I worked with Monte in a previous life. We were never on a project together, but had lots of water cooler interaction and that sort of thing. Played him at checkers once and won, which is surprising because I suck.
There were rumors about his past with good ol' Bill, but I never bothered to ask. It's funny, now that I haven't seen him for several years, to see his past highlighted in the article. The stories I heard about his past seemed unlikely for someone like him (i.e. a reasonably normal guy without obvious riches).
Don't get me wrong. Monte is a cool guy. Nice, friendly, smart and all of that. But to imagine him as one of the first 10 or less at MS is weird to say the least. Obviously he never got the riches out of it that the rest of them did. He always drove around in an ancient Honda Civic with faded and peeling paint. He had a relatively isolated position (in charge of development tools) in our relatively obscure company. Don't know much about his personal life, but I think he took Karate lessons. You could always count on him to ask the pointed, annoying question of the speaker at company meetings. It was inevitable, and they would always look for him in the crowd to get the questions out of the way.
Not the mover and shaker one would associate with
the other founders of MS. I wonder if he's sorry he didn't stick around long enough to become a billionaire. If you're reading this Monte, "Hey."
Before you exhort me to read the press release, maybe you should. See message 178 for a very relevant quote which I won't repeat here.
In short, this is a *very specific* process patent, not a general patent on checksumming pages. They're applying a checksum to user-defined sections of a page, then notifying the user of any change to the marked sections via email or mobile page.
They're not actually patenting the idea of checksumming a web page to detect change. They're patenting the idea of users "subscribing" to notifications of changes to sections of web pages, with changes being detected through comparisons of MD5 signatures, and with those notifications being done via email or mobile page (or something much like that).
Lame, and there may be prior art, but it's not a patent on "checksumming web pages".
You don't have to patent something to keep others from patenting it. You just have to have the idea and document it in a verifiable fashion. Putting your ideas into notebooks with dates on the pages is a good start, notarized pages are even better.
If you come up with an idea before someone else and can prove it, they cannot patent it. Only someone who thought of it before you and can prove it can patent the idea.
You probably need to demonstrate a certain amount of thoughtfulness and thoroughness in your notes for them to be considered "invention", however. Random scattered thoughts scribbled on paper probably won't cut it.
They have to have done it well before the filing date. Prior art is only considered prior art if someone came up with the idea first. Pumatech may have been working on the idea for 5 years for all we know, and unless Cisco had the idea before that it would not be considered prior art.
On the surface this sounds really bogus. However, patents are very complicated things. Context is everything, and unless you read the entire patent you can't understand exactly what it's about. The abstract of a patent is useless for understanding what it actually is for.
More than likely the MD5 summing of a web page is just a single claim in a patent with many small claims. Claims usually build up from broad to specific, and can be dependent on one another. Often times claims alone are meaningless, but in conjunction with earlier claims they actually have meaning.
Take the headline here with a grain of salt. Read the patent claims and understand them, and you might find the headline to be false or at least not totally correct. I am quite sure that MD5 summing a web page, etc, has wads of prior art, but maybe that's not exactly what they've patented. If so, there's no question it will be invalidated in short order as either too obvious or because of prior art. More than likely there's more to the story.
You raise some valid points. It would take some thought to find a way to teach the RIAA a lesson without stealing, but I'm sure there's a good idea out there waiting for a real protester to invent. Just because nobody's thought of it yet doesn't justify stealing. You think the RIAA is "stealing" from consumers or somehow taking money unfairly, so you're essentially saying that stealing from them in turn is just peachy. Yeah, "retribution theft" is moral and good, while "intitial theft" is not. I thought "an eye for an eye" went out with Hammurabi?
Look at what I said in my initial posting. I'm simply trying to point out that stealing makes for poor protest for many reasons, and, in addition, 99% of everyone doing it with Napster is using it merely as an excuse to get free music. Yes, $18 for a CD is a complete ripoff, but why can't you come up with a creative approach to make the RIAA feel the pain without resorting to the gutter approach?
BTW, I completely support the RIAA if they want to release music in album form rather than single track form. (Saw some arg above about this.) It's totally up to them (and the artist primarily) as to how they package their product. If I were an artist and I worked hard on 10 tracks to make an album, I'd want people to hear them all. Especially if it was a theme album of sorts. What I don't support is the pricing scheme, which is truly evil.
