I've been writing some winforms applications and all I've got to say is "no". As a long time Qt programmer, I found winforms initially familiar, but it's got a lot of quirks that drive me nuts.
Generally, you would not use winforms when writing a Linux application using Mono. You would use the Mono GTK bindings. You'd only use winforms if you were trying to make an app that runs on both Windows and Linux
Also, winforms is not part of the ECMA or ISO standards, so if you use winforms you actually do run a patent risk. Winforms is covered by Microsoft patents, whereas the ISO and ECMA parts are not known to be covered, and if they are covered, Microsoft has promised they will license them royalty free and on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Pick the right state, and you can incorporate for around $25, so it would be $35 for the first domain in your name, then $60 per subsequent domain ($35 for the domain, $25 for a corporation to register it).
It would be in public records if we were dealing with the US. The judge is on the board of the industrial property protection group, and board members of such groups are usually easy to find.
Here's the page for that group that lists the board, and he's right there
I can't find a website for the Swedish Copyright Association, probably because their real name is most likely something in Swedish.
What Gentry figured out was a scheme for carrying out arbitrary computations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result. That way, you can do your computation on encrypted data in the "cloud", but only you can view the results
The other direction--letting the server do secure computation on the client, is also very interesting. Consider an MMORPG. One of the problems in MMORPG is cheat programs. These can be particularly troublesome in a PvP game. For example, there were programs for Dark Age of Camelot that would show you every enemy player in a large bubble around you, regardless of any obstacles blocking line of sight or the use of stealth abilities.
The obvious solution for this is that the server should only send player position information to the client for players that should be visible to that player. That is currently not feasible, because the server hardware is simply not powerful enough. The server has to send all the information, and let the client do the extensive calculations of visibility.
If secure encrypted computing could be made fast enough, the server could send encrypted information on all nearby players, the client could compute what is visible and send the results back to the server, which could then send an unencrypted list of what players the client should show. The cheat programs would never see the data on the invisible players.
Violation of due process is violation of human rights
What violation of due process? They had a trial. They had no problem with the judge's organizational memberships before they lost (and yes, they almost certainly knew about them--we are not talking about membership in the Illuminati, but membership in prominent public professional organizations).
Good point. If scientists suddenly noticed that there has been a 50% drop in meteors entering the atmosphere over Russia, and a 50% increase in meteors entering the atmosphere over North Korea, it would be a pretty damn big clue that the military had moved some assets around.
I'm curious. When people discuss illegal downloads via bittorrent or other P2P, numerous pedants jump on anyone who dares say the downloads are "stealing" music. They are quick to point out that making copies doesn't deprive the copyright owner of his song, unlike the situation when someone, say, steals a car. Calling downloading "stealing" is just propaganda from the RIAA to brainwash people, yadda yadda yadda.
Interesting how the same standard doesn't apply when the copied item is source code.
$24 is the price they charge for 24 licenses for consumer use of songs. Licenses to make and distribute an unlimited, untracked, number copies generally go for a few orders of magnitude more than $1 per license.
Whenever Linux and Windows netbooks were made equally available to the public, the public has mostly chosen Windows. For example, Linux and Windows netbooks were (and still are) readily available from Amazon, and Windows, and if you check the top sellers, Windows dominates.
The quote doesn't say anything about Microsoft pressuring anybody. As one of the commentators on Groklaw pointed out, is can quite reasonably be read as simply saying it is hard to be different from the vast majority, and so its better to start off in a market where there is more diversity, like PDAs and smartphonest.
Another Groklaw commentator pointed out that: (1) people are familiar with Windows which makes them tend to choose it. (2) multiple distributions confuses ordinary computer users (there was no de facto standard distribution for netbooks). (A good fraction of the Linux users who purchase Linux netbooks through out the distribution that came on their netbook and install one of the more mainstream distributions). (3) There are still ease of use problems.
PJs response was interesting. She accused the commentator of working for Microsoft, told him he needs to update his FUD because "Linux is way easier to use now than Microsoft stuff. No comparison", and tossed off a circular argument ("If they were as difficult as you pretend, why kill it?").
And almost as soon as those first Linux networks came out, the blogs and press exploded with articles on how to put Windows on them. This notion that no one actually wants Windows, and it is only there because Microsoft is conspiring to suppress the public's vast inchoate yearning for Linux is ridiculous.
haha funny how you mention Yamaha when a lot of their digital pianos are actually running linux. such as the Disklavier Mark IV. so yea.. bye bye.
