While it's long presumed that X Windows preceded Windows, the history of the GUI quoted by others includes this tidbit:
"Sometime around the debut of the Amiga, the first UNIX GUI appeared as well. Many UNIX heads had long sneered at the simple-minded, overly convoluted operating systems and playtoy PCs that were populating the consumer market. But some UNIX users decided to see if they could overlay a GUI on UNIX in the same fashion as Microsoft overlaid Windows atop DOS, and thus X was born. X (sometimes called "X Windows," and sometimes incorrectly called "X for Windows") was born at MIT, fathered by a Stanford University windowing system called W and mothered by Sun's "SunView" environment. X became the main graphics system for most RISC-based UNIX operating systems..."
Right, X Windows. You never refer to "X Windows" as "Windows" (indeed, quite contrary: the abbreviated version of X Windows is X), and I have never heard that in common usage. In any case I believe that several historical examples have shown that X was never called "X Windows" (and isn't even in common use except for as a mistake) prior to Microsoft Windows.
Even if "Windows" was a commonly used term back in 1984 when Microsoft announced "Microsoft Windows", it was not a term generically used for a operating system/GUI: There were software products like Desqview, GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System), GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), etc. None of them generically used the term Windows?
Let me put it another way: If I came out with an operating system today and thought that a component of it, semaphores, would make a neat name, and I called my operating system SemaphoreTM, for someone to come along in 10 years and call theirs Lemaphones is just weak (This Lindows case is even MORE weak because they don't even call it Windows making their ultimate goal, which is to capitalize on the success of Microsoft Windows not to mention the likely goal of raising publicity due to the almost certain legal action, very obvious).
So Apple has it clearly, as the word Apple has nothing to do with computers
Sure it does: When someone says "I use an Apple to do my video editing" I immediately think of the computer, not the fruit. Of course I now associate "Apple" with the computer specifically because of Apple Computers, however what many are saying is that now that they associate "Windows" with "windowing software" (as weak as that is. I have never heard someone use the term "Windows" to refer to anything but Microsoft Windows) because of the widespread proliferation of the term when applied to Microsoft Windows, now it's a generic term.
Windows are glass panes that you put in your house to see outside without letting the environment in. The application of that term on a computer is just a metaphor, and Microsoft Windows isn't a literal implementation of "Windows", but rather uses it as a metaphor for a small (very small) portion of what it does.
The trademark for "Windows" is in trouble because the word was used to describe computer GUI software long before Microsoft introduced their product.
I'm very curious to see some proof of this (though proof is seldom needed when people pursue their anti-Microsoft campaigns). I was heavily involved in the consumer computer marketplace when Microsoft Windows 1.0 was first introduced (in 1985, though they had originally advertised the name and promised the release in late 1983/early 1984), and I remember thinking "Windows? What a dumb name. Windows are glass things that you put in houses." (much like how apples are fruits that you make a pie with.) I was a user of GEOS on the Commodore 64, and then TOS on the AtariST, and the terminology "windows" wasn't generic for a GUI concept, or at least it wasn't prevalent.
I could be wrong, and it could just be the information that I read from, but as hard as it seems to believe, Microsoft was one of the first out with a comprehensive graphical interface.
I see that you got moderated troll by self self-important open software crusader. Hardly surprizing here.
However I entirely agree with you. The name "Lindows" is clearly to confuse the consumer and to capitalize on the awareness of Windows (and everyone on the planet, pretty much, identifies "Windows" when referring to computer products as as "Microsoft Windows". There is no ambiguity and any attempts to pretend that it's a generic word is disingeuous). Microsoft is hardly intruding on their rights, either, as "Lindows" has every right to call it "Smoozleboog" with a disclaimer "Now offering subpar, marginal, largely useless Microsoft Windows(tm) compatibility".
Regardless of the trademark issue, two other points come to the forefront:
Lindows is a marginal name anyways. It just sounds and looks like a typo.
It's a fraudulent name when it portends great Windows compatibility when the reality is that such compatibility is at best marginal, and is hardly useful
Personally I found the article very difficult to read: Clearly (or rather hopefully) English is a second language for the author. I don't fault them for it as my second language is l33t Quake3 online speak ("Ghey! Noobz!"), however it did make reading this English article rather difficult.
