Well, then fooling you doesn't seem that hard to do. Those are just a few of the most obvious.
Email was invented by DARPA - which makes it public domain, not OSS. Usenet was public domain, not OSS. P2P? You're going to have to get more specific than that, because peer to peer architectures have existed since the dawn of networked computing. Bittorrent? OK, I'll give you that one. WWW? Public domain. Also, it builds upon the Gopher and Veronica systems that already existed, SGML was was developed for the US military (public domain), etc etc etc.
So, no, OSS hasn't innovated that much. Thanks though.
Some might fall outside your arbitrary little time frame, but OSS has email, the internet, WWW, Usenet, P2P, bittorrent, and pretty much everything else you use a computer for.
OSS innovated all of those? Funny... could have fooled me.
So explain how Word was supposed to use Postscript as its document format when (1) Word predated Postscript, so it couldn't, and (2) Postscript is a presentation format, not suitable for editing?
What the fuck? Care to explain any of this? What does the document format have to do with performance of editing on slow systems?
It's a page based piece-table system, designed to be handled in 512 byte chunks (IIRC) - just what you need on slow, low-memory systems. Because it stores everything in its in-memory form, all you have to do is write some code to swap in and out those 512 byte pages - doesn't matter how big your document is, or how complex, it all just works. (Mind you, the piece-table algorithm helps with that).
how can.DOC be considered to "degrade gracefully" when it often just breaks,
It just breaks? You'll have to explain that.
and Microsoft changes it all the time?
The Doc format was last changed in 1997. That's not "all the time".
For all we know computing as we know it would be years ahead if it wasnt for Microsoft and Bill Gates. The way Microsoft has taken over the market is disturbing. By killing the competition, not by selling better products. If it hadnt been Bill it would have been [insert name of choice here] that would be throwing money at third world countries to avoid taxes.
Given that it's impossible to kill "Free" Software, how come OSS hasn't really innovated at all in the last 15 years? Your argument doesn't hold water.
Similarly, you can't reduce your tax bill by donating to charity. All you're doing is deciding how your taxes are used - which, if you're not happy with how the Government will spend them is a wonderful idea.
Is giving ~2% of your fortune to charity each year really that amazing?
It is more worthy than all of the other donations by people, many of whom might be donating a lot more money in percentage terms, or actually donating their time to the cause?
Is that 2% of the total paper assets, total liquid capital, or the total that he can access without adversely affecting his total assets?
Bear in mind that if he decided to pull 20% of his stock out of Microsoft in any given year, he'd seriously adversely affect their stock price. It's not like he has X billion in the bank - it's all tied up in other things. About the only way he can pull it out of the system without killing the companies he has money invested in is by dying - and even then it'll cause issues unless they keep drawing it slowly.
The document format. Somehow text files work great, and we've had useful standards in publishing like Postscript for a long time. The.DOC format makes Microsoft Word practically useless.
Word predates Postscript by at least a year. It's also a great document format - it makes for a very fast, flexible application which keeps up with editing even on slow systems, and degrades gracefully.
Of course, that makes it more complex to write a parser for it, because you're dealing with in-memory structures written straight to disk.
Postscript is also nearly completely USELESS as a document format. It's essentially write-only. It's fine as a final output format, but that's about it.
Perhaps you should investigate how word processors are written before making blanket statements about which formats they should use?
Indeed, at least google does the exact same thing. There was an interesting article in Salon a while back about the way in which foreign IT firms play a big and subservient role in chinese official efforts to censor the net.
Well, they have to. The Chinese Govt. has a nasty habit of arresting officers of companies who don't toe the line on censorship and political issues. Microsoft employees in China have been thrown in jail more than once - the last example I know of was because of a bad timezone boundary (indicated that Taiwan was a separate country).
As in who pays for RMS' living and traveling expenses? Donations to the FSF? Someone with insight please comment. I think in many ways RMS is brilliant, but how has he paid his bills promoting FOSS for the last 20+ odd years?
In 1990, he was awarded a $240,000 fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2001, he won an $268k Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being.
