Is it still a trade secret if a court orders MS to disclose it? (Yes, I know that it was about copyright, not trade secrets. But still, that was one of the points brought up by their clickwrap license agreement.)
But it doesn't matter how many APIs Microsoft discloses, if they have a patent on them. See herefor a story on how Microsoft claims to have a patent on ASF files, and caused a GPL program to have to remove its support for those files, which is what you were referring to at the end.
Telling someone "here, this is what we do, oh, and BTW, you can't do that without paying us licensing fees" doesn't seem much use to me. I don't think the jugement affects this. Nothing that I could see (IANAL) seemed to stop them from owning and using patents - in fact, the final judgement states that IP rights used by both companies (presumably including patents) "shall be assigned to the Applications Business, and the Operating Systems Business shall be granted a perpetual, royalty-free license to license and distribute such Intellectual Property in its products".
Media Player is audio-only at this time. And there are easier ways to play mp3s on Linux;)
<plug> I'm sort of working on the msvideo stuff. I need more hours in the day though:) See http://www.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~bbaetz/win e/ for very very early patches with known bugs. (ie it doesn't display anything useful at all.)</plug>
Hopefully I'll have more time to work on it in the (short) uni holidays in a few weeks. Theres also a cosource.com request for this, but I haven't applied for it because I don't have the time.
From when this topic has come up before an Australia, I think that one of the points the Aus telcos were making is that orignally the agreement was fair because very little traffic was to the US, but now its not. That makes me think that that figure is probably wrong
The US isn't going to be paying for.AU access. The problem was that, say if for every 100 megs downloaded from the us to Australia 30 went the other way (no, I have no idea what the true figures are, but this is what the article implies). The Australian telcos would have to pay for the 100 megs, but the US wouldn't have to pay for the 30 megs. Australia will still be paying for what we use - just not what the US uses.
The question really should be why should the US get it for free?
OTOH, I think the figures in the article are mixed - I'd be very surprised if "Seventy per cent of Internet traffic between the two countries is from Australia into the US". I thought it would have been the other way around. Or does that mean 70% of requests?
I don't know about the UK, but Sydney Uni prohibits commercial use of their network. I seem to recall that the reason for this is that AARNET which provides the net connection for australian unis has been granted various exceptions from the communications act for academic uses. It may (I can't remember) even be illegal for commercial traffic to be carried.
My favourites are RFC1217 - Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research, which "uses a highly redundant optical communication technique to achieve ultra-low, ultra-robust transmission. The basic unit is the M1A1 tank. Each tank is labelled with the number 0 or 1 painted four feet high on the tank turret in yellow, day-glo luminescent paint.", and RFC2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, which extends RFC1149 - "Encapsulation may be done with saran wrappers. Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled."
USyd uses RedHat. I was given a copy of RH4.1, IIRC, a few years ago after I attended a summer school there. I'd been thinking about installing linux for some time, and so that's what I used. That cd included source, but later distributions got too big to fit source+binary on the one cd.
Unfortuately, they haven't updated much, and 5.0 + very few errata updates was what was given out last year. No idea what's planned for this year.
There's actually two bits on the CD - a standard RH with errata updates, and an install batch file which runs a self-extracting zip of a loadlin linux. The whole thing uses umsdos. The first time you boot up it asks you to select your mouse/video card/etc. I think they use the standard RH *config for it now, but it was just a simple shell script in the first versions. The umsdos version is missing things like ppp setup - its basically only meant to be used for windows people to run blue, which is only available for unix. (We have sunos at the uni). It is useful though - there's an icon on the desktop, and when you quit it boots back into windows.
I don't think its officially supported, but there is a CD with X 3.3.5 and a few other updates available for overnight loan to support newer video cards and so on. There's also a messageboard for cs1 students which fields questions about this sort of thing.
Blue's a nice teaching language, although IMHO its limiting for people who have programmed before. (The CS courses don't assume any programming knowledge, even for the advanced class)
And there have already been patches posted to wine-patches porting some of this stuff over. The announcement sent to the wine-devel list by Gavriel State (one of the Corel people who has been working on wine) states:
<i>We plan to start merging our changes back into WineHQ (ie: making patches out of our CVS commits) after we release. In the meantime, if anyone wants to do any of that work for us, please feel free to submit any patches you want from our branch so long we get credit in the changelog. 8-)</i>
I'm planning to merge in the x11drv/dib fixes if noone gets to them before the weekend, to see if that fixes the problems I've been having with msvideo stuff.
