Instead MS would patent technique X and if so motivated would sue anybody that implemented technique X regardless if it's implemented in Mono, Java, or plain C.
But they could very well (and supposedly have) patented algorithms necessary to the implementation of.Net itself, thus making Mono directly infringing. I can hypothetically write patent-clear code in C, but even "hello world" in C# is built on shaky ground.
If Microsoft wants to sue Mono, they can do that. They can also sue Linux, KDE, and any number of other people. You know why? Because they have a lot of superficial patents that anyone might violate totally by accident.
Yeah? Ones as fundamental to the success of those projects as the innards of C# are to Mono? Suppose MS sues KDE for violating their patented algorithm for decoding PNG files. KDE switches to a different algorithm and new versions continue to blossom. They could be barred from distributing old, violating versions but an orderly migration is still possible. In the worst case scenario, we'd lose KDE. That would suck immensely, but life would go on.
Now, suppose MS sues Novel [sic] for violating their patented algorithm for binding methods in dynamic languages. Have fun working around that little gotcha! If Mono really caught on and everyone started using it, then MS stepped in and destroyed it, we'd face the equivalent of losing GCC. That would be about the most damaging blow they could land, but people of your mindset are happily buying into that vulnerable position.
No, I have no expectation whatsoever that MS is in this to play nice. If they really wanted to embrace non-mainstream OSes, we'd have Office or VisualStudio for Linux. People would pony up good money to buy those. And yet, their most visible outreach to Unix involves providing a new foundation for everyone to build upon. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how convenient that would be for them.
This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it.
The data sheet for my Hitachi HDS721075KLA330 drive rates it at 50,000 load/unload cycles. If it powered up 50 times a day (which would be quite possible in a desktop with aggressive power savings enabled), it's specced to last about 3 years.
From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense.
The people who actually built it seem to disagree with you. Hint: a spinning hard drive takes little energy to stay in motion. A stopped hard drive takes quite a bit of torque to spin up to running speed in a small number of seconds.
In Nebraska, a 14-year-old can get a school permit under certain circumstances that allows them to drive themselves and their siblings to school. This is used by kids who live on farms outside small towns, almost always on low-traffic roads, so it's not nearly as crazy as you might think. Besides, most of the kids eligible for this permit have been driving trucks around the farm since they were old enough to reach the pedals.
Java used to provide lock-in, too. Hence, the GNU Classpath project, which is pretty much identical in its goals to Mono. Funny that I never saw you people screaming about that one being a trap.
The Java Trap was that you might get stuck on a language with no FOSS implementation and be reliant on a proprietary runtime. GNU Classpath and friends disarmed the trap by providing FOSS backends.
The Mono Trap is that you might get stuck on a platform encumbered by patents, so that even if you're coding on a 100% FOSS system, a court ruling granting an injunction against further release and development of Mono could yank the rug out from under you. Maybe that's no big deal for cute games or desktop applets, but there's no way on Earth I'd stake my business on a platform that may be nuked from orbit at any moment.
It's really quite obvious to anyone with any actual knowledge of how the industry works that people are going to write applications without Linux in mind.
It's equally obvious that Microsoft has never entered a relationship without destroying its partner. The naivety behind thinking that maybe they'll play nice this one time, for the first time in the history of their company, is simply astounding.
It's just that I've never heard of a non-American really defend Office. Besides, have you tried the girlfriend-and-grandma test with OpenOffice versus Office 2007, which looks totally different than anything they've ever used before? Finally, if you must use MS Office, then you can get it for OS X - you don't have to have a PC.
One of us thinks computer voting is largely tamperproof and the other sees it as dangerously untested. Somehow, I'm the moron? Listen, kid: I know that a bit of VB hacking can make you feel pretty knowledgeable, but come back after a couple of decades of actual experience and we'll have this conversation again.
Unless you get big time money and can go on an extended vacation to learn a new technology or dive into a project and reach the same level as the one covered by the non-compete or can feed yourself and your family of the royalties from the agreement until it runs out you shouldn't sign it.
I've signed one non-compete ever when I was offered a job doing web development. The terms were that I would not go to work for any of their customers or another webdev shop in that city for at least 6 months after my employment ended. That seemed pretty reasonable to me and kept with the legitimate idea behind a non-compete: they didn't want me to run off with their customer list or use my knowledge of their company to underbid them.