He ain't exactly hurting for cash. That's just the awards he has won. He makes most of his cash from speeches and personal appearances.
Which is cool, you know, if you're a superstar and can make money that way. But most programmers aren't, and can't.
Either you don't work in the software industry or you work for Microsoft (or you're still in school) but you apparently don't have the slightest idea how the real world works.
When you get a work working on software, it statistically *never* is writing one of those things that ends up in a box in your local shop. Writing software is fiddling with an application that's internal to the company you are currently working for or which ends up embedded in the entrails of some sort of device (or of a web site).
Funny... nearly every single job I've had in the computer industry has been working on software that ends up in a box in your local shop (or the equivalent - one was working on the control software for a mass spectrometer).
Just 'cos you chose to work in the boring, unglamorous world of customizing someone else's software, doesn't mean that the rest of us did.
Either way, don't feed them crap: breast-feed for as long as reasonably possible, then get them into eating their food as fresh, raw and un-tinkered-with as possible (a tactic which admittedly might not go down well amongst meat lovers).
Your body can't process raw food well. It has evolved to handle cooked food.
Raw veggies contain most of their nutrients packed in cellulose. Which you can't digest. The only way to break them out is to cook the food - which kills off some of the nutrients, but unleashes a hell of a lot more than you'd get by eating raw food.
Now if you're going for bacterial exposure, believe me, meat lovers are going to get plenty of that - especially if they like their meat rare or medium rare (yum).
They counted on their legal machine being able to crush tiny Eolas regardless of the merits of the case. Eolas is just one guy, Mike Doyle. He invented this technology legitimately, albeit about a month or two before other people.
Obviously you've never heard of the RIP protocol that was in use on Amiga BBS systems WAY before then. Or any number of other prior art examples.
How often do we see bug reports from Microsoft about a critical vulnerabilities, compared to third-party reports?
Microsoft don't report them unless they have a patch ready to roll - because, as they've said in the past, releasing details of the vulnerabilities allows people to exploit them, and that's just a bad idea if you don't have a patch waiting in the wings.
So usually you don't see them at all. The only time critical vulnerabilities get any press is when people other than Microsoft release info about them - and that's because there's no patch ready to roll when they're announced.
Meanwhile, those of us who have been advocating building large numbers of loosely coupled, message passing, components all running with their own process space gave enormous grins on our faces at the thought of being able to do the message passing via a shared cache with only a cycle or two penalty...
Yeah, but are you used to doing that in a DSP-like architecture, where most of your operations are going to be SIMD ones lest you hit massive branch penalties?
Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.
Thing is, bud, that if you don't believe people should be compensated for the things they craft using their mind, then why should anyone be compensated for anything at all?... which takes us right back to the communism idea.
There is a certain mindset that identifies anyone that does anything for anyone outside of their immediate family without receiving financial gain for it as a communist.
And then there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same.
I base it on the Windows XP box I'm using to develop WebServices, for - guess what? IIS. In the last year the XP box (which is never more than 24 hours out-of-date with MS updates) has BSOD-ed twice.
Bet you that it's either bad hardware, or a bad driver.
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This should have never even been in the WMF specification in the first place .
It was a bad idea then.
It's a bad idea now.
Except, under the hood, WMF is used to batch together GDI calls, which means it needs this functionality. So how do you fix it?
Dude.... you don't have to take microsoft's word for it.
WMF Exploit with different record lengths, completely invalidating Gibson's claims
Answer my question. Why would you think MS would ever admit intentional, malicious behavior?
It's irrelevant. Gibson's claim was based on faulty analysis in the first place.
WMF dates back to close to 10 years
Err.... no. Make that close to 18 years. Longer if you include when it was in development, rather than when Windows 2.0 shipped.
Well, then fooling you doesn't seem that hard to do. Those are just a few of the most obvious.
Email was invented by DARPA - which makes it public domain, not OSS.
Usenet was public domain, not OSS.
P2P? You're going to have to get more specific than that, because peer to peer architectures have existed since the dawn of networked computing.
Bittorrent? OK, I'll give you that one.
