Depending on your target class (there are many kinds of MCSD/E students), teaching them that their VB solutions are not completely tied to the Microsoft products is probably the best idea.
Someone mentioned that mySQL is not a replacement for SQL Server, which is true. But SQL Server is overkill for a lot of projects, and because of the expense they might end up using (argh!) Access. Any of those two open-source products are Access (argh!) killers.
A lot of Microsoft junkies make VB projects tied to Access/Excel (argh!) for a living, particulary those interested in the VB road of the certification. Although sometimes convenient for a number of reasons (data is already there, users use Excel, etc), it is often a very impractical solution.
Once more, which product to show off depends on the target. Some DB junkies would have problems with mySQL's missing subselects, young foreign key implementation, etc. but like PostreSQL a lot. Others would like mySQL for the same reason some open-source hackers do and wonder what all that relational integrity stuff is about.
Another thing: use a nice Windows-like GUI (KDE/Gnome) to show them around the system. Don't even mention WindowManagers or things like that until the end. Let them explore the new tools on a familiar GUI they already know how to handle. Heck, use one of those Windows themes to see who's the first to notice it's Unix, if you can get away with it.
Show them some nifty tricks on the command-line, but not too many. Piping, redirection, grep, tail, man (don't forget man! they'll be typing/? forever!), are all good, but if you get serious many of them will get lost and be wondering why would they want to do "that command-line thing" in the first place.
Show them the kind of things they can do on the shell without having to consult man. Then do them through ssh somewhere else in the world, preferably in a box with another Unix (Solaris, SunOS,etc). Then show them a bash script doing something they would only expect an "EXE" to do as an example that people do really complicated things with it.
Then, tell them they can get these tools for Windows. Most of them will not try Linux just because it looked nifty when you showed it to them, but if the useful tools available for their platform make them take open-source seriously, that might do the trick.
I'll run the risk and say it: in Java a GUI is written in Swing and then it's slow everywhere.
Although I've been told it's not technically true, at least that's the perception of the market. That's why GUIs are usually not written in Swing, and Java is usually in the server, not on the client's user interface.
The strength of Java is the server, not the client, and any competition C# provides for that is in the standard if I'm not mistaken (that's why iNet would technically be able to "compile" it to Java... neat!).
Cross-platform GUIs are implemented in cross-platform libraries that are compiled to specific platforms: Gtk and Qt, for example. I think there is nothing to stop these libraries from being implemented in the C# standard.
So, either everyone uses non-standard platform-specific libraries to implement GUIs, or they use non-standard cross-platform libraries to implement GUIs... the status quo does not change.
As far as C# is considered a competition for Java in anything that matters, it's a standard. As far as C# is considered a replacement for VB and Visual C++, it is not.
It would be relatively difficult to redesign the email protocol and get everyone in the bandwagon at this point. Redesigning it so as to get something new to be patented would be more problematic.
Of course, there is the big problem of prior art. I know this would be a "bad patent" on purpose, but "bad patents" without a lot of money behind them tend to be recognized as "bad" more quickly than is usual.
On the other hand, if you're willing to ignore the issues of prior art and take your chances, why not patent spam itself too? That way you get to sue spammers for patent infringement, not the violation of a license (which, without "damages", is likely to be resolved by revocation of the license, something corporate entities can play with easily).
We should treat SPAM differently because it can, and probably will, cost the end-user a lot of money when he ends up paying for bandwidth use.
When I get snail-mail spam (not in caps because it's slightly less evil) I may have the inconvenience of picking it up, and then throwing it away, but I don't pay postage.
Unfortunately, in the Internet the receiver, and everyone in the middle, also pays in resources, and since most users pay for their bandwidth indirectly (and will soon pay directly), it increases the cost of Internet for the consumer. The consumer is paying to read ads he doesn't want to read in the first place and that are not subsidizing any service, and that's not good.
Imagine if you were forced to accept collect-calls and every single tele-marketer in the nation took advantage of that.
The Internet may be self-policing, but we still reserve the right to prosecute for "real world crimes". If a website systematically uses my credit card information for identity/credit fraud, I want them to be legally prosecuted, "filtering them" (not buying from them and spreading the word) is not enough.
SPAM should be treated just like having someone stealing your cable connection, electricity, water or other utilities. There are real-world, monetary damages, which may be small or may accumulate to something significant over time, but either way it's not legal and there may be some penalties involved.
The alternative is regulating through code, but redefining the email standard so as to avoid SPAM would be problematic and (at least the solutions that come to mind) possibly raise some privacy issues.
