Re:Actually I've really seen the opposite
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 1
OpenOffice is really a partially-commercial product, which may explain why it is the way it is. However for most OSS I feel the opposite of what you say is true. Programmers do *not* work on features, instead they work really hard on making the part that exists as fast and elegant as possible.
Now before you say this is good, remember that the unimplemented features includes things like documentation, installation and configuration programs.
This was demoed at Siggraph in Los Angeles in the Emerging Technologies booth. It really appeared it worked, people wearing it stumbled around like they were drunk, but could really be made to stumble in a desired direction. I did not get to try it, there was a very long line. But surely there is somebody reading Slashdot who did.
This has got to be one of the stupidest comments I have ever seen.
First, there is no programmers union.
Second, it is well known that unions *want* higher salaries. Lower salaries for non-union employees obviously decrease the demand and/or salary of union employees and is blatently obviously against their interest. A union may try to *outlaw* non-union employees, but they certainly don't try to lower their salaries.
Actually the other poster was pretty much correct.
If the elevator is *stopped* or *moved at a constant speed* you would be weightless only at geosynchronous orbit. Below that you would be attracted toward the earth, above it you would be thrown away from the earth and have to stand on the elevator ceiling.
You could be weightless anywhere if the elevator happend to be slowing down (or speeding up past geosynchronous orbit) at the correct rate to match freefall.
I would expect any realistic elevator going up to accelerate for a very short time, thus giving you more than 1G, then go at a constant velocity for a very long time, with gradually reducing gravity until it gets *very* near zero near geosynchronous orbit. Then it would decelerate for a very short time, probably higher than freefall, so you would be entirely weightless for an instant just at the start of this, then under negative gravity. Then it would stop at geosynchronous orbit and you would be weightless again.
Two reasons: first sites started working, in that at least they removed the check and just fed their HTML, whether or not it worked on non-IE. Second is that the newer browsers support *temporarily* changing the string in a user-friendly way, old browsers would be permanently switched to IE as soon as the user fixed it to display one page.
Actually I suspect a large percentage of those very old IE versions they list are actually alternative browsers permanently switched to identify themselves as IE, inluding a lot of old Netscape versions.
Once they get a dupe, they want to milk him for as much as possible. If you fell for the $20 scam, it seems unlikely they would be able to extract more than $20 from you before you realized that something was wrong and quit sending money. But if you fall for the $10 million scam, they may be able to extract tens of thousands of dollars before you realize something is wrong.
So as long as the number of people who will be duped falls slower than 1/dollars, they have an incentive to make the amount as high as possible.
Also apparently once they find a dupe, it requires significan work to fool them into sending the money. This work is probably constant per dupe. Thus getting $20 from 1000 people may not be worth the effort, while $20,000 from one person is.
I think the difference is that the scammers have a somewhat accurate idea of what they will get. The dupes are apparently so blinded by greed that they are unable to use simple logic to determine what is going to happen.
Then again, it seems likely that a lot of scammers work real hard for no return, thinking they are going to rip off a rich american, perhaps hearing all kinds of stories about how somebody else got rich by running such a scam. They may even be taken in by other scammers who promise technical or forging services or contacts with dupes in exchange for cash. In this case the scammers' greed is the same thing.
No, DOS is based on CP/M, which inherited the CRLF from RSX-11M and earlier DEC operating systems, where it was established to match the characters that mechanical teletypes took. These teletypes took two characters due to initial designs in the 40's, apparently mechanically it was easier to move the head in one character and turn the platen with another. (there was no other reason other than mechanical design, typewriters had already well established the idea of using a single action to start a new line).
IBM operating systems were based on EBCDIC and did not have any CR or LF character (initially). Instead the older systems used "line control" which was a character at the start of each "record" sent to a device. There was a special character (#?) to continue the previous line, the default was to start a new line.
I am curious as to why "LF only is just stupid and wrong" however. Perhaps another character would be better (like CR, which is what the teletypes produced when a user hit the enter key), but it sounds like you actually believe a multibyte encoding of newlines is preferrable. I would love to hear your attempt to explain why this is better.
How about they get rid of "text mode" in the files? The fact that they don't do that is the biggest indication that they want *NO* Unix compatability and any claim to make a "better Unix than Unix" is a sham. We should have been writing plain LF to files in DOS2.0, yet this crap, designed to be compabile with the mechanical limitations of 1940's teletype technology, is STILL in DOS and Microsoft has the absolute gall to say they are "advanced".