It did seem rather void of information as well, and where there was information it was oft of dubious value. For example: If we interpolate, we will see that 512 KB must result in 7-8% gain in the SPECint 2000 (they got this value by dividing the gain of going to 1MB of L2 cache by 2. Of course the source of that information is absent so who knows). Wow, so 1GB of cache must result in a 15000% gain! Of course in reality such a simplistic interpolation isn't accurate, and indeed going to 512KB of L2 might yield 14% of the 15% gain of 1MB (depending on the test set).
people really were still defining what a video game was
It didn't take a genius to figure out that a game was garbage back in the day, and the reality is that a lot of these games were money-grabbing trash and there was no way that the publisher/author wasn't fully aware of that, but they thought they'd profiteer on suckers given the slowness of (or complete lack of) reviews.
This worst-of sort of counters the trait of people who only remember the best of yesteryear, always imagining that games used to be so great whereas now they're so horrendous, blah blah blah.
Notice how the clones is in quotation marks: Most of the claimed benefits about cloning humans revolve around traits that we already perpetuate via breeding-- Tall people have tall kids, and smart people have smart kids. If nature could get by just spitting off clones, I'm sure it would have a long time ago.
have a hard time believing that the experts would sit by not doing it because people are afraid.
Yes, we call it "having sex". It's an amazing cloning technique that nature gave us that allows one to combine traits and create "clones". If you really want purity, incest might be in order: Some sisterly love and you'll have a virtually perfect family clone.
Of course then there's the small problem that we've tinkering in things that we have only the slightest clue of. Already cloned mammals are showing shorter lifespans and other ailments clearly pointing a massive spotlight on the fact that they aren't a pure clone: There is something going wrong, but to use paraphrase a lame line from Jurassic Park "We're so caught up in if we could that we never question if we should".
I'll ignore that your whole foundation is flawed given that Mono and other open-source implementations of.NET are completely cross platform, and just focus on the hilarity of the foundation.
I find it hilarious how the anti-Microsoft crowd will constantly crow about the ability of [insert alternative platform here, be it Linux, BeOS, or J2EE] to run on "non x86" hardware, yet if you did a quick poll about, oh, 99.999% of you are running your alternative systems on x86 hardware. Of course the reasoning is that the price/performance ratio is extremely lucrative.
Indeed, in the nasceant days of NT Microsoft went to great lengths to support several different hardware platforms: MIPS, Alpha, x86, etc. They quickly discovered, though, that when a common software platform was available on multiple hardware platforms, people were buying x86 simply because the efficiency of scale came into play and a much more powerful x86 system could be had for the same price of a more esoteric system. Today Apple shuns away from releasing their software on the x86 simply because they know their software drives their hardware, and without the scarcity of their software on x86, the x86 would likely eat their lunch.
Remember that miss not only equals "failing to make contact", but also includes "making contact but in a way that does no damage". You'll notice that your propensity to "hit" is reduced by the armor that the opponent is wearing, though of course that armor doesn't make them harder to physically hit, but rather it means that you may make contact, but you're just making lots of noise.
I use a via based motherboard (333), an AMD processor, a nvidia GF4 4400, and I have _never_ seen a BSOD (or GSOD) on XP.
If you are with such mainstream hardware then I'd suspect that you have a borked piece of hardware. Contrary to FUDsterism, Linux can't protect one from flawed hardware anymore than XP/2000 can.
Macromedia doesn't ever remotely own the content development market. They are a contender, yes, but own it? Pshhhhhhhaw...
Why the hell did our incompetent courts not shut down that monster when they had the chance? Oh, right, they're incompetent. Forgot about that....
Yes because a fictional acquisition dreamed out of someone's imagination is all the proof that we need that they need to be reigned in, right? Note that on the markets today Macromedia gained marginally on 1/2 the share volume as normal: Clearly the market has laughed this off, but not the believe-anything-to-slam-Microsoft Slashdot community.
That and the fact that Flash has 99% market penetration and SVG has 0.01% and no active development.
Complete and absolute BS. Flash has probably 1% penetration in places where dynamic vector graphics could be used. There are countless places where neither Flash or SVG are in use because people either don't want to exclude users for marginal gain. Saying that SVG has "no active development" is absolute Flash-enabled fantasy as well: I don't know if you noticed, but SVG 1.1 was big news. SVG 1.2 will be even bigger news, and there is native support in virtually all graphics packages and a growing developer base. Flash just keeps on in the margins, shunned by the overwhelming majority of those in the know.