As a lot of people have to repeat every once in a while: Java != Javascript. Java has nothing to do with Javascript, actually (nothing more than with, say, CShell). The name of the latter was a marketing gimmick.
That said, Java earned a bad reputation from being used in Applets all over the Net, which are victims of every defect Java has (or at least used to have until very, very recently).
One of those defects is that Swing really, really sucks. Now, it's design may be great or not, and it may be full of design patterns or not, but it has been, up to 1.3, very "buggy and slow". You can cope with the buginess if you need to, but it will make it even slower.
AWT too, but at least AWT didn't claim it had fixed the problem when it did not.
Another defect, which is not exactly Java's, is that Applets on the web were mostly programming experiments by novices in both the language and programming. Java was hip, and everyone who had a webpage had to have an Applet. They were bound to be buggy. And the circumstances didn't help.
The world was exposed to millions of "Hello World" desktop applications brought online by Sun's Magnificent Hype Machine, programmed in a cranky and immature GUI library (AWT/early-Swing), with incompatible JVMs (Microsoft's), slowly downloaded to the client's machine through a 28.8K-56K modem... all increasing the amount of frustration when the "ClassNotFound" exception presents the user with a dazzling gray square.
Java is a nice language, but for desktop applications it's just not a great choice, unless 1.4 delivered the promise (I have yet to try it for desktop apps). But that promise was there with 1.3, and even with the birth of Swing.
I'm sure it is technically possible to use it for medium-big applications, there are plenty (big) IDEs written in Java that are very, very usable. I also hear very good comments about some non-Sun libraries, but I'm afraid no one really cares.
Java for the desktop is seen as the wrong solution to the problem, and will remain so for a long time even if they fix it, thanks to Sun's mistake. Java's place as the right solution seems to be on the server, where it's definitely not buggy nor terribly slow, with the desktop as a thin client (SOAP, JSP) implemented in something else.
I think the CDBTAAPGEHNASE or whatever the SSSCA is called these days will outlaw any hardware/software that does not implement a copyright management system approved by (read designed by) the RIAA/MPAA.
This means that directly or indirectly they get to decide which alternatives for protection are available, the minimum cost of recording devices (even outright outlaw recording technologies as "fundamentally insecure"), and their availability in the market.
The small documentary studio would not survive a dramatic increase in the cost of recording and reproduction technologies. And even if the startup band is able to afford recording at a licensed and approved studio, their costs of distribution would be higher and their available licenses would be restricted to the options pre-packaged by the studios in the technology.
Also, a pub/bar is more of a social setting than a restaurant. Part of the deal is bothering the bartender with your life, or using the "let me get a drink" excuse to cruise the bar, or the "can I get you a drink?" to talk to someone of the opposite sex just enough to hear the "not interested" part. Having an excuse to move around the bar lets you interact with other people, even (specially) if they're strangers.
"Automating" the re-fill would not be a convenience but a hassle, it would remove a great part of the ritual from the whole bar-thing. It's not like we have a lot of excuses left... going to the bathroom is a perfectly valid but too attractive excuse to use in public. Since the whole point of going to a bar is the ritual, that's probably not a good idea.
In a restaurant, you normally don't interact with other customers. Contacting the waiter/waitress may actually be an excercise in acrobatics and gesticulation, but it's definitely a disposable part of the restaurant ritual: you go there to eat and interact with those at your table, any moment interacting with someone else is usually an interruption and minimizing it makes sense.
Star Control II? bah! I want a mini-series based on STARFLIGHT!
Endurium dealers, Spemin politics... I want to know how did the Ulteck ally with the Gazertoids, did the Elowans know about what happened to them, and how did the Ancient Ones manage to make ruins if they're just sitting rocks in the first place?
Now, if that had been posted as an April's Fool story instead of a comment to a very lame one, I might at least have found a point for the whole April 1st on Slashdot idea this week.
Actually, it has nothing to do with the OSS definition, just as it has nothing to do with the Apple contract. It's just hard to deal contractually with minors directly.
A minor is not bound by a contract, because of his/her status as a minor. Apparently only the adult part is bound by the contract.
Therefore, a minor is not bound by, say, the GPL, to release the code he/she takes for a closed-source project. The licensing of copyright is tricky, to say the least, if he/she decides to violate the GPL...
I'm not sure whether the copyright licensing never took place, if it took place but is cancelled after the violation (with previous compliant work valid) without legal repercusions (because of the minor status), if it took place but is retroactively cancelled (as if it never took place, I guess), or maybe you could actually take the kid to court and see if he can be treated as an adult on a per-case basis.
I know one thing: it's so messy I probably wouldn't want to get a lawyer to deal with it.
