Actually, this only applies in cases where the free market has competition. How else do you explain the fact that CDs haven't changed prices (except in an upward direction) since they were introduced? It's not like it costs anywhere near $20 to make one...
Good point. And it could even apply in this case: Who owns the patents and other IP for the digital projection systems? Lucas?
OTOH I still believe it is in the economic interests of the movie distributors to get this techonology into the field. Therefore they will subsidize the equipment and do other things in order to bring down the costs...
Of course Moores Law doesn't apply to the fuel mileage of cars. It should apply to LCD screens though, and does. Perhaps a 19" LCD doesn't cost $6 today, but it doesn't cost $4000 either. Only four or five years ago they did! At the current rate they will be at par with CRT monitors soon.
As a general rule Moore's Law (or something similar) *does apply* to almost anything manufactured -- at least to some extent. Perhaps not at the same rate it applies to integrated circuits, but certainly as a manufacturing process is improved (usually with computers and computer controlled tools) the price of the manufactured item comes down. Eventually it nears the cost of raw materials and the item becomes a commodity. This happened with computers in general fairly recently and the bottom dropped out because only the Dells of the world have the economies of scale needed to compete at the razor thin margins of the new market.
Considering that the digital projection systems we are talking about are currently custom systems built by hand with custom software they are expensive. Over the next few years you will see digital projection systems built with much of the functionality bound up in silicon (to which Moore's Law definately applies) and the rest fairly standardized around commodity hard/firm/software, plus special built machine tools to make the rest of the parts. Add to this the fact that the development/design costs will already have been amortized. When that happens the price will come down to the current range of film projection equipment. (Or less, because it has fewer moving parts.)
I feel silly having to explicate things in this detail. But I guess I shouldn't have used Moore's Law as the title because it has a specific meaning and anyone sufficiently anal retentive will take umbrage and complain I am misusing the term. I was actually describing a more generalized process of descending prices as a manufacturing process is improved, of which Moore's Law is only one component. Is that better? Is there a term for it? Should I call it "Bell's Law"? I was hoping to reserve that one for something to do with sex, but whatever...
The price on the digitial projection equipment will not stay high forever.
Besides I suspect that your current equipment cost nearly the equivalent in today's dollars when it was new. Or at least the early 35mm sound projection equipment did.
Also, considering the cost savings in avoiding film prints alone, it seems pretty likely the movie distributors are going to push this technology pretty hard. Hopefully they will offer some kind of incentive to getting the equipment into the theatres.
For a monoculture GUI environment there is no need to use Moz. VB probably meets your needs just fine. Although from you dismissive words it sounds like you might be switching to.NET and finding out just how difficult it really is to bring over existing code. Had to change any WebForm control names and then spent an hour modifying the events to match yet?
For someone who is developing for a larger user set Moz is a pretty cool thing - but up until now they kept changing the API's every few weeks which would break your code. Now that it is going 1.0 they won't change the API's until 2.0 (although they might add functionality, they - hopefully - won't break existing XUL and XP-COM objects).
Like I said before, now that this is true you will see some pretty cool apps being built on top of Moz. Hell, I intend to produce a couple myself. Your lack of enthusiasm seems more rooted in your work environment than in Moz's applicability to a wider world, but I could be wrong.
I have read your post a couple of times now and I am not sure if you got my original point or missed it entirely. If you haven't checked out XUL, XP-COM and the rest of the Moz API's yet you should. If you have already (and you are a developer with experience creating GUI applications) and are not excited, I am surprised...
hmm... I just read all the +1 and higher responses and no one has mentioned the thing I personally think is the best thing of all about Moz going 1.0 -- It means they finally freeze the API's.
I don't know how many of you have checked out XUL and the Moz extension API's, but with them you have the ability to write literally any kind of application with an Open Source, Cross Platform, UI built using Moz via XML, HTML and a little javascript. This, I believe, is the most revolutionary thing about Moz! Using it for a UI surface, I can encapsulate routines that require speed in a C or C++ module (or even Python, Java and some other languages) and do the rest in not too much a different way than creating a DHTML web page. And the resulting UI code is portable...
And the end result is fairly fast as well. All of the browser itself, all of the built-tools like the mail manager, the calendar, the IRC chat and so on are implemented this way. The potential of Moz as a UI development API is huge, assuming anyone creates a decent IDE for it. Nonetheless you can do things right now without an IDE, and (because the API's are frozen) you can be confident it will work with bug fix releases until they do a major update.