For example, some might want to ban alcohol from any venue that a child might attend. This makes sense if the venue is primarily for children, but doesn't make sense if it is primarily adult, where parent can model responsible drinking rather than have the child's first experience at a high school kegger.
Definitely. My kids see us drinking the occasional glass of wine, or cracking the top on some beers when friends are over. We've even given them sips of both (universal reaction: "GROSS!"). Still, they've never seen us drunk or heard anything resembling "I need a drink". To them, alcohol is something adults sip from time to time while hanging out with other adults. I'd much rather they learn this than that alcohol is a mysterious, fascinating thing that must be discovered at the first opportunity.
Or do you come from the class of people that analogize having kids with crime and parenting is the sentence? Because as far as I can tell that's a particularly odious "libertarian" attitude.
Seriously, WTF? I'm pretty libertarian, but love having kids. I spent a good part of yesterday playing the part of the "tickle monster" and being swarmed by giggling kids. I think your description is much better suited to liberal soccer moms who are chained to their children by fear that something bad will happen to them.
That's valid for the 1,000 people in America who actually need some obscure function, but no big deal for the rest of us who are completely supported by Open Office.
The fact that you see any "fault" whatsoever in the desire of the general consumer to have an out-of-the-box perfectly running computer with intuitive user interfaces and the familiar assortment of applications...is why Linux will never succeed there.
The Eee PC ships with Firefox, OpenOffice, a slick little app launcher, a passel of games, and a bunch of Google icons on the first launcher tab. Honestly, if you can't apply your Windows experience to using an Eee, then you are broken.
I actually liked Xandros on my Eee. It booted quickly and ran great. My sole dislike - and it was enough to make me switch to eeeXubuntu - was that software upgrades were few and far between. Firefox 3 runs much better on this tiny system than Firefox 2 does, but I had doubts that it'd ever be officially supported.
Basically, if you were happy with the versions of the software that came with it, it was great. If not, you were in for a rough ride.
Right now the ONLY logical reasons to move to a Linux based PC is 1) cost and 2) boot time when run in minimalist mode. Otherwise an XP machine is far better for the availability of apps and consistency of experience.
Oh, and software that gets faster with time (see KDE 4 vs. KDE 3). And better hardware support (dead serious). And a nicer desktop (got anything to compare to Compiz yet?). And a smaller footprint (I'm using less than half of the 1GB of RAM on the Eee PC I'm typing this on right now). And a software library that makes Windows look niche (I'll put apt-get against VersionTracker any day of the week). And a more consistent interface (see: those screenshots of 20 different widget toolkits on a single Windows screen).
Yeah, besides being a better, faster, cheaper, prettier system with better 3rd-party support, I don't see much point in using Linux over XP. Oh, and double that for Vista.
OK, you're not my lawyer, and this is an explicit waiver of all responsibility for the results of any actions I may take based on any further communications between us on this subject in this forum.
I don't know how else to say "I'm not paying you so can I please just ask a question and not get hedge answers. I promise not to sue." Is there a standard clause that covers our non-relationship?
Anyway, it's my birthday and I'd kind of like to register a copyright for a program I've written. Thanks for the link! I think I can spare $35 to the project. Having said that, what exactly am I registering? That is, would the registration cover previous versions of my software? Will it automatically cover future versions, and if so, is there a limit after which I must re-register? If future versions are not protected, can I submit an addendum to my original application or must I re-register each new version?
The latter case could get pretty pricy for an open source project that releases early and releases often. Microsoft can afford to shell out for XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, Vista, Vista SP1 and so on because they only come once every couple of years.
While it is indeed possible for static electricity to jostle bus lines, power supply lines, etc..., I find it rather unlikely that static discharge would add an extra 10111011100 (binary) votes for a candidate. I would find a power of two (such as 2048 or 4096) more plausible, but still unlikely.
...all while leaving the other 512MB uncorrupted so that the software runs without crashing and is able to perform the rest of its duties.
Bullshit. There are better odds of our sun going supernova in the next 30 seconds and us being saved by Rocky & Bullwinkle flying backwards ala Superman to reverse time.
I, like many of us, participated in that mechanical turk thing a few days after the crash to try to find his airplane in satellite photos. Did we cover that area? I kind of hope not.
