name 3 de jure standards that have enabled or supported monopolies. Go on.
Well, while I generally agree with your assessment of the purpose of standards, standards processes have been hijacked before.
For example, both the DVD standard and the MPEG standards are really primarily there to let oligopolies control the market and make some patent holders very wealthy. In principle, you could encode audio and video better using free methods than using the methods in these standards, but making the patented methods standard ensures control and revenue.
He was being sarcastic. You are being rather dense.
Both the document formats on offer are thin XML veneers on an existing code base.
That is incorrect. ODF required significant changes to the OpenOffice codebase and represents an incompatible change from the previous OpenOffice XML format. Furthermore, it has been adopted by several other projects and vendors. Microsoft, however, has taken a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards the standards committee.
The only difference is that one code base is open source and the other is the market leader with 90% plus market share.
That, too, is incorrect: there are many differences in design and functionality. For example, ODF relies on existing web standards for features like mathematics and vector graphics, while Microsoft's XML has numerous unnecessary deviations from web standards.
Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard.
That may be, but Word is not a standard in the sense of an "ISO standard". Microsoft's format should not become an ISO standard because it doesn't satisfy the requirements for an ISO standard.
If people turn the standards process into a pissing contest they end up hurting everyone. Microsoft made a perfectly reasonable request. They did not ask for exclusivity, they made the IPR openly available.
Quite right, and ISO should reject Microsoft's submission, not because of any kind of competitive issues, but simply because it is a technically bad submission.
It is often more important to recognize a de facto standard than propose improvements. For example, in the US almost all lightbulbs use the flawed Edison Screw mount. From a technical point of view it is inferior to the European Swan Bayonet fixture in almost every way. The Edison screw was chosen as the standard in the Us because it was widely supported and the patents had expired.
And that brings up another point: the patents on Microsoft's submission have not expired yet.
A standards process must either recognize an existing de facto standard or establish a widespread consensus amongst the participants to succeed.
A standards process must also take technical considerations into account, like: whether the specification is sufficient for implementing compliant implementations, whether the specification is interoperable with other standards, and whether the intellectual property situation is clear. The Microsoft submission fails such tests. If a submission fails such tests, there is no point for ISO to approve it. In fact, arguably, the primary purpose of ISO is to verify that submissions satisfy these requirements and certify that they do.
The real question is why Microsoft wants to obtain ISO approval without actually satisfying the requirements. If Microsoft's XML is such a great de facto standard, why bother with ISO approval? It should be sufficient for Microsoft to put their specs on their web site and be done with it. ISO approval only makes sense if (1) a submission actually satisfies ISO requirements, and (2) the submitting organization is willing to listen to industry input and make changes.
The FSF and other organization writing open source licenses don't deliberately complicate licenses. The reason their licenses are long is because the legal environment is complex and there are a lot of cases they need to cover.
You may prefer a "refreshingly short and clean" library, but only until you have a disturbingly lengthy and messy debate with a lawyer or a court about what the intent and meaning of that license is and the court decides that people could reasonably interpret the license differently from the way you intended. The appearance of simplicity and actual simplicity are two different things, in licenses as much as in software.
I think it's unlikely that Microsoft's licenses contain a deliberate legal backdoor. And OSI approval is a good first step. But those licenses are unproven in practice, have no history behind them, and haven't been analyzed carefully by a lot of people. Maybe they'll eventually turn out to be reasonable and sound, but for now, I'd stick with one of the proven open source licenses.
and what suits them best, and some people work differently, there is no end all for everyone.
Nor did I claim there was. If you say "I use OS X because I like the colorful beach ball", that's fine. But if you say "I use OS X because it has more applications and better development environments", it's reasonable to point out that the statement following "because" is not necessarily factually true.
You could, for instance, mention just one civil law country in which the constitution is seen as being as big a deal as it is in the US. But you can't, and you won't.
Of course, there is no other country in which the population sees their constitution as "as big a deal" as the US. That tells you about civics, not legal importance.
Oh come on, guy. I'm not even going to argue. You have the entirety of the internet at your disposal; inform yourself.
