It seems to me the child conception would be the hard part. It seems our seed wouldnt be able to "swim" in 3 dimensions, and still make it where it needs to be. (i say 3d there as opposed to on earth, because on earth they have the whole up and down thing done for them by gravity, they only have to swim back and hang a left...)
It would more likely be a chemical scent trail that the sperm would follow, than reacting to gravity. Just a thought there.
Also, even if all them sperms went a wigglin' in all kinds of different directions, at least some are going to go in the RIGHT direction.
Well, Sun have always been in the market of selling hardware rather than software - it's the same model as Apple.
This is, by the way, why the Java floating-point spec is designed to match the Sparc chipset, rather than following IEEE specs (IIRC). The idea being that to match the spec exactly, you have to emulate the Sparc results on machines with other types of FPU, and so Sun gets an instant perf increase on their hardware for that class of tests.
Of course, most people don't bother with that side of it, and just implement it using native floating point.
And, BTW, MSDN membership costs money too. You'd be surprised how much and what the restrictions on those give aways are.
No it doesn't. Go to msdn.microsoft.com, and download the platform SDK. Go ahead - you know you want to. 2Gb of compressed data. 2Gb of documentation, samples, tools - you name it. (For more tools, download the DDK's - eg. the Win98 DDK has the MASM assembler in it).
And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is register - which means painlessly providing a name and address; the same as you'd have to give to subscribe to, say, the New York Times online site.
If you want MSDN delivered to you on CD every couple of months, sure, it'll cost money. And the more you pay the more you get (the universal subscription is about $3000 - IIRC - but for that you get pretty much everything that Microsoft produces, in every single version, on CD). In general though, it won't cost you a *cent*.
There are differences between what Sun is doing and what Microsoft has done. (And this analogy is getting really tired of being trotted out for any company Redhat's size or larger.)
First, Microsoft does not license their Windows technology to anyone. (Wince doesn't count.)
Sun licenses their technology to anyone that wants to pay the fees. In fact, Sun would be happy if they never had to do their own JVM implementations. They would be content to provide a reference implementation and compatability testing.
Hmmm... Microsoft does license Windows to people - many universities have the source code. So do many companies.
Microsoft charges for everything.
Sun gives JDK, JRE, etc. away for free... and has even made the JDK more free.
Sorry, but that's complete and utter rubbish.
Microsoft gives away all kinds of things for free, including a C & C++ compiler, assembler, over 2GB of sample code, documentation and libraries, plus lots of other freebie tools. They give away more than Sun has given away by a factor of 10, and have done so for YEARS.
You might want to check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/ some time... you'll be surprised (well, I don't know that for sure - but going off what you're claiming in your post, you'll be very surprised by the reality of what Microsoft gives away).
well then tell us His birthday so we can move the christmas celebration mr. know-it-all. >And really, what exactly is it about Jesus that is supposed to relate to this pagan festival? It certainly has absolutely nothing to do with his birthday. mr. clueless. tsk tsk. u dont know what ur talking about. i bet ur an atheist. pls do further studies b4 bshing others religion.
Well, specifically it was a Pagan festival initially. When the Christians moved into England (and other countries that observed the same religious festivals), they decided to take this festival of Fertility (there's a reason for the mistletoe you know) and turn it into another fertility festival - the birth of Christ. This was because it was easier to do it that way (and have the two religious festivals running in parallel) than to outright ban the pagan festival.
Think of it as dual-boot, but for religions. You run both for a while, until you've phased over to the new one completely.
Same thing happened with Easter - the Christian festivals took over the pre-existing symbolism of pagan festivals (easter eggs, et al), tamed it down and took it for itself.
To be precise, we're talking about the two equinoxes here pretty much...
Buy a clue and try to recognize sarcasm when you see it...
1. Looks like I'm not the only person who didn't recognize this as sarcasm. 2. If it was meant to be sarcastic, why did it read *EXACTLY* like the person was serious? 3. Sarcasm doesn't necessarily work well in text. Inflection helps. Or an emoticon.