Oh, and how do you know that there aren't people out there downloading every night, all the recent material (especially Metallica) and then smiling as they
delete each and every one of them?
Your argument is just plain disingenuous, but this statement is over the top. Must I play into this and point out that downloading a *copy* and deleting the *copy* is useless behavior, unless you count the miniscule amount of bandwidth wasted by the sum total of every person out there actually doing this?
Just think of Napster as a commercial version of the Boston Tea Party.
In the Boston Tea Party they dumped the tea into the harbor. They didn't go home and drink it. Protest vs. outright theft.
True protesters of the RIAA's evil ways would forsake music instead of stealing it. Else it's more akin to busting into a department store during a riot rather than actual protest.
Relatable is flawed. It doesn't scale, meaning you start getting duplicate identifiers for totally different musical tracks as you have more and more tracks in your database. If you have enough tracks, identification of the music becomes very ambiguous. I wonder how Napster plans to deal with this.
This probably bodes well for Napster users, as it may throw a monkey wrench in their ability to block stuff.
After reading the EFF's protest page, I'm left confused as to what they're actually protesting. They complain about blocking software overblocking the good stuff and underblocking the bad stuff. While I don't disagree with that assessment, it seems to imply that if blocking software actually worked correctly, they might not be in opposition to it in public institutions?
Okay, it's obvious that the spirit of their protest is against any censorship whatsoever, regardless of whether the intended sites are censored properly or not. But throwing this argument in there only seems to hurt their cause. What if blocking software could be made to function in a very reliable, thoughtful, nonbiased way (not really possible, but what if)? By using this argument as a component of their protest they only hurt themselves IMHO.
I can't quite bring myself to agree with their anti-censorship tack, however. While I can see some argument to leaving library computers unblocked (at least for adult patrons), I can see no reason whatsoever to allow kids in schools to be able to surf wherever they want. I don't want my kid getting exposed to pr0n until I'm damn ready to explain the facts of life first. If censorship software does *any* good whatsoever, then I support its use in schools at least. If parents feel it's important for their kids to be able to surf anywhere they want, let them do it at home then.
You do have a point here. FTP is screwy, and it's the bane of firewalls. PASV doesn't seem widely used though, so it's kind of like tilting at windmills to require its use.
FTP should have been
implemented as a single-connection protocol, IMHO, but it's too late for that. There's always HTTP, but that seems a bit lacking in file transfer features for it to actually replace FTP. We'll just have to live with the problems of FTP, which includes, for Linux 2.4 firewall administrators, patching (and using) ip_conntrack_ftp.
I've seen a lot of disparaging comments about Apple's lawyers here, and thought I'd throw out a few tidbits.
First of all, let's get early business taken care of. We're talking about lawyers. Praticing lawyers are almost invariably scum (I'm not including people who become lawyers for the education or other purposes besides actual practice). We all know that. Those of us who have ever dealt with lawyers hate them, unless you're a lawyer too. Even then, you probably still hate lawyers. Especially yourself.
With that in mind, Apple's lawyers are not doing this for fun, and they're not doing it to justify their jobs, etc. Rhetoric aside, they're probably doing it because they are obliged to defend Apple's trademarks or risk losing the ability to control their use. Should they not defend their trademarks, even in "stupid" cases, they could lose their ability to stop people from using their trademarks without permission. They are duty-bound to do what they're doing. I think someone posted something to this effect, and I'm confirming the truth of it. That's not to say that Apple wouldn't defend their trademark in this manner regardless of the law...
I've seen some attacks on the quality, etc., of Apples lawyers in this discussion. It's easy to say such things in the heat of anger. It's foolish, however, to think they're lame in any sense (other than perhaps a PR sense). These are the cream of the crop. Why would you expect anything less from a large, powerful company like Apple? I've dealt personally with their legal dept as an outsider, and they are nothing short of scary good. In one instance I saw them get a special form processed by a notorious government agency in a couple of hours with only a few calls; a form which takes any normal mortal *months* to get processed. These people are good, they are powerful, and they don't need to pull stupid stunts to make themselves look good to the bossman. More than likely they're proving themselves on a daily basis.
Though I hate lawyers, even my own, it's Jobs & friends you should be slamming first and foremost. There are all sorts of creative things they could do to preserve their trademarks, yet not stomp all over the Themes Project. But they're not doing any of those things.