Now Stallman created the GPL to "battle propietary software" or something like that. So it's doubtful that a minor will be taking over the world with a propietary software monopolist company, because of the same contractual difficulties.
So it would not be a matter of whether the GPL (or any other "open source" license) is appliable to minors or not. It's not. It's a matter of whether you care about minors breaking your license. Apple does.
The contract/license is not a legal contract anymore, it's more of a "gentlemen's agreement", and Apple (like anyone else) has all the right to be careful entering such deals if they want to.
Re:The oscars aren't about the best films...
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 2
Actually, the Oscars are usually given to the actors that everyone thinks should have gotten it the previous years. It's meant to be that way: it allows market analysis, and it builds anticipation?
So it really doesn't matter much if the performance on the current year was his best or not. Denzel Washington got one because the Academy figured they had ignored him long enough, and the mainstream public expected it.
I think they ignored Crowe for some time as well, and they will ignore Will Smith for a long time to come.
I'm not entirely sure the last is a bad thing, I have yet to see "Ali" but I confess I'm extremely skeptic over his capacity to play someone other than his I-day/MIB/TV-series persona.
I agree that Fortran 90 could have been allowed, but I'm not surprised.
Students simply don't know Fortran, it isn't taugth anymore. I seriously doubt it would be such a great advantage in these problems, but if it were it would put most students at a dissadvantage just because they don't know it anymore than they know COBOL. Sort of like allowing Perl for a string-manipulation competition if only 1/25 students had ever seen a line of Perl.
I don't think you have to know Fortran if you're a problem solver either. It's really not that great, and it doesn't seem so different to me as to give completely different approaches to the same problem. So I see no good reason why it should be taught more frequently either.
Sure, Fortran 90, is quite a decent language, and it's worth checking it out; far from the horror stories I had been told about Fortran, or the old Fortran code I had to read through a couple of times.
But there are many good languages out there, and since there are resource constraints, there's really no good reason to include Fortran if it doesn't bring something drastic to the table.
Four C-like languages are already plenty to handle. They were chosen obviously because they're the C-like languages used to teach in 99% of CS/CE courses.
I wonder, though, at the restriction of using only C-like languages. Being a collegiate contest, I don't think assuming some exposure to functional languages would be taking too much of a change, and that can definitely make a difference. Allowing SML/CLISP/Haskell would be rather interesting, if they make good problems.
A threat is not sufficient to be considered a crime, as many a harassed person knows ("Sorry ma'am, we can't do a thing, he has done nothing yet"). It may increase suspicion, but it is not a crime.
Maybe you can prove it's blackmail, which is more systematic, and actually criminal. But still blackmail is not murder, terrorism, or drug dealing. Really, it's like comparing a drug misdemeanor (personal use of marihuana) with controlling a drug cartel.
Selling products to schools is VERY FAR from selling adictive drugs. There is no physiological effect, no addiction (unless you derive an unnatural pleasure from using Word), no violation of regulations, no recruitment and training of gangs to deal the product, no violence, no theft to pay for the merchandise... really, what the hell are you talking about? Do you have any idea of the effects that illegal drug dealing have at schools?
It isn't clear where the dividing line is between skipping lunch today and starving to death in poverty, but it's very clear that somewhere in the middle there is such a line separating them as two different kinds of problems.
Microsoft will probably be fined and "jailed" (receive some restrictions on the liberty of their business). Just like in any court, the severity of those penalties will depend on a lot of things, and can even be quite lenient.
All the other consequences have nothing to do with the government: getting fired, divorced, losing your kids, segregated, life sucks... all these are because of reactions of society (the market) to your actions.
Microsoft will probably have to face creditors (although they do have cash), angry stockholders, fleeing customers, doubting partners and investors, etc. They will never be the "safe company" they were before. Maybe it will be bad, maybe it will not. But these will be market reactions, not government punishment.
Asking for the government to enforce these things is exactly equivalent to asking to government to make sure that every convict's life is destroyed once they're convicted. That is NOT a good idea. The government has a job, don't give it aother one.
Now, conduct restrictions (privations of liberty) will be in order. Whether they are harsh, or tame, will depend on the court, but I am inclined to think they will be tame at this moment.
If you don't like what Microsoft did, by all means do what you may to get the appropiate legal punishment for the company. Just don't go around talking about revoking charters and dissolving companies, because it's silly at best, and at worst it has all the charm and intelligence of a lynch-mob.