What does that have to do with anything? Just because a device runs Linux doesn't mean ti can do anything useful as a peripheral on another Linux system.
I suppose it might be a bigger deal for Canonical, but even the craziest judge isn't going to impose some ridiculous punishment for actions they take on good faith
Especially considering that one of the inventors on the relevant patent has publicly stated that the patent is available royalty free, as has the person in charge of IP at Microsoft. Estoppel would come into play now if Microsoft tried to charge royalties for the patent. So, even in the highly unlikely event that they were able to use the patent to stop any given free software implementation of their technology, it is almost inconceivable that there would be any monetary damages--just an order to stop distributing the technology. In that case, if there are significant apps using it, the patent would be worked around (just like open source developers plan to do for the numerous other patents violated in open source--which is also what those of us mostly working on closed source plan to do for all the patents we surely infringe).
Just like Wikipedia discourages people to make edits of a person's own article for themselves, this should also be discouraged
This is widely ignored, though. I recall an episode of TWiT where Leo said he edited his own entry, and asked the rest of the panel if they edit theirs, and they all said they do. Leo's edits were to fix factual errors--dates wrong on when specific shows were broadcast, and things like that.
Once you receive money for edits you've made, you're no longer an uninterested third party and have a biased voice
I don't think it is as clear cut as you make it sound. People editing controversial topics for free usually have a biased voice, too. A good case can be made that someone who had no opinion on a subject, and is only editing because someone paid him to do so, is less likely to be biased, depending on the details of the financial arrangement.
Sure, if the arrangement is "edit this page and if we like the changes, we will pay you", then sure, the edit is going to be biased toward the view the payer wants.
But what if the arrangement is "edit this page and make any changes you feel improve it, and we will pay you". What's the problem there? Presumably the person being offered the contract is some kind of expert in the subject, and so his professional reputation is on the line. That can be a powerful incentive to be fair in the edits--and if the edits aren't fair, they won't stick.
You mean only save the lives of iPhone users... Everyone who chooses a different phone will be punished to death for their arrogance...
More likely would be that Apple would propose this as an industry standard, and license it to all the other manufacturers. Look at Firewire--Apple owns the key patents, and yet you can find Firewire on non-Apple hardware.
We'll finally be able to measure IE's marketshare in a non-biased market
Actually, we were able to do that once before. Back in the Win95 days, before a browser was bundled with the OS, both IE and Netscape were available in retail stores such as CompUSA, Computer City, and Egghead, as a boxed product, although few people remember them. According the PC Data retail sales reports at the time, IE handily outsold Netscape.
They got in trouble because it wasn't readily apparent that customers would were buying a recurring subscription.
Where I work, we too sell a subscription service, but we make it obvious. I just went to our page, hit the "buy now" link, and here's what we show. There is a section with four offers, and radio buttons to select which offer you want. The row for each offer has the price on the left, next to the radio button. In the middle column of each row, it describes what you get and how it bills. The right column of each row describes how it re-bills.
For instance, the first offer is quarterly. It lists $19 on the left. The middle says "bills only four times a year", and the right says "Bills at $19 every 90 days".
The second if yearly: $49.95 in the left, the middle says "No billing for an entire year", and the right says "Bills at $49.95 per year".
There's also an option that is $89.95 on the left, and says "No Automatic Rebilling" on the right.
There is also a section with add-ons, such as physical media, which lists the price in the left, with check boxes instead of radio buttons, and on the right says "One-time charge".
The site layout is clean, so the right column is not buried or hard to see. It would be pretty hard for someone to buy without knowing if/when/how often/how much they are going to get charged.
It's just common sense to do it this way. We want our customers to be happy with us--that way they will keep giving us money. Causing them unwelcome surprises on their credit card is not a good way to keep them happy.
There is also no mention that ODF is short, sweet, and nearly complete
You've not read the ODF spec, have you? It is full of holes. That's one of the reasons the revision currently undergoing preparation for standardization is several hundred pages larger.
, while OOXML is Webster Dictionary sized, yet highly incomplete
And you clearly haven't read the OOXML spec, either. It is remarkably complete. That's why it is so large. Try actually reading the specs, instead of reading FUD sites.
Weir's tests of MS's ODF implementation made a big point of the fact that if you saved a spreadsheet in OO, and read it with Office, it was not fully functional (you get the cell values, but not the formulas, so it becomes a static snapshot of the data).
