Because a whole generation of CS students was raised on C and didn't know any better.
Because in those days, computer resources were so expensive that it was foolish to waste them. Here's a hint: garbage collection is a bad idea if you have so little memory that you're actually likely to run out of it. Automatic bounds checking on arrays is expensive if your processor is slow enough.
You really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, although they are certainly useful, I didn't advocate specifically bounds checking and garbage collection, I advocated type safety; you can have a type safe language with exactly the same functionality and performance as C; in fact, several existed before C. C's lack of safety is both unnecessary and unusual. Second, you greatly overestimate the overhead of garbage collection and bounds checking; we are talking a few percent overhead at most, and often, safe languages give better performance (less fragmentation, more opportunities for compiler optimization). Third, you don't understand what this device is doing; this device is decompressing a JPEG2000 image and displaying it on some bitmapped display. Most likely, it's a small embedded PC--basically, a slow desktop machine.
You can't run a JVM on this thing, and even if you wanted to, it would be a bad idea.
Of course, you can run a JVM on this thing, first because "this thing" is likely as powerful as a slow desktop, and second because JVMs run even on smartcards. But I'm not advocating a JVM; JVMs are trying to solve a much harder problem than safety, namely sandboxing. All I'm saying is that the industry should move to a safe language instead of C; that costs nothing in terms of performance.
No, the problem why these problems keep cropping up is because many programmers are prejudiced, uneducated, and don't know what they're doing. Kind of like you.
I need Open Source. I make my living with Linux. I need Linux to be strong and healthy. I need Apache and PHP. I need Bluefish, Kate and Quanta Plus
None of the software you mention depends on Sun. And that's fairly typical: a normal Linux install contains very little Sun software (except maybe OpenOffice).
If different members of the development community (and Sun is and continues to be a huge member of that community) perpetually sue each other, [...]
There are lots of ways in which people and companies hurt the open source community. I think that Sun's contributions have been overall negative; while they have released a lot of code, they have also badmouthed other open source projects, supported SCO, and picked licenses deliberately designed to be incompatible with other open source projects. So, if a lawsuit by Novell could shut Sun down, or at least shut them up, I'd be all for it.
I hope Novell will take advantage of this and threaten to sue Sun.
I think a good compromise settlement would be to force Sun to place Solaris under a Linux-compatible license so that Linux can reuse whichever bits and pieces of Solaris seem useful.
If Circuit City is a bad company (e.g., if they don't protect their inventory or business information against theft as well as their competitors), then Circuit City should go out of business and lay off their employees. Another company will then fill that market niche and re-hire those employees (at least those that are worth hiring). That's how a free market works. Companies are replacable and workers are mobile. How you care for your family and whether you can afford luxuries like a home and a car, is your business, not anybody else's.
People getting laid off is a normal part of our market economy. You seem to be a socialist or communist, someone who wants to guarantee families an income no matter how badly they or their employer screw up. I'm glad people like you are not in charge in the US.
The anti-business hippies are out there, anything that screws "tha man" is a Good Thing. I've been maxxed on karma for years, so I'm not too worried.
Trade secrets are valuable and important, but that doesn't mean that companies should be able to use the legal system as part of their investigation.
A lot of trade secret information is acquired by perfectly legal means. Allowing companies to force other companies to disclose how they obtained trade secret information is itself anti-business.
Keeping trade secrets is the responsibility of the company and of the company alone; in general, they do not have a right to use the legal system to help them in their investigations.
The violator should be fired, if nothing else.
He should be; but it's the company's responsibility to identify him using only the means available to them, nobody else's.
A company is trying to go after someone responsible for theft of corporate secrets (a felony, BTW).
Trade secret theft is a felony, but publishing trade secret information is not in general. In order to go after anybody, they first have to establish that a theft occurred. If they can't make a convincing argument to that effect, the presumption is that they simply handled their trade secret information carelessly, and that does not give them rights to go after anybody or infringe anybody's rights to anonymous free speech.
The problem is, as usual, the use of inherently unsafe and dangerous programming languages like C and C++.
There is no reason why any modern programming language should permit accidental buffer overflows; they are easily preventable without pushing the burden onto the programmer even in programming languages with the same power as C and C++.
