Wrong, read the agreement, although they do state 'GPL/LGPL' explicitely, they also indirectly include other licenses (such as BSD, etc). If it only covered (L)GPL, someone could easily get around it by making an identical license, but with a different name (MyGPL).
I assume you're referring to this passage:
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Let's dissect that.
(a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form: The BSD license does require that.
(b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works: The BSD license doesn't require linked code or included code to be relicensed to the BSD license if it's included in BSD-licensed code.
c) be redistributable at no charge: Again, the BSD license doesn't require the software to be redistributable for free.
Maybe I'm missing something, though. If you would like to point out the appropriate passage wherein Microsoft's license restricts non-viral Open Source licenses, I'd be happy to see it.
Can anybody explain to me how Microsoft can allow BSD software to use their license while forbiding GPL? Since BSD software can be re-licensed under any other license (the property that MS likes), why couldn't it be re-licensed under the GPL. In other words, what would prevent me from writing a very small BSD program that just used the MS doc but doesn't really do anything useful, and then re-license it under the GPL.
It's not so much that BSD-licensed code can be relicensed (GPL code can be relicensed as well, by the author or with the author's consent). It's more about how the GPL forces the code to be released.
There are really two ways to look at the GPL. The first is from the perspective of a programmer writing GPLed software. He licenses under the GPL because he wants to make sure his code is always available (alternatively, he worships RMS, or doesn't really know what the GPL is but has heard it used as a buzzword, or is trying to keep companies from profiting from his work, whatever). This is fine. Anybody who wants to use that code has to abide by the GPL or get a special license from the author.
The second way is what this is all about. Somebody writing a GPL application links to a non-GPL library. Now, it's not very clear on what the licensing situation should be at that point. The obvious solution is "don't do that", but there are plenty of ignorant people out there so we can't rely on that answer. Now, the way Microsoft (and most other GPL-unfriendly companies) interpret this situation is that the viral nature of the GPL goes both ways -- if you link to a GPL library, you're now forced to GPL your app, and if you link a non-GPL library to your GPLed app, that library must now be GPLed. This is exactly what Microsoft is trying to prevent. Remember, the GPL has not been tried in court yet (I don't remember exactly what happened with the recent MySQL case, but I seem to recall it was settled out of court. Anybody want to clear this up?), and so the lawyers are interpreting it pretty broadly to be safe.
This is not Microsoft being malicious about the GPL. It's Microsoft following the CYA (Cover Your Ass) policy with their own intellectual property.
What Microsoft is going to do is pretty serious. They are publishing documentation to the proprietary things they do and they publish them under a license that an Open Source developer is not allowed to use this information.
Let's revise that just a bit. Try s/Open Source/Free Software/g, because Microsoft is only restricting GPL/LGPL software. You can still write Open Source software using a myriad of other licenses (Artistic, BSD, MIT/X, just to name a few). <sarcasm>RMS would be very disappointed in you getting your terms wrong. You don't want to disappoint your god, do you?</sarcasm>
Double minor correction: the XBox uses a modified GeForce3 part, with an extra set of pixel and vertex shaders, and the ability to use UMA rather than have dedicated video RAM.
All of these combined with the high price of the x-box, at least right after it came out (I can't really comment on it lately) really makes for a bad looking situation for Microsoft and their system. Granted, some of the games for it have quite a bit better graphics than what I've seen out of the Nintendo and Playstation camps, but nothing really extraordinary. Maybe if their packages were the same price as the Nintendo or Playstation ones the system would have taken off a bit better, but who knows.
Let me give this disclaimer right up front -- I'm only referring to the US market. I happen to be from the US. I am not from Japan or Europe, so I really don't know much of what happens over there.
That said, the XBox is the same price as the Playstation 2. $299USD. Yes, the GameCube is cheaper by $100, but it's not just cheaper than the XBox. It's also cheaper than the PS2.
This is slightly OT, but am I the only person in the world who actually likes the controllers on the Xbox?
Certainly not. There are many people that like the XBox controllers (after all, Microsoft did do usability testing on them). It's been my experience that the only people who complain about the controllers are those who have only plaid the demo units in stores. In otherwords, the controller was in a fixed position, probably too low to be comfortable, and at completely the wrong angle. To properly enjoy the XBox controller, you need to be sitting on a couch 7 or 8 feet away from the XBox, able to just relax and adjust your grip to the controller. Once you do that, you'll realize that the XBox controller is the most ergonomic and comfortable controller available for any console to date.
As for the PS2, the controller is too small and, compared to the XBox, has too many corners and other "pointy" areas. Those controllers cramp my hands. The GameCube controller is pretty much a PS2 controller, except maybe a little larger (not enough -- it's still too small and crampy).
