Publishers claim copyright on all sorts of things; that doesn't mean that their claims are valid.
In the US, legal publishers have claimed copyright on the pagination and page numbers of texts, which presents a problem to open access because decisions are often made in reference to those page numbers.
Maybe we should criminalize invalid copyright claims, but until we do, those claims are worthless.
In some cases (e.g. early ANSI C), they did a reasonable job bringing together practitioners and standardizing and documenting a mature technology.
In other cases (e.g., ALGOL 68, MPEG-7), they brought together a bunch of academics who thought they could use the standards body to realize their untested and unrealistic ideas.
Neither of those cases is relevant anymore; people can communicate and build consensus over the Internet.
Where standards bodies still matter is in a legal sense: a standards body can guarantee that a "promise not to sue" actually has some legal force behind it, in the form of a binding agreement between the standards body and the vendor participants.
Of course, that requires a standards body that actually takes this aspect of standardization seriously and doesn't make exceptions. ECMA dropped the ball on this.
I think you're jumping to conclusions; that is Google's usual "content license", and something they need in order to offer services to you. I don't know how you think it applies to the browser. If you're trying to imply that Google is attempting to claim that everything you do with Chrome belongs to them, you're wrong.
Sure, Apple holds patents on particular ways of implementing multitouch. But they can't hold a valid patent on multitouch itself because they didn't invent it (and neither did the company they acquired to get multitouch for their systems).
Cygwin is not a "POSIX compatibility layer", it's POSIX emulation on top of Windows. It was a lot of work even to get it to the flaky state that it's in.
The modularity of Linux (and lack of modularity of Windows), whatever it means, is not something that is particularly relevant to its usefulness as a desktop OS.
You're absolutely right: it isn't. To get a good desktop OS, you can simply write a disorganized software turd and throw lots of engineers at fixing it and keeping it updated. Microsoft and Apple are both examples of that.
It is, however, highly relevant to what we're talking about: whether Linux is in "the same prison cell as Microsoft", and Linux is not. The supposition was that once masses of customers started freezing features in Linux, Linux would be stuck as much as Windows. But it is not, because Linux already has demonstrated that it's more flexible than that. The same Linux components run on anything from tiny embedded systems to huge supercomputers; all that needs to change is which modules you configure and put together.
Microsoft, however, needs a bunch of wildly incompatible products to even attempt to cover mobile, desktop, and supercomputer uses, and even with that, they are very limited in terms of devices and configurations.
The bar for "showing" something is pretty high in science, and this study doesn't meet it.
This study at best "provides indications" that solar systems like ours may be rare. The next level up would be that it "suggests" something, but I don't think it meets even that.
Your sarcasm just demonstrates your ignorance: none of the hacks you mention even come close, either in functionality or design, to the modularity of Linux.
(Mentioning the "POSIX compatibility layer" in Windows is particularly ironic, given that it works like shit.)
I doubt at those prices HP is creating a revolution.
Much more interesting is the EEE Monitor PC, which looks to be around $500, is a whole lot sleeker than that HP thing, and also function as a PC. Given ASUS' history on the EEE, there's a good chance it will run Linux.
I imagine what will happen when this userbase starts to commmand linux too.
The nice thing about Linux is that it's much more modular than Windows. So, corporate America may insist on a dull Windows-like desktop, but geeks and innovative companies can do something completely different with the UI while still retaining compatibility with mainstream applications.
If HP were serious about trying to revolutionize an industry, chances are, they'd have to partner with Apple to use their patents.
Patents on what? Apple hasn't invented anything substantial. Multitouch and all that comes from others. Even the EEE PC is shipping with Macbook-like multitouch.
HP doesn't need Apple's patents, they need to copy Apple's style and marketing pizazz. Fortunately, those are not patentable. Unfortunately, HP doesn't have the corporate culture to pull it off.
Corporations are pretty much required to do anything they can to extract profits, so long as it's legal.
They can. And in order to reduce the amount of profit that companies can make from legal but unethical practices, we point out their unethical practices. Hence, vilification of companies for these kinds of actions serves a real, rational economic purpose.
Furthermore, patents aren't filed by corporations, they are filed by people, people with a choice in the matter. And we can certainly vilify those people. So, when you hire someone, look up any patents they have filed and find any bogus ones. Then ask yourself: do you want your company to have people who squander precious legal resources and public good will in the way this person did?
This is a defensive measure on MS's part, and is EXACTLY why they are doing it.
Bogus patents like these are useless for defense.
If MS was truly as evil as we would like to believe, they would have used their patent wealth to shut down all other competing software by now.
That's total bullshit. What "competing software" are you talking about anyway? Any significant independent competitors are dead already, and the only companies that are still competing with Microsoft at all both have big patent portfolios of their own and are Microsoft business partners. Microsoft doesn't want to shut down competitors, they want to control them.