And the fact that one program (textedit) still does not handle bare linefeeds is proof positive that they are actively trying to make anything from a Linux/Unix machine look crappy on purpose. Every other program they have (ie the IDEs, Word, the RTF editor) handles it. But the *DEFAULT* program you get when you double-click the file has purposely been left with a bug so that any files served by Unix look like crap. What is up with that?
The moribund ones do not have nice websites, dummy.
However as to the original poster, I do trust software with working code and crummy looking websites over something with a fancier website than the code. So both this Microsoft effort and a lot of the non-moribund-but-crummy-website open source projects look good to me.
Trucks and busses are only cheaper if there is already a highway going where you want. Highways are not free, even though a lot of Americans seem to think they are a natural feature of the landscape.
The original poster said "SHOW ME A SLASHDOT STORY ABOUT A IE BUG THAT SIMPLY CRASHES IE".
You did not do that.
Actually there was one about 4 years ago I think. The point was however that somebody was purposely crashing IE, not that there was a bug. You could at least show the sense to try to look it up.
Obviously you have not been paying attention. I remember at least two flames in earlier discussions where somebody said "it's really hard to make a flyer in Gimp". When asked about Photoshop they than said "On Windows I'd use Illustrator, obviously.".
Don't be an idiot. Certainly an NDA style agreement is stronger than "fair use", as you explicitly SIGN AWAY your rights to fair use. However notice the word "SIGN". Ie put a pen onto a contract.
The GPL does not prevent fair use, because it cannot, as it is not a contract. Somebody can easily republish small parts of GPL code (or even large parts because it is allowed in the GPL) in their book. They can certainly take small pieces and put it into their program without releaseing the source: whether RMS likes it or not, the GPL does not and cannot prevent fair use.
The GPL is an *exception* to copyright, it says "you are allowed to violate the copyright on this code if you follow these rules". That has absolutely nothing to do with DRM, the DVD does not come with any exception to copyright.
There is a huge difference from cryptography. In cryptography both the sender and receiver of the message are interested in keeping it secret. The most advanced cryptography in the world will not work if the reciever takes the decrypted message and gives it to everybody.
1. Enforce copyright laws and sue *UPLOADERS*. Sue people making a profit off copyright violations. Illegal DVD duplicators (who completely ignore encrypiton and region coding, since they literally copy it to the destination disk without breaking it) make THOUSANDS of times as much money as any warez site. Going after programmers and home users, while ignoring the real big-money pirates, is just proof that you do not care about piracy and want to enforce playback rules and pay-per-use.
2. WATERMARK the data with information about the purchaser. The watermark MUST NOT PREVENT PLAYBACK, because otherwise it is easy to detect and remove. Keep the software that reads the watermark very secret so there is no chance of somebody being able to figure out how to detect and alter it. This will put a serious threat on somebody intent on uploading as they can be traced.
3. Distribute UNENCUMBERED data so that a pirate that strips the encumberances is not increasing the value. It is really stupid to make the stolen version more valuable than your own product.
What I meant is that a CLI could have been created where you typed "filename" instead of "edit filename". This would have been quite useful, actually, even early systems had enough file types that keeping track of what program was needed for each was painful.
As for all the comments about file creator being like the filename, it is true that Microsoft was really cheap in using the filename to decide what program to run, but I don't like using metadata. The proper solution would be something like the Unix "file" command which examines the contents and figures out what to do.
I keep posting the same list. Some of this is my opinion of course, but a few of them are in agreement. I believe Microsoft did "innovate" in a number of areas of GUI, but not as many as Microsoft believes. Most everything was from Windows 95 or so. Here is my list of the most important advances from Microsoft, ones that have been adopted everywhere:
1. The "taskbar". Before Windows 95 there was a concept of a window being "iconized", where the "icon" vanished if the window was open. It appears that Microsoft first made an "icon" that stayed there even if the window was open.
2. Also in the taskbar, the realazation that words are more important than icons, and shrinking the icon to a more appropriate 16x16 size and making the text visible.
3. Eliminating the artificial dividing line between the window border and the contents, so that a window displaying a uniform gray rectangle of the right color blends cleanly into the border. Although I wrote something like this myself quite a few years earlier for the NeXT, I hardly publicized it, and never saw similar graphics design until Windows.
4. "Combo box" where text input and multiple selection are done by the same widget. Having worked with NeXT before this, I'm pretty certain it did not have this, and never saw it on any other system either. (crappy popup implementation with the scroll bar is irrelevant to the innovation, although I really wish they would fix that...)
5. Scroll wheel. The idea of having another control to scroll data on the mouse was older, but Microsoft seems to have realized that a 1-D version would provide most of the benifit without the confusion or flakiness of older attempts that tried for 2 or even more degrees of freedom.