During development many projects demonstrating these capabilities were obsoleted when the API's changed out from under them, causing the developers to stop work until the API froze. With this at an end I fully expect to see some really cool stuff fairly soon. Check http://www.mozdev.org for some example projects (most of which probably won't go anywhere soon, but some of which are the kinds of thing I am talking about).
Hmmm... I don't know how to show you my user info. When you click on someone else's user number it doesn't show the karma. I will try to cut and paste from what it shows me. Hopefully you will believe I didn't fake it...
Welcome back Jack William Bell (84469)
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Computer programmer, writer, musician, artist, parent... Basically I am just
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Jack William Bell has posted 137 comments. Below find the most recent
24 comments.
Time for a stupid question: If it is such a bad idea to undefine the default (or any?) namespace, why does XML allow it? Perhaps the inability to undefine non-default namespaces (see the last section of the article) should be called a "wise decision" as opposed to an "oversight"?
I wouldn't call that a stupid question. It is one I have asked myself. So far as I can tell the answer is "Because some people thought it was a good idea and you don't have to use it."
True. You don't have to use GoTo either. Doesn't make GoTo less evil, even when you run into a situation where GoTo is the easiest option.
Don't feel bad about loosing karma points because of the stupid cap, you could be in my shoes. I had a karma of 97 before the cap, now it is down to 86. Eventually I will have 50 like everyone else. I *so* wanted to break 100 too, although I am not sure why. It isn't like/. karma gets me extra beer. But I felt that I had done rather well for someone who refused to karma whore and often took unpopular positions.
I never did understand the reason for the cap either -- to make all the kiddies with 20 karma feel better? But that's the way it goes...
I certainly agree with the author that people should avoid using default namespaces and then clearing the namespaces with an empty namespace declaration. But I would go further to say that you should avoid default namespaces altogether if you intend your XML to be human readable.
And, in my humber opinion, keeping it human readable is the main reason to use XML in the first place. As a purely data-transfer medium it is far to bulky and requires too much CPU at each end. Even HTML query strings are faster to parse and convert to binary equivalents.
For machine to machine transfer we really need a binary XML standard. My understanding is that W3C is working on such...
Don't assume everyone knows as much as you do and critisize on that basis!
I found it re-iterated a lot of points that I learned a year ago myself. But that doesn't mean everyone would agree. XML is still pretty new to a lot of people and anyone who reads this not knowing about XML and namespaces is going to gain a lot.
The only crtisism I have of the article is that it doesn't include enough pointers to bibliography and 'learn more here' sources like specific pages on w3c.org or other tutorials on the net. Someone who starts to understand this stuff from the article will want to have a list of resources to continue learning...
. . . which is still needed to provide decent security for collaborative web services. That aspect of Hailstorm will probably eventually lead to (probably several) centralized Hailstorm-like services. Espcially where money is moving around (which is why I mentioned banks and credit companies).
I certainly understand companies wanting to keep the information local (espcially sales and preferences info that can be used to infer sales). This kind of thing is very important and I doubt they would want to share it with Microsoft or anyone else. I am sure that was one of the reasons Microsoft folded their hand, and I am sure you are right about it coming back as a package.
Still I stand on my prediction for the need of central identification services and the loss of personal control if someone doesn't provde an open source implementation of such.
As to the "Troll" moderation, you might be right on that as well (although it seems a bit over the top). I do believe meta-moderation works because I know it makes me think before I moderate.
Someone moderated my original post as a 'Troll'. I am very curious why! I certainly didn't intend the post as as a troll and I cannot say that I can see anything in the post that would qualify it as such. Perhaps my mention of Microsoft and/or Hailstorm? Perhaps because I used a four-letter word in it?
Can anyone illuminate the moderator's thinking for me on this?
Attention moderators, feel free to moderate this post as 'Offtopic'. But know that I am asking out of real interest, not because I want to start a shitstorm. Perhaps I can use the information to write better posts in the future. This post is definately not intended as a troll either...
This issue is exactly why Microsoft thought they could put over Hailstorm. As a centralized model for Web Services with built-in security, user identification, preferences and certificate management Hailstorm looked like a damn good way for Microsoft to break into a new revenue space while consolidating control over the Internet.
Luckily for us Web Services weren't anywhere close to ready, at least compared to the hype for them, and Microsoft fell for their own marketing by introducing Hailstorm too soon. If they had kept it under wraps until Web Services were actually being rolled out (and running into the need for centralized security) they might have been hailed as saviors. Instead they jumped into the fray too soon and, combined with the antitrust problems, found themselves in a world of shit.