The issue isn't a difference of information but of interpretation. The Dutch self-image may be one of centuries of democratic self rule and tolerance punctuated by occasional incursions of aggressive neighbors. But the fact is that an uninterrupted history of democracy only goes back to 1945, and that even before that, the Dutch have changed their form of government quite frequently. And soon after 1945, the Dutch started ceding what amounts to constitutional authority to (what is now) the EU. The current Dutch form of government therefore has never had to demonstrate that it can stand on its own for centuries.
but considering that you pretty much admitted in the sentence above that apparently EU treaties can do the job just as well, I'd say you're not fooling yourself quite as effectively as you believe
No, the treaties simply mean that the Netherlands cannot serve as an example of a functioning democracy without a constitutional court because the Netherlands simply doesn't have the highest authority in constitutional questions anymore. That doesn't mean that what replaces that authority actually works well.
I view the failure of the EU to adopt a clear and concise constitution as a disaster. And, to answer the original question, yes, it is a "cultural difference" that Americans keep talking about their constitution while Europeans do not, and that difference does not bode well for the EU; it shows that Europeans still have so little in common that they can't even agree on something similar to the US Constitution.
Applications, Applications, Applications is what average users want.
Good thing that you mention that: OS X comes with almost no applications out of the box, while Ubuntu comes with hundreds of applications that satisfy almost everybody's needs. To get OS X to anywhere near the functionality you get out of the box with Ubuntu, you need to spend many hundreds of dollars.
Developers are attracted to OS X by frameworks that make it a breeze to rapidly develop your application without having to reinvent the wheel.
Good thing you mention that, too, since great development environments are another reason to prefer Ubuntu to OS X. XCode and Cocoa are really quite cumbersome and limited compared to MonoDevelop and Gtk#.
So, you are absolutely right: users care about applications and developers care about development environments, and both are far better on Ubuntu compared to OS X.
If you want a high quality, consistent, graphically appealing operating system with desktop search, office suite, iPod integration, better Windows compatibility (including NTFS mounts and Windows codecs), and plenty of graphical glitz, download Ubuntu 7.10 at ubuntulinux.org.
Unfortunately, as someone else pointed out, in the Netherlands, the courts can't overturn laws that violate the Dutch constitution (that is, the Netherlands have no constitutional court).
As a result, if parliament conspires to violate the Dutch constitution, there is nothing anybody can do about it. This isn't a hypothetical issue: a constitutional court is important for protecting minorities against tyranny of the majority.
Actually, I would argue that in a civil law system, a constitution is much less important. Please inform yourself.
Just because you argue that doesn't make it true.
In the Netherlands, for instance, the courts aren't even allowed to constitutionally test legislature,
So, the Dutch have decided to make their constitution matter less. So what? Given that Dutch democracy is relatively young and that EU courts can force the Netherlands to comply with EU requirements on human rights and other constitutional matters, I don't think that the Netherlands tells us much about the importance of constitutional law for a democracy.
Yes. You stated that you (1) don't understand why Americans refer to the constitution and (2) made fun of the fact that they do.
I'm just curious as to why there's a need to refer to it in seemingly every other trial.
You're interpreting the data incorrectly. People in the US refer to the Constitution in regular trials. They do refer to it frequently in trials that make the news. They do that because those tend to be the trials that involve issues that are controversial or legally unclear. The US legal system (like any other legal system) goes back to the constitution for principles that guide their decisions, not just in the US but also in Finland.
I'm perfectly aware that we have a constitution in Finland
I'm glad to hear it. However, you still don't seem to fully understand what constitutions are for or why they matter in controversial trials. I hope I've been able to clear that up for you a little.
And, yes, to answer your original question, it is a "cultural thing": it seems like civics really is more a part of public discourse and debate in the US than it is in Finland.
Several European nations have a constitution as well, and they are used in much the same way as the US constitution.
Finland, where you seem to hail from, got a new constitution in 2000 (http://www.om.fi/21910.htm), so maybe that's why you aren't familiar with it:
The Constitution is the cornerstone of all legislation and exercise of public power. It contains provisions on state organisation, checks and balances between the top government branches and fundamental civil rights.
The EU is deciding on a constitution for itself. It's a big problem that many Europeans don't seem to be paying much attention to this and don't understand the significance that it has for society and the legal system. Please inform yourself and participate.
and I can tell you that this is pretty much up in the night kinda speculation.