SouthPark has no place in the internet! For months and years now it has brainwashed our hapless children into doing unspeakable crimes! I feel that the introduction of SouthPark onto the internet (already saturated with pornography and evils) will make our children that much suseptiple to their heart's of darkness!
The world has been saturated with pornography for many many many years. One man's pornography is another man's erotica. One man's erotica is another's proof that God exists (that is, there is beauty in the world).
Your children should not be watching SouthPark anyway. Any adult who allows their children to watch that show is irresponsible. I'd say that kids should be at least 14 years old before watching it - and that's with parental discretion.
Act now! Please stop this. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL THE CHILDREN!
Really? Why? How come? I mean, it's a fucking cartoon. It is NOT FOR CHILDREN. It is FOR ADULTS ONLY. Use your brain and please take this opportunity to make the world a better place by taking responsibility for your own children by not letting them see it!!!
They're not old enough. You have the remote. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Just turn the fucking channel! Are you powerless? Are you going to turn another screaming skrikey brat who expects everything their way onto the planet? Yet another kid who can't interact socially with the rest of the world because you let them do whatever the hell they liked and expected THE GOVT. to fix it?
Please, grow up. Stop playing at being a parent.
http://www.lds.org can protect you all, go there!
Ummm... I know a few members of the LDS church who are Southpark fans. Go figure.
Just please, do this one thing for me:
Buy a clue and take responsibility for your kids upbringing. If not you, who the hell do you expect to do it?
Hell, for that matter, the Apple II entirely was a hack. Name another commercial PC which was designed by one person. And, I believe, he wrote the first OS for it, to boot
The SAM Coupe was another commercial PC which was designed by one person:)
Check the want ads sometime - no one is being this flippant about firing even the shittiest programmers. They're still worth their weight in gold, unfortunately...supply and demand being waht they are.
Sure... but you can imagine what problems are going to come down the pipe later for said companies...
As I said - any code shop worth their salt isn't going to put up for undocumented, "optimized", "job security" code.
Yes but there's a keyword called 'native.' Not that I'm attacking your solution, but MS approach shouldn't be to pervert Java, it should be to provide clear COM interfaces within Java.
I personally think that using doc-comment "hints" to the compiler and VM is a nice, clear, easy-to-understand and *obvious* way of doing it. After all, you've got to tell the VM how to understand what it's talking to somehow -- or would you like to propose another mechanism which would allow COM component authoring and use in Java, which would give access to both vtable and IDispatch based COM components?
It still bugs me the way MS changed Berkeley sockets when they implimented them in Winx
As another poster said, this wasn't MS's decision - they just decided to adopt Winsock to allow old apps to continue to work with MS's TCP/IP stack. Besides, Winsock has some really good bits to it - including a call-back and/or message-passing based mechanism for writing asynchronous network code.
This is because Java is basically a language for idiots. It makes them write out everything verbosely (so they don't have to understand what is happening), and then sits them down in their little sandbox so they can't do anything dangerous like interact with their own hardware.
Java is maybe, MAYBE useful as a teaching language, because students are the only people who should be forced to put up with such limitations and unnecessary code verbosity.
Guidelines for modern programming:
Code should be well documented If you don't document your code, the next person to touch it should be allowed to use piano wire in new and interesting ways on you.
All names should be meaningful With modern auto-completion IDEs, large hard drives,etc, you should use meaningful names for things. There's no need for "fnPtrCnvInt" or "szMAnifI" where "itemCount" or "m_DockingState" will do instead. Same applies to method names and class names. The IDE will do the hard work for you if it's a reasonably recent one.
Follow the rules if you want to eat. People who don't follow the points above, should be hung drawn, quartered, and only allowed to program for their own edification - that is, not professionally. Because ignoring code readability is a sure-fire way to get fired from any coding shop worth its salt.
Use the right tool for the right job If you're programming against hardware, use C or assembly (or a mix of C++, C and assembly if necessary). If you're programming against APIs, and never touch hardware, use anything you like (yes, including Java). If you really want to, you can write Java code against hardware as well - you just have to use J/Direct, JNI or RNI to talk to a C/C++ DLL to do the nitty-gritty work.