Furthermore, Microsoft's bogus patents are useless for shutting down competitors because their patents wouldn't survive a court challenge. What Microsoft is using those patents for is for controlling competitors and get them to do what they want. To do that, they can simply put a stack of a dozen patents on the table and say: "We're going to sue you over this. You'll probably be able to defeat most or all of those patents, but your company and management will be tied up in knots for the next few years. And if you still don't give in, here's another dozen patents that we'll continue suing you over. And so on. Now, are you ready to comply?"
Microsoft wants control, not total annihilation, and they are getting it through their bogus patents.
Even inline spell checking, red squiggle lines for spelling, and even dragging and dropping text is a MS design from the Word team, and arguably something they own as the current Patent laws have been upheld. How do you think this would affect any GUI OS or GUI based software product?
Microsoft is a public corporation. If they really had valid, enforceable patents, not only would they enforce them, they would have an obligation to their stock holders to do so. The fact that they aren't enforcing them tells you that Microsoft knows full well that their patents are bogus.
If you know C++, learning Java is trivial. But getting "Java" on your resume won't get you a job. With Java, it's all in the frameworks and toolkits.
Learning those takes time: there are hundreds of them, they tend to be bloated and idiosyncratic. It's that kind of obscure knowledge that companies hire and pay for.
Which one should you learn? Pick one that looks like it's up-and-coming but isn't enormously popular yet. That way, you'll have a head start. Don't expect it to be fun, though.
Honestly, all of these acronyms you can list, and yet you don't have the initiative to learn another language without posting silly questions like this?
It's not about "learning a new language". Learning Java is trivial. The problem is the hundreds of bloated, redundant, incompatible "frameworks" and "libraries" that exist for Java. Which one to learn is a valid question (albeit, it doesn't have a good answer).
Yes, and there are even more jobs available in sharecropping and cleaning toilets than in Java programming. And there's a good chance that they would be more exciting, too.
That's a core tactic of communists. There is no other reason for it to be there other than to scare the citizenry into submission.
That's not the "core tactic of communists", it's part of totalitarianism. In fact, in theory, communism is the complete opposite of totalitarianism, since it wants to get rid of the state altogether and instead appeals to people to share voluntarily (of course, in practice, all attempts at establishing communist states have led to totalitarianism). Reporting people to the state is a "core tactic" of fascism and right wing ideologies.
I'm not saying that to defend communism, which I consider inherently flawed and dangerous, but because knee-jerk statements like yours cause people to make wrong political choices.
In practice, the political spectrum has totalitarianism at both ends. The US political spectrum has shifted strongly to the right, and as a result, it's the right end of the US political spectrum that is advocating totalitarian policies, and to some degree succeeding in putting them in to practice. The left end of the US political spectrum is so moderate that even European-style socialism is considered extreme in the US.
There is no other reason for it to be there other than to scare the citizenry into submission.
Sadly, that is the approach most politicians take: they use fear to get elected. But, again, in the US, the right is much more guilty of this than the left.
Patents are neither for "ideas" nor for "implementations of ideas". Patents are for what patent law says they are for, and that can't be summed up in a couple of words.
The difference is enough that the problem here isn't MS, it's the patent system.
The problem MS. Most people learn in kindergarten that just because you can get away with doing something wrong doesn't mean you should.
There is no justification for Microsoft to file these ridiculous patents, and they should be vilified for it.
Not only is the fact that they are applying for these patents evil, it is just as evil that they are clogging up the patent system and patent examiners with this bullshit.
This is just Germans being German, but still it is incredibly stupid.
The US used to have the same laws. You know, back when the US economy was still doing well, the US didn't have a trade imbalance, and the future looked fairly bright.
Good thing too that the Soviets and the Americans burned the whole country to the ground, killed millions of them, and chased the few good
Thanks for outing yourself as a racist and a fascist.
The process of just moving to France WITHOUT work permits was neither quick nor painless (my wife & I moved here from the US in late 2006).
As I was saying: you do need a job offer and a work permit ahead of time.
I decided NOT to try to get permission to work
And that was your problem. If you go through an employer, it's a lot easier. Under US law, what you do violates immigration law, and it probably does in France as well.
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Publishers claim copyright on all sorts of things; that doesn't mean that their claims are valid.
In the US, legal publishers have claimed copyright on the pagination and page numbers of texts, which presents a problem to open access because decisions are often made in reference to those page numbers.
Maybe we should criminalize invalid copyright claims, but until we do, those claims are worthless.
Standards bodies have always had a mixed record.
In some cases (e.g. early ANSI C), they did a reasonable job bringing together practitioners and standardizing and documenting a mature technology.
In other cases (e.g., ALGOL 68, MPEG-7), they brought together a bunch of academics who thought they could use the standards body to realize their untested and unrealistic ideas.
