I don't count scaling as innovative...but I wouldn't rush to say that Intel's new product with unknown specs isn't innovative. It won't be the scaling, though, it'll be what they do with it.
If they've come up with an efficient way to run multiple cores at full speed (or close to it), then they've been quite innovative. If they've come up with a computer that can run a 2 GHz equivalent and sit on your arm, then it's innovative. If they've come up with a way to build chips 3-dimensionally (rather than 2 1/2), then it's innovative.
There's lots of ways that the product could be innovative. They could have a new microcode language. Nobody would notice, but that, in and of itself, could be quite innovative.
N.B.: Scaling, while not, in and of itself, innovative, frequently enables innovation. Consider the digital wrist watch. (Note also that innovations aren't always improvements.)
OTOH, innovation often isn't noticed as such. Consider those phone speaker/mikes that people are now frequently wearing in their ears. That's innovative, even though it wasn't much of a technical advance (if any).
Literally innovation means the making of something that's new...but different people have different standards for what's needed to count as new. For me, scaling doesn't suffice. It enables, but it doesn't suffice.
One of the functions of the OSI is to limit the number of licenses that programmers need to learn how to deal with. Unless a clear and convincing argument is presented for a new license, that alone should suffice for rejecting it.
OTOH, I must also admit that I am suspicious of this license in particular *BECAUSE* it comes from MS. MS is a company with a history, and not one that would cause one to wish to associate with them. This could, possibly, be as open as it superficially appears. But it could be that there are subtleties that aren't apparent. I wouldn't even know how to start to check, except by looking at the history of the company offering it.
There *are* other approaches. If you make it easier for teachers to just ignore you, most of them will. Especially if you appear to be attempting to monopolize their attention. (Well, honestly it wasn't just appear...)
I used to do my German homework in Physics class...which might have caused problems, but I was seated as close to front and center as I could manage...and I kept trying to answer all the questions whenever one was asked. (And *rarely* made a mistake.)
OTOH, my math teacher wouldn't cut me any slack when I was sick right before a mid-term...and out for a week while he was covering material that I hadn't considered. I was in tears because I only got a C. (I did, however, recover my GPA before the end of the semester.)
Still...when I got to college I discovered that it would have been FAR better if I'd developed good study habits. I'd never learned how to handle a challenging environment.
To be fair...most of this is "Looking Backwards". At the time I was just muddling through.
Does/.-Europe award points for Funny? On this/., some people consider that Funny should award points, so they vote something else. When I feel that way, I tend to vote "underrated", but I'm never sure that this awards points, so I can see the point for voting "Insightful".
That's what I mean by conservative too. I used to call myself one. Nobody else ever agreed with me that that was the correct term, however, so I stopped using it.
It's true that the term is currently being abused by "pseudo Christian lobbyists", but it had already been degraded before they ever got their hands on it.
These days I tend to call my politics "Cynical" which has the virtue of being understood in a way close to what I mean when I say it. Also, the more I observe people the closer I come to the philosophy of the original cynics. (Though I don't tend to [argumentally] run after people and tear them to shreds.) I do, however, like to think that my opinions have progressed beyond theirs...but then it's been over 2000 years, and we now have ethology and evolution to augment our tools of analysis.
My sources are: I was in the environs when it happened. I had friends complain to me at the time. (Sorry, I wasn't much of a gamer myself. But I had friends who had friends who were part of Chaosium.) I read descriptions in the media of how D&D worked, and had friends who confirmed it. This is BEFORE TSR's heist. D&D is a name created by and for the community of gamers...and then stolen from them. (It wasn't totally accurate. Most games didn't have any dragons. But that was the standard name.)
Sorry, if you want sources check old zines...of which I don't have any. They were the first commercializer of the class, but they sure didn't invent either that class of games OR the name.
The way it used to work was: Somebody invented a dungeon map, some characters, some monsters, etc. Positioned them strategically, And invited some friends over to play.
The problem: Characters created in one game often couldn't transfer to another.
