The context was not clear. The last statement made by the poster you were responding to was making a claim about version 3, so without you quoting a different part of his post it was reasonable to assume you were referring to 3 as well.
I agree that the patent system is broken. I also think it's dumb for the GPL (any version) to encourage any behavior other than avoiding the incorporation of any patented algorithm in GPL'd code whether the patent is held by the code writer or anyone else and without regard to the probability that the patent holder will take action against it.
As you said, it's difficult to be sure that you're not violating a patent, but it's a problem that the GPL is powerless to solve, so it shouldn't try.
"If you look who pushes for ISO-9000 it's large and slow moving companies that are used to a large and wasteful style of doing business."
It's not just becuase those companies like to waste time and money. These big, costly standards are a great way for big companies to compete with small, nimble competitors by getting business and government customers to require them. The increased cost and decreased efficiency keeps small companies out of the game.
"The developers who complain about java apps requiring *testing* are just lazy developers."
One could make the same argument about developers who complain about having to recompile their applications for each platform. WORA is entirely about saving work. True WORA would mean the testing on any platform would be exactly the same as testing on them all. So those "lazy" developers are really complaining about Sun's exaggerated claims about Java.
"MS forks and names its product 'J++'. They keep it just compatible enough that it segments the Java development community."
J++ didn't segment the Java development community, if it had been allowed to continue it would have brought Windows developers in the Java world. Instead Sun sued MS and doomed Java to the minor leagues of desktop development.
"Single-task PC operating systems (OSes) evolved into multitasking OSes to make the most of increasing CPU power"
I don't think so. The motivation for multitasking was to allow data to be exchanged between applications while both were still running as well as allowing a longer-term task to run in the background while the user does other work. The trade-offs between running a single application and muliple applications at the same time are actually rather independent of CPU speed.
In other words, vague predictions or predictions that are simply based on current well-known trends are easier to make and easier to spin into "correctness" than are specific predictions.
The problem is the less specific the prediction, the less useful or interesting it is.
Sure. You don't like what I said so the companies I've worked for are all idiots.
I guess you don't know much about lawyers. They have a duty to protect their clients and that means they write agreements that favor them. In the case of the NDA, they aren't going to write it in such a way that somebody forgetting to stamp information as confidential would allow employees to divulge that information. So they don't typically restrict the kind of information that the NDA covers.
Now let's say you've signed such an agreement, and then sometime later got fired and sued the company. There is a discovery process that allows the company to investigate you, question people about you and perhaps take relevent materials from your home. Now if in this process the company can show that you violated the NDA, no matter how little, you might lose the case or even get counter-sued or arrested.
So the bottom line: is read the NDA carefully and if you sign it, either abide by it to the letter, or don't give your company reasons to "harass" you.
So PC users shouldn't bother to consider an Apple and Apple users should bother to consider a PC since the comparison is meaningless. OK, I can buy that.
Yes, but the argument was the Apple's computers are no longer more expensive than PCs. Apple fans have always made the argument that the extra cost was worth it. If that's your argument fine, but it just means nothing has changed. Apples continue to be more expensive.
"I am bound by NDA only against discussing information marked as confidential of which I became aware during my tenure. Anything I may find out now, or anything that was not confidential, or even anything that I have surmised based on non-confidential information, is fair game."
IBM must have a very liberal NDA. I've signed many and I've never seen one that is limited to disclosing "information marked as confidential". The language is usually very general and a company can sue you for disclosing just about anything if they really wanted to.
"The whole point of the very quirky Microsoft Office file format, it seems, is to be as incompatible and incomprehensible as possible. So, it is understandable that OO would have difficulty"
Quirky or not, the point is that you shouldn't claim compatability if you don't have it.
"The Microsoft Office file format is part of Microsoft's unearned monopoly, an effective monopoly attained by trickery rather than caring for the customer and the people of the world."
MS office has nothing to do with the Windows "monopoly" unearned or otherwise. The problem is that sometimes believing in all the Anti-MS rhetoric may actually make you less able to compete with them. For example, the concern for compatiblity with Office to a great extent is based on the theory that people want to use Office only because they're supposedly "locked-in". The fact is that many people like Office and have a lot of time invested in learning it.
So if you truly want to compete with Office, you have to give a better reason than (sort of) file compatiblity.
"How the fuck can two people doing third party apps be *better* than the people that design the frigging OS?"
