widely praised as the most advanced OS in the world.
Most advanced DESKTOP OS, maybe.
Even Apple's 5 year old machines can run OSX.
To be fair, not much about Apple hardware has changed in the past 5 years...
They only have one machine left that even bothers with a CRT
Unfortunately LCD displays are not always superior choices to CRTs -- particularly in the types of intensive graphics work that Mac has traditionally dominated the market in. Moving to LCDs might actually be a step BACK for some users.
Look, it's very simple. Song lyrics, just like poety or newspaper articles or novels, are protected by copyright. It is a violation of copyright law to publish them without permission.
It DOESN'T MATTER if the sites publishing them don't make any money off of it.
It DOESN'T MATTER if free lyrics sites could have the effect of increasing album sales rather than decrease them. We're not talking about recordings. The RIAA is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
It DOESN'T MATTER if the lyrics are available for sale through legitimate channels.
It DOESN'T MATTER if you think the lyrics are inane and stupid. That doesn't make them any less worthy of copyright protection.
Unless you have permission from the copyright owner, you CANNOT PUBLISH the lyrics.
But let's not forget how when Word97 came out the.DOC format changed and Word95 users could not read it
Didn't we just go over this? MS Office has (almost) full backwards-compatibility on its file formats. To expect full FORWARD-compatibility (that you should be able to open a Word97 document in Word95) is ridiculous.
Win95 'emulates' Win3.1 bugs so that Win3.1 apps would run as expected, yes. That means Win95 is backward-compatible with the apps. It does not mean that the apps were forward-compatible with Win95.
Computers still rely on the original John von Neumann architecture they are not redundant in anyway, there will be always a single point of failure for ever, no matter what you hear about RAID, redundant power suppliers etc.. etc.. basically the self-healing system is based on the same concept, compare that to a natural thing like the nervous system of humans now that is redundant and self healing, a fly has more wires in it's brain than all of the internet nodes, cut your finger and after a couple of days a fully automated autonomous transparent healing system will fix it, if we ever need to create self healing computers we need to radically change what is a computer, we need to break from the John von Neumann not because anything wrong with it but because it is reaching it's limits quickly, we need truly parallel autonomous computers with replicated capacity that increase linearly by adding more hardware, and software paradigms that take advantage of that, try make a self-healing self-fixing computer today and you will end up with a every complicated piece of software that will fail in real life.
That was the longest sentence I've ever read, with the exception of Finnegan's Wake.
You see this in software too. People think if they just "start over", everything will be okay. Wrong! You just get a new set of problems.
That's why I'm still using MS-DOS 1.0! All this silly "start over" crap Microsoft pulled with later DOS versions and then this Windows horseshit provides absolutely zero benefit to the user!!!
Everything WON'T be okay forever if we migrate away from SMTP and something more securable, but it will be BETTER.
Take Negativland's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" : it contains a recognizable sample from U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" but is obviously an original work which is critical of the record industry establishment. While I recognize the sample, I can't find the ideas represented in the original work of U2, nor do I recognize the overall song structure. Something has obviously been created.
And that "something" has a name, and its name is "a derivative work".
Puffy essentially steals all the music from a song and sets different lyrics to it... like Wierd Al.
Not like Weird Al at all. Sean Combs pays licensing fees to the songwriters of the Police, Led Zeppelin, etc. songs that he 'remixes' into his own work.
Al Yankovic is creating works of parody, which he is allowed to do without paying license feea. Still, he (usually? always?) seeks the permission of the artists whose music he parodies, and most enthusiastically give their blessings.
For you can take this hacker's code and make it work in your environment, or backport it to DRI and/or XFree, and he'll probably be ok with it, as long as he doesn't have to support that
Why should a project require code to be written and THEN REWRITTEN before it meets the requirements of a broad userbase? It's wasted time and effort.
Granted, the original coder doesn't have any obligation to write code that's useful to anyone but himself, but if he's not concerned about anyone else finding it useful, why release it at all?
You mean DR-DOS, not Dr. DOS. (He never even finished his Master's.)
And the makers of DR-DOS at Digital Research did not lose their jobs. The product was bought up by Novell and continued to be released, with versions that were 100% compatible with Win3.
What about us who want a good MP3/OGG player that is under 100bucks?
Decent CD-R/RW players with MP3 and sometimes WMA decoders (sorry, no OGG) can be had for $70 or so. They're not as nifty as the hard-drive-based devices, but they serve my needs just fine.