Oh, the idea of a free-for-all parallel Internet that's considered too dangerous for regular people. Soccer moms and grandparents can hang out in the shiny, filtered overnet and leave the rest alone.
Guess which will have the better content? Everyone will have some vaguely seedy acquaintance who can get anything they want, for the right price. Gibson and Stephenson were only wrong in thinking it would be so far in the future.
So, and my professor suggested this, maybe the ideal swap size is ZERO.
I hate to be disillusionary, but your professor sucked. First, you get paging almost for free as a byproduct of implementing virtual memory. Second, the same mechanisms give you cool things like using an executable's binary image on the filesystem as the backing store for that executable, or even mmap(). Don't you like mmap()? Sure you do! Finally, virtual memory is absolutely, utterly critical for system stability. Unified, flat memory spaces were obsolete even before personal computers brought them back into common usage (too bad the 68000 didn't have an MMU), and VM is as good a thing as any I can think of to spend those 6 billion cycles per second on.
Your professor really told you that swap is bad? Pity.
About your second point: you accept "magic box" services every day of your life. You put your money in a bank and trust that they're gonna give it back when you ask for it.
I only use FDIC-ensured banks and keep my balances under their insurance limits. If we're to the point that the FDIC fails, then it's back to shotguns and canned goods anyway.
You pay a cable company to provide you internet, and trust that none of their techs are reading your email.
I use GPG for important stuff, and run my own TLS-enabled mailserver.
You use your credit/debit card at countless businesses, and trust a whole chain of people not to swipe your card number.
I only use cards with complete theft-protection guarantees.
You know, I'm not overly paranoid but I do take steps to mitigate the risks you list. Avoiding cloud computing for sensitive data is just another protective step.
By the way, statusbar sells web filtering software from a site with blog titles like "Christian women and Porn", "Government fails on COPA - once again", and "The Blasphemy Challenge - what will your parents say?". I detect a bit of pro-filtering bias.
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You're not pushing a cpu, it was designed to run faster! Just bined lower.
This is a brand new CPU. I don't think they're worried about the low-end market just yet, and are labeling them as high as they can.
Instead MS would patent technique X and if so motivated would sue anybody that implemented technique X regardless if it's implemented in Mono, Java, or plain C.
But they could very well (and supposedly have) patented algorithms necessary to the implementation of .Net itself, thus making Mono directly infringing. I can hypothetically write patent-clear code in C, but even "hello world" in C# is built on shaky ground.
If Microsoft wants to sue Mono, they can do that. They can also sue Linux, KDE, and any number of other people. You know why? Because they have a lot of superficial patents that anyone might violate totally by accident.
Yeah? Ones as fundamental to the success of those projects as the innards of C# are to Mono? Suppose MS sues KDE for violating their patented algorithm for decoding PNG files. KDE switches to a different algorithm and new versions continue to blossom. They could be barred from distributing old, violating versions but an orderly migration is still possible. In the worst case scenario, we'd lose KDE. That would suck immensely, but life would go on.
Now, suppose MS sues Novel [sic] for violating their patented algorithm for binding methods in dynamic languages. Have fun working around that little gotcha! If Mono really caught on and everyone started using it, then MS stepped in and destroyed it, we'd face the equivalent of losing GCC. That would be about the most damaging blow they could land, but people of your mindset are happily buying into that vulnerable position.
No, I have no expectation whatsoever that MS is in this to play nice. If they really wanted to embrace non-mainstream OSes, we'd have Office or VisualStudio for Linux. People would pony up good money to buy those. And yet, their most visible outreach to Unix involves providing a new foundation for everyone to build upon. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how convenient that would be for them.
This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it.
The data sheet for my Hitachi HDS721075KLA330 drive rates it at 50,000 load/unload cycles. If it powered up 50 times a day (which would be quite possible in a desktop with aggressive power savings enabled), it's specced to last about 3 years.
From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense.
The people who actually built it seem to disagree with you. Hint: a spinning hard drive takes little energy to stay in motion. A stopped hard drive takes quite a bit of torque to spin up to running speed in a small number of seconds.
In Nebraska, a 14-year-old can get a school permit under certain circumstances that allows them to drive themselves and their siblings to school. This is used by kids who live on farms outside small towns, almost always on low-traffic roads, so it's not nearly as crazy as you might think. Besides, most of the kids eligible for this permit have been driving trucks around the farm since they were old enough to reach the pedals.