Thanks for modding me down, Einstein. This place is a really crappy place to voice an unpopular opinion. Interesting that this is supposed to be a "discussion" forum.
I think I might be starting to understand why the trollers here do what they do.
Similar to the observations above, I have a home setup with:
- 2.4 GHZ video/audio child baby monitor (Safety 1st brand).
- 2 laptops with Lucent Orinoco gold PC wireless card w/128 bit encryption (as in the article) talking to a Lucent AP 500 base station.
- An X10 2.4 GHZ wireless video camera array (3 cams).
- A microwave oven in close proximity to all.
It took me quite some time to figure out how to get any of this to work simultaneously. It turned out that all I had to do was set the X10 cameras to the fourth channel instead of the default, and suddenly they all worked simultaneously without any noticable problems. Sometimes you can see individual ethernet packets warp the screen of the baby monitor, but that seems to only happen sometimes. I don't know why. Otherwise, good to perfect throughput on the ethernet, nice clear screen on the baby monitor and good pictures on the X10 cameras. And my food tastes cooked.:)
I'm thoroughly amazed that it all works as well as it does. I am afraid of what will happen if I get any other microwave devices, though. There's clarity somehow in the cacophony, and I don't want to disturb that ordered chaos.
I beg to differ on the stability front. SSH 2.X has really been problematic for me. I switched to OpenSSH and it's solved all of my issues. The main problem was really nasty; unbounded use of CPU while idle. There was also the problem of sftp biffing on really large file transfers, as well as the more minor problem of not displaying the progress properly. Not to mention really annoying runaway processes if you interrupt it during the login phase, and that irritating GUI login popup that happens sometimes as well (unless you compile it out). I'm sure there's more. OpenSSh made all the nasties go away and I haven't found any new serious problems.
I still can't get OpenSSH and SSH2 to talk to each other with scp, but I don't really care now that I only use OpenSSH.
I guess I'm just showing my old-timer bias. Don't know if it's still true, but in the olden days you couldn't call an OS "Unix" unless it passed SVID (I think that was the test). It was AT&T that controlled who was allowed to call their OS Unix, and they weren't about to hand it out to just anybody. Nowadays, it seems like if it has "ls" and "vi" and a Unix-like API it's Unix, though you should note that Unix-like products like Linux don't call themselves Unix because they can't do so legally AFAIK.
Could be that Mach is allowed to use the Unix name, not really sure. In any case, it looks like Unix, feels like Unix and smells like Unix, so who's to say Mach isn't Unix, I guess?
Okay, you've proven yourself to be totally ignorant of what a *real* OS is. Even Windows 2000 doesn't come close to any Unix in reliability and stability. When's the last time you heard of a heavily used combination web server / file server / mail server / general purpose user system running without a reboot on any Windows OS for a year or more? I have Unix boxes that have done and are still doing just that. Our Win2k servers still need reboots periodically...
I won't even bother to mention security.
I use Windows 2000 every day. It's more "stable", but just as unruly as all of its predecessors. I still have to reboot it about once a week even just using it as a workstation. And I still fear installing new software/hardware. In short, it's *still* a Microsoft product.
I have to admit, OS X is bound to be far more reliable than any Windows product. It probably won't be too long before it's as solid as any Unix box (considering it is essentially Unix, that's probably not an unreasonable assumption).
- An OS can be "fully-tested" yet have bugs. Normally a full test cycle means you'll usually find the most glaring bugs and fix them. You may decide not to fix the less serious bugs after finding them this way, but at least you know about them and they're hopefully logged and tracked so they can be fixed later. As I noted, personal experience shows Apple is willing to ship software that hasn't gone through any sort of rigorous test cycle. Not to say they don't test, but they do seem willing to drop heavy testing in favor of shipping on time.
- Linux seems better-tested than Max OS. But why should that be surprising? There are jillions of "testers" with actual source code in hand. Who wouldn't argue that Linux is more stable and reliable than Mac OS?
- Why bother even comparing Mac OS to Windows. Of course Windows is far worse. I figured it went without saying. However, just because it's worse than Mac OS doesn't mean Mac OS doesn't have problems too.
- I have not contradicted myself. Apple has been delaying for years, but not for *testing* AFAIK.
