Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.
Good: sending astronauts to the moon or to Mars is a waste of money. What we should be doing is sending out a lot more robotic probes. If we don't waste our money on sending meatbags to Mars, we could have planetary rovers on every major solar system body within the next three decades, and we could have several interstellar spacecraft on their way by the end of the century. The data and images those probes would send back is what's exciting.
I hate it when comments like this come across as proof of wrong-doing.
Where does it say that? No, they come across as "this matter is of sufficient concern to Jobs that he needs to hire a lawyer", nothing more and nothing less.
As a law student I'm coming to understand that you're a damn fool to deal with the gov't without someone there to advise you.
Maybe eventually, you'll also learn not to jump to conclusions.
To oversimplify, it would be like the US government printing money to pay debts.
Well, as far as the US is concerned, that would be a good thing because it would devalue the dollar and would make US goods and services more competitive, while at the same time reducing imports.
It would nominally lower the US standard of living, but practically, not being able to buy Chinese-made clothes and electronics in large amounts would probably be a good thing.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
You don't have to. In fact, you simply insert a blank CD and the rest is obvious, just like on Macintosh.
2) A lot of software I as a.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
Ubuntu comes with a full set of.NET development tools, including Monodevelop.
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
In all benchmarks I have ever seen, Windows XP performs consistently worse under load that UNIX or Linux. There are many reasons why you may get the impression that Windows is "more responsive under load" in your particular setup, but you're most likely comparing apples and oranges (i.e., the conditions and applications are different).
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
No, sorry, they don't. Windows XP's network configuration is a confusing mess. Gnome's network configuration is much more straightforward.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
To each their own, I suppose. The reason I use Linux is that the software I want to run either doesn't exist for Windows at all, or is astronomically expensive. A few years ago, there were still a few software packages for Windows that I wished existed for Linux, but none remain--everything I need has been implemented on Linux, and usually better than the Windows counterpat.
Chuckle! Snort! It would indeed be easy and simple to "put restrictions" on things as you say. Enforcement is another matter altogether. Do words like Tor, Gnutella, and "overseas hosting" mean anything?
Such restrictions don't make the data completely unavailable, they make it hard to get. That's sufficient for most privacy concerns.
If you say something in public then it is out there. Period. If the public forum in question is part of a worldwide network that crosses almost every jurisdictional boundry then that goes double. Even in the most ideal of societies, there is no such thing as public speech without consequence.
Again, you have a stupid black-and-white view of the world. In fact, in reality, information doesn't exist in two states, "out there" and "not out there", it has a complex set of costs associated with it, depending on who wants to get the information, for what purpose, and who can legally and illegally provide it.
What you seem to want is both self-contradictory and in opposition to principles of accountability. Yes, someone can google you holding forth in a blog and refuse to hire you because of it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Google can, and would continue to be able to, index and archive things. What they shouldn't be able to do is provide access to the contents of my blog after I have removed it, except under limited, specific circumstances.
But then things like the memoryhole and the Internet Archive also allow us to catch the rich and powerful rewriting history to their convenience. You can't have it both ways.
Yes, one can have it both ways. Wholesale and indefinite republishing, like the Internet Archive does, should be prohibited. Republishing of specific pieces of information of public interest, on the other hand, should be permitted. That's a distinction that already exists in the law and it's a distinction that has worked well traditionally. It would work just as well on the Internet.
Right now, there is only one site that I know of that archives+republishes old web pages on a large scale: the Internet Archive. Google News and a few other sites do it for USENET. It is neither possible nor desirable to prevent the archiving part, but it is easy and simple to put restrictions on wholesale republishing, and to enforce them.
If you cannot stand behind what you're willing to say in public then don't say it.
No, I'm not willing to have every word I ever said available for quoting out of context. If you don't understand why, then you don't understand how conversations, debate, and free speech work.
I used to use nynms based on my real name. Having a stable career and a family to think of changed my mind on that score.
And that's precisely why we should think about stopping republishing of archived materials in the way that the Internet Archive is doing.
I most certainly won't count on copyright law or any other sort of law to prevent that from happening.
These are not black-and-white issues; restricting sites like the Internet Archive and Google News would not give you complete protection, but they would permit people to participate in discussions significantly more openly.
