It took them three years to get from 2.17 to 2.18? At a rate of 0.0333 releases per year, it must have taken them sixty-five years just to get to 2.17. That means they've been developing BugZilla since just after the start of World War II, which means they really ought to have shaken all the bugs out by now. Better drop the word "bug" from the name, then.
If, as the Dr. Dobbs article says, "the free lunch is over", then the only sensible thing to do is make do with what we have now. For goshssakes, people, the computers we have now are already insanely over-powered. How many more gigahertz do we need my life already?
Maybe he does have a point. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to tell whether he does or not, because the substance of his article was smothered in a thick, fatty layer of impenetrable snideness and sarcasm.
If he wants us to respect his "reliable" source, he'd do better to publicise it in some other way than aping a narked thirteen-year-old. Show your competition some respect, sir, if you want to be shown some yourself.
One of the examples that sticks in my mind happened in a fighter plane. The knob to change the radio channel was exactly the same size and shape as the knob to deploy the flaps and was right next to it. The pilots would try to change radio channels and deploy the flaps instead and the plane would crash.
Well, it serves the pilots right. They should have
been concentrating on flying the darned planes, not
listening to music!
Until the Java world manages to get its act
together on agreeing that little detail,
forgive me if I remain skeptical about their
agreeing APIs in sufficient detail for
write-once, run-anywhere to be anything more
than a nice fairy-tail.
Won't do. The legal process is supposed to find
in favour of the person who's right, not the
person who's hired the best lawyers. Granted
that it ain't always so, nevertheless it should
surely be so in a clearly black-and-white case.
However many lawyers MS hire, they will not be
able to persuade a judge or jury that 2+2 = 5,
and neither should they or anyone else be able
to make the obviously invalid patents
stick.
I am not talking about those that are
invalidated by a subtle technical point.
I am talking about patents that are for
something that everyone knew about
a decade before they were issued.
What I really can't understand is why it's
supposedly so expensive for "infringers" to
defeat these things in court. Suppose
Microsoft decided to sue me for infringement
of, oh I don't know, their patent on using four
or more colours in a single application. Why
do I need to spend money on lawyers? Why can't
I defend myself, and have it all done in about
twenty seconds flat?
Microsoft Lawyer: Your honour, the accused has infringed our patent on using four or more colours in a single application.
Me: M'lud, the patent is bollocks. Here is a file of prior art that I assembled in about ten minutes using google, showing that people have been doing this for decades before the patent was issued.
Judge: [flicks through folder] Yes, you're clearly right. Case dismissed, and Microsoft must pay the accused $1M in compensation for wasting his and my valuable time.
This is excellent news indeed. A close friend
worked for PriceWaterhouseCooper until recently,
and eventually left because he couldn't keep
living with the mentality that cared about
nothing but money. I guess this is not unique
to PWC, but is a tendency that will tend to
afflict all big companies.
The point is that
they, unlike for example Richard Stallman,
most surely have no axe to grind when they talk
about software patents stifling innovation.
When they complain about the effects of software
patents, they are complaining only about their
effect on the bottom line - and every informed
analyst will know that. So their stance
against software patents will carry a lot more
weight than that of the people who've been
crying out in the wilderness for all these
years.
It's strange the friends we seem to be making
these days... First IBM, now PWC.
Re:v6 could help solve some net problems
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 1
... and you have no idea what you're replying to.
Read the parent. The point is that spam prevention
per se does not make Internet anonymity impossible.
Re:v6 could help solve some net problems
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe I'm not thinking clearly, but I don't see a way of making the net spammer-proof without ending the concept of internet anonymity.
I don't see a way of making
the sending of email
spammer-proof without ending the concept of
email-sender anonymity. But that is not the
same thing as Internet anonymity. Such a scheme
need have no effect whatsoever on all the other
numerous Internet protocols, including the Web.
I am an Englishman, living in London, and working
for a Danish company. I often visit my company
in Denmark, where all the computers have their
keys laid out completely differently from the
QWERTY layout that we all know and love. That's
before you even get into the positioning of all
the non-alphanumerics, and without beginning to
fear the special Danish characters like the "o"
with a diagonal slash through it.
