Others have shown that for these specific sections of code the history can be easily traced. However, imagine yourself in a trial, with sophist lawyers explaining to a technically ignorant judge and/or jury that the code is copied, IP rights were violated, and here's the proof.
Without the proper technical knowledge and resources, the outcome becomes completely dependent on which side can dumb the technical discussion down and argue the best. The facts are often secondary.
Now imagine this whole scenario with IBM being the "bad guy" and SCO being the "good guy", as seen from the/. perspective. Most of you would be cheering on SCO in this exact same situation, simply because your preconceived bias was reversed.
Take this as a lesson: try to objectively look at the facts (or be aware that you don't have the facts) before jumping to the conclusion that someone's guilty.
My biggest Linux annoyance is that with all this talk of "free" stuff there has yet to be a Free Hardware movement. I mean, if people can dedicate so much time to writing free software, why can't the hardware folks also contribute a bit? Think of the benefits to society!
I'm willing to pay for the cost of the raw materials, of course -- at least until there's a Free Raw Materials movement.
I've never been exposed to a lawsuit...if the defendant absolutely cannot pay, what happens? What if the awarded amount is something larger than the amount of money the defendant could earn in a lifetime? Do defendants get cast into a pit of living hell over crap like this?
Typically I think the solution is bankruptcy. According to the article, the $9.5 billion that Toshiba could have conceivably had to pay would have put the company at risk.
Yep: two guys who weren't even harmed were able force a company as large as Toshiba to choose between a rediculous settlement and gambling the fate of the company.
I've heard the average small business gets sued (or sues somebody) an average of 2-5 times a year. Fortunately a lot of those still get thrown out or defeated, but it's still a hassle and the outcomes seems to be getting worse, or at least more wild and unpredictable. Right now there's almost no risk for the plaintiff, so the game is to pick a big target and play it like the lottery.
Sure, it was a strange case. Toshiba caved to the tune of about $1 billion because they were worried about treble damages (to the tune of $9.5 billion) being awarded by an unpredictable Texas jury trial.
The kicker is that the suit is over a bug in a 10+ year old floppy drive controller chip manufactured by NEC, where neither NEC nor Toshiba ever received a single complaint of data corruption. No customer ever claims to have lost data because of the bug - not even the plaintiffs! The plaintiffs simply started the class action lawsuit because they were sold a "defective product". AFAIK the bug has only been reproduced in specific laboratory conditions and not the real world.
The lawyers were using Toshiba as a test case and then were going to go after HP, Compaq, etc. with similar class action lawsuits. I haven't tracked it, but I don't think they made much progress or we would have heard about it.
Should they have fixed the (known) bug? Probably. Was it worth a class action lawsuit, especially of this magnitude? Absolutely not. This is extortion plain and clear, and the scary thing is it's accelerating. If this keeps up it will eventually be impossible for any business to exist for more than a few years without being sued out of existence by corrupt, opportunistic, money-grabbing lawyers. The minute you make any kind of mistake they pounce, with grossly exaggerated damage figures that aren't even sane, but somehow actually get awarded--especially by jury trials--with an extremely low burden of proof.
Was that for the absolutely sickening extortion because of the alleged floppy drive data corruption bug?
These class action lawsuits are completely out of hand. The lawyers are have recently been holding seminars on suing restaurants and food producers over high fat content.
Leon, I wasn't trying to make an ad hominiem attack when I associated you with Rex and friends. I simply Google'd you and noticed your posts as far back as 1998 on comp.os.linux.advocacy, your participation in your Linux users group, who's top goals include Linux advocacy, your posts (and even articles) submitted here, which indicate strong Linux advocacy (and anti-Microsoft slandering, conference question ambushes (clever), etc.)
I'm sorry, but unlike you my hobby is not software advocacy. I step in from time to time to try to correct blatently wrong statements, but I should have Googled your name before responding the first time; I would have known it was going to be a waste of time.
