Most users like Explorer because it does a good job of surfing the web for the user.
As a web developer I HATE IT. Explorer does NOT correctly support HTML standards, and contains a lot of code that imposes it's own view of how flawed code should be shown, often making up tags as it goes along. I cannot use IE as a development tool because it just flat out does not display HTML correctly! It also is extrodinarily crappy for Javascript debugging.
IE has had the affect of encouraging sloppy HTML coding habits - something that is going to bite the web in the ass when smaller web devices without the horsepower to run large browsers like IE become common.
This is a ridiculous statement. Redhat's revenues were $5.4 million with a loss of about $3 million for the quarter ending Nov 1999, Apple's sales for the same period were about $2.5 BILLION with a profit of about $183 million.
Apple as an operating company is 500 times the size of RedHat, and has a profit stream more than 30 times the size of Redhat's total revenues.
Doesn't anyone either READ or THINK before editorializing in the postings in these news articles?
The headline on the article is "Supreme Court Weakens Design Patents" However the article says NO SUCH THING!!! The article talks about trademarks, WHICH ARE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM DESIGN PATENTS for crissakes.
In addition it goes on to say this ruling applies "until it (the item) has acquired distinctiveness such that the marketplace naturally perceives the design to be a designation of product source". Well duh! I would like see any kind of reasonable proof of the concept that the iMac design has not acquired this distinctiveness in the market!!! How many people will not immediately know ON SIGHT from ANY angle that the source is Apple Computer!!!
The chances of this affecting Apple's case are similar to those of all my molecules' thermal vibration all lining up in the vertical direction at once!
The matter of agreeing with slashdotters in this case is without thought as well. MANY slashdotters sided with Apple on this - these iMac case clones are CLEARLY instances of attempted ripoff. PERIOD. There is no defense against copying such material. Any company producing a design that has achieved such recognition in the marketplace, as well as in popular culture iteslf (see the recent Time Magazine or articles on the recent Design trade show in NYC as to the importance of the iMac design) would fight tooth and nail to protect this identity. The iMac is achieving a level of recognition matched only by icons like the coke bottle.
ON TOP of all these errors, the Slashdot article that this item was linked to is in itself full of errors i.e.:iMac Look Protected by Copyright. WRONG. This is a trademark issue, NOT a copyright issue.
The fact is that trademark law is important for both companies and consumers. Without trademark law anyone would be free to sell any liquid they want in a copy of a Mountain Dew can. You would have NO protection against conterfeit labels on goods in the market. Trademarks are essential to a well ordered commerce, PERIOD.
This news item is one of the greatest negative examples of internet journalism I have ever seen.
But Sun claims a patent on assembling memory chips into modules?
I think that this statement in the Forbes article exposes the usual ignorance that the press and public (and many in the technical community) have regarding patents.
If you look at the actual Sun patents mentioned elsewhere in this thread, they are much more specific - for example they cover only memory modules with certain unusual features, such as a 200 pin design. Clearly Sun does not own a patent on "assembling memory chips into modules" as the article claimed - rather they own a patent on a very specific type of module that Kingston is producing.
Umm.. no. Did you even read what I wrote? Patents should be given only to individuals not representing a corporation.
Your proposal has a lot of very severe problems. For example, how are you going to get corporations to fund research into new technologies when they don't end up owning the rights to the technology. If you actually are succesful in preventing corporations from owning patents, it would be the end of commercial R&D in the US, which would result in much slower rates of technological progress - and economic growth. Look at the recent economic expansion we have had - the Federal Reserve believes that much of the credit for the combination of low unemployment and low inflation is ddue to increasing worker productivity fueled by technological change. Do you really want to throw that in the crapper?
Even under current law, patents are granted to individuals (the inventors) now. The way corporations end up owning the patents is that the inventors are working under standard employment contracts that require them to assign the rights to the patents to their employers. If you try eliminationg this, the employer will just change the provisions of the employment contract to something like requiring a royalty-free exclusive license from the employee.
Who would have thought that the spiral notebook would ever become obsolete when it came to schooling?
