> In most civilized countries of which I know, fraud (i.e., falsifying information to get access to goods and/or services to which one is not normally entitled) is illegal.
But falsifying information to justify the invasion of another country is OK.
> One of my profs said he was giving a speach at Dijkstra's school. He wanted to make sure Dijkstra didn't attend (apperently Dijkstra was an asshole)
I don't know about 'asshole', but he certainly qualified as a curmudgeon. Famously, if he was at a talk and the speaker put up a slide that had more than one color in it, Djikstra would interrupt and ask what the different colors meant. (I actually had an opportunity to see him do that once.)
I have repeatedly heard rumors at second and third remove to the effect that at least some of the CS faculty at Texas found him "very divisive", but the rumors never told me what the context was. Decisions at faculty meetings, I would guess.
But it shouldn't surprise anyone on Slashdot to hear that some CS geniuses have a contrary streak.
> > If you buy a house in certain ritzy neighborhoods the purchase contract requires that you not sell the house to anyone of certain 'undesirable' ethnicities
> If you're in the USA, I wouldn't try enforcing that in court - housing discrimination due to race is illegal.
OK, maybe the courts don't tolerate it anymore. (I was surprised that such arrangements were legal when I first heard of them.)
The underlying concept that I was groping for was "covenant running with the land", described here as -
A covenant runs with the land when the burdens, benefits, or both pass to succeeding holders of the estate.
So the "running" nature of the GPL is not actually a legal innovation.
Of course, "covenants running with the land" may have explicit legislative endorsements in land ownership laws, in which case a court might not be willing to generalize the concept to copyrighted material. But the basic idea of the GPL isn't the legal novelty that everyone presumes it is.
> That's all well and good except that the GPL, being a bit of a non-standard contract, has never been tested in court.
It's not that odd. If you buy a house in certain ritzy neighborhoods the purchase contract requires that you not sell the house to anyone of certain 'undesirable' ethnicities, and the contract has an inductive application just like the GPL.
There may be a legal hole in the GPL, but if so I doubt that it's the part everyone is in doubt about.
> I think it makes sense to patent business processes, to a certain extent. If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.
In the USA the justification for patents is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". It's not clear to me that such raw protectionism promotes such progress.
Now if a patent encourages a business to license some procedure that would otherwise remain a trade secret with little chance of anyone else ever thinking of it, then that's good - it promotes progress in the useful arts. But shite like a patent on one-click shopping is no more than a letter of marque for boarding and plundering the competition.
Unfortunately the ruling class in the USA has developed a notion that ideas are like plots of land, and each should have a clearly defined "owner" with exclusive exploitation rights. That's going to stiffle progress in the useful arts rather than promote it.
Re: .NET was a success, Microsoft-style
on
.Net:... 3 Years Later
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> By announcing.NET as vaporware, Microsoft prevented any other vendors from doing anything similar. Not only that, but because ".NET" was going to be The Next Big Thing, they prevented other software houses from making any sales of existing working software while everyone waited for.NET to come along.
> This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the.NET case they succeeded on a collosal scale.
Yep. In particular,.net was launched at the height of the.craze to prevent people from switching over to Sun, who promised the same things MS did with.net.
Those with memories three years and one day long will remember that right up until the day MS announced.net they were ridiculing Sun for suggesting the very same thing. Some of us called attention to it at the time.
Classic application of vaporware, folks. And Sun didn't jerk the carpet out from under MS's feet, to chalk.net up as a rip-roaring success, even if no-one uses it.
> If they are charging so little to OEMs but so much to consumers, they could probably drop the consumer price down to $50 for XP Pro and find the piracy rate dropping! Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50? And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
The market value of an operating system these days is $0.00 plus the bandwidth of a big download. A $50 OS is overpriced by approximately $50.
Or maybe by more than $50, since Microsoft appears willing to pay governments to use their OS whenever another option is getting serious consideration.
> If I recall correctly, problem was when the first judge talked out of turn to the press, the government felt they had to ease up on the restrictions so people wouldn't feel that they were being too hard on Microsoft.
No, you're rolling two distinct events into one.
1) The judge did talk to the press in circumstances not generally deemed appropriate, but all that did was give legs to the appeal. The end result was that a higher court appointed another judge to give a second opinion on the penalty. IIRC the higher court didn't actually find fault with any of the lower court's decisions; they just didn't think the necessary proprieties had been observed. So they sent it back for a "clean room" second round in a different judge's court. There was absolutely nothing in the higher court's ruling that would have kept that second judge from "forking" Microsoft.