I still suggest that you look at the various issues you brought up in more depth, and even read the relevant depositions and technical articles (there's a decent Dr Dobb's article on the DR-DOS issue). As I said earlier, they don't paint Microsoft to be Mother Teresa, but they give a more complete, balanced perspective.
Oh, and for some real fun... If you want to see how these things happen I propose a game for you: Make up something anti-Microsoft that's plausible, but false and not immediately disprovable by technical means such as a packet sniffer. Occasionally post it and make references to it on./, your web page, and Usenet. If you do a good job it will soon be picked up as truth, and become part of anti-Microsoft lore. You've won the game when other people start linking to your site and post as "evidence" for how Microsoft is evil.
This could go on forever. Each of your claims basically follows the Linux Advocate party line, but it does not reflect reality. My take is skewed the other way, but a) I admit that, b) I have reason to, and c) I objectively believe I'm closer to the truth than you are.
I know this precisely because I have personally seen the source code and watched the unfurling of some of these instances (and others), and it's quite funny (in a dark way) how they get built up into exaggerated legends and tales that so many Linux advocates unquestionably believe.
You go on and continue to read and believe Rex Ballard, Bill Parish, RMS, and the catacombs of/. and comp.os.linux.advocacy, and claim to know everything, while I'll continue to write the actual code and grumble every once in a while when my features fall under the schizophrenic scrutiny of said people and new tales are spun.
Will you also ack that doing so reduces the righteousness of suing people using similar names, regardless of the other party's intent?
No, I don't think "righteous" is the right word. "Understandable" may be a better term. As I said earlier, our society's sue-happy attitude usually helps nobody but the lawyers.
If Microsoft hadn't accumulated such a rich track record of doing exactly what Stac Electronics accused them of doing, I might be tempted to allow them the presumption of innocence.
Ah, but therein lies the rub! Microsoft isn't Mother Teresa, but 98% of the instances in this track record falls apart upon closer examination--or at minimum it becomes clear that there are two sides to the story that could easily be logically argued.
So it's all circular: "Microsoft is evil because they do A, B, and C."
No, see, A (Stac) isn't exactly what it appears to be. This could be easily taken to be an abuse of the patent system ala. GIFs, Amazon one-click, etc.
"But they did B and C, so A must be true".
Well, let's look at B: That beta of Windows 3.X that shipped to only a couple thousand people had dubious code that checked for DR-DOS and gave a strange error message. Not only did they take it out, but they're arguably justified to give users a bypassable compatibility warning when users are running an untested combination. Oh, and DR-DOS was bought by Caldera (now SCO) for pennies on the dollar for the sole purpose of suing MS. Sound familiar?
"Yeah, but they did C, so A and B must be true."
Oh, C? Making RealPlayer not work? Yeah, Microsoft's Eric Engstrom actually pointed out that it was a simple bug in Real's player that they had tried to help them fix.
"Yeah, uhm, but they did D, so..."
D? That stupid Blue Mountain Arts suit where Microsoft's spam filters unintentially filtered out greeting cards (from both Blue Mountain and Microsoft) that had certain content that triggered the spam filters? Yeah, we all know spam filters are 100% accurate, especially back in 1998. Go read MS's testimony to find out what really happened.
"Yeah, but they did X, Y, and Z, so everything absolutely must be true"
Ad nausium... Sure, they have a pattern of non-perfect behavior, but see my comment earlier about them being a big target. They're a freaking huge target for greedy ambulance chasing lawyers and failed competitors. It doesn't mean everything that you read is true.
Leon, I'll give you that Microsoft frequently uses plain names for their products, but they're hardly alone. Why, just this afternoon I was sitting in the Sun eating an Apple and sipping Java.
Off the top of my head a large number of the companies and products I can think of are based on common words or compound words. The key is context. Microsoft isn't suing makers of glass windows, they're not even suing about X Windows (and would be stupid to do so). They're suing a company that deliberately violated their trademark to imply compatibility and cause confusion. (And to get free attention from the press, I might add.)