Same thing. Series of commands to be executed in a specified sequence. The conditional logic in Microsoft's batch language may not be as elaborate as csh, but neither is the plain Bourne shell -- does that mean Bourne shell scripts aren't scripts?
And an MCSD wouldn't write one to do anything in windows - it's a DOS construct
No, it's a command-line construct that's still completely available to NT-derived Windows versions. I can use a batch file to invoke 32-bit GUI applications if I want to.
he'd write a VBScript, JavaScript
So Windows has built-in interpreters for those languages? The only place I've ever found any use for Javascript is in a web browser.
This seems like a pretty fair and unbiased report... the only bullet point I have any issue with is the 'forced upgrade' one.
While it's true that commercial Linux vendors do not support older versions of their distributions indefinitely, the nature of the upgrade cycle is different with free software than it is with a closed-source product.
There are some costs that Linux and Windows upgrades have in common:
ongoing support
training
productivity decreases as computers have to be taken out of service temporarily to apply the upgrades
However with Linux, each upgrade to the OS is available free of charge. Microsoft requires you to give them money each time you upgrade. As such, forced upgrades are not as onerous on a company using Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The Amazon patent, however, is not autocompletion, but smart marketing.
THANK YOU.
It's nice to see that at least one Slashdotter bothered to research the specifics of the claim.
widely praised as the most advanced OS in the world.
Most advanced DESKTOP OS, maybe.
Even Apple's 5 year old machines can run OSX.
To be fair, not much about Apple hardware has changed in the past 5 years...
They only have one machine left that even bothers with a CRT
Unfortunately LCD displays are not always superior choices to CRTs -- particularly in the types of intensive graphics work that Mac has traditionally dominated the market in. Moving to LCDs might actually be a step BACK for some users.
Look, it's very simple. Song lyrics, just like poety or newspaper articles or novels, are protected by copyright. It is a violation of copyright law to publish them without permission.
It DOESN'T MATTER if the sites publishing them don't make any money off of it.
It DOESN'T MATTER if free lyrics sites could have the effect of increasing album sales rather than decrease them. We're not talking about recordings. The RIAA is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
It DOESN'T MATTER if the lyrics are available for sale through legitimate channels.
It DOESN'T MATTER if you think the lyrics are inane and stupid. That doesn't make them any less worthy of copyright protection.
Unless you have permission from the copyright owner, you CANNOT PUBLISH the lyrics.
The MPA is entirely in the right on this one.
I like how you jump from "lyrics" to "music" without even changing gear.
Why shouldn't he? "lyrics" and "music" and "poetry" are all protected by copyright. For the purposes of this discussion, they are interchangeable.
RIAA is seriously making some good efforts in keeping everyone hating it's guts.
That's some classic karma-whoring you're doing there, but unfortunately this story has nothing to do with the RIAA.
RTFA.
For you to copy ANY music requires permission from the songwriter, the musicians and the distributor
Almost all CD players copy data off the CD into a solid-state buffer before piping it into the DAC, to minimize the audible effects of skipping.
Under an extremely literal interpretation of copyright law, the simple act of playing a CD in a CD player could be in violation.
NEEDS A CHIMP.
GNU's not Unix...
my first chick had 8k worth of "enhacements" and a 30 min timelimt.
Learn something new every day... I didn't know before that if you overclock a RealDoll it will overheat after 30 minutes!
As soon as the prices come down on those swanky new 286s, I can finally get rid of my PCjr.
Exactly. Why spend $400 on the latest 3D graphics card when you can get four hundred 286's for the same price?
But let's not forget how when Word97 came out the .DOC format changed and Word95 users could not read it
Didn't we just go over this? MS Office has (almost) full backwards-compatibility on its file formats. To expect full FORWARD-compatibility (that you should be able to open a Word97 document in Word95) is ridiculous.
Win95 'emulates' Win3.1 bugs so that Win3.1 apps would run as expected, yes. That means Win95 is backward-compatible with the apps. It does not mean that the apps were forward-compatible with Win95.
let's face it - the vast majority are complete and utter drivel and manage to make a cereal packet look like an interesting read.
But Slashdot is a weblog... oooh, I see.
and cron them in.
What happens if the cron daemon dies?
