Replace Carmack with Microsoft, and/. with that guy who used a click-through agreement with modified QuakeWorld source, and it seems awfully familiar
The tactics used by the offending party seem the same. Carmack said "cease and desist", and so did Microsoft. And the perpetrator in both cases obfuscated the matter by replying with unrelated matters.
I don't think that/. should remove the comments either. Especially the ones detailing how to avoid the agreement (winzip--wow, what details), and the comments including links.
I just wanted to point out that it's interesting how different the argument is depending on what side you sit.
With respect to the second charge, I feel Microsoft stands a good chance of being granted relief by the Appeals Court. In the Consent Decree ruling, the appellate judges essentially concluded that separate demand for two products, and even separate marketing, do not necessarily indicate that those two products cannot be integrated.
I haven't been following the trial, and so I'm not at all swayed by this argument because your point is moot (IANAL but I like any word that makes you sound like a cow).
You need to re-read Jackson's conclusions. Microsoft is a monopoly, but he states that in order to be found liable you need to show anticompetative practices that were used to maintain the monopoly.
Netscape fit that bill. As middleware, the browser could offer an API to developers that could be used instead of Windows API. Unlike a competing OS, the chicken-and-egg problem is solved since it's already deployed on nearly every user's computer.
Jackson states that Microsoft realized that developer's "realiance on Netscape's platform would depend largely on the size and trajectory of Netscape's share of browser usage". Thus Microsoft used exclusionary deals with OEMs and eventually integration with the OS as a means to tie up the easy means of distributions for Netscape and crush their market share.
And realize that if this is to overturned, it will be on appeal, not a new trial. I don't know law, but I know that overturning a decision is a lot harder.
Besides, I'd think you'd welcome the break-up. I think that it will eventually make Microsoft better. And I'll still run Linux;-)
What if the offender had been another open source project? If they had used a BSD license instead of the GPL, for instance. Would they have been forced to change to the GPL? Would anyone have cared?
What if NVidia had just used a clever algorithm they found in an open source project?
I'm also confused on the point of how much and of what kind of code can be reused from other projects. Is any amount of cut and paste OK?
After all, the whole benefit of open source is to build on other people's code and learn from it, but licenses like the GPL say "touch it and you've bought it" as far as I can see. Although I'm sure that common sense dictates that things aren't in practice that strict.
Anybody know where the game manic miner can be found? The link given is bad and I haven't had any luck.
I've checked out the page for the DOS version of this game, but there aren't any pointers to a Linux version. That page says that the game is FREEWARE but that he won't release the source. Something I've never understood, but that's a different thread...
I was worried that I'd have to grab the C grammar off the net and write one of my own Real Soon Now.
You might try id-utils too (check freshmeat). I use id-utils.el in Emacs a lot on code I'm unfamiliar with. If you want to see who calls the function you're on, you just hit M-x gid and you get a list of hits in the compile buffer. Then you can just iterate through the list. Pretty cool.
The thing I like about cscope, from what I've seen, is that it does more and generates the ID file dynamically. Choices are good!
(ob-see-kwi-us) adj. excessively or sickeningly respectful.
There isn't anything to be gained by ripping apart Mozilla. It's the most high profile closed-to-open source project there is, and it's a poster boy for open source, like it or not. But for what passes as a pack of hungry wolves on most every subject here on/., Mozilla brings out the damndest bunch of apologist weenies I've ever seen.
Mozilla is big, behind schedule, unstable, and now developed by mostly AOL employees (sorry guys, but face the facts). Sounds like Windows almost, doesn't it? Yet everybody is so willing to prop this baby up and say it will. Well, cut the future tense crap.
Honesty. Do you use Mozilla for your daily browser under Linux? Have you contributed patches? If not, stop making excuses.
What the Mozilla project needs is a healthy dose of reality.
As somebody who holds a little bit of stock in a profitable brick-and-morter retailer, this is kind of gratifying. It was getting really annoying to see these outrageous valuations for money-losing companies.
Why are you happy that other people are losing money? This is the same attitude that politicians use to demagogue rich people. People who are rich are that way because people valued what they offered more than their money, otherwise they wouldn't have parted with their cash. The difference is CREATED wealth. You don't get poor because others get rich, it's not a zero sum game. The fact that Red Hat was a hot stock didn't hurt the performance of your brick-and-morter stock. Your stock was valued at exactly where supply met demand, and it still is. The loss in market value doesn't help you, in fact it hurts you. Red Hat and others created wealth, they didn't take it away. And if some of that is now gone, it's just less wealth to be spent at your brick-and-morter store.