A dissolution of Microsoft would harm the stockholders the most, and these are not executives or Gates (who has enough cash anyway), but the retired elderly, middle-class families with college funds for their kids, etc. Not only that, but it would delegitimize the whole antitrust process as much as letting Microsoft go would (will?).
Actually, I think they do ast the question. They freeze the assets while they find out, though.
On the credit issue, it's not the government action, or business. If Microsoft is, say, broken up, I'm sure there will be a lot of creditors with something to say to the new two companies with falling stock. But none of these consequences are government enacted.
Microsoft's business tactics are quite different from those entities. Can we really compare hardball business tactics with murder, terrorism and drug dealing in schools? I think we're losing perspective here.
Microsoft should face a punitive damage. When you're convicted of grand theft you face a punitive damage (you can go to jail). This punitive damage can vary greatly and be very harsh, nor not. But it is different and independent from taking away whatever you have legitimately acquired.
Also, getting an application to the point where it's "user-friendly" enough not to need support costs a lot of money, and not exactly in development.
Linux depends on relatively tech-oriented people to not only develop the software, but also to use it, and design the user interface according to what they need.
These are people that are usually intelligent enough to read the documentation and cope with an interface that might not be exactly intuitive. These are also people with their own subcultures, that find intuitive what the mainstream definitely does not: why does more read text? because it's more than cat. why less? because less is more! now let's learn 120 keyboard shortcuts so we can save 2 minutes a day of typing time!.
The "scratch an itch" model is not the best way to design a user interface for end-users. Even when an attempt is made, quite a lot of the techie users complain about the "dumbing down" of the interface, for good reason... they have different needs than the typical end-user. It follows that they will develop to meet their own needs.
Of course, attempts are made to develop "end-user-friendly" interfaces in open source programs, but the most successful of those UIs happen to be copies of someone else's design (KDE/GNOME/etc).
Designing a really good new GUI for end-users, be it for the OS or for some graphical/art app or something like that, requires input from non-tech-oriented users. People who are not likely to be using Linux in the first place, and who are also unlikely to become beta testers without a very good reason.
I can think only of two good reasons to get a LOT of users to provide input, assuming you have the interface designers to analyze the data: you're have enough marketing to convince people to volunteer (costs money), or you give them money (costs money).
The GPL-model tends to save on development costs, but I don't see how could it save on these expenses, and it obviously takes away a revenue source that covers for it (and since user-friendliness means less support, the new revenue source is in direct conflict with that goal). That would seem to indicate that the GPL is not appropiate for such applications, unless their UIs are imitations of propietary ones.
If you steal 25K, and you are proven to have stolen 25K, the government will take the 25K back. But they will not take away your house, your car, your children's college funds or your 401K.
Microsoft may have been declared to be an anticompetitive monopoly by the government, but it is not clear, in monetary terms, how much they owe to being a monopoly and how much to being just a successful software company.
You have to remember, Microsoft wasn't always a monopoly, and I don't think the case was clear on when exactly did it become one.
So, from all those billion dollars they have made since that old version of BASIC, how much would you say is directly linked to the crime? It's probably impossible to prove, and trying to figure it out would probably cost about as much in time, lawyers and accountants. That's why the federal government doesn't get into that mess and lets the respective parties deal with it in civil lawsuits, since civil lawsuits are more liberal with the definition of "facts".
Java isn't the greatest language anyway and will soon be phased out in favor of modern functional languages (O'Caml, Haskell, SML, etc.)Java isn't the greatest language anyway and will soon be phased out in favor of modern functional languages (O'Caml, Haskell, SML, etc.)
Modern as in LISP?
I'm not trying to point out chronology (ML is fairly new, LISP is fairly old). I mean that, if I'm not mistaken, LISP has had most of that functionality for decades, is better proven as a practical language, has a very rich library and an active community... and yet, imperative languages rule the world (LISP is not the phaser, it is the phasee).
I love SML; although I'm fairly new at it and have trouble thinking about how to use it in some applications, for most mathematical functions and list operations there's really no comparison in clarity.
But I'm really skeptical about these languages displacing imperative programming simply because there is no need for them to do that. They don't solve any problem that is not more easily solved by integrating some of their features into imperative programming (recursion, garbage collection, etc).
People are happy with C-like languages, and imperative prog. has become the euclidean geometry of computer science: it's the layman's world, and alternatives are constrained to very small and specialized circles, with new benefits and discoveries percolating down slowly.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... shoes.
Depending on your target class (there are many kinds of MCSD/E students), teaching them that their VB solutions are not completely tied to the Microsoft products is probably the best idea.
/? forever!), are all good, but if you get serious many of them will get lost and be wondering why would they want to do "that command-line thing" in the first place.