Look in the Changelog if you want to find the sort of stuff Corel has been submitting.
Note - extrans mode isn't working in the preview. Don't know if it'll show up in the post.
Well, I was going to write that media player almost worked with avis and native dlls. But then I tried running it now, and it seems something has broken in the last month or so - it just quits on startup:( There are also a few things to check - read documentation/status/multimedia about things which cause wine to crash.
The standard mplayer works though with native dlls. Unfortunately the codecs have to come from windows because of licensing issues.
OTOH, I've been looking into the msvideo dll support. In my week off over the new year I got to the stage where I have builtin support which almost works. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the mci stuff yet - all it does is display a blank grey area. Once I get that done, I'll submit it.
Did you vote for wine in the/. awards?:)
Blatant Plug: Theres a cosource.com request for avi playing in wine....
Actually, the ABA (Australian Broadcasting Authority) has issued a few takedown notices, but won't tell anyone who they issued them to. See today's Australian for details.
Well, from a brief skim of it (how come the entire text was at cnet, not microsoft?), they seem to be trying to show not that what they did was legal, but that the DOJ didn't actually claim hat they did anything illegal. Its not a defence of what they did, more an attack on the DOJ.
Selected quotes:
"There is remarkably little law in plaintiffs? proposed conclusions of law. Rather than address the legal principles that govern their claims, plaintiffs devote page after page to recounting the Court?s findings of fact, without regard to which of the facts found (or, in some cases, not found) have decisional significance."
[No tying arrangement] "The Court did not find that Microsoft forced anyone to purchase a second product in addition to Windows 98. Because Internet Explorer is part of Windows 98, Microsoft has never charged OEMs (or others) a separate royalty for Internet Explorer."
etc, etc. Plaintiffs haven't shown this, plaintiffs haven't shown that. They're not trying to claim that their actions were misinterpreted by the DOJ (although thats poart of their argument), but that the DOJ hasn't proved anything, and that even if what the DOJ says is right, they're still innocent. At least that's how I read it.
Does a lawyer want to tell me if that sort of thing (there's nothing to defend, they haven't said we done anything) is common?
Sydney is on daylight saving now, so we're GMT +11 at the moment.
One of the TV channels (9) is running a 25 hour special watching the new year come in from all around the world. However, at 10am Saturday, they have:
Today on Saturday: Y2K special
Today On Saturday will update and report any major problems associated with the Y2K bug. In the event of nothing or little to report, Channel Nine will revert back to the Millennium live coverage.
I think that it will run for about ten to fifteen minutes, but I could be wrong. Anywhere else doing something "special" like this?
(hint: the injunction against BN means that the judge thinks Amazon will prevail.)
I thought that the injunction was just referring to the fact that BN was probably guilty of breaching Amazon's patent, which isn't the issue here. It didn't have anything to with BN's claim that the patent was invalid to start with.
What do you think of the Australian legislation? I'm Australian, and I was amazed that there was almot no public debate at all. Despite the EFA's efforts, stories relating to the bill were stuck in the middle of computer sections of the paper. I first heard about this on slahsdot, rather than through local papers.
Article such as the one about the police commissioner's 10 yar old daughter recieving pornographic spam (which I believe isn't covered by the new bill anyway) got page 3 treatment on the evils of the internet:
Mr Ryan said: "I thought it was disgraceful people could send unsolicited mail of that type to young children and I think it is a very very prevalent thing that's occurring."
Is it censorship to stop this sort of thing from occuring?
As well, there were lots of political aspects in this legislation, but to what extent do you think that politicians and the general public knows, or even cares, about both the issues as a whole, and specifically the technical problems with censoring the internet? I know that a quick survey of some (non CS) friends of mine showed that only about half had heard of the legislation in the first place, and most of the rest coulnd't see any technical problems in doing it.