This is the problem that they attempted to solve, and they probably did a pretty good job of solving it. Unfortunately, their approach essentially killed the game as it had been. It made being a DM a much less creative activity, and opened the way for pre-packaged scenarios. (Previously people had rarely played a prepackaged scenario...not even one made by a friend. There are plusses and minuses to their approach. Now, e.g., one can figure what chance a troll has against a samurai... or at least measure their capabilities on the same scale. Used to be that a character being imported from another game took his chances of how the DM would rate his skills. Now it was standardized.
So there were basically the same advantage as any system of standards. And there was every problem that a system of *proprietary*!! standards creates. Including the company claim-jumping the name.
"Dungeons and Dragons", at least without the capitalization, was the common name for a group of associated games before that nlank-dashed company stole the name.
I suppose that steal isn't quite the right verb, but it's nearly right. Before they stole it, it was widely used. Now that they have stolen it, you can't use it any more. Sounds like stealing to me.
The technique was quite simple. They formed a company and issued a game using a commonly used term for the game. Then they sued anyone else who used the term. Unless that person looked able to defend themselves, in which case they'd find another victim. (Remind you of another company? There are several who've used this basic approach.)
I didn't like it when Mozilla claim-jumped the Firebird database project's name. Well, they eventually renamed it to FireFox. Most companies, however, just muscle in. This is the "dungeons and dragons" is the first instance where I noticed that happening. I'd thank them for sensitizing me, but I'm still mad at them.
My impression, which I'll admit in advance is ill-informed, was that only a very few went to jail, and that it wasn't at all certain that the fall-guys were the one's most culpable.
If it's a "natural monopoly", then it *SHOULD* be run by the government as a public service. By natural monopoly I mean things like physical infrastructure. Roads, water pipes, electrical wires, etc.
If it's not a natural monopoly, then the government _should_ act to decentralize the power. Should doesn't mean does. Perhaps a tax factored by n*log(n) where n = the number of employees (including in employees contractors who work for more for this company than for anybody else during a quarter [month? week?]).
It's not clear to me (for certain) that the provision of water should be a government responsibility...but the maintenance of the pipes and sewer systems certainly should. (N.B.: maintaining the pipes requires physical access.)
Government controlled monopolies and government facilitated monopolies have not uniformly proven disastrous... but by far the largest number of them have.
Looks like I got something wrong. The suit is against Capitol Records, not the RIAA. So possibly they do own the copyrights. (The rest is pretty much still valid.)
That's their valuation, not mine. That'd be like MS settling a suit with a Linux user by giving him coupons for MS software...useless.
I give their downloads negative value. In my case a fairly large negative value, as I count my time worth something, and I'd not only need to do the downloads, I'd need to then be sure to find them all so I could delete them.
That depends on the contract. I'd bet that most of the copyrights are owned by the music companies (for which the RIAA is acting as an agent). I'm not at all sure that misbehavior on the part of the RIAA is enough to allow a lien to be placed on the music company's property.
But I'm sure that the RIAA has some nice property of it's own. Office buildings, etc. Solid oak wastebaskets. Etc.
When C and C++ were my focus, I also looked for other languages to escape to. I totally hated the dangerous way that we were expected to use pointers. Given that situation, I'm almost certain that C# would be an improvement, and this is from knowing nothing about it.
(Mind you, I abandoned C/C++ over 20 years ago. First for Eiffel, and then for Ada. I didn't really like either of them, but they were both better choices than C/C++. Finally I switched to Python and was relatively happy. (I wasn't doing anything then that was speed limited.) Actually, I also tried Ruby for awhile, and I prefer the language qua language to Python, but Ruby is slower than Python, and Python was already nearing the point where execution speed was going to be the limitation. (As you can tell from my prior comments, I looked at a lot of other languages along the way.)
Currently my languages of choice are D and Python. D is for when I need the speed, Python is for fast development. Both are safe in comparison to C/C++. Both have escape hatches to allow one to use pre-written code in C. (Python also has some technique for using C++ libraries, but I've never investigated it.)
Am I opinionated? Yes. But I've got reasons for the opinions.