Neither of those cases is relevant anymore; people can communicate and build consensus over the Internet.
Where standards bodies still matter is in a legal sense: a standards body can guarantee that a "promise not to sue" actually has some legal force behind it, in the form of a binding agreement between the standards body and the vendor participants.
Of course, that requires a standards body that actually takes this aspect of standardization seriously and doesn't make exceptions. ECMA dropped the ball on this.
I think you're jumping to conclusions; that is Google's usual "content license", and something they need in order to offer services to you. I don't know how you think it applies to the browser. If you're trying to imply that Google is attempting to claim that everything you do with Chrome belongs to them, you're wrong.
Sure, Apple holds patents on particular ways of implementing multitouch. But they can't hold a valid patent on multitouch itself because they didn't invent it (and neither did the company they acquired to get multitouch for their systems).
When was the last time you actually used Cygwin?
Cygwin is not a "POSIX compatibility layer", it's POSIX emulation on top of Windows. It was a lot of work even to get it to the flaky state that it's in.
The modularity of Linux (and lack of modularity of Windows), whatever it means, is not something that is particularly relevant to its usefulness as a desktop OS.
You're absolutely right: it isn't. To get a good desktop OS, you can simply write a disorganized software turd and throw lots of engineers at fixing it and keeping it updated. Microsoft and Apple are both examples of that.
It is, however, highly relevant to what we're talking about: whether Linux is in "the same prison cell as Microsoft", and Linux is not. The supposition was that once masses of customers started freezing features in Linux, Linux would be stuck as much as Windows. But it is not, because Linux already has demonstrated that it's more flexible than that. The same Linux components run on anything from tiny embedded systems to huge supercomputers; all that needs to change is which modules you configure and put together.
Microsoft, however, needs a bunch of wildly incompatible products to even attempt to cover mobile, desktop, and supercomputer uses, and even with that, they are very limited in terms of devices and configurations.
The bar for "showing" something is pretty high in science, and this study doesn't meet it.
This study at best "provides indications" that solar systems like ours may be rare. The next level up would be that it "suggests" something, but I don't think it meets even that.
Patents are granted on inventions, not ideas, not implementations of ideas.
Your sarcasm just demonstrates your ignorance: none of the hacks you mention even come close, either in functionality or design, to the modularity of Linux.
(Mentioning the "POSIX compatibility layer" in Windows is particularly ironic, given that it works like shit.)
I doubt at those prices HP is creating a revolution.
Much more interesting is the EEE Monitor PC, which looks to be around $500, is a whole lot sleeker than that HP thing, and also function as a PC. Given ASUS' history on the EEE, there's a good chance it will run Linux.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/05/asus-intros-the-eee-monitor-all-in-one-pc-says-more-eee-models/
I imagine what will happen when this userbase starts to commmand linux too.
The nice thing about Linux is that it's much more modular than Windows. So, corporate America may insist on a dull Windows-like desktop, but geeks and innovative companies can do something completely different with the UI while still retaining compatibility with mainstream applications.
If HP were serious about trying to revolutionize an industry, chances are, they'd have to partner with Apple to use their patents.
Patents on what? Apple hasn't invented anything substantial. Multitouch and all that comes from others. Even the EEE PC is shipping with Macbook-like multitouch.
HP doesn't need Apple's patents, they need to copy Apple's style and marketing pizazz. Fortunately, those are not patentable. Unfortunately, HP doesn't have the corporate culture to pull it off.
Having several alternative and more or less equally worthy options for implementation means that nobody owns the platform you're developing for.
Actually, Sun still owns the entire platform.
The tools and frameworks, etc.. in Java were built to make it easier to do your job,
What planet are you from? Java is one of the most cumbersome platforms around.
but there are very few Java technologies that are -mandatory- in the fact that forces it down your throat.
They're mandatory if you are working on a big project.
Translation
"I own Microsoft stock options and I'm unhappy".
Corporations are pretty much required to do anything they can to extract profits, so long as it's legal.
They can. And in order to reduce the amount of profit that companies can make from legal but unethical practices, we point out their unethical practices. Hence, vilification of companies for these kinds of actions serves a real, rational economic purpose.
Furthermore, patents aren't filed by corporations, they are filed by people, people with a choice in the matter. And we can certainly vilify those people. So, when you hire someone, look up any patents they have filed and find any bogus ones. Then ask yourself: do you want your company to have people who squander precious legal resources and public good will in the way this person did?
Critical thinking needs to be applied here...
Yes, and you aren't doing it.
This is a defensive measure on MS's part, and is EXACTLY why they are doing it.
Bogus patents like these are useless for defense.
If MS was truly as evil as we would like to believe, they would have used their patent wealth to shut down all other competing software by now.
