Keep any form of legislation out of it. Sounds radical and utopian, but the opposite seems even worse, ineffective and ultimately pointless.
I'd give a hand* to eradicate cybersquatters by legislation. Also we have a big spam/scammer problem.
Legislation isn't out of the question, it just has to be applied with discipline. The internet is in its "wild west" phase right now, but as can be seen in USA itself, this is not a phase that lasts forever.
--- *Ok, I'd not give a hand, but you get my point.
[snip].... water is very slightly blue, in large quantities, the blue comes out.... [/snip]
This is true. Glass is also slightly green.
I attest to that. And air is slightly cyan/blue as well. In large quantities (such as a big sky), the cyan/blue comes out.
There's nothing like reading a good piece of science on Slashdot.
There's something I can't figure out: for some reason on sunset and sunrise, water becomes slightly yellow/red, just like the air.
I'm not sure what's with that, maybe as the sun gets ready to turn off, as heading into the ocean every night.
PS: Water reflects blue a bit better, but honestly, check some photos. You see the reflection on the surface. Water isn't cartoon bright blue as shown on the "proof photos" on Mars, especially when you lack the blue sky.
Gotta say, can't think of what it could be besides water. On the other hand, aren't the images artificially colored?
Shoot, it does look like water, a flowing river even, which reflects the blue sky and clouds on Mars. Which it doesn't have.
Also: "Puddles of Water Sighted on Mars". Damn it, Slashdot! What's wrong with that article title? Tell me.
You forgot the damn question mark is what it is! How many times do I have to repeat: when posting dubious speculative claims that are most likely false, never forget the damn question mark!!!
As about water on Mars, if anyone's so interested, there you go. Hope you're happy.
Is it just me, or does it seem like there are a lot of legal professionals who normally have no problem applying existing law to novel situations but who turn into drooling idiots as soon as a computer program or computer network becomes involved?
Apparently not. They'd be drooling idiots if they just said "well, it's a computer rating. They're expected to be wrong, I'm fine with it" and did nothing about it.
It has been ten years already that Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" was published. [...] Systems that are designed for amateurs or small businesses will evolve and become adopted more and more widely by professionals, until the old "professional-level" manufacturers go out of business. [...] If I were a Photoshop designer I would at least make an effort to learn how to use the Gimp. At least that seems the prudent thing to do.
Looks like you didn't learn a lot from that book of yours. Amateur apps don't automatically replace professional apps because of some law written somewhere. Yes, Photoshop will fall some day into the indefinite future, but which app it'll be, and how it'll operate, you have no idea right now. It may not have been written yet.
Some amateur apps simply become better than the current standard and people use them because they've become better. It's not the case with GIMP. Not at all.
The only reason GIMP is in this discussion at all, is because of all the screaming OSS fanboys trying to justify GIMP's existence. GIMP is makming a dent in a fraction of Photoshop's users: mostly the amateur-to-prosumer webdesigner niche. For anything else, such as professional web design, photo retouch, print design, image analysis, movie editing - it's just ridiculous to consider.
IMHO, they should first focus on making Firefox 2.x pass ACID2. I'm using Opera 9.21, because it passes ACID2 and had the fewest security bugs. Web standards compliance matters, because non-compliance makes creating rich web sites a royal pain.
Passing ACID2? Is this sort of like passing GAS3, maybe?
While busy explaining how important standard are, you forgot to mention ACID2 isn't anything like an official standards test, and doesn't confirm standards compliance.
It just confirms it supports the features used in ACID2, in the precise context of the ACID2 page. Opera has rendering bugs and many unsupported features just like Firefox.
A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support.
He said that? Shit.
Let me put things perspective. Tamarin (the Adobe Flash script engine) is currently implementation of JavaScript 2.0 and not 3.0. It'll show up not in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 earliest.
To get it from JS 2.0 to 3.0 (which doesn't exist even in the form of a draft yet), it'll probably mean few more major versions, Firefox 7, Firefox 8 maybe?
Firefox doesn't just run JavaScript in the pages on JavaScript. Instead, the whole damn thing is a big swat of JavaScript, that talks to the XUL/Gecko components.