Yes, it *is* theoretically possible to develop something for years and years but never test it properly.
- Windows sux, we know that. Why bother comparing it to Mac or Linux in the first place? We're talking about the absolute quality of Mac OS, not its quality relative to Windows or any other OS.
A friend of mine at Apple who works on OS X has told me for years that "it's almost ready". Heh heh. I wonder if this is for real? Personal experience has shown me that Apple is perfectly willing to ship buggy software w/o full testing, so maybe they will ship it this time.:)
Many states (if not the US, don't know) have laws that limit the usefulness of noncompetes. You can't force someone to not work in their area of expertise, especially if that represents their livelihood.
As for NDAs, they're also worthless. There's little hope of ever enforcing one unless you do a lot of diligence beforehand. That never happens, since most companies would require an NDA first anyway. Beware of these, they will not protect you. If you're the unscrupulous type, then they're a good tool to learn stuff from other companies (tongue in cheek, but true).
I'm far from a market whiz, but wouldn't a bear market be a good time to IPO? There's nowhere to go but up. Look at all the pretty dotcoms who IPOed recently that crashed along with the market. If TurboLinux IPOed now, one would think they would climb as the market recovered (assuming it does).
Obviously there are a lot of smart people who made the decision not to IPO, so there must be a reason that I have no clue about.
Actually, you're quite wrong. You're mistaking actual dissention for trolling. Yes, I know it's a rare thing here, especially on this topic, but someone with an original opinion *can* exist. Try to imagine the possibility.
1] Benjamin Franklin was hardly poor, and didn't need to profit from his invention. You can bet that had he been in need of income, he would have arranged to profit from it.
2] He didn't spend millions developing a prototype. It was a simple invention, and if I recall he had someone else make the first one. If he had spent years of his life and chunks of cash developing the stove, he probably wouldn't have just given the idea away.
I fail to understand the anti-patent sentiment when applied to things that have a significant cost behind their development. One-click ordering and the like, I can understand the criticism. Life isn't black and white, and neither are patents.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked with Monte in a previous life. We were never on a project together, but had lots of water cooler interaction and that sort of thing. Played him at checkers once and won, which is surprising because I suck.
There were rumors about his past with good ol' Bill, but I never bothered to ask. It's funny, now that I haven't seen him for several years, to see his past highlighted in the article. The stories I heard about his past seemed unlikely for someone like him (i.e. a reasonably normal guy without obvious riches).
Don't get me wrong. Monte is a cool guy. Nice, friendly, smart and all of that. But to imagine him as one of the first 10 or less at MS is weird to say the least. Obviously he never got the riches out of it that the rest of them did. He always drove around in an ancient Honda Civic with faded and peeling paint. He had a relatively isolated position (in charge of development tools) in our relatively obscure company. Don't know much about his personal life, but I think he took Karate lessons. You could always count on him to ask the pointed, annoying question of the speaker at company meetings. It was inevitable, and they would always look for him in the crowd to get the questions out of the way.
Not the mover and shaker one would associate with the other founders of MS. I wonder if he's sorry he didn't stick around long enough to become a billionaire. If you're reading this Monte, "Hey."
Probably not, but close.
Before you exhort me to read the press release, maybe you should. See message 178 for a very relevant quote which I won't repeat here.
In short, this is a *very specific* process patent, not a general patent on checksumming pages. They're applying a checksum to user-defined sections of a page, then notifying the user of any change to the marked sections via email or mobile page.
They're not actually patenting the idea of checksumming a web page to detect change. They're patenting the idea of users "subscribing" to notifications of changes to sections of web pages, with changes being detected through comparisons of MD5 signatures, and with those notifications being done via email or mobile page (or something much like that).
Lame, and there may be prior art, but it's not a patent on "checksumming web pages".
You don't have to patent something to keep others from patenting it. You just have to have the idea and document it in a verifiable fashion. Putting your ideas into notebooks with dates on the pages is a good start, notarized pages are even better.
If you come up with an idea before someone else and can prove it, they cannot patent it. Only someone who thought of it before you and can prove it can patent the idea.
You probably need to demonstrate a certain amount of thoughtfulness and thoroughness in your notes for them to be considered "invention", however. Random scattered thoughts scribbled on paper probably won't cut it.