I think we should re-think whether permanent archiving and full republishing of web pages should be permitted at all. Not only does it arguably conflict with copyright law, I think it also has a chilling effect on on-line discussions and free exchange of information.
was (and is), that few people realised how great the original NeXTStep environment - which GNUStep attempts to clone - was. [...] GNUStep (the structure of which is pretty revolutionary)
Neither GNUStep nor NeXTStep were "revolutionary"; almost all of the fundamental concepts and designs in those systems came from Smalltalk. They may have been better than C and Motif at the time, but they were still a poor imitation of Smalltalk.
Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments,
I'm running Gnome right now, and there is not a single non-Gnome app running on my desktop or on my launchbar. I think KDE users have the same experience with KDE. The notion that Linux desktops are an inconsistent mix of different toolkits and interface styles is a myth.
And still could be someday - after all, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps, like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.
There are several Illustrator clones for Gnome and KDE; what makes you think that GNUStep can deliver something that is better in any way?
Nowadays, people code for OS X because OS X is seen as a hip system with a small but viable installed base, and the fact that the dev tools are extremely nice is just an added bonus.
It sounds to me like you haven't tried modern development tools. I have done some apps in XCode and Objective-C, and I very much prefer Glade+Python, Eclipse, and Monodevelop. As far as I'm concerned, Apple is way behind on development tools, and even their upcoming update isn't going to fix that.
it could go a long way to attracting Mac developers to Linux if they can accomplish ports of many Cocoa apps with simple recompiles.
And this is useful... why? What Cocoa apps would actually be of interest to Linux users and wouldn't be so tied into the Macintosh desktop that it would still be a lot of work to port?
A lot of the "big apps" are developed using various compatibility or wrapper libraries anyway (e.g., Skype, NeoOffice, Microsoft Office, AOL IM, Acrobat, Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, etc.)
And why do we need to ensure (meaning spending taxpayers money) to make sure that everyone grows to their "full potential"? I personally don't care if someone their is so fucked up they cant teach themselves to read in their spare time. More cheap labour to serve me and less potential competition for me.
Ah, but you do care, because that's what has made Western nations rich, successful, and powerful, and what ensures your own standard of living.
The alternative, in which only a tiny elite is educated, still exists in many nations, and they are appropriately poor, and, more importantly, even the richest and most powerful individuals in those nations are weak compared to the power of Western democracies.
We didn't get to this point by accident, good will, or even struggle of the people; public education and Western democracies have dominated for the last century because they have worked well and are competitive. And whatever will replace them will likely involve universal literacy and public education as well because nations that don't have those are simply not competitive or efficient.
Government schools hurt children because they teach children that all knowledge comes from a higher authority.
So do lots of private schools, and so do lots of parents, for that matter.
In any case, the purpose of government schools is to give everybody access to education. If you are wealthy enough to afford a private school, go ahead and pay for it, you have that choice. For the rest of the nation, public schools are a good thing and clearly far better than the alternative. How do we know that? Because we have centuries of experience with the alternative.
People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them, when really it is their responsibility to make sure their child learns.
Yeah, so what's your point? That we should abolish public education? Or what?
My parents didn't know anything about science or engineering. Without public education, I wouldn't have been able to learn about those fields. Yes, my parents made sure that their child learned, but it was ultimately public education that taught what actually needed to be taught.
And that's the purpose of public education: to provide access to learning and knowledge, not to relieve parents of their responsibility to instill appreciation for learning in their kids.
Maybe the 30G drive is just in there to keep the price down. But maybe it's part of the overall system design--a good compromise between battery life, size, weight, robustness, etc. So, I wouldn't blindly assume that putting an 80G drive into the device will make a better camcorder.
Note that the 80G drives that the article mentions are found in iPods are actually in iPods that are substantially thicker than the iPods using 30G drives.
In fact, what Nielsen is overlooking is that movie UIs are extremely well designed--they serve exactly the purpose and user community they are meant to serve: the movie audience. But ignoring that point for a moment and actually looking at them as real user interfaces, Nielsen's analysis leaves a lot to be desired.
1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI [...] The fact that all user interfaces are walk-up-and-use is probably the single most unrealistic aspect of how movies depict computers
It sure is unrealistic given the kind of UI designs that are currently being created (and to which Nielsen contributes). But the fact that current UI designs are hard to learn and hard to use doesn't mean that it has to remain so in the future. Civilizations that have figured out antigravity and faster than light travel hopefully will also have figured out how to build UIs that are easier to learn than Windows and Macintosh.