So it'll be some 5-10 years before we see multithreaded Firefox? Nice. Perfect.
Now.. when do we expect multicore desktops and laptops to start showing up, and the competition (IE/Opera/Safari) making use of multiple threads to massively improve the responsiveness of their UI? Oh yes... yesterday.
Why is this whole story so familiar? It's Netscape all over again:
"Let's just wait and add bloat and not do much about our biggest problem, since The Solution Has To Be Perfect. Threads suck, instead we'll wait for Something Perfect to manifest in reality for us."
At the same time the competition uses whatever's out there and works, and runs past them.
And they will be like "oh shoot, we can never fix this in time, it's all based on JavaScript/XUL, we need a rewrite". Then they disappear for 5 years while trying to rewrite their newly formed mess, and Microsoft stops development at IE8 and stagnates.
Have you ever tried developing multithreaded GUI-applications? If not, I have. Usually, it starts off fine. No problems. Then you add more stuff. The application grows. The thing with GUI programming is that it is made to respond to operating system messages. Mixing that (event-driven) model with multi-threaded stuff requires an amount of discipline lacking in most developer teams. The more advanced(cool) graphical components you use, the more potholes and race-conditions appear.
What I'll say is horrible, but maybe will put things in perspective for you: I'd rather have Firefox crash from time to time, but be as responsive as Opera and IE, rather than it lock up every time I do *anything at all*, such as click a link.
Sum up the times it takes to reboot Firefox after a rare race condition crash and the times I've lost just waiting for it to unlock while thinking I may break out and cry if I gotta sit there doing nothing waiting for it, and multiple threads is suddenly looking a lot better.
That out of the way, giving each tab its own thread and not running the page in the UI thread has got to be one of the most obvious ways to improve the responsiveness of a browser.
I've been following the IEBlog at Microsoft and they said this is how they implemented tabs in IE because "otherwise it would lead to very bad performance every time only one of the pages is doing something slow". Amen, Jesus Christ in heaven!
Now all we need is for the Firefox team to see the light too. I'm not saying it'll be easy, and if you don't put proper architecture in it, it'll get nightmare to manage, but hell, it's quite very possible to do it if you have an idea what you're doing.
If Firefox needs to keep things simple so as "not to confuse the developers", then that's just the saddest excuse I've heard about its poor performance.
I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.
I second, triple, quadruple that. I absolutely hate the responsiveness of Firefox.
It's as if it's not waiting for a simple stream to send data, but doing something extremely CPU intensive. It truly seems like it locks up the entire process while it's doing something.
Neither IE7 or Opera do that and the browsing experience with those two is completely different just because of this performance issue in Firefox.
Defendant: I'm *not* guilty, I totally didn't kill that guy.
Community: But.. [looks in a the report paper] why did you bought the judge flowers, then bribed her, then threatened her if "she doesn't behave"?
Defendant: Have you seen her? She's a very hot chick. I just totally dig her. It's got nothing to do with my case. I mean, we all like a hot chick. You gays or something? I'm disappointed.
Notice I placed a question mark after each one of my phrases so I cannot be held responsible for them. You know, just asking questions, like Fox News and their "Hillary Clinton turns tricks?" headlines.
I'm running a macro when I visit slashdot that replaces "?" with "(of course this is total bullshit and we know it)."
People will go to the cinema and think: "Wow, looks like they totally Uwe'd this movie, let's check out something else."
It's not how it works. You see, some movies are so bad, I mean SO BAD, that they're good. The canonical example is "Plan 9 from outer space" (you gotta check this out).
If you thought Plan 9 is funny, then you will love Uwe's "Alone in the Dark" quite a bit more. The movie is so hilarious, that if they marketed it as a parody, I'd never suspect anything else.
The script, acting, editing, effects: everything is going to crack you up. And this is why, I like Uwe's movies and watch them. Especially good if you go watch it with some friends.
There were a ton of great queries, and unfortunately Mr. Anderson had only a limited time to spare for us.