P.S.: I've also had lots of bad experiences with trying to maintain other people's code where they used C's macro facility as a substitute for clean code.
I think the part of the EULA that bothered me the most was the part where I was expected to give them the right to "add, modify, copy, or delete any file on your system". There were other objectionable parts, but that was 1) clearly intelligible, and 2) totally unacceptable
P.S.: I think that I saw that in the last Apple EULA for iTunes, unfortunately I was tired, so I'm not certain. I'm glad I switched to Linux instead, but I had been doing support to family with Mac products. I'll need to read the EULA quite carefully next time, but I suspect that I'll be dropping Apple support, also. Do note, however, that the rest of the text in Apple's EULAs aren't as abusive as those from MS. Most of the conditions have been essentially reasonable. Still, I think they've finally gone beyond the pale.(*)
(*) The proper metaphor should be "crossed the deadline". When Napoleon was a palace guard he once confronted a mob. He had his troops draw a line in the street and said "Anyone who crosses this line will be shot." That was the original deadline.
"Beyond the pale" traces back to the British occupation of Ireland. There was a certain area (in Dublin?) that the British troops controlled, which they called the pale. They strongly attempted to protect people (at least British) who were "within the pale", but if you went "beyond the pale" you were taking your own chances, and liable to be ambushed by locals who objected to the invasion.
Note that the second metaphor doesn't mean a closely what I mean, but popular usage has hidden the true meaning of "deadline", so I couldn't use it.
As I read the deal at the time I thought it was a part of the stock manipulation. Ignoring the IP stuff, Sun was given the right to buy a large number of SCOX shares a a fixed price that was far below the current market price. Don't know if they ever exercised that option...but they could exercise it the day before they sold the shares, and the price was both fixed and low. Sun would need to buy the shares from SCO and sell them on the market, but as I remember they had the right to buy the shares for $0.25 each. (That sounds too low, and I don't believe my memory, but that's what I remember. Anyway, it was much less than the going market rate at the time I heard about it.)
Given the nature of the SCO management, I would expect them to manipulate others via greed when they needed cooperation. They seem to believe that greed and threats are the only reasonable tools for ensuring cooperation.
Actually, SunSite isn't the most important contribution of Sun. OpenOffice is. At the time that Sun made StarOffice5.0 (I think that was the version) freely distributable in Linux there was *NO* competing word processor. I had actually been using Netscape's HTML editor as a word processor because there wasn't anything better. (This was actually worse than in 1966 when I was using nroff as a word processor. N.B.: Not text editor. I used a text editor to produce the files that I fed to nroff.) There were plenty of decent text editors around, just no word processors. Yes, groff was probably around, but that is so far inferior to nroff when it comes to a human using it to product formatted text that it isn't funny. Even troff was far inferior. I'd have been better off using Lyx. I almost did...I tried it several times, but never had enough motivation to make it over the initial hump.
You could look into D or Python (or Ada, or possibly even C++...but I'm less sure about that). They all support the kind of overload that you want, with differing advantages and drawbacks. Except for speed, Python is the best choice. If you want speed, then of the languages that I know the best choices are D or Ada (and I prefer D).
With Python you might get the speed that you need either via Pyrex or NumPy (or possibly it's now PyNumeric). This actually operates via calls to C libraries, but they get hidden by syntactic sugar.
D and Ada are type sensitive to varying degrees. (Ada tends to be verbosely fanatic about it.)
I'm not familiar with Mono, because I don't trust it not to have embedded MS IP of some sort (patents probably, if anything). It's probably safe enough...but I tend to be nervous. That's also why I won't have anything to do with Novell unless through an intermediate who has their own lawyers. Probably there's no MS IP... but there's no way I would know.
And since I won't let MS products be installed, (Not since I read the last MS EULA!) I can't speak WRT C#.