I don't know if Micrsoft has abandoned Hailstorm for good -- I do know they don't have a problem walking away from anything that doesn't pan out. But there is a chance Hailstorm, or something very similar (perhaps funded by Microsoft, but not directly owned), will return when the time is right. I expect the best model for this would be for Microsoft (and/or their competitors) to partner with the big banks and credit firms. In this case you have the businesses with the largest need for such services (and who already have significant databases) opening up their system as another revenue source. If my conjecture is valid I would expect to see announcements of such partnerships in the next six months or so.
In any case what I would like to see is an open source 'Hailstorm'. I understand there are a couple of such projects like that out there now. It would be a very Good Thing (tm) if these projects would settle on a single wire format and data model soon. Why? Because the first such system in general use is going to set the standard for everyone that follows. I would like to see both the standard itself and at least one of the implementations of that standard be open and free (as in speach).
A further extension of this concept would be to allow easy, trusted, collaboration between user identification systems. This kind of decentralization would help keep the biggies from controlling the entire dataspace. Unfortunately it may be difficult or impossible to do without compromising security.
Perhaps the best way to start is small and simple: An identification server of some kind. This service would allow you to check with with a trusted authority to make sure someone accessing your service is who they say they are. Such a server should also allow for anomynity by allowing someone to create an identity that cannot easily be traced back to the real person. Such an anomymous identify should be marked as such in some way in order to allow the service provider to decide if they want to accept it or not, but should be set up so that only the original creator of the identity can use it.
First I thought about modding your post up. Then I went there and looked and afterwards I considered modding you down instead. (I have mod points right now.)
Why? Because the Blackmask site you refer to has few or no books of the type referred to by the original post. There does seem to be a lot of cool content there, but most of it is stuff you can find just as easily on the Project Guttenburg site or elsewhere.
So basically your post is somewhat off-topic, almost cool, but not really cool enough to merit a mod up despite the off-topicness of it. If I would have wasted a down-mod point on you someone else would have meta-modded it badly because they probably wouldn't know why I modded as I did. And, as I said, I just don't think the link is worth the mod up, despite the fact such a mod would probably survive a meta-mod.
All this points out one interesting fact about meta-modding -- it may work better than its critics give it credit for! At the very least it makes a subset of the moderators (a subset with at least one member, me) think twice before bestowing mod points either way. Note that I often lose mod points when the time runs out because I just don't find anything truly worthy of moderating.
Jack William Bell, who fully expects someone will mod this down as 'Off-topic'...
I did go to the website linked on the slashdot article. There is no mention there of a Windows version. And I posted rather early, but did read the posts that preceded mine. So thank you for the link, but no thanx for the sarcasm.
Still the link puts you ahead a couple of points...
In many ways this looks like a Visual Basic for Linux. In some ways this would be more cool if there was a Windows version, simply because it would provide a cross-platform development environment that MS didn't control and that would allow for easy transition of users to Linux.
Still, Linux only has some interesting possibilities as well...
Jack William Bell; who writes business software for a living and would like very much to transition his users to Linux
I am acquanted Thor Osborn (who, I believe, is no longer with Microvision) and have tried out the demo unit. It really works, although the thought of a laser beam shining on your retina seems a little counter-intuitive. I have also met Tom Furness and it is clear Tom is involved in lots of VR related stuff, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The model I tried was red only. Last I heard they were working hard on an RGB system. The kicker is that everything in one of these units can be reduced to solid state electronics: laser diodes, MEM mirrors, driver chips, CPU & memory. This is important because Moores law could drive down the cost of these things pretty quickly.
Many, far too many, moons ago I started a contract at Aldus Corporation as a SE/T (Software Engineer/Test). My job was to work with one of the first commercial applications developed for OS/2, a new version of Aldus Pagemaker.
Because no-one at Aldus knew anything about OS/2 (they were pretty much all Mac-heads and sneered at PC's, DOS and Windows) they gave me a brand new computer, a bunch of sticks of RAM and a pile of floppies they got from IBM. "Go figure it out." So I did.
The developers (who I was never allowed to meet for some bizarre reason) got Yesler (the codename for OS/2 Pagemaker) running about the time I was getting really bored with playing Reversi (the only real application on the OS/2 distribution I had) and I got started doing what they were paying me for; figuring out how to crash Yesler and/or OS/2 and emailing formatted dumps with my comments to the developers. It wasn't hard to find said bugs, although I was told "You can't crash OS/2, it is too solid." Hah!
