That would of course depend on whether she was travelling head-first or facing forwards. Head first clearly makes more sense in an accelerating frame, though, so perhaps that isn't so bad... In fact, relatively speaking, she'd become thinner!:)
Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd. Even if everyone qualified as a technical writer was thrown at the problem, there still needs to an information flow, probably from some people who are on vacation for a month now that Vista has shipped. There's only so much that can be written at a time, and only so much that can be documented in any period of time. Add in the time for editing, and legal review, and to verify completion... eight days? It's just an excuse to charge Microsoft with more money. Even a month would be more of an indication that they expected Microsoft to be able to comply. Given that up until this point Microsoft was working at having it done next July, the scheduling cannot be compressed by 8 months.
The original deadline was in July. Think of it as a free 4 month extension.
In a truly free market, you'd see Visual Studio (which is an awesome kit) that runs under Linux/BSD
Why would you? The development costs are likely to be substantial, and the takings fairly small, given that most Linux/BSD users are apparently happy with the tools they have there already.
and can be bound to other compilers (e.g. Intel CC, GCC, etc).
Err... it already can be. I've used Intel's compiler from within VS6 and it seems to work fine.
if I'm not doing something illegal I'm just a competitor.
Judges can't award damages for out-competing, can they?
No. But there's nothing to stop your competitor from suing you anyway, other than the risk that if they actually get as far as a court case and lose the judge will decide the claim was vexatious and give you a costs award. But they'd be betting you'd fold before you got that far.
All of these things occurred in the US. This topic is about EU law. In the EU, reverse engineering of software for the purposes of compatibility is a specifically protected right, enumerated in the copyright directive and the implementing laws of member states.
Microsoft is not a monopoly, it is just able to use the preferential treatment of the law better than their competitors.
Irrelevant under European law. The relevant EU competition law states:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the common market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the common market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.
Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:
(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;
(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;
(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts.
The emphasis is mine, and shows the relevant parts. The EU comission has interpreted MS's lack of production of adequate API and network protocol documentation as "applying dissimilar conditions" by making it harder for competitor's products to interoperate with their operating systems than for MS's own products. It makes perfect sense to me. MS *do* have a dominant position, and the market *should* be protected from any predatory practises they decide to use because of it.
One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.
My understanding (and I'll admit I could be misinformed) was that Brunel's system wasn't adopted nationwide because a number of cities in the country had city walls still intact which didn't have any openings wide enough for two 7-foot tracks to pass through, whereas two 4'8.5" trackes would fit through all of them. Brunel's system was simply impractical for national implementation, although it worked fine in the southern region he originally built it in.
Of course, this doesn't explain why the 4'8.5" guage would be adopted in the US, which didn't have any such problem...
The first true computer-on-a-chip was Motorola's 6800, but they muffed their opportunity by waiting too long to market it and priced it too high. Worse, some employees stole their chip masks and modified the design, which they sold (cheaply, compared to the 8008 and 6800) as the 6502, which was adopted for the Apple.
Err... that doesn't sound right to me.
First: 6800 was released after the 8080, which really was a single-chip processor. Second: the 6502 was actually an innovative design, being the first microprocessor to feature an instruction pipeline, even if it was only a 2-stage one; doesn't sound like a mask-level rip-off to me.
On the other hand, the more prestigious French schools take a much more abstract and mathematical approach than their counterparts in the UK - or anywhere else, really.
I'm not convinced that's true. For instance, when I applied to Oxford (back in 93), they called their CS degree "Theory of Computation" to reflect the fact that they regarded it as a discipline of mathematics rather than an independent subject. I understand they've renamed it to CS since then, but I don't think the focus of the course has changed substantially.
Maths forces you to learn the logic, whereas CS tends to teach you factual details on how it works etc.
I think that's only really the case for particularly poor CS curricula. I don't know what your university does, but mine really didn't concentrate on details of how anything works. Yes, there were a few courses like that in the 1st year (there was a programming course, and a couple on digital electronics, for example), but the other courses really concentrated on the logic behind it as well. Other courses in the 1st year included:
* Discrete Maths (only an introductory level; set theory, groups, nothing particularly advanced) * Introduction to Statistics * History of Computing * One, whose title I've forgotten, that introduced computational linguistics (i.e. regular expressions, context-free grammars, LALR parsers, that kind of stuff). * A "design of algorithms" course, which was essentially about computation/complexity theory
Subsequent years continued with a similar mix of maths and practical -- i.e., mostly maths. What practical stuff there was was stuff that tends to be difficult to pick up: parallel algorithms, formal proof of correctness, methods of working in teams, that kind of thing. I'd say a CS degree is great for anyone who aspires to be more than a code monkey -- it teaches architecture, how to think outside the box, and how to know what will work and what won't without trying it.