If that's not the most blatant ripoff I've ever seen, I've got some swampland in Senzhen to sell you.
I don't understand what you're trying to get at. Apple already tried and failed to protect the "look and feel" of their products, so they don't have a legal leg to stand on complaining about this.
And morally, give me a break! Apple has no grounds to complain about this, given how much technology and ideas they have copied from others.
It's nice when people spot errors in data sets, but climate science doesn't depend for its conclusions on a single data set, or a single data point.
Even after the correction, the data set is still consistent with mainstream conclusions about global warming, which are based on hundreds of data sets using many different methods.
Maybe those are important to you. To me, a Linux-based device with an iPhone form factor, a Firefox-based browser, and a non-iTunes-based desktop sounds like something I'd prefer, in particular if it's cheaper. The only feature that's really unique to iPhone (multi-touch) is something I can do without.
But let's all keep buying these unregulated, untested imported products because, wow, look at the savings!
The Apple iPhone (and, in fact, pretty much ever cell phone in the world) is manufactured in China, so I really don't see the difference.
The iPhone is basically a box with a big touch screen. The iPhone design has so few distinguishing features that it's hard to see which parts of the design Apple could claim a trademark on. Furthermore, Apple wasn't even the first to ship such a phone, LG was.
"Piracy" means violating either copyrights or trademarks. So, if they put an Apple logo or some unique graphical design on the phone, that would be piracy. If they copied Apple code, that would be piracy. It seems unlikely that they did either.
They might run into some patents, but patent infringement isn't usually referred to as piracy. Furthermore, the only really novel functionality on the iPhone is multitouch (technology Apple didn't invent but bought), and I seriously doubt the clones even bothered with multitouch.
So, this kind of cloning is probably not piracy. And given the many limitations of the iPhone, this kind of cloning is a good thing for the consumer. Even if they were the same price, I'd want one of these Chinese phones because it sounds like a better phone to me.
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Why was this, do you think?
Because a whole generation of CS students was raised on C and didn't know any better.
Because in those days, computer resources were so expensive that it was foolish to waste them. Here's a hint: garbage collection is a bad idea if you have so little memory that you're actually likely to run out of it. Automatic bounds checking on arrays is expensive if your processor is slow enough.
You really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, although they are certainly useful, I didn't advocate specifically bounds checking and garbage collection, I advocated type safety; you can have a type safe language with exactly the same functionality and performance as C; in fact, several existed before C. C's lack of safety is both unnecessary and unusual. Second, you greatly overestimate the overhead of garbage collection and bounds checking; we are talking a few percent overhead at most, and often, safe languages give better performance (less fragmentation, more opportunities for compiler optimization). Third, you don't understand what this device is doing; this device is decompressing a JPEG2000 image and displaying it on some bitmapped display. Most likely, it's a small embedded PC--basically, a slow desktop machine.
You can't run a JVM on this thing, and even if you wanted to, it would be a bad idea.
Of course, you can run a JVM on this thing, first because "this thing" is likely as powerful as a slow desktop, and second because JVMs run even on smartcards. But I'm not advocating a JVM; JVMs are trying to solve a much harder problem than safety, namely sandboxing. All I'm saying is that the industry should move to a safe language instead of C; that costs nothing in terms of performance.
No, the problem why these problems keep cropping up is because many programmers are prejudiced, uneducated, and don't know what they're doing. Kind of like you.
I need Open Source. I make my living with Linux. I need Linux to be strong and healthy. I need Apache and PHP. I need Bluefish, Kate and Quanta Plus
None of the software you mention depends on Sun. And that's fairly typical: a normal Linux install contains very little Sun software (except maybe OpenOffice).
If different members of the development community (and Sun is and continues to be a huge member of that community) perpetually sue each other, [...]
There are lots of ways in which people and companies hurt the open source community. I think that Sun's contributions have been overall negative; while they have released a lot of code, they have also badmouthed other open source projects, supported SCO, and picked licenses deliberately designed to be incompatible with other open source projects. So, if a lawsuit by Novell could shut Sun down, or at least shut them up, I'd be all for it.
I hope Novell will take advantage of this and threaten to sue Sun.