What you're saying is true. But the GPL places limits on some things:
These requirements [modifying software] apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
IANAL, but that, to me, means that if I have a GPL program, I cannot accept someone else's public domain code into it. Why? Because I am "modifying" a GPL program, but then if I want to distribute it, the entire thing has to be under the GPL. But I didn't write the PD code, so I can't apply the GPL "to each and every part regardless of who wrote it", so I can't distribute it.
PD code is the easiest to give this example with, because it tends to avoid license wars:). However, the same argument applies to any other Open Source licensed code.
Note that this is the opposite to the "virus" arguement, which states that if you ant to change a GPLed program, your code must be GPLed as well. This is stating that if you want to use someone elses code in a GPL programmed, it must be GPLed, or you can't benefit. This is probably not what either author (the GPL, or the one license) wanted.
I'm sure that there are similar conflicts betwwen other, non-GPL, licenses. All these licenses basically want the same sort of thing, but because of their wording, and the vast number of licenses available, all it does is confuse things.
I agree with that, except (playing Devil's advocate) it is hard to enforce this. Larger customers get special favours, access to pre-alpha versions often among them. I'm just saying that its a hard line to draw in a judgement. Someone will always find worthwhile exceptions.
As it stands now, almost certainly a lot of the compiler "patches" don't see light of day
Hm, like what? Speedup type things, or additional features? I know there's proof for the undocumented library calls (DDJ), but are there any for this sort of stuff, or are we all just being paranoid?
I think that the Chinese wall idea is a nice idea, but realistically unworkable.
Imagine that, as you seem to be inferring above, MSOfficeApps, Inc (Stuff like MSOffice, money - bascially stuff for businesses) was separated from MSDevelopment (the compiler/devel environments/etc). The office company would still probably be the largest customer of MSDevel, representing the most number of uesrs (correct me if I'm wrong)
A company should be able to talk to its largest customer. If this customer has a reasonable feature suggestion, then it should be implemented. And a feature requested by the company with the most number of users using its software would probably have a higher priority than one from a small developer with only a few customers.
The fact that that customer is an MS Company shouldn't change things.
MS, because of its size and marketshare, would, no matter how its broken up, still have to have these close ties.
Its very hard to distinguish between legitimate contacts and anticompetitive tactics, and I don't know how to draw the line in a clear way. Suggestions?
The big problem (IIRC) is that when someone in Australia downloads from America, the Aussie backbone provider pays the US backbone provider, but not the other way arround!
I don't know if that's still true, but it used to be at one stage. The US arguement was basically that there was so much more US->AU traffic than the other way around that it wasn't worth the US paying for their share. It was a one way deal. The AU (and other countries) telcos weren't too pleased, but short of not letting their customeers connect to the US, their wasn't much they could do about it.
I pay per meg (uni dialup modem line). A$4 a month, + 0c/Meg local (inside a few local unis), 3c/Meg Aus, and 17c/Meg International.
The uni doesn't like us running servers either, but mainly becuase they (and the government, and the telco) subsidise it. We can't use it for commercial purposes, that that isn't as much of a problem.
They don't like semi-permenant connections when the lines are busy (which is fair enough), so they have a kickoff arrangment that starts by kicking off people who have been connected the longest when the lines get busy. Almost never happens though.
Well, that didn't help us much for the Y2K problem, did it?
Note the quotes and the smiley...
I'm aware of the datafile issues. However, changing from 32->64 bit will affect those as well (sizeof(everything) changes, etc). Why not shove in one additional change at the same time?
In fact, time_t can remain a long, just the size of it changes... That's why currently time_t and lots of other things are typedef, so they're the same length on all platforms. That's why I diagreed with the person who said he'd converted all his source to use doubles rather than time_t.
According to the ABC (the.AU one, not the American one), this will be covered by new privacy legislation. Whether this is effective is a different matter.
For all the/.ers who were saying that the Australian media doesn't care (mainly in yesterday's article), this led the 6pm news on ABC today. Maybe the ABC reads slashdot...
Slashdot Mirror
Is it still a trade secret if a court orders MS to disclose it? (Yes, I know that it was about copyright, not trade secrets. But still, that was one of the points brought up by their clickwrap license agreement.)