I used VJ++ a couple years ago (versions 1.1 and 6, I think, were the versions I tried; the former downloaded from MS's site) because I had become familiar with using the MS dev tools. However, I had to turn around and recompile all my code with Sun's compiler because the code generated by the MS compiler would crash non-MS JVM's. This was simple code, too -- all JDK1.0-compliant and pure. Didn't even try to detect platforms or anything.
Ever stop and consider that the VM's you were using were at fault, and weren't verifying their bytecode correctly?
Check it out... it's the ULTIMATE massage thingy. It sounds weird, but it feels *literally* like someone is shooting bolts of electricity through your scalp... and it's almost orgasmic - you get that "nggghhhh! jusssstt.... onnnn.... theeee... edddddddddddddddge!!!!!!!!!!!" feeling when someone applies it to you:)
My own personal nightmare scenario for Y2K goes something like this:
Everyone decides to phone their friends as the year clocks over.
Think about it for a second. It sounds innocuous, but it isn't.
The telephone system works the way it does because it makes the assumption that most people aren't going to be using the phone simultaneously. Once enough calls are being made at the same time, you get equipment-busy signals. If you get enough calls, you don't even get those - you just get a dead line. (It may even be possible to lock up phone exchanges in this way).
People, faced with as dependable a service as the phone going out (remember: not even power-outages takes out your phone service) will get very worried. They'll start hammering on the cradle (putting even more load on some older phone exchanges) after seeing it in the movies and on TV, which will just exacerbate the problem.
The word will spread - hey! the phones are broken! it's a Y2K problem! - and more and more people will start to panic. Even if people can get through to a dial-tone, they won't be able to get through to their friends.
Panic presumably ensues at this point, with some people taking advantage of the problem and going in for a spot of looting and rioting. The phone system stays down, as more and more people try to get through to their friends. People phone the 911 service, because they're scared by it. The emergency services (already overwhelmed) can't get through to the calls - and any fires which break out don't get reported automatically to the emergency services either - because the alarms need a phone line to do send the report in.
Fires begin to break out across a city; people see them, and panic even more.
And so on and so on ad infinitum. I'm not worried about technology going out of service - I'm worried about how people will react.
Still.. here's to having a happy New Year - if we're all around afterwards to enjoy it:)
Well, given that a friend of mine works at Slate, and sat OVER HIS SHOULDER while he wrote the article, on my friend's laptop, using his "ergonometric" keyboard, I can confirm that he did indeed write the article, and not some schmoe working in PR for the Whitehouse or for Microsoft.
This lie has been repeated so often and for so long that reasonable people are starting to believe it. When selling in a retail venue, software vendors have no rights over and above what is granted to them under copyright law; you own the bits. That's why they're trying to cram the UCITA through the state legislatures, which will cement their ability to continue abusing consumers. I have never, nor shall I ever, consider myself bound by any so-called "license" unless you get me to actually sign the thing. The ethical consequences of believing otherwise are just too staggering.
However, without explicitly reassigning your copyright, the person buying your work does NOT own anything other than the media it comes on. They do not own the work itself - just the representation.
For example, a photographer can take portraits of you, and give you prints. However, the photographer owns the copyright of the prints - not you. Which is why you can't get duplicates of professional photos made in any photography store.
The same applies to software, through and through - license or no license. You own the media, and the use of that media - you hold no rights to the information itself, unless it is EXPLICITLY given to you, in writing. Copyright law makes this automatic, by the way.
it's not a matter of "do we want to cripple Microsoft in every market", it's "did Microsoft act illegally here?"
Since the tactics, and effects were the same, I believe yes, Jackson, and the DOJ's lawyers did overlook this area.
MS don't have a monopoly in the server market - so it doesn't apply.
Sorry:) Thanks for playing.
Jackson and the DOJ can only go after MS in issues *relating* to their "Intel-based desktop consumer operating systems market" - that is, Windows 95 & 98.
Simon
Re:breaking up microsoft would be effective
on
Everything Microsoft
·
· Score: 1
Now, Microsoft can dominate any market it wants to by bundling software for "free". IE and IIS are examples. If Microsoft had real competition in the Office space, it would bundle office as well. Companies, especially small companies, need cash flow to survive and grow. Microsoft's bundling, like IIS/ASP, can kill all server products until it achieves market dominance. Microsoft has the cash to lose money for years until it achieves dominance over the server market.