Alan Kay for one. He described exactly this in his Master's Thesis written in the '60s.
People have to realize that in terms of conceptual evolution, there has been very little new thought up since the early seventies in CompSci. All we have been doing has been implementing the ideas of people like Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart. What is Linux but a clone of a 30 year old OS? What has Microsoft or Apple done new that wasn't done first and Xerox PARC and SRI?
A patent applicant must show intent to actually use the patent. For utility patents, this means marketing and selling the device, other patents work as appropriate. No intent to use, no patent.
This would put hundreds of R&D companies out of business. For example, there are many small biotech companies who exist only to do R&D for large companies. They have no intention of ever manufacturing anything. This would be a total disaster for innovation. It woul also eliminate funding of university R&D programs by corporations.
A patent expires if the patent is not "used" as defined above within one year of its filing.
Impossibly burdensome on both the R&D process and the patent office. Guaranteed to create a whole new bureacracy and branch of the legal profession, along with expensive lawsuits. PLUS there is already a mechanism in place that achieves tha same effect - the patent office charges 'maintenance fees' on patents. If you want your patent to continue in force, you have to pay a fee every year to keep it active. It owrks; a quite review of the US Patent iles shows that most patents expire due to non-payment of the fees rather than lapse of the default 20 year time period.
five years for corporations
Better sell your stocks. You just wiped out the Pharmaceutical industry and crippled all industrial research. Legislation like this would destroy any technologically derived economic growth in the US.
The widespread, low-cost availability of the programmable computer has so dramatically lowered the cost of developing and deploying the products of original art that such innovations no longer present enough of a barrier to entry as to require the protections of patent law, and to the contrary, the burden of intellectual property law with respect to computer software now exceeds the burden of innovation.
Abolish software patents.
Non-sequiter.
The primary purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to disclose their invention. Software authors have often resorted to schemes such as encryption, restrictive license agreements and similar strategies to prevent their competitors from being able to copy the technologies they develop. KEEPING TECHNOLOGY SECRETS IF FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR PROGRESS.
The software patent may need reform, but if it is abolished we will all regret it.
whats its culture or ideals that make it different?
The point here is that American popular culture has been very much adopted by the rest of the world - American culture is not different because everyone copies it and incorporates it into their own culture. Many countries have had to introduce various laws to try to protect their own cultures from being overwhelmed by this phenomena. Radio and TV stations have to play local music, theatres must show locally produced films and so on. American English has become the Lingua Franca. The Internet is almost totally English, and in most civilized countries the ability to speak fluent English has become a requisite to finding a good job.
Is American culture different from other cultures? How could it be, since most other cultures have been subsumed by it to a large degree.
Asia. Particularly the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates
Printing press (ok, ok, but the Chinese kept it to themselves).
you answer yourself
Law.
code of Hammurabi - Asia
Rationalism.
Roots are in Egypt, which was the primary source for the works of Thales.
The nation state.
Sumeria.
Cars.
ok you got one right
Flight.
Which? Heavier than air was developed in US and Australia. A lot of people think it is likely that hot air ballons were used in India and China long before Europe.
How would the US be created if the european wouldn't have discovered it?
Give me a fscking break. America had been settled for 15,000 years by Asians before the Europeans arrived.
The first thing the Europeans did on arriving is export genocide, and wipe out native civilizations. Their explorers (DeSoto, Pizarro, etc.) were in fact just a bunch of butchering theives.
I have been a Canvas user for many years, well, at least up until version 5. Early on it was a nice vector drawing program, but then it got delusions of granduer. Version 5 especially. I was quite disappointed in the bugginess and bloat of version 5, so I switched to other programs. I'm glad to hear that the Linux version is going to be free beer, because I don't think I'd want to wrestle with a non-free version of Canvas again.
Man, dont a few thousand websites do that sort of thing?
Yup
How the Hell can Amazon think of patenting such a broad idea?
Maybe because the US Patent system gives inventors the right to patent something they invented. One thing I know for sure is that Amazon was very early on the web as a ecommerce company, and their affiliate program got a lot of press as being innovative when it first came out.