DHTML makes for not fully-functional GUIs and excludes NS4, Java crapplets collapsed under browser incompability, and VBish client-server stuff is too hard to deploy.
If one is willing to say "Well Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install the Flash plug-in", then I'll turn that around and say "Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install IE 6/Mozilla. If one has the option to install Flash, then a newer browser is certainly in the works. One will have probably an equal number of users who don't have Flash installed as those who have a browser ill suited for modern DHTML.
As far as SVG having an "unmaintained plugin" that's just a riot. Have you used the Adobe SVG Viewer? It is tremendous. Corel is actively developing a plugin. There is a version of Mozilla with SVG native support. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention (of have been hiding hoping that the web switches to Flash), but virtually every graphics company but Macromedia is involved and participating in the SVG standard. Take a look at the signators at the bottom of the spec...the only big company missing is Macromedia. Tell me again how Flash is the new world order...
Adobe has pretty much dropped SVG development, and nobody else is picking it up. That train is not going anywhere soon.
I find this humorous because people, so use to products so incomplete and full of bugs that there are constant iterations, visit Adobe's SVG viewer to find that the last update was November of 2001. The problem in their thought process, though, is that that iteration is extremely good and very comprehensive. It may not support the latest version of Mozilla, but on the most popular platform (IE on the Wintel platform) it works absolutely stunningly. During the same time SVG has been added to virtually every vector graphics package as a native or export graphics format.
Recently, within the past two months, the W3C formalized SVG 1.1 and mobile SVG 1.1.
The only reason SVG isn't front and foremost right now is because of the tech downturn at the same time that the technology became mature. It should be noted that during the same time Flash has been marginalized to basically animated advertisements (the only other common use of Flash that I see are misguided intro animations, themselves a bad relic of 1998. The sites that keep out patrons by using Macromedia at the GUI are few and far between, and generally are "Web design firms desperate for business".
DOM is a part of browsers, as is XML, as is ECMAScript/JavaScript. A standard vector graphics package that interacts with these native elements is such an obvious eventual destination that it's screaming out. It wouldn't suprize me at all if the next version of Internet Explorer had native SVG support (perhaps provided by Adobe) which would basically ring the death knell for Flash.
On a bright side, I'm glad CF's power is finally recognized
Recognized in a weak story where the writer was looking for anything and everything to try to support a ridiculous idea. With all due respect, the only houses that I've seen that use CF use it as a "ASP or JSP for dummies". In any case, Microsoft has.NET, a tremendously wide and actually very full featured server language, and they certainly don't need CF to show them how it's done.
Wait, I think I'm about to come up with a gem....groan.....grunt....grrrrr....errrrrrr...PLOP! By BogusPulledOutOfAssNews Posted: 23/12/2002 at 14:14 GMT
Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Slashdot.org, lining up a deal that would throw the Linux and open source communities into a spin, Ergo98 writes.
Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets Somewhere, Michigan-based Slashdot.org's recently horribly unreliable message board system, which is a hotbed of radical, contrarian thoughts and advocacy.
Microsoft's own Astroturfing efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform FUDstering of the GPL community, which now includes GCC, Linux, and Gnome, and has taken steps closer towards FreeBSD via promiscuous "borrowing" of BSD code. The primary advocates, meanwhile, continue to push their communist dreams of a utopian future to any and all who'll listen.
That story is pure FUD (check out computerwire.info to see the credibility of the source, and of course "The Register" `reporting' it immediately makes it suspect anyways). Someone literally pulled this stinker out of their ass as the likelihood of Microsoft acquiring Macromedia is tremendously small. Ignoring the regulatory nuisance it would create, the justification used to support this absurd premise just seemed so weak: If anything Flash has been rapidly declining in usage, and DHTML has supplanted it in the vast majority of its prior uses. SVG, an actual vector graphics standard (http://www.w3c.org/svg), will likely make even more of a chink in Macromedia's armour.
DirectX once was quite "difficult" for non-Windows/non-COM programmers because there was a substantial amount of setup involved with simply getting a 3D surface, at least if using the interfaces directly and not using helper middleware libraries, and then there were more complex functions such as calls that called callbacks. Now that's mostly alleviated though, and there is far less setup, and instead of callbacks you can iterate with an ordinal index value.
As far as which is better, while in the nascent days of DirectX its existence seemed to be more because Microsoft felt that OpenGL was "not invented here", nowadays Direct3D is much more feature rich than OpenGL (and note that I'm talking about core functionality of the library itself. i.e. I'm not including specialized nvidia openGL extensions, etc, because generally those get unused because they are not standardized).
