes, having a good personal relationship with little "Mom-n-Pop" type stores is a good thing in this world of Megamarts and Supermalls,
C) I had some kind of recourse to tell the "Bubblekick" guy, "You know, I've been thinking, I don't like that you have my shopping experiences recorded. Delete anything related to my profile. Here's the number on that little box, which you have fortunately made very easy for me to find so I can easily have you delete all my profile information."
It's just a shame that it looks like we have to resort to legislation to enforce what in "Real Life" would be simple courtesy, simply because companies think (or know) they can get away with a lot more when it's all just happening over the wire.
To repeat: this is not an "openness" issue. Peer review wouldn't have resulted in better functionality.
Of course it would have. Someone would have said, "That won't work. You see, once someone gets a single key, which they will be able to do if they disassemble or just pay attention to what a software decoder does, the whole thing goes ka-blooey."
I think what we need is a plugin-centric browser... one with a basic display engine that knows how to draw/display stuff, but doesn't come with any specific information. Then plugins with that information -- plugins that can be updated on the fly, or replaced when needed -- are added, and voia! Superbrowser!
And of course 99% of those plugins will all be distributed as.DLLs written with Microsoft Visual Studio. No source, either, because this is proprietary technology, you see.
Oh, you can't use.DLLs on your platform. Oh well, I guess you can't view our new proprietary content. Sorry.
No, we don't need a browser that is plug-in based, we have those and they obviously only work if you own the OS platform and browser that uses them as well. What we need are sites that conform to STANDARDS.
Unfortunately that will never happen.
I don't think the "war" will ever be over. There will ALWAYS be a company somewhere perverting the standards for their own benefit. If they can convince enough of their users that the advantages of doing something that will never work anywhere enough outweights the drawbacks, it will catch on and you're right back at square one.
There will ALWAYS be more people willing to go for "Cheap, easy and the WRONG thing to do" than "Less cheap, less easy, but the RIGHT thing to do." People are lazy.
The point is that in the business world, someone always has to be accountable..... It's the reassurance that there's someone to blame when all hell breaks loose..... And that's what they're doing now -- blaming the hackers who broke the code.
Right, instead of blaming themselves for developing such a lousy encryption scheme and not putting it ou for public comment to find out if it's lousy or not, they're saying, "We designed a lousy encryption scheme and kept it private but now these people have disclosed that it was a lousy encryption scheme therefore we must sue them rather than take the blame."
That whole "accountability" thing is a sham in the industry. No corporation, whether you want to talk about Sony, Microsoft, IBM, Ford, probably not even RedHat now that they have stockholders to be responsible to, nobody will take responsbility for doing something stupid or "wrong" if they can instead sue some poor schmoe in attempt to pass the buck.
Once the jinni gets out of the bottle, it's damned hard to get it back in. Lawsuits might harass individuals, but it won't stop the momentum.
The only way I can see this thing being stopped is for a "DVD2" to come out and for "the industry" to obsolete all DVD currently on the market, and if that happened, I'd bet the consumers would raise bloody hell over it. ESPECIALLY considering how long everyone waited to get the freaking DVD standard in the first place.
I'm pretty sure it's all been on Digital UNIX running on some hefty Alphaservers. At least according to an interview with Jeff Bezos I read in an "Oracle Magazine" article a couple years ago that's what they were using then. It'd be pretty silly to migrate onto something else as long as it's all working for them, which it seems to have been.
Why does this interview (which I enjoyed very much, thank you) remind me of that Monty Python episode.... everything gets all wavy and misty, this is obviously an imaginative day-dream sequence.
In recognition of Her loyal subject's being interviewed on Slashdot, Her Royal Highness the Queen has decided to surf the 'web today. If she should show up here in Slashdot, we would like to request that all our readers please stand out of respect for HRH. You will be notified when she is visiting.
{a few minutes later}
We understand that HRH is currently reading something on C|Net. More information when we have it.
{A couple minutes later, a MIDI of God Save The Queen begins to play, then is cut off quickly}
We thought for a moment that she was going to click on a link Slashdot, but she decided to read NTKNow first.
{A couple minutes later, the MIDI starts to play again and a little Javascript "Alert" box pops up to all/. readers saying:}
We understand that HRH Queen Elizabeth II is now reading articles on Slashdot. If you would please stand to show your respect.
.... and all across the world, random geeks in offices, cubicles, living rooms, and dens stand up, looking a bit embarrassed and uncomfortable because everyone's looking at them as they stand at attention with a tinny little MIDI coming from their computer.