To be Pure-OO, everything must be an object and derived from one single base type -- that is not the case in Java because of the primitives (int, byte, etc).
Egads, I hope not! That's the sickest, most incorrect thing I've ever heard. That is extremely fragile. What happens if you or someone else adds a virtual/abstract method somewhere up the inheritence tree? You now have to either implement a default (thus making it no longer abstract) in the class where the new method is added, or at least in any classes directly derived from that one. Worst-case scenario is that all inherited classes will need to implement that new method. This is bad. Not to mention that it's simply poor design (don't believe me? go read Design Patterns and see for yourself -- you're making arbitrary relationships that have no reason to exist).
The only reason I can see to justify the "everything derived from a single base type" methodology would be for implementing things like generic containers. Obviously, Java must work this way because it doesn't have any concept of generic programming (C++ templates, for instance -- there are other ways to implement generic programming concepts without requiring everything to derive from a single class, but I'm not going to go into all of that now). In other words, I wouldn't really call Java "Pure OO" (whatever that means).
You may still get your wish. Passport still exists and will continue to exist, as it was not part of Hailstorm/My Services (it was used by Hailstorm, but it was not Hailstorm). For the others, well... not likely you'll be seeing number 2 any time soon (hey, as others have stated, why would amazon.com want to make it easy for you to move your wishlist over to barnesandnoble.com?). Number 3 is available now, and is called "Exchange". Office.NET will likely have similar services available (for a fee, obviously) when it's released at some point in the future.
How about Max Payne (PS2) and Max Payne (XBox)? Hit the reviews, compare the screenies side by side, rent the games. The XBox version blows the PS2 one away (the PS2 can hardly keep up a 25-30 fps rate even with scaled back graphics, while the XBox chugs along nicely at around 60fps).
In other words, had you actually done what the original poster suggested and compared the same game on the PS2 and the XBox, you would notice that in general things look better and play better on the XBox. Yes, there are some ports where no effort is made (SSX Tricky (PS2) v. SSX Tricky (XBox), but then again I prefer Amped, but ignore Gamespot's review score -- they were pretty biased against the XBox for the first few months), but in general when the same game appears on both platforms, the XBox version is better.
(In other words, the guy is funny as hell, and may know something being that he does run a video game store, but he's never been a marketing person for Sony, Sega, Nintendo, or Microsoft, nor has he been on the "inside" (from the perspective of the console developers themselves) of the console world, so he's not exactly qualified to comment.)
Steve Gibson is a kook and a crackpot. He's an alarmist, but unfortunately people not "in the know" tend to listen to him (most likely because he is an alarmist). He rails against raw sockets in XP, never bothering to notice that NT (which XP is based upon) has had raw sockets for a long time, and that it's possible to modify the Win9x TCP/IP stack to allow for raw socket-like abilities. Nevermind that raw sockets are only available to administrative users in NT, as with any *nix (problem -- too many users run with administrative rights on NT, which is the equivalent of running as root all the time. This is the true problem, not raw sockets, and should be the one that's addressed). His "Distributed Reflection" DoS is nothing new. Hax0rs and kiddies have been doing it for a while. His GENESIS project is basically poorly-implemented SYN cookie protection. And so on and so on...
In short, the guy's a nut and only nut's pay attention to him. Try a real security site, like SecurityFocus.
My only problem with the installation was that it didn't like the partitions I made with Partition Magic. It installed fine, but afterword when I tried to setup Grub, the/boot partition somehow disappeared! fsck chucked out some serious errors, and I had to start over again... and that was not fun.
And you have no realized why it's the generally-accepted practice of anybody using PQMagic to simply use it to make some free (non-partitioned) space on a hard drive. You can then go in with the fdisk tool for whatever OS you're installing and divvy up what you need for that OS. The assumption here is that those writing the fdisk app for their respective OS know more about what's expected by their particular system than a company like PowerQuest that has essentially written their own fancy generic fdisk.
If you need to resize, use pqmagic. If you need to create partitions, use fdisk.
the day i see an xbox game that looks and plays half as good as all they hype will be the day that i buy one.
I guess you haven't seen Rallisport yet, then. Assuming you're into racing games, this is the ultimate in Rally racing. As well, it seriously increases the graphics and physics bars for other racing games now. Real-time damage better than that in Gotham (Gotham's was great, mind you. there's nothing quite like putting a huge scratch down the side of a Porsche GT Turbo because you sideswiped a barrier, but Rallisport goes so far as to model the dirt that accumulates on the car as you race!), visuals like you wouldn't believe (essentially infinite clipping distance, excellent scenery along tracks, cars that look just like the real thing, shadows that go so far as to model the shadows from the moving wheels, fully-3D wheels, not just textures in the middle of the wheel, etc), and some of the best driving fun I've had outside of my own actual car.