For those of you curious about what John was diagraming on the whiteboards, let me be of assistance
The three circles, decreasing in size from left to right, should actually be the same size. John was drawing a map of his last game of "hunt the wumpus" for his "research", but his hand got tired. As you can probably tell, he doesn't get much exercise or sun.
The second pic on the first page that looks like a hamburger is actually just that, a hamburger. Everyone was getting a little sleepy at that point, so John started talking about Burger Time strategy just to see if anyone was still listening.
I wouldn't say great movie, but great performance. Maybe the best I saw all year. Casting Jon Stewart (who I like, at least on TV) against Gillian Anderson was the worst casting ever. But keep the Sean Connery stuff and Jolie as Joan and it WAS a great movie. Probably better than the one she won an Oscar for.
At least in the case of Secure Computing, I'm not suprised in the least that they can't get funding. They are a local company located a few miles from my home. I considered working for them, so I studied them in depth, reading their 10K reports and talking to people who worked there.
The impression I got was that they are like so many tech companies in this boom. That is, they weren't growing fast enough. So they tried every fad around. Then they moved their headquarters to San Jose, despite the fact that they still remain largely a Minnesota based company. They moved most of their effort out of building UNIX firewalls into porting to NT. Now everybody wants UNIX--oops. And of course they acquired other companies only marginally related to what they do, things like filtering software. Only to find that they were a poor fit and quickly worth less than what they paid for them.
The shame of it all is that they grew in the first place because they made good firewalling software for UNIX, mostly Sun. Now they're back to where they started, poorer and out of cash, suddenly without all the good engineers that made them a good company in the first place.
Keep it up! We've needed somebody to fill sengan's shoes for a while. I'm not sure why he posted so often so late, but it was cool to see tech news posted at midnight. Sorta like a bowl of Captain Crunch before you hit the sack (with ice cold milk--yum.)
I can't believe Microsoft hasn't sued him. He basically admitted he copied Excel.
You forget your history. That is how Compaq managed to copy the IBM PC Bios without getting sued. They got a "virgin", somebody who had never studied the inner workings of the Bios, to study its functionality and write it all down. Then Compaq took that info and made sure that their Bios did the same stuff.
Not to get offtopic, but that's a cool book. I especially liked his classification of programmers that enjoy the high stress of pre-IPO companies as "stormtroopers". It's weak point is the Bill Gates bashing--go figure.
Perl monger meetings, usually held once a month, are better than LUG's if you want to meet other programmers in your area.
0. Sending your application and resume
Don't. If the person your sending it to doesn't already know who you are and isn't expecting your resume, this is a bad idea. If there are a hundred applicants for a new job, which do you think a manager is likely to choose
99 resume's from people he's never heard of who may or may not be lying.
One guy who has been recommended by people already on his staff and who understands the job.
What it takes is a little research of a few companies that interest you and some contacts. If you haven't met somebody from a perl monger meeting or LUG working there, then just call up an engineer at the company. That is tough, I know. But you're not calling them to ask for a job, just for info. You want to find out about the open job, what skills it requires, the group manager, and the company in general. Remember, the guy at the other end is a geek just like you.
A better idea is to print out the article accompanied with a typed and signed letter. Or even better just summarize the article in a letter (of course reference it) and send it to the rep.
Actually, save yourself the stamp and just call. Every representative except Senators likely answer their own phones. The benefit over a letter is that the call becomes Q&A rather than just a rant, and you're guaranteed a captive audience. Just make sure you know the issue in some depth.
I once called my rep to ask him to support a bill to add slot machines to the local racetrack, only to find that he authored the damn bill. Still, he liked hearing that people supported his bill, and he told me so once he'd stopped laughing.
Anyone who puts a small gloss on this fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building further on it, is a thief.
I think Tim watches the Simpsons:
Betty White (on the Simpsons a couple weeks ago) at PBS pledge drive: If you've watched even
one second of PBS without contributing, you're a THIEF!
helped cull this mass down to 10 extremely high-quality questions
The key word there is helped. Why not remove the obvious flames, if they are still scored at 5, and send the rest to Bjarne? I'm disappointed that my question got Score:5, managing to overcome being posted late (#260 or so), only to get scrapped because it wasn't thought worthy by the/. crew.
Most programmers that I know prefer Java, the programming language, over C++. What they dislike about Java is the VM and bytecodes slowing everything down. Hence my question
Will ahead-of-time Java compilers, like
GCJ for instance, eventually be able to produce machine code comparable in speed to compiled C++?