Someone mentioned that mySQL is not a replacement for SQL Server, which is true. But SQL Server is overkill for a lot of projects, and because of the expense they might end up using (argh!) Access. Any of those two open-source products are Access (argh!) killers.
A lot of Microsoft junkies make VB projects tied to Access/Excel (argh!) for a living, particulary those interested in the VB road of the certification. Although sometimes convenient for a number of reasons (data is already there, users use Excel, etc), it is often a very impractical solution.
Once more, which product to show off depends on the target. Some DB junkies would have problems with mySQL's missing subselects, young foreign key implementation, etc. but like PostreSQL a lot. Others would like mySQL for the same reason some open-source hackers do and wonder what all that relational integrity stuff is about.
Another thing: use a nice Windows-like GUI (KDE/Gnome) to show them around the system. Don't even mention WindowManagers or things like that until the end. Let them explore the new tools on a familiar GUI they already know how to handle. Heck, use one of those Windows themes to see who's the first to notice it's Unix, if you can get away with it.
Show them some nifty tricks on the command-line, but not too many. Piping, redirection, grep, tail, man (don't forget man! they'll be typing
Show them the kind of things they can do on the shell without having to consult man. Then do them through ssh somewhere else in the world, preferably in a box with another Unix (Solaris, SunOS,etc). Then show them a bash script doing something they would only expect an "EXE" to do as an example that people do really complicated things with it.
Then, tell them they can get these tools for Windows. Most of them will not try Linux just because it looked nifty when you showed it to them, but if the useful tools available for their platform make them take open-source seriously, that might do the trick.
At least Microsoft and Gateway, like any decent capitalistic corporation, scare consumers into buying more products.
The RIAA seems to prefer to scare the government into subsidizing theirs.
I'll run the risk and say it: in Java a GUI is written in Swing and then it's slow everywhere.
Although I've been told it's not technically true, at least that's the perception of the market. That's why GUIs are usually not written in Swing, and Java is usually in the server, not on the client's user interface.
The strength of Java is the server, not the client, and any competition C# provides for that is in the standard if I'm not mistaken (that's why iNet would technically be able to "compile" it to Java... neat!).
Cross-platform GUIs are implemented in cross-platform libraries that are compiled to specific platforms: Gtk and Qt, for example. I think there is nothing to stop these libraries from being implemented in the C# standard.
So, either everyone uses non-standard platform-specific libraries to implement GUIs, or they use non-standard cross-platform libraries to implement GUIs... the status quo does not change.
As far as C# is considered a competition for Java in anything that matters, it's a standard. As far as C# is considered a replacement for VB and Visual C++, it is not.
How about a ruthlessly efficient surrender?
It would be relatively difficult to redesign the email protocol and get everyone in the bandwagon at this point. Redesigning it so as to get something new to be patented would be more problematic.
Of course, there is the big problem of prior art. I know this would be a "bad patent" on purpose, but "bad patents" without a lot of money behind them tend to be recognized as "bad" more quickly than is usual.
On the other hand, if you're willing to ignore the issues of prior art and take your chances, why not patent spam itself too? That way you get to sue spammers for patent infringement, not the violation of a license (which, without "damages", is likely to be resolved by revocation of the license, something corporate entities can play with easily).
We should treat SPAM differently because it can, and probably will, cost the end-user a lot of money when he ends up paying for bandwidth use.
When I get snail-mail spam (not in caps because it's slightly less evil) I may have the inconvenience of picking it up, and then throwing it away, but I don't pay postage.
Unfortunately, in the Internet the receiver, and everyone in the middle, also pays in resources, and since most users pay for their bandwidth indirectly (and will soon pay directly), it increases the cost of Internet for the consumer. The consumer is paying to read ads he doesn't want to read in the first place and that are not subsidizing any service, and that's not good.
Imagine if you were forced to accept collect-calls and every single tele-marketer in the nation took advantage of that.
The Internet may be self-policing, but we still reserve the right to prosecute for "real world crimes". If a website systematically uses my credit card information for identity/credit fraud, I want them to be legally prosecuted, "filtering them" (not buying from them and spreading the word) is not enough.
SPAM should be treated just like having someone stealing your cable connection, electricity, water or other utilities. There are real-world, monetary damages, which may be small or may accumulate to something significant over time, but either way it's not legal and there may be some penalties involved.
The alternative is regulating through code, but redefining the email standard so as to avoid SPAM would be problematic and (at least the solutions that come to mind) possibly raise some privacy issues.
As a lot of people have to repeat every once in a while: Java != Javascript. Java has nothing to do with Javascript, actually (nothing more than with, say, CShell). The name of the latter was a marketing gimmick.