How is Internet Suspend/Resume going to make
those keyboards usable to me?
There's a good reason why LRU caching
(least recently used) is so widespread,
and that is that it's very very hard to
come up with a sophisticated algorithm
that outperforms this very naive one.
For the uninitiated, elements are added
to an LRU cache until it fills up; thereafter,
whenever a new element is added, space is made
for it by throwing away the least-recently
used one. Note, least recently used,
not the
least recently added, i.e. the
oldest, since an element that was cached
long ago may be used all the time, and so be
well worth its place in the cache. For example,
consider the company-logo image that your
browser caches when you visit a new site and
that is embedded in every page on that site.
However old it gets, it's likely to continue
to be used while you're on the site. As soon
as you move to another site, it gradually
shuffles its way down the deck until it falls
off the bottom - which is precisely what you
want.
I would be very much interested in seeing it. Could you email, or make it available through http/ftp/whatever?
I'd like to see it, too, please. I've set my
root password to "querty". Please ssh onto my
box and run this fascinating software so I can
look into it.
And concerning which browser is "the best", there's always the classic list of 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.
True, but there's one thing IE does do much
better than Mozilla, and that's that the BACK
button is quick. It always seems to take an
age for Moz to go back a page, which in my book
is absolutely unforgivable.
The irony is that Netscape 4 was blindingly
fast at this: much, much faster than either
IE or Moz. And really, how hard can it be?
1.) Create a search engine that will be popular enough to rival Google.
2.) Create a method of forcing users to view unending advertisements each time they search, click, blink, etc.
3.) Profit unendingly.
How is small memory a new thing?
I had small memory on my VIC-20.
Obligatory 80s microcomputer fanboy reference:
anyone else remember the adverts for the Dragon
32 and its "massive 32Kb memory"? The VIC's 5Kb
is the smallest amount I've had to work with,
but only because I managed to avoid the ZX-81.
It certainly makes you think about browsers
whose publicity material describes them as having
a "small footprint", which then turns out to mean
no more than ten megabytes. Or two thousand
VIC-20s, if you want to think of it that way.
A VIC is about three inches tall, so if you stack
2000 on top of each other (enough to run a
"small footprint" browser), they'll be about
500 feet tall which IIRC is about the height
of the Eiffel Tower. Now there's a
mental image!
In ``inventor'' of this thing is quoted as
saying:
People would be able to see writing in the skies from the Earth no worse than they see the stars.
Speaking as someone who lives in a big city
(London), I can hardly even remember what
stars look like. A combination of light-pollution,
smog and good, old-fashioned English weather mean
that they are hardly ever visible.
In a perfect world you could do that, but a perfect world and the American judical system are not one in the same. SCO has high priced lawyers, so if you go in there with Lionel Hutz from the Simpsons, well you know how it will turn out.
But WHY? Are judges and juries really
that stupid that they are more influenced
by Lawyer Flashiness Coefficient than by the
self-evident facts of a case?
What's the limit? What if Darl McBribe brings
a lawsuit against me for murdering him? Do I
have to hire Expensive Lawyers then? Can't
I just point to him in court and say, ``But
your Honour, he's alive, hence I can't have
murdered him''? And if so, how is the SCO
IPR case any different?
Bollocks is still bollocks, even when spoken
by someone in a sharp Italian suit. Surely
the law respects that fact?
Slashdot Mirror
It took them three years to get from 2.17 to 2.18? At a rate of 0.0333 releases per year, it must have taken them sixty-five years just to get to 2.17. That means they've been developing BugZilla since just after the start of World War II, which means they really ought to have shaken all the bugs out by now. Better drop the word "bug" from the name, then.
If, as the Dr. Dobbs article says, "the free lunch is over", then the only sensible thing to do is make do with what we have now. For goshssakes, people, the computers we have now are already insanely over-powered. How many more gigahertz do we need my life already?
You must be new here.
As an educator, you should not be perpetrating dangling participles.
If he wants us to respect his "reliable" source, he'd do better to publicise it in some other way than aping a narked thirteen-year-old. Show your competition some respect, sir, if you want to be shown some yourself.
Well, it serves the pilots right. They should have been concentrating on flying the darned planes, not listening to music!