Well, so is an operating system and applications that don't crash, and intuitive user interfaces, and that doesn't stop companies from claiming success in those domains either.
Apple has been trailing other manufacturers on MP3 player hard disk and flash capacities (as well as wireless and functionality).
high performance dedicated graphics processor, one Apple greatest advantages for a long time.
Apple has always trailed behind in terms of desktop graphics processors.
The Lisa, and Mac, of course, introduced the WIMP interface to the average user,
Nice story, but not true. The average user learned WIMP from Windows. And the average early adopters split between Mac, Atari, Amiga, and several other systems.
but likely will not have the full features of iPhone
Yeah, it won't have multi-touch. Other than that, as far as I can tell, it will have a lot more features than the iPhone. Heck, my 2 year old Nokia does everything the iPhone does and then some.
it is because Apple made a decision not to be consumer friendly on this product
I see: even when Apple makes a consumer un-friendly device, it's on purpose.
Processes are cheap, the OS takes care of them, which is a good enough reason to use them for background processes.
No, processes are demonstrably not cheap. Not only do they cost significantly in terms of context switches, page tables, and kernel data structures, they impose an enormous overhead in terms of inter-process communication.
The library method, where multiple libraries would work together and share and access common data structures in itself is a bit of a paradox. Libraries are commonly generalized pieces of code especially for the reason to factor out common elements from programs.
I didn't say "libraries" I said "components". "Shared libraries" is simply the operating system mechanism for implementing them.
Creating a master background daemon would require a lot of glue code, with a very small common denominator between the different libraries.
It only requires a lot of glue code because the C runtime is so idiotic. The real reason why people don't do it, however, is simply that you cannot componentize safely in C.
Basically you'd code up the system in a few years and slowly optimize it, and one day you realise that you've reinvented process management in userspace.
Quite to the contrary: the people who are reinventing the wheel are the people who have been trying to implement a safe, dynamic runtime using C and processes. That's why we have shared libraries, shared memory, DBUS, and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, you end up with something that's far more costly to develop for and far less efficient than if you based your system on a dynamic runtime in the first place.
At a very coarse level, the process and separate address space approach is fine. The X server, kernel, and Apache web server are fine. But trying to push the paradigm beyond that to fine-grained componentization is inefficient and simply not working out.
If you have Alzheimer's, you should not be permitted to hold jobs where you make life-and-death decisions because the disease affects your ability to make such judgments. That's different from heart disease or cancer.
(If you're merely at risk of Alzheimer's, of course, that should not disqualify you, but you should be monitored closely for symptoms.)
has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power
Yes, as in "stop bugging us or we'll fry your country without giant microwave beam from space". Politically, this is unworkable.
And as a source of energy, space based power doesn't work out. Even if we believe the optimistic assumptions, you may get a 4x better utilization of solar energy per unit area. But stationing and maintaining even 4N solar cells on the ground is still a lot cheaper than launching N solar cells into space and maintaining them there.
Componentize them: turn them into shared libraries and load them into a single process. All panels, widgets, and other add-ons should be loaded into the window manager (or even the X11 server).
The individual components would remain as independent as they are now, but the would run in a single address space, be able to share and access common data structures, and not have the overhead of separate processes and heaps.
There are way too many daemons running on modern Linux systems; it really shouldn't require separate processes for I/O, settings, hardware configuration, every little panel thingy, etc.
These arguments about Microsoft Office, Outlook, OpenOffice, etc. sound ridiculously outdated. Come on, do you really think people will want to install, maintain, or run any of that bloated, complicated crap in the future?
OpenOffice is a good stop-gap replacement for people wed to old paradigms, and I'm glad its' there, but people: get over it.
Why would you run Exchange on your servers? In fact, the natural direction for migration is first to migrate the servers to Linux, and then the client.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nice. Now, can we take away his driver's license and impound his car, please?
name 3 de jure standards that have enabled or supported monopolies. Go on.
Well, while I generally agree with your assessment of the purpose of standards, standards processes have been hijacked before.