6. Having all files be "commands" in that if you double-click it examines the file (even if only the filename) and opens it with the correct program. The Mac does not count because it relied on imbedded metadata in the file, rather than an outside deciding program. Nor does #! notation in Unix exec of files, as it still requires the execute bit and does not work for files that lack this. I think a very important detail is that this idea could have been implemented 20 years earlier, it does not rely on GUI, and no CLI system ever did. A useful idea that is not realized until long after it is possible is a real indication that it is an "innovation".
There are certainly others, I'm only familiar with GUI issues. But neither claims that Microsoft invented nothing, nor claims that they invented major things, are true. The above list is imho an indication of the style and size of a list of actual innovations.
The "loophole" is an intended result of the GPL. Since this is it's purpose it makes no sense to call it a "loophole" whether you like or dislike the GPL.
In any case, they are perfectly free to do this. They are also free to release the source code in a way that does not have this "loophole", such as by using normal copyright. Equating "being able to see the source" with "GPL" is a bit of FUD.
I didn't know the child was redistributing the music and claiming she wrote it. Plaguarism is completely different than copyright violation (it is quite possible to plaguarize something in the public domain by claiming you wrote it). It wouldn't sound so clever, but redistributing modified GPL code without source, but acknoledging the source of the code, would be only copyright infringement.
Of course the GPL allows you to download the code and use it in any way, so what she was doing with the music is not equivalent to violating the GPL. However she certainly acquired the music from an illegal source, while a GPL program is probably not aquired from an illegal source. This is a big difference, and indicates that the guilt lies in the uploading side.
I have never heard of a GPL author trying to sue somebody downloading GPL code provided without source, and in fact I doubt they have any legal force. Instead they always go after the provider, who is the actual copyright violator. Also the RIAA uses copyright to attack models they don't like in order to implement a pay-per-use system, technically speaking the GPL is violated all the time: a bittorrent node redistributing part of a GPL binary is violating the GPL, and some of the RIAA attacks would be like some GPL author who does not like bittorrent using this to try to shut it down.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice is really a partially-commercial product, which may explain why it is the way it is. However for most OSS I feel the opposite of what you say is true. Programmers do *not* work on features, instead they work really hard on making the part that exists as fast and elegant as possible.
Now before you say this is good, remember that the unimplemented features includes things like documentation, installation and configuration programs.
This was demoed at Siggraph in Los Angeles in the Emerging Technologies booth. It really appeared it worked, people wearing it stumbled around like they were drunk, but could really be made to stumble in a desired direction. I did not get to try it, there was a very long line. But surely there is somebody reading Slashdot who did.
This has got to be one of the stupidest comments I have ever seen.
First, there is no programmers union.
Second, it is well known that unions *want* higher salaries. Lower salaries for non-union employees obviously decrease the demand and/or salary of union employees and is blatently obviously against their interest. A union may try to *outlaw* non-union employees, but they certainly don't try to lower their salaries.
Isn't the 3:2 pulldown added by the DVD player, and the film is actually stored as 24 fps on the DVD?
Actually the other poster was pretty much correct.
If the elevator is *stopped* or *moved at a constant speed* you would be weightless only at geosynchronous orbit. Below that you would be attracted toward the earth, above it you would be thrown away from the earth and have to stand on the elevator ceiling.
You could be weightless anywhere if the elevator happend to be slowing down (or speeding up past geosynchronous orbit) at the correct rate to match freefall.
I would expect any realistic elevator going up to accelerate for a very short time, thus giving you more than 1G, then go at a constant velocity for a very long time, with gradually reducing gravity until it gets *very* near zero near geosynchronous orbit. Then it would decelerate for a very short time, probably higher than freefall, so you would be entirely weightless for an instant just at the start of this, then under negative gravity. Then it would stop at geosynchronous orbit and you would be weightless again.
I think you will find that there are plenty of people who don't mind nuclear power plants but would still object to nuclear-powered rocket exhaust!
I agree, this used to be true but no longer.
Two reasons: first sites started working, in that at least they removed the check and just fed their HTML, whether or not it worked on non-IE. Second is that the newer browsers support *temporarily* changing the string in a user-friendly way, old browsers would be permanently switched to IE as soon as the user fixed it to display one page.
Actually I suspect a large percentage of those very old IE versions they list are actually alternative browsers permanently switched to identify themselves as IE, inluding a lot of old Netscape versions.
Are you selling those copied pieces of music and claiming you wrote and performed them?