Telling someone "here, this is what we do, oh, and BTW, you can't do that without paying us licensing fees" doesn't seem much use to me. I don't think the jugement affects this. Nothing that I could see (IANAL) seemed to stop them from owning and using patents - in fact, the final judgement states that IP rights used by both companies (presumably including patents) "shall be assigned to the Applications Business, and the Operating Systems Business shall be granted a perpetual, royalty-free license to license and distribute such Intellectual Property in its products".
<plug> I'm sort of working on the msvideo stuff. I need more hours in the day though :) See http://www.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~bbaetz/win e/ for very very early patches with known bugs. (ie it doesn't display anything useful at all.)</plug>
Hopefully I'll have more time to work on it in the (short) uni holidays in a few weeks. Theres also a cosource.com request for this, but I haven't applied for it because I don't have the time.
From when this topic has come up before an Australia, I think that one of the points the Aus telcos were making is that orignally the agreement was fair because very little traffic was to the US, but now its not. That makes me think that that figure is probably wrong
The US isn't going to be paying for .AU access. The problem was that, say if for every 100 megs downloaded from the us to Australia 30 went the other way (no, I have no idea what the true figures are, but this is what the article implies). The Australian telcos would have to pay for the 100 megs, but the US wouldn't have to pay for the 30 megs. Australia will still be paying for what we use - just not what the US uses.
The question really should be why should the US get it for free?
OTOH, I think the figures in the article are mixed - I'd be very surprised if "Seventy per cent of Internet traffic between the two countries is from Australia into the US". I thought it would have been the other way around. Or does that mean 70% of requests?
would be added, but you could add links with , for times when you didn't want HTML for markup, but rather for embedding useful info.
doesn't take that much effort, true, but it was still useful.
:)
I believe that was a bug, but it was a useful one
I don't know about the UK, but Sydney Uni prohibits commercial use of their network. I seem to recall that the reason for this is that AARNET which provides the net connection for australian unis has been granted various exceptions from the communications act for academic uses. It may (I can't remember) even be illegal for commercial traffic to be carried.
A quick search of the rfc archives turn up several:
The first one I can find is RFC748, from 1978.
My favourites are RFC1217 - Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research, which "uses a highly redundant optical communication technique to achieve ultra-low, ultra-robust transmission. The basic unit is the M1A1 tank. Each tank is labelled with the number 0 or 1 painted four feet high on the tank turret in yellow, day-glo luminescent paint.", and RFC2549, IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, which extends RFC1149 - "Encapsulation may be done with saran wrappers. Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled."
Anyone know how/why this started?
The australianIT page search page is giving errors, so I can't find it. I don't even know if australianIT keeps archives.
Here's a link to theregister's article about it. The link from that article to the original is also broken. See http://www.oxford-university.com/ for the guy's side of the story.
The original had more info though. IIRC, apparently the person answers the phone as "Mr University". Anyone know where the original article is?
Bradley
PS - extrans mode is broken again.
USyd uses RedHat. I was given a copy of RH4.1, IIRC, a few years ago after I attended a summer school there. I'd been thinking about installing linux for some time, and so that's what I used. That cd included source, but later distributions got too big to fit source+binary on the one cd.
Unfortuately, they haven't updated much, and 5.0 + very few errata updates was what was given out last year. No idea what's planned for this year.
There's actually two bits on the CD - a standard RH with errata updates, and an install batch file which runs a self-extracting zip of a loadlin linux. The whole thing uses umsdos. The first time you boot up it asks you to select your mouse/video card/etc. I think they use the standard RH *config for it now, but it was just a simple shell script in the first versions. The umsdos version is missing things like ppp setup - its basically only meant to be used for windows people to run blue, which is only available for unix. (We have sunos at the uni). It is useful though - there's an icon on the desktop, and when you quit it boots back into windows.
I don't think its officially supported, but there is a CD with X 3.3.5 and a few other updates available for overnight loan to support newer video cards and so on. There's also a messageboard for cs1 students which fields questions about this sort of thing.
