You mean that companies can come up with the same idea independently? Like without sharing people or ideas? Imposterous! There is no way that two people on the planet can come up with the same idea, especially right around the same time. Statistically speaking, that's like a monkey speaking French. It's pure frivolity to even suggest.
They still aren't in compliance with documentation from the original order. There are lots of functions for example that iexplore/explorer call which are not found in a search of MSDN, and really google fails for a lot of them - except returning one page complaining about the lack of documentation.
The explorer shell could be seen as part of the OS, but a web browser has no business calling undocumented functions. Too bad they tried to bundle the two. And it's also too bad that there is a lot of duplicated code among explorer.exe, browseui.dll, shlwapi.dll, and some others - I can't imagine trying to make a patch for this stuff. Instead of just making a documented API, they copy the code into all sorts of different places. And slightly differently I might add - so patching is not just a copy and paste job - it definitely has to be merged.
However, as soon as a company provides anything to an external entity, it fears loss of competitive advantage and gain of responsibility. What if someone puts that source code into and escalator control box, and the escalator malfunctions and kills someone? Legal does not want to be associated with unknown, although impossible, risks like that.
Plus, they are trying to show ROI and other numbers - typically a company does not want to do free work, thinking that they might be able to sell their services instead. Yes there are counter examples but legal departments often operate on fear, not logic.
If they made the suite a requirement, it would simply take longer to get to 1.0.
They need the viewers so that people can't say "Well I can't see this document someone sent me because OOo doesn't render blah correctly". So a 1.0 release accomplishes the goal of being able to read documents as they were intended to be read, while still offering a functional, very compatible office suite. It's a good compromise I think, functional while not yet complete.
It's kinda in that link, but I cannot stress enough organizing the code files themselves. Unless you have a very tiny project, you probably have bunches of stuff like the main application, some GUI work, support functions, classes/libraries, different architectures, translations, documentation, meta-documentation, build files, configuration...
I know you're not (necessarily) talking about open-source, but it's easy to pick on. There is nothing worse in open-source than downloading a promising application's source code and having hundreds of files in the root folder with no obvious organization, and having to do a full text search on "main" to see where the ignition key is.
You may not release your code to the public, but think of the poor guy/gal who replaces the guy who just retired/quit. How long will it take him to figure out where everything goes? Taking the perspective of a new user and organizing the files so you can find the entry point, or the platform-independent sections, or the file-format logic. It forces you to think about where things belong, or don't belong, and what to keep private versus exposed.
I would just be belabouring a point if I didn't have my latest example, Firefox. The windows build is buried way at the bottom in a non-intuitive location, and the installer code actually seems to be copied (with different versions of some files, sometimes one folder is newer, sometimes the other) in another location ("moztoolkit" versus "xpinstall"). I honestly can't see the difference or figure out where each is called out or which one actually runs without doing a full-text search on the whole source tree. The installer build itself is in.bat files, perl, and normal make, and the resulting executable is a mess of UPX'ed 7-zipped SFX with the 7z stub UPX'ed and that just gets you to the NSIS setup.exe installer. What a disaster it is! And not organized!
Lay out your code like you lay out a book - so you can just go to a specific chapter and read the parts you want. If you need to add something, you should be able to find where it goes, and may be surprised to find it already exists. It makes porting, library replacement, task distribution, and many other things a lot easier. If listing just the folder names doesn't add any clarity or value, you probably need t reorganize.
The patent seems to be about saving CC info so you can order one item with one click. If I send everything to a shopping cart and click "buy now", even if they remember my credit card information, that seems not to be covered under the patent. Or I can "1-Click" every purchase, and amazon has to either queue those somehow in order to ship them to me all at once (effectively having the "shopping cart" function on the back end which shouldn't be covered either), or sending me one item per box and increasing either cost to them or cost to me.
I'm struggling to really understand the benefit of this patent - it seems truly useful if I want to buy one single item. But it only saves time if I frequently buy a single item. A one-time use of the one-click method saves no time because you have to save your CC info instead of just entering it on-demand. And buying multiple items at once in order to save on shipping works very well with a shopping cart/checkout model.
For the same reason, try to name a famous flautist (one who plays the flute). If you managed to do that, now try to name a famous female flautist. Chances are you can't think of one - even though well over 95% of flute players in middle / high school band classes are female.
It's not guaranteed obviously, but there are data points to support some correlation.