Once they get a dupe, they want to milk him for as much as possible. If you fell for the $20 scam, it seems unlikely they would be able to extract more than $20 from you before you realized that something was wrong and quit sending money. But if you fall for the $10 million scam, they may be able to extract tens of thousands of dollars before you realize something is wrong.
So as long as the number of people who will be duped falls slower than 1/dollars, they have an incentive to make the amount as high as possible.
Also apparently once they find a dupe, it requires significan work to fool them into sending the money. This work is probably constant per dupe. Thus getting $20 from 1000 people may not be worth the effort, while $20,000 from one person is.
I think the difference is that the scammers have a somewhat accurate idea of what they will get. The dupes are apparently so blinded by greed that they are unable to use simple logic to determine what is going to happen.
Then again, it seems likely that a lot of scammers work real hard for no return, thinking they are going to rip off a rich american, perhaps hearing all kinds of stories about how somebody else got rich by running such a scam. They may even be taken in by other scammers who promise technical or forging services or contacts with dupes in exchange for cash. In this case the scammers' greed is the same thing.
No, DOS is based on CP/M, which inherited the CRLF from RSX-11M and earlier DEC operating systems, where it was established to match the characters that mechanical teletypes took. These teletypes took two characters due to initial designs in the 40's, apparently mechanically it was easier to move the head in one character and turn the platen with another. (there was no other reason other than mechanical design, typewriters had already well established the idea of using a single action to start a new line).
IBM operating systems were based on EBCDIC and did not have any CR or LF character (initially). Instead the older systems used "line control" which was a character at the start of each "record" sent to a device. There was a special character (#?) to continue the previous line, the default was to start a new line.
I am curious as to why "LF only is just stupid and wrong" however. Perhaps another character would be better (like CR, which is what the teletypes produced when a user hit the enter key), but it sounds like you actually believe a multibyte encoding of newlines is preferrable. I would love to hear your attempt to explain why this is better.
How about they get rid of "text mode" in the files? The fact that they don't do that is the biggest indication that they want *NO* Unix compatability and any claim to make a "better Unix than Unix" is a sham. We should have been writing plain LF to files in DOS2.0, yet this crap, designed to be compabile with the mechanical limitations of 1940's teletype technology, is STILL in DOS and Microsoft has the absolute gall to say they are "advanced".
And the fact that one program (textedit) still does not handle bare linefeeds is proof positive that they are actively trying to make anything from a Linux/Unix machine look crappy on purpose. Every other program they have (ie the IDEs, Word, the RTF editor) handles it. But the *DEFAULT* program you get when you double-click the file has purposely been left with a bug so that any files served by Unix look like crap. What is up with that?
The moribund ones do not have nice websites, dummy.
However as to the original poster, I do trust software with working code and crummy looking websites over something with a fancier website than the code. So both this Microsoft effort and a lot of the non-moribund-but-crummy-website open source projects look good to me.
Trucks and busses are only cheaper if there is already a highway going where you want. Highways are not free, even though a lot of Americans seem to think they are a natural feature of the landscape.
I meant a Slashdot story about a DOS-only bug in IE, not a bug itself (there are hundreds in both IE and Firefox).
Way to miss the point.
The original poster said "SHOW ME A SLASHDOT STORY ABOUT A IE BUG THAT SIMPLY CRASHES IE".
You did not do that.
Actually there was one about 4 years ago I think. The point was however that somebody was purposely crashing IE, not that there was a bug. You could at least show the sense to try to look it up.
It should also start blinking when you approach 30 years of age so the sandman know when it is time to kill you.
Obviously you have not been paying attention. I remember at least two flames in earlier discussions where somebody said "it's really hard to make a flyer in Gimp". When asked about Photoshop they than said "On Windows I'd use Illustrator, obviously.".
Don't be an idiot. Certainly an NDA style agreement is stronger than "fair use", as you explicitly SIGN AWAY your rights to fair use. However notice the word "SIGN". Ie put a pen onto a contract.
The GPL does not prevent fair use, because it cannot, as it is not a contract. Somebody can easily republish small parts of GPL code (or even large parts because it is allowed in the GPL) in their book. They can certainly take small pieces and put it into their program without releaseing the source: whether RMS likes it or not, the GPL does not and cannot prevent fair use.
The GPL is an *exception* to copyright, it says "you are allowed to violate the copyright on this code if you follow these rules". That has absolutely nothing to do with DRM, the DVD does not come with any exception to copyright.
There is a huge difference from cryptography. In cryptography both the sender and receiver of the message are interested in keeping it secret. The most advanced cryptography in the world will not work if the reciever takes the decrypted message and gives it to everybody.
