Uhm, the HD-DVD format is stuffed full of copy protection that would prevent legal fair-use, too. The difference is that HD-DVD has the specific features that align with Microsoft's vision of the future -- allowing the PC to be the centre of the home entertainment system. HD-DVD aligns with Microsoft's long-term goals, and Blu-ray doesn't. It's really that simple. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Microsoft is more a friend of the consumer than Sony is, because it is simply not the case. Neither could care less about you making use of your "Fair Use" exemptions in copyright law.
Each user only gets to see a few pages if the publisher specifically authorizes this. Otherwise you only get a couple lines of text from the book. See these screenshots for information on the different book modes Google Print has. As for how a lawsuit would go if it went to court, I could see it being a very close call. Google is cutting quite close to the Fair Use exemption.
I don't see that Google really had any choice, though. If they had tried to go book-by-book and get permission for each one, it would've taken a decade to produce a useful product, and by that time certain publishers would've foolishly forged exclusive deals with other search engines. Most would've demanded fees and payments for use of their books, and other things that would've completely removed the usefulness of the service. For just doing it, Google forced the publishers to either accept the deal that was acceptable to Google (and search engines in general), or to sue them. Some have chosen the first option and even made deals with Google to provide enhanced service for their publications, and others have chosen to duke it out in court.
This will be an interesting battle to say the least. We'll see just how far "Fair Use" actually goes.
How about how they altered the.net requirements so they could give the contract to Verisign? With the exception of things that were so completely hated by internet users (SiteFinder, WLS) that it would threaten ICANN's existance, Verisign seems to get whatever Verisign wants.
*sigh* Try putting yourself in other people's positions before you criticise them.
There are a number of reasons why other countries would prefer if the ITU or some other neutral party controlled the root servers. Perhaps the most prominent is the fact that most countries are somewhat uneasy with having a foreign country control a critical part of infrastructure that they use in their country. Maybe everything is fine right now, but what if a trade conflict arrises? Will the U.S. exploit their control over DNS to their advantage in this situation?
Then there's ICANN itself. ICANN has been pressuring ccTLDs to adopt their dispute policies, and various other policies. There's real friction between ICANN and the ccTLDs, and this "It's our toy, you can't have it!" attitude from the U.S. government isn't helping.
Microsoft has said that they license based on physical CPU, not virtual or cores. IBM and Oracle, on the other hand, intend to ding you for every core. Red Hat and SuSE also charge per physical CPU rather than by core.
Multi-core chips and virtualization are starting to challenge the way software vendors license their products.
You also should learn to manage your manager Constantly trying to please your manager by doing everything that is asked of you won't get you as far as you might think. Even if you think your manager is a complete idiot, learning how to manage him will make your job more enjoyable and your life easier. It might even make you visibly more productive to him or her.
If you have a single manager that you must answer to, talk to him or her, and ask them what to do about this situation. Asking on Slashdot is unlikely to get you the help you need. Your immediate manager might be able to intervene on your behalf, and insist the other managers go through the proper channels. If you have multiple managers, or your immediate manager can't help, the organization is probably dysfunctional anyway and your career will be limited by this dysfunction if you like it or not.
You have a choice, you can please some of the people, all the time, or you can please all of the people, some of the time. But you'll never please all of the people, all of the time, and trying to do so will only cause you problems.
RTFA, it was a jury trial. Whoever thought that business method patents were a good idea? "Yeah, we'd prefer if we just didn't have to compete in the marketplace -- please give us a government granted monopoly."
You forget possibly the most important factor. The US (and it's corporations) has the resources to entice extremely smart people from abroad to relocate to the US. From Alexander Graham Bell to Albert Einstein, some of the greatest minds the U.S. likes to take credit for were not even born on U.S. soil.
I'm not sure many Canadians would agree with you about CBC. Aside from news, Hockey Night in Canada, and maybe some of the comedy programming, there isn't much worth watching on CBC.
Indeed. It seems all Lyons ever writes about Open Source or Free software is rants about "zealots" eating their own. He even tossed in a groklaw is full of lies statement for good measure. Frankly, he wouldn't even pass as a plausable troll here on Slashdot. Pure yellow journalism at it's worst.
While I don't dislike pointer arithmetic, you might want to investigate the -fstrength-reduce optimization (included in -O2/-O3) for GCC instead of foolishly making your work harder by writing pointer code instead of array code. If array code is more obvious, use that. If pointer arithmetic code is more obvious, use it instead. Don't use one or the other because it's faster -- it won't be if you're enabling compiler optimizations (and if it is, despite the compiler optimizations, file a bug).
seems like "delegates" are little more than function pointers, of a sort.