Everything gets all wavy and misty again, indicating the end of the day-dream sequence.
Just slap three really nice video cards in your PC grab three of a really nice brand of "standard" LCD monitor on the market, like IBM's or Viewsonic's, put them all right next to each other (look for a brand of LCD monitor with a very slim edge around the viewable display to maximize screen display and minimize the clutter between screens) and use new new XFree86 beta with its panoramic multi-head support thingie (I forget what it's called) and get pretty much the same results.
Let's say really nice video cards are $200/ea and really nice LCD monitors are $1200/ea, that puts you at $4000 even to do virtually the same thing this $27,000 mostrosity costs. The only difference being that you'll have three seperate pieces of monitor instead of one.
That actually looks pretty much like what these guys did except they have a custom case they put the three seperate monitors into and built a custom connector so that you only have to plug one cable into your PC instead of three.
If you're any good at hardware, I bet you could even take your LCD monitors out of the plastic cases and come up with some way to mount them so they would be literally right next to each other and do it for a lot less than the $23,000 difference in price between buying one of these and making one....
Dungeon Keeper (1|2) - I can't play them enough. "Evil is Good". I think DK2 might be my favorite game ever.
Simcity (1|2|3000) - I just love those Maxis games. I heard at one point that SC3K was supposed to be ported to BeOS but I've yet to actually see it.
Diablo - It's just a simple click-n-shoot but so danged addictive! I'd really love to see Diablo II come out on Linux when it's released, but I'm not going to hold my breath for it.
What I *am* holding by breath for is Neverwinter Nights. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my chin from thinking about this game. I just hope they can pull it off.
Anyone know if there is a site anywhere that has some sort of "Nominate and vote for your favorite game that you'd like to see ported to Linux" type poll? I'd be willing to set something like this up if there isn't one someplace already.
It would also be really nice if some of these game companies would follow ID's lead and a couple/few years after the games are released (like about the time you start seeing the boxes in the "Bargain bin" at your local software store for $4.99) they would release the source code under some kind of relatively non-restrictive license. (doesn't have to be GPL, but it should be enough that someone else could take the code and work on ports to other platforms and redistribute at least as patches.) I still play the original Dungeon Keeper occasionally; I'd love to be able to play it on Linux.
I've had to maintain Perl-written CGI and whenever I have to do so, I usually wish that Larry Wall had been hit by a truck before he could have come up with the idea for Perl...
Not that I have anything against Larry, but his TMTOWTDI (There's More Than One Way To Do It) philosophy has made it way too easy for people to write really awful spaghetti code in Perl. Much more easily than in any other language. In Perl, precisely because of TMTOWTDI, you can have four scripts that do exactly the same thing and look completely different! ARGH!
And that is the "danger" of using Perl for CGI, and this is the situation I think the "web programming" industry is in - everyone and their grandmother can pick up a "Perl for Dummies" at the local bookstore and, without any concept of "proper programming practices" (i.e. don't write spaghetti code, try to comment at least what's not immediately obvious, stay structured so you can make changes easier) can start banging out CGI code and since Perl will take just about anything, nobody knows the crap that's running until it comes time for that burger-flipper to leave this job and move on to the next.
I've been given Perl CGIs to try to figure out why they're breaking that are 100's of K in size and 1000's of lines of Perl code and took 10's of megs of core and way too much time to execute. When they were written, the author literally cut-and-pasted from any source that looked vaguely like it would do something like what they wanted their script to do and just left all the extra cruft in and kept just appending to the existing code any time they modified the scripts with thousands of lines of code doing calulations the results of which were just being overwritten by later lines of code. Perl being Perl didn't care, but when it came time for someone else to figure out what the damned thing was doing - forget about it.
Yes, I occasionally write stuff in Perl, but I don't use any of the funky streamlined grammatical constructs that make the code horrendous to try to read through if you go back and have to maintain it, which also means that I don't usually gain a whole lot by writing my code in Perl except that I can be sloppy and it doesn't care, which IMHO is A Bad Thing. If possible, I will rewrite the thing in C or as a Java servlet, which just makes it much easier to maintain since there's ONLY ONE way to do it in those languages and you have to do it THAT WAY; when you see a statement in C or Java, you can figure out what it means and it can only mean one thing. Not like Perl... *shudder*
Personally I think Perl should be considered a "non-rewriteable" language; kind of the programming equivalent to a CD-R. Once the program is out there and has been running unmaintained for a while, don't even think about modifying it! If you need to do something else, write a new program because it'll probably be faster than trying to figure out what you did with the old program, and will almost certainly be faster than trying to find out what someone else has done in their Perl program.