That's total bullshit. What "competing software" are you talking about anyway? Any significant independent competitors are dead already, and the only companies that are still competing with Microsoft at all both have big patent portfolios of their own and are Microsoft business partners. Microsoft doesn't want to shut down competitors, they want to control them.
Furthermore, Microsoft's bogus patents are useless for shutting down competitors because their patents wouldn't survive a court challenge. What Microsoft is using those patents for is for controlling competitors and get them to do what they want. To do that, they can simply put a stack of a dozen patents on the table and say: "We're going to sue you over this. You'll probably be able to defeat most or all of those patents, but your company and management will be tied up in knots for the next few years. And if you still don't give in, here's another dozen patents that we'll continue suing you over. And so on. Now, are you ready to comply?"
Microsoft wants control, not total annihilation, and they are getting it through their bogus patents.
Even inline spell checking, red squiggle lines for spelling, and even dragging and dropping text is a MS design from the Word team, and arguably something they own as the current Patent laws have been upheld. How do you think this would affect any GUI OS or GUI based software product?
Microsoft is a public corporation. If they really had valid, enforceable patents, not only would they enforce them, they would have an obligation to their stock holders to do so. The fact that they aren't enforcing them tells you that Microsoft knows full well that their patents are bogus.
If you know C++, learning Java is trivial. But getting "Java" on your resume won't get you a job. With Java, it's all in the frameworks and toolkits.
Learning those takes time: there are hundreds of them, they tend to be bloated and idiosyncratic. It's that kind of obscure knowledge that companies hire and pay for.
Which one should you learn? Pick one that looks like it's up-and-coming but isn't enormously popular yet. That way, you'll have a head start. Don't expect it to be fun, though.
Honestly, all of these acronyms you can list, and yet you don't have the initiative to learn another language without posting silly questions like this?
It's not about "learning a new language". Learning Java is trivial. The problem is the hundreds of bloated, redundant, incompatible "frameworks" and "libraries" that exist for Java. Which one to learn is a valid question (albeit, it doesn't have a good answer).
Yes, and there are even more jobs available in sharecropping and cleaning toilets than in Java programming. And there's a good chance that they would be more exciting, too.
That's a core tactic of communists. There is no other reason for it to be there other than to scare the citizenry into submission.
That's not the "core tactic of communists", it's part of totalitarianism. In fact, in theory, communism is the complete opposite of totalitarianism, since it wants to get rid of the state altogether and instead appeals to people to share voluntarily (of course, in practice, all attempts at establishing communist states have led to totalitarianism). Reporting people to the state is a "core tactic" of fascism and right wing ideologies.
I'm not saying that to defend communism, which I consider inherently flawed and dangerous, but because knee-jerk statements like yours cause people to make wrong political choices.
In practice, the political spectrum has totalitarianism at both ends. The US political spectrum has shifted strongly to the right, and as a result, it's the right end of the US political spectrum that is advocating totalitarian policies, and to some degree succeeding in putting them in to practice. The left end of the US political spectrum is so moderate that even European-style socialism is considered extreme in the US.
There is no other reason for it to be there other than to scare the citizenry into submission.
Sadly, that is the approach most politicians take: they use fear to get elected. But, again, in the US, the right is much more guilty of this than the left.
They also had neighbors reporting on neighbors.
After a few years, the state graduates to recruiting children to report on their parents.
Patents are neither for "ideas" nor for "implementations of ideas". Patents are for what patent law says they are for, and that can't be summed up in a couple of words.
The difference is enough that the problem here isn't MS, it's the patent system.
The problem MS. Most people learn in kindergarten that just because you can get away with doing something wrong doesn't mean you should.
There is no justification for Microsoft to file these ridiculous patents, and they should be vilified for it.
Not only is the fact that they are applying for these patents evil, it is just as evil that they are clogging up the patent system and patent examiners with this bullshit.
Christ almighty, maybe it is time for the Americans to start bombing....
Where do you think this patent shit is coming from? It's coming from the US.
When the US patent system gets cleaned up, then the Europeans will follow.
Of course, bad as things are in Europe, European patent examiners are still considerably more responsible than US ones.
This is just Germans being German, but still it is incredibly stupid.
The US used to have the same laws. You know, back when the US economy was still doing well, the US didn't have a trade imbalance, and the future looked fairly bright.
Good thing too that the Soviets and the Americans burned the whole country to the ground, killed millions of them, and chased the few good
Thanks for outing yourself as a racist and a fascist.
The process of just moving to France WITHOUT work permits was neither quick nor painless (my wife & I moved here from the US in late 2006).
As I was saying: you do need a job offer and a work permit ahead of time.
I decided NOT to try to get permission to work
And that was your problem. If you go through an employer, it's a lot easier. Under US law, what you do violates immigration law, and it probably does in France as well.