I have one item at 10 units of electricity. I have another item using 10 times less electricity. So it uses (10 units * 10 = 100) 100 less units of electricity, for a total of -90 units.
Does that make any kind of sense to any of you?
Wouldn't you want to say 1/10th and 1/30,000th? Or even be cool and say "one order of magnitude" or even "5 orders of magnitude and a third applied to the result".
(please disregard the less/fewer issue here, one thing at a time)
Your comment basically says "don't take advantage of new, convenient technologies because someone wants to do something they have no need of doing".
That's a horrible idea, and I don't see how anyone in this audience found it insightful. Putting personal pictures on a business laptop, or including financial information on a business notebook because the institution is only open at the same hours you are at work - these seem like reasonable uses of modern technology.
If anything, items such as you described are more secure now, because you typically need to log in, then find a document, and open it up - not accidentally read it when it pops out of one of your hundred pockets, or come across it when looking for something that can explode.
Screw that, build it yourself with parts from wal-mart. While you're there, add a simple generator so the computer won't have electricity unless someone is walking. Comfort, exercise, and it's all good for the environment.
I'm too uncomfortable to find it again, but I searched for chairs for a while. One guy took an old Beamer seat from a junkyard (make sure it has all of its windows intact), and put it on sliding rails just like your desk has for a keyboard. He said car seats are designed for long hours of sitting in one position and it made sense.
So you plop in, and slide it forward to the desk, then slide out when you're done. That solves the problem where the chair is really heavy.
Side effect - the whole apparatus is kinda permanent just cos it's pretty heavy. But it truly seemed like the ultimate seat.
Oh wait, here it is and it was even on slashdot many moons ago so you don't have to take my word for it, he who can't spell his own name without resorting to numbers: http://www.arrickrobotics.com/chair/
Freenet, darknet, tor - the day will come where anyone can do anything on the net because of unintended consequences - untraceable and anonymous. I hate to make the suggestion, but if I were in power I would have just not said anything at all because right now you know where the stuff is. You don't know where it's going to go.
Ever tried to rent-to-own? I know, people here are too smart to do that, but I wanted to try out a couch for a while, find out what I liked or didn't like, then use that info to buy the "perfect" couch - defeating the "paradox of choice".
In order to rent a couch for two weeks, I had to give 4 personal references (two non-family, all of whom they would call), list my work address and salary, and hand over my address (where they would deliver the couch so they would know where it was), all phone numbers, SSN, and I stopped reading there and said no way am I giving you this much information.
It is harder to rent a couch than do anything that could potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people.
I'm not saying it's better that way, I'm saying that with a vested interest in ensuring business continuity, businesses err on the side of safety. Without a vested interest, it's CYA mode so you can say "It's not my fault, I tried". Malicious attacks don't put responsibility on the provider to restore or repay damages, so it's CYA mode. Airlines take an insurance hit and tax write-off, so there's no vested interest. Rent-to-own places probably don't pay for enough insurance to replace every item because that would be too much expense to justify, so they have to make sure they know the person to whom they are renting.
The level of risk determines how far the business will go in terms of REAL safeguards, and the potential level of embarrassment determines how far they will go in terms of ARTIFICIAL safeguards.
No kidding. I don't have Vista, but I lose track on a daily basis at how many times I am typing in some box and all of a sudden my keystrokes are in another window - even after I change the "don't allow windows to steal focus" boxes.
Or when I'm using the keyboard to navigate outlook (tab, tab, arrows, space bar will let me change folders), but sometimes it stops working until I reboot.
Or I put a space between two words but the space never shows up - and I have to wonder, what grey box with a default button did I just say "Yes" to?
Or when SMS starts updating and I can't click on a FRIGGING THING because 1) it's not below normal priority and 2) all disk access seems to be prioritized so that CPU tasks can't do a bloody thing, ever since at least NT 4.
Or the way Office adds individual documents as top-level windows so that you have to ALT-TAB a bunch of extra times to switch between an Office app and something else. I mean, when you can CTRL+TAB, why would you also want to ALT+TAB?
Slashdot Mirror
Your kids would be taken away because you allowed them to access porn. Thank the puritans.
Was he on vacation?
You mean that companies can come up with the same idea independently? Like without sharing people or ideas? Imposterous! There is no way that two people on the planet can come up with the same idea, especially right around the same time. Statistically speaking, that's like a monkey speaking French. It's pure frivolity to even suggest.