In small shops where a piece of code might have to be banged out for something quick-and-dirty and never looked at again, do it with Perl. If you're going to try to write something that will need to be maintained and changed and worked on by many people, you either have to make sure those people are going to be VERY CAREFUL and VERY RESTRAINED in their programmin, or just don't even do it with Perl - it will quickly become unmaintainable.
This industry is the best. Especially in this country.
Oh, you found out we've been scanning your hard drive and sending data on what music you listen to and what kind of files you have on your system without telling you we would be? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out we're using your personal registration information to build mailing lists that we sell to SPAM and junk snail-mail companies without telling you we would be? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out we've been embedding serial numbers in every document you create so we can track them as they travel across the computer systems of the world and we never let you know about it? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out that we've purposely left back-doors into our security products so that gov't agents can come in and look at what you're doing any time they'd like? Well, we deny it therefore it never happened! All better!
You'd think someone would actually get outraged enough to take some sort of counter-action at all this stupidity. I guess the sheep^H^H^H^H^H citizens of this country are so used to our government doing it that corporations can get away with it with nothing more than an apology and the statement that they'll "stop doing it" which of course, we must all believe is sincere since they were invading our privacy without telling us to begin with.
This might actually be a good thing for patent reform. Think about it:
It's barely two months before "Y2K" and it's certain that thousands of consultants are scrambling around computer systems all over this country trying to fix "Y2K bugs." Some of those consultants are working for the Federal Government. Some of those consultants working for the Gov't are using this "Windowing" technique to fix the bugs. McDonnel-Douglass is going to want to sue these consultants and/or the federal government for violating their patent, causing those consultants to have to re-do all their work with some other method...
...less than two months before "Y2K".
Can you say "National Security"? Can you see the federal government using its pull to invalidate this patent pretty f-ing quickly so it doesn't have to scrap everything they've been working on for the last couple of years?
This really could be a good thing. Of course, what will likely happen is that only this one patent will get overturned and the rest of the patent system will continue to be screwed up and useless just like it has been.
I'm kind of surprised that nobody has taken the tack that, as stated in the Contitution, the whole concept of "patents" and the "patent office" comes from the phrase, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" and that it seems pretty obvious that the patent system, as exists, no longer promotes Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Someone brave should just sue the patent office as it exists as being unconstitutional and use as evidence the huge number of patent lawsuits and the ways these massive technology corporations now keep "patent portfolios" not to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" but to use as essentially blackmail to keep other companies from suing them, or as in this case with McDonnel-Douglass, to threaten every computer-reliant corporation in the country with lawsuits for doing what's essentially government mandated work to update their computer systems. It might work.
Slashdot Mirror
One can't quite help but suspect these guys might be trying to ride some of the current publicity around Linux, especially that generated by Comdex.
I'd personally wait until Corel makes some sort of announcement themselves before taking this one from GraphOn with anything but a large grain of salt.
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Could this happen?
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No, it won't. One of the things holding up Blackdown's JDK 1.2 release has been getting Linux' kernel threads into a state that the JDK can deal with. (And incidentally the work on kernel threads is also why Mozilla works best on glibc 2.1 machines and not so well on glibc 2.0 machines...)
BSD's kernel threading mechanism is not at all like Linux's. Not to mention there are many other kernel dependencies in the JDK that needed to be ported to the Linux OS specifically that would bear no resemblance to BSD syscalls.
If porting the JDK were that easy, Blackdown would have just taken Sun's Solaris JDK source (which you can easily get, even if the license sucks) and "typed make and it would have worked."
There are a lot of OS/libc/kernel dependencies inside the JDK that need to be ported specifically to the system. Fortunately, from what little has leaked out of the black box around Blackdown, this little fiasco getting the JDK ported over to Linux has made the JDK code somewhat less platform-dependent.
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Festival
It's something of a hassle to get set up (there are a few software dependencies that you might have to get working first) but once it's going, it's unbelievable. It does stuff like real-time text-to-speech that lets you decide to either have the software "speak" the text directly or write it out as a sound file, "pluggable" voice databases so you can plug in your own phoneme samples that the software will speak with, a scheme-based scripting language and all kinds of other nifty things. Oh yeah, and it is distributed under an X11-style license.
