McDonalds (and Dixons, a UK electrical retailer) have at times tried to sue people with their names in UK courts and lost; you simply can't prevent someone from trading under their own name, unless they start using big yellow arches etc. even if they are in the same line of business.
In the case of the Dixon's guy, he opened an electrical goods shop opposite his local branch of Dixons. They sued him and lost and then he changed the name of the shop because it was "attracting the wrong sort of customer".
McDonalds is on even looser ground since no one called McDonald has been involved in running the company for decades.
Sure, visual programming hasn't succeeded, yet. That does not mean it never will happen.
Part of my point was that Eidola is not visual programming at all, it's just complicated text. The success or failure of visual programming is not an issue as it is not a genuine feature of the system, at least from what is shown on the website.
Actually all computer science (with the possible subset of computer architecture, which is engineering) is applied mathematics, including the subset of programming.
I agree, but that's like saying that Civil Engineering is a subset of physics. It is, but making construction workers and architects use the methods of physics is not going to get you anywhere fast.
It's the same with programming, the working methods and, frequently, the thought processes of programmers are not like those of "straight" mathmaticians.
Wasn't it Don Knuth that compared writing a computer program using a specific language to proving a mathematical theorem using a specific set of axioms?
I rest my case: a programmer writes programs, the mathmatician writes theorems (theori ?). They are both doing maths, but the methods are not interchangable (unless you're Don Knuth).
It's all been tried before and it never works because programming is not maths. Obviously there is a mathmatical background to it which is important but forcing programmers to think like mathmaticians just alienates a lot of (good) programmers and less gets done (it is arguable that what does get done has a higher reliability although I personally doubt that that is inherent).
Also, the notation they are using is, in fact, textual. Just because the text in question has a wider range of characters than some programming languages does not mean you aren't using text. I assume they've never heard of APL. Indeed their whole effort seems to be based on C++/Java. Building a better OOPL based on those two is like trying to build a better horse by starting with a camel (no offence to Perl programmers intended).
Finally, they seem to think that "Semantic" means "behaviour"; and that "TeX" means "LaTeX" for that matter.
They are accused of being a monopoly, they have not proved Microsoft of being a monopoly.
This is like saying the sky isn't blue because no one has thought of a way to prove it to a blind person (or a person pretending to be blind in your case). Everyone knows it, who cares if you want to pretend they aren't? Go ahead, knock yourself out.
there is this company who specifically purchased the code base and used it to write optimizations in their OS so that the chip and the OS would run more compliant with each other.
Try English next time. What code are you suggesting Intel sold to MS? Why would MS need to buy code from Intel to know how to make Windows more compliant? Couldn't they just read the manual?
Intel are not happy at being leaned on and have said so in public. They are not happy to repay some bizarre favour that occured in your head but not in reality. Intel know that MS can buy AMD and start using their chips' custom registers and/or instructions and Intel would be fucked overnight. Why? Because they have monopoly power. Once again, however, you and the MS legal dept are the only ones who even bother to deny it. The rest of the world isn't interested in bullshit claims that black is white.
Wanna knnow there vision? To connect everyone.
I agree that that is their intension but it's not really visionary; that is the aim of almost everyone involved in the net from long before Bill changed his mind about it not being important. MS has spent the last four years trying to find a way of doing this while preventing anyone accessing the net without paying their tithe to the good old church of Bill..NET is their solution and they are going to push it down everyone's throats. Those of us that haven't already touched our toes in readiness, that is.
100 years from now when people look back at the internets origins. The first name that will appear in every history book will be either (A)Bill Gates (B) MIcrosoft or (C) Windows.
What are you? 12? 15 years old?
Linu$ Torvald$ or Linux won't even be mentioned.
Since neither have much to do with the history of the internet, that's not really a big deal is it?
Well if there products are soooo bad. Then why does everyone use them?
Because they're a MONOPOLY, that's why. Who's software is pre-installed on 95% of all computers? Who did IBM give control of the market to? Who designs stupid extensions to Internet standards to lock in their customers?
If Windows programs are so bad then they wouldn't have even had a chance.