Then again, I guess if you don't like racing games, you probably won't appreciate Rallisport.
Didn't MS kill Java in XP? So someone using Microsoft's latest OS that is perusing the Unisys site will get a big empty grey block in their browser...
No, they'll get a dialog asking them if they wish to install Java, and if so will then go ahead and download and install Microsoft's JVM. Subsequent visits to any site with java applets will work just fine without any prompting (because they already installed the JVM).
I would document every existing key in the default Windows registry in a publically avaliable format, included with the OS.
Pointless waste of time. Better -- document every existing useful key in the default Windows registry or added by Microsoft software. There are plenty of keys that you have no reason to care about (for instance, much of what's under CLSID -- that's just the registration information for COM objects, and the format is pretty well-known already)
I'd allow all changes to a Windows server to be reversable and changable in time
Done
I'd make part of the `Designed to Work With Blackcomb' badge program include a provision that to install or update a piece of software, a reboot must not be required.
Already most software does not require a reboot, even if it says it does. Exceptions would be anything that would modify the OS itself, and thus needs to touch system files that are currently in use (say, Service Packs and Hotfixes).
Again, for the `Designed to Work With Blackcomb' badge program, I'd specifiy that software installation must not require interactive operation, allowing Windows admins to install thousands of packages simultaneously.
Most software can already install in a silent mode (made easier if the software uses Windows Installer rather than some hacked-together method like NSIS). I don't think it's a requirement of the logo program, though.
I would improve Windows scripting, and make command line interfaces available to the most popular Windows libraries, and libraries available for most popular Widows programs, so you could, for example, write a simple backup script and SMS the systems administrator if the backup fails
This is a matter of learning what's already there. Windows already has a very robust and powerful scripting engine. You just don't realize this because you're looking for something unix-like. Windows scripting typically revolves more around instantiating COM objects and working through those, rather than running many small CLI apps and piping the output around.
I'd give Unix administrators the tools they need to work with and feel comfortable with my OS
Windows is not Unix. Just because you're a successful Unix admin does not mean that translates to being a successful NT admin, and vice versa. Learn the system. That said, Microsoft has Services For Unix available, and there's always Cygwin.
I'd include a virus scanning engine in Windows and Exchange that worked reliably
And then you'd be screaming bloody murder that Microsoft is trying to force its way into the anti-virus industry.
Of course, I didn't reply to all your points. Some of them were pretty good. These are just the ones that I had issues with.
Ok, we aren't talking product here buddy. Computers are made to solve problems and it's both science and engineering.
Sorry for confusing you with the word "results". I guess I should've said that the act of simply putting the source code out there does not guarantee you better source code. The "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" premise is flawed. Did you take a look at Darwin when Apple opened it up? Or how about Solaris when Sun did the same? Or Mozilla? Or StarOffice branched the OpenOffice tree? Go digging on sourceforge, check out how many open source projects have more than say 10 active contributors? (10 is an arbitrary number.) How often do you pore over source code before just compiling it and getting on with life? The point here is that, like I said, Open Source is not a panacea. Ask Netscape how much they benefitted from opening up.
Scrap it all and rewrite... sometimes it's needed.
Rarely. Rewrite components, yes. Scrap everything and rewrite, no. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to be cliched. In other words, you're throwing away years of experience, years of bugfixes, all to rewrite the software. And there's no guarantee you'll get it "right" this time around, either. Yes, that old code may be hairy and ugly. Yes, there are parts of it that may need rewritten. No, you should not throw everything away and start over. (caveat -- I'm obviously not talking about rinky-dink little applications. I'm talking about large, involved applications that took serious man years to get to where they are now.)
what I do know is that sometimes a product developed behind closed doors has problems.
The door swings both ways. There's a hell of a lot of shit source code out there, open and closed. While the fact that other people might look at the code may cause some of the better programmers to be more conscious of what they're writing, many and more programmers couldn't care less. At least when you're getting paid to write the code, there's the potential to lose your job if it's not very good.
The point of open source IMHO is trying to develop products which won't fail when you are depending on them. OSS isn't about making cash hand over fist.
And yet... if you can't make any money, how are you going to be able to afford to work on this software? There's a balance to be struck. Opening the source does not inherently increase the quality of a product, and keeping the source closed doesn't necessarily mean your goal is to rake in pantloads of money.
The OS needs to be open. The OS will work better 2 days later.