Americans, please tell me what "non-dairy" means? On the TV sometimes I see people adding somthing called "Non-Dairy Creamer" to coffee.
I can't possibly convey to you how un-appetising that sounds! How could somthing be a "creamer" and "non-dairy"? Is it soy, or totally artificial?
Non-dairy creamer is just a tribute to our truth in advertising and labelling laws. It indeed tastes like crap, and is primarily based on vegetable oil products (such as soy). It's used by people who don't have the ability to keep dairy based creamer around, such as office workers without access to a refrigerator, or the lactose intolerant. With increasing ethnic diversity in America, taht is making up a ever increasing percentage of the population. Only Mongols and North Europeans have the ability to digest the lactose in cow's milk.
The good news is that it is rapidly being pushed out of the market by irradiated dairy products that don't need refrigeration to prevent spoilage. The only problem with these milk products is that the fat globules tend to coagulate after a while at room temperature - which people wrongly interpet as spoilage.
If you think about it, if your a large company and you are looking to bundle an OS with your PC, that's a HUGE decision. Are you really going to go with choice B just because you can't immediatly get hold of choice A? It makes for an interesting story, but it just doesn't ring true if you think it through.
Large corporation or not, business is still conducted by people. The ability to feel 'safe' when dealing with a company or individual is crucial when you are making a deal. It is not at all far fetched to me that as a result of this incident, as well as their response from Microsoft and Gates that they decided that Microsoft (and Gates) were people that were a better fit with their way of doing things.
I am sure that some people have success with MS Exchange.
However my experience has been that it is CRAP.
My employer (a large multinational with about 30,000 employees world wide) uses exchange for both email and group applications.
The problems with this are legion. Exchange has a workable client for ONE and only ONE OS. Guess which. If you a non-Windows user, forget it. It's proprietary out the wazoo. There is a client for the Mac, but it is missing so many features compared to the Windows client you might as well forget it.
The servers we have are go through periods of unbelievable flakyness. Sometimes they will work fine for a few months. However if the 'troubles' start, forget it. The servers will be up and down for weeks at a time. And when they are up they will act as if they are running on a Commodore 64, not a high end Compaq server.
It has gotten to the point a couple of times where my company has threatened to sue Microsoft because of these reliability issues. Twice Microsoft flew engineers out from Redmond to try to try to get the systems working normally. Didn't make any difference.
I cannot believe that people use MS Exchange as an enterprise mail system of this nature. I think you would be MUCH better off with a Sendmail plus NNTP.
I read a statement that the attackers were obviously knowledgeable about both Unix and networks.
That suggests to me that the attackers were able to plant their zombie programs on Unix machines but not on NT ones.
I think that is nonsense. It's like something that Microsoft would post as a reason for buying NT in a FUD campaign.
There are plenty of programs like L0pht and BO 2000 that will turn your NT box into a zombie. The number of people that have had their Windows 9x machines compromised after putting them on a cable modem is legendary.
We've been examing our records and found that you have been complaining no numerous message boards and Usenet groups about our product. This is damaging and inflammatory to us. We're going to take away your software and there's nothing you can do about it. You'll be lucky if we don't call the police on you either.
In a case like this UCITA would be ruled unconstitutional.
I don't know how much the debugging symbols slow things down, but that are a several aspects to this that DO slow an application down. Aggressive optimizations make use of debuggers difficult. Use of assertions, checks for error returns and similar code, especially in tight loops can have a significant affect, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Most users like Explorer because it does a good job of surfing the web for the user.
As a web developer I HATE IT. Explorer does NOT correctly support HTML standards, and contains a lot of code that imposes it's own view of how flawed code should be shown, often making up tags as it goes along. I cannot use IE as a development tool because it just flat out does not display HTML correctly! It also is extrodinarily crappy for Javascript debugging.
IE has had the affect of encouraging sloppy HTML coding habits - something that is going to bite the web in the ass when smaller web devices without the horsepower to run large browsers like IE become common.
only lets the attackers read .asp or .asa files.
Read access to these files can be enough to allow a clever hacker to find further security holes in a web site.