Here is a solution:
1. Enforce copyright laws and sue *UPLOADERS*. Sue people making a profit off copyright violations. Illegal DVD duplicators (who completely ignore encrypiton and region coding, since they literally copy it to the destination disk without breaking it) make THOUSANDS of times as much money as any warez site. Going after programmers and home users, while ignoring the real big-money pirates, is just proof that you do not care about piracy and want to enforce playback rules and pay-per-use.
2. WATERMARK the data with information about the purchaser. The watermark MUST NOT PREVENT PLAYBACK, because otherwise it is easy to detect and remove. Keep the software that reads the watermark very secret so there is no chance of somebody being able to figure out how to detect and alter it. This will put a serious threat on somebody intent on uploading as they can be traced.
3. Distribute UNENCUMBERED data so that a pirate that strips the encumberances is not increasing the value. It is really stupid to make the stolen version more valuable than your own product.
What I meant is that a CLI could have been created where you typed "filename" instead of "edit filename". This would have been quite useful, actually, even early systems had enough file types that keeping track of what program was needed for each was painful.
As for all the comments about file creator being like the filename, it is true that Microsoft was really cheap in using the filename to decide what program to run, but I don't like using metadata. The proper solution would be something like the Unix "file" command which examines the contents and figures out what to do.
I keep posting the same list. Some of this is my opinion of course, but a few of them are in agreement. I believe Microsoft did "innovate" in a number of areas of GUI, but not as many as Microsoft believes. Most everything was from Windows 95 or so. Here is my list of the most important advances from Microsoft, ones that have been adopted everywhere:
1. The "taskbar". Before Windows 95 there was a concept of a window being "iconized", where the "icon" vanished if the window was open. It appears that Microsoft first made an "icon" that stayed there even if the window was open.
2. Also in the taskbar, the realazation that words are more important than icons, and shrinking the icon to a more appropriate 16x16 size and making the text visible.
3. Eliminating the artificial dividing line between the window border and the contents, so that a window displaying a uniform gray rectangle of the right color blends cleanly into the border. Although I wrote something like this myself quite a few years earlier for the NeXT, I hardly publicized it, and never saw similar graphics design until Windows.
4. "Combo box" where text input and multiple selection are done by the same widget. Having worked with NeXT before this, I'm pretty certain it did not have this, and never saw it on any other system either. (crappy popup implementation with the scroll bar is irrelevant to the innovation, although I really wish they would fix that...)
5. Scroll wheel. The idea of having another control to scroll data on the mouse was older, but Microsoft seems to have realized that a 1-D version would provide most of the benifit without the confusion or flakiness of older attempts that tried for 2 or even more degrees of freedom.
6. Having all files be "commands" in that if you double-click it examines the file (even if only the filename) and opens it with the correct program. The Mac does not count because it relied on imbedded metadata in the file, rather than an outside deciding program. Nor does #! notation in Unix exec of files, as it still requires the execute bit and does not work for files that lack this. I think a very important detail is that this idea could have been implemented 20 years earlier, it does not rely on GUI, and no CLI system ever did. A useful idea that is not realized until long after it is possible is a real indication that it is an "innovation".
There are certainly others, I'm only familiar with GUI issues. But neither claims that Microsoft invented nothing, nor claims that they invented major things, are true. The above list is imho an indication of the style and size of a list of actual innovations.
The "loophole" is an intended result of the GPL. Since this is it's purpose it makes no sense to call it a "loophole" whether you like or dislike the GPL.
In any case, they are perfectly free to do this. They are also free to release the source code in a way that does not have this "loophole", such as by using normal copyright. Equating "being able to see the source" with "GPL" is a bit of FUD.
I didn't know the child was redistributing the music and claiming she wrote it. Plaguarism is completely different than copyright violation (it is quite possible to plaguarize something in the public domain by claiming you wrote it). It wouldn't sound so clever, but redistributing modified GPL code without source, but acknoledging the source of the code, would be only copyright infringement.
Of course the GPL allows you to download the code and use it in any way, so what she was doing with the music is not equivalent to violating the GPL. However she certainly acquired the music from an illegal source, while a GPL program is probably not aquired from an illegal source. This is a big difference, and indicates that the guilt lies in the uploading side.
I have never heard of a GPL author trying to sue somebody downloading GPL code provided without source, and in fact I doubt they have any legal force. Instead they always go after the provider, who is the actual copyright violator. Also the RIAA uses copyright to attack models they don't like in order to implement a pay-per-use system, technically speaking the GPL is violated all the time: a bittorrent node redistributing part of a GPL binary is violating the GPL, and some of the RIAA attacks would be like some GPL author who does not like bittorrent using this to try to shut it down.