Right like Mozilla. Uh... nevermind. Seems like it took Mozilla quite a while to get to a useable state after being opened. Open Source is not a panacea. The simple act of putting the source code out there will not guarantee you better results. In fact, still using Mozilla as an example, you're likely to end up being pushed to just scrap it all and rewrite, taking you out of the market for 2+ years and still 95% of the work is done by your own employees.
I wiped XP from my new box without ever booting it. If a decent Windows were available, I'd try it.
So, you wipe the latest and greatest version of Windows off your system before even trying it, yet you say that if there were a decent version of Windows available then you'd try it? Uh... hello?
Locking out browsers that don't identify themselves as IE is not innovation.
Microsoft hasn't done this (okay, so MSN did that for a short amount of time, but when they realized they had, it was fixed). Microsoft is very much about making their stuff compatible with down-level browsers. Look at OWA (Outlook Web Access), for instance. You can access that from just about any browser. Sure, you don't get all the fancy stuff you'd get if you were using IE 5.01 or newer, but it's still useable.
Breaking the Kerberos spec is not innovation.
Microsoft didn't break the Kerberos spec. Kerberos, like any good standard, has an extension mechanism, and Microsoft used that. What they did do wrong was trying to restrict access to their documentation detailing their extension (which is not typical for Microsoft -- have a look at MSDN if you don't believe Microsoft believes in documentation).
I hav yet to see a case of a standard being broken in the name of innovation.
How about HTML? It's no secret that the W3C works slower than molasses when designing the next version of a standard, so both Netscape (<blink>) and Microsoft (<marquee>) extended the spec (blink and marquee are examples of stupid extensions. better extensions would be things like frames, layers, the whole concept of DHTML and document object models, etc). If neither Netscape nor Microsoft had taken the initiative to try to advance the state of HTML, the W3C would still be working on a rough draft of the HTML3.0 spec.
In the long run, building (or even buying) their own expertise in the form of some competent programmers or only Linux savy consultants would probably save them money. But who thinks for the long run.
I don't buy it. I can see only two cases where that would be true.
The first is when the recurring support and license costs, in total, would exceed the costs of hiring and retaining several employees (depending on the scope of the project, anywhere between 3 and 20 people may be needed), including projected raises and bonuses for these people, as well as reasonable benefits. I could see this scenario working, and it falls right into the equation I gave.
The second scenario deals with one or more of the partner companies going under. If you're trying to hedge your bets against such a circumstance, then that means you believe such a thing is likely to happen to your potential partners, and thus probably shouldn't be considering them as partners anyway (alternatively, it means the market you've chosen is not sustainable, and you'll probably fold as well even if you keep everything in-house). Given that scenario, and assuming your company is still solvent, then it's trivial to hire the failed company's employees and purchase that company's IP. Speaking of the long-run, this will still turn out better -- If it were cheaper for your company to build your own expertise from the start, then you would have chosen that path to begin with. Assuming it's not, and you didn't, then this scenario only moves you from the licensing path to the internal expertise path. You've saved money in the long run, because for the amount of time you spent as a licensee, you saved the difference between the cost of being self-reliant and being a licensee. Now you're forced to become self-reliant, so you no longer save the difference, but you still have the past savings to show that over the long run money was saved.
Now, obviously many companies don't run on this logic, but larger companies generally do, and Sharp is a larger company.
The definition seems pretty clear and straightforward to me. From the page:
Microsoft.NET is the Microsoft platform for XML Web services.
and later, defining "XML Web services":
XML Web services are small, reusable component applications that can be connected like building blocks to perform tasks on behalf of users. Microsoft and others are developing a core set of these building block services,.NET My Services, which are based on the Microsoft Passport user authentication system.
If that doesn't clear things up, I don't think anything will.
Note that you can use the.NET platform as a basis for an ASP, but that's not the core, and Microsoft isn't really doing that (for example, even the upcoming Office.NET will still have a native rich client, even though it will have.NET-based services you can use as well).
Only if he's buying a new computer with the GeForce4 pre-installed. (Next time, read the link you post. It explicitly said that distributors to OEMs were having a hard time getting stock, because nVidia is pushing them hard in the retail channels. That means cards from Hercules, Elsa, Visiontek, and others will be easier to find because less stock is going to OEMs and more to store shelves.)
More importantly, do not get suckered into buying the GeForce4 MX, as it's not a GeForce4 at all. The GeForce4 is the nv25 chipset, while the GF4MX uses the nv17. In other words, the GF4MX is little more than a GF2 (the GF3 being the nv20, the GF2 GTS being the nv15, and the GF2 Ultra being the nv16). Thus, the GF4MX is a GF4 in name only.