Blue's a nice teaching language, although IMHO its limiting for people who have programmed before. (The CS courses don't assume any programming knowledge, even for the advanced class)
And there have already been patches posted to wine-patches porting some of this stuff over. The announcement sent to the wine-devel list by Gavriel State (one of the Corel people who has been working on wine) states:
<i>We plan to start merging our changes back into WineHQ (ie: making patches out of our CVS commits) after we release. In the meantime, if anyone wants to do any of that work for us, please feel free to submit any patches you want from our branch so long we get credit in the changelog. 8-)</i>
I'm planning to merge in the x11drv/dib fixes if noone gets to them before the weekend, to see if that fixes the problems I've been having with msvideo stuff.
Look in the Changelog if you want to find the sort of stuff Corel has been submitting.
Note - extrans mode isn't working in the preview. Don't know if it'll show up in the post.
Well, I was going to write that media player almost worked with avis and native dlls. But then I tried running it now, and it seems something has broken in the last month or so - it just quits on startup :( There are also a few things to check - read documentation/status/multimedia about things which cause wine to crash.
/. awards? :)
The standard mplayer works though with native dlls. Unfortunately the codecs have to come from windows because of licensing issues.
OTOH, I've been looking into the msvideo dll support. In my week off over the new year I got to the stage where I have builtin support which almost works. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the mci stuff yet - all it does is display a blank grey area. Once I get that done, I'll submit it.
Did you vote for wine in the
Blatant Plug: Theres a cosource.com request for avi playing in wine....
Actually, the ABA (Australian Broadcasting Authority) has issued a few takedown notices, but won't tell anyone who they issued them to. See today's Australian for details.
IANAL.
Well, from a brief skim of it (how come the entire text was at cnet, not microsoft?), they seem to be trying to show not that what they did was legal, but that the DOJ didn't actually claim hat they did anything illegal. Its not a defence of what they did, more an attack on the DOJ.
Selected quotes:
"There is remarkably little law in plaintiffs? proposed conclusions of law. Rather than address the legal principles that govern their claims, plaintiffs devote page after page to recounting the Court?s findings of fact, without regard to which of the facts found (or, in some cases, not found) have decisional significance."
[No tying arrangement] "The Court did not find that Microsoft forced anyone to purchase a second product in addition to Windows 98. Because Internet Explorer is part of Windows 98, Microsoft has never charged OEMs (or others) a separate royalty for Internet Explorer."
etc, etc. Plaintiffs haven't shown this, plaintiffs haven't shown that. They're not trying to claim that their actions were misinterpreted by the DOJ (although thats poart of their argument), but that the DOJ hasn't proved anything, and that even if what the DOJ says is right, they're still innocent. At least that's how I read it.
Does a lawyer want to tell me if that sort of thing (there's nothing to defend, they haven't said we done anything) is common?
Yes, but did your announcement email arrive in your mailbox at 4am on the 31st of December? (GMT+11)
Redhat just put out an update for sharutils.
Anyone else see any last minute updates?
Sydney is on daylight saving now, so we're GMT +11 at the moment.
One of the TV channels (9) is running a 25 hour special watching the new year come in from all around the world. However, at 10am Saturday, they have:
Today on Saturday: Y2K special
Today On Saturday will update and report any major problems associated with the Y2K bug. In the event of nothing or little to report, Channel Nine will revert back to the Millennium live coverage.
I think that it will run for about ten to fifteen minutes, but I could be wrong. Anywhere else doing something "special" like this?
(hint: the injunction against BN means that the judge thinks Amazon will prevail.)
I thought that the injunction was just referring to the fact that BN was probably guilty of breaching Amazon's patent, which isn't the issue here. It didn't have anything to with BN's claim that the patent was invalid to start with.
Or did I miss something?
What do you think of the Australian legislation? I'm Australian, and I was amazed that there was almot no public debate at all. Despite the EFA's efforts, stories relating to the bill were stuck in the middle of computer sections of the paper. I first heard about this on slahsdot, rather than through local papers.
Article such as the one about the police commissioner's 10 yar old daughter recieving pornographic spam (which I believe isn't covered by the new bill anyway) got page 3 treatment on the evils of the internet:
Mr Ryan said: "I thought it was disgraceful people could send unsolicited mail of that type to young children and I think it is a very very prevalent thing that's occurring."
Is it censorship to stop this sort of thing from occuring?
As well, there were lots of political aspects in this legislation, but to what extent do you think that politicians and the general public knows, or even cares, about both the issues as a whole, and specifically the technical problems with censoring the internet? I know that a quick survey of some (non CS) friends of mine showed that only about half had heard of the legislation in the first place, and most of the rest coulnd't see any technical problems in doing it.