Microsoft is always fast (I am seriously curious what sort of bandwidth they do have. I suspect absolutely tremendous). I just downloaded quite quickly with an average throughput of 259KB/second (Cogeco High Speed in Southern Ontario).
I guess my point was that it's a common fallacy to believe that there is something unique and "rare" among certain sequences, when indeed there is equal rarity among all sequences. The classic one is the lottery where people are astounded when several numbers are drawn close to each other, yet it's equally possible that 1 2 3 4 5 6 is drawn than is any other "random" cluster of numbers. There was a really fascinating story about statistics and the human's mind tendancy to find patterns but I can't recall where it was right now.
Let's see there are 900 3 digit numbers (100-999 inclusive), and 8 different descending values (987, 876, 765, 654, 543, 432, 321, 210), so a 0.8% change of getting such a combination. It might seem rare until you realize that there's a 0.11% change of getting the number "692" from among the 3 digit numbers, but I doubt you'd have expressed such a reservation if it were the number used ("But...the statistical probability of the number 692 is so remote!").
Altec Lansing destroyed themselves when they came out with computer speaker systems that were no better than the $5 clone speakers. Much like Bose they decided to capitalize and profiteer on their name for short term gain.
Check out "Cambridge Soundworks". Great speaker values.
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, however Cambridge Soundworks once was a great value in speakers: I have a set of the system from around the time when Creative Labs bought them, but before their cheap, greedy hands destroyed the product line-These speakers are fantastic. Literally it is one of the highest quality reproductions I've heard, and while I don't have super high end, my home audio equipment isn't bad (right now it's Boston Acoustics, however previously it was Paradigm). However Creative decided to do some re-engineering and, for example, instead of nice little wood satellites, now they're a super cheap garbage plastic with horrendous acoustics. I can say this from the perspective that the PC I'm typing on has the "classic" version of the micro system, and my wife's PC at another desk has the new version that's branded the same: The former sounds great, but the latter literally is difficult to listen to.
I wouldn't buy a Cambridge Soundworks today unless it's an old system on Ebay.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's long presumed that X Windows preceded Windows, the history of the GUI quoted by others includes this tidbit:
"Sometime around the debut of the Amiga, the first UNIX GUI appeared as well. Many UNIX heads had long sneered at the simple-minded, overly convoluted operating systems and playtoy PCs that were populating the consumer market. But some UNIX users decided to see if they could overlay a GUI on UNIX in the same fashion as Microsoft overlaid Windows atop DOS, and thus X was born. X (sometimes called "X Windows," and sometimes incorrectly called "X for Windows") was born at MIT, fathered by a Stanford University windowing system called W and mothered by Sun's "SunView" environment. X became the main graphics system for most RISC-based UNIX operating systems..."
Right, X Windows. You never refer to "X Windows" as "Windows" (indeed, quite contrary: the abbreviated version of X Windows is X), and I have never heard that in common usage. In any case I believe that several historical examples have shown that X was never called "X Windows" (and isn't even in common use except for as a mistake) prior to Microsoft Windows.
Even if "Windows" was a commonly used term back in 1984 when Microsoft announced "Microsoft Windows", it was not a term generically used for a operating system/GUI: There were software products like Desqview, GEOS (Graphical Environment Operating System), GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), etc. None of them generically used the term Windows?
Let me put it another way: If I came out with an operating system today and thought that a component of it, semaphores, would make a neat name, and I called my operating system SemaphoreTM, for someone to come along in 10 years and call theirs Lemaphones is just weak (This Lindows case is even MORE weak because they don't even call it Windows making their ultimate goal, which is to capitalize on the success of Microsoft Windows not to mention the likely goal of raising publicity due to the almost certain legal action, very obvious).
So Apple has it clearly, as the word Apple has nothing to do with computers
Sure it does: When someone says "I use an Apple to do my video editing" I immediately think of the computer, not the fruit. Of course I now associate "Apple" with the computer specifically because of Apple Computers, however what many are saying is that now that they associate "Windows" with "windowing software" (as weak as that is. I have never heard someone use the term "Windows" to refer to anything but Microsoft Windows) because of the widespread proliferation of the term when applied to Microsoft Windows, now it's a generic term.
