[This is OT, but replies to issues raised in the parent].
I am not an English Major. I did poorly in it at school. Still, I have made a concious effort to improve my English since leaving school.
English majors, as a class, are not writers. Just as in programming, "writing good language", and "writing things that people will get excited about" are quite different properties.
Poor journalism is more to do with corporate image. The ABC and the BBC put a lot of effort into grooming their on-line people.
I have 50 karma as well. But then, I care about this.
It seems that they keep a low profile. "Microsoft" is mentioned only in small letters.
I think their adverts are not that subtle either: one of them runs along the "nice way to die" line. Maybe a 240 volts escaping through a programming hole?
In the early 1980's, writing addin functions for things like Lotus 1-2-3 and the like was a big deal. PC-Mag had debug scripts for users to create their own scripts for nifty little utilities.
Now-a-days, macros are hived off to another area, and we're supposed to learn VirusBasic for Applications, and their woofy interface and use long commands like "CallApplicationFunctionInExcel()" in order to do any automation.
Basically, I just leave VBA for the script kiddies now. Never could make head nor tail of it.
On the other hand, leave me alone with some REXX and a ascii format, and since it's my baby, I understand it and make it do nice things.
Still, my hobbyist science is plowing into new world research:), so there's plenty of noonosphere to claim.
Windows NT has tab completion: to be sure - it's lamer than the thing in 4NT or 4DOS, and is off by default. You can set it to anything you like, eg "x", as long as you hunt down the appropiate registry key. Win9x does not have tab completion.
Window "type" does not compare in the wildest dreams to "cat". It has no "list", "tee" or "y". To get these, you need to get external utilities. You can type more than one file at once, so you can't assemble files with a single type.
"find" is lame. You can't find text in a file, only a pipe. So you can't scavange a tree looking for a string.
God help us if piping and redirection works like UNIX. Oh yes, they do work. And then it closes the window. What a clever little thing. So anyway, to get any sort of piping like sort outfile more often works, and then closes the files.
And then there's edlin. The sole scriptable text editor, an ugly sister of command.com.
And don't get me started on running scripts with parameters. Something like perl script.pl parameters runs, and closes the windows.
The pipes and redirection work better under the DOS emulation, but then in this environment, you get no file completion or command history, and the thing generally feels that it's just about to wobble out because it's hammering too many resources just processing keys.
{disclaimer}ianal{/disclaimer}
It is unreasonable. The matter is not confined to this peice of fiction (ie Spider-Man), but the over-writing of adverts on racing cars and so forth.
For what it's worth, someone sells space to the advert companies, who then on-sell it to whoever is keen to place an advert there. Obviously, if the space is over-written digitally, then this reduces the effectiveness of that particular site, and hence the revenue passing through to the owner of that site.
It's a big deal in motor-racing, where it is possible to geoplace adverts on the sides of cars. Since these cars are funded by displaying the adverts on them, obviously the racing teams and the companies paying for them were understandably upset. The same thing applies to the adverts in the grass of sports games.
In essence, an advert is a payment for a particular point of exposure. That means, everything that happens to it in the nature of being seen / heard in passing, including the recording of that scene on any number of pictures and film while it is being displayed.
The issue is not filming private property but distorting the image in an area for which no permission is granted. You need permission of the site owners to relabel buildings to tie in with your plot, etc.
It's from bitter experience, knowing that it is possible, and not happening.
And here it comes: Microsoft helped IBM create OS/2.
You lost me. DRI helped make DOS, but they don't control it. It's not what MSFT did for others, but what they do to the user.
The three R's of Windows (reboot, reinstall, rebuild) is a sad reflection that their loosing software is bletcherous to fix. On the other hand, I have had a lot of joy from OS/2 (who have never tried to lock me into any middleware.
I can replace the WPS shell if I want to: and in one of the installations, I did just that. You don't need a resource hungry shell on a system you are trying to maximise memory and processor use.
In the end, it's all about choice. OS/2 was the choice when I started. I liked it then and I continue to like it.
Without the intrusive middleware, the thing would actually work. People would not be looking for the latest version, and hence rely on their doggedly old Windows1836, just as we have old clunkers on the road.