The idea that a CS degree concentrates on "how to program" is rather narrow-minded, I think. It teaches how to think about how computers work.
My Digital Image Processing class spent too much time on the Discrete Fourier Transform and dismissed the DCT with some hand-waving (and this after two years of pointless control and communication theory - when was the last time you used Vestigal Sideband Modulation?
Once you know what a DFT is, how it works, and how to do it, learning the same things about DCT is trivial.
I've still got SUNOS 4 code ( from suppliers long since disappeared) running on Solaris 9.
Trying to that with Windows code is a real bother....might work and might not - more likely not.
Hmm.. SunOS 4 would place the code as from some time around 1990. It's hard to find Windows apps that old, because the OS hadn't taken off at that point; it was still in version 2, which was just about unusable. However Win3 era apps seem to work with little trouble, in my experience. I have several programs that I wrote in 1992 using Borland Pascal that work flawlessly, as does the Borland Pascal IDE.
If you redistribute code under the GPL, you give all the recipients rights to all the patents they need to actually use the code, and they can pass those rights on to others.
Only if I hold those rights. Otherwise, I might have violated somebody else's rights in doing so, but if *they* aren't going to sue me, why should I care?
See my other post above for a reason why this is a problem.
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
Actually, it does. If Mircosoft didn't want to grant a patent license, they could not distribute it under the GPL. The funny twist is the one Microsoft pulled with Novell - what you need to make sure is the party distributing the code (Novell) isn't the same as the one holding the patent (Microsoft). They can't give Novell a patent license because that'd hold Novell to the GPL - instead they create a covenant saying they won't sue Novell for those patents.
You're almost onto the reason why GPL patent licensing stuff is pointless. It goes like this:
* I am a corporation, and have a patentable technology A that I want to include in GPL'd software B. * I spin off two subsidiaries [Me-1 Inc. and Me-2 Inc.]. * Me-1 holds rights to tech A and applies for the patents on it. * Me-2 performs the integration of A with B, and distributes the modified B (C) to You. * You can't sue Me-2 for not providing a patent license in violation of the GPL, because the GPL doesn't require it to, as it doesn't hold any such rights. * Me-1 could sue Me-2 for violation of its patents in distributing C, but elects not to. * If You distribute C, on the other hand, Me-1 could sue You.
As somebody who's worked on a fork of it, I beg to differ. Some versions of Kaffe are GPL; the original Kaffe is BSD licensed. See explanation of the history here.
Isn't the point of text messaging typically to say something you wouldn't want to say out loud?
Perhaps for some people. For me, the point is usually to let somebody know something that I don't expect an immediate reply to (e.g. because I'm asking them to make a decision that they'll need to think about before getting back to me, or I'm just notifying them of something they won't actually need to discuss with me).
In most countries, the letter/number mapping you're talking about isn't used so much. Over here in the UK, for example, I think I've seen about 3 numbers advertised using that method in the last year, and all of them have the numeric information as well, for people who don't understand how it works. I've never seen the system used in the mainland Europe countries I've travelled in either.
I'm holding out for the phone that translates my voice directly into voice the other party can hear.
Over here in the UK, BT already provides a service where they'll phone you and have a computer read your text messages over the line to you, so all you need to do is put the two services together...!
Slashdot Mirror
apparently one of the mods has faced the dilemma of trying to choose which woman to date
Doesn't sound very likely to me. You must be... no... hold on. Oh.
Yet I failed to become any fatter!
:)
That would of course depend on whether she was travelling head-first or facing forwards. Head first clearly makes more sense in an accelerating frame, though, so perhaps that isn't so bad... In fact, relatively speaking, she'd become thinner!