Red Hat as a larger market share than Apple
This is a ridiculous statement. Redhat's revenues were $5.4 million with a loss of about $3 million for the quarter ending Nov 1999, Apple's sales for the same period were about $2.5 BILLION with a profit of about $183 million.
Apple as an operating company is 500 times the size of RedHat, and has a profit stream more than 30 times the size of Redhat's total revenues.
Whoop-de-do! I can get them for free off the web.
And you can't get RedHsat 6.2 Free off the web?
Doesn't anyone either READ or THINK before editorializing in the postings in these news articles?
:iMac Look Protected by Copyright. WRONG. This is a trademark issue, NOT a copyright issue.
The headline on the article is "Supreme Court Weakens Design Patents" However the article says NO SUCH THING!!! The article talks about trademarks, WHICH ARE A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM DESIGN PATENTS for crissakes.
In addition it goes on to say this ruling applies "until it (the item) has acquired distinctiveness such that the marketplace naturally perceives the design to be a designation of product source". Well duh! I would like see any kind of reasonable proof of the concept that the iMac design has not acquired this distinctiveness in the market!!! How many people will not immediately know ON SIGHT from ANY angle that the source is Apple Computer!!!
The chances of this affecting Apple's case are similar to those of all my molecules' thermal vibration all lining up in the vertical direction at once!
The matter of agreeing with slashdotters in this case is without thought as well. MANY slashdotters sided with Apple on this - these iMac case clones are CLEARLY instances of attempted ripoff. PERIOD. There is no defense against copying such material. Any company producing a design that has achieved such recognition in the marketplace, as well as in popular culture iteslf (see the recent Time Magazine or articles on the recent Design trade show in NYC as to the importance of the iMac design) would fight tooth and nail to protect this identity. The iMac is achieving a level of recognition matched only by icons like the coke bottle.
ON TOP of all these errors, the Slashdot article that this item was linked to is in itself full of errors i.e.
The fact is that trademark law is important for both companies and consumers. Without trademark law anyone would be free to sell any liquid they want in a copy of a Mountain Dew can. You would have NO protection against conterfeit labels on goods in the market. Trademarks are essential to a well ordered commerce, PERIOD.
This news item is one of the greatest negative examples of internet journalism I have ever seen.
But Sun claims a patent on assembling memory chips into modules?
I think that this statement in the Forbes article exposes the usual ignorance that the press and public (and many in the technical community) have regarding patents.
If you look at the actual Sun patents mentioned elsewhere in this thread, they are much more specific - for example they cover only memory modules with certain unusual features, such as a 200 pin design. Clearly Sun does not own a patent on "assembling memory chips into modules" as the article claimed - rather they own a patent on a very specific type of module that Kingston is producing.
Umm.. no. Did you even read what I wrote? Patents should be given only to individuals not representing a corporation.
Your proposal has a lot of very severe problems. For example, how are you going to get corporations to fund research into new technologies when they don't end up owning the rights to the technology. If you actually are succesful in preventing corporations from owning patents, it would be the end of commercial R&D in the US, which would result in much slower rates of technological progress - and economic growth. Look at the recent economic expansion we have had - the Federal Reserve believes that much of the credit for the combination of low unemployment and low inflation is ddue to increasing worker productivity fueled by technological change. Do you really want to throw that in the crapper?
Even under current law, patents are granted to individuals (the inventors) now. The way corporations end up owning the patents is that the inventors are working under standard employment contracts that require them to assign the rights to the patents to their employers. If you try eliminationg this, the employer will just change the provisions of the employment contract to something like requiring a royalty-free exclusive license from the employee.
Microsoft and Apple brought computing to the average individual.
Computing was brought to the average individual by the hardware innovations coming out of Shugart, Intel and so forth.
Who would have thought that the spiral notebook would ever become obsolete when it came to schooling?
Alan Kay for one. He described exactly this in his Master's Thesis written in the '60s.