Just about the time they got Yesler stable enough that I could put together a demo script the marketroids could use to show off the program (they had to follow it exactly or it would crash) I found a way to make OS/2 have a complete spastic seizure. It involved a fairly complex series of actions that had to be followed exactly, but when you did the last one the computer would freeze and waves of color would wash over the screen. Kind of pretty in a psychodelic way.
We called it the Colorshow bug and the developers claimed it was an OS/2 problem. This kicked off a shitstorm of finger pointing that ended with the developers working around the bug instead of IBM fixing it. Remember, at this point IBM was actually pretty happy about the Yesler project because it gave their new operating system some street cred, so it really surprised me that there was so much rancor. An earlier problem with printer drivers was fixed in a day from my reporting it.
But the punchline happened about a week after I found the Colorshow bug. One of the marketroids came by and asked if I could demonstrate the bug for a group of suits that were waiting down the hall. No problem, bring them on (and, yes, I promise to watch my language). So the suits crowd around the desk and I walk the dog and pony (click, click, drag, click, drag, click, colors, "OOOOHH!", nervous laughter). The suits thank me and they leave.
Then the guy sitting across from me leans over and says "You know who that was?" I shake my head. "That was Paul Brainard," (the CEO of Aldus) "and a bunch of Apple executives up here for a visit."
OK...
Jack William Bell
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 2
What you have to remember is that there are now rich companies with high-priced lawyers playing the game, and you can be damn sure that they'll make it exceedingly difficult for "someone" to succeed unless they get a slice of the pie. And they like big slices.
And Vulture Capitalists didn't? That part is nothing new. I am talking about the Internet Culture (if there is such a thing) and what it takes to succeed. My point is that the geeks continue to have the upper hand.
For now.
Jack William Bell
'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The closing paragraph of the article reads:
The Internet has changed, too, as Mr Andreessen's own journey from Netscape to Loudcloud illustrates. What was once the province of geeks is now ruled by suits. The web has become the basis of a vast and complex industry dominated by large companies. Even though it started as a consumer-led phenomenon, the Internet's greatest impact has been on business. There turned out to be very little money in selling "front-end" software such as browsers to consumers; but there were fortunes to be made at the "back-end" selling services, software, storage and hardware to companies. Loudcloud may be successful in its own way, but it will not be the Netscape of the decade, the dawn of a new world. The Internet, like its poster-boy, has grown up.
This is clearly the kind of thing that the editors and readers of The Economist would like to believe about the Internet: The show is over, nothing more to see, move along everyone, move along. Too bad it is total tripe...
Andreeson and LoudCloud are a real business now, true. And their revenue model is well designed and might actually work. But the Internet isn't about to turn into a buttondown, suit ruled, geeks don't make the rules anymore thing anytime soon. That is what happens to mature markets and, while the first gold-rush is over, the Internet is far from a mature market. There is still lots of room for someone with ideas to make a difference. What is less likely is that those ideas are worth twenty million in VC money.
I'm afraid the suits are in store for a hard awakening if they think differently.
I think your *customers* would have more of a problem with what you described than Microsoft would.
I did call it an 'unlikely' scenario. And what you say is true for your average L^hUser. But Rotor doesn't include the kinds of things I would need for applications a non-technical user would care about, like Windows Forms. OTOH applications which could run on Rotor without problems include Server-Side stuff and utilities. In that case someone who really wants to run it on something other than Windoze will have both the skills and the incentive.
Besides, I write business applications, not word processors. I am leaning towards Mozilla as the UI platform of choice for my future applications. But I do want to write the hard parts (business rules, data management and heavy processing) in something other than XUL/Javascript, and where I can break out those objects and run them on different boxen. I have done a lot of comparing between Java and C#, and gotta say that C# is the best choice for me - if it can be cross-platform enough and if there are open implementations. Between Rotor and Mono (and there is one other I think) it might be getting there.
Jack William Bell
There is an end-run around 'Non Commercial'!
on
Rotor: Shared Source CLI
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Available for 'Non Commercial Use Only'? Hmm... But this is a runtime! This has some really interesting implications...
Let us suppose Rotor is fully compatible with the Windows CLI. I develop a commercial application for the Windows CLI. I also test the application for Rotor, but I don't ship the application packaged for it. Instead I ship the application packaged so that it simply expects a CLI runtime.
In my FAQ I mention that it was tested with Rotor and provide a pointer to some generic explanation for installing a CLI application to run with Rotor. My customers wanting to run the app on FreeBSD or Mac (or any future Rotor implementation) simply install the app as described and now have my application there.
Microsoft may have a case against this, but they probably do not have a case against me. And I doubt they would go after all of my customers.