2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs [...] If you were transported back in time to the Napoleonic wars and made captain of a British frigate, you'd have no clue how to sail the ship: You couldn't use a sextant and you wouldn't know the names of the different sails, so you couldn't order the sailors to rig the masts appropriately. [...] In contrast, it's highly unlikely that anyone from 2207 would have ever seen Windows Vista screens.
Well, as Nielsen's unwarranted dig at UNIX shows, he himself certainly doesn't bother studying historically significant systems. But he shouldn't generalize from his own ignorance and prejudices. People who time travel in movies are usually actually quite good at what they are doing. In fact, studying classical approaches is part of the curriculum in most fields, from physics to navigation. A modern captain knows how to use a sextant, just like a modern photographer learns about film cameras, and a modern mathematician learns about constructive geometry. And once computer science has become a field with a tradition, computer engineers from 2207 will learn about Windows Vista (provided DRM and copyrights permit it), because it is historically significant.
3. The 3D UI [...] it's very tiring to keep your arms in the air while using a computer. Gestures do have their place, but not as the primary user interface for office systems.
The Minority Report UI is being used by in-shape young police officers, not out of shape geezers or armchair UI designers. Besides, maybe the reason that the Minority Report users are in shape has something to do with the fact that their UI actually makes them move. I very much hope that our UIs will change such that they will require more physical exertion.
8. Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls) [...] Many other films feature other types of remote control, which always work with high speed and accuracy despite input devices that are suboptimal for the task.
Geez, maybe Nielsen failed to notice that the remote control was special-purpose designed and had to fit into a cell phone. Also, it's not designed to be used by some nerd, it's designed to be used by 007, the kind of person who leaps out of an airplane, and not only survives, but lands in the arms of a beautiful woman while picking up a martini on the way down.
10. "This is Unix, It's Easy" [...] Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system [...] Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system
In fact, 12-year olds do know UNIX (I did), and even better, what I knew back then still applies nearly perfectly to today's UNIX systems, decades later. In fact, it even applies to Macintosh, while little of the original Macintosh survives. And the UNIX command line is highly consistent. UNIX is probably the single best choice the script writers could have made for the movie plot, since, although it may seem a little confusing to the likes of Nielsen and home users, among existing, widely-used operating systems, it has the longest-lived and most consistent design and conventions.
I used to install all the GNU stuff from source, before any binary packaging existed, so I'm perfectly capable of doing it. However, it took a lot of my time. These days, it comes prepackaged and tested and it saves me a lot of time. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, if it hasn't been packaged (and that includes integration and testing) for my distribution, it doesn't exist. I think a lot of other competent people basically have the same view.
So Microsoft's patented process is nothing new. Most of it can be claimed as prior art.
Of course, it's nothing new. The point is that Microsoft deliberately applied for this patent despite knowing that there is prior art. Furthermore, getting a patent struck down based on prior art is hard, so if this patent gets granted, it is a problem.
So you are saying your inability to cite an instance of Microsoft suing, or even threatening to sue is clear evidence that this is exactly what Microsoft are actually doing.
No, I'm saying that the small number of lawsuits and threats we know about is only the tip of the iceberg.
Thats just fucking brilliant. Rumsfeldian logic at its best.
By "Rumsfeldian logic", you're apparently referring to your own cynical manipulation of facts and statements.
You'd think so. In practice, that can be a difficult and costly argument to make because there are lots of conditions to be met for something to count as prior art.
Slashdot Mirror
Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.
Good: sending astronauts to the moon or to Mars is a waste of money. What we should be doing is sending out a lot more robotic probes. If we don't waste our money on sending meatbags to Mars, we could have planetary rovers on every major solar system body within the next three decades, and we could have several interstellar spacecraft on their way by the end of the century. The data and images those probes would send back is what's exciting.
I hate it when comments like this come across as proof of wrong-doing.
Where does it say that? No, they come across as "this matter is of sufficient concern to Jobs that he needs to hire a lawyer", nothing more and nothing less.
As a law student I'm coming to understand that you're a damn fool to deal with the gov't without someone there to advise you.