WWW? Public domain. Also, it builds upon the Gopher and Veronica systems that already existed, SGML was was developed for the US military (public domain), etc etc etc.
So, no, OSS hasn't innovated that much. Thanks though.
Some might fall outside your arbitrary little time frame, but OSS has email, the internet, WWW, Usenet, P2P, bittorrent, and pretty much everything else you use a computer for.
OSS innovated all of those? Funny... could have fooled me.
So what? Word is an application, not a standard.
.DOC be considered to "degrade gracefully" when it often just breaks,
So explain how Word was supposed to use Postscript as its document format when (1) Word predated Postscript, so it couldn't, and (2) Postscript is a presentation format, not suitable for editing?
What the fuck? Care to explain any of this? What does the document format have to do with performance of editing on slow systems?
It's a page based piece-table system, designed to be handled in 512 byte chunks (IIRC) - just what you need on slow, low-memory systems. Because it stores everything in its in-memory form, all you have to do is write some code to swap in and out those 512 byte pages - doesn't matter how big your document is, or how complex, it all just works. (Mind you, the piece-table algorithm helps with that).
how can
It just breaks? You'll have to explain that.
and Microsoft changes it all the time?
The Doc format was last changed in 1997. That's not "all the time".
For all we know computing as we know it would be years ahead if it wasnt for Microsoft and Bill Gates. The way Microsoft has taken over the market is disturbing. By killing the competition, not by selling better products. If it hadnt been Bill it would have been [insert name of choice here] that would be throwing money at third world countries to avoid taxes.
Given that it's impossible to kill "Free" Software, how come OSS hasn't really innovated at all in the last 15 years? Your argument doesn't hold water.
Similarly, you can't reduce your tax bill by donating to charity. All you're doing is deciding how your taxes are used - which, if you're not happy with how the Government will spend them is a wonderful idea.
Is giving ~2% of your fortune to charity each year really that amazing?
It is more worthy than all of the other donations by people, many of whom might be donating a lot more money in percentage terms, or actually donating their time to the cause?
Is that 2% of the total paper assets, total liquid capital, or the total that he can access without adversely affecting his total assets?
Bear in mind that if he decided to pull 20% of his stock out of Microsoft in any given year, he'd seriously adversely affect their stock price. It's not like he has X billion in the bank - it's all tied up in other things. About the only way he can pull it out of the system without killing the companies he has money invested in is by dying - and even then it'll cause issues unless they keep drawing it slowly.
The document format. Somehow text files work great, and we've had useful standards in publishing like Postscript for a long time. The .DOC format makes Microsoft Word practically useless.
Word predates Postscript by at least a year. It's also a great document format - it makes for a very fast, flexible application which keeps up with editing even on slow systems, and degrades gracefully.
Of course, that makes it more complex to write a parser for it, because you're dealing with in-memory structures written straight to disk.
Postscript is also nearly completely USELESS as a document format. It's essentially write-only. It's fine as a final output format, but that's about it.
Perhaps you should investigate how word processors are written before making blanket statements about which formats they should use?
Indeed, at least google does the exact same thing. There was an interesting article in Salon a while back about the way in which foreign IT firms play a big and subservient role in chinese official efforts to censor the net.
Well, they have to. The Chinese Govt. has a nasty habit of arresting officers of companies who don't toe the line on censorship and political issues. Microsoft employees in China have been thrown in jail more than once - the last example I know of was because of a bad timezone boundary (indicated that Taiwan was a separate country).
As in who pays for RMS' living and traveling expenses? Donations to the FSF? Someone with insight please comment. I think in many ways RMS is brilliant, but how has he paid his bills promoting FOSS for the last 20+ odd years?
In 1990, he was awarded a $240,000 fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In 2001, he won an $268k Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievement for Social/Economic Well-Being.
He ain't exactly hurting for cash. That's just the awards he has won. He makes most of his cash from speeches and personal appearances.
Which is cool, you know, if you're a superstar and can make money that way. But most programmers aren't, and can't.
Either you don't work in the software industry or you work for Microsoft (or you're still in school) but you apparently don't have the slightest idea how the real world works.