Providing MS with an EIGHT DAY deadline is just absurd. Even if everyone qualified as a technical writer was thrown at the problem, there still needs to an information flow, probably from some people who are on vacation for a month now that Vista has shipped. There's only so much that can be written at a time, and only so much that can be documented in any period of time. Add in the time for editing, and legal review, and to verify completion... eight days? It's just an excuse to charge Microsoft with more money. Even a month would be more of an indication that they expected Microsoft to be able to comply. Given that up until this point Microsoft was working at having it done next July, the scheduling cannot be compressed by 8 months.
The original deadline was in July. Think of it as a free 4 month extension.
EU businesses would scream bloody murder and governments across the EU would be in chaos.
And by the time MS could reverse what they'd done, we'd all be using alternative systems. They'd kill the market.
In a truly free market, you'd see Visual Studio (which is an awesome kit) that runs under Linux/BSD
Why would you? The development costs are likely to be substantial, and the takings fairly small, given that most Linux/BSD users are apparently happy with the tools they have there already.
and can be bound to other compilers (e.g. Intel CC, GCC, etc).
Err... it already can be. I've used Intel's compiler from within VS6 and it seems to work fine.
if I'm not doing something illegal I'm just a competitor.
Judges can't award damages for out-competing, can they?
No. But there's nothing to stop your competitor from suing you anyway, other than the risk that if they actually get as far as a court case and lose the judge will decide the claim was vexatious and give you a costs award. But they'd be betting you'd fold before you got that far.
All of these things occurred in the US. This topic is about EU law. In the EU, reverse engineering of software for the purposes of compatibility is a specifically protected right, enumerated in the copyright directive and the implementing laws of member states.
Irrelevant under European law. The relevant EU competition law states:
The emphasis is mine, and shows the relevant parts. The EU comission has interpreted MS's lack of production of adequate API and network protocol documentation as "applying dissimilar conditions" by making it harder for competitor's products to interoperate with their operating systems than for MS's own products. It makes perfect sense to me. MS *do* have a dominant position, and the market *should* be protected from any predatory practises they decide to use because of it.
Come on, taggers. You know it should be spelled "whine" not "wine", surely?
Sun release the UltraSparc T1 as open source; Intel give away masks for the 4004. Who do you think is going to get more press coverage?
One man did. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did exactly that. He sat down and thought about what gauge to make his railway (The Great Western) and came up with 7 feet as a much more sensible value. He was entirely correct, but unfortunately his version was abandoned simply because far more people had used the existing default.
My understanding (and I'll admit I could be misinformed) was that Brunel's system wasn't adopted nationwide because a number of cities in the country had city walls still intact which didn't have any openings wide enough for two 7-foot tracks to pass through, whereas two 4'8.5" trackes would fit through all of them. Brunel's system was simply impractical for national implementation, although it worked fine in the southern region he originally built it in.
Of course, this doesn't explain why the 4'8.5" guage would be adopted in the US, which didn't have any such problem...
The first true computer-on-a-chip was Motorola's 6800, but they muffed their opportunity by waiting too long to market it and priced it too high. Worse, some employees stole their chip masks and modified the design, which they sold (cheaply, compared to the 8008 and 6800) as the 6502, which was adopted for the Apple.
Err... that doesn't sound right to me.
First: 6800 was released after the 8080, which really was a single-chip processor.
Second: the 6502 was actually an innovative design, being the first microprocessor to feature an instruction pipeline, even if it was only a 2-stage one; doesn't sound like a mask-level rip-off to me.
On the other hand, the more prestigious French schools take a much more abstract and mathematical approach than their counterparts in the UK - or anywhere else, really.
I'm not convinced that's true. For instance, when I applied to Oxford (back in 93), they called their CS degree "Theory of Computation" to reflect the fact that they regarded it as a discipline of mathematics rather than an independent subject. I understand they've renamed it to CS since then, but I don't think the focus of the course has changed substantially.
Maths forces you to learn the logic, whereas CS tends to teach you factual details on how it works etc.
I think that's only really the case for particularly poor CS curricula. I don't know what your university does, but mine really didn't concentrate on details of how anything works. Yes, there were a few courses like that in the 1st year (there was a programming course, and a couple on digital electronics, for example), but the other courses really concentrated on the logic behind it as well. Other courses in the 1st year included:
* Discrete Maths (only an introductory level; set theory, groups, nothing particularly advanced)
* Introduction to Statistics
* History of Computing
* One, whose title I've forgotten, that introduced computational linguistics (i.e. regular expressions, context-free grammars, LALR parsers, that kind of stuff).