The problem I see so far is that on the Java side there is the problem of making exceptions faster, which are notorious for slowing down C++ code. And Java has to deal with garbage collection, which you say in your FAQ can be added to C++. Yet, despite its obvious benefits, nobody seem to do.
OpenSource programmers can write code in whatever language they want. Consequently, they write a lot of C, Perl, and Python. But with some notable exceptions, they don't write C++.
Contrast that with the lanuages programmers use at work, which are primarily C++ and Java.
It can't be entirely explained by the size of the programs written either. And as your FAQ says in the section C is better than C++ for small projects, right?, you believe that any C program can be better written in C++.
That was the title of an op-ed posted at DDJ a couple years ago.
CPAN is a collection of free, downloadable modules that can be use'd in your Perl programs. It's a wonderful resource and the true strength of Perl. Code gets written once and used and tested by many. Over time the modules just get better tested and more robust. Everybody wins.
Why doesn't an equivalent CCAN (Comprehensive C++ Archive Network) exist if C++ truly is reusable?
Incidentally what level of math expertice are they assuming? I have taken up through differential calculus and still hardly know a damn thing contained.
The problem is that Calculus doesn't help you in analysing algorithms, which is what CS is all about. So what to do? The book Concrete Math is an expansion of the first part of volume one, and is a much much easier read. After reading it, you'll be set to tackle all the math in Knuth.
Of course it's not a small book, and it's hard to get motivated to learn something when you don't know WHY you need it. So I'd suggest just skimming the math in Knuth and work on MIX and the programming stuff, then go back later.
In other words, eat your cake and ice cream first, and then tackle the broccoli.
If memory serves me correctly (not always), the logo was chosen through an open submission / voting system - artists/graphics geeks submitted ideas for Mozilla logos, people voted, most popular was selected.
The spinner thingy was choosen through a competition (twice), but not the logo. JWZ created the mozilla.org site, so he might have also created the logo, but I'm just guessing there.
A "stable" release is thoughly tested, sometimes TOO thoughly tested =) But when you have something that's critial on being rock stable, these are they way to go to start. And if there is a program that you need a later version because of mroe functionality, you can do that too.
A Redhat release is just as stable as a Debian release. The reason that Debian takes so much longer to release is that they include many more packages. That is good because you can find the packages you need on the CD, without the need to retrieve them via rpmfind. But I think that most people would give that diversity up to have more up to date packages.
It's also not true that you can just grab an updated package if you need it. Any current Slink user can tell you that. Package maintainers tend to make updated packages just for unstable, since that's what they run.
Slashdot Mirror
Replace Carmack with Microsoft, and /. with that guy who used a click-through agreement with modified QuakeWorld source, and it seems awfully familiar
The tactics used by the offending party seem the same. Carmack said "cease and desist", and so did Microsoft. And the perpetrator in both cases obfuscated the matter by replying with unrelated matters.
I don't think that /. should remove the comments either. Especially the ones detailing how to avoid the agreement (winzip--wow, what details), and the comments including links.
I just wanted to point out that it's interesting how different the argument is depending on what side you sit.
I haven't been following the trial, and so I'm not at all swayed by this argument because your point is moot (IANAL but I like any word that makes you sound like a cow).
You need to re-read Jackson's conclusions. Microsoft is a monopoly, but he states that in order to be found liable you need to show anticompetative practices that were used to maintain the monopoly.
Netscape fit that bill. As middleware, the browser could offer an API to developers that could be used instead of Windows API. Unlike a competing OS, the chicken-and-egg problem is solved since it's already deployed on nearly every user's computer.
Jackson states that Microsoft realized that developer's "realiance on Netscape's platform would depend largely on the size and trajectory of Netscape's share of browser usage". Thus Microsoft used exclusionary deals with OEMs and eventually integration with the OS as a means to tie up the easy means of distributions for Netscape and crush their market share.
And realize that if this is to overturned, it will be on appeal, not a new trial. I don't know law, but I know that overturning a decision is a lot harder.
Besides, I'd think you'd welcome the break-up. I think that it will eventually make Microsoft better. And I'll still run Linux ;-)
What if the offender had been another open source project? If they had used a BSD license instead of the GPL, for instance. Would they have been forced to change to the GPL? Would anyone have cared?
What if NVidia had just used a clever algorithm they found in an open source project?
I'm also confused on the point of how much and of what kind of code can be reused from other projects. Is any amount of cut and paste OK?
After all, the whole benefit of open source is to build on other people's code and learn from it, but licenses like the GPL say "touch it and you've bought it" as far as I can see. Although I'm sure that common sense dictates that things aren't in practice that strict.