As for Stac, that's fine for you to think that they did it deliberately, but the case is too complex to be judged based on our cursory glances. Again, the key issue here is they sued Microsoft over vague compression patents (think GIF). It's common for companies to countersue in these situations, especially when intellectual property is involved. IMHO, the implied truce (cold war?) between large patent holders like IBM and Microsoft have kept litigation down and has helped the computer industry. Litigation rarely helps anybody but lawyers. It's when little companies with nothing left to lose (SCO, InterTrust, etc.) get involved that things get messy.
As for lawyer overburden, it's disingenuous to compare Microsoft--possibly the most scrutinized company of all time--with random unnamed "high tech companies". I've heard the average small company sues, or gets sued 2-5 times a year. For a large company like Microsoft that is also a big target, this number skyrockets.
Lastly, you can't offhandedly dismiss all of my points: I refuted every dubious link you brought up. If this were a debate you'd have lost, but who's keeping score?:)
1) This is a suit against people registering misleading domain names that people might accidentally type, like "mnsbc.com", and directing them to porn sites. Exactly how is this suit bad?
2) This is to invalidate a presumably overly broad patents to protect partners Dell and Gateway because Lucent sued them over patent infringement. Note that Lucent didn't go after Microsoft directly, for some reason. Hmm...
3) April Fools
4) This is a contract dispute; it happens all the time in business. BTW: This dispute was settled out of court, with both sides claiming to be pleased with the outcome.
5) First, this photo company isn't even Microsoft, although it's owned by BillG. Second, people were infringing on Corbis's copyrights, but Amazon is claiming that they take down the infringing material when there are complaints. Corbis should probably have gone after the individuals violating the copyrights instead of the carrier (Amazon).
6) The Lindows fiasco. Everybody has an opinion on this one, but I think it's valid to sue a company attempting to maliciously feed off of one of the world's most valuable brand names. Now I'm off to go listen to my Somy Walman and then go out for a drive in my Porshe. Do you think I should get an Appie ePod to replace my Walman?
7) In 1998 Microsoft sued to get their hands on notes for a book about Netscape because they believed it to have evidence explaining that Netscape lost market share due to their own mistakes. This was when the antitrust suit was ramping up with potentially disastrous consequences to MS. Sure, it would have been better to simply subpoena the info, but I don't know the whole story and neither do you.
8) In 1997 Microsoft sued a cracker that posted a patch that removed the 90-day timeout for a trial version of Office 97. You know, piracy was illegal back then, and is still illegal. Microsoft was fully justified in suing him, and hopefully the guy got into big trouble.
9) Microsoft loses case to Stacker. I've never followed this one closely, but it sounds like Microsoft infringed on a a couple (arguably overly-broad) patents regarding compression. Wait, isn't this the kind of thing Slashdot hates? Oh, only when Microsoft isn't the one getting sued, I guess.
You've got nothing. If that was the best you could do to show that Microsoft sues their competitors on the same level as Sun, Oracle, Netscape, SCO, etc., then you've done poorly. If anything, you've given evidence to exactly the opposite.
Yeah, Slashdot should recognize that although Microsoft has a large (and growing) patent portfolio they've been pretty good about only using those patents for defensive purposes. Give credit where credit is due.
For as much as Microsoft's livelihood depends on IP, they've shown an amazing amount of restraint (IMHO) when it comes to clones of their products. (Not just borrowing elements, or arguably unintentional patent violations, which all companies do, but blatent end-to-end ripoffs like Evolution.)
Take a binary editor to Microsofts earlier products and you will find they are including all sorts of code which they did not license. Older IE versions are explicitly good examples of this.
Care to give an example, or are you just making stuff up?