Since a working windows would not help Microsoft take over the world, it would be....
crippled!
{OT subject="cripple"}Years ago, I heard that you could circumvent viruses by renaming command.com to 1234567.com, and doing a few string hacks in the kernel. Lots of other 7-letter words work: legless.com and cripple.com. Armed with the wheel-chair icon, it makes a dandy command propt for Windows.{/OT}
Security is not an issue in bare computing machines. "Security" is about un-authorised access and use, not about "not crashing".
For what it's worth, the Soviets used a form of DOS to get run their rockets. If a system is critical to operation, it will be made robust and physically isolated from the outside.
If remote control is also needed, then a second element will be created so that security does not interfere with the machine, or, like teller machines, some work will go into making them tamper-proof.
That OS/2 is often used for ATMs and other embeddd systems, but has no native inbuilt security (this is an addon), suggest that robustness and security are different.
Much of what Microsoft has been doing is about "security", that is, stopping people using poorly written comingled code to do things to people's hard disks through net apps.
I would rather trust my life to a robust system than a secure one.
Re:The sad truth: foreigners gobble up US culture
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
Either that, or the US killed off local competition. It's not anything that the US did, but simply because they are huge.
Put simply, there were local movie industries in Europe and Australia, and elsewhere. It's not that they were not innovative: it's just that the ecconomies of scale killed it.
On much the same vain, syndicating radio and television shows is a lot cheaper than making your own. So it is cheaper to make the news in one city, and send it to two, then to make it in two cities, and send each to its own.
And because US stuff makes its profits domestically, all the foreign rerun stuff is free profit.
The DVD regions were aimed to preserve this advantage. Removing the DVD zones would break down the lags in transfer of film, and therefore "recycling" movies around the world.
Update: not everyone agrees on everything. ipoverscsi writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has a followup interview with Joel Spolsky comprised mainly of rebuttals from the comments section of an older article on Slashdot. A quote I found interesting regarding re-writing software: 'Don't even talk to me about spending money replacing something that works. The only question that is relevant is -- what does it cost to fix it if it doesn't work?'"
There are other issues about rewritting software, such as considering what is up and down stream from it. A sort program may work perfectly well, but may be wholy unusable as a filter.
Another reason that software may need to be looked at is that they no longer conform with the way people do things. Consider the multitude of program exits that existed before the CUA became widespread.
This is not dissimilar to redesigning peices of machinery to work with other elsewise incompatible machines.
Microsoft did not "simply give up on it". NT really is OS/2 running a legacy shell, just as Win9x is DOS running the legacy shell.
The decline in RISC operating systems (such as the PPC), came more as a result of that these chips never took the market by storm. Yes, there was a OS/2 for PPC in the pipeline.
The reason more often pushed forward is, that MS was quite happy with OS/2 when it was a console session, and even alright when it had the PM layer. But the moment it grew WPS, MS was not keen on it because, were it to succeed in the market place, MSFT would not control it.
Microsoft essentially forked OS/2 (and all its bits), just as they forked HTML, Kerebos, etc, etc.
The really good bits (REXX, IPF, WPS, PM, IFS, Program Manager, File Manager) are IBM stuff. The bad bits (the DOS coffin, 16-bit stuff) are Microsoft's stuff.
IFS forst appeared in the DOS world in PCDOS 4.0. IBM wrote that.
IBM had virtual machines before Microsoft *existed*.
File and Program Manager appeared in OS/2 1.1 or 1.2. Microsoft borrowed these for the Windows 3.x shell apps.
REXX and IPF are IBM mainframe stuff, using standard bits in different operating systems.
WPS is IBM's invention: the shell, and even the colours were borrowed by Microsoft. The teal background first appeared in OS/2 2.11, way before Windows.
And more, IBM tried to support existing machines, and not only the latest and greatest. IE they support the idea of using your OS on an old machine.
The Linuxers do well to learn from the experiences of the OS/2 and Amiga grass roots campaigns.
Like Linux, many OS/2 users chose and stuck with their OS because they wanted, and because they changed.
OS/2 users often multibooted, and were quite familiar with Windows systems. Often far better than the Windows users themselves.:) This is in part because fixing the problems up in OS/2 often required a bit of poking around, and this habit passed onto fixing Windows systems.
