The basic difference between drug patents and software patents is the barrier to entry. You can buy a $200 computer, a $50 book on programming, and be infringing on software patents later that evening.
I stronly suspect that no professional programmer has not infringed on US software patents. I occasionally do a keyword search for "computer" on the USPTO to see the latest tech patents, and I'm always appalled by what comes up.
It's not that they even always violate the rules of the USPTO -- sure, for a lot of them, there's prior art. It's that they are *never* clever ideas that another person wouldn't immediately think of if presented with the same problem. This simply does not drive technical advancement.
What I'm really scared about is the upcoming patent Apocalypse.
For the past decade or so, the rate of granting tech patents has *vastly* accelerated. There are now a huge body of tech patents out there.
Thus far, we've only had a few problems with tech patents -- usually the ones that are getting long in the tooth, about to expire, and ones that the holders feel that they have to hurry up and make money on. Kind of like the GIF/LZW patent from Unisys.
Towards the end of a patent's life, whoever is holding the patent -- maybe an inventor, maybe a patent troll, maybe a company in financial trouble (a la SCO) knows that they are in a "use it or lose it" situation. It's just that there's about a fifteen year delay from the time that the patent is granted to the time that it gets really urgent to start litigating on it.
We've talked about patent reform, but no matter what happens, legislators will never, ever invalidate existing patents. To do so would produce business chaos -- business decisions were made based on the value of those patents, and there would be deep concern from companies if that IP value vanished.
Even if I turn on my computer tomorrow and discover that, wonderfully, Congress has officially banned the granting of software patents, there is still a decade's worth of glut of software patents out there.
What happens in another five years when software patent holders start warily eyeing the expiration date on their patents, wondering when they're going to make a return? Oh, sure, maybe IBM isn't going to go out and start suing people left and right, but they can easily sell their patents off to a patent troll. That way, they get a flat return on their patent and don't suffer any PR damage. Patent trolls don't give a damn about PR, because they aren't in a business where PR helps them in the least.
That's what worries me. And no matter how bad the situation gets, there isn't a whole lot that Congress can do. They can't reasonably do anything about *existing* patents. And there isn't much that the industry can do to work around the problem. Sure, they can ship software development jobs overseas to developers that aren't hamstrung by US software patents...but if you want to sell your finished product to the lucrative US software market, you *still* have to abide by the patents. This affects everyone, because just about every software development company out there depends on at least some US sales.
The problem isn't even just patent trolls. Given their recent exploits against Microsoft and similar folks, I'm pretty sure that IBM/MSFT/etc are more than happy to push for legislation that makes life miserable for trolls. But they sure as hell don't want to stop the stream of patents that *they* are acquiring. And there are *plenty* of bullshit patents going to both of those folks.
The really doubly frusterating thing is that if you're a researcher, a PhD that's gone into industry, almost always *have* to file for patents. It's a metric of "how well you're doing" in a field where it's *really* goddamn hard for your superiors to figure out how effective you are.
You've seen academics that have hundreds of papers with some authorship credit. Very, very few people have hundreds of papers worth of importa
In a corporate environment, using software from an actual company makes managers and IT folk feel warm and fuzzy.
Second this *ten times over*.
I've been suggesting perl for producing test harnesses for ages (writing them in C is just a waste of time), but the folks running things just don't *trust* perl. Until someone discovered ActiveState. I walked in one day and found them using the commercial Komodo, happy as a clam, and talking about how great perl was.
Confused the hell out of me.
The only thing I can guess is that if you have business roots, you're always trying to figure out the other guy's angle. Why is he doing something for you? What's he planning to get? If business folks can figure this out, and decide that it's aligned with their own interests, then they feel okay accepting the deal.
Open source software just doesn't make any sense in a model that only recognizes human time and direct monetary value. So you get people who *never* have worked with hobbyists who like producing free stuff. They've never worked in an environment in which the marginal cost of production and distribution can approximate zero. It's very reasonable for them to look very dubiously at software, thinking "I can't figure out how this guy is going to profit from this, so I'd better stay the hell away, since he might try some sort of horrific extortion down the line. Who the hell would write software for *fun*? I have to yell at people to get them in on time to meet our deadlines!"