In the real world this is not, sadly, true. The current versions of Windows and Word are crap but the first version of Windows was one of the worst programs ever released on a commercial basis. Windows v2 was not only bad but in competition with much better systems. Systems which did not have a monopoly position as pre-installed software and so failed.
Frankly, if Office 2000 was offered on the Linux Plat, I bet you would use it and if you say "no"... (This is my way of saying go to hell) I would reply... "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU."
Well, gee, do you think I might have a computer here now that can run Office 2000? If Office 2000 had anything to offer me then I'd have it installed. In fact it would make life slightly easier when dickheads send me a half page of plain text notes in an 80K Word attachment. But in the long run, using MS is just paying someone to beat your head off the wall. I did it for five years and it was really good when I stopped.
I am not even touching three and four, if you are that dense then you aren't even worht argueing with
Actually, you did touch four. It was the first thing you argued about. Are you not even reading what you wrote?
As for three, I have explained what the intent of.NET is and it's not like MS is hiding the fact. The whole idea is to get you to pay them to run programs on their computers which you could have run on your own machine. Oh, modem broke or line down? Guess you're not going to do any spreadsheets today, then. Was it important?
Well for a man who has 50+ billion dollars... he can't be dumb. Chalk another stupid remark made by you.
I said he was a genius, just not the one the astroturf makes out. Chalk up more evidence that you aren't even reading what you're arguing with. Does it bother you to think that you might fail the Turing Test?
Well at least I can run xchat in root mode without a problem. Whereas every Linux user is insane to do that. Hell someone with enough braisn could shut you down. Then again i wouldn't call Linux secure, it has its holes.
I tried to run this through Babelfish but they didn't have a setting for "gibberish".
I am sure only one or two recruiters came there to get a resume.
There were 30 of them. In a big truck thing.
Doens't mena you will get the job. YOU HAVE TO BE A GOOD RPOGRAMMER! Just in case you didn't know.
I knew some of the people that got jobs; they were not good programmers. They had no trouble getting a job with MS because MS has a recuitment shortfall since, as I said, any decent programmer would be ashamed to be associated with them.
The spreadsheet example points out a strange paradox in the whole.NET thing; In the days when computers were big and required huge amounts of space and power everything was done in batches with jobs queued up and results spat out to be collected by the user.
.NET's vision is of this world, left behind in the 80's, but with the users sending in their jobs and receiving the results via the net. Yet we're all sitting here with machines which could cope with the biggest projects of the batch-processing days, with so much processing power spare that SETI can run in the background without impacting our word-processing/payroll/spreadsheet activities. Why on earth would we want to send all our data back and forth across the net when we can process it in situ faster than the transport time for.NET???
.NET is the product of a seriously deranged mind, if looked at from a user's point of view. From a sales point of view, of course, it's great. One thing about the old way of doing things was the cost: everything cost you money, including (especially) your mistakes. The great thing with the desktop machine is that you've paid for it and so the only cost of processing is your time and MS don't get paid for that.
So here is the vision of the future: 1970's batch programming with pay-as-you-go processing all run from a machine on your desk which is easily capable for doing the actual work faster and for free.
Then again I don't see how Microsoft is a monopoly. They are a business and as a business if you have a competitor you crush them. An example of this is Netscape.
Which they crushed using their monopoly power.
Just because you don't have a problem with them being a monopoly does not mean that they aren't one.
My real question is, what is Microsofts bullshit? Seriously?
Their bullshit is almost endless but, for example:
That they have vision (count the number of times MS has claimed that X or Y is never going to be a big deal: GUIs, The Net etc).
That they provide good products: not only do most of their products suck big time they actually reduce the quality ast time goes by. Excel has moved from being the best reason to use Windows to being a bloated buggy warthog of a program over the last 5 years.
That.NET is a good thing for the user..NET==lock-in. That's the entire reason for.NET: to screw the customer.
That they are not a monopoly. Well, when you can lean on Intel and HP to suppress new products because you think they'll compete with you and they agree then you're a monopoly.