2) The second event was that by the time things got to the second judge's court there had been a regime change in the USA and the new regime's DoJ threw over the case and offered a handslap settlement to Microsoft, even though the Findings of Fact would have almost certainly let them get a hardball settlement if that had fit in with their new bosses' ideology. The new judge didn't see anything wrong with the proposed settlement and ignored the critics who pointed out the inevitable outcome...
...and here we are today.
Massachusets, IIRC, was the only state that didn't cave in somewhere along the way. Some never signed on; some did but then withdrew before it ever got to court (e.g. Texas, purportedly at the influence of Michael Dell); most of those left at the end of the trial signed off on the wrist slap.
All this from memory... I'm sure someone will correct me wherever I'm wrong.
> How is the Libertarian Party any different that the Republican party? Both parties believe in Dog-Eat-Dog/Survival of the Fittest.
As best I can tell, the econo-Libertarians believe in "survival of the fittest" and the econo-Republicans believe in "survival of whoever is currently on top".
But that's a subtle distinction; as you suggest, they're both just a "might makes right" ideology applied to the economy.
BTW, I qualified both groups as "econo-", since both are umbrella groups that also cover people interested in other agendas than the 'inalienable right' to get or stay filthy rich without regard to the effect on other people.
> Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law. The question, though, is how much is "enough" and do we REALLY need to go through all of the heavy handed law enforcement attempts before this happens?
How many people do you suppose are in prison right now for smoking pot, and how long has that enforcement been going on?
> Can't the law makers see for once, that this is what the PEOPLE want and step up to the plate to do their job?
Most of them will take an interest exactly when they think the number of votes the current arrangement costs them will hurt worse than the number of lobbying dollars an alternative tack would cost them.
> But is there any way of making gtk+2 look like gtk+1's default theme? Everyone seems more interested in making really fancy themes. But I rather like gtk+1's old grey theme, whereas gtk+2's default is vomit-inducing.
What is the GTK2 default theme? I know Red Hat 9 comes with a v-i theme that's hard as hell to change ("hard" as in "unintuitive", it comes up as a common question on Usenet); is that what you're talking about?
At any rate I've been able to make several nice GTK1 themes work under GTK2 by simply copying $WHEREVER/$THEMNAME/gtk recursively to $WHEREVER/$THEMNAME/gtk-2.0. That may not work for everything, but it worked for a couple of my old faves, one of which I'm using under GTK+ 2.2 even as I write. Pick your theme and give it a try.
Getting RH9 to see them is another problem altogether...
> My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too. > It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?
Related notion, now that I'm finally running versions of stuff that supports the much-touted anti-aliasing, I find it annoying as hell that my cursor has a fuzzy cloud around it whenever it's over a bright white background. Is that an inherent drawback of AA, or just a poor implementation?
> It might be of more benefit to everyone if the GTK people focussed instead on overall useability, which is lacking in many places. Once the interface is as refined as, say, that of OS X, we can concentrate on the eye-candy.
While I don't dispute the underlying sentiment, wouldn't that actually be an issue for the appplication people rather than the GTK people? Aren't there enough people hacking on FOSS software that individuals can afford to scratch an itch?
> A full, easily exploitable security hole in MacOS X. Now all those windoids will have no reason not to switch, as MacOS X now provides all the features of Windows, including a security hole.
And think how much faster the exploits will run on a G5!
> They give a hoot because it can help predict the performance of higher MHz machines when they become available.
> So when some NASA folks who use Jet3D are buying hardware a year from now and see they can buy a 3 GHz G5 or a 4.4 GHz P4 they'll be able to extrapolate performance to some degree.
Except that you can't really interpolate that far out. Our nGHz systems would be real dogs if cache, memory, an memory bus hadn't scaled up enormously over the years.
Which component is the bottleneck in the applications they are going to be purchasing for, how will that bottleneck scale up, and will it still be the bottleneck after the scaling?
Slashdot Mirror
> In most civilized countries of which I know, fraud (i.e., falsifying information to get access to goods and/or services to which one is not normally entitled) is illegal.
But falsifying information to justify the invasion of another country is OK.
> One of my profs said he was giving a speach at Dijkstra's school. He wanted to make sure Dijkstra didn't attend (apperently Dijkstra was an asshole)
I don't know about 'asshole', but he certainly qualified as a curmudgeon. Famously, if he was at a talk and the speaker put up a slide that had more than one color in it, Djikstra would interrupt and ask what the different colors meant. (I actually had an opportunity to see him do that once.)
I have repeatedly heard rumors at second and third remove to the effect that at least some of the CS faculty at Texas found him "very divisive", but the rumors never told me what the context was. Decisions at faculty meetings, I would guess.