What we do not really need is this "death threat" thing when advocates turned nasty.
OS/2 trives even now, not because of IBM or Microsoft, but, like Linux, because of the users themselves. It aims at a different market to Linux, but both have vigourous grass roots. No monopolist likes that:).
Netscape competed in a market against free browsers. Their browser included in the browser window the ftp client, and a number of different innovations. They exposed assorted API for developers, and included SUN's JAVA virtual machine.
They sold their browser at a price of about half a game, eg $25. Despite this, they captured 80% of the market.
Microsoft saw this happening, and decided to put their finger in the pie. They sold IE v1, but this did not capture any of the market. Their attempt at IE2 failed dismally, even though they distributed it for free, and included it in Windows. But this did not discourage NS use.
It was the tieing of IE into Windows, that was one of the complaints of the trial. It really was Microsoft's fault that NS collapesd, first by preditory pricing, and when that failed, by contractual, and then technological, tieing.
Ye folk using OS/2, Linux, etc would not have a decent browser were it not for netscape.
And if ye really care about diversity, ye should care about competition, such as NS.
If I create something in VBasic - does MS own it?
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
I am not a lawyer, but....
The question gives two examples, the use of external tools on a work, and the use of someone's code in a work.
Were the copyright incident on the work, then Microsoft, Borland, Watcom, IBM, etc would "own" every peice of software compiled under their compilers. The fact that they expose APIs and libraries for the user to use does not affect the issue.
The same holds true for any editors, IDE and so forth. What this means is, that if I were to use the GCC compiler as I would use MSC or VBASIC, then my work is not using any code created under the GPL, and my original work (the source code) does not contain any GPL or Microsoft or Borland code, and is therefore not copyright by any of these.
What matters is that these tools take an original set of text files, and produces an original work at the other end. As long as you "own" the source material, you "own" the output, and therefore you can do whatever you wish with it.
The second example suggests that there is some source code, that they wish to hide through passing through name-changes. Derivation, not incidence operates here, and then you would be covered by the copyright provisions of the author.
The fact that you want to hide the origions of the code is indication that it is not propper.
Your lawyer friend should need to consider these issues.
First, note that IE was included in the OS to forclose the market for NS. This is itself illegal.
Second, by creating an artificial tie between the OS and the browser, they have made it impossible for an end user or anyone else to remove IE. Yes, I know about 98lite, but 98lite only restores the system to how it ought have been.
Third, by promoting IE as "the browser of choice" and by making it available only for Windows, it makes Windows the "OS of choice" for Internet access, and therefore protect their monopoly.
Fourthly, that Windows cannot change its shell and that functionality is affected is clearly not true. Consider:
The default shell in Win 1.x and 2.x is msdos.exe, a "file open" dialog box.
The default shell in Win 3.x was lifted from OS/2 1.3's desktop manager and file manager, even replicatng the bugs... Lining up the icons in a vertical list is straight out of OS/2's program manager.
The third largest market of Win3x software was programs to replace the default shell: Norton Desktop for Windows was pretty common that programs needed to be aware of it.
Windows 95 and NT4 sported a shell that did not have any internet or web based hooks.
The shell in Windows 2000, 98 and Me can all be replaced, but XP and SP 2 onwards can not.
All it needs is a "new-found desire" to move the shell into "new and exciting directions" to get MS to uncouple the shell from the browser.
But even removing the icons from the desktop does not remove the code. All it does is remove the icon. Ye might as well say that there is no registry editor, since there is no icon for it.
98lite pro, really DOES remove IE code. It also patches a number of files (including wordpad and notepad), so that the dependance is gone. There's about a dozen files it patches to make Windows work without IE.
Whether or not you can use the RTF tool if you're making a competing word processor has never been tested in court, as far as I know.
Microsoft are saying "They can't remove IE", because it is the comingling of code that they're in the courts for. They have not been accused of comingling DefectX code, or notepad, into the OS. Both of these are freely installable and uninstallable. Like browsers in every other OS.