Basically true, they are like a strongly typed function pointer. The only benefit they really have over the Java way of doing things is they require quite a bit less code to make use of them. They are less "correct" than the normal Java way of doing it, but they serve in most of the cases where the correct way is overkill. When you need to wire up dozens of events, the approved Java method for wiring each event gets cumbersome. You can read about Sun's and Microsoft's view on delegates for a great deal of information on this (this was one of the many reasons behind Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft for their Java VM incompatibilities).
Personally, I find delegates useful, although I'm not fond of the fact they introduce a large amount of separation between the object and the event handler. It's far too easy to rename an object in VS.Net, and start having delegates that have function names that don't reflect the object they're handling (Button1_Click() anyone?).
Properties seem to be an interesting syntactic sugar on private member vars and public getter/setters.
Again, basically true. In fact, internally, properties are generated in nearly the same way a Java programmer would write a set of getter/setter functions. One of the biggest benefits I've found for them is the fact they keep your set/get functions in the same spot in your source code, and add a bit of structure to them (so you can see if a given property is read-only at a glance). It also keeps the namespace a little less cluttered, and for RAD GUI development, it lets you have something that operates like a field, but is handled by code in your class like a function.
There are some critiques of these features and other C# features at this page, but author writes like he has an axe to grind against C#, and most of the dangers of the features are quite overstated. In the example of delegates, he badly misuses them to show the dangers of them (but he is correct that they are not as type-safe as they should be). In the rant against properties, indexers, etc, he overstates the performance impact of them by ignoring the fact the optimizer is capable of inlining such function calls during JIT just as Java VMs are. And the user-defined implicit type conversions rant largely consists of telling the story about how VB4's preset type conversions caused havoc, therefore it must suck in C#, too. I would have to agree with him on structs (nearly useless and endlessly confusing on what the proper use for them is) and the problems with unchecked exceptions (which makes programming initially easier until you actually need some exception handling), though.
Do take an evening to back through the newer features added to java lately.
I've been meaning to, just haven't had the chance. I'm glad that a 'native' look to swing is finally getting the attention it deserves by Sun in Java 6. I hate odd-ball apps on my desktop, regardless of platform.
Add the three magic words "for the X-box" to the end of the statement he made, and it's probably true. In that context, Halo 2 was the greatest game ever since the original Halo.
Java is still secure by design (and has shown to be in practice).
False. Java can protect you from a large class of possible exploit vectors (buffer overflow, off-by-one, etc), but programs written in Java are still vulnerable to other classes of exploits. SQL injection, cross-site scripting, information leakage, and certain types of privilege escalation are all still possible in Java programs. Despite some of the common refrains here, Java can not make a bad programmer into a good one, and a bad programmer can be just as dangerous in Java as they are in C/C++.
Microsoft says things are licensed on a physical CPU basis. You could put four quad-core chips in there and still be properly licensed. See this story or this document for more details.
I didn't mention generics/templates because I've not used them yet, so I don't fully understand the benefits gained by using them. I've been meaning to try them out, but I just haven't found an outlet yet. Delegates and properties were ripped from Visual Basic/Delphi, and their most important use is for event-driven GUIs.
The RIAA is the association of recording companies, not the artists. Everything they do to protect the artists is only where the interests of the artists and the companies coincide (they often do, but not always). Don't confuse the Mission Statement bullshit with the actual aims of the group. ASCAP and BMI are the organizations that represent the actual songwriters.
The region codes aren't important in the U.S. I don't believe anyone in the movie industry is losing any sleep about people in North America having region free DVD players because the biggest reason for getting region free DVD players is to play stuff from Region 1. It's the folks in Europe and Australia that are being shafted, not North Americans. This may be hard to accept, but not every restriction is designed to target all people equally. It's a little like region codes in consoles -- it's not to prevent the Japanese from playing particular games because the games generally come to that market first.
Ok, so you're proposing that adding unsigned operators would cause less confusion than simply adding a handful of unsigned types? What would an unsigned divide or add do to a floating point number? How about an unsigned comparison between them? Frankly, unsigned types are not as bad as some of the Java Faithful would claim. They're certainly overused, but they're not that hard to understand. The only complex part is the signed to unsigned conversion which can be easily enforced by a strongly typed language.
Er, this apples to oranges comparison proves your point how, exactly? In other news, a 2005 Porsche can move faster than a 2005 Ford F-150, but that hardly makes for a useful comparison.
Or how about the fact you actually have UNSIGNED integer types in C#/.NET. I don't care how much James Gosling says that unsigned/signed types cause confusion, they're a reality of dealing with data on computers. The moment you have to force Java to interoperate with some "legacy" (read: non-Java) infrastructure, you're stuck with hacks and nasty ones at that.
Other useful parts of C#/.NET include delegates, enums, automatic boxing of value types, properties, indexers, multidimensional arrays (as opposed to jagged ones) and foreach (for simple iteration through arrays or other indexed/enumerable objects). Hopefully the Java language designers will take notice and adapt some of these incredibly useful features to Java. Microsoft took so much from the Java language design that it should only be fair for Java to do the same to Microsoft's product.