They still aren't in compliance with documentation from the original order. There are lots of functions for example that iexplore/explorer call which are not found in a search of MSDN, and really google fails for a lot of them - except returning one page complaining about the lack of documentation.
The explorer shell could be seen as part of the OS, but a web browser has no business calling undocumented functions. Too bad they tried to bundle the two. And it's also too bad that there is a lot of duplicated code among explorer.exe, browseui.dll, shlwapi.dll, and some others - I can't imagine trying to make a patch for this stuff. Instead of just making a documented API, they copy the code into all sorts of different places. And slightly differently I might add - so patching is not just a copy and paste job - it definitely has to be merged.
And given the number of readers here, hotlinking images like that could be seen as malicious.
You are absolutely correct IMO.
However, as soon as a company provides anything to an external entity, it fears loss of competitive advantage and gain of responsibility. What if someone puts that source code into and escalator control box, and the escalator malfunctions and kills someone? Legal does not want to be associated with unknown, although impossible, risks like that.
Plus, they are trying to show ROI and other numbers - typically a company does not want to do free work, thinking that they might be able to sell their services instead. Yes there are counter examples but legal departments often operate on fear, not logic.
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/ It's already done
If they made the suite a requirement, it would simply take longer to get to 1.0.
They need the viewers so that people can't say "Well I can't see this document someone sent me because OOo doesn't render blah correctly". So a 1.0 release accomplishes the goal of being able to read documents as they were intended to be read, while still offering a functional, very compatible office suite. It's a good compromise I think, functional while not yet complete.
My girlfriend has DSL.
It's kinda in that link, but I cannot stress enough organizing the code files themselves. Unless you have a very tiny project, you probably have bunches of stuff like the main application, some GUI work, support functions, classes/libraries, different architectures, translations, documentation, meta-documentation, build files, configuration...
.bat files, perl, and normal make, and the resulting executable is a mess of UPX'ed 7-zipped SFX with the 7z stub UPX'ed and that just gets you to the NSIS setup.exe installer. What a disaster it is! And not organized!
I know you're not (necessarily) talking about open-source, but it's easy to pick on. There is nothing worse in open-source than downloading a promising application's source code and having hundreds of files in the root folder with no obvious organization, and having to do a full text search on "main" to see where the ignition key is.
You may not release your code to the public, but think of the poor guy/gal who replaces the guy who just retired/quit. How long will it take him to figure out where everything goes? Taking the perspective of a new user and organizing the files so you can find the entry point, or the platform-independent sections, or the file-format logic. It forces you to think about where things belong, or don't belong, and what to keep private versus exposed.
I would just be belabouring a point if I didn't have my latest example, Firefox. The windows build is buried way at the bottom in a non-intuitive location, and the installer code actually seems to be copied (with different versions of some files, sometimes one folder is newer, sometimes the other) in another location ("moztoolkit" versus "xpinstall"). I honestly can't see the difference or figure out where each is called out or which one actually runs without doing a full-text search on the whole source tree. The installer build itself is in
Lay out your code like you lay out a book - so you can just go to a specific chapter and read the parts you want. If you need to add something, you should be able to find where it goes, and may be surprised to find it already exists. It makes porting, library replacement, task distribution, and many other things a lot easier. If listing just the folder names doesn't add any clarity or value, you probably need t reorganize.
How many pages is 2076: A Novel?
The patent seems to be about saving CC info so you can order one item with one click. If I send everything to a shopping cart and click "buy now", even if they remember my credit card information, that seems not to be covered under the patent. Or I can "1-Click" every purchase, and amazon has to either queue those somehow in order to ship them to me all at once (effectively having the "shopping cart" function on the back end which shouldn't be covered either), or sending me one item per box and increasing either cost to them or cost to me.
I'm struggling to really understand the benefit of this patent - it seems truly useful if I want to buy one single item. But it only saves time if I frequently buy a single item. A one-time use of the one-click method saves no time because you have to save your CC info instead of just entering it on-demand. And buying multiple items at once in order to save on shipping works very well with a shopping cart/checkout model.
Can anyone help me out here?
For the same reason, try to name a famous flautist (one who plays the flute). If you managed to do that, now try to name a famous female flautist. Chances are you can't think of one - even though well over 95% of flute players in middle / high school band classes are female.