That said, Java earned a bad reputation from being used in Applets all over the Net, which are victims of every defect Java has (or at least used to have until very, very recently).
One of those defects is that Swing really, really sucks. Now, it's design may be great or not, and it may be full of design patterns or not, but it has been, up to 1.3, very "buggy and slow". You can cope with the buginess if you need to, but it will make it even slower.
AWT too, but at least AWT didn't claim it had fixed the problem when it did not.
Another defect, which is not exactly Java's, is that Applets on the web were mostly programming experiments by novices in both the language and programming. Java was hip, and everyone who had a webpage had to have an Applet. They were bound to be buggy. And the circumstances didn't help.
The world was exposed to millions of "Hello World" desktop applications brought online by Sun's Magnificent Hype Machine, programmed in a cranky and immature GUI library (AWT/early-Swing), with incompatible JVMs (Microsoft's), slowly downloaded to the client's machine through a 28.8K-56K modem... all increasing the amount of frustration when the "ClassNotFound" exception presents the user with a dazzling gray square.
Java is a nice language, but for desktop applications it's just not a great choice, unless 1.4 delivered the promise (I have yet to try it for desktop apps). But that promise was there with 1.3, and even with the birth of Swing.
I'm sure it is technically possible to use it for medium-big applications, there are plenty (big) IDEs written in Java that are very, very usable. I also hear very good comments about some non-Sun libraries, but I'm afraid no one really cares.
Java for the desktop is seen as the wrong solution to the problem, and will remain so for a long time even if they fix it, thanks to Sun's mistake. Java's place as the right solution seems to be on the server, where it's definitely not buggy nor terribly slow, with the desktop as a thin client (SOAP, JSP) implemented in something else.
I think the CDBTAAPGEHNASE or whatever the SSSCA is called these days will outlaw any hardware/software that does not implement a copyright management system approved by (read designed by) the RIAA/MPAA.
This means that directly or indirectly they get to decide which alternatives for protection are available, the minimum cost of recording devices (even outright outlaw recording technologies as "fundamentally insecure"), and their availability in the market.
The small documentary studio would not survive a dramatic increase in the cost of recording and reproduction technologies. And even if the startup band is able to afford recording at a licensed and approved studio, their costs of distribution would be higher and their available licenses would be restricted to the options pre-packaged by the studios in the technology.
Is Tomcat integration available for the new Apache? If not, do they plan to release the module (be it webapp or something else) soon?
Also, a pub/bar is more of a social setting than a restaurant. Part of the deal is bothering the bartender with your life, or using the "let me get a drink" excuse to cruise the bar, or the "can I get you a drink?" to talk to someone of the opposite sex just enough to hear the "not interested" part. Having an excuse to move around the bar lets you interact with other people, even (specially) if they're strangers.
"Automating" the re-fill would not be a convenience but a hassle, it would remove a great part of the ritual from the whole bar-thing. It's not like we have a lot of excuses left... going to the bathroom is a perfectly valid but too attractive excuse to use in public. Since the whole point of going to a bar is the ritual, that's probably not a good idea.
In a restaurant, you normally don't interact with other customers. Contacting the waiter/waitress may actually be an excercise in acrobatics and gesticulation, but it's definitely a disposable part of the restaurant ritual: you go there to eat and interact with those at your table, any moment interacting with someone else is usually an interruption and minimizing it makes sense.
Star Control II? bah! I want a mini-series based on STARFLIGHT!
Endurium dealers, Spemin politics... I want to know how did the Ulteck ally with the Gazertoids, did the Elowans know about what happened to them, and how did the Ancient Ones manage to make ruins if they're just sitting rocks in the first place?
if (w.isPregnant())
{
man.pack();
man.setName("John Smith");
man.setAddress(null);
town.remove(man);
}
Now, if that had been posted as an April's Fool story instead of a comment to a very lame one, I might at least have found a point for the whole April 1st on Slashdot idea this week.
The joke is in the moderation.
Actually, it has nothing to do with the OSS definition, just as it has nothing to do with the Apple contract. It's just hard to deal contractually with minors directly.
A minor is not bound by a contract, because of his/her status as a minor. Apparently only the adult part is bound by the contract.
Therefore, a minor is not bound by, say, the GPL, to release the code he/she takes for a closed-source project. The licensing of copyright is tricky, to say the least, if he/she decides to violate the GPL...