Java used to provide lock-in, too. Hence, the GNU Classpath project, which is pretty much identical in its goals to Mono. Funny that I never saw you people screaming about that one being a trap.
The Java Trap was that you might get stuck on a language with no FOSS implementation and be reliant on a proprietary runtime. GNU Classpath and friends disarmed the trap by providing FOSS backends.
The Mono Trap is that you might get stuck on a platform encumbered by patents, so that even if you're coding on a 100% FOSS system, a court ruling granting an injunction against further release and development of Mono could yank the rug out from under you. Maybe that's no big deal for cute games or desktop applets, but there's no way on Earth I'd stake my business on a platform that may be nuked from orbit at any moment.
It's really quite obvious to anyone with any actual knowledge of how the industry works that people are going to write applications without Linux in mind.
It's equally obvious that Microsoft has never entered a relationship without destroying its partner. The naivety behind thinking that maybe they'll play nice this one time, for the first time in the history of their company, is simply astounding.
It's just that I've never heard of a non-American really defend Office. Besides, have you tried the girlfriend-and-grandma test with OpenOffice versus Office 2007, which looks totally different than anything they've ever used before? Finally, if you must use MS Office, then you can get it for OS X - you don't have to have a PC.
One of us thinks computer voting is largely tamperproof and the other sees it as dangerously untested. Somehow, I'm the moron? Listen, kid: I know that a bit of VB hacking can make you feel pretty knowledgeable, but come back after a couple of decades of actual experience and we'll have this conversation again.
Unless you get big time money and can go on an extended vacation to learn a new technology or dive into a project and reach the same level as the one covered by the non-compete or can feed yourself and your family of the royalties from the agreement until it runs out you shouldn't sign it.
I've signed one non-compete ever when I was offered a job doing web development. The terms were that I would not go to work for any of their customers or another webdev shop in that city for at least 6 months after my employment ended. That seemed pretty reasonable to me and kept with the legitimate idea behind a non-compete: they didn't want me to run off with their customer list or use my knowledge of their company to underbid them.
For example, some might want to ban alcohol from any venue that a child might attend. This makes sense if the venue is primarily for children, but doesn't make sense if it is primarily adult, where parent can model responsible drinking rather than have the child's first experience at a high school kegger.
Definitely. My kids see us drinking the occasional glass of wine, or cracking the top on some beers when friends are over. We've even given them sips of both (universal reaction: "GROSS!"). Still, they've never seen us drunk or heard anything resembling "I need a drink". To them, alcohol is something adults sip from time to time while hanging out with other adults. I'd much rather they learn this than that alcohol is a mysterious, fascinating thing that must be discovered at the first opportunity.
Or do you come from the class of people that analogize having kids with crime and parenting is the sentence? Because as far as I can tell that's a particularly odious "libertarian" attitude.
Seriously, WTF? I'm pretty libertarian, but love having kids. I spent a good part of yesterday playing the part of the "tickle monster" and being swarmed by giggling kids. I think your description is much better suited to liberal soccer moms who are chained to their children by fear that something bad will happen to them.
That's valid for the 1,000 people in America who actually need some obscure function, but no big deal for the rest of us who are completely supported by Open Office.
The fact that you see any "fault" whatsoever in the desire of the general consumer to have an out-of-the-box perfectly running computer with intuitive user interfaces and the familiar assortment of applications...is why Linux will never succeed there.
The Eee PC ships with Firefox, OpenOffice, a slick little app launcher, a passel of games, and a bunch of Google icons on the first launcher tab. Honestly, if you can't apply your Windows experience to using an Eee, then you are broken.
I actually liked Xandros on my Eee. It booted quickly and ran great. My sole dislike - and it was enough to make me switch to eeeXubuntu - was that software upgrades were few and far between. Firefox 3 runs much better on this tiny system than Firefox 2 does, but I had doubts that it'd ever be officially supported.
Basically, if you were happy with the versions of the software that came with it, it was great. If not, you were in for a rough ride.
Right now the ONLY logical reasons to move to a Linux based PC is 1) cost and 2) boot time when run in minimalist mode. Otherwise an XP machine is far better for the availability of apps and consistency of experience.