Microsoft could charge you for using DefectX right now. DefectX basically allows you to play DefectX games. Offis plugins allow you to extend Offis, and you need that virus installed for the plugin to work. I mean, Netscape charged in the order of 25$ for their browser, and people brought it.
I mean, there is nothing wrong with charging for an engine, and then charging a different amount for games to play under that.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an English Major. I did poorly in it at school. Still, I have made a concious effort to improve my English since leaving school.
English majors, as a class, are not writers. Just as in programming, "writing good language", and "writing things that people will get excited about" are quite different properties.
Poor journalism is more to do with corporate image. The ABC and the BBC put a lot of effort into grooming their on-line people.
I have 50 karma as well. But then, I care about this.
I think their adverts are not that subtle either: one of them runs along the "nice way to die" line. Maybe a 240 volts escaping through a programming hole?
Now-a-days, macros are hived off to another area, and we're supposed to learn VirusBasic for Applications, and their woofy interface and use long commands like "CallApplicationFunctionInExcel()" in order to do any automation.
Basically, I just leave VBA for the script kiddies now. Never could make head nor tail of it.
On the other hand, leave me alone with some REXX and a ascii format, and since it's my baby, I understand it and make it do nice things.
Still, my hobbyist science is plowing into new world research :), so there's plenty of noonosphere to claim.
Windows NT has tab completion: to be sure - it's lamer than the thing in 4NT or 4DOS, and is off by default. You can set it to anything you like, eg "x", as long as you hunt down the appropiate registry key. Win9x does not have tab completion.
Window "type" does not compare in the wildest dreams to "cat". It has no "list", "tee" or "y". To get these, you need to get external utilities. You can type more than one file at once, so you can't assemble files with a single type.
"find" is lame. You can't find text in a file, only a pipe. So you can't scavange a tree looking for a string.
God help us if piping and redirection works like UNIX. Oh yes, they do work. And then it closes the window. What a clever little thing. So anyway, to get any sort of piping like sort outfile more often works, and then closes the files.
And then there's edlin. The sole scriptable text editor, an ugly sister of command.com.
And don't get me started on running scripts with parameters. Something like perl script.pl parameters runs, and closes the windows.
The pipes and redirection work better under the DOS emulation, but then in this environment, you get no file completion or command history, and the thing generally feels that it's just about to wobble out because it's hammering too many resources just processing keys.
For what it's worth, someone sells space to the advert companies, who then on-sell it to whoever is keen to place an advert there. Obviously, if the space is over-written digitally, then this reduces the effectiveness of that particular site, and hence the revenue passing through to the owner of that site.
It's a big deal in motor-racing, where it is possible to geoplace adverts on the sides of cars. Since these cars are funded by displaying the adverts on them, obviously the racing teams and the companies paying for them were understandably upset. The same thing applies to the adverts in the grass of sports games.
In essence, an advert is a payment for a particular point of exposure. That means, everything that happens to it in the nature of being seen / heard in passing, including the recording of that scene on any number of pictures and film while it is being displayed.
The issue is not filming private property but distorting the image in an area for which no permission is granted. You need permission of the site owners to relabel buildings to tie in with your plot, etc.
It's from bitter experience, knowing that it is possible, and not happening.
And here it comes: Microsoft helped IBM create OS/2.
You lost me. DRI helped make DOS, but they don't control it. It's not what MSFT did for others, but what they do to the user.
The three R's of Windows (reboot, reinstall, rebuild) is a sad reflection that their loosing software is bletcherous to fix. On the other hand, I have had a lot of joy from OS/2 (who have never tried to lock me into any middleware. I can replace the WPS shell if I want to: and in one of the installations, I did just that. You don't need a resource hungry shell on a system you are trying to maximise memory and processor use.
In the end, it's all about choice. OS/2 was the choice when I started. I liked it then and I continue to like it.
And a tear runs down your poor little cheek.
The tear is wept for the loss of choice.
You don't need a windows environment: I've done this under DOS programs. If you're game, you could use debug.
Always try it out on a boot floppy first :)
But you can with 98Lite Pro remove it.....
Without the intrusive middleware, the thing would actually work. People would not be looking for the latest version, and hence rely on their doggedly old Windows1836, just as we have old clunkers on the road.