It does a remarkably good job of figuring out how to pronounce words. It's obviously computer-generated, but nonetheless very understandable. The pluggable voice databases is possibly the coolest part, but I've not yet put the effort into figuring out how difficult a new database would be to create/set up.
I think somewhere out there is even a Festival script that gets and speaks the latest
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Since it's based on Debian, what's the story on mirroring the distro? Is Corel going to want to keep it locked down so that you can only get the "Official" Corel Linux distro from Corel? It makes sense, but I can only imagine what not having a good set of mirrors in place will do to their bandwidth utilization...
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Now, perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but sounds too much like a great opportunity for data mining to me. Especially when you consider that a) you will have to register some user information so they can track your computational contribution and that information will of course be attached to all data the client sends back and b) you're never going to see the source code for the client, and since you're probably going to be sending back blocks of funky not-really-decrypted text, sniffing the datastream isn't guaranteed to root out any other information they might have coded up and embedded in that data.
I don't know who these people are, but the fact that they're offering for-pay advertising at the very beginning of the project just doesn't bode well. They might have good intentions, but how far will those last when some advertiser offers a check with lots of zeros in exchange not just for banner space but also for the list of usernames/emails of the people running their client?
If a project is going to ask for information about me, as any distributed computation project is almost certainly going to want to, then they just need to stay out of the whole Advertising for Dollars game, especially in the digital world where it's so hard to see what exactly they're doing with your data.
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I suppose I'm just going to have to put in some overtime and get both...
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That's a very good analogy, and I think to extend it to the online world, imagine that when you went into any shop, there was a representative from "Bubblekick" who snapped a little GPS-like transciever onto your belt which would send signals to the special "Bubblekick" receiver in this store and recorded how you walked around the store and what products you picked up and looked at.
BUT, you don't get asked if you want to wear the transciever, it simply gets strapped onto you *unless* you go through some kind of annoying processes to let them know you DON'T want it.
Worse yet, it seems that more and more, that "Bubblekick" rep is in EVERY store you go in and now you have to tell the guy for EVERY store you walk into that you don't want to have their stupid little adapter stuck to you if you don't already have one on your belt.
And then, as if that weren't bad enough, you find out that, even though your favorite store has this "Bubblekick" guy standing by the front door ready to track your movements, your store owner doesn't directly get that data at all - it all gets downloaded directly to "Bubblekick" HQ along with all the "Bubblekick" data from every other store (which includes the "Global ID" for your particular "Bubblekick" box) - and the owner of your favorite store has to request to have the data for his/her store sent back so they can make some use of it.
Meanwhile, the "Bubblekick" guys have all the data you have collected for them for EVERY store you've been into and are busy trying to sell it to stores like that place down the street that you don't like because the guy behind the counter is a jerk. So even though you won't give him your business, he's getting a benefit from your own shopping experience, and "Bubblekick" is making a profit from incliuding your shopping experience in the profiles they are selling - all without your permission.
It sounds a lot worse if you take your analogy and translate it into Real Life... People just don't see the invasiveness when it's all done digitally.
Maybe you'd like their shop more if they did look and acted upon it.
It would be more acceptible (and these all semm plainly obvious if you look at them in context of "Real Life" shopping) if:
A) *NOT* having that transceiver strapped onto me was the "default action" taken by the "Bubblekick" representative,
B) I could say that only my favorite store received the data gathered by my browsing there - and that means "Bubblekick" DOES NOT get even a single bit of the data collected at that store- because yes, having a good personal relationship with little "Mom-n-Pop" type stores is a good thing in this world of Megamarts and Supermalls,
C) I had some kind of recourse to tell the "Bubblekick" guy, "You know, I've been thinking, I don't like that you have my shopping experiences recorded. Delete anything related to my profile. Here's the number on that little box, which you have fortunately made very easy for me to find so I can easily have you delete all my profile information."
It's just a shame that it looks like we have to resort to legislation to enforce what in "Real Life" would be simple courtesy, simply because companies think (or know) they can get away with a lot more when it's all just happening over the wire.
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Of course it would have. Someone would have said, "That won't work. You see, once someone gets a single key, which they will be able to do if they disassemble or just pay attention to what a software decoder does, the whole thing goes ka-blooey."
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And of course 99% of those plugins will all be distributed as
Oh, you can't use
No, we don't need a browser that is plug-in based, we have those and they obviously only work if you own the OS platform and browser that uses them as well. What we need are sites that conform to STANDARDS.