Another possible choice is ObjectiveC or ObjectiveC++. That gives more flexibility at run time than C or C++ (well, unless you wriggle and turn a lot) with good compatibility. (C libraries are directly callable, and I believe that C++ libraries are as well.) I'm not sure that you could redefine the primitive operators over class operations...but I believe that you could. The major problem with ObjectiveC/C++ is that there doesn't seem to be any significant amount of tutorial material. Still, every legitimate c program is a legitimate ObjectiveC program, so you could learn slowly. And it transfers easily to the Mac. (I'm less sure how well it runs on MSWind.)
I didn't yet mention Ruby or Smalltalk. Both of them can do what you want (though the Smalltalk syntax is peculiar...and might be unacceptable). Unfortunately, Ruby is slower than Python, even though I like the language design better. Smalltalk comes in a variety of forms, but tends to be faster than pure Python code. Unfortunately, it's far easier to link to an external library from Python. Smalltalk tries to be a closed system. So I basically left both of these out of the discussion.
Then there's LISP and Scheme. A good LISP would be essentially as fast as C... but I don't think you would find the syntax acceptable. So I left it to the end as well. I'm not sure about the speed of various Schemes, but it would have essentially the same syntax problem as LISP.
If interpreted Java is fast enough for you (you didn't mention speed as a consideration), then you should probably give Python a look-see. It's a bit slower when you're using pure Python code, but a lot of stuff is done via library calls, which are generally optimized C code...and thus quite fast.
Now it's true that with Linux around the Hurd has no particular reason to rush to conclusion. It's being run as a continued research project. As such it's a current success, even if it get no closer to completion.
It's also a totally independent free software OS that could mature quite rapidly if there were need. There were a few times during the SCO vs. the world trial that I was quite glad that such a backstop existed. (True, OpenSolaris makes this less necessary...but first we need to gauge Novell's reaction now that it's been "confirmed in it's ownership of Unix". Probably nothing to worry about, but in such matters care is advisable.)
Still, I've always been a belt AND suspenders kind of guy, and I'll continue to appreciate the Hurd's existence even if(when?) OpenSolaris becomes GPL3. (But I might switch from Linux to OpenSolaris...or some close offshoot.)
Well, the Hurd is *free* enough for me. It might be good enough if they'd stop going back to the beginning and re-writing everything. (I know the trap...I'm in it too. But I do know that it's a trap.)
I can't respect Microsoft. They are immoral, unethical, criminal, etc.
There may, indeed, be something good that one can say about them. The closest I can come is "They made a good mouse." That's not sufficient basis for respecting them.
Making fun of them? Of course. I'm afraid, and I don't intend to yield, so what else should I do? Cry?
So I cheer the victories of almost anyone against MS. And I especially cheer the victories of "the home team". And I shrug off the victories of MS. I must. Depression is bad for you.
MS, it's not just a disease, it's an operating system.
OK, that was in bad taste. And not original. It's the best I could do on the spur of the moment.
And having the ballot anonymous and printed by a machine is a recipe for having a ballot box stuffed. The election official signing it means that he takes responsibility that the laws were abided by. Having a number for your ballot is, indeed, relatively useless...but some people could check. Think of it as a quality control. (Ideally you should be able to search for a ballot by number over the internet. Unfortunately, this same ideal would require that nobody else be able to search for your ballot, or you enable vote buying...and a new form of extortion. Don't know an answer here.)
A partial answer is that there needs to be some quality control on the vote counts. The "how" I'm less sure about. Secret ballots are important. So is elimination of fraud. Think of it as unit testing.
How are we supposed to force people to notice something they don't want to hear? If I just tell them repeatedly, they stop listening. If I ask the voting commissioner, I'm told "Sorry, we signed a contract." The only next step that I can see is to hire a lawyer and sue him for misfeasance...but I'd better quit my job and move to another county first. (Possibly another state. Maybe another country.)
This area is massively Democrat, and we have Diebold voting machines. (Well, we did the last election. Possibly they'll have been replaced by now. Possibly.)
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I don't count scaling as innovative...but I wouldn't rush to say that Intel's new product with unknown specs isn't innovative. It won't be the scaling, though, it'll be what they do with it.