Lemme guess, he was busy flying around and dunging bullets... "Dunging" isn't what I really think it is, is it:P Oh well, I bet he'd do that too but they cut it from the movie.
As another poster commented, without fresh DNA coming into the area, the local wildlife would not be as successful. Destroy all the ecosystems of the entire world, add a little nuclear winter and we will have created the worst extinction event the world has ever seen.
I think, however, that this epic tragedy will be offset from all the people who'll gain superpowers as a result.
But, so long as less corrupted genetic material can migrate in, you'll get a superfical appearance of normalcy.
You know, if the animals live to leave offspring, it's not superficial appearance of normalcy, it's normalcy, never mind all the curruption going under.
The purpose of an animal, is, after all, precisely this.
As about 1/3 of offspring being malformed, this is far from bad for the wildlife. If 1/2 was, they'd do fine, hell, if 3/4 were, they'd do fine. Even if none of them had mutation, most of the animal offspring would die in infancy for plenty of other reasons (like natural predators).
And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally. Only goes to show how much redundancy and resilience is built into the DNA / replicating mechanisms we use.
Truth is, even with a sufficient number of a-bombs accross the world, we'll have a very hard time wijping all of humanity and wild life. Life's a tough mother f*cker, hard to destroy.
The small companies are the only real thorn in the side of the bigger ones as they might offer a product that revolutionizes the field, but ends up costing a major conglomerate billions to redevelop their products). So patents force them out of business, causing the owners to work for the mega-corp and thus give the mega-corp control.
Perhaps in a few years, everyone will be working for a mega-corp and that will define our identities. We are theirs after all...
Don't forget though, patents expire. And the more bullshit gets patented, the more bullshit will expire in some (20?) years and will be never patentable again.
In which case everyone and his dog, can implement solution upon it. Patents stiffle innovation simply because the computer industry develops so damn fast, and we're "fresh" in thousands of stupid patents created during the last two decades. In 20-30 years all of this will be free for (ab)use.
The U.S. patent office simply wasn't designed to handle the modern influx of very complex patents and patent claims. It simply can't scale to the size that it needs to be to actually review and police so many patents that are so complex in nature. So they've basically just thrown up their hands and said "Let the courts work it out."
That's not true at all. Nobody has thrown up their hands about it, they ARE trying to get as many patents approved as possible, since this is what they get paid to do and the system encourages approving anything that falls in their sight.
Those processes are macro processes, for this reason you can't blame the people, as some other posters said. USPTO are not "stupid", they are just poorly designed for the current situation.
If they were split in two, one fraction getting paid to approve patents, and one getting paid to reject them based on obviousness or other reasons, we'd see instantly a much better balance of the content being approved.
The "complex in nature patents"... this I don't buy at all. The patents we're complaining about are exactly the most obvious and simple things one could imagine. One click shopping? Three column interface? How is this complex.
The USPTO right now is like a system where the client (patent submitter) has a bunch of lawyers, some of them working in the court itself, and there are exactly zero prosecutors. There's no balance of interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep any form of legislation out of it. Sounds radical and utopian, but the opposite seems even worse, ineffective and ultimately pointless.
I'd give a hand* to eradicate cybersquatters by legislation. Also we have a big spam/scammer problem.
Legislation isn't out of the question, it just has to be applied with discipline. The internet is in its "wild west" phase right now, but as can be seen in USA itself, this is not a phase that lasts forever.
---
*Ok, I'd not give a hand, but you get my point.
I'm surprised that some nutjob asshat hasn't yet barged into their offices and raked 'em all down with machine gun fire.
... and eliminated
You're going to jail for this!
While I don't advocate someone blowing their office to flinders
Fine, you're off the hook...
with a bomb or some other evil terroristic act
That's is: jail time!
I am surprised that it hasn't happened yet
Oh ok, you're a fine fella.
(one would think that with all the loosely bound people in the USA, one of them would have freaked out by now and targeted them...)
Effin terrorist! JAIL!
What I DO advocate is that the RIAA and the MPAA and their associated organisations be banned
Oh, banned. That's cool I guess.