That Gates is a genius programmer. Gates is a genius marketing man; he couldn't program to save his life.
That Windows is more secure than anything else on the market. I couldn't believe it when MS came out with this one the other day. MS's contribution to security is purely in the field of employment generation for consultants.
That it's full of the best of the best programmers in the world. I remember when MS came sniffing around our University. All the naff programmers signed up 'cause they needed the jobs and wanted the perks. The good programmers had more pride than to work for such a bunch of crooks. Pride in one's work is a characteristic of good programmers, one which is not visible in MS products.
I'm from Northern Ireland and I can tell you that most terrorists are pretty thick and a one-time pad would be well beyond their ability to use. A system which automatically encrypts their email is of some use (assuming that at least the cell leader can install it for them) as they don't actually have to do anything much except remember a password (which they'll probably write on the computer).
Personally, I don't care. Phone taps and mail scans only catch a tiny number of terrorists and the ones that planted the bomb in Omagh, for example, which killed 29 people used clear-speech mobile phones to communicate and they still haven't been caught. The reason is that operation-time messages are just "At A", "Met J" style stuff which is no use to the phone-tapper or a court. Cells will always need to be infiltrated at planning-time to have any real effect. Meanwhile I want the ability to talk in private when I want to - not much to ask is it?
The new Lord of the Rings game by Reiner Knizia is a co-operative game where the players are the hobbits and the game system is Sauron. If the hobbits play gainst each other they will all lose, if they work together they will all win (basic game) or one of them will win (advanced game).
English edition by Hasbro/Parker cost me 37 pounds from Esdevium games in Aldershot, England (phone +44 1252 311443).
Since when did it become government's job (any pro-democracy government) to provide computers to anyone?
Since the day someone decided that the job of government is to help the people of the country rather than just finding excuses to start wars.
I would gladly never take a government funded college loan if it meant that welfare would be abolished.
Well then, fuck you. That's what you're saying to the rest of the people in whatever country you live in - "fuck the lot of you-I'm alright". Of course while you're saying this you aren't using any government supplied roads and obviously you've posted this message on some strange network which doen't owe its existance to Govt. sponsored projects and your house is powered by electricity which does not come from a station built with the aid of Govt development grants (nor, for that matter, do you live near any of the big Govt.-paid-for hydro-electric dams).
No man is an island. If you want to live as if you are then go and live on an island and stop being a dead weight on the rest of us.
If the Nautilus demo was supposed to make we want to download it, it is sadly misguided. One look was enough to make me think "Oh, a chance to go back to Windows' way of doing things. Maybe later; after the lobotomy".
All I want is a good, fast file manager. One that doesn't have huge ugly icons in a huge ugly toolbar and NO BLOODY SIDEBARS.
Why is it that all File Management work on Linux is geared to making everything as unpleasant to use as Windows? I can see an argument for making things easy for converts from Windows but surely not every single project has to start with someone saying "Okay, let's see how Microsoft does it."
What really gets me is the waste of talent; these guys mostly seem to be pretty good programmers. Although they could do with trying to run their code on a sub 1GHz machine with 64Mb of RAM every once in a while.
TWW
Large Company says Rival "Rubbish" Shock!
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 3
In an astounding move today the head of a large company stated that people really should buy their computers from them. When pressed as to why this was he said "I dunno, really. Perhaps our competitors are no good. Yeah, that's probably it."
He then went on to say that he had heard that quality assurance costs money but was not clear as to where he was getting his figures from. "I think we tried it on one of our early products," he said, "But, of course that was before we realised that IT Managers would buy our stuff no matter how many bugs it had. Linux is at a disadvantage because people expect it to work."
MSFT shares did exactly nothing at all on the breaking of this news.
If you are doing the project for your own/your company's own use then there is no problem.
If you want to ditribute this for no benefit to you/your company, then you'll not have any problem in distributing the source code.
If you want to distribute this project for your own benefit (which may or may not involve money) then you have a moral responsibility to share the code because your code has only come into existance because someone else shared their code with you.