What you're saying is true. But the GPL places limits on some things:
:). However, the same argument applies to any other Open Source licensed code.
These requirements [modifying software] apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
IANAL, but that, to me, means that if I have a GPL program, I cannot accept someone else's public domain code into it. Why? Because I am "modifying" a GPL program, but then if I want to distribute it, the entire thing has to be under the GPL. But I didn't write the PD code, so I can't apply the GPL "to each and every part regardless of who wrote it", so I can't distribute it.
PD code is the easiest to give this example with, because it tends to avoid license wars
Note that this is the opposite to the "virus" arguement, which states that if you ant to change a GPLed program, your code must be GPLed as well. This is stating that if you want to use someone elses code in a GPL programmed, it must be GPLed, or you can't benefit. This is probably not what either author (the GPL, or the one license) wanted.
I'm sure that there are similar conflicts betwwen other, non-GPL, licenses. All these licenses basically want the same sort of thing, but because of their wording, and the vast number of licenses available, all it does is confuse things.
I agree with that, except (playing Devil's advocate) it is hard to enforce this. Larger customers get special favours, access to pre-alpha versions often among them. I'm just saying that its a hard line to draw in a judgement. Someone will always find worthwhile exceptions.
As it stands now, almost certainly a lot of the compiler "patches" don't see light of day
Hm, like what? Speedup type things, or additional features? I know there's proof for the undocumented library calls (DDJ), but are there any for this sort of stuff, or are we all just being paranoid?
I think that the Chinese wall idea is a nice idea, but realistically unworkable.
Imagine that, as you seem to be inferring above, MSOfficeApps, Inc (Stuff like MSOffice, money - bascially stuff for businesses) was separated from MSDevelopment (the compiler/devel environments/etc). The office company would still probably be the largest customer of MSDevel, representing the most number of uesrs (correct me if I'm wrong)
A company should be able to talk to its largest customer. If this customer has a reasonable feature suggestion, then it should be implemented. And a feature requested by the company with the most number of users using its software would probably have a higher priority than one from a small developer with only a few customers.
The fact that that customer is an MS Company shouldn't change things.
MS, because of its size and marketshare, would, no matter how its broken up, still have to have these close ties.
Its very hard to distinguish between legitimate contacts and anticompetitive tactics, and I don't know how to draw the line in a clear way. Suggestions?
The big problem (IIRC) is that when someone in Australia downloads from America, the Aussie backbone provider pays the US backbone provider, but not the other way arround!
I don't know if that's still true, but it used to be at one stage. The US arguement was basically that there was so much more US->AU traffic than the other way around that it wasn't worth the US paying for their share. It was a one way deal. The AU (and other countries) telcos weren't too pleased, but short of not letting their customeers connect to the US, their wasn't much they could do about it.
I pay per meg (uni dialup modem line). A$4 a month, + 0c/Meg local (inside a few local unis), 3c/Meg Aus, and 17c/Meg International.
The uni doesn't like us running servers either, but mainly becuase they (and the government, and the telco) subsidise it. We can't use it for commercial purposes, that that isn't as much of a problem.
They don't like semi-permenant connections when the lines are busy (which is fair enough), so they have a kickoff arrangment that starts by kicking off people who have been connected the longest when the lines get busy. Almost never happens though.
I prefer it this way. Its cheap and useable.
Well, that didn't help us much for the Y2K problem, did it?
Note the quotes and the smiley...
I'm aware of the datafile issues. However, changing from 32->64 bit will affect those as well (sizeof(everything) changes, etc). Why not shove in one additional change at the same time?
In fact, time_t can remain a long, just the size of it changes... That's why currently time_t and lots of other things are typedef, so they're the same length on all platforms. That's why I diagreed with the person who said he'd converted all his source to use doubles rather than time_t.
According to the ABC (the .AU one, not the American one), this will be covered by new privacy legislation. Whether this is effective is a different matter.
/.ers who were saying that the Australian media doesn't care (mainly in yesterday's article), this led the 6pm news on ABC today. Maybe the ABC reads slashdot...
For all the