If Microsoft is split into OS, Office and Internet, then the IE and IIS/ASP company must charge for its products. Then you would have competition. Little companies like Opera or Spyglass or Caucho could compete with the browser or the server. It's very hard to compete against "free" software.
Makes you wonder how people are going to compete against GNU'd software.
Um, I was borrowing phraseology from the founding fathers of the US. I'm sure that will bother you too; probably too paternalistic.
Nah... it's just that I didn't recognize the quote - probably because I'm a Brit, and won't be allowed to go for citizenship for at least a decade. At which point I'll probably end up learning more about it than most americans - which is kind of sad really.
They don't make it easy to get into the country... *sigh*
Corporations are *not* people, and as such *do not* have the inalienable rights granted us by our creator.
Mind telling me what those are? Because I think my manual was lost at birth... wasn't in the packaging, wasn't anywhere around the O.R.... they couldn't find it.
So I'm currently trying to work out what these inalienable rights my mother/God/whoever grantment me are.
Bloatware has always been a MS tactic, not some act of sloppy coding that most people attribute it to. Bloatware has always been about propelling the need for higher end systems with more storage and ram to support MS's larger OS's.
Ummm... actually, look at Star Office, or any other fully-fledged Unix GUI program - they're big and BLOATY, because that kind of stuff explodes what the program has to carry around, so I'm not entirely sure that your argument holds water...
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you post a blank message?
It seems to me the child conception would be the hard part. It seems our seed wouldnt be able to "swim" in 3 dimensions, and still make it where it needs to be. (i say 3d there as opposed to on earth, because on earth they have the whole up and down thing done for them by gravity, they only have to swim back and hang a left...)
It would more likely be a chemical scent trail that the sperm would follow, than reacting to gravity. Just a thought there.
Also, even if all them sperms went a wigglin' in all kinds of different directions, at least some are going to go in the RIGHT direction.
Simon
Good to know sun is coming to its senses.
Well, Sun have always been in the market of selling hardware rather than software - it's the same model as Apple.
This is, by the way, why the Java floating-point spec is designed to match the Sparc chipset, rather than following IEEE specs (IIRC). The idea being that to match the spec exactly, you have to emulate the Sparc results on machines with other types of FPU, and so Sun gets an instant perf increase on their hardware for that class of tests.
Of course, most people don't bother with that side of it, and just implement it using native floating point.
It's also why they give away Solaris for free.
Simon
And, BTW, MSDN membership costs money too. You'd be surprised how much and what the restrictions on those give aways are.
No it doesn't. Go to msdn.microsoft.com, and download the platform SDK. Go ahead - you know you want to. 2Gb of compressed data. 2Gb of documentation, samples, tools - you name it. (For more tools, download the DDK's - eg. the Win98 DDK has the MASM assembler in it).
And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is register - which means painlessly providing a name and address; the same as you'd have to give to subscribe to, say, the New York Times online site.
If you want MSDN delivered to you on CD every couple of months, sure, it'll cost money. And the more you pay the more you get (the universal subscription is about $3000 - IIRC - but for that you get pretty much everything that Microsoft produces, in every single version, on CD). In general though, it won't cost you a *cent*.
Simon
Remember stories of people getting FM radio stations in their fillings and braces?
This could be bad
On the other hand, it could be the start of a break-dancing revival. I'm all for that.
Simon
There are differences between what Sun is doing and what Microsoft has done. (And this analogy is getting really tired of being trotted out for any company Redhat's size or larger.)
First, Microsoft does not license their Windows technology to anyone. (Wince doesn't count.)
Sun licenses their technology to anyone that wants to pay the fees. In fact, Sun would be happy if they never had to do their own JVM implementations. They would be content to provide a reference implementation and compatability testing.
Hmmm... Microsoft does license Windows to people - many universities have the source code. So do many companies.
Microsoft charges for everything.
Sun gives JDK, JRE, etc. away for free... and has even made the JDK more free.