I'm not sure whether the copyright licensing never took place, if it took place but is cancelled after the violation (with previous compliant work valid) without legal repercusions (because of the minor status), if it took place but is retroactively cancelled (as if it never took place, I guess), or maybe you could actually take the kid to court and see if he can be treated as an adult on a per-case basis.
I know one thing: it's so messy I probably wouldn't want to get a lawyer to deal with it.
Now Stallman created the GPL to "battle propietary software" or something like that. So it's doubtful that a minor will be taking over the world with a propietary software monopolist company, because of the same contractual difficulties.
So it would not be a matter of whether the GPL (or any other "open source" license) is appliable to minors or not. It's not. It's a matter of whether you care about minors breaking your license. Apple does.
The contract/license is not a legal contract anymore, it's more of a "gentlemen's agreement", and Apple (like anyone else) has all the right to be careful entering such deals if they want to.
Actually, the Oscars are usually given to the actors that everyone thinks should have gotten it the previous years. It's meant to be that way: it allows market analysis, and it builds anticipation?
So it really doesn't matter much if the performance on the current year was his best or not. Denzel Washington got one because the Academy figured they had ignored him long enough, and the mainstream public expected it.
I think they ignored Crowe for some time as well, and they will ignore Will Smith for a long time to come.
I'm not entirely sure the last is a bad thing, I have yet to see "Ali" but I confess I'm extremely skeptic over his capacity to play someone other than his I-day/MIB/TV-series persona.
I agree that Fortran 90 could have been allowed, but I'm not surprised.
Students simply don't know Fortran, it isn't taugth anymore. I seriously doubt it would be such a great advantage in these problems, but if it were it would put most students at a dissadvantage just because they don't know it anymore than they know COBOL. Sort of like allowing Perl for a string-manipulation competition if only 1/25 students had ever seen a line of Perl.
I don't think you have to know Fortran if you're a problem solver either. It's really not that great, and it doesn't seem so different to me as to give completely different approaches to the same problem. So I see no good reason why it should be taught more frequently either.
Sure, Fortran 90, is quite a decent language, and it's worth checking it out; far from the horror stories I had been told about Fortran, or the old Fortran code I had to read through a couple of times.
But there are many good languages out there, and since there are resource constraints, there's really no good reason to include Fortran if it doesn't bring something drastic to the table.
Four C-like languages are already plenty to handle. They were chosen obviously because they're the C-like languages used to teach in 99% of CS/CE courses.
I wonder, though, at the restriction of using only C-like languages. Being a collegiate contest, I don't think assuming some exposure to functional languages would be taking too much of a change, and that can definitely make a difference. Allowing SML/CLISP/Haskell would be rather interesting, if they make good problems.
A threat is not sufficient to be considered a crime, as many a harassed person knows ("Sorry ma'am, we can't do a thing, he has done nothing yet"). It may increase suspicion, but it is not a crime.
Maybe you can prove it's blackmail, which is more systematic, and actually criminal. But still blackmail is not murder, terrorism, or drug dealing. Really, it's like comparing a drug misdemeanor (personal use of marihuana) with controlling a drug cartel.
Selling products to schools is VERY FAR from selling adictive drugs. There is no physiological effect, no addiction (unless you derive an unnatural pleasure from using Word), no violation of regulations, no recruitment and training of gangs to deal the product, no violence, no theft to pay for the merchandise... really, what the hell are you talking about? Do you have any idea of the effects that illegal drug dealing have at schools?
It isn't clear where the dividing line is between skipping lunch today and starving to death in poverty, but it's very clear that somewhere in the middle there is such a line separating them as two different kinds of problems.
Microsoft will probably be fined and "jailed" (receive some restrictions on the liberty of their business). Just like in any court, the severity of those penalties will depend on a lot of things, and can even be quite lenient.
All the other consequences have nothing to do with the government: getting fired, divorced, losing your kids, segregated, life sucks... all these are because of reactions of society (the market) to your actions.
Microsoft will probably have to face creditors (although they do have cash), angry stockholders, fleeing customers, doubting partners and investors, etc. They will never be the "safe company" they were before. Maybe it will be bad, maybe it will not. But these will be market reactions, not government punishment.
Asking for the government to enforce these things is exactly equivalent to asking to government to make sure that every convict's life is destroyed once they're convicted. That is NOT a good idea. The government has a job, don't give it aother one.
Now, conduct restrictions (privations of liberty) will be in order. Whether they are harsh, or tame, will depend on the court, but I am inclined to think they will be tame at this moment.
If you don't like what Microsoft did, by all means do what you may to get the appropiate legal punishment for the company. Just don't go around talking about revoking charters and dissolving companies, because it's silly at best, and at worst it has all the charm and intelligence of a lynch-mob.