Windows are glass panes that you put in your house to see outside without letting the environment in. The application of that term on a computer is just a metaphor, and Microsoft Windows isn't a literal implementation of "Windows", but rather uses it as a metaphor for a small (very small) portion of what it does.
The trademark for "Windows" is in trouble because the word was used to describe computer GUI software long before Microsoft introduced their product.
I'm very curious to see some proof of this (though proof is seldom needed when people pursue their anti-Microsoft campaigns). I was heavily involved in the consumer computer marketplace when Microsoft Windows 1.0 was first introduced (in 1985, though they had originally advertised the name and promised the release in late 1983/early 1984), and I remember thinking "Windows? What a dumb name. Windows are glass things that you put in houses." (much like how apples are fruits that you make a pie with.) I was a user of GEOS on the Commodore 64, and then TOS on the AtariST, and the terminology "windows" wasn't generic for a GUI concept, or at least it wasn't prevalent.
I could be wrong, and it could just be the information that I read from, but as hard as it seems to believe, Microsoft was one of the first out with a comprehensive graphical interface.
However I entirely agree with you. The name "Lindows" is clearly to confuse the consumer and to capitalize on the awareness of Windows (and everyone on the planet, pretty much, identifies "Windows" when referring to computer products as as "Microsoft Windows". There is no ambiguity and any attempts to pretend that it's a generic word is disingeuous). Microsoft is hardly intruding on their rights, either, as "Lindows" has every right to call it "Smoozleboog" with a disclaimer "Now offering subpar, marginal, largely useless Microsoft Windows(tm) compatibility".
Regardless of the trademark issue, two other points come to the forefront:
Personally I found the article very difficult to read: Clearly (or rather hopefully) English is a second language for the author. I don't fault them for it as my second language is l33t Quake3 online speak ("Ghey! Noobz!"), however it did make reading this English article rather difficult.
It did seem rather void of information as well, and where there was information it was oft of dubious value. For example: If we interpolate, we will see that 512 KB must result in 7-8% gain in the SPECint 2000 (they got this value by dividing the gain of going to 1MB of L2 cache by 2. Of course the source of that information is absent so who knows). Wow, so 1GB of cache must result in a 15000% gain! Of course in reality such a simplistic interpolation isn't accurate, and indeed going to 512KB of L2 might yield 14% of the 15% gain of 1MB (depending on the test set).
Why? Easier to code for.
I don't really know if it's fair to say "easier to code for", though it would definitely be fair to say "easier to transition to".
people really were still defining what a video game was
It didn't take a genius to figure out that a game was garbage back in the day, and the reality is that a lot of these games were money-grabbing trash and there was no way that the publisher/author wasn't fully aware of that, but they thought they'd profiteer on suckers given the slowness of (or complete lack of) reviews.
This worst-of sort of counters the trait of people who only remember the best of yesteryear, always imagining that games used to be so great whereas now they're so horrendous, blah blah blah.
Notice how the clones is in quotation marks: Most of the claimed benefits about cloning humans revolve around traits that we already perpetuate via breeding-- Tall people have tall kids, and smart people have smart kids. If nature could get by just spitting off clones, I'm sure it would have a long time ago.
have a hard time believing that the experts would sit by not doing it because people are afraid.
Yes, we call it "having sex". It's an amazing cloning technique that nature gave us that allows one to combine traits and create "clones". If you really want purity, incest might be in order: Some sisterly love and you'll have a virtually perfect family clone.
Of course then there's the small problem that we've tinkering in things that we have only the slightest clue of. Already cloned mammals are showing shorter lifespans and other ailments clearly pointing a massive spotlight on the fact that they aren't a pure clone: There is something going wrong, but to use paraphrase a lame line from Jurassic Park "We're so caught up in if we could that we never question if we should".
I want to know when the next ship to Blisstonia is.
I'll ignore that your whole foundation is flawed given that Mono and other open-source implementations of .NET are completely cross platform, and just focus on the hilarity of the foundation.
I find it hilarious how the anti-Microsoft crowd will constantly crow about the ability of [insert alternative platform here, be it Linux, BeOS, or J2EE] to run on "non x86" hardware, yet if you did a quick poll about, oh, 99.999% of you are running your alternative systems on x86 hardware. Of course the reasoning is that the price/performance ratio is extremely lucrative.