Following the corporate need to be able to blame someone, they went with Lineo, Trolltech and Opera in spite of the fact that they could have everything for free.
s/to be able to blame someone/to be able to have competent support without having to invest in the non-profitable area of building their own expertise or relying on the so-called "Linux community" (that may be fine for individual users, but no company with any regard for its own existence would rely solely on that community for support.)/. In other words, just because there are free (as in price) alternatives to those they chose, that doesn't mean there are no associated costs. The basic equation would be "if price(service contract) + price(licensing fees) < salary(programmer)*n + salary(support)*m + projected loss due to late market entry; then buy from Lineo/Trolltech/Opera; else DIY", where 'n' is the projected number of programmers necessary to duplicate any specific effort already done by companies such as Lineo or Trolltech that have not been made freely available and 'm' is the projected number of support personal. Both of these are above and beyond any current programmers or support employees.
Now for the ultimate challenge name one Eric Statemnt that over time has proven false!
Oh man, this is going to be easy. Let's for the sake of argument stick strictly to this latest interview, in an attempt to prove that ESR is wrong up front and immediately, not slowly and over time.
Our first gem is ESR talking about the "Microsoft Tax". In this quote, he insinuates that Microsoft's Windows CE license is ungodly expensive, while apparently a PalmOS license is free. Never mind that Windows CE requires different and more hardware than Palm OS. Anyway, the quote:
I got that figure by looking at the position of Microsoft in the market for PDAs and handhelds. Above $350, Windows CE has some presence, largely because Microsoft is heavily subsidizing it, but below $350, Microsoft is nowhere. And the reason is very clear: if your unit price is that low, you can't pay the Microsoft tax and make any money.
As you can see, this is completely and immediately wrong.
Want another one? How about this little beauty, in which ESR ignores the software Microsoft has released over the past year and more. In particular, he completely ignores things like Visual Studio.NET, the latest revision of Passport, the.NET Servers, and so on. If all you paid attention to was ESR, you'd think Microsoft had done nothing but sit on their collective thumb for the past year or so since the initial.NET press release. And now, the quote:
I wouldn't be sleeping too well if I was a Microsoft strategist right now, because that's a really hard job, especially considering that they don't even have the technology in place for the new business model yet.
Just to keep on in that vein, here's ESR completely confusing the definition of.NET, somehow believing that it's synonymous with ASP (Application Service Provider).
If I have all my business processes farmed out to an ASP, I don't control them any more.
So there you have it. That's three statements made by ESR that are not only wrong, but are completely and utterly wrong. And we don't have to wait a year or two years to see that. We can see that they're hilariously incorrect right now, simply by knowing what's going on in the industry on which ESR is commenting.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you're referring to this passage:
Let's dissect that.
(a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form: The BSD license does require that.
(b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works: The BSD license doesn't require linked code or included code to be relicensed to the BSD license if it's included in BSD-licensed code.
c) be redistributable at no charge: Again, the BSD license doesn't require the software to be redistributable for free.
Maybe I'm missing something, though. If you would like to point out the appropriate passage wherein Microsoft's license restricts non-viral Open Source licenses, I'd be happy to see it.
It's not so much that BSD-licensed code can be relicensed (GPL code can be relicensed as well, by the author or with the author's consent). It's more about how the GPL forces the code to be released.
There are really two ways to look at the GPL. The first is from the perspective of a programmer writing GPLed software. He licenses under the GPL because he wants to make sure his code is always available (alternatively, he worships RMS, or doesn't really know what the GPL is but has heard it used as a buzzword, or is trying to keep companies from profiting from his work, whatever). This is fine. Anybody who wants to use that code has to abide by the GPL or get a special license from the author.
The second way is what this is all about. Somebody writing a GPL application links to a non-GPL library. Now, it's not very clear on what the licensing situation should be at that point. The obvious solution is "don't do that", but there are plenty of ignorant people out there so we can't rely on that answer. Now, the way Microsoft (and most other GPL-unfriendly companies) interpret this situation is that the viral nature of the GPL goes both ways -- if you link to a GPL library, you're now forced to GPL your app, and if you link a non-GPL library to your GPLed app, that library must now be GPLed. This is exactly what Microsoft is trying to prevent. Remember, the GPL has not been tried in court yet (I don't remember exactly what happened with the recent MySQL case, but I seem to recall it was settled out of court. Anybody want to clear this up?), and so the lawyers are interpreting it pretty broadly to be safe.
This is not Microsoft being malicious about the GPL. It's Microsoft following the CYA (Cover Your Ass) policy with their own intellectual property.