Sorry, but that's complete and utter rubbish.
Microsoft gives away all kinds of things for free, including a C & C++ compiler, assembler, over 2GB of sample code, documentation and libraries, plus lots of other freebie tools. They give away more than Sun has given away by a factor of 10, and have done so for YEARS.
You might want to check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/ some time... you'll be surprised (well, I don't know that for sure - but going off what you're claiming in your post, you'll be very surprised by the reality of what Microsoft gives away).
Simon
well then tell us His birthday so we can move the christmas celebration mr. know-it-all. >And really, what exactly is it about Jesus that is supposed to relate to this pagan festival? It certainly has absolutely nothing to do with his birthday. mr. clueless. tsk tsk. u dont know what ur talking about. i bet ur an atheist. pls do further studies b4 bshing others religion.
Well, specifically it was a Pagan festival initially. When the Christians moved into England (and other countries that observed the same religious festivals), they decided to take this festival of Fertility (there's a reason for the mistletoe you know) and turn it into another fertility festival - the birth of Christ. This was because it was easier to do it that way (and have the two religious festivals running in parallel) than to outright ban the pagan festival.
Think of it as dual-boot, but for religions. You run both for a while, until you've phased over to the new one completely.
Same thing happened with Easter - the Christian festivals took over the pre-existing symbolism of pagan festivals (easter eggs, et al), tamed it down and took it for itself.
To be precise, we're talking about the two equinoxes here pretty much...
Simon
Buy a clue and try to recognize sarcasm when you see it...
1. Looks like I'm not the only person who didn't recognize this as sarcasm.
2. If it was meant to be sarcastic, why did it read *EXACTLY* like the person was serious?
3. Sarcasm doesn't necessarily work well in text. Inflection helps. Or an emoticon.
SouthPark has no place in the internet! For months and years now it has brainwashed our hapless children into doing unspeakable crimes!
I feel that the introduction of SouthPark onto the internet (already saturated with pornography and evils) will make our children that much suseptiple to their heart's of darkness!
The world has been saturated with pornography for many many many years. One man's pornography is another man's erotica. One man's erotica is another's proof that God exists (that is, there is beauty in the world).
Your children should not be watching SouthPark anyway. Any adult who allows their children to watch that show is irresponsible. I'd say that kids should be at least 14 years old before watching it - and that's with parental discretion.
Act now! Please stop this. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL THE CHILDREN!
Really? Why? How come? I mean, it's a fucking cartoon . It is NOT FOR CHILDREN . It is FOR ADULTS ONLY . Use your brain and please take this opportunity to make the world a better place by taking responsibility for your own children by not letting them see it!!!
They're not old enough. You have the remote. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Just turn the fucking channel! Are you powerless? Are you going to turn another screaming skrikey brat who expects everything their way onto the planet? Yet another kid who can't interact socially with the rest of the world because you let them do whatever the hell they liked and expected THE GOVT. to fix it?
Please, grow up. Stop playing at being a parent.
http://www.lds.org can protect you all, go there!
Ummm... I know a few members of the LDS church who are Southpark fans. Go figure.
Just please, do this one thing for me:
Buy a clue and take responsibility for your kids upbringing. If not you, who the hell do you expect to do it?
Simon
Hell, for that matter, the Apple II entirely was a hack. Name another commercial PC which was designed by one person. And, I believe, he wrote the first OS for it, to boot
:)
The SAM Coupe was another commercial PC which was designed by one person
Si
Check the want ads sometime - no one is being this flippant about firing even the shittiest programmers. They're still worth their weight in gold, unfortunately...supply and demand being waht they are.
Sure... but you can imagine what problems are going to come down the pipe later for said companies...
As I said - any code shop worth their salt isn't going to put up for undocumented, "optimized", "job security" code.
Simon
Yes but there's a keyword called 'native.' Not that I'm attacking your solution, but MS approach shouldn't be to pervert Java, it should be to provide clear COM interfaces within Java.
I personally think that using doc-comment "hints" to the compiler and VM is a nice, clear, easy-to-understand and *obvious* way of doing it. After all, you've got to tell the VM how to understand what it's talking to somehow -- or would you like to propose another mechanism which would allow COM component authoring and use in Java, which would give access to both vtable and IDispatch based COM components?