For example, both the DVD standard and the MPEG standards are really primarily there to let oligopolies control the market and make some patent holders very wealthy. In principle, you could encode audio and video better using free methods than using the methods in these standards, but making the patented methods standard ensures control and revenue.
Well what do you expect if this is your attitude?
He was being sarcastic. You are being rather dense.
Both the document formats on offer are thin XML veneers on an existing code base.
That is incorrect. ODF required significant changes to the OpenOffice codebase and represents an incompatible change from the previous OpenOffice XML format. Furthermore, it has been adopted by several other projects and vendors. Microsoft, however, has taken a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards the standards committee.
The only difference is that one code base is open source and the other is the market leader with 90% plus market share.
That, too, is incorrect: there are many differences in design and functionality. For example, ODF relies on existing web standards for features like mathematics and vector graphics, while Microsoft's XML has numerous unnecessary deviations from web standards.
Word is a standard the way that FAT is a standard.
That may be, but Word is not a standard in the sense of an "ISO standard". Microsoft's format should not become an ISO standard because it doesn't satisfy the requirements for an ISO standard.
If people turn the standards process into a pissing contest they end up hurting everyone. Microsoft made a perfectly reasonable request. They did not ask for exclusivity, they made the IPR openly available.
Quite right, and ISO should reject Microsoft's submission, not because of any kind of competitive issues, but simply because it is a technically bad submission.
It is often more important to recognize a de facto standard than propose improvements. For example, in the US almost all lightbulbs use the flawed Edison Screw mount. From a technical point of view it is inferior to the European Swan Bayonet fixture in almost every way. The Edison screw was chosen as the standard in the Us because it was widely supported and the patents had expired.
And that brings up another point: the patents on Microsoft's submission have not expired yet.
A standards process must either recognize an existing de facto standard or establish a widespread consensus amongst the participants to succeed.
A standards process must also take technical considerations into account, like: whether the specification is sufficient for implementing compliant implementations, whether the specification is interoperable with other standards, and whether the intellectual property situation is clear. The Microsoft submission fails such tests. If a submission fails such tests, there is no point for ISO to approve it. In fact, arguably, the primary purpose of ISO is to verify that submissions satisfy these requirements and certify that they do.
The real question is why Microsoft wants to obtain ISO approval without actually satisfying the requirements. If Microsoft's XML is such a great de facto standard, why bother with ISO approval? It should be sufficient for Microsoft to put their specs on their web site and be done with it. ISO approval only makes sense if (1) a submission actually satisfies ISO requirements, and (2) the submitting organization is willing to listen to industry input and make changes.
The FSF and other organization writing open source licenses don't deliberately complicate licenses. The reason their licenses are long is because the legal environment is complex and there are a lot of cases they need to cover.
You may prefer a "refreshingly short and clean" library, but only until you have a disturbingly lengthy and messy debate with a lawyer or a court about what the intent and meaning of that license is and the court decides that people could reasonably interpret the license differently from the way you intended. The appearance of simplicity and actual simplicity are two different things, in licenses as much as in software.
I think it's unlikely that Microsoft's licenses contain a deliberate legal backdoor. And OSI approval is a good first step. But those licenses are unproven in practice, have no history behind them, and haven't been analyzed carefully by a lot of people. Maybe they'll eventually turn out to be reasonable and sound, but for now, I'd stick with one of the proven open source licenses.
Too bad it's probably heavily patented. We could use some "cloud computing", but hell will freeze over before we support Amazon.
and what suits them best, and some people work differently, there is no end all for everyone.
Nor did I claim there was. If you say "I use OS X because I like the colorful beach ball", that's fine. But if you say "I use OS X because it has more applications and better development environments", it's reasonable to point out that the statement following "because" is not necessarily factually true.
It has supported sound on any laptop and desktop I have installed it on, and I'm using some pretty obscure hardware.
If you really have an unsupported sound card (which one?), buy a new one or a USB sound dongle. That's still a lot cheaper than buying OS X.
Or, better yet, buy a machine configure for, and with Linux preinstalled. After all, you don't buy a PC to run OS X either, do you?
You could, for instance, mention just one civil law country in which the constitution is seen as being as big a deal as it is in the US. But you can't, and you won't.