If they've come up with an efficient way to run multiple cores at full speed (or close to it), then they've been quite innovative. If they've come up with a computer that can run a 2 GHz equivalent and sit on your arm, then it's innovative. If they've come up with a way to build chips 3-dimensionally (rather than 2 1/2), then it's innovative.
There's lots of ways that the product could be innovative. They could have a new microcode language. Nobody would notice, but that, in and of itself, could be quite innovative.
N.B.: Scaling, while not, in and of itself, innovative, frequently enables innovation. Consider the digital wrist watch. (Note also that innovations aren't always improvements.)
OTOH, innovation often isn't noticed as such. Consider those phone speaker/mikes that people are now frequently wearing in their ears. That's innovative, even though it wasn't much of a technical advance (if any).
Literally innovation means the making of something that's new...but different people have different standards for what's needed to count as new. For me, scaling doesn't suffice. It enables, but it doesn't suffice.
One of the functions of the OSI is to limit the number of licenses that programmers need to learn how to deal with. Unless a clear and convincing argument is presented for a new license, that alone should suffice for rejecting it.
OTOH, I must also admit that I am suspicious of this license in particular *BECAUSE* it comes from MS. MS is a company with a history, and not one that would cause one to wish to associate with them. This could, possibly, be as open as it superficially appears. But it could be that there are subtleties that aren't apparent. I wouldn't even know how to start to check, except by looking at the history of the company offering it.
There *are* other approaches. If you make it easier for teachers to just ignore you, most of them will. Especially if you appear to be attempting to monopolize their attention. (Well, honestly it wasn't just appear...)
I used to do my German homework in Physics class...which might have caused problems, but I was seated as close to front and center as I could manage...and I kept trying to answer all the questions whenever one was asked. (And *rarely* made a mistake.)
OTOH, my math teacher wouldn't cut me any slack when I was sick right before a mid-term...and out for a week while he was covering material that I hadn't considered. I was in tears because I only got a C. (I did, however, recover my GPA before the end of the semester.)
Still...when I got to college I discovered that it would have been FAR better if I'd developed good study habits. I'd never learned how to handle a challenging environment.
To be fair...most of this is "Looking Backwards". At the time I was just muddling through.
Does /.-Europe award points for Funny? On this /., some people consider that Funny should award points, so they vote something else. When I feel that way, I tend to vote "underrated", but I'm never sure that this awards points, so I can see the point for voting "Insightful".
That's what I mean by conservative too. I used to call myself one. Nobody else ever agreed with me that that was the correct term, however, so I stopped using it.
It's true that the term is currently being abused by "pseudo Christian lobbyists", but it had already been degraded before they ever got their hands on it.
These days I tend to call my politics "Cynical" which has the virtue of being understood in a way close to what I mean when I say it. Also, the more I observe people the closer I come to the philosophy of the original cynics. (Though I don't tend to [argumentally] run after people and tear them to shreds.) I do, however, like to think that my opinions have progressed beyond theirs...but then it's been over 2000 years, and we now have ethology and evolution to augment our tools of analysis.
My sources are: I was in the environs when it happened. I had friends complain to me at the time. (Sorry, I wasn't much of a gamer myself. But I had friends who had friends who were part of Chaosium.) I read descriptions in the media of how D&D worked, and had friends who confirmed it. This is BEFORE TSR's heist. D&D is a name created by and for the community of gamers...and then stolen from them. (It wasn't totally accurate. Most games didn't have any dragons. But that was the standard name.)
... or at least measure their capabilities on the same scale. Used to be that a character being imported from another game took his chances of how the DM would rate his skills. Now it was standardized.
Sorry, if you want sources check old zines...of which I don't have any. They were the first commercializer of the class, but they sure didn't invent either that class of games OR the name.
The way it used to work was:
Somebody invented a dungeon map, some characters, some monsters, etc. Positioned them strategically, And invited some friends over to play.
The problem:
Characters created in one game often couldn't transfer to another.
