So in other words, maniacs who threaten acts of violence against innocent civilians should be able to dictate the political decisions made by governments? That _is_ essentially what you're advocating, because after all, if the US (and every other country with a terrorism problem) just acted the way the terrorists want them to act, no problem, right?
Do you apply this thinking in your everyday life? Have you allowed or would you allow some maniac to tell you who you can be friends with? No? Then why should the US listen to terrorists who want us to stop being on friendly terms with Israel, for example?
If you were born about 60 years earlier you would've been with the Hitler appeasement crowd, I bet.
Oh please. If it were the other way around and someone running for (let's say) prime minister in another country blocked website access to Americans, Slashdot would be flooded with comments along the lines of "good. Americans are too stupid to understand politics anyway. All they do is eat Big Macs and drive SUVs, har har."
If you don't live in the US, you have no say in our elections. Get over it.
No, that shouldn't matter. Pirates don't provide music companies with money (as per the licensing agreements), so I don't see why the CherryOS guy should have to provide the source. He's not plagarizing anymore, I thought that was enough to satisfy you Slashdotters?
No, there's a major difference. This CherryOS guy is claiming credit for someone else's work.
Oh, I see. So that's why Slashdotters get all up in arms about products that use GPL code (and admit it), but don't make the source available? I mean, it's not like they're passing it off as their own code...
OK, let's see if I can keep my Slashdot double standards straight here:
Digital information, such as music and movie files, are nothing but a sequence of bits that can be infinitely reproduced without degradation. Therefore, you can't "steal" said files, only duplicate them. No one gets hurt, right?
Source code is nothing but a sequence of bits that can be infinitely reproduced without degradation, so you can't "steal" source code either, right?
It's funny that point number two is just as true as point number one, but everyone on Slashdot seems to forget that when someone "steals" open source code. Well, I say if the music companies get no sympathy for people "stealing" their music, then open source coders deserve no sympathy for people "stealing" their code. "Get a better business model", right?
Re:Parent is right but referring to the wrong thin
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
OK, and what I'm saying is that you don't NEED VS Express to write C# 2.0 code (you only need it for now because that's the only thing shipping with a C# 2.0 compiler at the moment). Soon enough, C# 2.0 proper will be released FOR FREE, including its own compiler.
Hence, it doesn't matter if VS Express someday costs money. You can still code C# 2.0 for free.
Re:Parent is right but referring to the wrong thin
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't matter because you can get VS Express for free (which allows you to write C# 2.0 code), and eventually C# 2.0 _will_ be released for free. You can just use the free VS Express to tide you over until then.
The parent poster is actually correct. I'm not going to go to the trouble of digging up the links right now, but if you go back and look at the past few Firefox vulnerability Slashdot stories you'll see the links to Bugzilla that state that many of the problems (for instance, the shell: exploit) have not only been known for years before being fixed, but only had their status changed from "confidential" to "public" soon after the fix was released.
Lots of luck keeping up with Microsoft. Once they find they have competition they'll undoubtably come up with some stinky way to break your applications.
In this case, I doubt it. What Xamlon is doing is helping Microsoft's technology gain mindshare. It's not like they're creating a similar, but different technology that is threatening to shut Microsoft out of a particular market.
For reference, see Chili!Soft ASP (although I think Sun might have bought that product out), which existed for many years despite being a "competing" implementation of Microsoft's ASP platform. There were probably also other implementations that I'm not aware of.
In the end, I don't think the existence of any implementation of a Microsoft technology produced by third parties are seen in any way as a threat to Microsoft. They're still going to make their money off Visual Studio whether the third parties exist or not. This is exactly why I don't think Mono is going anywhere either: it only helps Microsoft increase awareness and mindshare of C#/.NET, and they know that when someone wants to develop a commerical Windows app, they're going to use Microsoft's product, not Mono.
I've heard this said before and wondered why they don't use a combination of SDL/Alsa/OpenGL to keep it cross platform.
Perhaps -- and I know this may be shocking to some -- iD doesn't find SDL to be as advanced as DirectX when it comes to sound and input.
Besides which, since SDL sits on top of DirectX (note that this does not necessarily mean that SDL can do everything that DirectX does), that means they've got to deal with one extra level of abstraction, which hinders speed, if even slightly.
Wrong. Just because something is standardized does NOT mean it isn't patented or patent pending. The two are orthogonal issues, there are many patented standards out there. With a patented standard, you ned to license the patent to legally use the standard.