People have to realize that in terms of conceptual evolution, there has been very little new thought up since the early seventies in CompSci. All we have been doing has been implementing the ideas of people like Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart. What is Linux but a clone of a 30 year old OS? What has Microsoft or Apple done new that wasn't done first and Xerox PARC and SRI?
Nothing.
A patent applicant must show intent to actually use the patent. For utility patents, this means marketing and selling the device, other patents work as appropriate. No intent to use, no patent.
This would put hundreds of R&D companies out of business. For example, there are many small biotech companies who exist only to do R&D for large companies. They have no intention of ever manufacturing anything. This would be a total disaster for innovation. It woul also eliminate funding of university R&D programs by corporations.
A patent expires if the patent is not "used" as defined above within one year of its filing.
Impossibly burdensome on both the R&D process and the patent office. Guaranteed to create a whole new bureacracy and branch of the legal profession, along with expensive lawsuits. PLUS there is already a mechanism in place that achieves tha same effect - the patent office charges 'maintenance fees' on patents. If you want your patent to continue in force, you have to pay a fee every year to keep it active. It owrks; a quite review of the US Patent iles shows that most patents expire due to non-payment of the fees rather than lapse of the default 20 year time period.
five years for corporations
Better sell your stocks. You just wiped out the Pharmaceutical industry and crippled all industrial research. Legislation like this would destroy any technologically derived economic growth in the US.
The widespread, low-cost availability of the programmable computer has so dramatically lowered the cost of developing and deploying the products of original art that such innovations no longer present enough of a barrier to entry as to require the protections of patent law, and to the contrary, the burden of intellectual property law with respect to computer software now exceeds the burden of innovation.
Abolish software patents.
Non-sequiter.
The primary purpose of patents is to encourage inventors to disclose their invention. Software authors have often resorted to schemes such as encryption, restrictive license agreements and similar strategies to prevent their competitors from being able to copy the technologies they develop. KEEPING TECHNOLOGY SECRETS IF FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR PROGRESS.
The software patent may need reform, but if it is abolished we will all regret it.
whats its culture or ideals that make it different?
The point here is that American popular culture has been very much adopted by the rest of the world - American culture is not different because everyone copies it and incorporates it into their own culture. Many countries have had to introduce various laws to try to protect their own cultures from being overwhelmed by this phenomena. Radio and TV stations have to play local music, theatres must show locally produced films and so on. American English has become the Lingua Franca. The Internet is almost totally English, and in most civilized countries the ability to speak fluent English has become a requisite to finding a good job.
Is American culture different from other cultures? How could it be, since most other cultures have been subsumed by it to a large degree.
Try Africa (Egypt)
Enhanced agriculture.
Asia. Particularly the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates
Printing press (ok, ok, but the Chinese kept it to themselves).
you answer yourself
Law.
code of Hammurabi - Asia
Rationalism.
Roots are in Egypt, which was the primary source for the works of Thales.
The nation state.
Sumeria.
Cars.
ok you got one right
Flight.
Which? Heavier than air was developed in US and Australia. A lot of people think it is likely that hot air ballons were used in India and China long before Europe.
Rockets.
what do you think Chinese fireworks are?
How would the US be created if the european wouldn't have discovered it?
Give me a fscking break. America had been settled for 15,000 years by Asians before the Europeans arrived.
The first thing the Europeans did on arriving is export genocide, and wipe out native civilizations. Their explorers (DeSoto, Pizarro, etc.) were in fact just a bunch of butchering theives.
Hmmm -
I have been a Canvas user for many years, well, at least up until version 5. Early on it was a nice vector drawing program, but then it got delusions of granduer. Version 5 especially. I was quite disappointed in the bugginess and bloat of version 5, so I switched to other programs. I'm glad to hear that the Linux version is going to be free beer, because I don't think I'd want to wrestle with a non-free version of Canvas again.
Man, dont a few thousand websites do that sort of thing?
Yup
How the Hell can Amazon think of patenting such a broad idea?
Maybe because the US Patent system gives inventors the right to patent something they invented. One thing I know for sure is that Amazon was very early on the web as a ecommerce company, and their affiliate program got a lot of press as being innovative when it first came out.