Face to face collaboration is sometimes very productive, but not always. Sometimes it's a complete waste of everybody's time, and often it really is less productive than people working together, independently. This is especially true when it comes to things like creating an original document or design.
One problem is that face to face collaboration often doesn't give people the same time to think and reflect on the work as sequential document or email-based collaboration. So you end up with very vocally skilled people completely ruling the collaboration: Carrot Top doing all the talking while Einstein can barely get in a word edgewise.
The key is to recognize when each type of communication is appropriate.
For some reason the parent was mod'd down, but I looked at some of the spec #'s with different compilers and think it's useful information, so here's a copy:
Here is a comparison using the officially published results at www.spec.org of the dell 650 using the Intel C and Fortran compilers*
Visual C++ isn't too shabby either, but the main point is that using GCC for x86 leads to very misleading numbers, especially for those of us on Windows who don't have most of our software compiled through it.
BTW: I'm not knocking the new machine or PPC 970, it looks like a kick-ass processor from my point of view and Apple has done a good job. Changing OS's and architectures like Apple has repeatedly pulled off is no easy task.
(And WTF,/. removes spaces even in TT or ECODE section?)
Private members aren't for hiding code or data from other malicious programs; if they're being used in that way that's a flaw.
It's simply a compile-time verification that you're using the object through it's intended public interface instead of relying on the internal implementation. If you disregard it you just end up throwing away a lot of the benefits of OO and you build fragile apps.
That said, people should be aware of this so they don't mistakenly think that "private string m_password" is a secure way to store data.
BTW: A long time ago I did this in Java by programmatically altering the bytecode of a.class file from another app.
It's fair to say that Win2k/XP, Linux, and probably OSX are all in the same class of reliability these days... to the point that it would be very difficult to say which one is more stable without significant research.
Denying this with anecdotal stories or memories of Win9x is futile, and Linux folks who continue to try to play the reliability card will lose credibility.
If any of these systems crash more than once every few months you either: 1) Have a faulty driver (yeah, you may think it's a cop out, but 3rd party drivers unfortunately have far less quality control than the Windows/BSD/Linux kernel. Video drivers are especially problematic.) 2) Have faulty hardware (including I/O issues) 3) Have discovered a really serious kernel bug
That's part of it, but to overextend your metaphor: software engineering today is a little bit like telling the civil engineer to build a two lane highway that is traffic-jam-proof, maintenance free, impossible to deface with graffiti, low cost, and can be rerouted half way through the project.
My experience is that as long as you have a good, experienced team the programming and testing part can be reasonably predictable. We have a pretty good idea of how to write secure/reliable/performant software. Sure, there's room for improvement, but one of the hardest parts about software engineering is managing changing requirements and unrealistic expectations.
And to get on my soapbox for a second: this is fine. Software engineering is evolving and improving, but it's unrealistic to expect 100% perfection out of any given programmer or company; rather, the focus should be on outrunning the other guy. That is the road to improvement.
So what's the easiest way to dramatically reduce piracy: use open-source software.
Not so fast. Without intellectual property protection the GPL and all other licenses are meaningless. There's no difference between piracy and violating the GPL. Both are stealing, and both are wrong.
A long time ago, when I worked at a restaurant as a teenager, I saw an employee that was screwing around with an ion ray gun accidentally open a secure time-lock safe. He simply pointed it at the safe from a few inches away and the safe's electronic display started blinking and it just opened.
Re:The authors of the article didn't bother to RTF
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
I think this Open Office guy is looking for a devil in Office 11 that isn't there.
Not only that, but why is somebody representing Open Office being asked in the first place? Is he the only one they could find to critique Office 2003's XML support? It's not like he's going to say something nice about his primary competitor.
Seems to me this is just another "loaded" article.
Slashdot Mirror
Others have shown that for these specific sections of code the history can be easily traced. However, imagine yourself in a trial, with sophist lawyers explaining to a technically ignorant judge and/or jury that the code is copied, IP rights were violated, and here's the proof.