Can you name a case where something similar (let's say an API or language spec) was submitted as, let's say, an ECMA spec and later the implementor(s) was sued into oblivion? I find it highly unlikely that Microsoft would legally be able to make publicly available, to a standards body, documents describing the bytecode file format and syntax of the language and then suddenly be able to say "no no, you aren't actually allowed to implement any of this."
Wrong again. You can patent APIs. I don't know if it has been done by MS, I haven't been wasting my time following all their C# moves. And if it was a submarine patent, we wouldn't know yet anyway.
Sure you can patent APIs. But there's nothing stopping me from making a functionally and API-equivalent clone of your, let's say, LinkedList class. BTW, you better warn those Wine guys, seeing as how they've been cloning the Win32 API for years.
ANything that makes it easier to switch OSes they care about.
You're missing the point. The ONLY part of the APIs that keeps people locked in to Windows IS NOT the mundane 90%, but the ~10% of stuff that can only be found on Windows.
Why does someone always make this absolutely retarded comment every time a Mono story is posted on Slashdot?
Let's get a few things straight about Mono:
Microsoft submitted the language spec and virtual machine bytecode format as an ECMA standard. There's no way that Microsoft could possible sue Mono because they have a language that resemebles C# in syntax or produces.NET bytecode. Period.
To that end, there is absolutely nothing stopping someone from producing.NET bytecode that just so happens to be API-compatible with the publicly available API documentation Microsoft has released
Microsoft does not care if Mono is ~90% compatible with the.NET standard library because it's full of a bunch of mundane stuff like data structures, I/O routines, and XML/DOM/SAX APIs that are available on just about any platform. To put it another way, 90% of the stuff in the.NET standard library DOESN'T contribute to Microsoft's vendor lock-in, so why would they care if it's implemented on another platform? It's the remaining part of the.NET API that contains anything at all platform-specific (like WinForms), and that stuff can't reasonably be implemented on Linux simply because Linux isn't Windows and lacks the requisite OS-specific software to perform such tasks.
To summarize: Mono isn't going anywhere. There's plenty that Mono can't reasonably implement to allow Microsoft to retain its platform lock-in without any nasty tricks.
My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
Well, seeing as how this is Slashdot, it's obvious that anything released by Microsoft could in no way be as good as or even better than an Open Source project. Duh.
Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"
Neither Office nor any other Microsoft product uses "non-standard" XML. They simply use XML with Base64-encoded sections for images, raw data, etc. Completely standardized. Please check your facts before making baseless assertions.
Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly
In the interest of being completely accurate, Mozilla doesn't support CSS properly, if by "support properly" you mean it doesn't absolutely implement 100% of the CSS1-3 specs. What you mean to say is that Mozilla supports MORE of the CSS specs than IE does.
Just because there's an "open standard" document format doesn't mean that all word processors will magically become compatible with one another and render every document flawlessly. Standards can be and often are hard to understand and even harder to implement.
My prediction is that with this standard there will be many open source programs implementing the most basic parts of the standard mostly correct, while the nastier bits are either left unimplemented or poorly implemented. The net result? You'll have big apps like OpenOffice that implement about 90% of the features (let's be realistic here, 100% standards compliance for anything moderately complex is very hard to achieve) and smaller apps like AbiWord supporting about 30-60% of the standard in bits and pieces.
In the end, most word processors will all be able to handle basic documents of this format with simple formatting. Come to think of it, that's about how it is with MS Word documents today!
It almost seems kind of pointless to post stories about pay-per-download stories on Slashdot, because there's never going to be one "good enough" for geeks. Might as well just post one last "All pay-for-download services suck. Back to Bittorrent" story and be done with it.
I could be wrong though. There might someday be a movie download service that offers
The largest video library known to man
Every possible encoding format, from raw HD to 200Kb/s XviD + Ogg Vorbis (for PDAs, of course).
No DRM to keep users from sharing their download with millions of other users
That's still more than what a 19" CRT costs. And you STILL can't get an LCD that does 1600x1200 unless you buy a monitor that's 20" or larger or a laptop.
Speaking of which, if my laptop, which is at least three years old, can do 1400x1050 on a 15" LCD, why can't I buy a 17" LCD monitor that can do that resolution or higher? Why is the cheapest LCD capable of anything higher than 1280x1024 nearly $1000?
There have been several IBM repairmen from the time who report doing this on a regular basis.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that someone who reportedly didn't type memos would know how to do this or was even inclined to do so. We could ask Mr. Killian, but he's dead. Very convenient.