On the other hand, doing a deal in which the other guy is clearly making a profit means that they don't need to imagine ways in which they can get stabbed in the back later. They can be comfortable believing that the other guy is simply happy making the deal.
It's a weird mentality from a hobbyist standpoint, but it's the only way I can explain why so many companies look at Debian and walk away quickly but are happy as a clam buying Red Hat Enterprise Edition./me shrugs
As long as I get to use something at work that I can freely use myself the rest of the time, I'm all for it.
You didn't quite read the (very short) FA, before chiming in, now did you?
Or perhaps he read between the lines in the FA and you didn't.
Do you expect a company that wants to collect license fees to claim "we're going to siphon money from competitors" or "we're going to protect our users against spyware"? Which do you think a marketer is more likely to produce as a public statement, regardless of a company's aims?
That being said, I'm a lot more sympathetic to BitTorrent's position, even if they just want some money, than I am to most other companies trying to lurk until something acquires value and then enforce it. So maybe they're banking on some name recognition, but that changes awfully quickly in the online world, and they *did* produce something decent.
No, he's going for people using his trademark maliciously...attacking spyware in the way that is easiest and best for him.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that anyone who is planning to start extracting money from people is *not* going to say "We're doing this to chisel money from people". SCO didn't say "Boy, we found a great way to freeload off the Linux world, and we're going to try that!" They said "We're trying to protect the work that we've put into advancing technology" or something like that.
Of course they're going to say that they're targetting adware and spyware, no matter what their goals are. To do otherwise would be stupid from a PR standpoint. Do you really expect them to do something different?
BitTorrent is not *just* the name of the software package (and I would agree with Bram on going after people who simply try to trade off the fame of the package), but also the name of the protocol, which many other packages than his own implement and have for some time. That may be unfortunate, but such is life. That protocol achieved public awareness by the number of servents available.
My guess is that "BitTorrent" is no longer trademarkable, given the amount of time that it has been in common use -- common use for a period of time without challenges does negate trademarks. However, the sorts of hobbyist programmers writing BitTorrent clients aren't the sorts who are going to mount a legal fight.
One possible fix would be doing what happened with trampolines. "Trampoline" with a capital "T" is trademarked, but "trampoline" simply refers to the device itself. Perhaps "BitTorrent" could refer to the software package, and "bittorrent" to the protocol. Still, I doubt that Bram would settle for this.
I really hope that people settle on another name for it (preferably with the same "bt" abbreviation) that is the same, instead of the name fragmenting into eight zillion different names (I remember Sony calling Firewire "iLink"...). "ByteTorrent?"
No matter what, it's a frusterating situation, that's for certain.
Ah, yes. Middle school. The point where everyone is busy throwing off authority but still has absolutely no idea how to get along with anyone else at all.
Actually I've been looking forward to a paycut to have more free hours so I can work on things I like, i.e. Open Source development. Currently i get too tired from the job to keep on going, but by programming on Open Source projects, I feel like I'm helping the world and all that.
I've found that when I work a lot on interesting Linux systems programming at work, my desire to do open source goes down.
When I'm writing.NET code, I get desperate to get out of the office so that I can actually produce something solid at home.
Under Windows, for various reasons (including the lack of a sane update and library dependency management system), applications all have their own damn copies of all the shared libraries. Which means that memory doesn't get "shared", as it does under Linux. It just gets wasted.
Emacs gets flack for memory usage based on using a whole couple megs of memory back in the day -- but do you want to compare its usage to Visual Studio's or Visual Slickedit's?
BBedit might use less memory -- haven't been following BBedit recently...
The thing is, when you fork it maps the memmory and marks everything as copy on write, when something needs to write to part of the memmory, then it will make the copy for each process.
A couple other tips:
* Each thread in a process shows up as consuming the same amount of memory (either this only happens under Linuxthreads or I don't have any threaded applications running on my system).