Maybe eventually, you'll also learn not to jump to conclusions.
To oversimplify, it would be like the US government printing money to pay debts.
Well, as far as the US is concerned, that would be a good thing because it would devalue the dollar and would make US goods and services more competitive, while at the same time reducing imports.
It would nominally lower the US standard of living, but practically, not being able to buy Chinese-made clothes and electronics in large amounts would probably be a good thing.
Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory??
Because software frequently puts sensitive data in files outside your home directory.
Are they just concentrating on a Windows-only solution that will lock out OS X and Linux??
Linux supports full disk encryption. If OS X doesn't, well, it should, since home-directory-only encryption is not particularly secure.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
.NET development tools, including Monodevelop.
You don't have to. In fact, you simply insert a blank CD and the rest is obvious, just like on Macintosh.
2) A lot of software I as a
Ubuntu comes with a full set of
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
In all benchmarks I have ever seen, Windows XP performs consistently worse under load that UNIX or Linux. There are many reasons why you may get the impression that Windows is "more responsive under load" in your particular setup, but you're most likely comparing apples and oranges (i.e., the conditions and applications are different).
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
No, sorry, they don't. Windows XP's network configuration is a confusing mess. Gnome's network configuration is much more straightforward.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
To each their own, I suppose. The reason I use Linux is that the software I want to run either doesn't exist for Windows at all, or is astronomically expensive. A few years ago, there were still a few software packages for Windows that I wished existed for Linux, but none remain--everything I need has been implemented on Linux, and usually better than the Windows counterpat.
Chuckle! Snort! It would indeed be easy and simple to "put restrictions" on things as you say. Enforcement is another matter altogether. Do words like Tor, Gnutella, and "overseas hosting" mean anything?
Such restrictions don't make the data completely unavailable, they make it hard to get. That's sufficient for most privacy concerns.
If you say something in public then it is out there. Period. If the public forum in question is part of a worldwide network that crosses almost every jurisdictional boundry then that goes double. Even in the most ideal of societies, there is no such thing as public speech without consequence.
Again, you have a stupid black-and-white view of the world. In fact, in reality, information doesn't exist in two states, "out there" and "not out there", it has a complex set of costs associated with it, depending on who wants to get the information, for what purpose, and who can legally and illegally provide it.
What you seem to want is both self-contradictory and in opposition to principles of accountability. Yes, someone can google you holding forth in a blog and refuse to hire you because of it.
There is nothing wrong with that. Google can, and would continue to be able to, index and archive things. What they shouldn't be able to do is provide access to the contents of my blog after I have removed it, except under limited, specific circumstances.
But then things like the memoryhole and the Internet Archive also allow us to catch the rich and powerful rewriting history to their convenience. You can't have it both ways.
Yes, one can have it both ways. Wholesale and indefinite republishing, like the Internet Archive does, should be prohibited. Republishing of specific pieces of information of public interest, on the other hand, should be permitted. That's a distinction that already exists in the law and it's a distinction that has worked well traditionally. It would work just as well on the Internet.
You can order on-line from one of the Linux vendors.
Alternatively, you can take a live Linux CD to the store, boot from it, and see what works.
Personally, I have found Ubuntu to be a great all-round distro and highly recommend it for general use.
How do you intend to prevent such a thing?
Right now, there is only one site that I know of that archives+republishes old web pages on a large scale: the Internet Archive. Google News and a few other sites do it for USENET. It is neither possible nor desirable to prevent the archiving part, but it is easy and simple to put restrictions on wholesale republishing, and to enforce them.
If you cannot stand behind what you're willing to say in public then don't say it.
No, I'm not willing to have every word I ever said available for quoting out of context. If you don't understand why, then you don't understand how conversations, debate, and free speech work.
I used to use nynms based on my real name. Having a stable career and a family to think of changed my mind on that score.
And that's precisely why we should think about stopping republishing of archived materials in the way that the Internet Archive is doing.
I most certainly won't count on copyright law or any other sort of law to prevent that from happening.
These are not black-and-white issues; restricting sites like the Internet Archive and Google News would not give you complete protection, but they would permit people to participate in discussions significantly more openly.
I think we should re-think whether permanent archiving and full republishing of web pages should be permitted at all. Not only does it arguably conflict with copyright law, I think it also has a chilling effect on on-line discussions and free exchange of information.