Indeed, in the nasceant days of NT Microsoft went to great lengths to support several different hardware platforms: MIPS, Alpha, x86, etc. They quickly discovered, though, that when a common software platform was available on multiple hardware platforms, people were buying x86 simply because the efficiency of scale came into play and a much more powerful x86 system could be had for the same price of a more esoteric system. Today Apple shuns away from releasing their software on the x86 simply because they know their software drives their hardware, and without the scarcity of their software on x86, the x86 would likely eat their lunch.
Remember that miss not only equals "failing to make contact", but also includes "making contact but in a way that does no damage". You'll notice that your propensity to "hit" is reduced by the armor that the opponent is wearing, though of course that armor doesn't make them harder to physically hit, but rather it means that you may make contact, but you're just making lots of noise.
I use a via based motherboard (333), an AMD processor, a nvidia GF4 4400, and I have _never_ seen a BSOD (or GSOD) on XP.
If you are with such mainstream hardware then I'd suspect that you have a borked piece of hardware. Contrary to FUDsterism, Linux can't protect one from flawed hardware anymore than XP/2000 can.
Macromedia owns the content development market
Macromedia doesn't ever remotely own the content development market. They are a contender, yes, but own it? Pshhhhhhhaw...
Why the hell did our incompetent courts not shut down that monster when they had the chance? Oh, right, they're incompetent. Forgot about that....
Yes because a fictional acquisition dreamed out of someone's imagination is all the proof that we need that they need to be reigned in, right? Note that on the markets today Macromedia gained marginally on 1/2 the share volume as normal: Clearly the market has laughed this off, but not the believe-anything-to-slam-Microsoft Slashdot community.
That and the fact that Flash has 99% market penetration and SVG has 0.01% and no active development.
Complete and absolute BS. Flash has probably 1% penetration in places where dynamic vector graphics could be used. There are countless places where neither Flash or SVG are in use because people either don't want to exclude users for marginal gain. Saying that SVG has "no active development" is absolute Flash-enabled fantasy as well: I don't know if you noticed, but SVG 1.1 was big news. SVG 1.2 will be even bigger news, and there is native support in virtually all graphics packages and a growing developer base. Flash just keeps on in the margins, shunned by the overwhelming majority of those in the know.
DHTML makes for not fully-functional GUIs and excludes NS4, Java crapplets collapsed under browser incompability, and VBish client-server stuff is too hard to deploy.
If one is willing to say "Well Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install the Flash plug-in", then I'll turn that around and say "Netscape 4 is Flash enabled when you install IE 6/Mozilla. If one has the option to install Flash, then a newer browser is certainly in the works. One will have probably an equal number of users who don't have Flash installed as those who have a browser ill suited for modern DHTML.
As far as SVG having an "unmaintained plugin" that's just a riot. Have you used the Adobe SVG Viewer? It is tremendous. Corel is actively developing a plugin. There is a version of Mozilla with SVG native support. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention (of have been hiding hoping that the web switches to Flash), but virtually every graphics company but Macromedia is involved and participating in the SVG standard. Take a look at the signators at the bottom of the spec...the only big company missing is Macromedia. Tell me again how Flash is the new world order...
Adobe has pretty much dropped SVG development, and nobody else is picking it up. That train is not going anywhere soon.
I find this humorous because people, so use to products so incomplete and full of bugs that there are constant iterations, visit Adobe's SVG viewer to find that the last update was November of 2001. The problem in their thought process, though, is that that iteration is extremely good and very comprehensive. It may not support the latest version of Mozilla, but on the most popular platform (IE on the Wintel platform) it works absolutely stunningly. During the same time SVG has been added to virtually every vector graphics package as a native or export graphics format.
Recently, within the past two months, the W3C formalized SVG 1.1 and mobile SVG 1.1.
The only reason SVG isn't front and foremost right now is because of the tech downturn at the same time that the technology became mature. It should be noted that during the same time Flash has been marginalized to basically animated advertisements (the only other common use of Flash that I see are misguided intro animations, themselves a bad relic of 1998. The sites that keep out patrons by using Macromedia at the GUI are few and far between, and generally are "Web design firms desperate for business".
DOM is a part of browsers, as is XML, as is ECMAScript/JavaScript. A standard vector graphics package that interacts with these native elements is such an obvious eventual destination that it's screaming out. It wouldn't suprize me at all if the next version of Internet Explorer had native SVG support (perhaps provided by Adobe) which would basically ring the death knell for Flash.