Yet Lotus Symphony has almost exactly the same problem. Weir got around that by using a beta of a future version of Symphony that fixes the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been writing some winforms applications and all I've got to say is "no". As a long time Qt programmer, I found winforms initially familiar, but it's got a lot of quirks that drive me nuts.
Generally, you would not use winforms when writing a Linux application using Mono. You would use the Mono GTK bindings. You'd only use winforms if you were trying to make an app that runs on both Windows and Linux
Also, winforms is not part of the ECMA or ISO standards, so if you use winforms you actually do run a patent risk. Winforms is covered by Microsoft patents, whereas the ISO and ECMA parts are not known to be covered, and if they are covered, Microsoft has promised they will license them royalty free and on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Pick the right state, and you can incorporate for around $25, so it would be $35 for the first domain in your name, then $60 per subsequent domain ($35 for the domain, $25 for a corporation to register it).
It would be in public records if we were dealing with the US. The judge is on the board of the industrial property protection group, and board members of such groups are usually easy to find.
Here's the page for that group that lists the board, and he's right there
I can't find a website for the Swedish Copyright Association, probably because their real name is most likely something in Swedish.
What Gentry figured out was a scheme for carrying out arbitrary computations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result. That way, you can do your computation on encrypted data in the "cloud", but only you can view the results
The other direction--letting the server do secure computation on the client, is also very interesting. Consider an MMORPG. One of the problems in MMORPG is cheat programs. These can be particularly troublesome in a PvP game. For example, there were programs for Dark Age of Camelot that would show you every enemy player in a large bubble around you, regardless of any obstacles blocking line of sight or the use of stealth abilities.
The obvious solution for this is that the server should only send player position information to the client for players that should be visible to that player. That is currently not feasible, because the server hardware is simply not powerful enough. The server has to send all the information, and let the client do the extensive calculations of visibility.
If secure encrypted computing could be made fast enough, the server could send encrypted information on all nearby players, the client could compute what is visible and send the results back to the server, which could then send an unencrypted list of what players the client should show. The cheat programs would never see the data on the invisible players.
Violation of due process is violation of human rights
What violation of due process? They had a trial. They had no problem with the judge's organizational memberships before they lost (and yes, they almost certainly knew about them--we are not talking about membership in the Illuminati, but membership in prominent public professional organizations).
Good point. If scientists suddenly noticed that there has been a 50% drop in meteors entering the atmosphere over Russia, and a 50% increase in meteors entering the atmosphere over North Korea, it would be a pretty damn big clue that the military had moved some assets around.
I'm curious. When people discuss illegal downloads via bittorrent or other P2P, numerous pedants jump on anyone who dares say the downloads are "stealing" music. They are quick to point out that making copies doesn't deprive the copyright owner of his song, unlike the situation when someone, say, steals a car. Calling downloading "stealing" is just propaganda from the RIAA to brainwash people, yadda yadda yadda.
Interesting how the same standard doesn't apply when the copied item is source code.
$24 is the price they charge for 24 licenses for consumer use of songs. Licenses to make and distribute an unlimited, untracked, number copies generally go for a few orders of magnitude more than $1 per license.
Couple of problems here
Another Groklaw commentator pointed out that: (1) people are familiar with Windows which makes them tend to choose it. (2) multiple distributions confuses ordinary computer users (there was no de facto standard distribution for netbooks). (A good fraction of the Linux users who purchase Linux netbooks through out the distribution that came on their netbook and install one of the more mainstream distributions). (3) There are still ease of use problems.
PJs response was interesting. She accused the commentator of working for Microsoft, told him he needs to update his FUD because "Linux is way easier to use now than Microsoft stuff. No comparison", and tossed off a circular argument ("If they were as difficult as you pretend, why kill it?").
The truth is that in the country where I live (Belgium) I simply can't buy one anywhere
What about Amazon? Don't they sell to Belgium?
And almost as soon as those first Linux networks came out, the blogs and press exploded with articles on how to put Windows on them. This notion that no one actually wants Windows, and it is only there because Microsoft is conspiring to suppress the public's vast inchoate yearning for Linux is ridiculous.
haha funny how you mention Yamaha when a lot of their digital pianos are actually running linux. such as the Disklavier Mark IV. so yea.. bye bye.
What does that have to do with anything? Just because a device runs Linux doesn't mean ti can do anything useful as a peripheral on another Linux system.