Screw it, I'm calling the FBI on ya!!
[snip].... water is very slightly blue, in large quantities, the blue comes out .... [/snip]
This is true. Glass is also slightly green.
I attest to that. And air is slightly cyan/blue as well. In large quantities (such as a big sky), the cyan/blue comes out.
There's nothing like reading a good piece of science on Slashdot.
There's something I can't figure out: for some reason on sunset and sunrise, water becomes slightly yellow/red, just like the air.
I'm not sure what's with that, maybe as the sun gets ready to turn off, as heading into the ocean every night.
PS: Water reflects blue a bit better, but honestly, check some photos. You see the reflection on the surface. Water isn't cartoon bright blue as shown on the "proof photos" on Mars, especially when you lack the blue sky.
Gotta say, can't think of what it could be besides water. On the other hand, aren't the images artificially colored?
Shoot, it does look like water, a flowing river even, which reflects the blue sky and clouds on Mars.
Which it doesn't have.
Also: "Puddles of Water Sighted on Mars". Damn it, Slashdot! What's wrong with that article title? Tell me.
You forgot the damn question mark is what it is! How many times do I have to repeat: when posting dubious speculative claims that are most likely false, never forget the damn question mark!!!
As about water on Mars, if anyone's so interested, there you go. Hope you're happy.
Is it just me, or does it seem like there are a lot of legal professionals who normally have no problem applying existing law to novel situations but who turn into drooling idiots as soon as a computer program or computer network becomes involved?
Apparently not. They'd be drooling idiots if they just said "well, it's a computer rating. They're expected to be wrong, I'm fine with it" and did nothing about it.
It has been ten years already that Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" was published. [...] Systems that are designed for amateurs or small businesses will evolve and become adopted more and more widely by professionals, until the old "professional-level" manufacturers go out of business. [...]
If I were a Photoshop designer I would at least make an effort to learn how to use the Gimp. At least that seems the prudent thing to do.
Looks like you didn't learn a lot from that book of yours. Amateur apps don't automatically replace professional apps because of some law written somewhere. Yes, Photoshop will fall some day into the indefinite future, but which app it'll be, and how it'll operate, you have no idea right now. It may not have been written yet.
Some amateur apps simply become better than the current standard and people use them because they've become better. It's not the case with GIMP. Not at all.
The only reason GIMP is in this discussion at all, is because of all the screaming OSS fanboys trying to justify GIMP's existence. GIMP is makming a dent in a fraction of Photoshop's users: mostly the amateur-to-prosumer webdesigner niche. For anything else, such as professional web design, photo retouch, print design, image analysis, movie editing - it's just ridiculous to consider.
IMHO, they should first focus on making Firefox 2.x pass ACID2. I'm using Opera 9.21, because it passes ACID2 and had the fewest security bugs. Web standards compliance matters, because non-compliance makes creating rich web sites a royal pain.
Passing ACID2? Is this sort of like passing GAS3, maybe?
While busy explaining how important standard are, you forgot to mention ACID2 isn't anything like an official standards test, and doesn't confirm standards compliance.
It just confirms it supports the features used in ACID2, in the precise context of the ACID2 page. Opera has rendering bugs and many unsupported features just like Firefox.
A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support.
He said that? Shit.
Let me put things perspective. Tamarin (the Adobe Flash script engine) is currently implementation of JavaScript 2.0 and not 3.0. It'll show up not in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 earliest.
To get it from JS 2.0 to 3.0 (which doesn't exist even in the form of a draft yet), it'll probably mean few more major versions, Firefox 7, Firefox 8 maybe?
Firefox doesn't just run JavaScript in the pages on JavaScript. Instead, the whole damn thing is a big swat of JavaScript, that talks to the XUL/Gecko components.
So it'll be some 5-10 years before we see multithreaded Firefox? Nice. Perfect.
Now.. when do we expect multicore desktops and laptops to start showing up, and the competition (IE/Opera/Safari) making use of multiple threads to massively improve the responsiveness of their UI? Oh yes... yesterday.