On a bright side, I'm glad CF's power is finally recognized
.NET, a tremendously wide and actually very full featured server language, and they certainly don't need CF to show them how it's done.
Recognized in a weak story where the writer was looking for anything and everything to try to support a ridiculous idea. With all due respect, the only houses that I've seen that use CF use it as a "ASP or JSP for dummies". In any case, Microsoft has
Wait, I think I'm about to come up with a gem. ...groan.....grunt....grrrrr....errrrrrr...PLOP!
By BogusPulledOutOfAssNews
Posted: 23/12/2002 at 14:14 GMT
Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Slashdot.org, lining up a deal that would throw the Linux and open source communities into a spin, Ergo98 writes.
Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets Somewhere, Michigan-based Slashdot.org's recently horribly unreliable message board system, which is a hotbed of radical, contrarian thoughts and advocacy.
Microsoft's own Astroturfing efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform FUDstering of the GPL community, which now includes GCC, Linux, and Gnome, and has taken steps closer towards FreeBSD via promiscuous "borrowing" of BSD code. The primary advocates, meanwhile, continue to push their communist dreams of a utopian future to any and all who'll listen.
That story is pure FUD (check out computerwire.info to see the credibility of the source, and of course "The Register" `reporting' it immediately makes it suspect anyways). Someone literally pulled this stinker out of their ass as the likelihood of Microsoft acquiring Macromedia is tremendously small. Ignoring the regulatory nuisance it would create, the justification used to support this absurd premise just seemed so weak: If anything Flash has been rapidly declining in usage, and DHTML has supplanted it in the vast majority of its prior uses. SVG, an actual vector graphics standard (http://www.w3c.org/svg), will likely make even more of a chink in Macromedia's armour.
DirectX once was quite "difficult" for non-Windows/non-COM programmers because there was a substantial amount of setup involved with simply getting a 3D surface, at least if using the interfaces directly and not using helper middleware libraries, and then there were more complex functions such as calls that called callbacks. Now that's mostly alleviated though, and there is far less setup, and instead of callbacks you can iterate with an ordinal index value.
As far as which is better, while in the nascent days of DirectX its existence seemed to be more because Microsoft felt that OpenGL was "not invented here", nowadays Direct3D is much more feature rich than OpenGL (and note that I'm talking about core functionality of the library itself. i.e. I'm not including specialized nvidia openGL extensions, etc, because generally those get unused because they are not standardized).
Microsoft is always fast (I am seriously curious what sort of bandwidth they do have. I suspect absolutely tremendous). I just downloaded quite quickly with an average throughput of 259KB/second (Cogeco High Speed in Southern Ontario).
I guess my point was that it's a common fallacy to believe that there is something unique and "rare" among certain sequences, when indeed there is equal rarity among all sequences. The classic one is the lottery where people are astounded when several numbers are drawn close to each other, yet it's equally possible that 1 2 3 4 5 6 is drawn than is any other "random" cluster of numbers. There was a really fascinating story about statistics and the human's mind tendancy to find patterns but I can't recall where it was right now.
Let's see there are 900 3 digit numbers (100-999 inclusive), and 8 different descending values (987, 876, 765, 654, 543, 432, 321, 210), so a 0.8% change of getting such a combination. It might seem rare until you realize that there's a 0.11% change of getting the number "692" from among the 3 digit numbers, but I doubt you'd have expressed such a reservation if it were the number used ("But...the statistical probability of the number 692 is so remote!").
Altec Lansing destroyed themselves when they came out with computer speaker systems that were no better than the $5 clone speakers. Much like Bose they decided to capitalize and profiteer on their name for short term gain.
Check out "Cambridge Soundworks". Great speaker values.
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, however Cambridge Soundworks once was a great value in speakers: I have a set of the system from around the time when Creative Labs bought them, but before their cheap, greedy hands destroyed the product line-These speakers are fantastic. Literally it is one of the highest quality reproductions I've heard, and while I don't have super high end, my home audio equipment isn't bad (right now it's Boston Acoustics, however previously it was Paradigm). However Creative decided to do some re-engineering and, for example, instead of nice little wood satellites, now they're a super cheap garbage plastic with horrendous acoustics. I can say this from the perspective that the PC I'm typing on has the "classic" version of the micro system, and my wife's PC at another desk has the new version that's branded the same: The former sounds great, but the latter literally is difficult to listen to.
I wouldn't buy a Cambridge Soundworks today unless it's an old system on Ebay.