Unfortunately that will never happen.
I don't think the "war" will ever be over. There will ALWAYS be a company somewhere perverting the standards for their own benefit. If they can convince enough of their users that the advantages of doing something that will never work anywhere enough outweights the drawbacks, it will catch on and you're right back at square one.
There will ALWAYS be more people willing to go for "Cheap, easy and the WRONG thing to do" than "Less cheap, less easy, but the RIGHT thing to do." People are lazy.
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Right, instead of blaming themselves for developing such a lousy encryption scheme and not putting it ou for public comment to find out if it's lousy or not, they're saying, "We designed a lousy encryption scheme and kept it private but now these people have disclosed that it was a lousy encryption scheme therefore we must sue them rather than take the blame."
That whole "accountability" thing is a sham in the industry. No corporation, whether you want to talk about Sony, Microsoft, IBM, Ford, probably not even RedHat now that they have stockholders to be responsible to, nobody will take responsbility for doing something stupid or "wrong" if they can instead sue some poor schmoe in attempt to pass the buck.
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Once the jinni gets out of the bottle, it's damned hard to get it back in. Lawsuits might harass individuals, but it won't stop the momentum.
The only way I can see this thing being stopped is for a "DVD2" to come out and for "the industry" to obsolete all DVD currently on the market, and if that happened, I'd bet the consumers would raise bloody hell over it. ESPECIALLY considering how long everyone waited to get the freaking DVD standard in the first place.
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In recognition of Her loyal subject's being interviewed on Slashdot, Her Royal Highness the Queen has decided to surf the 'web today. If she should show up here in Slashdot, we would like to request that all our readers please stand out of respect for HRH. You will be notified when she is visiting.
{a few minutes later}
We understand that HRH is currently reading something on C|Net. More information when we have it.
{A couple minutes later, a MIDI of God Save The Queen begins to play, then is cut off quickly}
We thought for a moment that she was going to click on a link Slashdot, but she decided to read NTKNow first.
{A couple minutes later, the MIDI starts to play again and a little Javascript "Alert" box pops up to all
We understand that HRH Queen Elizabeth II is now reading articles on Slashdot. If you would please stand to show your respect.
.... and all across the world, random geeks in offices, cubicles, living rooms, and dens stand up, looking a bit embarrassed and uncomfortable because everyone's looking at them as they stand at attention with a tinny little MIDI coming from their computer.
Everything gets all wavy and misty again, indicating the end of the day-dream sequence.
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Let's say really nice video cards are $200/ea and really nice LCD monitors are $1200/ea, that puts you at $4000 even to do virtually the same thing this $27,000 mostrosity costs. The only difference being that you'll have three seperate pieces of monitor instead of one.
That actually looks pretty much like what these guys did except they have a custom case they put the three seperate monitors into and built a custom connector so that you only have to plug one cable into your PC instead of three.
If you're any good at hardware, I bet you could even take your LCD monitors out of the plastic cases and come up with some way to mount them so they would be literally right next to each other and do it for a lot less than the $23,000 difference in price between buying one of these and making one....
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Simcity (1|2|3000) - I just love those Maxis games. I heard at one point that SC3K was supposed to be ported to BeOS but I've yet to actually see it.
Diablo - It's just a simple click-n-shoot but so danged addictive! I'd really love to see Diablo II come out on Linux when it's released, but I'm not going to hold my breath for it.
What I *am* holding by breath for is Neverwinter Nights. Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my chin from thinking about this game. I just hope they can pull it off.
Anyone know if there is a site anywhere that has some sort of "Nominate and vote for your favorite game that you'd like to see ported to Linux" type poll? I'd be willing to set something like this up if there isn't one someplace already.
It would also be really nice if some of these game companies would follow ID's lead and a couple/few years after the games are released (like about the time you start seeing the boxes in the "Bargain bin" at your local software store for $4.99) they would release the source code under some kind of relatively non-restrictive license. (doesn't have to be GPL, but it should be enough that someone else could take the code and work on ports to other platforms and redistribute at least as patches.) I still play the original Dungeon Keeper occasionally; I'd love to be able to play it on Linux.
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Not that I have anything against Larry, but his TMTOWTDI (There's More Than One Way To Do It) philosophy has made it way too easy for people to write really awful spaghetti code in Perl. Much more easily than in any other language. In Perl, precisely because of TMTOWTDI, you can have four scripts that do exactly the same thing and look completely different! ARGH!