This is the problem that they attempted to solve, and they probably did a pretty good job of solving it. Unfortunately, their approach essentially killed the game as it had been. It made being a DM a much less creative activity, and opened the way for pre-packaged scenarios. (Previously people had rarely played a prepackaged scenario...not even one made by a friend. There are plusses and minuses to their approach. Now, e.g., one can figure what chance a troll has against a samurai
So there were basically the same advantage as any system of standards. And there was every problem that a system of *proprietary*!! standards creates. Including the company claim-jumping the name.
*Can* an individual sue for anti-trust violations? Or does that need to be done by a DA or a grand jury?
Not that they aren't guilty of all charges, and of anti-trust also, but I'm not sure that this would strengthen the case.
(Caution: IANAL)
"Dungeons and Dragons", at least without the capitalization, was the common name for a group of associated games before that nlank-dashed company stole the name.
I suppose that steal isn't quite the right verb, but it's nearly right. Before they stole it, it was widely used. Now that they have stolen it, you can't use it any more. Sounds like stealing to me.
The technique was quite simple. They formed a company and issued a game using a commonly used term for the game. Then they sued anyone else who used the term. Unless that person looked able to defend themselves, in which case they'd find another victim. (Remind you of another company? There are several who've used this basic approach.)
I didn't like it when Mozilla claim-jumped the Firebird database project's name. Well, they eventually renamed it to FireFox. Most companies, however, just muscle in. This is the "dungeons and dragons" is the first instance where I noticed that happening. I'd thank them for sensitizing me, but I'm still mad at them.
My impression, which I'll admit in advance is ill-informed, was that only a very few went to jail, and that it wasn't at all certain that the fall-guys were the one's most culpable.
Where should I look to find out otherwise?
If it's a "natural monopoly", then it *SHOULD* be run by the government as a public service. By natural monopoly I mean things like physical infrastructure. Roads, water pipes, electrical wires, etc.
If it's not a natural monopoly, then the government _should_ act to decentralize the power. Should doesn't mean does. Perhaps a tax factored by n*log(n) where n = the number of employees (including in employees contractors who work for more for this company than for anybody else during a quarter [month? week?]).
It's not clear to me (for certain) that the provision of water should be a government responsibility...but the maintenance of the pipes and sewer systems certainly should. (N.B.: maintaining the pipes requires physical access.)
Government controlled monopolies and government facilitated monopolies have not uniformly proven disastrous... but by far the largest number of them have.
I'm familiar...I just don't count that as a benefit. I count it as corruption of the legal system.
Looks like I got something wrong. The suit is against Capitol Records, not the RIAA. So possibly they do own the copyrights. (The rest is pretty much still valid.)
That's their valuation, not mine. That'd be like MS settling a suit with a Linux user by giving him coupons for MS software...useless.
I give their downloads negative value. In my case a fairly large negative value, as I count my time worth something, and I'd not only need to do the downloads, I'd need to then be sure to find them all so I could delete them.
That depends on the contract. I'd bet that most of the copyrights are owned by the music companies (for which the RIAA is acting as an agent). I'm not at all sure that misbehavior on the part of the RIAA is enough to allow a lien to be placed on the music company's property.
But I'm sure that the RIAA has some nice property of it's own. Office buildings, etc. Solid oak wastebaskets. Etc.
When C and C++ were my focus, I also looked for other languages to escape to. I totally hated the dangerous way that we were expected to use pointers. Given that situation, I'm almost certain that C# would be an improvement, and this is from knowing nothing about it.
(Mind you, I abandoned C/C++ over 20 years ago. First for Eiffel, and then for Ada. I didn't really like either of them, but they were both better choices than C/C++. Finally I switched to Python and was relatively happy. (I wasn't doing anything then that was speed limited.) Actually, I also tried Ruby for awhile, and I prefer the language qua language to Python, but Ruby is slower than Python, and Python was already nearing the point where execution speed was going to be the limitation. (As you can tell from my prior comments, I looked at a lot of other languages along the way.)
Currently my languages of choice are D and Python. D is for when I need the speed, Python is for fast development. Both are safe in comparison to C/C++. Both have escape hatches to allow one to use pre-written code in C. (Python also has some technique for using C++ libraries, but I've never investigated it.)