Why is this whole story so familiar? It's Netscape all over again:
"Let's just wait and add bloat and not do much about our biggest problem, since The Solution Has To Be Perfect. Threads suck, instead we'll wait for Something Perfect to manifest in reality for us."
At the same time the competition uses whatever's out there and works, and runs past them.
And they will be like "oh shoot, we can never fix this in time, it's all based on JavaScript/XUL, we need a rewrite". Then they disappear for 5 years while trying to rewrite their newly formed mess, and Microsoft stops development at IE8 and stagnates.
Nice.
Have you ever tried developing multithreaded GUI-applications?
If not, I have. Usually, it starts off fine. No problems. Then you add more stuff. The application grows.
The thing with GUI programming is that it is made to respond to operating system messages.
Mixing that (event-driven) model with multi-threaded stuff requires an amount of discipline lacking in most developer teams.
The more advanced(cool) graphical components you use, the more potholes and race-conditions appear.
What I'll say is horrible, but maybe will put things in perspective for you: I'd rather have Firefox crash from time to time, but be as responsive as Opera and IE, rather than it lock up every time I do *anything at all*, such as click a link.
Sum up the times it takes to reboot Firefox after a rare race condition crash and the times I've lost just waiting for it to unlock while thinking I may break out and cry if I gotta sit there doing nothing waiting for it, and multiple threads is suddenly looking a lot better.
That out of the way, giving each tab its own thread and not running the page in the UI thread has got to be one of the most obvious ways to improve the responsiveness of a browser.
I've been following the IEBlog at Microsoft and they said this is how they implemented tabs in IE because "otherwise it would lead to very bad performance every time only one of the pages is doing something slow". Amen, Jesus Christ in heaven!
Now all we need is for the Firefox team to see the light too. I'm not saying it'll be easy, and if you don't put proper architecture in it, it'll get nightmare to manage, but hell, it's quite very possible to do it if you have an idea what you're doing.
If Firefox needs to keep things simple so as "not to confuse the developers", then that's just the saddest excuse I've heard about its poor performance.
I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.
I second, triple, quadruple that. I absolutely hate the responsiveness of Firefox.
It's as if it's not waiting for a simple stream to send data, but doing something extremely CPU intensive. It truly seems like it locks up the entire process while it's doing something.
Neither IE7 or Opera do that and the browsing experience with those two is completely different just because of this performance issue in Firefox.
Defendant: I'm *not* guilty, I totally didn't kill that guy.
Community: But.. [looks in a the report paper] why did you bought the judge flowers, then bribed her, then threatened her if "she doesn't behave"?
Defendant: Have you seen her? She's a very hot chick. I just totally dig her. It's got nothing to do with my case. I mean, we all like a hot chick. You gays or something? I'm disappointed.
This is Russia we're talking about. Ukraine, actually. And there are a lot of crazy people in the Ukraine.
I can attest to that. And worse still, they are all called Ivan.
Notice I placed a question mark after each one of my phrases so I cannot be held responsible for them. You know, just asking questions, like Fox News and their "Hillary Clinton turns tricks?" headlines.
I'm running a macro when I visit slashdot that replaces "?" with "(of course this is total bullshit and we know it)."
People will go to the cinema and think: "Wow, looks like they totally Uwe'd this movie, let's check out something else."
It's not how it works. You see, some movies are so bad, I mean SO BAD, that they're good. The canonical example is "Plan 9 from outer space" (you gotta check this out).
If you thought Plan 9 is funny, then you will love Uwe's "Alone in the Dark" quite a bit more. The movie is so hilarious, that if they marketed it as a parody, I'd never suspect anything else.
The script, acting, editing, effects: everything is going to crack you up. And this is why, I like Uwe's movies and watch them. Especially good if you go watch it with some friends.
MEDIA: Do you plan FF on 360?
Exec1: Well.. I don't know of any plans to make one on 360 for now.
MEDIA: Aha! "EXEC SAYS: FF ON 360, NEVER!"
Exec2: Wait, we never said that, we're talking about immediate plans.