That's the morality of it; the legality of it is that any project which depends on GPL'd code (source or binary) to work must be GPL'd too. "Depends" on here means that the GPL'd section is either the basis of actual code or so important to the project that it must be offered by you to the users of the project.
An interesting legal point here seems to be that if you are so sure that the GPL'd parts are already available to the user that you can refuse to supply them, then you need not GPL your own material. So a binary for *nix which calls the "touch" command need not be GPL'd unless you distribute it with the binary or code for "touch". Seek legal advice before trying this approach.
If you have a problem with this then don't use other people's code (at least people that release code under the GPL).
Those/.ers who are comparing this with DVD are skipping the morality section and the legality angle.
No one sane is arguing that copying movies and/or music and distributing the copies without permission is right or legal. It has never been either. But preventing fair use (ie I make a copy of a CD to listen to in my car, or a copy of a DVD on my hard drive so I can play it back under Linux) is not moral or legal (really, it's not legal according to US law, getting a judge that understands this seems difficult though).
Revolutions occur when the gap between moral and legal grows too wide for too many people.
You really mean "...what is so hard about using 64.209.200.100 to find something..." don't you?
Oh, a wise guy, huh? You are right, this is the stumbling block with a numberic system: the first step of getting a search engine ot directory service. The solution, like the telephone system, is to have a handfull of standard numbers for these services. So http://1/1/1, 1/1/2 , 1/1/3 etc could be assigned to search engines and 1/2/1, 1/2/2 etc to directory services. This would require some administration on behalf of the organisation looking after the assignments, but I don't think it would be too hard.
BTW I only use slashes to divide the numbers in these examples because it reduces the number of people that say "oh, IP addresses", in fact I think dots are better and hold out the possibility of doing the whole thing without changing Bind (v8+).
The cards at the bottom of a house may not carry much weight each, but take one away...
RMS is wildly optimistic but, OTOH, the loss of OEMs to Linux (or any other OS other than the MAC) would be the beginning of the end. As many people have pointed out, they don't get a huge chunk of their income from the MS tax but thing about the implication of machines having some other OS loaded at sale: no more Office sales! That is such a big hit to their income that it could bring them down.
A similar argument holds for the future.NET: take away IE and the default bookmarks MS will no doubt be putting into it and were does.NET go?
This just underlines why they are so keen to force OEMs to put Windows on their machines "or else": whree Windows goes Office follows. Where Linux goes StarOffice or KOffice follows and Bill doesn't make any money on them.
We have to ditch the current DNS. As long as DNS works with letters which spell out words this is just going to get worse and worse.
I've said before (there would be a link at this point if/.'s search engine was any good) that numbers (in a hierarchy system, eg http://13/1832/7, this is not IPs) are the only solution and got nothing except "I can't remember numbers" back. Like I can!
Letters score over numbers in only one way: advertising. It's a lot easier to read and memorise a name. But the cost is all this cyber-bulling, as the article calls it. Ultimatly the whole point of the DNS structure is going to be lost in that domain owners will effectivly claim the right to use all the TLDs for any given domain name (in the case of Wal-Mart for all possible domain names starting with the letters Wal)
The degree to which the TLDs are already irrelivent is something which/.'ers do not seem to be aware. The namespace in DNS is actually shrinking and, as long as lawyers get money for making it shrink, it will continue to do so until only companies can afford to buy useful domain names.
But, to get back to the numbers, what is so hard about using Google to find something and click on the link? Nothing, and how would it be harder to do that if the url in the link was numeric?
In a similar way, directory portals like Yahoo would still work to most people's satisfaction as would bookmarks and links in pages.
The point I'm making is that a numeric system does not have to require users to memorise huge lists of long numbers.
Using telephone numbers is not a good idea, though.
There is a problem, it is getting worse, if you don't like my solution tell us yours.
People like you are the reason the domain name system is collapsing.
The comparision with Ford is misleading. A closer example would be if someone owned "cars.com" and someone else started "cars.tv". If you take out a domain name which is a single, non-trademarked generic term (like "Fandom") then though titties if someone else uses it, mate.