Jack William Bell, who thinks this is a pretty unlikely scenario and is hoping Mono will make it moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. And it could even apply in this case: Who owns the patents and other IP for the digital projection systems? Lucas?
OTOH I still believe it is in the economic interests of the movie distributors to get this techonology into the field. Therefore they will subsidize the equipment and do other things in order to bring down the costs...
Jack William BellOf course Moores Law doesn't apply to the fuel mileage of cars. It should apply to LCD screens though, and does. Perhaps a 19" LCD doesn't cost $6 today, but it doesn't cost $4000 either. Only four or five years ago they did! At the current rate they will be at par with CRT monitors soon.
As a general rule Moore's Law (or something similar) *does apply* to almost anything manufactured -- at least to some extent. Perhaps not at the same rate it applies to integrated circuits, but certainly as a manufacturing process is improved (usually with computers and computer controlled tools) the price of the manufactured item comes down. Eventually it nears the cost of raw materials and the item becomes a commodity. This happened with computers in general fairly recently and the bottom dropped out because only the Dells of the world have the economies of scale needed to compete at the razor thin margins of the new market.
Considering that the digital projection systems we are talking about are currently custom systems built by hand with custom software they are expensive. Over the next few years you will see digital projection systems built with much of the functionality bound up in silicon (to which Moore's Law definately applies) and the rest fairly standardized around commodity hard/firm/software, plus special built machine tools to make the rest of the parts. Add to this the fact that the development/design costs will already have been amortized. When that happens the price will come down to the current range of film projection equipment. (Or less, because it has fewer moving parts.)
I feel silly having to explicate things in this detail. But I guess I shouldn't have used Moore's Law as the title because it has a specific meaning and anyone sufficiently anal retentive will take umbrage and complain I am misusing the term. I was actually describing a more generalized process of descending prices as a manufacturing process is improved, of which Moore's Law is only one component. Is that better? Is there a term for it? Should I call it "Bell's Law"? I was hoping to reserve that one for something to do with sex, but whatever...
Jack William Bell
The price on the digitial projection equipment will not stay high forever.
Besides I suspect that your current equipment cost nearly the equivalent in today's dollars when it was new. Or at least the early 35mm sound projection equipment did.
Also, considering the cost savings in avoiding film prints alone, it seems pretty likely the movie distributors are going to push this technology pretty hard. Hopefully they will offer some kind of incentive to getting the equipment into the theatres.
Jack William Bell
For a monoculture GUI environment there is no need to use Moz. VB probably meets your needs just fine. Although from you dismissive words it sounds like you might be switching to .NET and finding out just how difficult it really is to bring over existing code. Had to change any WebForm control names and then spent an hour modifying the events to match yet?
For someone who is developing for a larger user set Moz is a pretty cool thing - but up until now they kept changing the API's every few weeks which would break your code. Now that it is going 1.0 they won't change the API's until 2.0 (although they might add functionality, they - hopefully - won't break existing XUL and XP-COM objects).
Like I said before, now that this is true you will see some pretty cool apps being built on top of Moz. Hell, I intend to produce a couple myself. Your lack of enthusiasm seems more rooted in your work environment than in Moz's applicability to a wider world, but I could be wrong.
I have read your post a couple of times now and I am not sure if you got my original point or missed it entirely. If you haven't checked out XUL, XP-COM and the rest of the Moz API's yet you should. If you have already (and you are a developer with experience creating GUI applications) and are not excited, I am surprised...
Jack William Bell
hmm... I just read all the +1 and higher responses and no one has mentioned the thing I personally think is the best thing of all about Moz going 1.0 -- It means they finally freeze the API's.
I don't know how many of you have checked out XUL and the Moz extension API's, but with them you have the ability to write literally any kind of application with an Open Source, Cross Platform, UI built using Moz via XML, HTML and a little javascript. This, I believe, is the most revolutionary thing about Moz! Using it for a UI surface, I can encapsulate routines that require speed in a C or C++ module (or even Python, Java and some other languages) and do the rest in not too much a different way than creating a DHTML web page. And the resulting UI code is portable...
And the end result is fairly fast as well. All of the browser itself, all of the built-tools like the mail manager, the calendar, the IRC chat and so on are implemented this way. The potential of Moz as a UI development API is huge, assuming anyone creates a decent IDE for it. Nonetheless you can do things right now without an IDE, and (because the API's are frozen) you can be confident it will work with bug fix releases until they do a major update.