It's not guaranteed obviously, but there are data points to support some correlation.
Yes. Because the terrorists have already won and now we have new rules. Thank your federal politician for that.
I have one item at 10 units of electricity. I have another item using 10 times less electricity. So it uses (10 units * 10 = 100) 100 less units of electricity, for a total of -90 units.
Does that make any kind of sense to any of you?
Wouldn't you want to say 1/10th and 1/30,000th? Or even be cool and say "one order of magnitude" or even "5 orders of magnitude and a third applied to the result".
(please disregard the less/fewer issue here, one thing at a time)
it's all in the emphasis: This isn't madness - this is AFRAICAAAAAAA!!!!!
Your comment basically says "don't take advantage of new, convenient technologies because someone wants to do something they have no need of doing".
That's a horrible idea, and I don't see how anyone in this audience found it insightful. Putting personal pictures on a business laptop, or including financial information on a business notebook because the institution is only open at the same hours you are at work - these seem like reasonable uses of modern technology.
If anything, items such as you described are more secure now, because you typically need to log in, then find a document, and open it up - not accidentally read it when it pops out of one of your hundred pockets, or come across it when looking for something that can explode.
Plus, your chair won't smell like farts
I'm too uncomfortable to find it again, but I searched for chairs for a while. One guy took an old Beamer seat from a junkyard (make sure it has all of its windows intact), and put it on sliding rails just like your desk has for a keyboard. He said car seats are designed for long hours of sitting in one position and it made sense.
So you plop in, and slide it forward to the desk, then slide out when you're done. That solves the problem where the chair is really heavy.
Side effect - the whole apparatus is kinda permanent just cos it's pretty heavy. But it truly seemed like the ultimate seat.
Oh wait, here it is and it was even on slashdot many moons ago so you don't have to take my word for it, he who can't spell his own name without resorting to numbers:
http://www.arrickrobotics.com/chair/
Freenet, darknet, tor - the day will come where anyone can do anything on the net because of unintended consequences - untraceable and anonymous. I hate to make the suggestion, but if I were in power I would have just not said anything at all because right now you know where the stuff is. You don't know where it's going to go.
Ever tried to rent-to-own? I know, people here are too smart to do that, but I wanted to try out a couch for a while, find out what I liked or didn't like, then use that info to buy the "perfect" couch - defeating the "paradox of choice".
In order to rent a couch for two weeks, I had to give 4 personal references (two non-family, all of whom they would call), list my work address and salary, and hand over my address (where they would deliver the couch so they would know where it was), all phone numbers, SSN, and I stopped reading there and said no way am I giving you this much information.
It is harder to rent a couch than do anything that could potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people.
I'm not saying it's better that way, I'm saying that with a vested interest in ensuring business continuity, businesses err on the side of safety. Without a vested interest, it's CYA mode so you can say "It's not my fault, I tried". Malicious attacks don't put responsibility on the provider to restore or repay damages, so it's CYA mode. Airlines take an insurance hit and tax write-off, so there's no vested interest. Rent-to-own places probably don't pay for enough insurance to replace every item because that would be too much expense to justify, so they have to make sure they know the person to whom they are renting.
The level of risk determines how far the business will go in terms of REAL safeguards, and the potential level of embarrassment determines how far they will go in terms of ARTIFICIAL safeguards.
Longer? You're not helping...
If you don't see any, next in line is Democrats. Either one is a sure sign something suspicious is happening/happened/about to happen.
No kidding. I don't have Vista, but I lose track on a daily basis at how many times I am typing in some box and all of a sudden my keystrokes are in another window - even after I change the "don't allow windows to steal focus" boxes.
Or when I'm using the keyboard to navigate outlook (tab, tab, arrows, space bar will let me change folders), but sometimes it stops working until I reboot.
Or I put a space between two words but the space never shows up - and I have to wonder, what grey box with a default button did I just say "Yes" to?
Or when SMS starts updating and I can't click on a FRIGGING THING because 1) it's not below normal priority and 2) all disk access seems to be prioritized so that CPU tasks can't do a bloody thing, ever since at least NT 4.
Or the way Office adds individual documents as top-level windows so that you have to ALT-TAB a bunch of extra times to switch between an Office app and something else. I mean, when you can CTRL+TAB, why would you also want to ALT+TAB?
Not a good idea. Bananas are dying. Netcraft confirms it.