But it shouldn't surprise anyone on Slashdot to hear that some CS geniuses have a contrary streak.
You can read more about this here.
> They will blame everyone and everything, except the two causes:
> 1) the people who teased them to death for years.
I thought people who suffered excessive childhood teasing grew up to be programmers.
> If you want to go on a huge killing spree and kill lots of innocent people as a "Warrior of Freedom" sign up for the United States Army.
Remember the joke on the old recruiting ad?
So the "running" nature of the GPL is not actually a legal innovation.> > If you buy a house in certain ritzy neighborhoods the purchase contract requires that you not sell the house to anyone of certain 'undesirable' ethnicities
> If you're in the USA, I wouldn't try enforcing that in court - housing discrimination due to race is illegal.
OK, maybe the courts don't tolerate it anymore. (I was surprised that such arrangements were legal when I first heard of them.)
The underlying concept that I was groping for was "covenant running with the land", described here as -
Of course, "covenants running with the land" may have explicit legislative endorsements in land ownership laws, in which case a court might not be willing to generalize the concept to copyrighted material. But the basic idea of the GPL isn't the legal novelty that everyone presumes it is.
> That's all well and good except that the GPL, being a bit of a non-standard contract, has never been tested in court.
It's not that odd. If you buy a house in certain ritzy neighborhoods the purchase contract requires that you not sell the house to anyone of certain 'undesirable' ethnicities, and the contract has an inductive application just like the GPL.
There may be a legal hole in the GPL, but if so I doubt that it's the part everyone is in doubt about.
> > Ahhh... I feel the slashdot effect. Since this doc has tables, I put a mirror up.
> And another, 'cos what the hell
Could someone post a decision table for which link I should click?
> I think it makes sense to patent business processes, to a certain extent. If I have a company that manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I have a competitor who manufactures low profit margin widgets, and I devise a business process that streamlines my manufacturing to eke out more profits, I won't want my competitor to have that business process.
In the USA the justification for patents is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". It's not clear to me that such raw protectionism promotes such progress.
Now if a patent encourages a business to license some procedure that would otherwise remain a trade secret with little chance of anyone else ever thinking of it, then that's good - it promotes progress in the useful arts. But shite like a patent on one-click shopping is no more than a letter of marque for boarding and plundering the competition.
Unfortunately the ruling class in the USA has developed a notion that ideas are like plots of land, and each should have a clearly defined "owner" with exclusive exploitation rights. That's going to stiffle progress in the useful arts rather than promote it.
> By announcing
> This is hardly a new strategy for Microsoft. And in the
Yep. In particular,
Those with memories three years and one day long will remember that right up until the day MS announced
Classic application of vaporware, folks. And Sun didn't jerk the carpet out from under MS's feet, to chalk
> Nope. They play the law like a cheap violin.
I'd like to reserve this spot for a joke conflating "violin", "violation", and "inaction", which I can't quite work out at the moment.
> > There was absolutely nothing in the higher court's ruling that would have kept that second judge from "forking" Microsoft.
> Actually, the appeals court threw out the "tying" charge, which was the lynchpin for the breakup order.
Ah, thanks. I didn't remember that.
(BTW, I see you opted for Definition B of "forked".)
> If they are charging so little to OEMs but so much to consumers, they could probably drop the consumer price down to $50 for XP Pro and find the piracy rate dropping! Who here wouldn't buy a legal copy of XP Pro for $50? And wouldn't you not mind the bugs as much, concidering how much you had payed for it?
The market value of an operating system these days is $0.00 plus the bandwidth of a big download. A $50 OS is overpriced by approximately $50.
Or maybe by more than $50, since Microsoft appears willing to pay governments to use their OS whenever another option is getting serious consideration.
> If I recall correctly, problem was when the first judge talked out of turn to the press, the government felt they had to ease up on the restrictions so people wouldn't feel that they were being too hard on Microsoft.
No, you're rolling two distinct events into one.
1) The judge did talk to the press in circumstances not generally deemed appropriate, but all that did was give legs to the appeal. The end result was that a higher court appointed another judge to give a second opinion on the penalty. IIRC the higher court didn't actually find fault with any of the lower court's decisions; they just didn't think the necessary proprieties had been observed. So they sent it back for a "clean room" second round in a different judge's court. There was absolutely nothing in the higher court's ruling that would have kept that second judge from "forking" Microsoft.