Let's revise that just a bit. Try s/Open Source/Free Software/g, because Microsoft is only restricting GPL/LGPL software. You can still write Open Source software using a myriad of other licenses (Artistic, BSD, MIT/X, just to name a few). <sarcasm>RMS would be very disappointed in you getting your terms wrong. You don't want to disappoint your god, do you?</sarcasm>
Double minor correction: the XBox uses a modified GeForce3 part, with an extra set of pixel and vertex shaders, and the ability to use UMA rather than have dedicated video RAM.
Let me give this disclaimer right up front -- I'm only referring to the US market. I happen to be from the US. I am not from Japan or Europe, so I really don't know much of what happens over there.
That said, the XBox is the same price as the Playstation 2. $299USD. Yes, the GameCube is cheaper by $100, but it's not just cheaper than the XBox. It's also cheaper than the PS2.
Certainly not. There are many people that like the XBox controllers (after all, Microsoft did do usability testing on them). It's been my experience that the only people who complain about the controllers are those who have only plaid the demo units in stores. In otherwords, the controller was in a fixed position, probably too low to be comfortable, and at completely the wrong angle. To properly enjoy the XBox controller, you need to be sitting on a couch 7 or 8 feet away from the XBox, able to just relax and adjust your grip to the controller. Once you do that, you'll realize that the XBox controller is the most ergonomic and comfortable controller available for any console to date.
As for the PS2, the controller is too small and, compared to the XBox, has too many corners and other "pointy" areas. Those controllers cramp my hands. The GameCube controller is pretty much a PS2 controller, except maybe a little larger (not enough -- it's still too small and crampy).
(emphasis added by me)
Egads, I hope not! That's the sickest, most incorrect thing I've ever heard. That is extremely fragile. What happens if you or someone else adds a virtual/abstract method somewhere up the inheritence tree? You now have to either implement a default (thus making it no longer abstract) in the class where the new method is added, or at least in any classes directly derived from that one. Worst-case scenario is that all inherited classes will need to implement that new method. This is bad. Not to mention that it's simply poor design (don't believe me? go read Design Patterns and see for yourself -- you're making arbitrary relationships that have no reason to exist).
The only reason I can see to justify the "everything derived from a single base type" methodology would be for implementing things like generic containers. Obviously, Java must work this way because it doesn't have any concept of generic programming (C++ templates, for instance -- there are other ways to implement generic programming concepts without requiring everything to derive from a single class, but I'm not going to go into all of that now). In other words, I wouldn't really call Java "Pure OO" (whatever that means).
You may still get your wish. Passport still exists and will continue to exist, as it was not part of Hailstorm/My Services (it was used by Hailstorm, but it was not Hailstorm). For the others, well ... not likely you'll be seeing number 2 any time soon (hey, as others have stated, why would amazon.com want to make it easy for you to move your wishlist over to barnesandnoble.com?). Number 3 is available now, and is called "Exchange". Office.NET will likely have similar services available (for a fee, obviously) when it's released at some point in the future.
Feel free to use dobbole/dobbole, if you wish. (/me wonders how many get that reference.)
How about Max Payne (PS2) and Max Payne (XBox)? Hit the reviews, compare the screenies side by side, rent the games. The XBox version blows the PS2 one away (the PS2 can hardly keep up a 25-30 fps rate even with scaled back graphics, while the XBox chugs along nicely at around 60fps).
Then there's Blood Omen 2 (PS2) and Blood Omen 2 (XBox), again do the comparisons. Just to round things out, how about Onimousha: Warlords (PS2) v. Genma Onimousha.
In other words, had you actually done what the original poster suggested and compared the same game on the PS2 and the XBox, you would notice that in general things look better and play better on the XBox. Yes, there are some ports where no effort is made (SSX Tricky (PS2) v. SSX Tricky (XBox), but then again I prefer Amped, but ignore Gamespot's review score -- they were pretty biased against the XBox for the first few months), but in general when the same game appears on both platforms, the XBox version is better.
You've invoked the name of Gord. You lose.
(In other words, the guy is funny as hell, and may know something being that he does run a video game store, but he's never been a marketing person for Sony, Sega, Nintendo, or Microsoft, nor has he been on the "inside" (from the perspective of the console developers themselves) of the console world, so he's not exactly qualified to comment.)
Steve Gibson is a kook and a crackpot. He's an alarmist, but unfortunately people not "in the know" tend to listen to him (most likely because he is an alarmist). He rails against raw sockets in XP, never bothering to notice that NT (which XP is based upon) has had raw sockets for a long time, and that it's possible to modify the Win9x TCP/IP stack to allow for raw socket-like abilities. Nevermind that raw sockets are only available to administrative users in NT, as with any *nix (problem -- too many users run with administrative rights on NT, which is the equivalent of running as root all the time. This is the true problem, not raw sockets, and should be the one that's addressed). His "Distributed Reflection" DoS is nothing new. Hax0rs and kiddies have been doing it for a while. His GENESIS project is basically poorly-implemented SYN cookie protection. And so on and so on ...