Americans, please tell me what "non-dairy" means? On the TV sometimes I see people adding somthing called "Non-Dairy Creamer" to coffee.
I can't possibly convey to you how un-appetising that sounds! How could somthing be a "creamer" and "non-dairy"? Is it soy, or totally artificial?
Non-dairy creamer is just a tribute to our truth in advertising and labelling laws. It indeed tastes like crap, and is primarily based on vegetable oil products (such as soy). It's used by people who don't have the ability to keep dairy based creamer around, such as office workers without access to a refrigerator, or the lactose intolerant. With increasing ethnic diversity in America, taht is making up a ever increasing percentage of the population. Only Mongols and North Europeans have the ability to digest the lactose in cow's milk.
The good news is that it is rapidly being pushed out of the market by irradiated dairy products that don't need refrigeration to prevent spoilage. The only problem with these milk products is that the fat globules tend to coagulate after a while at room temperature - which people wrongly interpet as spoilage.
If you think about it, if your a large company and you are looking to bundle an OS with your PC, that's a HUGE decision. Are you really going to go with choice B just because you can't immediatly get hold of choice A? It makes for an interesting story, but it just doesn't ring true if you think it through.
Large corporation or not, business is still conducted by people. The ability to feel 'safe' when dealing with a company or individual is crucial when you are making a deal. It is not at all far fetched to me that as a result of this incident, as well as their response from Microsoft and Gates that they decided that Microsoft (and Gates) were people that were a better fit with their way of doing things.
any g4 owners that got the dvd-rom scene have any comments on it as a removable media?
It's slowwww for use as normal removable media, but boy is it a sweet device for backup.
My last customer was using Exchange Servers (2)
I am sure that some people have success with MS Exchange.
However my experience has been that it is CRAP.
My employer (a large multinational with about 30,000 employees world wide) uses exchange for both email and group applications.
The problems with this are legion. Exchange has a workable client for ONE and only ONE OS. Guess which. If you a non-Windows user, forget it. It's proprietary out the wazoo. There is a client for the Mac, but it is missing so many features compared to the Windows client you might as well forget it.
The servers we have are go through periods of unbelievable flakyness. Sometimes they will work fine for a few months. However if the 'troubles' start, forget it. The servers will be up and down for weeks at a time. And when they are up they will act as if they are running on a Commodore 64, not a high end Compaq server.
It has gotten to the point a couple of times where my company has threatened to sue Microsoft because of these reliability issues. Twice Microsoft flew engineers out from Redmond to try to try to get the systems working normally. Didn't make any difference.
I cannot believe that people use MS Exchange as an enterprise mail system of this nature. I think you would be MUCH better off with a Sendmail plus NNTP.
I read a statement that the attackers were obviously knowledgeable about both Unix and networks.
That suggests to me that the attackers were able to plant their zombie programs on Unix machines but not on NT ones.
I think that is nonsense. It's like something that Microsoft would post as a reason for buying NT in a FUD campaign.
There are plenty of programs like L0pht and BO 2000 that will turn your NT box into a zombie. The number of people that have had their Windows 9x machines compromised after putting them on a cable modem is legendary.
We've been examing our records and found that you have been complaining no numerous message boards and Usenet groups about our product. This is damaging and inflammatory to us. We're going to take away your software and there's nothing you can do about it. You'll be lucky if we don't call the police on you either.
In a case like this UCITA would be ruled unconstitutional.
Congress shall make no law...
Five immortal words.
Well, this is a dilemma! Either support UCITA (and side with Microsoft) or oppose UCITA (and side with the MPAA).
What is the discerning Slashdotter to do?
I hesitate to suggest this in modern society, but could the answer be -
Read the legislation and think through the issues, then make up your own mind rather than have somebody do it for you.
?
Are you a man, or are we sheeple?
I don't know how much the debugging symbols slow things down, but that are a several aspects to this that DO slow an application down. Aggressive optimizations make use of debuggers difficult. Use of assertions, checks for error returns and similar code, especially in tight loops can have a significant affect, too.
How is a CD-ROM 12mm in diameter? That's like 0.5"