Without the proper technical knowledge and resources, the outcome becomes completely dependent on which side can dumb the technical discussion down and argue the best. The facts are often secondary.
Now imagine this whole scenario with IBM being the "bad guy" and SCO being the "good guy", as seen from the /. perspective. Most of you would be cheering on SCO in this exact same situation, simply because your preconceived bias was reversed.
Take this as a lesson: try to objectively look at the facts (or be aware that you don't have the facts) before jumping to the conclusion that someone's guilty.
My biggest Linux annoyance is that with all this talk of "free" stuff there has yet to be a Free Hardware movement. I mean, if people can dedicate so much time to writing free software, why can't the hardware folks also contribute a bit? Think of the benefits to society!
I'm willing to pay for the cost of the raw materials, of course -- at least until there's a Free Raw Materials movement.
I've never been exposed to a lawsuit...if the defendant absolutely cannot pay, what happens? What if the awarded amount is something larger than the amount of money the defendant could earn in a lifetime? Do defendants get cast into a pit of living hell over crap like this?
Typically I think the solution is bankruptcy. According to the article, the $9.5 billion that Toshiba could have conceivably had to pay would have put the company at risk.
Yep: two guys who weren't even harmed were able force a company as large as Toshiba to choose between a rediculous settlement and gambling the fate of the company.
I've heard the average small business gets sued (or sues somebody) an average of 2-5 times a year. Fortunately a lot of those still get thrown out or defeated, but it's still a hassle and the outcomes seems to be getting worse, or at least more wild and unpredictable. Right now there's almost no risk for the plaintiff, so the game is to pick a big target and play it like the lottery.
Sure, it was a strange case. Toshiba caved to the tune of about $1 billion because they were worried about treble damages (to the tune of $9.5 billion) being awarded by an unpredictable Texas jury trial.
link
The kicker is that the suit is over a bug in a 10+ year old floppy drive controller chip manufactured by NEC, where neither NEC nor Toshiba ever received a single complaint of data corruption. No customer ever claims to have lost data because of the bug - not even the plaintiffs! The plaintiffs simply started the class action lawsuit because they were sold a "defective product". AFAIK the bug has only been reproduced in specific laboratory conditions and not the real world.
The lawyers were using Toshiba as a test case and then were going to go after HP, Compaq, etc. with similar class action lawsuits. I haven't tracked it, but I don't think they made much progress or we would have heard about it.
Should they have fixed the (known) bug? Probably. Was it worth a class action lawsuit, especially of this magnitude? Absolutely not. This is extortion plain and clear, and the scary thing is it's accelerating. If this keeps up it will eventually be impossible for any business to exist for more than a few years without being sued out of existence by corrupt, opportunistic, money-grabbing lawyers. The minute you make any kind of mistake they pounce, with grossly exaggerated damage figures that aren't even sane, but somehow actually get awarded--especially by jury trials--with an extremely low burden of proof.
Was that for the absolutely sickening extortion because of the alleged floppy drive data corruption bug?
These class action lawsuits are completely out of hand. The lawyers are have recently been holding seminars on suing restaurants and food producers over high fat content.
Leon, I wasn't trying to make an ad hominiem attack when I associated you with Rex and friends. I simply Google'd you and noticed your posts as far back as 1998 on comp.os.linux.advocacy, your participation in your Linux users group, who's top goals include Linux advocacy, your posts (and even articles) submitted here, which indicate strong Linux advocacy (and anti-Microsoft slandering, conference question ambushes (clever), etc.)
I'm sorry, but unlike you my hobby is not software advocacy. I step in from time to time to try to correct blatently wrong statements, but I should have Googled your name before responding the first time; I would have known it was going to be a waste of time.
I still suggest that you look at the various issues you brought up in more depth, and even read the relevant depositions and technical articles (there's a decent Dr Dobb's article on the DR-DOS issue). As I said earlier, they don't paint Microsoft to be Mother Teresa, but they give a more complete, balanced perspective.