You've gotta love that vaporware sales pitch. "Yes, their product can do something ours can't do now, but our product will be better than theirs when out new features come out in a little while!" Of course, all this is moot because HD movies aren't available yet, and given the inertia against DVDs that the studios and rental places had, I seriously doubt there'll be any serious availablity next year or even three years from now.
As much as I like watching Microsoft and Sony fanbois duke it out, it's getting a little tired.
You should never have got "space back" from a defrag. The point of the defragmentation was to make sure the files are contigious on the disk, so the drive doesn't need to seek to read it all. NTFS is still prone to fragmentation, and it can be even more dangerous for NTFS than FAT. NTFS has it's file of all files (\$MFT) which can become fragmented over time (especially if you have lots of little files and sometimes get close to the disk size limit). I've seen a few instances where the MFT overflowed it's reserved area, and began becoming heavily fragmented and eventually damaged outright. Unfortunately, Microsoft's defragment tools can not defragment the MFT or other critical system files. A number of third party defragmentation tools can, however, but they generally require doing this defragmentation offline. Raxco PerfectDisk, O&O defrag and Executive Diskeeper are the three that I know have this capability.
Defragmentation is supposed to increase performance of your system on filesystems that are prone to fragmentation. Recently, defrag vendors have discovered that there are other ways of using this ability to increase performance, perhaps even by intentionally fragmenting files. They discovered that by manually placing files on disk in the order in which they would be loaded, you can often reduce load times.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, the HD-DVD format is stuffed full of copy protection that would prevent legal fair-use, too. The difference is that HD-DVD has the specific features that align with Microsoft's vision of the future -- allowing the PC to be the centre of the home entertainment system. HD-DVD aligns with Microsoft's long-term goals, and Blu-ray doesn't. It's really that simple. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Microsoft is more a friend of the consumer than Sony is, because it is simply not the case. Neither could care less about you making use of your "Fair Use" exemptions in copyright law.
I don't see that Google really had any choice, though. If they had tried to go book-by-book and get permission for each one, it would've taken a decade to produce a useful product, and by that time certain publishers would've foolishly forged exclusive deals with other search engines. Most would've demanded fees and payments for use of their books, and other things that would've completely removed the usefulness of the service. For just doing it, Google forced the publishers to either accept the deal that was acceptable to Google (and search engines in general), or to sue them. Some have chosen the first option and even made deals with Google to provide enhanced service for their publications, and others have chosen to duke it out in court.
This will be an interesting battle to say the least. We'll see just how far "Fair Use" actually goes.
How about how they altered the .net requirements so they could give the contract to Verisign? With the exception of things that were so completely hated by internet users (SiteFinder, WLS) that it would threaten ICANN's existance, Verisign seems to get whatever Verisign wants.
There are a number of reasons why other countries would prefer if the ITU or some other neutral party controlled the root servers. Perhaps the most prominent is the fact that most countries are somewhat uneasy with having a foreign country control a critical part of infrastructure that they use in their country. Maybe everything is fine right now, but what if a trade conflict arrises? Will the U.S. exploit their control over DNS to their advantage in this situation?
Then there's ICANN itself. ICANN has been pressuring ccTLDs to adopt their dispute policies, and various other policies. There's real friction between ICANN and the ccTLDs, and this "It's our toy, you can't have it!" attitude from the U.S. government isn't helping.
That is great. Poor Australia, though.
Didn't get the joke, eh? This is one of the few Slashdot moments where the misspelling is intentional.
Multi-core chips and virtualization are starting to challenge the way software vendors license their products.
If you have a single manager that you must answer to, talk to him or her, and ask them what to do about this situation. Asking on Slashdot is unlikely to get you the help you need. Your immediate manager might be able to intervene on your behalf, and insist the other managers go through the proper channels. If you have multiple managers, or your immediate manager can't help, the organization is probably dysfunctional anyway and your career will be limited by this dysfunction if you like it or not.
You have a choice, you can please some of the people, all the time, or you can please all of the people, some of the time. But you'll never please all of the people, all of the time, and trying to do so will only cause you problems.
RTFA, it was a jury trial. Whoever thought that business method patents were a good idea? "Yeah, we'd prefer if we just didn't have to compete in the marketplace -- please give us a government granted monopoly."
You forget possibly the most important factor. The US (and it's corporations) has the resources to entice extremely smart people from abroad to relocate to the US. From Alexander Graham Bell to Albert Einstein, some of the greatest minds the U.S. likes to take credit for were not even born on U.S. soil.
I'm not sure many Canadians would agree with you about CBC. Aside from news, Hockey Night in Canada, and maybe some of the comedy programming, there isn't much worth watching on CBC.