MEDIA: Aha! "SQUARE STEPS BACK FROM WHAT THEY SAID BEFORE!"
Exec3: But we never said it...?!
MEDIA: Aha! "SQUARE TRIES TO BEND HISTORY AND CENSOR MEDIA!"
Exec1: O_o
Exec2: o_O
Exec3: O_O
There were a ton of great queries, and unfortunately Mr. Anderson had only a limited time to spare for us.
:P Oh well, I bet he'd do that too but they cut it from the movie.
Lemme guess, he was busy flying around and dunging bullets... "Dunging" isn't what I really think it is, is it
As another poster commented, without fresh DNA coming into the area, the local wildlife would not be as successful. Destroy all the ecosystems of the entire world, add a little nuclear winter and we will have created the worst extinction event the world has ever seen.
I think, however, that this epic tragedy will be offset from all the people who'll gain superpowers as a result.
But, so long as less corrupted genetic material can migrate in, you'll get a superfical appearance of normalcy.
You know, if the animals live to leave offspring, it's not superficial appearance of normalcy, it's normalcy, never mind all the curruption going under.
The purpose of an animal, is, after all, precisely this.
As about 1/3 of offspring being malformed, this is far from bad for the wildlife. If 1/2 was, they'd do fine, hell, if 3/4 were, they'd do fine. Even if none of them had mutation, most of the animal offspring would die in infancy for plenty of other reasons (like natural predators).
Any photos of giant insects or ninja turtles? At least maybe a cross between a spider and a man?
Damn. Radiation in real life is BORING.
No: it was full of wildlife for years now.
And yes, the DNA of most animals in the area is pretty effed up, but surprisingly most of them appear healthy and reproduce normally. Only goes to show how much redundancy and resilience is built into the DNA / replicating mechanisms we use.
Truth is, even with a sufficient number of a-bombs accross the world, we'll have a very hard time wijping all of humanity and wild life. Life's a tough mother f*cker, hard to destroy.
The small companies are the only real thorn in the side of the bigger ones as they might offer a product that revolutionizes the field, but ends up costing a major conglomerate billions to redevelop their products). So patents force them out of business, causing the owners to work for the mega-corp and thus give the mega-corp control.
Perhaps in a few years, everyone will be working for a mega-corp and that will define our identities. We are theirs after all...
Don't forget though, patents expire. And the more bullshit gets patented, the more bullshit will expire in some (20?) years and will be never patentable again.
In which case everyone and his dog, can implement solution upon it. Patents stiffle innovation simply because the computer industry develops so damn fast, and we're "fresh" in thousands of stupid patents created during the last two decades. In 20-30 years all of this will be free for (ab)use.
The U.S. patent office simply wasn't designed to handle the modern influx of very complex patents and patent claims. It simply can't scale to the size that it needs to be to actually review and police so many patents that are so complex in nature. So they've basically just thrown up their hands and said "Let the courts work it out."
That's not true at all. Nobody has thrown up their hands about it, they ARE trying to get as many patents approved as possible, since this is what they get paid to do and the system encourages approving anything that falls in their sight.
Those processes are macro processes, for this reason you can't blame the people, as some other posters said. USPTO are not "stupid", they are just poorly designed for the current situation.
If they were split in two, one fraction getting paid to approve patents, and one getting paid to reject them based on obviousness or other reasons, we'd see instantly a much better balance of the content being approved.
The "complex in nature patents"... this I don't buy at all. The patents we're complaining about are exactly the most obvious and simple things one could imagine. One click shopping? Three column interface? How is this complex.
The USPTO right now is like a system where the client (patent submitter) has a bunch of lawyers, some of them working in the court itself, and there are exactly zero prosecutors. There's no balance of interests.
Wacom are powering their tablet pens and mice wirelessly via simple electromagnetic induction. And they patented the hell out of it.
Just saying.
OMG you just pinged the entire Internet!
Poor internet. I'll reboot it, may fix it.
Upon visiting this site, firefox started attempting to visit 255.255.255.255 on UDP 67 (BOOTPS).
I wonder of one of their ad providers actually infected me with something. Worst site ever.