I hope they didn't use a snake robot for a prostatectomy...
The original claim didn't specify "flat".
Neither did it specify "corner", which means that the statement is true if it works for "flat".
was (and is), that few people realised how great the original NeXTStep environment - which GNUStep attempts to clone - was. [...] GNUStep (the structure of which is pretty revolutionary)
Neither GNUStep nor NeXTStep were "revolutionary"; almost all of the fundamental concepts and designs in those systems came from Smalltalk. They may have been better than C and Motif at the time, but they were still a poor imitation of Smalltalk.
Linux desktops are such a melting pot of different toolkits and environments,
I'm running Gnome right now, and there is not a single non-Gnome app running on my desktop or on my launchbar. I think KDE users have the same experience with KDE. The notion that Linux desktops are an inconsistent mix of different toolkits and interface styles is a myth.
And still could be someday - after all, that perhaps some "killer GNUStep apps" (graphics apps, like an Illustrator clone would be a good start) could get people to notice GNUStep again.
There are several Illustrator clones for Gnome and KDE; what makes you think that GNUStep can deliver something that is better in any way?
Nowadays, people code for OS X because OS X is seen as a hip system with a small but viable installed base, and the fact that the dev tools are extremely nice is just an added bonus.
It sounds to me like you haven't tried modern development tools. I have done some apps in XCode and Objective-C, and I very much prefer Glade+Python, Eclipse, and Monodevelop. As far as I'm concerned, Apple is way behind on development tools, and even their upcoming update isn't going to fix that.
it could go a long way to attracting Mac developers to Linux if they can accomplish ports of many Cocoa apps with simple recompiles.
And this is useful... why? What Cocoa apps would actually be of interest to Linux users and wouldn't be so tied into the Macintosh desktop that it would still be a lot of work to port?
A lot of the "big apps" are developed using various compatibility or wrapper libraries anyway (e.g., Skype, NeoOffice, Microsoft Office, AOL IM, Acrobat, Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, etc.)
And why do we need to ensure (meaning spending taxpayers money) to make sure that everyone grows to their "full potential"? I personally don't care if someone their is so fucked up they cant teach themselves to read in their spare time. More cheap labour to serve me and less potential competition for me.
Ah, but you do care, because that's what has made Western nations rich, successful, and powerful, and what ensures your own standard of living.
The alternative, in which only a tiny elite is educated, still exists in many nations, and they are appropriately poor, and, more importantly, even the richest and most powerful individuals in those nations are weak compared to the power of Western democracies.
We didn't get to this point by accident, good will, or even struggle of the people; public education and Western democracies have dominated for the last century because they have worked well and are competitive. And whatever will replace them will likely involve universal literacy and public education as well because nations that don't have those are simply not competitive or efficient.
Government schools hurt children because they teach children that all knowledge comes from a higher authority.
So do lots of private schools, and so do lots of parents, for that matter.
In any case, the purpose of government schools is to give everybody access to education. If you are wealthy enough to afford a private school, go ahead and pay for it, you have that choice. For the rest of the nation, public schools are a good thing and clearly far better than the alternative. How do we know that? Because we have centuries of experience with the alternative.
But perhaps those are lessons you weren't taught.
People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them, when really it is their responsibility to make sure their child learns.
Yeah, so what's your point? That we should abolish public education? Or what?
My parents didn't know anything about science or engineering. Without public education, I wouldn't have been able to learn about those fields. Yes, my parents made sure that their child learned, but it was ultimately public education that taught what actually needed to be taught.
And that's the purpose of public education: to provide access to learning and knowledge, not to relieve parents of their responsibility to instill appreciation for learning in their kids.
Maybe the 30G drive is just in there to keep the price down. But maybe it's part of the overall system design--a good compromise between battery life, size, weight, robustness, etc. So, I wouldn't blindly assume that putting an 80G drive into the device will make a better camcorder.
Note that the 80G drives that the article mentions are found in iPods are actually in iPods that are substantially thicker than the iPods using 30G drives.
In fact, what Nielsen is overlooking is that movie UIs are extremely well designed--they serve exactly the purpose and user community they are meant to serve: the movie audience. But ignoring that point for a moment and actually looking at them as real user interfaces, Nielsen's analysis leaves a lot to be desired.