During development many projects demonstrating these capabilities were obsoleted when the API's changed out from under them, causing the developers to stop work until the API froze. With this at an end I fully expect to see some really cool stuff fairly soon. Check http://www.mozdev.org for some example projects (most of which probably won't go anywhere soon, but some of which are the kinds of thing I am talking about).
Jack William Bell
Hmmm... I don't know how to show you my user info. When you click on someone else's user number it doesn't show the karma. I will try to cut and paste from what it shows me. Hopefully you will believe I didn't fake it...
Welcome back Jack William Bell (84469)This is your User Info page. There are thousands more, but this one is yours. You most likely are not so interested in yourself, and probably would be more interested in the Preferences links you see up top there, where you can customize Slashdot, change your password, or just click pretty widgets to kill time.
You're a moderator with 5 points(expire after 2002-06-02). Please read the Moderator Guidelines before you do any moderation.
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Karma 86 (mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments)jackb@sff.net
User Bio
Computer programmer, writer, musician, artist, parent... Basically I am just a guy with no spare time.
Jack William Bell has posted 137 comments. Below find the most recent 24 comments.
Jack William Bell1 Re:Default namespaces are evil! posted on 01:57 PM May 30th, 2002 (Score:2)
attached to XML Namespaces and How They Affect XPath and XSLT
I wouldn't call that a stupid question. It is one I have asked myself. So far as I can tell the answer is "Because some people thought it was a good idea and you don't have to use it."
True. You don't have to use GoTo either. Doesn't make GoTo less evil, even when you run into a situation where GoTo is the easiest option.
Jack William BellDon't feel bad about loosing karma points because of the stupid cap, you could be in my shoes. I had a karma of 97 before the cap, now it is down to 86. Eventually I will have 50 like everyone else. I *so* wanted to break 100 too, although I am not sure why. It isn't like /. karma gets me extra beer. But I felt that I had done rather well for someone who refused to karma whore and often took unpopular positions.
I never did understand the reason for the cap either -- to make all the kiddies with 20 karma feel better? But that's the way it goes...
Jack William Bell
I certainly agree with the author that people should avoid using default namespaces and then clearing the namespaces with an empty namespace declaration. But I would go further to say that you should avoid default namespaces altogether if you intend your XML to be human readable.
And, in my humber opinion, keeping it human readable is the main reason to use XML in the first place. As a purely data-transfer medium it is far to bulky and requires too much CPU at each end. Even HTML query strings are faster to parse and convert to binary equivalents.
For machine to machine transfer we really need a binary XML standard. My understanding is that W3C is working on such...
Jack William Bell
Don't assume everyone knows as much as you do and
critisize on that basis!
I found it re-iterated a lot of points that I learned a year ago myself. But that doesn't mean everyone would agree. XML is still pretty new to a lot of people and anyone who reads this not knowing about XML and namespaces is going to gain a lot.
The only crtisism I have of the article is that it doesn't include enough pointers to bibliography and 'learn more here' sources like specific pages on w3c.org or other tutorials on the net. Someone who starts to understand this stuff from the article will want to have a list of resources to continue learning...
Jack William Bell
Two words: "Coffee stains."
Jack William Bell
. . . which is still needed to provide decent security for collaborative web services. That aspect of Hailstorm will probably eventually lead to (probably several) centralized Hailstorm-like services. Espcially where money is moving around (which is why I mentioned banks and credit companies).
I certainly understand companies wanting to keep the information local (espcially sales and preferences info that can be used to infer sales). This kind of thing is very important and I doubt they would want to share it with Microsoft or anyone else. I am sure that was one of the reasons Microsoft folded their hand, and I am sure you are right about it coming back as a package.
Still I stand on my prediction for the need of central identification services and the loss of personal control if someone doesn't provde an open source implementation of such.
As to the "Troll" moderation, you might be right on that as well (although it seems a bit over the top). I do believe meta-moderation works because I know it makes me think before I moderate.
Jack William Bell
Someone moderated my original post as a 'Troll'. I am very curious why! I certainly didn't intend the post as as a troll and I cannot say that I can see anything in the post that would qualify it as such. Perhaps my mention of Microsoft and/or Hailstorm? Perhaps because I used a four-letter word in it?
Can anyone illuminate the moderator's thinking for me on this?
Attention moderators, feel free to moderate this post as 'Offtopic'. But know that I am asking out of real interest, not because I want to start a shitstorm. Perhaps I can use the information to write better posts in the future. This post is definately not intended as a troll either...