Oh, and software that gets faster with time (see KDE 4 vs. KDE 3). And better hardware support (dead serious). And a nicer desktop (got anything to compare to Compiz yet?). And a smaller footprint (I'm using less than half of the 1GB of RAM on the Eee PC I'm typing this on right now). And a software library that makes Windows look niche (I'll put apt-get against VersionTracker any day of the week). And a more consistent interface (see: those screenshots of 20 different widget toolkits on a single Windows screen).
Yeah, besides being a better, faster, cheaper, prettier system with better 3rd-party support, I don't see much point in using Linux over XP. Oh, and double that for Vista.
OK, you're not my lawyer, and this is an explicit waiver of all responsibility for the results of any actions I may take based on any further communications between us on this subject in this forum.
I don't know how else to say "I'm not paying you so can I please just ask a question and not get hedge answers. I promise not to sue." Is there a standard clause that covers our non-relationship?
Anyway, it's my birthday and I'd kind of like to register a copyright for a program I've written. Thanks for the link! I think I can spare $35 to the project. Having said that, what exactly am I registering? That is, would the registration cover previous versions of my software? Will it automatically cover future versions, and if so, is there a limit after which I must re-register? If future versions are not protected, can I submit an addendum to my original application or must I re-register each new version?
The latter case could get pretty pricy for an open source project that releases early and releases often. Microsoft can afford to shell out for XP, XPSP1, XPSP2, Vista, Vista SP1 and so on because they only come once every couple of years.
The gag order is to prevent an actual hacking event.
The gag order is to hide actual hacking events.
"There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage."
Ironic, since you'd have us unprepared to conduct a fair election.
I assume then, that none of your family plays Windows-only games?
I bet Aunt Millie the genealogist is dying to get her hands on Warhammer Online.
While it is indeed possible for static electricity to jostle bus lines, power supply lines, etc..., I find it rather unlikely that static discharge would add an extra 10111011100 (binary) votes for a candidate. I would find a power of two (such as 2048 or 4096) more plausible, but still unlikely.
...all while leaving the other 512MB uncorrupted so that the software runs without crashing and is able to perform the rest of its duties.
Bullshit. There are better odds of our sun going supernova in the next 30 seconds and us being saved by Rocky & Bullwinkle flying backwards ala Superman to reverse time.
I, like many of us, participated in that mechanical turk thing a few days after the crash to try to find his airplane in satellite photos. Did we cover that area? I kind of hope not.
Oh, the idea of a free-for-all parallel Internet that's considered too dangerous for regular people. Soccer moms and grandparents can hang out in the shiny, filtered overnet and leave the rest alone.
Guess which will have the better content? Everyone will have some vaguely seedy acquaintance who can get anything they want, for the right price. Gibson and Stephenson were only wrong in thinking it would be so far in the future.
So, and my professor suggested this, maybe the ideal swap size is ZERO.
I hate to be disillusionary, but your professor sucked. First, you get paging almost for free as a byproduct of implementing virtual memory. Second, the same mechanisms give you cool things like using an executable's binary image on the filesystem as the backing store for that executable, or even mmap(). Don't you like mmap()? Sure you do! Finally, virtual memory is absolutely, utterly critical for system stability. Unified, flat memory spaces were obsolete even before personal computers brought them back into common usage (too bad the 68000 didn't have an MMU), and VM is as good a thing as any I can think of to spend those 6 billion cycles per second on.
Your professor really told you that swap is bad? Pity.
About your second point: you accept "magic box" services every day of your life. You put your money in a bank and trust that they're gonna give it back when you ask for it.
I only use FDIC-ensured banks and keep my balances under their insurance limits. If we're to the point that the FDIC fails, then it's back to shotguns and canned goods anyway.
You pay a cable company to provide you internet, and trust that none of their techs are reading your email.
I use GPG for important stuff, and run my own TLS-enabled mailserver.
You use your credit/debit card at countless businesses, and trust a whole chain of people not to swipe your card number.
I only use cards with complete theft-protection guarantees.
You know, I'm not overly paranoid but I do take steps to mitigate the risks you list. Avoiding cloud computing for sensitive data is just another protective step.
Not to mention that trees only "borrow" the CO2. Unless you plan to bury them, they eventually release their components back into the ecosystem.
By the way, statusbar sells web filtering software from a site with blog titles like "Christian women and Porn", "Government fails on COPA - once again", and "The Blasphemy Challenge - what will your parents say?". I detect a bit of pro-filtering bias.