Computers still rely on the original John von Neumann architecture they are not redundant in anyway, there will be always a single point of failure for ever, no matter what you hear about RAID, redundant power suppliers etc.. etc.. basically the self-healing system is based on the same concept, compare that to a natural thing like the nervous system of humans now that is redundant and self healing, a fly has more wires in it's brain than all of the internet nodes, cut your finger and after a couple of days a fully automated autonomous transparent healing system will fix it, if we ever need to create self healing computers we need to radically change what is a computer, we need to break from the John von Neumann not because anything wrong with it but because it is reaching it's limits quickly, we need truly parallel autonomous computers with replicated capacity that increase linearly by adding more hardware, and software paradigms that take advantage of that, try make a self-healing self-fixing computer today and you will end up with a every complicated piece of software that will fail in real life.
That was the longest sentence I've ever read, with the exception of Finnegan's Wake.
You see this in software too. People think if they just "start over", everything will be okay. Wrong! You just get a new set of problems.
That's why I'm still using MS-DOS 1.0! All this silly "start over" crap Microsoft pulled with later DOS versions and then this Windows horseshit provides absolutely zero benefit to the user!!!
Everything WON'T be okay forever if we migrate away from SMTP and something more securable, but it will be BETTER.
Take Negativland's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" : it contains a recognizable sample from U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" but is obviously an original work which is critical of the record industry establishment. While I recognize the sample, I can't find the ideas represented in the original work of U2, nor do I recognize the overall song structure. Something has obviously been created.
And that "something" has a name, and its name is "a derivative work".
Puffy essentially steals all the music from a song and sets different lyrics to it... like Wierd Al.
Not like Weird Al at all. Sean Combs pays licensing fees to the songwriters of the Police, Led Zeppelin, etc. songs that he 'remixes' into his own work.
Al Yankovic is creating works of parody, which he is allowed to do without paying license feea. Still, he (usually? always?) seeks the permission of the artists whose music he parodies, and most enthusiastically give their blessings.
The spammer can just put the $16 million charge on the stolen credit cards he used. Problem solved!
mechanisms for defining rich, concurrent interfaces have been in common use for ages everywhere else?
.NET now.
You must be talking about OLE. No, wait, DDE. No, now it's COM. Oops, I blinked and everyone's using
(disclaimer: I am not an MS developer, thank god.)
For you can take this hacker's code and make it work in your environment, or backport it to DRI and/or XFree, and he'll probably be ok with it, as long as he doesn't have to support that
Why should a project require code to be written and THEN REWRITTEN before it meets the requirements of a broad userbase? It's wasted time and effort.
Granted, the original coder doesn't have any obligation to write code that's useful to anyone but himself, but if he's not concerned about anyone else finding it useful, why release it at all?
As far as I know, W3C isn't that quick on updating their standards, for example.
And yet, they're still ahead of the implementation curve of all the major browsers. 100% CSS2 compliance? What's that?
- the state of Internet border security is "allow everything but ..."
For companies where this is true, the network admins simply aren't doing their jobs.
You mean DR-DOS, not Dr. DOS. (He never even finished his Master's.)
And the makers of DR-DOS at Digital Research did not lose their jobs. The product was bought up by Novell and continued to be released, with versions that were 100% compatible with Win3.
What about us who want a good MP3/OGG player that is under 100bucks?
Decent CD-R/RW players with MP3 and sometimes WMA decoders (sorry, no OGG) can be had for $70 or so. They're not as nifty as the hard-drive-based devices, but they serve my needs just fine.
.bat isn't a script, it's a batch file.
Same thing. Series of commands to be executed in a specified sequence. The conditional logic in Microsoft's batch language may not be as elaborate as csh, but neither is the plain Bourne shell -- does that mean Bourne shell scripts aren't scripts?
And an MCSD wouldn't write one to do anything in windows - it's a DOS construct
No, it's a command-line construct that's still completely available to NT-derived Windows versions. I can use a batch file to invoke 32-bit GUI applications if I want to.
he'd write a VBScript, JavaScript
So Windows has built-in interpreters for those languages? The only place I've ever found any use for Javascript is in a web browser.
This seems like a pretty fair and unbiased report... the only bullet point I have any issue with is the 'forced upgrade' one.
While it's true that commercial Linux vendors do not support older versions of their distributions indefinitely, the nature of the upgrade cycle is different with free software than it is with a closed-source product.
There are some costs that Linux and Windows upgrades have in common:
ongoing support
training
productivity decreases as computers have to be taken out of service temporarily to apply the upgrades
However with Linux, each upgrade to the OS is available free of charge. Microsoft requires you to give them money each time you upgrade. As such, forced upgrades are not as onerous on a company using Linux.