A dissolution of Microsoft would harm the stockholders the most, and these are not executives or Gates (who has enough cash anyway), but the retired elderly, middle-class families with college funds for their kids, etc. Not only that, but it would delegitimize the whole antitrust process as much as letting Microsoft go would (will?).
Actually, I think they do ast the question. They freeze the assets while they find out, though.
On the credit issue, it's not the government action, or business. If Microsoft is, say, broken up, I'm sure there will be a lot of creditors with something to say to the new two companies with falling stock. But none of these consequences are government enacted.
Microsoft's business tactics are quite different from those entities. Can we really compare hardball business tactics with murder, terrorism and drug dealing in schools? I think we're losing perspective here.
Microsoft should face a punitive damage. When you're convicted of grand theft you face a punitive damage (you can go to jail). This punitive damage can vary greatly and be very harsh, nor not. But it is different and independent from taking away whatever you have legitimately acquired.
Also, getting an application to the point where it's "user-friendly" enough not to need support costs a lot of money, and not exactly in development.
Linux depends on relatively tech-oriented people to not only develop the software, but also to use it, and design the user interface according to what they need.
These are people that are usually intelligent enough to read the documentation and cope with an interface that might not be exactly intuitive. These are also people with their own subcultures, that find intuitive what the mainstream definitely does not: why does more read text? because it's more than cat. why less? because less is more! now let's learn 120 keyboard shortcuts so we can save 2 minutes a day of typing time!.
The "scratch an itch" model is not the best way to design a user interface for end-users. Even when an attempt is made, quite a lot of the techie users complain about the "dumbing down" of the interface, for good reason... they have different needs than the typical end-user. It follows that they will develop to meet their own needs.
Of course, attempts are made to develop "end-user-friendly" interfaces in open source programs, but the most successful of those UIs happen to be copies of someone else's design (KDE/GNOME/etc).
Designing a really good new GUI for end-users, be it for the OS or for some graphical/art app or something like that, requires input from non-tech-oriented users. People who are not likely to be using Linux in the first place, and who are also unlikely to become beta testers without a very good reason.
I can think only of two good reasons to get a LOT of users to provide input, assuming you have the interface designers to analyze the data: you're have enough marketing to convince people to volunteer (costs money), or you give them money (costs money).
The GPL-model tends to save on development costs, but I don't see how could it save on these expenses, and it obviously takes away a revenue source that covers for it (and since user-friendliness means less support, the new revenue source is in direct conflict with that goal). That would seem to indicate that the GPL is not appropiate for such applications, unless their UIs are imitations of propietary ones.
Whatever you say, but please, please, please don't use the sentence "uncensored movie of Gates/Ballmer cracking loose" ever again.
If you steal 25K, and you are proven to have stolen 25K, the government will take the 25K back. But they will not take away your house, your car, your children's college funds or your 401K.
Microsoft may have been declared to be an anticompetitive monopoly by the government, but it is not clear, in monetary terms, how much they owe to being a monopoly and how much to being just a successful software company.
You have to remember, Microsoft wasn't always a monopoly, and I don't think the case was clear on when exactly did it become one.
So, from all those billion dollars they have made since that old version of BASIC, how much would you say is directly linked to the crime? It's probably impossible to prove, and trying to figure it out would probably cost about as much in time, lawyers and accountants. That's why the federal government doesn't get into that mess and lets the respective parties deal with it in civil lawsuits, since civil lawsuits are more liberal with the definition of "facts".
Java isn't the greatest language anyway and will soon be phased out in favor of modern functional languages (O'Caml, Haskell, SML, etc.)Java isn't the greatest language anyway and will soon be phased out in favor of modern functional languages (O'Caml, Haskell, SML, etc.)
Modern as in LISP?
I'm not trying to point out chronology (ML is fairly new, LISP is fairly old). I mean that, if I'm not mistaken, LISP has had most of that functionality for decades, is better proven as a practical language, has a very rich library and an active community... and yet, imperative languages rule the world (LISP is not the phaser, it is the phasee).
I love SML; although I'm fairly new at it and have trouble thinking about how to use it in some applications, for most mathematical functions and list operations there's really no comparison in clarity.
But I'm really skeptical about these languages displacing imperative programming simply because there is no need for them to do that. They don't solve any problem that is not more easily solved by integrating some of their features into imperative programming (recursion, garbage collection, etc).
People are happy with C-like languages, and imperative prog. has become the euclidean geometry of computer science: it's the layman's world, and alternatives are constrained to very small and specialized circles, with new benefits and discoveries percolating down slowly.