Until the Java world manages to get its act together on agreeing that little detail, forgive me if I remain skeptical about their agreeing APIs in sufficient detail for write-once, run-anywhere to be anything more than a nice fairy-tail.
Surely a prequel would be more appropriate?
Won't do. The legal process is supposed to find in favour of the person who's right, not the person who's hired the best lawyers. Granted that it ain't always so, nevertheless it should surely be so in a clearly black-and-white case. However many lawyers MS hire, they will not be able to persuade a judge or jury that 2+2 = 5, and neither should they or anyone else be able to make the obviously invalid patents stick.
I am not talking about those that are invalidated by a subtle technical point. I am talking about patents that are for something that everyone knew about a decade before they were issued.
Seriously. Why wouldn't this work?
I think it'll get cheaper.
The point is that they, unlike for example Richard Stallman, most surely have no axe to grind when they talk about software patents stifling innovation. When they complain about the effects of software patents, they are complaining only about their effect on the bottom line - and every informed analyst will know that. So their stance against software patents will carry a lot more weight than that of the people who've been crying out in the wilderness for all these years.
It's strange the friends we seem to be making these days ... First IBM, now PWC.
... and you have no idea what you're replying to. Read the parent. The point is that spam prevention per se does not make Internet anonymity impossible.
I don't see a way of making the sending of email spammer-proof without ending the concept of email-sender anonymity. But that is not the same thing as Internet anonymity. Such a scheme need have no effect whatsoever on all the other numerous Internet protocols, including the Web.
I live in zone 2 and would like to know where these cinemas are! Feel free to reply directly to me if you prefer that to posting. mike@indexdata.com
This guy may think he's purpose in life is unattainable, but he's got nothing on Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
How is Internet Suspend/Resume going to make those keyboards usable to me?
Explain again why this is a disadvantage?
For the uninitiated, elements are added to an LRU cache until it fills up; thereafter, whenever a new element is added, space is made for it by throwing away the least-recently used one. Note, least recently used, not the least recently added, i.e. the oldest, since an element that was cached long ago may be used all the time, and so be well worth its place in the cache. For example, consider the company-logo image that your browser caches when you visit a new site and that is embedded in every page on that site. However old it gets, it's likely to continue to be used while you're on the site. As soon as you move to another site, it gradually shuffles its way down the deck until it falls off the bottom - which is precisely what you want.
I'd like to see it, too, please. I've set my root password to "querty". Please ssh onto my box and run this fascinating software so I can look into it.
True, but there's one thing IE does do much better than Mozilla, and that's that the BACK button is quick. It always seems to take an age for Moz to go back a page, which in my book is absolutely unforgivable.
The irony is that Netscape 4 was blindingly fast at this: much, much faster than either IE or Moz. And really, how hard can it be?
Dude, you forgot:
Obligatory 80s microcomputer fanboy reference: anyone else remember the adverts for the Dragon 32 and its "massive 32Kb memory"? The VIC's 5Kb is the smallest amount I've had to work with, but only because I managed to avoid the ZX-81.
It certainly makes you think about browsers whose publicity material describes them as having a "small footprint", which then turns out to mean no more than ten megabytes. Or two thousand VIC-20s, if you want to think of it that way. A VIC is about three inches tall, so if you stack 2000 on top of each other (enough to run a "small footprint" browser), they'll be about 500 feet tall which IIRC is about the height of the Eiffel Tower. Now there's a mental image!
Speaking as someone who lives in a big city (London), I can hardly even remember what stars look like. A combination of light-pollution, smog and good, old-fashioned English weather mean that they are hardly ever visible.
So neither will the adverts be.
Cool: a use for pollution! As an ad-blocker.
But WHY? Are judges and juries really that stupid that they are more influenced by Lawyer Flashiness Coefficient than by the self-evident facts of a case?
What's the limit? What if Darl McBribe brings a lawsuit against me for murdering him? Do I have to hire Expensive Lawyers then? Can't I just point to him in court and say, ``But your Honour, he's alive, hence I can't have murdered him''? And if so, how is the SCO IPR case any different?
Bollocks is still bollocks, even when spoken by someone in a sharp Italian suit. Surely the law respects that fact?