Re: Java editor

On Jun 25, 5:14 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Huh. Firefox on the Linux systems I use sometimes just displays
a blank page for PDF files. I misremember whether this happens
only when using Adobe's reader or is sometimes a problem when
using one of the comes-with-the-system PDF browsers [1]. On one
of the systems I use, it seems to have helped to configure things
so the PDF reader always pop up a new window rather than trying
to display in the browser window. Probably not the optimal
solution, but okay for now.

Adobe is evil and its software is crap. (Sounds like another software
company that casts a somewhat larger shadow for non-Mac-users, hmm?)

[ snip further discussion of intellectual property and how
to compensate programmers ]

Snipped because of lack of time to think further about it right
now. I came across the following link in another newsgroup,
though, which seems to contain an interesting summary, including a
proposal for what sounds to me like an irritating "solution" (ads):

http://www.invece.org/article/financing.html

"FWIW", maybe.

Ads, schmads. Ads are going to go the way of the dodo in a decade at
most. Narrowcast, foo-on-demand, smart client devices, users being in
charge of their own client devices, and filtering capabilities will
kill any kind of advertising that isn't either interesting content in
its own right or embedded plugs and product placements. The latter
will, if too blatant, damage the host content's rating on the peer
review based charts, and it won't make the top forty that week or any
week. (We already have the beginnings of this. Firefox with Adblock.
Rotten Tomatoes and other sites with crowdsourced movie ratings.)

The only thing that can save the traditional commercial is the
imposition by fiat of "trusted computing", i.e. taking our computers
away from us and renting the functionality back at ridiculous prices,
or at minimum "a government/Hollywood cabal owns root on all boxes;
everyone else, regardless of if they paid for and own the physical
hardware, is a mere unprivileged user". I find it unlikely the forces
pushing for that nightmare can prevail in the end. Putting region and
"UOP" restrictions in DVD players provoked consumer backlashes and
griping; reaching into our general-purpose computers to impose similar
restrictions would provoke a broad-based revolt by IT professionals
and serious non-professional computer users alike. (Microsoft's put
some evil stuff like that into Windows Vista. At last report, Windows
Vista is not selling very well, and those statistics fail to take
account of those who try it and then reinstall Windoze XP, counting
them as one more Vista convert. Contrast the rapid uptake of Windows
95, and later of Windoze XP despite the controversy over WPA.)

One other form of ad will survive, besides an ad that's entertaining
in its own right and an embedded plug. That will be the classified ad,
where people specifically go when they want information about things
for sale, and can be considered to include online things like
sponsored links at Google and sites like Craigslist and eBay. (Google
AdWords is another matter. It will die, though not quite yet.
Sponsored links on the other hand appear while you're searching for
something rather than getting in your way when your goal is something
other than search, and, if they are relevant to the user's search,
they may remain successful indefinitely.)

Curious. Microsoft has a reputation for having a very tough
interview process for programmers.

How did you think they kept out the ones that know what they're doing?
The ones that would spot code that was there just to make Netscape or
(these days) Google Desktop Search perform poorly, or win.exe not work
with 4Dos and PCDos (ok, maybe before your time), or whatever and blow
the whistle to the media, or would spend all their time fixing bugs
and thereby denying the Microsoft Support side of the operation
revenue, or would make Notepad so efficient and useful that nobody
would shell out for Word anymore, or would fix some of the dumber
algorithm choices like Explorer's frequent use of bubble-sort and
other quadratic-time algorithms, thereby causing Microsoft to fail its
under-the-table obligations to Intel to force people to buy ever-
faster CPUs in exchange for kickbacks?

Let's face it -- Microsoft does not want to produce quality software.
If they did, with their money they could surely manage it and yet they
do not. Therefore they obviously don't want to. Quality software is
easy for the competition to interoperate with. It's easy for users to
avoid paying your support department if the software simply works. If
the built-in abilities don't suck they compete with your own paid add-
ons. Hardware manufacturers pay you to make your software gratuitously
slow and bloated, and pay a lot more than your customers do. The
entertainment industry pays you to cripple it in other ways*, and pays
a lot more than your customers do.

* Disclaimer: documented in the case of Zune-related goings-on. Not
proven in connection with Vista misfeatures. Yet.

.

Relevant Pages

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