And that is the "danger" of using Perl for CGI, and this is the situation I think the "web programming" industry is in - everyone and their grandmother can pick up a "Perl for Dummies" at the local bookstore and, without any concept of "proper programming practices" (i.e. don't write spaghetti code, try to comment at least what's not immediately obvious, stay structured so you can make changes easier) can start banging out CGI code and since Perl will take just about anything, nobody knows the crap that's running until it comes time for that burger-flipper to leave this job and move on to the next.
I've been given Perl CGIs to try to figure out why they're breaking that are 100's of K in size and 1000's of lines of Perl code and took 10's of megs of core and way too much time to execute. When they were written, the author literally cut-and-pasted from any source that looked vaguely like it would do something like what they wanted their script to do and just left all the extra cruft in and kept just appending to the existing code any time they modified the scripts with thousands of lines of code doing calulations the results of which were just being overwritten by later lines of code. Perl being Perl didn't care, but when it came time for someone else to figure out what the damned thing was doing - forget about it.
Yes, I occasionally write stuff in Perl, but I don't use any of the funky streamlined grammatical constructs that make the code horrendous to try to read through if you go back and have to maintain it, which also means that I don't usually gain a whole lot by writing my code in Perl except that I can be sloppy and it doesn't care, which IMHO is A Bad Thing. If possible, I will rewrite the thing in C or as a Java servlet, which just makes it much easier to maintain since there's ONLY ONE way to do it in those languages and you have to do it THAT WAY; when you see a statement in C or Java, you can figure out what it means and it can only mean one thing. Not like Perl... *shudder*
Personally I think Perl should be considered a "non-rewriteable" language; kind of the programming equivalent to a CD-R. Once the program is out there and has been running unmaintained for a while, don't even think about modifying it! If you need to do something else, write a new program because it'll probably be faster than trying to figure out what you did with the old program, and will almost certainly be faster than trying to find out what someone else has done in their Perl program.
In small shops where a piece of code might have to be banged out for something quick-and-dirty and never looked at again, do it with Perl. If you're going to try to write something that will need to be maintained and changed and worked on by many people, you either have to make sure those people are going to be VERY CAREFUL and VERY RESTRAINED in their programmin, or just don't even do it with Perl - it will quickly become unmaintainable.
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Oh, you found out we've been scanning your hard drive and sending data on what music you listen to and what kind of files you have on your system without telling you we would be? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out we're using your personal registration information to build mailing lists that we sell to SPAM and junk snail-mail companies without telling you we would be? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out we've been embedding serial numbers in every document you create so we can track them as they travel across the computer systems of the world and we never let you know about it? Sorry, we'll stop! All better!
Oh, you found out that we've purposely left back-doors into our security products so that gov't agents can come in and look at what you're doing any time they'd like? Well, we deny it therefore it never happened! All better!
You'd think someone would actually get outraged enough to take some sort of counter-action at all this stupidity. I guess the sheep^H^H^H^H^H citizens of this country are so used to our government doing it that corporations can get away with it with nothing more than an apology and the statement that they'll "stop doing it" which of course, we must all believe is sincere since they were invading our privacy without telling us to begin with.
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It's barely two months before "Y2K" and it's certain that thousands of consultants are scrambling around computer systems all over this country trying to fix "Y2K bugs." Some of those consultants are working for the Federal Government. Some of those consultants working for the Gov't are using this "Windowing" technique to fix the bugs. McDonnel-Douglass is going to want to sue these consultants and/or the federal government for violating their patent, causing those consultants to have to re-do all their work with some other method...
...less than two months before "Y2K".
Can you say "National Security"? Can you see the federal government using its pull to invalidate this patent pretty f-ing quickly so it doesn't have to scrap everything they've been working on for the last couple of years?
This really could be a good thing. Of course, what will likely happen is that only this one patent will get overturned and the rest of the patent system will continue to be screwed up and useless just like it has been.
I'm kind of surprised that nobody has taken the tack that, as stated in the Contitution, the whole concept of "patents" and the "patent office" comes from the phrase, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" and that it seems pretty obvious that the patent system, as exists, no longer promotes Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Someone brave should just sue the patent office as it exists as being unconstitutional and use as evidence the huge number of patent lawsuits and the ways these massive technology corporations now keep "patent portfolios" not to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" but to use as essentially blackmail to keep other companies from suing them, or as in this case with McDonnel-Douglass, to threaten every computer-reliant corporation in the country with lawsuits for doing what's essentially government mandated work to update their computer systems. It might work.
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