In short, the guy's a nut and only nut's pay attention to him. Try a real security site, like SecurityFocus.
And you have no realized why it's the generally-accepted practice of anybody using PQMagic to simply use it to make some free (non-partitioned) space on a hard drive. You can then go in with the fdisk tool for whatever OS you're installing and divvy up what you need for that OS. The assumption here is that those writing the fdisk app for their respective OS know more about what's expected by their particular system than a company like PowerQuest that has essentially written their own fancy generic fdisk.
If you need to resize, use pqmagic. If you need to create partitions, use fdisk.
I guess you haven't seen Rallisport yet, then. Assuming you're into racing games, this is the ultimate in Rally racing. As well, it seriously increases the graphics and physics bars for other racing games now. Real-time damage better than that in Gotham (Gotham's was great, mind you. there's nothing quite like putting a huge scratch down the side of a Porsche GT Turbo because you sideswiped a barrier, but Rallisport goes so far as to model the dirt that accumulates on the car as you race!), visuals like you wouldn't believe (essentially infinite clipping distance, excellent scenery along tracks, cars that look just like the real thing, shadows that go so far as to model the shadows from the moving wheels, fully-3D wheels, not just textures in the middle of the wheel, etc), and some of the best driving fun I've had outside of my own actual car.
Then again, I guess if you don't like racing games, you probably won't appreciate Rallisport.
No, they'll get a dialog asking them if they wish to install Java, and if so will then go ahead and download and install Microsoft's JVM. Subsequent visits to any site with java applets will work just fine without any prompting (because they already installed the JVM).
Nothing is too trivial for SourceForge.
Pointless waste of time. Better -- document every existing useful key in the default Windows registry or added by Microsoft software. There are plenty of keys that you have no reason to care about (for instance, much of what's under CLSID -- that's just the registration information for COM objects, and the format is pretty well-known already)
Done
Already most software does not require a reboot, even if it says it does. Exceptions would be anything that would modify the OS itself, and thus needs to touch system files that are currently in use (say, Service Packs and Hotfixes).
Most software can already install in a silent mode (made easier if the software uses Windows Installer rather than some hacked-together method like NSIS). I don't think it's a requirement of the logo program, though.
This is a matter of learning what's already there. Windows already has a very robust and powerful scripting engine. You just don't realize this because you're looking for something unix-like. Windows scripting typically revolves more around instantiating COM objects and working through those, rather than running many small CLI apps and piping the output around.
Windows is not Unix. Just because you're a successful Unix admin does not mean that translates to being a successful NT admin, and vice versa. Learn the system. That said, Microsoft has Services For Unix available, and there's always Cygwin.
And then you'd be screaming bloody murder that Microsoft is trying to force its way into the anti-virus industry.
Of course, I didn't reply to all your points. Some of them were pretty good. These are just the ones that I had issues with.
Sorry for confusing you with the word "results". I guess I should've said that the act of simply putting the source code out there does not guarantee you better source code. The "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" premise is flawed. Did you take a look at Darwin when Apple opened it up? Or how about Solaris when Sun did the same? Or Mozilla? Or StarOffice branched the OpenOffice tree? Go digging on sourceforge, check out how many open source projects have more than say 10 active contributors? (10 is an arbitrary number.) How often do you pore over source code before just compiling it and getting on with life? The point here is that, like I said, Open Source is not a panacea. Ask Netscape how much they benefitted from opening up.
Rarely. Rewrite components, yes. Scrap everything and rewrite, no. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to be cliched. In other words, you're throwing away years of experience, years of bugfixes, all to rewrite the software. And there's no guarantee you'll get it "right" this time around, either. Yes, that old code may be hairy and ugly. Yes, there are parts of it that may need rewritten. No, you should not throw everything away and start over. (caveat -- I'm obviously not talking about rinky-dink little applications. I'm talking about large, involved applications that took serious man years to get to where they are now.)
The door swings both ways. There's a hell of a lot of shit source code out there, open and closed. While the fact that other people might look at the code may cause some of the better programmers to be more conscious of what they're writing, many and more programmers couldn't care less. At least when you're getting paid to write the code, there's the potential to lose your job if it's not very good.
And yet ... if you can't make any money, how are you going to be able to afford to work on this software? There's a balance to be struck. Opening the source does not inherently increase the quality of a product, and keeping the source closed doesn't necessarily mean your goal is to rake in pantloads of money.