Since a working windows would not help Microsoft take over the world, it would be ....
crippled!
{OT subject="cripple"}Years ago, I heard that you could circumvent viruses by renaming command.com to 1234567.com, and doing a few string hacks in the kernel. Lots of other 7-letter words work: legless.com and cripple.com. Armed with the wheel-chair icon, it makes a dandy command propt for Windows.{/OT}
For what it's worth, the Soviets used a form of DOS to get run their rockets. If a system is critical to operation, it will be made robust and physically isolated from the outside.
If remote control is also needed, then a second element will be created so that security does not interfere with the machine, or, like teller machines, some work will go into making them tamper-proof.
That OS/2 is often used for ATMs and other embeddd systems, but has no native inbuilt security (this is an addon), suggest that robustness and security are different.
Much of what Microsoft has been doing is about "security", that is, stopping people using poorly written comingled code to do things to people's hard disks through net apps.
I would rather trust my life to a robust system than a secure one.
Put simply, there were local movie industries in Europe and Australia, and elsewhere. It's not that they were not innovative: it's just that the ecconomies of scale killed it.
On much the same vain, syndicating radio and television shows is a lot cheaper than making your own. So it is cheaper to make the news in one city, and send it to two, then to make it in two cities, and send each to its own.
And because US stuff makes its profits domestically, all the foreign rerun stuff is free profit.
The DVD regions were aimed to preserve this advantage. Removing the DVD zones would break down the lags in transfer of film, and therefore "recycling" movies around the world.
There are other issues about rewritting software, such as considering what is up and down stream from it. A sort program may work perfectly well, but may be wholy unusable as a filter.
Another reason that software may need to be looked at is that they no longer conform with the way people do things. Consider the multitude of program exits that existed before the CUA became widespread.
This is not dissimilar to redesigning peices of machinery to work with other elsewise incompatible machines.
The decline in RISC operating systems (such as the PPC), came more as a result of that these chips never took the market by storm. Yes, there was a OS/2 for PPC in the pipeline.
The reason more often pushed forward is, that MS was quite happy with OS/2 when it was a console session, and even alright when it had the PM layer. But the moment it grew WPS, MS was not keen on it because, were it to succeed in the market place, MSFT would not control it.
Microsoft essentially forked OS/2 (and all its bits), just as they forked HTML, Kerebos, etc, etc.
Gee, I installed Windoze way more times than OS/2. It's given out as a "standard fix for anything."
And you obviously have not seen NT install :)
Likewise, you can say IBM wrote Windows.
The really good bits (REXX, IPF, WPS, PM, IFS, Program Manager, File Manager) are IBM stuff. The bad bits (the DOS coffin, 16-bit stuff) are Microsoft's stuff.
IFS forst appeared in the DOS world in PCDOS 4.0. IBM wrote that.
IBM had virtual machines before Microsoft *existed*. File and Program Manager appeared in OS/2 1.1 or 1.2. Microsoft borrowed these for the Windows 3.x shell apps.
REXX and IPF are IBM mainframe stuff, using standard bits in different operating systems.
WPS is IBM's invention: the shell, and even the colours were borrowed by Microsoft. The teal background first appeared in OS/2 2.11, way before Windows.
And more, IBM tried to support existing machines, and not only the latest and greatest. IE they support the idea of using your OS on an old machine.
Like Linux, many OS/2 users chose and stuck with their OS because they wanted, and because they changed.
OS/2 users often multibooted, and were quite familiar with Windows systems. Often far better than the Windows users themselves. :) This is in part because fixing the problems up in OS/2 often required a bit of poking around, and this habit passed onto fixing Windows systems.
What we do not really need is this "death threat" thing when advocates turned nasty.
OS/2 trives even now, not because of IBM or Microsoft, but, like Linux, because of the users themselves. It aims at a different market to Linux, but both have vigourous grass roots. No monopolist likes that :).
They sold their browser at a price of about half a game, eg $25. Despite this, they captured 80% of the market.
Microsoft saw this happening, and decided to put their finger in the pie. They sold IE v1, but this did not capture any of the market. Their attempt at IE2 failed dismally, even though they distributed it for free, and included it in Windows. But this did not discourage NS use.