They have to have done it well before the filing date. Prior art is only considered prior art if someone came up with the idea first. Pumatech may have been working on the idea for 5 years for all we know, and unless Cisco had the idea before that it would not be considered prior art.
On the surface this sounds really bogus. However, patents are very complicated things. Context is everything, and unless you read the entire patent you can't understand exactly what it's about. The abstract of a patent is useless for understanding what it actually is for.
More than likely the MD5 summing of a web page is just a single claim in a patent with many small claims. Claims usually build up from broad to specific, and can be dependent on one another. Often times claims alone are meaningless, but in conjunction with earlier claims they actually have meaning.
Take the headline here with a grain of salt. Read the patent claims and understand them, and you might find the headline to be false or at least not totally correct. I am quite sure that MD5 summing a web page, etc, has wads of prior art, but maybe that's not exactly what they've patented. If so, there's no question it will be invalidated in short order as either too obvious or because of prior art. More than likely there's more to the story.
You raise some valid points. It would take some thought to find a way to teach the RIAA a lesson without stealing, but I'm sure there's a good idea out there waiting for a real protester to invent. Just because nobody's thought of it yet doesn't justify stealing. You think the RIAA is "stealing" from consumers or somehow taking money unfairly, so you're essentially saying that stealing from them in turn is just peachy. Yeah, "retribution theft" is moral and good, while "intitial theft" is not. I thought "an eye for an eye" went out with Hammurabi?
Look at what I said in my initial posting. I'm simply trying to point out that stealing makes for poor protest for many reasons, and, in addition, 99% of everyone doing it with Napster is using it merely as an excuse to get free music. Yes, $18 for a CD is a complete ripoff, but why can't you come up with a creative approach to make the RIAA feel the pain without resorting to the gutter approach?
BTW, I completely support the RIAA if they want to release music in album form rather than single track form. (Saw some arg above about this.) It's totally up to them (and the artist primarily) as to how they package their product. If I were an artist and I worked hard on 10 tracks to make an album, I'd want people to hear them all. Especially if it was a theme album of sorts. What I don't support is the pricing scheme, which is truly evil.
Oh, and how do you know that there aren't people out there downloading every night, all the recent material (especially Metallica) and then smiling as they delete each and every one of them?
Your argument is just plain disingenuous, but this statement is over the top. Must I play into this and point out that downloading a *copy* and deleting the *copy* is useless behavior, unless you count the miniscule amount of bandwidth wasted by the sum total of every person out there actually doing this?
Just think of Napster as a commercial version of the Boston Tea Party.
In the Boston Tea Party they dumped the tea into the harbor. They didn't go home and drink it. Protest vs. outright theft.
True protesters of the RIAA's evil ways would forsake music instead of stealing it. Else it's more akin to busting into a department store during a riot rather than actual protest.
Relatable is flawed. It doesn't scale, meaning you start getting duplicate identifiers for totally different musical tracks as you have more and more tracks in your database. If you have enough tracks, identification of the music becomes very ambiguous. I wonder how Napster plans to deal with this.
This probably bodes well for Napster users, as it may throw a monkey wrench in their ability to block stuff.
After reading the EFF's protest page, I'm left confused as to what they're actually protesting. They complain about blocking software overblocking the good stuff and underblocking the bad stuff. While I don't disagree with that assessment, it seems to imply that if blocking software actually worked correctly, they might not be in opposition to it in public institutions?
Okay, it's obvious that the spirit of their protest is against any censorship whatsoever, regardless of whether the intended sites are censored properly or not. But throwing this argument in there only seems to hurt their cause. What if blocking software could be made to function in a very reliable, thoughtful, nonbiased way (not really possible, but what if)? By using this argument as a component of their protest they only hurt themselves IMHO.
I can't quite bring myself to agree with their anti-censorship tack, however. While I can see some argument to leaving library computers unblocked (at least for adult patrons), I can see no reason whatsoever to allow kids in schools to be able to surf wherever they want. I don't want my kid getting exposed to pr0n until I'm damn ready to explain the facts of life first. If censorship software does *any* good whatsoever, then I support its use in schools at least. If parents feel it's important for their kids to be able to surf anywhere they want, let them do it at home then.
You do have a point here. FTP is screwy, and it's the bane of firewalls. PASV doesn't seem widely used though, so it's kind of like tilting at windmills to require its use.