And, anyway, the whole point of the TLDs (generic or country codes) is to divide up the namespace and allow this sort of thing. The reason it doesn't work is twats like you don't understand or honour it.
Taking your approach would mean the removal of TLDs: we would just have www.ford or www.ms or whatever, since you are saying that owning a domain in one TLD should be equivalent to owning it in them all.
Libel is disparagement of a person's reputation with commercial consequences.
As with copyright law commercial consequences are not the sole definition of damage.
You can't libel a company, only individuals
Limited companies are legal entities in the UK (and, I think, in the US although the terminology is different). In the case of non-limited companies the the owner is the one libeled as they are the one you are damaging.
Only under exceptional circumstances will an intellectual property violation be a crime.
I was saying, unclearly, that patent infringement is against the law. I should have said "infringing a patent is unlawful". Either way you are still damaging someone's reputation and, in this case, making it harder for them to do business since investors will be worried about picking up a future lawsuit.
For instance, willful copyright infringement for commercial gain
In the USA , commercial gain is not a factor in judging the seriousness of a copyright. The loss of market to the rightful owner is instead supposed to be taken into account: you can copy all you like and give it all away free but the court's still going to hammer you. In a similar way it is possible to sell copies and make the defense that you are not affecting a market, say with abandonware. I wouldn't like to try it unless I had OJ's lawyer, though.
Actually, I should have said that it's a crime in the common meaning of the word. The only way you can go to jail is if you refused to pay the fine or whatever. AFAIK, IANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of the Dixon's guy, he opened an electrical goods shop opposite his local branch of Dixons. They sued him and lost and then he changed the name of the shop because it was "attracting the wrong sort of customer".
McDonalds is on even looser ground since no one called McDonald has been involved in running the company for decades.
TWW
Part of my point was that Eidola is not visual programming at all, it's just complicated text. The success or failure of visual programming is not an issue as it is not a genuine feature of the system, at least from what is shown on the website.
TWW
I agree, but that's like saying that Civil Engineering is a subset of physics. It is, but making construction workers and architects use the methods of physics is not going to get you anywhere fast.
It's the same with programming, the working methods and, frequently, the thought processes of programmers are not like those of "straight" mathmaticians.
Wasn't it Don Knuth that compared writing a computer program using a specific language to proving a mathematical theorem using a specific set of axioms?
I rest my case: a programmer writes programs, the mathmatician writes theorems (theori ?). They are both doing maths, but the methods are not interchangable (unless you're Don Knuth).
TWW
Also, the notation they are using is, in fact, textual. Just because the text in question has a wider range of characters than some programming languages does not mean you aren't using text. I assume they've never heard of APL. Indeed their whole effort seems to be based on C++/Java. Building a better OOPL based on those two is like trying to build a better horse by starting with a camel (no offence to Perl programmers intended).
Finally, they seem to think that "Semantic" means "behaviour"; and that "TeX" means "LaTeX" for that matter.
TWW
This is like saying the sky isn't blue because no one has thought of a way to prove it to a blind person (or a person pretending to be blind in your case). Everyone knows it, who cares if you want to pretend they aren't? Go ahead, knock yourself out.
there is this company who specifically purchased the code base and used it to write optimizations in their OS so that the chip and the OS would run more compliant with each other.
Try English next time. What code are you suggesting Intel sold to MS? Why would MS need to buy code from Intel to know how to make Windows more compliant? Couldn't they just read the manual?
Intel are not happy at being leaned on and have said so in public. They are not happy to repay some bizarre favour that occured in your head but not in reality. Intel know that MS can buy AMD and start using their chips' custom registers and/or instructions and Intel would be fucked overnight. Why? Because they have monopoly power. Once again, however, you and the MS legal dept are the only ones who even bother to deny it. The rest of the world isn't interested in bullshit claims that black is white.
Wanna knnow there vision? To connect everyone.
I agree that that is their intension but it's not really visionary; that is the aim of almost everyone involved in the net from long before Bill changed his mind about it not being important. MS has spent the last four years trying to find a way of doing this while preventing anyone accessing the net without paying their tithe to the good old church of Bill. .NET is their solution and they are going to push it down everyone's throats. Those of us that haven't already touched our toes in readiness, that is.