Oh, and for some real fun... If you want to see how these things happen I propose a game for you: Make up something anti-Microsoft that's plausible, but false and not immediately disprovable by technical means such as a packet sniffer. Occasionally post it and make references to it on ./, your web page, and Usenet. If you do a good job it will soon be picked up as truth, and become part of anti-Microsoft lore. You've won the game when other people start linking to your site and post as "evidence" for how Microsoft is evil.
This could go on forever. Each of your claims basically follows the Linux Advocate party line, but it does not reflect reality. My take is skewed the other way, but a) I admit that, b) I have reason to, and c) I objectively believe I'm closer to the truth than you are.
/. and comp.os.linux.advocacy, and claim to know everything, while I'll continue to write the actual code and grumble every once in a while when my features fall under the schizophrenic scrutiny of said people and new tales are spun.
I know this precisely because I have personally seen the source code and watched the unfurling of some of these instances (and others), and it's quite funny (in a dark way) how they get built up into exaggerated legends and tales that so many Linux advocates unquestionably believe.
You go on and continue to read and believe Rex Ballard, Bill Parish, RMS, and the catacombs of
No, I don't think "righteous" is the right word. "Understandable" may be a better term. As I said earlier, our society's sue-happy attitude usually helps nobody but the lawyers.
Ah, but therein lies the rub! Microsoft isn't Mother Teresa, but 98% of the instances in this track record falls apart upon closer examination--or at minimum it becomes clear that there are two sides to the story that could easily be logically argued.
So it's all circular: "Microsoft is evil because they do A, B, and C."
No, see, A (Stac) isn't exactly what it appears to be. This could be easily taken to be an abuse of the patent system ala. GIFs, Amazon one-click, etc.
"But they did B and C, so A must be true".
Well, let's look at B: That beta of Windows 3.X that shipped to only a couple thousand people had dubious code that checked for DR-DOS and gave a strange error message. Not only did they take it out, but they're arguably justified to give users a bypassable compatibility warning when users are running an untested combination. Oh, and DR-DOS was bought by Caldera (now SCO) for pennies on the dollar for the sole purpose of suing MS. Sound familiar?
"Yeah, but they did C, so A and B must be true."
Oh, C? Making RealPlayer not work? Yeah, Microsoft's Eric Engstrom actually pointed out that it was a simple bug in Real's player that they had tried to help them fix.
"Yeah, uhm, but they did D, so..."
D? That stupid Blue Mountain Arts suit where Microsoft's spam filters unintentially filtered out greeting cards (from both Blue Mountain and Microsoft) that had certain content that triggered the spam filters? Yeah, we all know spam filters are 100% accurate, especially back in 1998. Go read MS's testimony to find out what really happened.
"Yeah, but they did X, Y, and Z, so everything absolutely must be true"
Ad nausium... Sure, they have a pattern of non-perfect behavior, but see my comment earlier about them being a big target. They're a freaking huge target for greedy ambulance chasing lawyers and failed competitors. It doesn't mean everything that you read is true.
Leon, I'll give you that Microsoft frequently uses plain names for their products, but they're hardly alone. Why, just this afternoon I was sitting in the Sun eating an Apple and sipping Java.
Off the top of my head a large number of the companies and products I can think of are based on common words or compound words. The key is context. Microsoft isn't suing makers of glass windows, they're not even suing about X Windows (and would be stupid to do so). They're suing a company that deliberately violated their trademark to imply compatibility and cause confusion. (And to get free attention from the press, I might add.)
As for Stac, that's fine for you to think that they did it deliberately, but the case is too complex to be judged based on our cursory glances. Again, the key issue here is they sued Microsoft over vague compression patents (think GIF). It's common for companies to countersue in these situations, especially when intellectual property is involved. IMHO, the implied truce (cold war?) between large patent holders like IBM and Microsoft have kept litigation down and has helped the computer industry. Litigation rarely helps anybody but lawyers. It's when little companies with nothing left to lose (SCO, InterTrust, etc.) get involved that things get messy.