FTP should have been implemented as a single-connection protocol, IMHO, but it's too late for that. There's always HTTP, but that seems a bit lacking in file transfer features for it to actually replace FTP. We'll just have to live with the problems of FTP, which includes, for Linux 2.4 firewall administrators, patching (and using) ip_conntrack_ftp.
I've seen a lot of disparaging comments about Apple's lawyers here, and thought I'd throw out a few tidbits.
First of all, let's get early business taken care of. We're talking about lawyers. Praticing lawyers are almost invariably scum (I'm not including people who become lawyers for the education or other purposes besides actual practice). We all know that. Those of us who have ever dealt with lawyers hate them, unless you're a lawyer too. Even then, you probably still hate lawyers. Especially yourself.
With that in mind, Apple's lawyers are not doing this for fun, and they're not doing it to justify their jobs, etc. Rhetoric aside, they're probably doing it because they are obliged to defend Apple's trademarks or risk losing the ability to control their use. Should they not defend their trademarks, even in "stupid" cases, they could lose their ability to stop people from using their trademarks without permission. They are duty-bound to do what they're doing. I think someone posted something to this effect, and I'm confirming the truth of it. That's not to say that Apple wouldn't defend their trademark in this manner regardless of the law...
I've seen some attacks on the quality, etc., of Apples lawyers in this discussion. It's easy to say such things in the heat of anger. It's foolish, however, to think they're lame in any sense (other than perhaps a PR sense). These are the cream of the crop. Why would you expect anything less from a large, powerful company like Apple? I've dealt personally with their legal dept as an outsider, and they are nothing short of scary good. In one instance I saw them get a special form processed by a notorious government agency in a couple of hours with only a few calls; a form which takes any normal mortal *months* to get processed. These people are good, they are powerful, and they don't need to pull stupid stunts to make themselves look good to the bossman. More than likely they're proving themselves on a daily basis.
Though I hate lawyers, even my own, it's Jobs & friends you should be slamming first and foremost. There are all sorts of creative things they could do to preserve their trademarks, yet not stomp all over the Themes Project. But they're not doing any of those things.
Thanks for modding me down, Einstein. This place is a really crappy place to voice an unpopular opinion. Interesting that this is supposed to be a "discussion" forum.
I think I might be starting to understand why the trollers here do what they do.
Similar to the observations above, I have a home setup with:
:)
- 2.4 GHZ video/audio child baby monitor (Safety 1st brand).
- 2 laptops with Lucent Orinoco gold PC wireless card w/128 bit encryption (as in the article) talking to a Lucent AP 500 base station.
- An X10 2.4 GHZ wireless video camera array (3 cams).
- A microwave oven in close proximity to all.
It took me quite some time to figure out how to get any of this to work simultaneously. It turned out that all I had to do was set the X10 cameras to the fourth channel instead of the default, and suddenly they all worked simultaneously without any noticable problems. Sometimes you can see individual ethernet packets warp the screen of the baby monitor, but that seems to only happen sometimes. I don't know why. Otherwise, good to perfect throughput on the ethernet, nice clear screen on the baby monitor and good pictures on the X10 cameras. And my food tastes cooked.
I'm thoroughly amazed that it all works as well as it does. I am afraid of what will happen if I get any other microwave devices, though. There's clarity somehow in the cacophony, and I don't want to disturb that ordered chaos.
I beg to differ on the stability front. SSH 2.X has really been problematic for me. I switched to OpenSSH and it's solved all of my issues. The main problem was really nasty; unbounded use of CPU while idle. There was also the problem of sftp biffing on really large file transfers, as well as the more minor problem of not displaying the progress properly. Not to mention really annoying runaway processes if you interrupt it during the login phase, and that irritating GUI login popup that happens sometimes as well (unless you compile it out). I'm sure there's more. OpenSSh made all the nasties go away and I haven't found any new serious problems.
I still can't get OpenSSH and SSH2 to talk to each other with scp, but I don't really care now that I only use OpenSSH.
I guess I'm just showing my old-timer bias. Don't know if it's still true, but in the olden days you couldn't call an OS "Unix" unless it passed SVID (I think that was the test). It was AT&T that controlled who was allowed to call their OS Unix, and they weren't about to hand it out to just anybody. Nowadays, it seems like if it has "ls" and "vi" and a Unix-like API it's Unix, though you should note that Unix-like products like Linux don't call themselves Unix because they can't do so legally AFAIK.