It was the tieing of IE into Windows, that was one of the complaints of the trial. It really was Microsoft's fault that NS collapesd, first by preditory pricing, and when that failed, by contractual, and then technological, tieing.
Ye folk using OS/2, Linux, etc would not have a decent browser were it not for netscape.
And if ye really care about diversity, ye should care about competition, such as NS.
The question gives two examples, the use of external tools on a work, and the use of someone's code in a work.
Were the copyright incident on the work, then Microsoft, Borland, Watcom, IBM, etc would "own" every peice of software compiled under their compilers. The fact that they expose APIs and libraries for the user to use does not affect the issue.
The same holds true for any editors, IDE and so forth. What this means is, that if I were to use the GCC compiler as I would use MSC or VBASIC, then my work is not using any code created under the GPL, and my original work (the source code) does not contain any GPL or Microsoft or Borland code, and is therefore not copyright by any of these.
What matters is that these tools take an original set of text files, and produces an original work at the other end. As long as you "own" the source material, you "own" the output, and therefore you can do whatever you wish with it.
The second example suggests that there is some source code, that they wish to hide through passing through name-changes. Derivation, not incidence operates here, and then you would be covered by the copyright provisions of the author.
The fact that you want to hide the origions of the code is indication that it is not propper.
Your lawyer friend should need to consider these issues.
This is simple.
First, note that IE was included in the OS to forclose the market for NS. This is itself illegal.
Second, by creating an artificial tie between the OS and the browser, they have made it impossible for an end user or anyone else to remove IE. Yes, I know about 98lite, but 98lite only restores the system to how it ought have been.
Third, by promoting IE as "the browser of choice" and by making it available only for Windows, it makes Windows the "OS of choice" for Internet access, and therefore protect their monopoly.
Fourthly, that Windows cannot change its shell and that functionality is affected is clearly not true. Consider:
- The default shell in Win 1.x and 2.x is msdos.exe, a "file open" dialog box.
- The default shell in Win 3.x was lifted from OS/2 1.3's desktop manager and file manager, even replicatng the bugs... Lining up the icons in a vertical list is straight out of OS/2's program manager.
- Windows 95 and NT4 sported a shell that did not have any internet or web based hooks.
- The shell in Windows 2000, 98 and Me can all be replaced, but XP and SP 2 onwards can not.
- All it needs is a "new-found desire" to move the shell into "new and exciting directions" to get MS to uncouple the shell from the browser.
But even removing the icons from the desktop does not remove the code. All it does is remove the icon. Ye might as well say that there is no registry editor, since there is no icon for it.The third largest market of Win3x software was programs to replace the default shell: Norton Desktop for Windows was pretty common that programs needed to be aware of it.
98lite pro, really DOES remove IE code. It also patches a number of files (including wordpad and notepad), so that the dependance is gone. There's about a dozen files it patches to make Windows work without IE.
Whether or not you can use the RTF tool if you're making a competing word processor has never been tested in court, as far as I know.
Microsoft are saying "They can't remove IE", because it is the comingling of code that they're in the courts for. They have not been accused of comingling DefectX code, or notepad, into the OS. Both of these are freely installable and uninstallable. Like browsers in every other OS.
Microsoft could charge you for using DefectX right now. DefectX basically allows you to play DefectX games. Offis plugins allow you to extend Offis, and you need that virus installed for the plugin to work. I mean, Netscape charged in the order of 25$ for their browser, and people brought it.
I mean, there is nothing wrong with charging for an engine, and then charging a different amount for games to play under that.
Wrong url - try this
You're not the only one :)
Cringley's remarks are about restoring competition to the market place, he uses Apple OS/X as a candidate.
But there already exists suitable candidates that have a large amount of software available, that could easily be pre-installed on computers.
The simple process is to dual-boot all new computers, and provide internet and networking connectivity through the non-Microsoft OS.
I think the only valid condition is to remove clauses, or grant further rights, or not to persue breaches of existing conditions.
But then, I am not a lawyer.
Maybe they'll claim IE is not part of Windows.
XTree users might care to check out the xtree clone ZTBold and ZTreeWin