100 years from now when people look back at the internets origins. The first name that will appear in every history book will be either (A)Bill Gates (B) MIcrosoft or (C) Windows.
What are you? 12? 15 years old?
Linu$ Torvald$ or Linux won't even be mentioned.
Since neither have much to do with the history of the internet, that's not really a big deal is it?
Well if there products are soooo bad. Then why does everyone use them?
Because they're a MONOPOLY, that's why. Who's software is pre-installed on 95% of all computers? Who did IBM give control of the market to? Who designs stupid extensions to Internet standards to lock in their customers?
If Windows programs are so bad then they wouldn't have even had a chance.
In the real world this is not, sadly, true. The current versions of Windows and Word are crap but the first version of Windows was one of the worst programs ever released on a commercial basis. Windows v2 was not only bad but in competition with much better systems. Systems which did not have a monopoly position as pre-installed software and so failed.
Frankly, if Office 2000 was offered on the Linux Plat, I bet you would use it and if you say "no"... (This is my way of saying go to hell) I would reply... "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU."
Well, gee, do you think I might have a computer here now that can run Office 2000? If Office 2000 had anything to offer me then I'd have it installed. In fact it would make life slightly easier when dickheads send me a half page of plain text notes in an 80K Word attachment. But in the long run, using MS is just paying someone to beat your head off the wall. I did it for five years and it was really good when I stopped.
I am not even touching three and four, if you are that dense then you aren't even worht argueing with
Actually, you did touch four. It was the first thing you argued about. Are you not even reading what you wrote?
As for three, I have explained what the intent of .NET is and it's not like MS is hiding the fact. The whole idea is to get you to pay them to run programs on their computers which you could have run on your own machine. Oh, modem broke or line down? Guess you're not going to do any spreadsheets today, then. Was it important?
Well for a man who has 50+ billion dollars... he can't be dumb. Chalk another stupid remark made by you.
I said he was a genius, just not the one the astroturf makes out. Chalk up more evidence that you aren't even reading what you're arguing with. Does it bother you to think that you might fail the Turing Test?
Well at least I can run xchat in root mode without a problem. Whereas every Linux user is insane to do that. Hell someone with enough braisn could shut you down. Then again i wouldn't call Linux secure, it has its holes.
I tried to run this through Babelfish but they didn't have a setting for "gibberish".
I am sure only one or two recruiters came there to get a resume.
There were 30 of them. In a big truck thing.
Doens't mena you will get the job. YOU HAVE TO BE A GOOD RPOGRAMMER! Just in case you didn't know.
I knew some of the people that got jobs; they were not good programmers. They had no trouble getting a job with MS because MS has a recuitment shortfall since, as I said, any decent programmer would be ashamed to be associated with them.
Better luck next time.
TWW
.NET's vision is of this world, left behind in the 80's, but with the users sending in their jobs and receiving the results via the net. Yet we're all sitting here with machines which could cope with the biggest projects of the batch-processing days, with so much processing power spare that SETI can run in the background without impacting our word-processing/payroll/spreadsheet activities. Why on earth would we want to send all our data back and forth across the net when we can process it in situ faster than the transport time for .NET???
.NET is the product of a seriously deranged mind, if looked at from a user's point of view. From a sales point of view, of course, it's great. One thing about the old way of doing things was the cost: everything cost you money, including (especially) your mistakes. The great thing with the desktop machine is that you've paid for it and so the only cost of processing is your time and MS don't get paid for that.
So here is the vision of the future: 1970's batch programming with pay-as-you-go processing all run from a machine on your desk which is easily capable for doing the actual work faster and for free.
Pretty pathetic really, isn't it?
TWW
Which they crushed using their monopoly power.
Just because you don't have a problem with them being a monopoly does not mean that they aren't one.
My real question is, what is Microsofts bullshit? Seriously?