Indeed. It seems all Lyons ever writes about Open Source or Free software is rants about "zealots" eating their own. He even tossed in a groklaw is full of lies statement for good measure. Frankly, he wouldn't even pass as a plausable troll here on Slashdot. Pure yellow journalism at it's worst.
While I don't dislike pointer arithmetic, you might want to investigate the -fstrength-reduce optimization (included in -O2/-O3) for GCC instead of foolishly making your work harder by writing pointer code instead of array code. If array code is more obvious, use that. If pointer arithmetic code is more obvious, use it instead. Don't use one or the other because it's faster -- it won't be if you're enabling compiler optimizations (and if it is, despite the compiler optimizations, file a bug).
Personally, I find delegates useful, although I'm not fond of the fact they introduce a large amount of separation between the object and the event handler. It's far too easy to rename an object in VS.Net, and start having delegates that have function names that don't reflect the object they're handling (Button1_Click() anyone?).
Again, basically true. In fact, internally, properties are generated in nearly the same way a Java programmer would write a set of getter/setter functions. One of the biggest benefits I've found for them is the fact they keep your set/get functions in the same spot in your source code, and add a bit of structure to them (so you can see if a given property is read-only at a glance). It also keeps the namespace a little less cluttered, and for RAD GUI development, it lets you have something that operates like a field, but is handled by code in your class like a function.There are some critiques of these features and other C# features at this page, but author writes like he has an axe to grind against C#, and most of the dangers of the features are quite overstated. In the example of delegates, he badly misuses them to show the dangers of them (but he is correct that they are not as type-safe as they should be). In the rant against properties, indexers, etc, he overstates the performance impact of them by ignoring the fact the optimizer is capable of inlining such function calls during JIT just as Java VMs are. And the user-defined implicit type conversions rant largely consists of telling the story about how VB4's preset type conversions caused havoc, therefore it must suck in C#, too. I would have to agree with him on structs (nearly useless and endlessly confusing on what the proper use for them is) and the problems with unchecked exceptions (which makes programming initially easier until you actually need some exception handling), though.
I've been meaning to, just haven't had the chance. I'm glad that a 'native' look to swing is finally getting the attention it deserves by Sun in Java 6. I hate odd-ball apps on my desktop, regardless of platform.Add the three magic words "for the X-box" to the end of the statement he made, and it's probably true. In that context, Halo 2 was the greatest game ever since the original Halo.
Microsoft says things are licensed on a physical CPU basis. You could put four quad-core chips in there and still be properly licensed. See this story or this document for more details.
I didn't mention generics/templates because I've not used them yet, so I don't fully understand the benefits gained by using them. I've been meaning to try them out, but I just haven't found an outlet yet. Delegates and properties were ripped from Visual Basic/Delphi, and their most important use is for event-driven GUIs.
The RIAA is the association of recording companies, not the artists. Everything they do to protect the artists is only where the interests of the artists and the companies coincide (they often do, but not always). Don't confuse the Mission Statement bullshit with the actual aims of the group. ASCAP and BMI are the organizations that represent the actual songwriters.
The region codes aren't important in the U.S. I don't believe anyone in the movie industry is losing any sleep about people in North America having region free DVD players because the biggest reason for getting region free DVD players is to play stuff from Region 1. It's the folks in Europe and Australia that are being shafted, not North Americans. This may be hard to accept, but not every restriction is designed to target all people equally. It's a little like region codes in consoles -- it's not to prevent the Japanese from playing particular games because the games generally come to that market first.
Ok, so you're proposing that adding unsigned operators would cause less confusion than simply adding a handful of unsigned types? What would an unsigned divide or add do to a floating point number? How about an unsigned comparison between them? Frankly, unsigned types are not as bad as some of the Java Faithful would claim. They're certainly overused, but they're not that hard to understand. The only complex part is the signed to unsigned conversion which can be easily enforced by a strongly typed language.
Er, this apples to oranges comparison proves your point how, exactly? In other news, a 2005 Porsche can move faster than a 2005 Ford F-150, but that hardly makes for a useful comparison.
Other useful parts of C#/.NET include delegates, enums, automatic boxing of value types, properties, indexers, multidimensional arrays (as opposed to jagged ones) and foreach (for simple iteration through arrays or other indexed/enumerable objects). Hopefully the Java language designers will take notice and adapt some of these incredibly useful features to Java. Microsoft took so much from the Java language design that it should only be fair for Java to do the same to Microsoft's product.
As much as I like watching Microsoft and Sony fanbois duke it out, it's getting a little tired.
Defragmentation is supposed to increase performance of your system on filesystems that are prone to fragmentation. Recently, defrag vendors have discovered that there are other ways of using this ability to increase performance, perhaps even by intentionally fragmenting files. They discovered that by manually placing files on disk in the order in which they would be loaded, you can often reduce load times.