* Device mappings show up as consumed memory (which generates plenty of XFree86/xorg complaints). If you want to find out how much memory xorg/X11 is actually using (bytes in cached pixmaps on behalf of each process and sans device mappings), try this program (contains a tiny program that lists how much memory X is using for other programs by caching pixmaps and a perl script that lists how much memory X is using sans device mappings).
* The article mentions the fact that shared libraries show up in every application's memory usage. So, for example, glibc alone adds 1.5MB to the memory usage of every process. But Win folks may not realize how significant this is. Most Windows applications ship with their own copies of almost all shared libraries used, which means that there is a huge amount of wasted memory under Windows that *actually affects you*. Under Linux, instead of shipping shared libraries with applications, folks have built tools to automatically download the latest shared libraries and use those across multiple applications. Result -- only one copy of the library need be in memory at a time. This means that it's actually reasonable to run a box with 128MB of memory and three remote users using the thing. You simply can't pull that under Windows and expect usability.
* This may not sound significant, but Linux's VM is (anecdotal evidence, of course) really solid. When I run out of memory under Windows, performance rapidly degrades -- bring an application to the foreground, and the system just starts churning. Under Linux, you can push a ways into VM and things generally keep functioning pretty well (this is one of the causes of people talking about "applications loading faster under WINE than Windows" when they're trying to prove that WINE is 'faster' than Windows -- good disk I/O and VM code).
In my opinion, rewriting GIMP from scratch and making it extensible would be the best choice.
You mean like instead of making your primitive a bunch of stored images and a set of operations that can be applied to them, making your primitives images and DAG operations (thus allowing going back in a history of image editing and modifying a parameter or so)?
The idea of simple free markets is that it's okay for companies to be greedy, and things just all work out. Of course, in the real world, there are a lot of exceptions, but it works well enough as a model to use for some things.
While it is a little annoying that Apple's APIs are only available on, y'know, Apple's OS, it's not really unreasonable, IMHO, any more than it would be to expect MS to port Win32 to Linux and freely release it.
I get irritated when I think that people are trying to *deliberately* introduce incompatibilities for the sake of incompatibility. However, that isn't happening here. Apple was trying to address a need for rapid application development with Cocoa. Okay, they aren't giving their platform away, but I can't really fault them for that. They're playing fair -- the market needed a feature, they implemented.
Now if they *sued* anyone who tried making a Cocoa-compatible implementation for a different platform, then I'd be upset -- but there's no evil conspiracy (or at least, one is not required to explain Apple's actions).
Criminal/drug dealer type buys expensive car with his ill gotten money....Buy aforementioned expensive car. No need to install expensive tracking device in case it gets stolen, because the thief would soon find themselves trying to play Harry Houdini with concrete slippers encased around their ankles....
I hate to break this to you, but a drug dealer is just some guy that, y'know, happens to sell drugs. Drug dealers don't have mysterious tracking powers that put the police to shame and allow them to locate their stolen cars.
1. Where are my blending options? I want to be able to bevel, emboss, texture, etc. on each layer with an easy to use dialog. I don't want to fiddle with 5 layers, each filtered their own way just to achieve a button. And I want immediate feedback.
Granted, not there today, but if my understanding of the gegl rework is correct, it should be easy to feed a layer into a "series of operations", and when updating that layer, have the "series of operations" reapplied. Basically, if you can store a directed acyclic graph of operations to be applied, it becomes a trivial operation to make a layer an "effect layer".
3. And yes, color support. I've only been able to achieve some effects with CMYK.
Google has a lot of good properties for web browsing that DNS lacks, actually. Given that at least Firefox does (by default) a Google I Feel Lucky search on a failed DNS lookup, from my mother's standpoint, Google has replaced DNS.
Amazon's homepage currently seems to be a redirect to a different page (which is another redirect). That last page contains a unique identifier in the title. This behavior probably interacts poorly with Google's ranking algorithm (since "nobody" links to a page with a unique identifier in the path), just as a guess.
$ telnet www.amazon.com 80 Trying 207.171.175.29... Connected to www.amazon.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:07:51 GMT Server: Server Set-Cookie: skin=; domain=.amazon.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 01-Aug-01 12:00:00 GMT Location: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home. html Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain
Google "sells" searches to me in exchange for my eyeball time. Which they then resell to advertisers.