I think a good compromise settlement would be to force Sun to place Solaris under a Linux-compatible license so that Linux can reuse whichever bits and pieces of Solaris seem useful.
If Circuit City is a bad company (e.g., if they don't protect their inventory or business information against theft as well as their competitors), then Circuit City should go out of business and lay off their employees. Another company will then fill that market niche and re-hire those employees (at least those that are worth hiring). That's how a free market works. Companies are replacable and workers are mobile. How you care for your family and whether you can afford luxuries like a home and a car, is your business, not anybody else's.
People getting laid off is a normal part of our market economy. You seem to be a socialist or communist, someone who wants to guarantee families an income no matter how badly they or their employer screw up. I'm glad people like you are not in charge in the US.
The anti-business hippies are out there, anything that screws "tha man" is a Good Thing. I've been maxxed on karma for years, so I'm not too worried.
Trade secrets are valuable and important, but that doesn't mean that companies should be able to use the legal system as part of their investigation.
A lot of trade secret information is acquired by perfectly legal means. Allowing companies to force other companies to disclose how they obtained trade secret information is itself anti-business.
They have every right to find out who did it.
Keeping trade secrets is the responsibility of the company and of the company alone; in general, they do not have a right to use the legal system to help them in their investigations.
The violator should be fired, if nothing else.
He should be; but it's the company's responsibility to identify him using only the means available to them, nobody else's.
A company is trying to go after someone responsible for theft of corporate secrets (a felony, BTW).
Trade secret theft is a felony, but publishing trade secret information is not in general. In order to go after anybody, they first have to establish that a theft occurred. If they can't make a convincing argument to that effect, the presumption is that they simply handled their trade secret information carelessly, and that does not give them rights to go after anybody or infringe anybody's rights to anonymous free speech.
The problem is, as usual, the use of inherently unsafe and dangerous programming languages like C and C++.
There is no reason why any modern programming language should permit accidental buffer overflows; they are easily preventable without pushing the burden onto the programmer even in programming languages with the same power as C and C++.
There is not a single Apple logo on the device. Furthermore, except for some design touches, Meizu and LG actually designed iPhone-like touch screen phones before Apple. Perhaps the real rip-off company is Apple. http://www.bigberries.com/?s=meizu http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=e n&q=meizu+minione&btnG=Search+Images
The real question is: are people like you deliberately lying?
If that's not the most blatant ripoff I've ever seen, I've got some swampland in Senzhen to sell you. I don't understand what you're trying to get at. Apple already tried and failed to protect the "look and feel" of their products, so they don't have a legal leg to stand on complaining about this. And morally, give me a break! Apple has no grounds to complain about this, given how much technology and ideas they have copied from others.
It's nice when people spot errors in data sets, but climate science doesn't depend for its conclusions on a single data set, or a single data point.
Even after the correction, the data set is still consistent with mainstream conclusions about global warming, which are based on hundreds of data sets using many different methods.
Maybe those are important to you. To me, a Linux-based device with an iPhone form factor, a Firefox-based browser, and a non-iTunes-based desktop sounds like something I'd prefer, in particular if it's cheaper. The only feature that's really unique to iPhone (multi-touch) is something I can do without.
But let's all keep buying these unregulated, untested imported products because, wow, look at the savings! The Apple iPhone (and, in fact, pretty much ever cell phone in the world) is manufactured in China, so I really don't see the difference.
The iPhone is basically a box with a big touch screen. The iPhone design has so few distinguishing features that it's hard to see which parts of the design Apple could claim a trademark on. Furthermore, Apple wasn't even the first to ship such a phone, LG was.
"Piracy" means violating either copyrights or trademarks. So, if they put an Apple logo or some unique graphical design on the phone, that would be piracy. If they copied Apple code, that would be piracy. It seems unlikely that they did either.
They might run into some patents, but patent infringement isn't usually referred to as piracy. Furthermore, the only really novel functionality on the iPhone is multitouch (technology Apple didn't invent but bought), and I seriously doubt the clones even bothered with multitouch.
So, this kind of cloning is probably not piracy. And given the many limitations of the iPhone, this kind of cloning is a good thing for the consumer. Even if they were the same price, I'd want one of these Chinese phones because it sounds like a better phone to me.