As for lawyer overburden, it's disingenuous to compare Microsoft--possibly the most scrutinized company of all time--with random unnamed "high tech companies". I've heard the average small company sues, or gets sued 2-5 times a year. For a large company like Microsoft that is also a big target, this number skyrockets.
Lastly, you can't offhandedly dismiss all of my points: I refuted every dubious link you brought up. If this were a debate you'd have lost, but who's keeping score? :)
leonbrooks, Is this all you can dig up?
1) This is a suit against people registering misleading domain names that people might accidentally type, like "mnsbc.com", and directing them to porn sites. Exactly how is this suit bad?
2) This is to invalidate a presumably overly broad patents to protect partners Dell and Gateway because Lucent sued them over patent infringement. Note that Lucent didn't go after Microsoft directly, for some reason. Hmm...
3) April Fools
4) This is a contract dispute; it happens all the time in business. BTW: This dispute was settled out of court, with both sides claiming to be pleased with the outcome.
5) First, this photo company isn't even Microsoft, although it's owned by BillG. Second, people were infringing on Corbis's copyrights, but Amazon is claiming that they take down the infringing material when there are complaints. Corbis should probably have gone after the individuals violating the copyrights instead of the carrier (Amazon).
6) The Lindows fiasco. Everybody has an opinion on this one, but I think it's valid to sue a company attempting to maliciously feed off of one of the world's most valuable brand names. Now I'm off to go listen to my Somy Walman and then go out for a drive in my Porshe. Do you think I should get an Appie ePod to replace my Walman?
7) In 1998 Microsoft sued to get their hands on notes for a book about Netscape because they believed it to have evidence explaining that Netscape lost market share due to their own mistakes. This was when the antitrust suit was ramping up with potentially disastrous consequences to MS. Sure, it would have been better to simply subpoena the info, but I don't know the whole story and neither do you.
8) In 1997 Microsoft sued a cracker that posted a patch that removed the 90-day timeout for a trial version of Office 97. You know, piracy was illegal back then, and is still illegal. Microsoft was fully justified in suing him, and hopefully the guy got into big trouble.
9) Microsoft loses case to Stacker. I've never followed this one closely, but it sounds like Microsoft infringed on a a couple (arguably overly-broad) patents regarding compression. Wait, isn't this the kind of thing Slashdot hates? Oh, only when Microsoft isn't the one getting sued, I guess.
You've got nothing. If that was the best you could do to show that Microsoft sues their competitors on the same level as Sun, Oracle, Netscape, SCO, etc., then you've done poorly. If anything, you've given evidence to exactly the opposite.
Yeah, Slashdot should recognize that although Microsoft has a large (and growing) patent portfolio they've been pretty good about only using those patents for defensive purposes. Give credit where credit is due.
For as much as Microsoft's livelihood depends on IP, they've shown an amazing amount of restraint (IMHO) when it comes to clones of their products. (Not just borrowing elements, or arguably unintentional patent violations, which all companies do, but blatent end-to-end ripoffs like Evolution.)
Take a binary editor to Microsofts earlier products and you will find they are including all sorts of code which they did not license. Older IE versions are explicitly good examples of this.
Care to give an example, or are you just making stuff up?
Face to face collaboration is sometimes very productive, but not always. Sometimes it's a complete waste of everybody's time, and often it really is less productive than people working together, independently. This is especially true when it comes to things like creating an original document or design.
One problem is that face to face collaboration often doesn't give people the same time to think and reflect on the work as sequential document or email-based collaboration. So you end up with very vocally skilled people completely ruling the collaboration: Carrot Top doing all the talking while Einstein can barely get in a word edgewise.