You know what I mean.
Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
His original point is still valid. I am Google's user. Google is looking out for my interests. I don't care whether BMW gets screwed over in the process, and I'd *enjoy* seeing search engine spammers getting screwed over.
Google is thus continuing to make *my* life good. Which is why they remain the most used search engine.
Despite a long time of watching Google with a wary eye, the only honestly bad thing about Google that I can think of is that they retain personally identifying search profile information beyond 30 days (whereas search.aol.com doesn't, and that only came up very recently).
No. The point of this is not to facilitate boycotts (of which only a tiny number of users participate -- if techie boycotts of services aimed at the general populace worked, then Amazon would not *still* be shoveling out bullshit patents).
The point of it is to clearly indicate that search engine spamming (which hurts me) is going to have a high risk associated with it. There is only one reason for a company to do things like this -- to try to game the system. Clearly, they care a lot about traffic coming in from Google. This behavior makes me, the person behind the browser, the person that Google wants to keep happy, unhappy.
People that try to manipulate Google are trying to taint a useful service that Google is offering to make more money themselves. The hell with them. I'm all for filtering them out. If you don't want to face the risk of a potential blacklist, don't repeatedly attempt to abuse Google to the detriment of Google users.
Google only works if not everyone in the world is malicious. It's possible to filter out random porn spam sites, but if major legitimate sites attempt to manipulate their ratings, then search engines can't function.
This provides a strong reason not to engage in SEO.
Because the goal is not to produce a fully human-edited database, but to provide disincentive to companies to use dirty SEO tactics (which inconvenience *me*).
Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?
It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.
The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.
The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.
User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.
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The basic difference between drug patents and software patents is the barrier to entry. You can buy a $200 computer, a $50 book on programming, and be infringing on software patents later that evening.
I stronly suspect that no professional programmer has not infringed on US software patents. I occasionally do a keyword search for "computer" on the USPTO to see the latest tech patents, and I'm always appalled by what comes up.
It's not that they even always violate the rules of the USPTO -- sure, for a lot of them, there's prior art. It's that they are *never* clever ideas that another person wouldn't immediately think of if presented with the same problem. This simply does not drive technical advancement.
What I'm really scared about is the upcoming patent Apocalypse.
For the past decade or so, the rate of granting tech patents has *vastly* accelerated. There are now a huge body of tech patents out there.
Thus far, we've only had a few problems with tech patents -- usually the ones that are getting long in the tooth, about to expire, and ones that the holders feel that they have to hurry up and make money on. Kind of like the GIF/LZW patent from Unisys.
Towards the end of a patent's life, whoever is holding the patent -- maybe an inventor, maybe a patent troll, maybe a company in financial trouble (a la SCO) knows that they are in a "use it or lose it" situation. It's just that there's about a fifteen year delay from the time that the patent is granted to the time that it gets really urgent to start litigating on it.
We've talked about patent reform, but no matter what happens, legislators will never, ever invalidate existing patents. To do so would produce business chaos -- business decisions were made based on the value of those patents, and there would be deep concern from companies if that IP value vanished.
Even if I turn on my computer tomorrow and discover that, wonderfully, Congress has officially banned the granting of software patents, there is still a decade's worth of glut of software patents out there.
What happens in another five years when software patent holders start warily eyeing the expiration date on their patents, wondering when they're going to make a return? Oh, sure, maybe IBM isn't going to go out and start suing people left and right, but they can easily sell their patents off to a patent troll. That way, they get a flat return on their patent and don't suffer any PR damage. Patent trolls don't give a damn about PR, because they aren't in a business where PR helps them in the least.
That's what worries me. And no matter how bad the situation gets, there isn't a whole lot that Congress can do. They can't reasonably do anything about *existing* patents. And there isn't much that the industry can do to work around the problem. Sure, they can ship software development jobs overseas to developers that aren't hamstrung by US software patents...but if you want to sell your finished product to the lucrative US software market, you *still* have to abide by the patents. This affects everyone, because just about every software development company out there depends on at least some US sales.