Am I opinionated? Yes. But I've got reasons for the opinions.
P.S.: I've also had lots of bad experiences with trying to maintain other people's code where they used C's macro facility as a substitute for clean code.
I think the part of the EULA that bothered me the most was the part where I was expected to give them the right to "add, modify, copy, or delete any file on your system". There were other objectionable parts, but that was
1) clearly intelligible, and
2) totally unacceptable
P.S.: I think that I saw that in the last Apple EULA for iTunes, unfortunately I was tired, so I'm not certain. I'm glad I switched to Linux instead, but I had been doing support to family with Mac products. I'll need to read the EULA quite carefully next time, but I suspect that I'll be dropping Apple support, also. Do note, however, that the rest of the text in Apple's EULAs aren't as abusive as those from MS. Most of the conditions have been essentially reasonable. Still, I think they've finally gone beyond the pale.(*)
(*) The proper metaphor should be "crossed the deadline". When Napoleon was a palace guard he once confronted a mob. He had his troops draw a line in the street and said "Anyone who crosses this line will be shot." That was the original deadline.
"Beyond the pale" traces back to the British occupation of Ireland. There was a certain area (in Dublin?) that the British troops controlled, which they called the pale. They strongly attempted to protect people (at least British) who were "within the pale", but if you went "beyond the pale" you were taking your own chances, and liable to be ambushed by locals who objected to the invasion.
Note that the second metaphor doesn't mean a closely what I mean, but popular usage has hidden the true meaning of "deadline", so I couldn't use it.
Don't debate. Try both. Then choose the one you like best.
As I read the deal at the time I thought it was a part of the stock manipulation. Ignoring the IP stuff, Sun was given the right to buy a large number of SCOX shares a a fixed price that was far below the current market price. Don't know if they ever exercised that option...but they could exercise it the day before they sold the shares, and the price was both fixed and low. Sun would need to buy the shares from SCO and sell them on the market, but as I remember they had the right to buy the shares for $0.25 each. (That sounds too low, and I don't believe my memory, but that's what I remember. Anyway, it was much less than the going market rate at the time I heard about it.)
Given the nature of the SCO management, I would expect them to manipulate others via greed when they needed cooperation. They seem to believe that greed and threats are the only reasonable tools for ensuring cooperation.
Actually, SunSite isn't the most important contribution of Sun. OpenOffice is. At the time that Sun made StarOffice5.0 (I think that was the version) freely distributable in Linux there was *NO* competing word processor. I had actually been using Netscape's HTML editor as a word processor because there wasn't anything better. (This was actually worse than in 1966 when I was using nroff as a word processor. N.B.: Not text editor. I used a text editor to produce the files that I fed to nroff.) There were plenty of decent text editors around, just no word processors. Yes, groff was probably around, but that is so far inferior to nroff when it comes to a human using it to product formatted text that it isn't funny. Even troff was far inferior. I'd have been better off using Lyx. I almost did...I tried it several times, but never had enough motivation to make it over the initial hump.
You could look into D or Python (or Ada, or possibly even C++...but I'm less sure about that). They all support the kind of overload that you want, with differing advantages and drawbacks. Except for speed, Python is the best choice. If you want speed, then of the languages that I know the best choices are D or Ada (and I prefer D).
... but there's no way I would know.
... but I don't think you would find the syntax acceptable. So I left it to the end as well. I'm not sure about the speed of various Schemes, but it would have essentially the same syntax problem as LISP.
N.B.: There's more than one D, so the particular one that I mean is: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html
With Python you might get the speed that you need either via Pyrex or NumPy (or possibly it's now PyNumeric). This actually operates via calls to C libraries, but they get hidden by syntactic sugar.
D and Ada are type sensitive to varying degrees. (Ada tends to be verbosely fanatic about it.)
I'm not familiar with Mono, because I don't trust it not to have embedded MS IP of some sort (patents probably, if anything). It's probably safe enough...but I tend to be nervous. That's also why I won't have anything to do with Novell unless through an intermediate who has their own lawyers. Probably there's no MS IP
And since I won't let MS products be installed, (Not since I read the last MS EULA!) I can't speak WRT C#.