Their bullshit is almost endless but, for example:
Personally, I don't care. Phone taps and mail scans only catch a tiny number of terrorists and the ones that planted the bomb in Omagh, for example, which killed 29 people used clear-speech mobile phones to communicate and they still haven't been caught. The reason is that operation-time messages are just "At A", "Met J" style stuff which is no use to the phone-tapper or a court. Cells will always need to be infiltrated at planning-time to have any real effect. Meanwhile I want the ability to talk in private when I want to - not much to ask is it?
If I had mod points today you could've had them all; that's the best "Funny" post I've seen on /.
English edition by Hasbro/Parker cost me 37 pounds from Esdevium games in Aldershot, England (phone +44 1252 311443).
TWW
TWW
Since the day someone decided that the job of government is to help the people of the country rather than just finding excuses to start wars.
I would gladly never take a government funded college loan if it meant that welfare would be abolished.
Well then, fuck you. That's what you're saying to the rest of the people in whatever country you live in - "fuck the lot of you-I'm alright". Of course while you're saying this you aren't using any government supplied roads and obviously you've posted this message on some strange network which doen't owe its existance to Govt. sponsored projects and your house is powered by electricity which does not come from a station built with the aid of Govt development grants (nor, for that matter, do you live near any of the big Govt.-paid-for hydro-electric dams).
No man is an island. If you want to live as if you are then go and live on an island and stop being a dead weight on the rest of us.
TWW
CmdrTaco
TWW
"The price of freedom is justice"
-Judge Dredd
All I want is a good, fast file manager. One that doesn't have huge ugly icons in a huge ugly toolbar and NO BLOODY SIDEBARS .
Why is it that all File Management work on Linux is geared to making everything as unpleasant to use as Windows? I can see an argument for making things easy for converts from Windows but surely not every single project has to start with someone saying "Okay, let's see how Microsoft does it."
What really gets me is the waste of talent; these guys mostly seem to be pretty good programmers. Although they could do with trying to run their code on a sub 1GHz machine with 64Mb of RAM every once in a while.
TWW
He then went on to say that he had heard that quality assurance costs money but was not clear as to where he was getting his figures from. "I think we tried it on one of our early products," he said, "But, of course that was before we realised that IT Managers would buy our stuff no matter how many bugs it had. Linux is at a disadvantage because people expect it to work."
MSFT shares did exactly nothing at all on the breaking of this news.
TWW
If you want to ditribute this for no benefit to you/your company, then you'll not have any problem in distributing the source code.
If you want to distribute this project for your own benefit (which may or may not involve money) then you have a moral responsibility to share the code because your code has only come into existance because someone else shared their code with you.
That's the morality of it; the legality of it is that any project which depends on GPL'd code (source or binary) to work must be GPL'd too. "Depends" on here means that the GPL'd section is either the basis of actual code or so important to the project that it must be offered by you to the users of the project.
An interesting legal point here seems to be that if you are so sure that the GPL'd parts are already available to the user that you can refuse to supply them, then you need not GPL your own material. So a binary for *nix which calls the "touch" command need not be GPL'd unless you distribute it with the binary or code for "touch". Seek legal advice before trying this approach.
If you have a problem with this then don't use other people's code (at least people that release code under the GPL).
Those /.ers who are comparing this with DVD are skipping the morality section and the legality angle.
No one sane is arguing that copying movies and/or music and distributing the copies without permission is right or legal. It has never been either. But preventing fair use (ie I make a copy of a CD to listen to in my car, or a copy of a DVD on my hard drive so I can play it back under Linux) is not moral or legal (really, it's not legal according to US law, getting a judge that understands this seems difficult though).
Revolutions occur when the gap between moral and legal grows too wide for too many people.
TWW
After several hundred years.
the babylonians, killed children as a part of worship, society collapsed
After several THOUSAND years! This "morality as a bastion of civilization" idea isn't exactly fast-acting.
TWW
Oh, a wise guy, huh? You are right, this is the stumbling block with a numberic system: the first step of getting a search engine ot directory service. The solution, like the telephone system, is to have a handfull of standard numbers for these services. So http://1/1/1, 1/1/2 , 1/1/3 etc could be assigned to search engines and 1/2/1, 1/2/2 etc to directory services. This would require some administration on behalf of the organisation looking after the assignments, but I don't think it would be too hard.