The problem isn't even just patent trolls. Given their recent exploits against Microsoft and similar folks, I'm pretty sure that IBM/MSFT/etc are more than happy to push for legislation that makes life miserable for trolls. But they sure as hell don't want to stop the stream of patents that *they* are acquiring. And there are *plenty* of bullshit patents going to both of those folks.
The really doubly frusterating thing is that if you're a researcher, a PhD that's gone into industry, almost always *have* to file for patents. It's a metric of "how well you're doing" in a field where it's *really* goddamn hard for your superiors to figure out how effective you are.
You've seen academics that have hundreds of papers with some authorship credit. Very, very few people have hundreds of papers worth of importa
In a corporate environment, using software from an actual company makes managers and IT folk feel warm and fuzzy.
/me shrugs
Second this *ten times over*.
I've been suggesting perl for producing test harnesses for ages (writing them in C is just a waste of time), but the folks running things just don't *trust* perl. Until someone discovered ActiveState. I walked in one day and found them using the commercial Komodo, happy as a clam, and talking about how great perl was.
Confused the hell out of me.
The only thing I can guess is that if you have business roots, you're always trying to figure out the other guy's angle. Why is he doing something for you? What's he planning to get? If business folks can figure this out, and decide that it's aligned with their own interests, then they feel okay accepting the deal.
Open source software just doesn't make any sense in a model that only recognizes human time and direct monetary value. So you get people who *never* have worked with hobbyists who like producing free stuff. They've never worked in an environment in which the marginal cost of production and distribution can approximate zero. It's very reasonable for them to look very dubiously at software, thinking "I can't figure out how this guy is going to profit from this, so I'd better stay the hell away, since he might try some sort of horrific extortion down the line. Who the hell would write software for *fun*? I have to yell at people to get them in on time to meet our deadlines!"
On the other hand, doing a deal in which the other guy is clearly making a profit means that they don't need to imagine ways in which they can get stabbed in the back later. They can be comfortable believing that the other guy is simply happy making the deal.
It's a weird mentality from a hobbyist standpoint, but it's the only way I can explain why so many companies look at Debian and walk away quickly but are happy as a clam buying Red Hat Enterprise Edition.
As long as I get to use something at work that I can freely use myself the rest of the time, I'm all for it.
You didn't quite read the (very short) FA, before chiming in, now did you?
Or perhaps he read between the lines in the FA and you didn't.
Do you expect a company that wants to collect license fees to claim "we're going to siphon money from competitors" or "we're going to protect our users against spyware"? Which do you think a marketer is more likely to produce as a public statement, regardless of a company's aims?
That being said, I'm a lot more sympathetic to BitTorrent's position, even if they just want some money, than I am to most other companies trying to lurk until something acquires value and then enforce it. So maybe they're banking on some name recognition, but that changes awfully quickly in the online world, and they *did* produce something decent.
No, he's going for people using his trademark maliciously...attacking spyware in the way that is easiest and best for him.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that anyone who is planning to start extracting money from people is *not* going to say "We're doing this to chisel money from people". SCO didn't say "Boy, we found a great way to freeload off the Linux world, and we're going to try that!" They said "We're trying to protect the work that we've put into advancing technology" or something like that.
Of course they're going to say that they're targetting adware and spyware, no matter what their goals are. To do otherwise would be stupid from a PR standpoint. Do you really expect them to do something different?
I can't agree with this move.
BitTorrent is not *just* the name of the software package (and I would agree with Bram on going after people who simply try to trade off the fame of the package), but also the name of the protocol, which many other packages than his own implement and have for some time. That may be unfortunate, but such is life. That protocol achieved public awareness by the number of servents available.
My guess is that "BitTorrent" is no longer trademarkable, given the amount of time that it has been in common use -- common use for a period of time without challenges does negate trademarks. However, the sorts of hobbyist programmers writing BitTorrent clients aren't the sorts who are going to mount a legal fight.
One possible fix would be doing what happened with trampolines. "Trampoline" with a capital "T" is trademarked, but "trampoline" simply refers to the device itself. Perhaps "BitTorrent" could refer to the software package, and "bittorrent" to the protocol. Still, I doubt that Bram would settle for this.