What do you mean? Half the Slashdotters believe that they could do a better job improving Windows than the people who designed it and most of them haven't written any Windows apps. The difference is that in the case of these two guys, it might actually be true.
The first time I tried opening a large.doc file in Open Office, it crashed. Now I wouldn't expect a non-MS word processor to open a Word document: unless it course, it claimed to be compatible. The best thing that could happen to OO is to be honest about it's limited compatability with MS Office.
"In effect, the open development model puts far more emphasis on code review and regression tests than would ever be practical or economically feasible for most commercial closed-source development efforts"
Is there really any evidence that extensive code review and regression testing is taking place in most OSS projects? This is the sort of effort developers really hate even when paid to do it. It's hard to imagine that volunteers are spending hours and hours performing this boring chore.
A simple way to slow down inflation of CEO compensation would be to limit them to serving on one board of directors at a time. The norm today is for CEOs to be on the board of multiple companies. So there's a great motivation and ability to use their power to maintain or raise CEO compensation in general and consequently their own specifically.
Has IT ever been the place where hard-core development goes on? In high-tech companies, IT generally doesn't directly participate in product development.
But isn't this really about the relationship between what a cracker assumes passwords will be like and what they actually are. If they assumed people were using "strong" passwords wouldn't "weak" passwords actually be more difficult to crack (assuming equal length)?
You're missing the point. The only reason that hidden functionality in Windows has anything to do with servers is that they are really part of the same market.
As for the origin of the EU legal effort, do you claim that it wasn't initiated at the request of MS competitors?
But note the qualification "in the market for PC operating systems". It was necessary to carefully carve out a part of the OS market in order to make the charges stick. Now in order to make the EU charges stick, the market has been expanded in full. If the desktop and server markets were really disjoint as the US courts assumed, there would be no way MS's desktop "monopoly" could have any effect on the server market.
The inconsistencies are unimportant however, because the goal of the US and EU efforts was to enrich MS's competitors and this goal has been achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
The context was not clear. The last statement made by the poster you were responding to was making a claim about version 3, so without you quoting a different part of his post it was reasonable to assume you were referring to 3 as well.
I agree that the patent system is broken. I also think it's dumb for the GPL (any version) to encourage any behavior other than avoiding the incorporation of any patented algorithm in GPL'd code whether the patent is held by the code writer or anyone else and without regard to the probability that the patent holder will take action against it.
As you said, it's difficult to be sure that you're not violating a patent, but it's a problem that the GPL is powerless to solve, so it shouldn't try.
It must be a great comfort to know that the new GPL allows you to distribute code that violates patents thus enabling you to be sued.
"If you look who pushes for ISO-9000 it's large and slow moving companies that are used to a large and wasteful style of doing business."
It's not just becuase those companies like to waste time and money. These big, costly standards are a great way for big companies to compete with small, nimble competitors by getting business and government customers to require them. The increased cost and decreased efficiency keeps small companies out of the game.
"The developers who complain about java apps requiring *testing* are just lazy developers."
One could make the same argument about developers who complain about having to recompile their applications for each platform. WORA is entirely about saving work. True WORA would mean the testing on any platform would be exactly the same as testing on them all. So those "lazy" developers are really complaining about Sun's exaggerated claims about Java.
"MS forks and names its product 'J++'. They keep it just compatible enough that it segments the Java development community."
J++ didn't segment the Java development community, if it had been allowed to continue it would have brought Windows developers in the Java world. Instead Sun sued MS and doomed Java to the minor leagues of desktop development.
"Single-task PC operating systems (OSes) evolved into multitasking OSes to make the most of increasing CPU power"
I don't think so. The motivation for multitasking was to allow data to be exchanged between applications while both were still running as well as allowing a longer-term task to run in the background while the user does other work. The trade-offs between running a single application and muliple applications at the same time are actually rather independent of CPU speed.
In other words, vague predictions or predictions that are simply based on current well-known trends are easier to make and easier to spin into "correctness" than are specific predictions.
The problem is the less specific the prediction, the less useful or interesting it is.
Sure. You don't like what I said so the companies I've worked for are all idiots.
I guess you don't know much about lawyers. They have a duty to protect their clients and that means they write agreements that favor them. In the case of the NDA, they aren't going to write it in such a way that somebody forgetting to stamp information as confidential would allow employees to divulge that information. So they don't typically restrict the kind of information that the NDA covers.