The key is to recognize when each type of communication is appropriate.
For some reason the parent was mod'd down, but I looked at some of the spec #'s with different compilers and think it's useful information, so here's a copy:
Here is a comparison using the officially published results at www.spec.org of the dell 650 using the Intel C and Fortran compilers*
Visual C++ isn't too shabby either, but the main point is that using GCC for x86 leads to very misleading numbers, especially for those of us on Windows who don't have most of our software compiled through it.
BTW: I'm not knocking the new machine or PPC 970, it looks like a kick-ass processor from my point of view and Apple has done a good job. Changing OS's and architectures like Apple has repeatedly pulled off is no easy task.
(And WTF, /. removes spaces even in TT or ECODE section?)
Private members aren't for hiding code or data from other malicious programs; if they're being used in that way that's a flaw.
.class file from another app.
It's simply a compile-time verification that you're using the object through it's intended public interface instead of relying on the internal implementation. If you disregard it you just end up throwing away a lot of the benefits of OO and you build fragile apps.
That said, people should be aware of this so they don't mistakenly think that "private string m_password" is a secure way to store data.
BTW: A long time ago I did this in Java by programmatically altering the bytecode of a
It's fair to say that Win2k/XP, Linux, and probably OSX are all in the same class of reliability these days... to the point that it would be very difficult to say which one is more stable without significant research.
Denying this with anecdotal stories or memories of Win9x is futile, and Linux folks who continue to try to play the reliability card will lose credibility.
If any of these systems crash more than once every few months you either:
1) Have a faulty driver (yeah, you may think it's a cop out, but 3rd party drivers unfortunately have far less quality control than the Windows/BSD/Linux kernel. Video drivers are especially problematic.)
2) Have faulty hardware (including I/O issues)
3) Have discovered a really serious kernel bug
In that order, and it's probably not #3.
That's part of it, but to overextend your metaphor: software engineering today is a little bit like telling the civil engineer to build a two lane highway that is traffic-jam-proof, maintenance free, impossible to deface with graffiti, low cost, and can be rerouted half way through the project.
My experience is that as long as you have a good, experienced team the programming and testing part can be reasonably predictable. We have a pretty good idea of how to write secure/reliable/performant software. Sure, there's room for improvement, but one of the hardest parts about software engineering is managing changing requirements and unrealistic expectations.
And to get on my soapbox for a second: this is fine. Software engineering is evolving and improving, but it's unrealistic to expect 100% perfection out of any given programmer or company; rather, the focus should be on outrunning the other guy. That is the road to improvement.
Others have mentioned Maya PLE but there are free / learning editions of most of the top commercial 3D apps these days:
SoftImage XSI|EXP
Lightwave Discovery Edition (takes a while for them to mail it, though)
Houdini Apprentice (a lesser known but very powerful 3D app used by major studios.)
http://www.microsoft.com
But you do hear Linux folks talking about forking children, killing zombies, fingering people, etc.
It's an ugly world out there...
So what's the easiest way to dramatically reduce piracy: use open-source software.
Not so fast. Without intellectual property protection the GPL and all other licenses are meaningless. There's no difference between piracy and violating the GPL. Both are stealing, and both are wrong.
A long time ago, when I worked at a restaurant as a teenager, I saw an employee that was screwing around with an ion ray gun accidentally open a secure time-lock safe. He simply pointed it at the safe from a few inches away and the safe's electronic display started blinking and it just opened.
I think this Open Office guy is looking for a devil in Office 11 that isn't there.
Not only that, but why is somebody representing Open Office being asked in the first place? Is he the only one they could find to critique Office 2003's XML support? It's not like he's going to say something nice about his primary competitor.
Seems to me this is just another "loaded" article.
But so is DOS.
:-)
*ducks*
Actually it should be pretty straightforward to use the Speech SDK directly with a Browser Helper Object or similar. No need to use the Agent.