* A "design of algorithms" course, which was essentially about computation/complexity theory
Subsequent years continued with a similar mix of maths and practical -- i.e., mostly maths. What practical stuff there was was stuff that tends to be difficult to pick up: parallel algorithms, formal proof of correctness, methods of working in teams, that kind of thing. I'd say a CS degree is great for anyone who aspires to be more than a code monkey -- it teaches architecture, how to think outside the box, and how to know what will work and what won't without trying it.
The idea that a CS degree concentrates on "how to program" is rather narrow-minded, I think. It teaches how to think about how computers work.
My Digital Image Processing class spent too much time on the Discrete Fourier Transform and dismissed the DCT with some hand-waving (and this after two years of pointless control and communication theory - when was the last time you used Vestigal Sideband Modulation?
Once you know what a DFT is, how it works, and how to do it, learning the same things about DCT is trivial.
I've still got SUNOS 4 code ( from suppliers long since disappeared) running on Solaris 9.
Trying to that with Windows code is a real bother....might work and might not - more likely not.
Hmm.. SunOS 4 would place the code as from some time around 1990. It's hard to find Windows apps that old, because the OS hadn't taken off at that point; it was still in version 2, which was just about unusable. However Win3 era apps seem to work with little trouble, in my experience. I have several programs that I wrote in 1992 using Borland Pascal that work flawlessly, as does the Borland Pascal IDE.
You must be new here. It's a common joke around these parts that Debian takes a very long time to upgrade to new versions of anything.
But they take an OS with less than 70% seriously?
I'd lake to know where you got that 70% figure from. Seriously; the number of applications that actually broke with XP SP2 is tiny.
If you redistribute code under the GPL, you give all the recipients rights to all the patents they need to actually use the code, and they can pass those rights on to others.
Only if I hold those rights. Otherwise, I might have violated somebody else's rights in doing so, but if *they* aren't going to sue me, why should I care?
See my other post above for a reason why this is a problem.
1. GPL doesn't require patent licenses to be granted.
Actually, it does. If Mircosoft didn't want to grant a patent license, they could not distribute it under the GPL. The funny twist is the one Microsoft pulled with Novell - what you need to make sure is the party distributing the code (Novell) isn't the same as the one holding the patent (Microsoft). They can't give Novell a patent license because that'd hold Novell to the GPL - instead they create a covenant saying they won't sue Novell for those patents.
You're almost onto the reason why GPL patent licensing stuff is pointless. It goes like this:
* I am a corporation, and have a patentable technology A that I want to include in GPL'd software B.
* I spin off two subsidiaries [Me-1 Inc. and Me-2 Inc.].
* Me-1 holds rights to tech A and applies for the patents on it.
* Me-2 performs the integration of A with B, and distributes the modified B (C) to You.
* You can't sue Me-2 for not providing a patent license in violation of the GPL, because the GPL doesn't require it to, as it doesn't hold any such rights.
* Me-1 could sue Me-2 for violation of its patents in distributing C, but elects not to.
* If You distribute C, on the other hand, Me-1 could sue You.
Kaffe will survive because it's BSD licensed.
Kaffe is GPL.
As somebody who's worked on a fork of it, I beg to differ. Some versions of Kaffe are GPL; the original Kaffe is BSD licensed. See explanation of the history here.
Then why don't they use the Dvorak layout? It's theoretically more efficient and the punctuation will be grouped to one key.
Dvorak would be less efficient on a phone keypad, as all the most common letters would be placed on 3 buttons.
Isn't the point of text messaging typically to say something you wouldn't want to say out loud?
Perhaps for some people. For me, the point is usually to let somebody know something that I don't expect an immediate reply to (e.g. because I'm asking them to make a decision that they'll need to think about before getting back to me, or I'm just notifying them of something they won't actually need to discuss with me).
In most countries, the letter/number mapping you're talking about isn't used so much. Over here in the UK, for example, I think I've seen about 3 numbers advertised using that method in the last year, and all of them have the numeric information as well, for people who don't understand how it works. I've never seen the system used in the mainland Europe countries I've travelled in either.
I'm holding out for the phone that translates my voice directly into voice the other party can hear.
Over here in the UK, BT already provides a service where they'll phone you and have a computer read your text messages over the line to you, so all you need to do is put the two services together...!