It still bugs me the way MS changed Berkeley sockets when they implimented them in Winx
As another poster said, this wasn't MS's decision - they just decided to adopt Winsock to allow old apps to continue to work with MS's TCP/IP stack. Besides, Winsock has some really good bits to it - including a call-back and/or message-passing based mechanism for writing asynchronous network code.
Simon
borland PIONEERED this in delphi and it works great! i think cafe can do it as well. netbeans sucks!
Wrong, actually. Microsoft pioneered it in Visual Basic 5.0 and refined it Visual J++ 6 and Visual Interdev 6.0
Microsoft hold a patent on it, and Microsoft licensed the technology to Borland for use in its Delphi product.
How do I know this? Let's just say that when I was at Microsoft, I worked on VJ++...
Simon
ps. Don't ask for insider info. I'm bound by NDA.
This is because Java is basically a language for idiots. It makes them write out everything verbosely (so they don't have to understand what is happening), and then sits them down in their little sandbox so they can't do anything dangerous like interact with their own hardware.
Java is maybe, MAYBE useful as a teaching language, because students are the only people who should be forced to put up with such limitations and unnecessary code verbosity.
Guidelines for modern programming:
If you don't document your code, the next person to touch it should be allowed to use piano wire in new and interesting ways on you.
With modern auto-completion IDEs, large hard drives,etc, you should use meaningful names for things. There's no need for "fnPtrCnvInt" or "szMAnifI" where "itemCount" or "m_DockingState" will do instead. Same applies to method names and class names. The IDE will do the hard work for you if it's a reasonably recent one.
People who don't follow the points above, should be hung drawn, quartered, and only allowed to program for their own edification - that is, not professionally. Because ignoring code readability is a sure-fire way to get fired from any coding shop worth its salt.
If you're programming against hardware, use C or assembly (or a mix of C++, C and assembly if necessary). If you're programming against APIs, and never touch hardware, use anything you like (yes, including Java). If you really want to, you can write Java code against hardware as well - you just have to use J/Direct, JNI or RNI to talk to a C/C++ DLL to do the nitty-gritty work.
Simon
I used VJ++ a couple years ago (versions 1.1 and 6, I think, were the versions I tried; the former downloaded from MS's site) because I had become familiar with using the MS dev tools. However, I had to turn around and recompile all my code with Sun's compiler because the code generated by the MS compiler would crash non-MS JVM's. This was simple code, too -- all JDK1.0-compliant and pure. Didn't even try to detect platforms or anything.
Ever stop and consider that the VM's you were using were at fault, and weren't verifying their bytecode correctly?
Simon
http://www.thetingler.com/
:)
Check it out... it's the ULTIMATE massage thingy. It sounds weird, but it feels *literally* like someone is shooting bolts of electricity through your scalp... and it's almost orgasmic - you get that "nggghhhh! jusssstt.... onnnn.... theeee... edddddddddddddddge!!!!!!!!!!!" feeling when someone applies it to you
Si
My own personal nightmare scenario for Y2K goes something like this:
:)
Everyone decides to phone their friends as the year clocks over.
Think about it for a second. It sounds innocuous, but it isn't.
The telephone system works the way it does because it makes the assumption that most people aren't going to be using the phone simultaneously. Once enough calls are being made at the same time, you get equipment-busy signals. If you get enough calls, you don't even get those - you just get a dead line. (It may even be possible to lock up phone exchanges in this way).
People, faced with as dependable a service as the phone going out (remember: not even power-outages takes out your phone service) will get very worried. They'll start hammering on the cradle (putting even more load on some older phone exchanges) after seeing it in the movies and on TV, which will just exacerbate the problem.
The word will spread - hey! the phones are broken! it's a Y2K problem! - and more and more people will start to panic. Even if people can get through to a dial-tone, they won't be able to get through to their friends.