When you get a work working on software, it statistically *never* is writing one of those things that ends up in a box in your local shop.
Writing software is fiddling with an application that's internal to the company you are currently working for or which ends up embedded in the entrails of some sort of device (or of a web site).
Funny... nearly every single job I've had in the computer industry has been working on software that ends up in a box in your local shop (or the equivalent - one was working on the control software for a mass spectrometer).
Just 'cos you chose to work in the boring, unglamorous world of customizing someone else's software, doesn't mean that the rest of us did.
Didn't Lex Luthor get all sorts of humanitarian awards too?
Let's see... rich guy, gives money to charities, does humanitarian things, does some evil on the side...
Sorry to break this to you, but Lex Luthor is a fictional character.
Get a grip.
The same amount I've raised using illegal business practices.
Not a particularly good argument, especially given that the court system seems to have found him not personally guilty - he isn't in jail, after all.
Sounds like you're trying to compensate for your own lack of charity.
The "Benefits of first to market"? Well, maybe Microsoft should ask Sega about this one. Only the hardcore gamers bought the dreamcast.
Microsoft already know all about the Dreamcast - they wrote a huge chunk of system libraries for it based on Windows CE.
Either way, don't feed them crap: breast-feed for as long as reasonably possible, then get them into eating their food as fresh, raw and un-tinkered-with as possible (a tactic which admittedly might not go down well amongst meat lovers).
Your body can't process raw food well. It has evolved to handle cooked food.
Raw veggies contain most of their nutrients packed in cellulose. Which you can't digest. The only way to break them out is to cook the food - which kills off some of the nutrients, but unleashes a hell of a lot more than you'd get by eating raw food.
Now if you're going for bacterial exposure, believe me, meat lovers are going to get plenty of that - especially if they like their meat rare or medium rare (yum).
They counted on their legal machine being able to crush tiny Eolas regardless of the merits of the case. Eolas is just one guy, Mike Doyle. He invented this technology legitimately, albeit about a month or two before other people.
Obviously you've never heard of the RIP protocol that was in use on Amiga BBS systems WAY before then. Or any number of other prior art examples.
How often do we see bug reports from Microsoft about a critical vulnerabilities, compared to third-party reports?
Microsoft don't report them unless they have a patch ready to roll - because, as they've said in the past, releasing details of the vulnerabilities allows people to exploit them, and that's just a bad idea if you don't have a patch waiting in the wings.
So usually you don't see them at all. The only time critical vulnerabilities get any press is when people other than Microsoft release info about them - and that's because there's no patch ready to roll when they're announced.
Meanwhile, those of us who have been advocating building large numbers of loosely coupled, message passing, components all running with their own process space gave enormous grins on our faces at the thought of being able to do the message passing via a shared cache with only a cycle or two penalty...
Yeah, but are you used to doing that in a DSP-like architecture, where most of your operations are going to be SIMD ones lest you hit massive branch penalties?
Your point was about the use of force.
No, it wasn't. But thanks for playing.
Exactly wrong, bud. It is the believers in "Intellectual Property" who need to use force to stop folks using ideas, or methods, or forms of speech or code. Without that State-backed force or the threat of it, all those things would be as free as the air.
... which takes us right back to the communism idea.
Thing is, bud, that if you don't believe people should be compensated for the things they craft using their mind, then why should anyone be compensated for anything at all?
There is a certain mindset that identifies anyone that does anything for anyone outside of their immediate family without receiving financial gain for it as a communist.
And then there are people who want to get rid of all forms of intellectual property, and ensure that everything is Free as in liberty and Free as in cash - and force everyone else to do the same.
I base it on the Windows XP box I'm using to develop WebServices, for - guess what? IIS. In the last year the XP box (which is never more than 24 hours out-of-date with MS updates) has BSOD-ed twice.
Bet you that it's either bad hardware, or a bad driver.
Care to share the text of the BSOD?
Yeah this is so true. Windows servers usually have to be upgraded every few years or you risk losing access to bug and security fixes.
I wouldn't call 8 years "every few years".