BTW I only use slashes to divide the numbers in these examples because it reduces the number of people that say "oh, IP addresses", in fact I think dots are better and hold out the possibility of doing the whole thing without changing Bind (v8+).
TWW
I know someone's wildly optimistic. If I just list names long enough I'm bound to get it right...
TWW
RMS is wildly optimistic but, OTOH, the loss of OEMs to Linux (or any other OS other than the MAC) would be the beginning of the end. As many people have pointed out, they don't get a huge chunk of their income from the MS tax but thing about the implication of machines having some other OS loaded at sale: no more Office sales! That is such a big hit to their income that it could bring them down.
A similar argument holds for the future .NET: take away IE and the default bookmarks MS will no doubt be putting into it and were does .NET go?
This just underlines why they are so keen to force OEMs to put Windows on their machines "or else": whree Windows goes Office follows. Where Linux goes StarOffice or KOffice follows and Bill doesn't make any money on them.
TWW
I've said before (there would be a link at this point if /.'s search engine was any good) that numbers (in a hierarchy system, eg http://13/1832/7, this is not IPs) are the only solution and got nothing except "I can't remember numbers" back. Like I can!
Letters score over numbers in only one way: advertising. It's a lot easier to read and memorise a name. But the cost is all this cyber-bulling, as the article calls it. Ultimatly the whole point of the DNS structure is going to be lost in that domain owners will effectivly claim the right to use all the TLDs for any given domain name (in the case of Wal-Mart for all possible domain names starting with the letters Wal)
The degree to which the TLDs are already irrelivent is something which /.'ers do not seem to be aware. The namespace in DNS is actually shrinking and, as long as lawyers get money for making it shrink, it will continue to do so until only companies can afford to buy useful domain names.
But, to get back to the numbers, what is so hard about using Google to find something and click on the link? Nothing, and how would it be harder to do that if the url in the link was numeric?
In a similar way, directory portals like Yahoo would still work to most people's satisfaction as would bookmarks and links in pages.
The point I'm making is that a numeric system does not have to require users to memorise huge lists of long numbers.
Using telephone numbers is not a good idea, though.
There is a problem, it is getting worse, if you don't like my solution tell us yours.
TWW
The comparision with Ford is misleading. A closer example would be if someone owned "cars.com" and someone else started "cars.tv". If you take out a domain name which is a single, non-trademarked generic term (like "Fandom") then though titties if someone else uses it, mate.
And, anyway, the whole point of the TLDs (generic or country codes) is to divide up the namespace and allow this sort of thing. The reason it doesn't work is twats like you don't understand or honour it.
Taking your approach would mean the removal of TLDs: we would just have www.ford or www.ms or whatever, since you are saying that owning a domain in one TLD should be equivalent to owning it in them all.
TWW
As with copyright law commercial consequences are not the sole definition of damage.
You can't libel a company, only individuals
Limited companies are legal entities in the UK (and, I think, in the US although the terminology is different). In the case of non-limited companies the the owner is the one libeled as they are the one you are damaging.
Only under exceptional circumstances will an intellectual property violation be a crime.
I was saying, unclearly, that patent infringement is against the law. I should have said "infringing a patent is unlawful". Either way you are still damaging someone's reputation and, in this case, making it harder for them to do business since investors will be worried about picking up a future lawsuit.
For instance, willful copyright infringement for commercial gain
In the USA , commercial gain is not a factor in judging the seriousness of a copyright. The loss of market to the rightful owner is instead supposed to be taken into account: you can copy all you like and give it all away free but the court's still going to hammer you. In a similar way it is possible to sell copies and make the defense that you are not affecting a market, say with abandonware. I wouldn't like to try it unless I had OJ's lawyer, though.
TWW
Actually, I should have said that it's a crime in the common meaning of the word. The only way you can go to jail is if you refused to pay the fine or whatever. AFAIK, IANAL.
TWW