Panic presumably ensues at this point, with some people taking advantage of the problem and going in for a spot of looting and rioting. The phone system stays down, as more and more people try to get through to their friends. People phone the 911 service, because they're scared by it. The emergency services (already overwhelmed) can't get through to the calls - and any fires which break out don't get reported automatically to the emergency services either - because the alarms need a phone line to do send the report in.
Fires begin to break out across a city; people see them, and panic even more.
And so on and so on ad infinitum. I'm not worried about technology going out of service - I'm worried about how people will react.
Still.. here's to having a happy New Year - if we're all around afterwards to enjoy it
Simon
Well, given that CTRL+ALT+DELETE is used to log-in on NT boxen, no we wouldn't.
It's also used in Linux.
The hardware's there, it's standard, why not use it?
Well, given that a friend of mine works at Slate, and sat OVER HIS SHOULDER while he wrote the article, on my friend's laptop, using his "ergonometric" keyboard, I can confirm that he did indeed write the article, and not some schmoe working in PR for the Whitehouse or for Microsoft.
Cool huh?
Simon
This lie has been repeated so often and for so long that reasonable people are starting to believe it. When selling in a retail venue, software vendors have no rights over and above what is granted to them under copyright law; you own the bits. That's why they're trying to cram the UCITA through the state legislatures, which will cement their ability to continue abusing consumers. I have never, nor shall I ever, consider myself bound by any so-called "license" unless you get me to actually sign the thing. The ethical consequences of believing otherwise are just too staggering.
However, without explicitly reassigning your copyright, the person buying your work does NOT own anything other than the media it comes on. They do not own the work itself - just the representation.
For example, a photographer can take portraits of you, and give you prints. However, the photographer owns the copyright of the prints - not you. Which is why you can't get duplicates of professional photos made in any photography store.
The same applies to software, through and through - license or no license. You own the media, and the use of that media - you hold no rights to the information itself, unless it is EXPLICITLY given to you, in writing. Copyright law makes this automatic, by the way.
Simon
it's not a matter of "do we want to cripple Microsoft in every market", it's "did Microsoft act illegally here?"
:) Thanks for playing.
Since the tactics, and effects were the same, I believe yes, Jackson, and the DOJ's lawyers did overlook this area.
MS don't have a monopoly in the server market - so it doesn't apply.
Sorry
Jackson and the DOJ can only go after MS in issues *relating* to their "Intel-based desktop consumer operating systems market" - that is, Windows 95 & 98.
Simon
Now, Microsoft can dominate any market it wants to by bundling software for "free". IE and IIS are examples. If Microsoft had real competition in the Office space, it would bundle office as well.
Companies, especially small companies, need cash flow to survive and grow. Microsoft's bundling, like IIS/ASP, can kill all server products until it achieves market dominance. Microsoft has the cash to lose money for years until it achieves dominance over the server market.
If Microsoft is split into OS, Office and Internet, then the IE and IIS/ASP company must charge for its products. Then you would have competition. Little companies like Opera or Spyglass or Caucho could compete with the browser or the server. It's very hard to compete against "free" software.
Makes you wonder how people are going to compete against GNU'd software.
Bye bye software industry. I loved you.
Simon
Um, I was borrowing phraseology from the founding fathers of the US. I'm sure that will bother you too; probably too paternalistic.
Nah... it's just that I didn't recognize the quote - probably because I'm a Brit, and won't be allowed to go for citizenship for at least a decade. At which point I'll probably end up learning more about it than most americans - which is kind of sad really.
They don't make it easy to get into the country... *sigh*
Simon
Corporations are *not* people, and as such *do not* have the inalienable rights granted us by our creator.
Mind telling me what those are? Because I think my manual was lost at birth... wasn't in the packaging, wasn't anywhere around the O.R.... they couldn't find it.
So I'm currently trying to work out what these inalienable rights my mother/God/whoever grantment me are.
Simon
Bloatware has always been a MS tactic, not some act of sloppy coding that most people attribute it to. Bloatware has always been about propelling the need for higher end systems with more storage and ram to support MS's larger OS's.
Ummm... actually, look at Star Office, or any other fully-fledged Unix GUI program - they're big and BLOATY, because that kind of stuff explodes what the program has to carry around, so I'm not entirely sure that your argument holds water...