Jack William Bell
This issue is exactly why Microsoft thought they could put over Hailstorm. As a centralized model for Web Services with built-in security, user identification, preferences and certificate management Hailstorm looked like a damn good way for Microsoft to break into a new revenue space while consolidating control over the Internet.
Luckily for us Web Services weren't anywhere close to ready, at least compared to the hype for them, and Microsoft fell for their own marketing by introducing Hailstorm too soon. If they had kept it under wraps until Web Services were actually being rolled out (and running into the need for centralized security) they might have been hailed as saviors. Instead they jumped into the fray too soon and, combined with the antitrust problems, found themselves in a world of shit.
I don't know if Micrsoft has abandoned Hailstorm for good -- I do know they don't have a problem walking away from anything that doesn't pan out. But there is a chance Hailstorm, or something very similar (perhaps funded by Microsoft, but not directly owned), will return when the time is right. I expect the best model for this would be for Microsoft (and/or their competitors) to partner with the big banks and credit firms. In this case you have the businesses with the largest need for such services (and who already have significant databases) opening up their system as another revenue source. If my conjecture is valid I would expect to see announcements of such partnerships in the next six months or so.
In any case what I would like to see is an open source 'Hailstorm'. I understand there are a couple of such projects like that out there now. It would be a very Good Thing (tm) if these projects would settle on a single wire format and data model soon. Why? Because the first such system in general use is going to set the standard for everyone that follows. I would like to see both the standard itself and at least one of the implementations of that standard be open and free (as in speach).
A further extension of this concept would be to allow easy, trusted, collaboration between user identification systems. This kind of decentralization would help keep the biggies from controlling the entire dataspace. Unfortunately it may be difficult or impossible to do without compromising security.
Perhaps the best way to start is small and simple: An identification server of some kind. This service would allow you to check with with a trusted authority to make sure someone accessing your service is who they say they are. Such a server should also allow for anomynity by allowing someone to create an identity that cannot easily be traced back to the real person. Such an anomymous identify should be marked as such in some way in order to allow the service provider to decide if they want to accept it or not, but should be set up so that only the original creator of the identity can use it.
I can go on, but then I already have. Haven't I?
Jack William Bell
First I thought about modding your post up. Then I went there and looked and afterwards I considered modding you down instead. (I have mod points right now.)
Why? Because the Blackmask site you refer to has few or no books of the type referred to by the original post. There does seem to be a lot of cool content there, but most of it is stuff you can find just as easily on the Project Guttenburg site or elsewhere.
So basically your post is somewhat off-topic, almost cool, but not really cool enough to merit a mod up despite the off-topicness of it. If I would have wasted a down-mod point on you someone else would have meta-modded it badly because they probably wouldn't know why I modded as I did. And, as I said, I just don't think the link is worth the mod up, despite the fact such a mod would probably survive a meta-mod.
All this points out one interesting fact about meta-modding -- it may work better than its critics give it credit for! At the very least it makes a subset of the moderators (a subset with at least one member, me) think twice before bestowing mod points either way. Note that I often lose mod points when the time runs out because I just don't find anything truly worthy of moderating.
Jack William Bell, who fully expects someone will mod this down as 'Off-topic'...
I did go to the website linked on the slashdot article. There is no mention there of a Windows version. And I posted rather early, but did read the posts that preceded mine. So thank you for the link, but no thanx for the sarcasm.
Still the link puts you ahead a couple of points...
Jack William Bell
The subject line pretty much says it all.
In many ways this looks like a Visual Basic for Linux. In some ways this would be more cool if there was a Windows version, simply because it would provide a cross-platform development environment that MS didn't control and that would allow for easy transition of users to Linux.
Still, Linux only has some interesting possibilities as well...
Jack William Bell; who writes business software for a living and would like very much to transition his users to Linux
Still subject to Moore's Law. Which is the point I was trying to make.
Jack William Bell
I am acquanted Thor Osborn (who, I believe, is no longer with Microvision) and have tried out the demo unit. It really works, although the thought of a laser beam shining on your retina seems a little counter-intuitive. I have also met Tom Furness and it is clear Tom is involved in lots of VR related stuff, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The model I tried was red only. Last I heard they were working hard on an RGB system. The kicker is that everything in one of these units can be reduced to solid state electronics: laser diodes, MEM mirrors, driver chips, CPU & memory. This is important because Moores law could drive down the cost of these things pretty quickly.
Jack William Bell
Many, far too many, moons ago I started a contract at Aldus Corporation as a SE/T (Software Engineer/Test). My job was to work with one of the first commercial applications developed for OS/2, a new version of Aldus Pagemaker.