Of course, there is no other country in which the population sees their constitution as "as big a deal" as the US. That tells you about civics, not legal importance.
Oh come on, guy. I'm not even going to argue. You have the entirety of the internet at your disposal; inform yourself.
The issue isn't a difference of information but of interpretation. The Dutch self-image may be one of centuries of democratic self rule and tolerance punctuated by occasional incursions of aggressive neighbors. But the fact is that an uninterrupted history of democracy only goes back to 1945, and that even before that, the Dutch have changed their form of government quite frequently. And soon after 1945, the Dutch started ceding what amounts to constitutional authority to (what is now) the EU. The current Dutch form of government therefore has never had to demonstrate that it can stand on its own for centuries.
but considering that you pretty much admitted in the sentence above that apparently EU treaties can do the job just as well, I'd say you're not fooling yourself quite as effectively as you believe
No, the treaties simply mean that the Netherlands cannot serve as an example of a functioning democracy without a constitutional court because the Netherlands simply doesn't have the highest authority in constitutional questions anymore. That doesn't mean that what replaces that authority actually works well.
I view the failure of the EU to adopt a clear and concise constitution as a disaster. And, to answer the original question, yes, it is a "cultural difference" that Americans keep talking about their constitution while Europeans do not, and that difference does not bode well for the EU; it shows that Europeans still have so little in common that they can't even agree on something similar to the US Constitution.
Applications, Applications, Applications is what average users want.
Good thing that you mention that: OS X comes with almost no applications out of the box, while Ubuntu comes with hundreds of applications that satisfy almost everybody's needs. To get OS X to anywhere near the functionality you get out of the box with Ubuntu, you need to spend many hundreds of dollars.
Developers are attracted to OS X by frameworks that make it a breeze to rapidly develop your application without having to reinvent the wheel.
Good thing you mention that, too, since great development environments are another reason to prefer Ubuntu to OS X. XCode and Cocoa are really quite cumbersome and limited compared to MonoDevelop and Gtk#.
So, you are absolutely right: users care about applications and developers care about development environments, and both are far better on Ubuntu compared to OS X.
If you want a high quality, consistent, graphically appealing operating system with desktop search, office suite, iPod integration, better Windows compatibility (including NTFS mounts and Windows codecs), and plenty of graphical glitz, download Ubuntu 7.10 at ubuntulinux.org.
Unfortunately, as someone else pointed out, in the Netherlands, the courts can't overturn laws that violate the Dutch constitution (that is, the Netherlands have no constitutional court).
As a result, if parliament conspires to violate the Dutch constitution, there is nothing anybody can do about it. This isn't a hypothetical issue: a constitutional court is important for protecting minorities against tyranny of the majority.
Actually, I would argue that in a civil law system, a constitution is much less important. Please inform yourself.
Just because you argue that doesn't make it true.
In the Netherlands, for instance, the courts aren't even allowed to constitutionally test legislature,
So, the Dutch have decided to make their constitution matter less. So what? Given that Dutch democracy is relatively young and that EU courts can force the Netherlands to comply with EU requirements on human rights and other constitutional matters, I don't think that the Netherlands tells us much about the importance of constitutional law for a democracy.
Did you read my post?
Yes. You stated that you (1) don't understand why Americans refer to the constitution and (2) made fun of the fact that they do.
I'm just curious as to why there's a need to refer to it in seemingly every other trial.
You're interpreting the data incorrectly. People in the US refer to the Constitution in regular trials. They do refer to it frequently in trials that make the news. They do that because those tend to be the trials that involve issues that are controversial or legally unclear. The US legal system (like any other legal system) goes back to the constitution for principles that guide their decisions, not just in the US but also in Finland.
I'm perfectly aware that we have a constitution in Finland
I'm glad to hear it. However, you still don't seem to fully understand what constitutions are for or why they matter in controversial trials. I hope I've been able to clear that up for you a little.
And, yes, to answer your original question, it is a "cultural thing": it seems like civics really is more a part of public discourse and debate in the US than it is in Finland.