:)
Could be that Mach is allowed to use the Unix name, not really sure. In any case, it looks like Unix, feels like Unix and smells like Unix, so who's to say Mach isn't Unix, I guess?
That's essentially why I said "essentially".
Okay, you've proven yourself to be totally ignorant of what a *real* OS is. Even Windows 2000 doesn't come close to any Unix in reliability and stability. When's the last time you heard of a heavily used combination web server / file server / mail server / general purpose user system running without a reboot on any Windows OS for a year or more? I have Unix boxes that have done and are still doing just that. Our Win2k servers still need reboots periodically...
I won't even bother to mention security.
I use Windows 2000 every day. It's more "stable", but just as unruly as all of its predecessors. I still have to reboot it about once a week even just using it as a workstation. And I still fear installing new software/hardware. In short, it's *still* a Microsoft product.
I have to admit, OS X is bound to be far more reliable than any Windows product. It probably won't be too long before it's as solid as any Unix box (considering it is essentially Unix, that's probably not an unreasonable assumption).
Okay, some clarification:
- An OS can be "fully-tested" yet have bugs. Normally a full test cycle means you'll usually find the most glaring bugs and fix them. You may decide not to fix the less serious bugs after finding them this way, but at least you know about them and they're hopefully logged and tracked so they can be fixed later. As I noted, personal experience shows Apple is willing to ship software that hasn't gone through any sort of rigorous test cycle. Not to say they don't test, but they do seem willing to drop heavy testing in favor of shipping on time.
- Linux seems better-tested than Max OS. But why should that be surprising? There are jillions of "testers" with actual source code in hand. Who wouldn't argue that Linux is more stable and reliable than Mac OS?
- Why bother even comparing Mac OS to Windows. Of course Windows is far worse. I figured it went without saying. However, just because it's worse than Mac OS doesn't mean Mac OS doesn't have problems too.
- I have not contradicted myself. Apple has been delaying for years, but not for *testing* AFAIK. Yes, it *is* theoretically possible to develop something for years and years but never test it properly.
- Windows sux, we know that. Why bother comparing it to Mac or Linux in the first place? We're talking about the absolute quality of Mac OS, not its quality relative to Windows or any other OS.
A friend of mine at Apple who works on OS X has told me for years that "it's almost ready". Heh heh. I wonder if this is for real? Personal experience has shown me that Apple is perfectly willing to ship buggy software w/o full testing, so maybe they will ship it this time. :)
Many states (if not the US, don't know) have laws that limit the usefulness of noncompetes. You can't force someone to not work in their area of expertise, especially if that represents their livelihood.
As for NDAs, they're also worthless. There's little hope of ever enforcing one unless you do a lot of diligence beforehand. That never happens, since most companies would require an NDA first anyway. Beware of these, they will not protect you. If you're the unscrupulous type, then they're a good tool to learn stuff from other companies (tongue in cheek, but true).
I'm far from a market whiz, but wouldn't a bear market be a good time to IPO? There's nowhere to go but up. Look at all the pretty dotcoms who IPOed recently that crashed along with the market. If TurboLinux IPOed now, one would think they would climb as the market recovered (assuming it does).
Obviously there are a lot of smart people who made the decision not to IPO, so there must be a reason that I have no clue about.
Actually, you're quite wrong. You're mistaking actual dissention for trolling. Yes, I know it's a rare thing here, especially on this topic, but someone with an original opinion *can* exist. Try to imagine the possibility.
1] Benjamin Franklin was hardly poor, and didn't need to profit from his invention. You can bet that had he been in need of income, he would have arranged to profit from it.
2] He didn't spend millions developing a prototype. It was a simple invention, and if I recall he had someone else make the first one. If he had spent years of his life and chunks of cash developing the stove, he probably wouldn't have just given the idea away.
I fail to understand the anti-patent sentiment when applied to things that have a significant cost behind their development. One-click ordering and the like, I can understand the criticism. Life isn't black and white, and neither are patents.
Napster has to comply with the court or they die. I'd say CDDB is helping Napster to survive. Why would anyone consider that helping the *RIAA*??
If CDDB *didn't* help Napster, that would be helping the RIAA, IHMO.