Because no-one at Aldus knew anything about OS/2 (they were pretty much all Mac-heads and sneered at PC's, DOS and Windows) they gave me a brand new computer, a bunch of sticks of RAM and a pile of floppies they got from IBM. "Go figure it out." So I did.
The developers (who I was never allowed to meet for some bizarre reason) got Yesler (the codename for OS/2 Pagemaker) running about the time I was getting really bored with playing Reversi (the only real application on the OS/2 distribution I had) and I got started doing what they were paying me for; figuring out how to crash Yesler and/or OS/2 and emailing formatted dumps with my comments to the developers. It wasn't hard to find said bugs, although I was told "You can't crash OS/2, it is too solid." Hah!
Just about the time they got Yesler stable enough that I could put together a demo script the marketroids could use to show off the program (they had to follow it exactly or it would crash) I found a way to make OS/2 have a complete spastic seizure. It involved a fairly complex series of actions that had to be followed exactly, but when you did the last one the computer would freeze and waves of color would wash over the screen. Kind of pretty in a psychodelic way.
We called it the Colorshow bug and the developers claimed it was an OS/2 problem. This kicked off a shitstorm of finger pointing that ended with the developers working around the bug instead of IBM fixing it. Remember, at this point IBM was actually pretty happy about the Yesler project because it gave their new operating system some street cred, so it really surprised me that there was so much rancor. An earlier problem with printer drivers was fixed in a day from my reporting it.
But the punchline happened about a week after I found the Colorshow bug. One of the marketroids came by and asked if I could demonstrate the bug for a group of suits that were waiting down the hall. No problem, bring them on (and, yes, I promise to watch my language). So the suits crowd around the desk and I walk the dog and pony (click, click, drag, click, drag, click, colors, "OOOOHH!", nervous laughter). The suits thank me and they leave.
Then the guy sitting across from me leans over and says "You know who that was?" I shake my head. "That was Paul Brainard," (the CEO of Aldus) "and a bunch of Apple executives up here for a visit."
OK...
Jack William Bell
And Vulture Capitalists didn't? That part is nothing new. I am talking about the Internet Culture (if there is such a thing) and what it takes to succeed. My point is that the geeks continue to have the upper hand.
For now.
Jack William BellThe closing paragraph of the article reads:
This is clearly the kind of thing that the editors and readers of The Economist would like to believe about the Internet: The show is over, nothing more to see, move along everyone, move along. Too bad it is total tripe...
Andreeson and LoudCloud are a real business now, true. And their revenue model is well designed and might actually work. But the Internet isn't about to turn into a buttondown, suit ruled, geeks don't make the rules anymore thing anytime soon. That is what happens to mature markets and, while the first gold-rush is over, the Internet is far from a mature market. There is still lots of room for someone with ideas to make a difference. What is less likely is that those ideas are worth twenty million in VC money.
I'm afraid the suits are in store for a hard awakening if they think differently.
Jack William BellI did call it an 'unlikely' scenario. And what you say is true for your average L^hUser. But Rotor doesn't include the kinds of things I would need for applications a non-technical user would care about, like Windows Forms. OTOH applications which could run on Rotor without problems include Server-Side stuff and utilities. In that case someone who really wants to run it on something other than Windoze will have both the skills and the incentive.
Besides, I write business applications, not word processors. I am leaning towards Mozilla as the UI platform of choice for my future applications. But I do want to write the hard parts (business rules, data management and heavy processing) in something other than XUL/Javascript, and where I can break out those objects and run them on different boxen. I have done a lot of comparing between Java and C#, and gotta say that C# is the best choice for me - if it can be cross-platform enough and if there are open implementations. Between Rotor and Mono (and there is one other I think) it might be getting there.
Jack William Bell
Available for 'Non Commercial Use Only'? Hmm... But this is a runtime! This has some really interesting implications...
Let us suppose Rotor is fully compatible with the Windows CLI. I develop a commercial application for the Windows CLI. I also test the application for Rotor, but I don't ship the application packaged for it. Instead I ship the application packaged so that it simply expects a CLI runtime.
In my FAQ I mention that it was tested with Rotor and provide a pointer to some generic explanation for installing a CLI application to run with Rotor. My customers wanting to run the app on FreeBSD or Mac (or any future Rotor implementation) simply install the app as described and now have my application there.
Microsoft may have a case against this, but they probably do not have a case against me. And I doubt they would go after all of my customers.
Jack William Bell, who thinks this is a pretty unlikely scenario and is hoping Mono will make it moot.