1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI [...] The fact that all user interfaces are walk-up-and-use is probably the single most unrealistic aspect of how movies depict computers
It sure is unrealistic given the kind of UI designs that are currently being created (and to which Nielsen contributes). But the fact that current UI designs are hard to learn and hard to use doesn't mean that it has to remain so in the future. Civilizations that have figured out antigravity and faster than light travel hopefully will also have figured out how to build UIs that are easier to learn than Windows and Macintosh.
2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs [...] If you were transported back in time to the Napoleonic wars and made captain of a British frigate, you'd have no clue how to sail the ship: You couldn't use a sextant and you wouldn't know the names of the different sails, so you couldn't order the sailors to rig the masts appropriately. [...] In contrast, it's highly unlikely that anyone from 2207 would have ever seen Windows Vista screens.
Well, as Nielsen's unwarranted dig at UNIX shows, he himself certainly doesn't bother studying historically significant systems. But he shouldn't generalize from his own ignorance and prejudices. People who time travel in movies are usually actually quite good at what they are doing. In fact, studying classical approaches is part of the curriculum in most fields, from physics to navigation. A modern captain knows how to use a sextant, just like a modern photographer learns about film cameras, and a modern mathematician learns about constructive geometry. And once computer science has become a field with a tradition, computer engineers from 2207 will learn about Windows Vista (provided DRM and copyrights permit it), because it is historically significant.
3. The 3D UI [...] it's very tiring to keep your arms in the air while using a computer. Gestures do have their place, but not as the primary user interface for office systems.
The Minority Report UI is being used by in-shape young police officers, not out of shape geezers or armchair UI designers. Besides, maybe the reason that the Minority Report users are in shape has something to do with the fact that their UI actually makes them move. I very much hope that our UIs will change such that they will require more physical exertion.
8. Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls) [...] Many other films feature other types of remote control, which always work with high speed and accuracy despite input devices that are suboptimal for the task.
Geez, maybe Nielsen failed to notice that the remote control was special-purpose designed and had to fit into a cell phone. Also, it's not designed to be used by some nerd, it's designed to be used by 007, the kind of person who leaps out of an airplane, and not only survives, but lands in the arms of a beautiful woman while picking up a martini on the way down.
10. "This is Unix, It's Easy" [...] Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system [...] Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system
In fact, 12-year olds do know UNIX (I did), and even better, what I knew back then still applies nearly perfectly to today's UNIX systems, decades later. In fact, it even applies to Macintosh, while little of the original Macintosh survives. And the UNIX command line is highly consistent. UNIX is probably the single best choice the script writers could have made for the movie plot, since, although it may seem a little confusing to the likes of Nielsen and home users, among existing, widely-used operating systems, it has the longest-lived and most consistent design and conventions.
It shouldn't be rocket science to display a piece of formatted text while disallowing network connections or scripts.
The fact that none of the major E-mail clients can be trusted to do this is a testament to the sad state of software engineering.
Thanks for the response and info.
I suspect a conspiracy by FOOS (the Foes Of Open Source) to deprive Linux of its mascot.
I used to install all the GNU stuff from source, before any binary packaging existed, so I'm perfectly capable of doing it. However, it took a lot of my time. These days, it comes prepackaged and tested and it saves me a lot of time. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, if it hasn't been packaged (and that includes integration and testing) for my distribution, it doesn't exist. I think a lot of other competent people basically have the same view.
So Microsoft's patented process is nothing new. Most of it can be claimed as prior art.
Of course, it's nothing new. The point is that Microsoft deliberately applied for this patent despite knowing that there is prior art. Furthermore, getting a patent struck down based on prior art is hard, so if this patent gets granted, it is a problem.
So you are saying your inability to cite an instance of Microsoft suing, or even threatening to sue is clear evidence that this is exactly what Microsoft are actually doing.
No, I'm saying that the small number of lawsuits and threats we know about is only the tip of the iceberg.
Thats just fucking brilliant. Rumsfeldian logic at its best.
By "Rumsfeldian logic", you're apparently referring to your own cynical manipulation of facts and statements.
You'd think so. In practice, that can be a difficult and costly argument to make because there are lots of conditions to be met for something to count as prior art.