Finland, where you seem to hail from, got a new constitution in 2000 (http://www.om.fi/21910.htm), so maybe that's why you aren't familiar with it:
The EU is deciding on a constitution for itself. It's a big problem that many Europeans don't seem to be paying much attention to this and don't understand the significance that it has for society and the legal system. Please inform yourself and participate.
and I can tell you that this is pretty much up in the night kinda speculation.
Well, so is an operating system and applications that don't crash, and intuitive user interfaces, and that doesn't stop companies from claiming success in those domains either.
Apple pushes the hard disk capacity.
Apple has been trailing other manufacturers on MP3 player hard disk and flash capacities (as well as wireless and functionality).
high performance dedicated graphics processor, one Apple greatest advantages for a long time.
Apple has always trailed behind in terms of desktop graphics processors.
The Lisa, and Mac, of course, introduced the WIMP interface to the average user,
Nice story, but not true. The average user learned WIMP from Windows. And the average early adopters split between Mac, Atari, Amiga, and several other systems.
but likely will not have the full features of iPhone
Yeah, it won't have multi-touch. Other than that, as far as I can tell, it will have a lot more features than the iPhone. Heck, my 2 year old Nokia does everything the iPhone does and then some.
it is because Apple made a decision not to be consumer friendly on this product
I see: even when Apple makes a consumer un-friendly device, it's on purpose.
Processes are cheap, the OS takes care of them, which is a good enough reason to use them for background processes.
No, processes are demonstrably not cheap. Not only do they cost significantly in terms of context switches, page tables, and kernel data structures, they impose an enormous overhead in terms of inter-process communication.
The library method, where multiple libraries would work together and share and access common data structures in itself is a bit of a paradox. Libraries are commonly generalized pieces of code especially for the reason to factor out common elements from programs.
I didn't say "libraries" I said "components". "Shared libraries" is simply the operating system mechanism for implementing them.
Creating a master background daemon would require a lot of glue code, with a very small common denominator between the different libraries.
It only requires a lot of glue code because the C runtime is so idiotic. The real reason why people don't do it, however, is simply that you cannot componentize safely in C.
Basically you'd code up the system in a few years and slowly optimize it, and one day you realise that you've reinvented process management in userspace.
Quite to the contrary: the people who are reinventing the wheel are the people who have been trying to implement a safe, dynamic runtime using C and processes. That's why we have shared libraries, shared memory, DBUS, and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, you end up with something that's far more costly to develop for and far less efficient than if you based your system on a dynamic runtime in the first place.
At a very coarse level, the process and separate address space approach is fine. The X server, kernel, and Apache web server are fine. But trying to push the paradigm beyond that to fine-grained componentization is inefficient and simply not working out.
If you have Alzheimer's, you should not be permitted to hold jobs where you make life-and-death decisions because the disease affects your ability to make such judgments. That's different from heart disease or cancer.
(If you're merely at risk of Alzheimer's, of course, that should not disqualify you, but you should be monitored closely for symptoms.)
"without" -> "with our"
has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power
Yes, as in "stop bugging us or we'll fry your country without giant microwave beam from space". Politically, this is unworkable.
And as a source of energy, space based power doesn't work out. Even if we believe the optimistic assumptions, you may get a 4x better utilization of solar energy per unit area. But stationing and maintaining even 4N solar cells on the ground is still a lot cheaper than launching N solar cells into space and maintaining them there.
So what are the alternatives?
Componentize them: turn them into shared libraries and load them into a single process. All panels, widgets, and other add-ons should be loaded into the window manager (or even the X11 server).
The individual components would remain as independent as they are now, but the would run in a single address space, be able to share and access common data structures, and not have the overhead of separate processes and heaps.
There are way too many daemons running on modern Linux systems; it really shouldn't require separate processes for I/O, settings, hardware configuration, every little panel thingy, etc.
These arguments about Microsoft Office, Outlook, OpenOffice, etc. sound ridiculously outdated. Come on, do you really think people will want to install, maintain, or run any of that bloated, complicated crap in the future?
OpenOffice is a good stop-gap replacement for people wed to old paradigms, and I'm glad its' there, but people: get over it.
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together
In what specific ways do you think Microsoft Office apps "work together" that OpenOffice apps don't?
Why would you run Exchange on your servers? In fact, the natural direction for migration is first to migrate the servers to Linux, and then the client.