Unless I miss my guess, that was a decent attempt at sardonic humor. Add a :-) to the end of what was said and reread.
Anybody know where the game manic miner can be found? The link given is bad and I haven't had any luck.
I've checked out the page for the DOS version of this game, but there aren't any pointers to a Linux version. That page says that the game is FREEWARE but that he won't release the source. Something I've never understood, but that's a different thread...
You might try id-utils too (check freshmeat). I use id-utils.el in Emacs a lot on code I'm unfamiliar with. If you want to see who calls the function you're on, you just hit M-x gid and you get a list of hits in the compile buffer. Then you can just iterate through the list. Pretty cool.
The thing I like about cscope, from what I've seen, is that it does more and generates the ID file dynamically. Choices are good!
(ob-see-kwi-us) adj. excessively or sickeningly respectful.
There isn't anything to be gained by ripping apart Mozilla. It's the most high profile closed-to-open source project there is, and it's a poster boy for open source, like it or not. But for what passes as a pack of hungry wolves on most every subject here on /., Mozilla brings out the damndest bunch of apologist weenies I've ever seen.
Mozilla is big, behind schedule, unstable, and now developed by mostly AOL employees (sorry guys, but face the facts). Sounds like Windows almost, doesn't it? Yet everybody is so willing to prop this baby up and say it will. Well, cut the future tense crap.
Honesty. Do you use Mozilla for your daily browser under Linux? Have you contributed patches? If not, stop making excuses.
What the Mozilla project needs is a healthy dose of reality.
Why are you happy that other people are losing money? This is the same attitude that politicians use to demagogue rich people. People who are rich are that way because people valued what they offered more than their money, otherwise they wouldn't have parted with their cash. The difference is CREATED wealth. You don't get poor because others get rich, it's not a zero sum game. The fact that Red Hat was a hot stock didn't hurt the performance of your brick-and-morter stock. Your stock was valued at exactly where supply met demand, and it still is. The loss in market value doesn't help you, in fact it hurts you. Red Hat and others created wealth, they didn't take it away. And if some of that is now gone, it's just less wealth to be spent at your brick-and-morter store.
For those of you curious about what John was diagraming on the whiteboards, let me be of assistance
Hope that helps!
Go rent/buy Playing by Heart. Great movie.
I wouldn't say great movie, but great performance. Maybe the best I saw all year. Casting Jon Stewart (who I like, at least on TV) against Gillian Anderson was the worst casting ever. But keep the Sean Connery stuff and Jolie as Joan and it WAS a great movie. Probably better than the one she won an Oscar for.
Liked her in Hackers too :-)
Posted with Mozilla Classic using Lesstif
At least in the case of Secure Computing, I'm not suprised in the least that they can't get funding. They are a local company located a few miles from my home. I considered working for them, so I studied them in depth, reading their 10K reports and talking to people who worked there.
The impression I got was that they are like so many tech companies in this boom. That is, they weren't growing fast enough. So they tried every fad around. Then they moved their headquarters to San Jose, despite the fact that they still remain largely a Minnesota based company. They moved most of their effort out of building UNIX firewalls into porting to NT. Now everybody wants UNIX--oops. And of course they acquired other companies only marginally related to what they do, things like filtering software. Only to find that they were a poor fit and quickly worth less than what they paid for them.
The shame of it all is that they grew in the first place because they made good firewalling software for UNIX, mostly Sun. Now they're back to where they started, poorer and out of cash, suddenly without all the good engineers that made them a good company in the first place.
Keep it up! We've needed somebody to fill sengan's shoes for a while. I'm not sure why he posted so often so late, but it was cool to see tech news posted at midnight. Sorta like a bowl of Captain Crunch before you hit the sack (with ice cold milk--yum.)
You forget your history. That is how Compaq managed to copy the IBM PC Bios without getting sued. They got a "virgin", somebody who had never studied the inner workings of the Bios, to study its functionality and write it all down. Then Compaq took that info and made sure that their Bios did the same stuff.
At least that's what Cringely's book Accidental Empires said.
Not to get offtopic, but that's a cool book. I especially liked his classification of programmers that enjoy the high stress of pre-IPO companies as "stormtroopers". It's weak point is the Bill Gates bashing--go figure.
Perl monger meetings, usually held once a month, are better than LUG's if you want to meet other programmers in your area.