Especially considering that one of the inventors on the relevant patent has publicly stated that the patent is available royalty free, as has the person in charge of IP at Microsoft. Estoppel would come into play now if Microsoft tried to charge royalties for the patent. So, even in the highly unlikely event that they were able to use the patent to stop any given free software implementation of their technology, it is almost inconceivable that there would be any monetary damages--just an order to stop distributing the technology. In that case, if there are significant apps using it, the patent would be worked around (just like open source developers plan to do for the numerous other patents violated in open source--which is also what those of us mostly working on closed source plan to do for all the patents we surely infringe).
People who aren't paid have slanted opinions too. What's your point?
This is widely ignored, though. I recall an episode of TWiT where Leo said he edited his own entry, and asked the rest of the panel if they edit theirs, and they all said they do. Leo's edits were to fix factual errors--dates wrong on when specific shows were broadcast, and things like that.
I don't think it is as clear cut as you make it sound. People editing controversial topics for free usually have a biased voice, too. A good case can be made that someone who had no opinion on a subject, and is only editing because someone paid him to do so, is less likely to be biased, depending on the details of the financial arrangement.
Sure, if the arrangement is "edit this page and if we like the changes, we will pay you", then sure, the edit is going to be biased toward the view the payer wants.
But what if the arrangement is "edit this page and make any changes you feel improve it, and we will pay you". What's the problem there? Presumably the person being offered the contract is some kind of expert in the subject, and so his professional reputation is on the line. That can be a powerful incentive to be fair in the edits--and if the edits aren't fair, they won't stick.
Windows 95 released: August 1995
IE 2 released: November 1995
IE 1 became available a couple weeks before Win 95, but was in Microsoft Plus!, not Win 95 itself. IE 2 became bundled with Win 95 in Win 95 OSR1.
Never heard of OS X, eh?
More likely would be that Apple would propose this as an industry standard, and license it to all the other manufacturers. Look at Firewire--Apple owns the key patents, and yet you can find Firewire on non-Apple hardware.
This gives a graph from 1995 to 2005. I don't think their data goes back farther, and I could not find a way to get the total.
Note, though, that it tries to soften the blow by helpfully telling you that this is 3 times the length of an AA battery.
Actually, we were able to do that once before. Back in the Win95 days, before a browser was bundled with the OS, both IE and Netscape were available in retail stores such as CompUSA, Computer City, and Egghead, as a boxed product, although few people remember them. According the PC Data retail sales reports at the time, IE handily outsold Netscape.
They got in trouble because it wasn't readily apparent that customers would were buying a recurring subscription.
Where I work, we too sell a subscription service, but we make it obvious. I just went to our page, hit the "buy now" link, and here's what we show. There is a section with four offers, and radio buttons to select which offer you want. The row for each offer has the price on the left, next to the radio button. In the middle column of each row, it describes what you get and how it bills. The right column of each row describes how it re-bills.
For instance, the first offer is quarterly. It lists $19 on the left. The middle says "bills only four times a year", and the right says "Bills at $19 every 90 days".
The second if yearly: $49.95 in the left, the middle says "No billing for an entire year", and the right says "Bills at $49.95 per year".
There's also an option that is $89.95 on the left, and says "No Automatic Rebilling" on the right.
There is also a section with add-ons, such as physical media, which lists the price in the left, with check boxes instead of radio buttons, and on the right says "One-time charge".
The site layout is clean, so the right column is not buried or hard to see. It would be pretty hard for someone to buy without knowing if/when/how often/how much they are going to get charged.
It's just common sense to do it this way. We want our customers to be happy with us--that way they will keep giving us money. Causing them unwelcome surprises on their credit card is not a good way to keep them happy.
You've not read the ODF spec, have you? It is full of holes. That's one of the reasons the revision currently undergoing preparation for standardization is several hundred pages larger.
And you clearly haven't read the OOXML spec, either. It is remarkably complete. That's why it is so large. Try actually reading the specs, instead of reading FUD sites.
Weir's tests of MS's ODF implementation made a big point of the fact that if you saved a spreadsheet in OO, and read it with Office, it was not fully functional (you get the cell values, but not the formulas, so it becomes a static snapshot of the data).
Yet Lotus Symphony has almost exactly the same problem. Weir got around that by using a beta of a future version of Symphony that fixes the problem.
Perhaps it will include things that aren't in Debian's repositories?