2) The second event was that by the time things got to the second judge's court there had been a regime change in the USA and the new regime's DoJ threw over the case and offered a handslap settlement to Microsoft, even though the Findings of Fact would have almost certainly let them get a hardball settlement if that had fit in with their new bosses' ideology. The new judge didn't see anything wrong with the proposed settlement and ignored the critics who pointed out the inevitable outcome...
Massachusets, IIRC, was the only state that didn't cave in somewhere along the way. Some never signed on; some did but then withdrew before it ever got to court (e.g. Texas, purportedly at the influence of Michael Dell); most of those left at the end of the trial signed off on the wrist slap.
All this from memory... I'm sure someone will correct me wherever I'm wrong.
> How is the Libertarian Party any different that the Republican party? Both parties believe in Dog-Eat-Dog/Survival of the Fittest.
As best I can tell, the econo-Libertarians believe in "survival of the fittest" and the econo-Republicans believe in "survival of whoever is currently on top".
But that's a subtle distinction; as you suggest, they're both just a "might makes right" ideology applied to the economy.
BTW, I qualified both groups as "econo-", since both are umbrella groups that also cover people interested in other agendas than the 'inalienable right' to get or stay filthy rich without regard to the effect on other people.
> Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law. The question, though, is how much is "enough" and do we REALLY need to go through all of the heavy handed law enforcement attempts before this happens?
How many people do you suppose are in prison right now for smoking pot, and how long has that enforcement been going on?
> Can't the law makers see for once, that this is what the PEOPLE want and step up to the plate to do their job?
Most of them will take an interest exactly when they think the number of votes the current arrangement costs them will hurt worse than the number of lobbying dollars an alternative tack would cost them.
Welcome to the lobbyocracy.
> But is there any way of making gtk+2 look like gtk+1's default theme? Everyone seems more interested in making really fancy themes. But I rather like gtk+1's old grey theme, whereas gtk+2's default is vomit-inducing.
What is the GTK2 default theme? I know Red Hat 9 comes with a v-i theme that's hard as hell to change ("hard" as in "unintuitive", it comes up as a common question on Usenet); is that what you're talking about?
At any rate I've been able to make several nice GTK1 themes work under GTK2 by simply copying $WHEREVER/$THEMNAME/gtk recursively to $WHEREVER/$THEMNAME/gtk-2.0. That may not work for everything, but it worked for a couple of my old faves, one of which I'm using under GTK+ 2.2 even as I write. Pick your theme and give it a try.
Getting RH9 to see them is another problem altogether...
> My experience with shadow dropping menus is that the overall usuabily and visual quality degenerates. The underlying text structures are worse to read and after 16 hours in front of the screen your eyes start to hurt. And it seems to me that it reduces the menu contrast, which I personally don't like, too.
> It's rather strange that people always want to add this feature. In real live you wouldn't read a news paper in blinding sunlight just to see the pages drop a shadow, would you ?
Related notion, now that I'm finally running versions of stuff that supports the much-touted anti-aliasing, I find it annoying as hell that my cursor has a fuzzy cloud around it whenever it's over a bright white background. Is that an inherent drawback of AA, or just a poor implementation?
> It might be of more benefit to everyone if the GTK people focussed instead on overall useability, which is lacking in many places. Once the interface is as refined as, say, that of OS X, we can concentrate on the eye-candy.
While I don't dispute the underlying sentiment, wouldn't that actually be an issue for the appplication people rather than the GTK people? Aren't there enough people hacking on FOSS software that individuals can afford to scratch an itch?
> A full, easily exploitable security hole in MacOS X. Now all those windoids will have no reason not to switch, as MacOS X now provides all the features of Windows, including a security hole.
And think how much faster the exploits will run on a G5!
> Uh... sorry. Chopsticks have been in use for well over 1000 years, and probably longer.
Whereas we've only had 'forks' for the past 30...
> "Blessed are those who seek to associate themselves with the latest techno-fad: for they shall be called 3L33T for at least Another Half Hour.
Andy would be jealous: that's twice what anyone has a right to expect.
> 1) Buy SCO and read their evil plans before making them all walk the plank.
Hell, I'd buy SCO just for the fun of nelsoning McBride them after looking at the source code without signing an NDA.
> They give a hoot because it can help predict the performance of higher MHz machines when they become available.
> So when some NASA folks who use Jet3D are buying hardware a year from now and see they can buy a 3 GHz G5 or a 4.4 GHz P4 they'll be able to extrapolate performance to some degree.
Except that you can't really interpolate that far out. Our nGHz systems would be real dogs if cache, memory, an memory bus hadn't scaled up enormously over the years.
Which component is the bottleneck in the applications they are going to be purchasing for, how will that bottleneck scale up, and will it still be the bottleneck after the scaling?