Now let's say you've signed such an agreement, and then sometime later got fired and sued the company. There is a discovery process that allows the company to investigate you, question people about you and perhaps take relevent materials from your home. Now if in this process the company can show that you violated the NDA, no matter how little, you might lose the case or even get counter-sued or arrested.
So the bottom line: is read the NDA carefully and if you sign it, either abide by it to the letter, or don't give your company reasons to "harass" you.
So PC users shouldn't bother to consider an Apple and Apple users should bother to consider a PC since the comparison is meaningless. OK, I can buy that.
Yes, but the argument was the Apple's computers are no longer more expensive than PCs. Apple fans have always made the argument that the extra cost was worth it. If that's your argument fine, but it just means nothing has changed. Apples continue to be more expensive.
"I am bound by NDA only against discussing information marked as confidential of which I became aware during my tenure. Anything I may find out now, or anything that was not confidential, or even anything that I have surmised based on non-confidential information, is fair game."
IBM must have a very liberal NDA. I've signed many and I've never seen one that is limited to disclosing "information marked as confidential". The language is usually very general and a company can sue you for disclosing just about anything if they really wanted to.
"The whole point of the very quirky Microsoft Office file format, it seems, is to be as incompatible and incomprehensible as possible. So, it is understandable that OO would have difficulty"
Quirky or not, the point is that you shouldn't claim compatability if you don't have it.
"The Microsoft Office file format is part of Microsoft's unearned monopoly, an effective monopoly attained by trickery rather than caring for the customer and the people of the world."
MS office has nothing to do with the Windows "monopoly" unearned or otherwise. The problem is that sometimes believing in all the Anti-MS rhetoric may actually make you less able to compete with them. For example, the concern for compatiblity with Office to a great extent is based on the theory that people want to use Office only because they're supposedly "locked-in". The fact is that many people like Office and have a lot of time invested in learning it.
So if you truly want to compete with Office, you have to give a better reason than (sort of) file compatiblity.
"How the fuck can two people doing third party apps be *better* than the people that design the frigging OS?"
What do you mean? Half the Slashdotters believe that they could do a better job improving Windows than the people who designed it and most of them haven't written any Windows apps. The difference is that in the case of these two guys, it might actually be true.
The first time I tried opening a large .doc file in Open Office, it crashed. Now I wouldn't expect a non-MS word processor to open a Word document: unless it course, it claimed to be compatible. The best thing that could happen to OO is to be honest about it's limited compatability with MS Office.
Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell announced they are moving out of their parents' basements.
"In effect, the open development model puts far more emphasis on code review and regression tests than would ever be practical or economically feasible for most commercial closed-source development efforts"
Is there really any evidence that extensive code review and regression testing is taking place in most OSS projects? This is the sort of effort developers really hate even when paid to do it. It's hard to imagine that volunteers are spending hours and hours performing this boring chore.
A simple way to slow down inflation of CEO compensation would be to limit them to serving on one board of directors at a time. The norm today is for CEOs to be on the board of multiple companies. So there's a great motivation and ability to use their power to maintain or raise CEO compensation in general and consequently their own specifically.
I hate to burst your idealistic bubble, but the fact is that historically most important standards were developed by large corporations.
Has IT ever been the place where hard-core development goes on? In high-tech companies, IT generally doesn't directly participate in product development.
Perhaps that's OO's security strategy: crash before any exploits can do any harm.
Wow, MS must be on the fringe of standard business practices.
Yeah, it's not as if any engineering or customer support operations were talking place in any US city other than New York.
But isn't this really about the relationship between what a cracker assumes passwords will be like and what they actually are. If they assumed people were using "strong" passwords wouldn't "weak" passwords actually be more difficult to crack (assuming equal length)?
You're missing the point. The only reason that hidden functionality in Windows has anything to do with servers is that they are really part of the same market.
As for the origin of the EU legal effort, do you claim that it wasn't initiated at the request of MS competitors?
But note the qualification "in the market for PC operating systems". It was necessary to carefully carve out a part of the OS market in order to make the charges stick. Now in order to make the EU charges stick, the market has been expanded in full. If the desktop and server markets were really disjoint as the US courts assumed, there would be no way MS's desktop "monopoly" could have any effect on the server market.
The inconsistencies are unimportant however, because the goal of the US and EU efforts was to enrich MS's competitors and this goal has been achieved.