Right like Mozilla. Uh ... nevermind. Seems like it took Mozilla quite a while to get to a useable state after being opened. Open Source is not a panacea. The simple act of putting the source code out there will not guarantee you better results. In fact, still using Mozilla as an example, you're likely to end up being pushed to just scrap it all and rewrite, taking you out of the market for 2+ years and still 95% of the work is done by your own employees.
So, you wipe the latest and greatest version of Windows off your system before even trying it, yet you say that if there were a decent version of Windows available then you'd try it? Uh ... hello?
Microsoft hasn't done this (okay, so MSN did that for a short amount of time, but when they realized they had, it was fixed). Microsoft is very much about making their stuff compatible with down-level browsers. Look at OWA (Outlook Web Access), for instance. You can access that from just about any browser. Sure, you don't get all the fancy stuff you'd get if you were using IE 5.01 or newer, but it's still useable.
Microsoft didn't break the Kerberos spec. Kerberos, like any good standard, has an extension mechanism, and Microsoft used that. What they did do wrong was trying to restrict access to their documentation detailing their extension (which is not typical for Microsoft -- have a look at MSDN if you don't believe Microsoft believes in documentation).
How about HTML? It's no secret that the W3C works slower than molasses when designing the next version of a standard, so both Netscape (<blink>) and Microsoft (<marquee>) extended the spec (blink and marquee are examples of stupid extensions. better extensions would be things like frames, layers, the whole concept of DHTML and document object models, etc). If neither Netscape nor Microsoft had taken the initiative to try to advance the state of HTML, the W3C would still be working on a rough draft of the HTML3.0 spec.
I don't buy it. I can see only two cases where that would be true.
Now, obviously many companies don't run on this logic, but larger companies generally do, and Sharp is a larger company.
The definition seems pretty clear and straightforward to me. From the page:
and later, defining "XML Web services":
If that doesn't clear things up, I don't think anything will.
Note that you can use the .NET platform as a basis for an ASP, but that's not the core, and Microsoft isn't really doing that (for example, even the upcoming Office.NET will still have a native rich client, even though it will have .NET-based services you can use as well).
Only if he's buying a new computer with the GeForce4 pre-installed. (Next time, read the link you post. It explicitly said that distributors to OEMs were having a hard time getting stock, because nVidia is pushing them hard in the retail channels. That means cards from Hercules, Elsa, Visiontek, and others will be easier to find because less stock is going to OEMs and more to store shelves.)
More importantly, do not get suckered into buying the GeForce4 MX, as it's not a GeForce4 at all. The GeForce4 is the nv25 chipset, while the GF4MX uses the nv17. In other words, the GF4MX is little more than a GF2 (the GF3 being the nv20, the GF2 GTS being the nv15, and the GF2 Ultra being the nv16). Thus, the GF4MX is a GF4 in name only.
s/to be able to blame someone/to be able to have competent support without having to invest in the non-profitable area of building their own expertise or relying on the so-called "Linux community" (that may be fine for individual users, but no company with any regard for its own existence would rely solely on that community for support.)/. In other words, just because there are free (as in price) alternatives to those they chose, that doesn't mean there are no associated costs. The basic equation would be "if price(service contract) + price(licensing fees) < salary(programmer)*n + salary(support)*m + projected loss due to late market entry; then buy from Lineo/Trolltech/Opera; else DIY", where 'n' is the projected number of programmers necessary to duplicate any specific effort already done by companies such as Lineo or Trolltech that have not been made freely available and 'm' is the projected number of support personal. Both of these are above and beyond any current programmers or support employees.
Oh man, this is going to be easy. Let's for the sake of argument stick strictly to this latest interview, in an attempt to prove that ESR is wrong up front and immediately, not slowly and over time.
Our first gem is ESR talking about the "Microsoft Tax". In this quote, he insinuates that Microsoft's Windows CE license is ungodly expensive, while apparently a PalmOS license is free. Never mind that Windows CE requires different and more hardware than Palm OS. Anyway, the quote:
As you can see, this is completely and immediately wrong.
Want another one? How about this little beauty, in which ESR ignores the software Microsoft has released over the past year and more. In particular, he completely ignores things like Visual Studio .NET, the latest revision of Passport, the .NET Servers, and so on. If all you paid attention to was ESR, you'd think Microsoft had done nothing but sit on their collective thumb for the past year or so since the initial .NET press release. And now, the quote:
Just to keep on in that vein, here's ESR completely confusing the definition of
So there you have it. That's three statements made by ESR that are not only wrong, but are completely and utterly wrong. And we don't have to wait a year or two years to see that. We can see that they're hilariously incorrect right now, simply by knowing what's going on in the industry on which ESR is commenting.