Don't. If the person your sending it to doesn't already know who you are and isn't expecting your resume, this is a bad idea. If there are a hundred applicants for a new job, which do you think a manager is likely to chooseWhat it takes is a little research of a few companies that interest you and some contacts. If you haven't met somebody from a perl monger meeting or LUG working there, then just call up an engineer at the company. That is tough, I know. But you're not calling them to ask for a job, just for info. You want to find out about the open job, what skills it requires, the group manager, and the company in general. Remember, the guy at the other end is a geek just like you.
Actually, save yourself the stamp and just call. Every representative except Senators likely answer their own phones. The benefit over a letter is that the call becomes Q&A rather than just a rant, and you're guaranteed a captive audience. Just make sure you know the issue in some depth.
I once called my rep to ask him to support a bill to add slot machines to the local racetrack, only to find that he authored the damn bill. Still, he liked hearing that people supported his bill, and he told me so once he'd stopped laughing.
I think Tim watches the Simpsons:
The key word there is helped. Why not remove the obvious flames, if they are still scored at 5, and send the rest to Bjarne? I'm disappointed that my question got Score:5, managing to overcome being posted late (#260 or so), only to get scrapped because it wasn't thought worthy by the /. crew.
Oops, lost the spaceship operator :-)
sub bycount {
$solib{$b} <=> $solib{$a};
}
>I'm not entirely sure your assertion (that C++ is >significantly less used for OSS then other >languages) is correct. KDE comes to mind.
/g;
...
/usr/bin/eqn /usr/bin/geqn ...
Here's my Perl program for checking the library dependencies on my system (RedHat 6.0 mostly)
#!/usr/bin/perl
sub deps {
$r_array = shift;
foreach $file (@$r_array) {
my $deps = `ldd $file`;
my @libs = $deps =~ m/(\S+) =>
foreach my $lib (@libs) {
$solib{$lib}++;
push @$lib, $file;
}
}
}
sub bycount {
$solib{$b} $solib{$a};
}
foreach $dir (@ARGV) {
opendir DH, $dir;
@programs = grep -x, map "$dir/$_", readdir DH;
deps(\@programs);
closedir DH;
}
foreach $so (sort bycount keys %solib) {
print "$so $solib{$so}\n";
print "@$so\n\n";
}
This is what I get:
libc.so.6 1318
/bin/mktemp
libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 44
/usr/bin/addftinfo
That's 1318 programs linked to the C library and 44 to C++. In addition, those 44 C++ programs are really just groff, xpdf, and my jikes compiler.
Most programmers that I know prefer Java, the programming language, over C++. What they dislike about Java is the VM and bytecodes slowing everything down. Hence my question
The problem I see so far is that on the Java side there is the problem of making exceptions faster, which are notorious for slowing down C++ code. And Java has to deal with garbage collection, which you say in your FAQ can be added to C++. Yet, despite its obvious benefits, nobody seem to do.
OpenSource programmers can write code in whatever language they want. Consequently, they write a lot of C, Perl, and Python. But with some notable exceptions, they don't write C++.
Contrast that with the lanuages programmers use at work, which are primarily C++ and Java.
It can't be entirely explained by the size of the programs written either. And as your FAQ says in the section C is better than C++ for small projects, right?, you believe that any C program can be better written in C++.
So why the disparity then?
That was the title of an op-ed posted at DDJ a couple years ago.
CPAN is a collection of free, downloadable modules that can be use'd in your Perl programs. It's a wonderful resource and the true strength of Perl. Code gets written once and used and tested by many. Over time the modules just get better tested and more robust. Everybody wins.
Why doesn't an equivalent CCAN (Comprehensive C++ Archive Network) exist if C++ truly is reusable?
Of course it's not a small book, and it's hard to get motivated to learn something when you don't know WHY you need it. So I'd suggest just skimming the math in Knuth and work on MIX and the programming stuff, then go back later.
In other words, eat your cake and ice cream first, and then tackle the broccoli.
If memory serves me correctly (not always), the logo was chosen through an open submission / voting system - artists/graphics geeks submitted ideas for Mozilla logos, people voted, most popular was selected.
The spinner thingy was choosen through a competition (twice), but not the logo. JWZ created the mozilla.org site, so he might have also created the logo, but I'm just guessing there.
A Redhat release is just as stable as a Debian release. The reason that Debian takes so much longer to release is that they include many more packages. That is good because you can find the packages you need on the CD, without the need to retrieve them via rpmfind. But I think that most people would give that diversity up to have more up to date packages.
It's also not true that you can just grab an updated package if you need it. Any current Slink user can tell you that. Package maintainers tend to make updated packages just for unstable, since that's what they run.