I really hope that people settle on another name for it (preferably with the same "bt" abbreviation) that is the same, instead of the name fragmenting into eight zillion different names (I remember Sony calling Firewire "iLink"...). "ByteTorrent?"
No matter what, it's a frusterating situation, that's for certain.
Ah, yes. Middle school. The point where everyone is busy throwing off authority but still has absolutely no idea how to get along with anyone else at all.
The least pleasant years of K-12, definitely.
Actually I've been looking forward to a paycut to have more free hours so I can work on things I like, i.e. Open Source development. Currently i get too tired from the job to keep on going, but by programming on Open Source projects, I feel like I'm helping the world and all that.
.NET code, I get desperate to get out of the office so that I can actually produce something solid at home.
I've found that when I work a lot on interesting Linux systems programming at work, my desire to do open source goes down.
When I'm writing
Install a Fedora RPM and look how many shared libraries are installed private to that RPM. You will find damn few packages like this.
Now install just about any commercial software package for Windows, and count the number of DLLs that get dumped in application-private directories.
Apple has had for years a JVM that shares classes between numerous virtual machine instances. It thus reduces unnecessary memory consumption.
So it's kind of like a slow version of native compiled code from gcj?
Under Windows, for various reasons (including the lack of a sane update and library dependency management system), applications all have their own damn copies of all the shared libraries. Which means that memory doesn't get "shared", as it does under Linux. It just gets wasted.
Emacs gets flack for memory usage based on using a whole couple megs of memory back in the day -- but do you want to compare its usage to Visual Studio's or Visual Slickedit's?
BBedit might use less memory -- haven't been following BBedit recently...
The thing is, when you fork it maps the memmory and marks everything as copy on write, when something needs to write to part of the memmory, then it will make the copy for each process.
A couple other tips:
* Each thread in a process shows up as consuming the same amount of memory (either this only happens under Linuxthreads or I don't have any threaded applications running on my system).
* Device mappings show up as consumed memory (which generates plenty of XFree86/xorg complaints). If you want to find out how much memory xorg/X11 is actually using (bytes in cached pixmaps on behalf of each process and sans device mappings), try this program (contains a tiny program that lists how much memory X is using for other programs by caching pixmaps and a perl script that lists how much memory X is using sans device mappings).
* The article mentions the fact that shared libraries show up in every application's memory usage. So, for example, glibc alone adds 1.5MB to the memory usage of every process. But Win folks may not realize how significant this is. Most Windows applications ship with their own copies of almost all shared libraries used, which means that there is a huge amount of wasted memory under Windows that *actually affects you*. Under Linux, instead of shipping shared libraries with applications, folks have built tools to automatically download the latest shared libraries and use those across multiple applications. Result -- only one copy of the library need be in memory at a time. This means that it's actually reasonable to run a box with 128MB of memory and three remote users using the thing. You simply can't pull that under Windows and expect usability.
* This may not sound significant, but Linux's VM is (anecdotal evidence, of course) really solid. When I run out of memory under Windows, performance rapidly degrades -- bring an application to the foreground, and the system just starts churning. Under Linux, you can push a ways into VM and things generally keep functioning pretty well (this is one of the causes of people talking about "applications loading faster under WINE than Windows" when they're trying to prove that WINE is 'faster' than Windows -- good disk I/O and VM code).
In my opinion, rewriting GIMP from scratch and making it extensible would be the best choice.
You mean like instead of making your primitive a bunch of stored images and a set of operations that can be applied to them, making your primitives images and DAG operations (thus allowing going back in a history of image editing and modifying a parameter or so)?
Good thing the GIMP people feel the same way.
Well...
The idea of simple free markets is that it's okay for companies to be greedy, and things just all work out. Of course, in the real world, there are a lot of exceptions, but it works well enough as a model to use for some things.
While it is a little annoying that Apple's APIs are only available on, y'know, Apple's OS, it's not really unreasonable, IMHO, any more than it would be to expect MS to port Win32 to Linux and freely release it.