Another possible choice is ObjectiveC or ObjectiveC++. That gives more flexibility at run time than C or C++ (well, unless you wriggle and turn a lot) with good compatibility. (C libraries are directly callable, and I believe that C++ libraries are as well.) I'm not sure that you could redefine the primitive operators over class operations...but I believe that you could. The major problem with ObjectiveC/C++ is that there doesn't seem to be any significant amount of tutorial material. Still, every legitimate c program is a legitimate ObjectiveC program, so you could learn slowly. And it transfers easily to the Mac. (I'm less sure how well it runs on MSWind.)
I didn't yet mention Ruby or Smalltalk. Both of them can do what you want (though the Smalltalk syntax is peculiar...and might be unacceptable). Unfortunately, Ruby is slower than Python, even though I like the language design better. Smalltalk comes in a variety of forms, but tends to be faster than pure Python code. Unfortunately, it's far easier to link to an external library from Python. Smalltalk tries to be a closed system. So I basically left both of these out of the discussion.
Then there's LISP and Scheme. A good LISP would be essentially as fast as C
If interpreted Java is fast enough for you (you didn't mention speed as a consideration), then you should probably give Python a look-see. It's a bit slower when you're using pure Python code, but a lot of stuff is done via library calls, which are generally optimized C code...and thus quite fast.
Otherwise I'd give D strong consideration.
Why do you say it's failed? I wouldn't.
Now it's true that with Linux around the Hurd has no particular reason to rush to conclusion. It's being run as a continued research project. As such it's a current success, even if it get no closer to completion.
It's also a totally independent free software OS that could mature quite rapidly if there were need. There were a few times during the SCO vs. the world trial that I was quite glad that such a backstop existed. (True, OpenSolaris makes this less necessary...but first we need to gauge Novell's reaction now that it's been "confirmed in it's ownership of Unix". Probably nothing to worry about, but in such matters care is advisable.)
Still, I've always been a belt AND suspenders kind of guy, and I'll continue to appreciate the Hurd's existence even if(when?) OpenSolaris becomes GPL3. (But I might switch from Linux to OpenSolaris...or some close offshoot.)
Well, the Hurd is *free* enough for me. It might be good enough if they'd stop going back to the beginning and re-writing everything. (I know the trap...I'm in it too. But I do know that it's a trap.)
I can't respect Microsoft. They are immoral, unethical, criminal, etc.
There may, indeed, be something good that one can say about them. The closest I can come is "They made a good mouse." That's not sufficient basis for respecting them.
Making fun of them? Of course. I'm afraid, and I don't intend to yield, so what else should I do? Cry?
So I cheer the victories of almost anyone against MS. And I especially cheer the victories of "the home team". And I shrug off the victories of MS. I must. Depression is bad for you.
MS, it's not just a disease, it's an operating system.
OK, that was in bad taste. And not original. It's the best I could do on the spur of the moment.
And having the ballot anonymous and printed by a machine is a recipe for having a ballot box stuffed. The election official signing it means that he takes responsibility that the laws were abided by. Having a number for your ballot is, indeed, relatively useless...but some people could check. Think of it as a quality control. (Ideally you should be able to search for a ballot by number over the internet. Unfortunately, this same ideal would require that nobody else be able to search for your ballot, or you enable vote buying...and a new form of extortion. Don't know an answer here.)
A partial answer is that there needs to be some quality control on the vote counts. The "how" I'm less sure about. Secret ballots are important. So is elimination of fraud. Think of it as unit testing.
How are we supposed to force people to notice something they don't want to hear? If I just tell them repeatedly, they stop listening. If I ask the voting commissioner, I'm told "Sorry, we signed a contract." The only next step that I can see is to hire a lawyer and sue him for misfeasance...but I'd better quit my job and move to another county first. (Possibly another state. Maybe another country.)
This area is massively Democrat, and we have Diebold voting machines. (Well, we did the last election. Possibly they'll have been replaced by now. Possibly.)