I get irritated when I think that people are trying to *deliberately* introduce incompatibilities for the sake of incompatibility. However, that isn't happening here. Apple was trying to address a need for rapid application development with Cocoa. Okay, they aren't giving their platform away, but I can't really fault them for that. They're playing fair -- the market needed a feature, they implemented.
Now if they *sued* anyone who tried making a Cocoa-compatible implementation for a different platform, then I'd be upset -- but there's no evil conspiracy (or at least, one is not required to explain Apple's actions).
Criminal/drug dealer type buys expensive car with his ill gotten money....Buy aforementioned expensive car. No need to install expensive tracking device in case it gets stolen, because the thief would soon find themselves trying to play Harry Houdini with concrete slippers encased around their ankles....
I hate to break this to you, but a drug dealer is just some guy that, y'know, happens to sell drugs. Drug dealers don't have mysterious tracking powers that put the police to shame and allow them to locate their stolen cars.
1. Where are my blending options? I want to be able to bevel, emboss, texture, etc. on each layer with an easy to use dialog. I don't want to fiddle with 5 layers, each filtered their own way just to achieve a button. And I want immediate feedback.
Granted, not there today, but if my understanding of the gegl rework is correct, it should be easy to feed a layer into a "series of operations", and when updating that layer, have the "series of operations" reapplied. Basically, if you can store a directed acyclic graph of operations to be applied, it becomes a trivial operation to make a layer an "effect layer".
3. And yes, color support. I've only been able to achieve some effects with CMYK.
Also will be in gegl.
Oh, is this why Miserable Failure still goes to President Bush?
Because Google reflects majority views of webpage authors?
Google has a lot of good properties for web browsing that DNS lacks, actually. Given that at least Firefox does (by default) a Google I Feel Lucky search on a failed DNS lookup, from my mother's standpoint, Google has replaced DNS.
Amazon's homepage currently seems to be a redirect to a different page (which is another redirect). That last page contains a unique identifier in the title. This behavior probably interacts poorly with Google's ranking algorithm (since "nobody" links to a page with a unique identifier in the path), just as a guess.
. html
$ telnet www.amazon.com 80
Trying 207.171.175.29...
Connected to www.amazon.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 05:07:51 GMT
Server: Server
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Google "sells" searches to me in exchange for my eyeball time. Which they then resell to advertisers.
You know what I mean.
His original point is still valid. I am Google's user. Google is looking out for my interests. I don't care whether BMW gets screwed over in the process, and I'd *enjoy* seeing search engine spammers getting screwed over.
Google is thus continuing to make *my* life good. Which is why they remain the most used search engine.
Despite a long time of watching Google with a wary eye, the only honestly bad thing about Google that I can think of is that they retain personally identifying search profile information beyond 30 days (whereas search.aol.com doesn't, and that only came up very recently).
Good Lord, no! Not the brewery!
In other news, Google's cafeteria options have recently expanded...
No. The point of this is not to facilitate boycotts (of which only a tiny number of users participate -- if techie boycotts of services aimed at the general populace worked, then Amazon would not *still* be shoveling out bullshit patents).
The point of it is to clearly indicate that search engine spamming (which hurts me) is going to have a high risk associated with it. There is only one reason for a company to do things like this -- to try to game the system. Clearly, they care a lot about traffic coming in from Google. This behavior makes me, the person behind the browser, the person that Google wants to keep happy, unhappy.
People that try to manipulate Google are trying to taint a useful service that Google is offering to make more money themselves. The hell with them. I'm all for filtering them out. If you don't want to face the risk of a potential blacklist, don't repeatedly attempt to abuse Google to the detriment of Google users.
Google only works if not everyone in the world is malicious. It's possible to filter out random porn spam sites, but if major legitimate sites attempt to manipulate their ratings, then search engines can't function.
This provides a strong reason not to engage in SEO.
I'm rooting for Google on this one.
Because the goal is not to produce a fully human-edited database, but to provide disincentive to companies to use dirty SEO tactics (which inconvenience *me*).
Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?
It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.
The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.
The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.
User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.