Again, the claim made was false, the similarities disappear when you do a comparison at a decent resolution.
I don't follow. I tried this, and you can try it yourself. Find a website that has the MS Word file of the memo, then print it and the CBS memo PDF out and overlay them (turning the Word memo every so slightly to compensate for the CBS memo being scanned at a slight angle) and you will clearly see that the spacing is remarkably similar.
you still don't come up with the uneven baseline that is very clear on the CBS copy.
The memo was scanned in at a slight angle...
I wonder why so many Bush appologists preferred to make demonstratively untrue statements such as 'typewriters cannot do proportional fonts' rather than perform the simple test that would be decisive.
I think you heard a lot of people who were simplifying the issue, that's all. And haven't people been TRYING to perform the "simple" decisive test? Didn't CBS admit that they can't vouch for the authenticity of the memos (in other words, they're sugarcoating "these memos are forged")? Their source even refuses to identify where the got the memos from -- it's just a little bit suspicious, don't you think?
Whoever took the trouble to create the documents definitely used a typewriter to do so.
Well, which typewriter is it? No one has provided a definitive answer, only stating the obvious fact that "this typewriter can do superscripts IF you go to the trouble of replacing a type ball and this other typewriter can do proportional spacing" or even pointing out that very expensive typesetters that only experienced people could operate COULD actually produce this document (but not necessarily with the exact same spacing and fonts that a brand new copy of MS Word possesses). Honestly, it should be very easy for those among us who are not convinced of MS Word forgery to identify THE EXACT typewriters that could have been used (and more importantly, likely to have been used) and compare National Guard purchase records. Even with THAT simple, decisive test, CBS still has to acknowledge that they don't believe the memos are authentic anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, maniacs who threaten acts of violence against innocent civilians should be able to dictate the political decisions made by governments? That _is_ essentially what you're advocating, because after all, if the US (and every other country with a terrorism problem) just acted the way the terrorists want them to act, no problem, right?
Do you apply this thinking in your everyday life? Have you allowed or would you allow some maniac to tell you who you can be friends with? No? Then why should the US listen to terrorists who want us to stop being on friendly terms with Israel, for example?
If you were born about 60 years earlier you would've been with the Hitler appeasement crowd, I bet.
Oh please. If it were the other way around and someone running for (let's say) prime minister in another country blocked website access to Americans, Slashdot would be flooded with comments along the lines of "good. Americans are too stupid to understand politics anyway. All they do is eat Big Macs and drive SUVs, har har."
If you don't live in the US, you have no say in our elections. Get over it.
No, that shouldn't matter. Pirates don't provide music companies with money (as per the licensing agreements), so I don't see why the CherryOS guy should have to provide the source. He's not plagarizing anymore, I thought that was enough to satisfy you Slashdotters?
By the way, nice try Arben.
Are you kidding me? Are you trying to say I'm the CherryOS guy?
We don't give a fuck about merely *copying* and *using* open-source software.
...", right?
I see. So everyone would be OK with the guy saying, in fine print, "CherryOS is based off of PearPC and was written by
No, there's a major difference. This CherryOS guy is claiming credit for someone else's work.
Oh, I see. So that's why Slashdotters get all up in arms about products that use GPL code (and admit it), but don't make the source available? I mean, it's not like they're passing it off as their own code...
It's funny that point number two is just as true as point number one, but everyone on Slashdot seems to forget that when someone "steals" open source code. Well, I say if the music companies get no sympathy for people "stealing" their music, then open source coders deserve no sympathy for people "stealing" their code. "Get a better business model", right?
OK, and what I'm saying is that you don't NEED VS Express to write C# 2.0 code (you only need it for now because that's the only thing shipping with a C# 2.0 compiler at the moment). Soon enough, C# 2.0 proper will be released FOR FREE, including its own compiler.
Hence, it doesn't matter if VS Express someday costs money. You can still code C# 2.0 for free.
It doesn't matter because you can get VS Express for free (which allows you to write C# 2.0 code), and eventually C# 2.0 _will_ be released for free. You can just use the free VS Express to tide you over until then.
The parent poster is actually correct. I'm not going to go to the trouble of digging up the links right now, but if you go back and look at the past few Firefox vulnerability Slashdot stories you'll see the links to Bugzilla that state that many of the problems (for instance, the shell: exploit) have not only been known for years before being fixed, but only had their status changed from "confidential" to "public" soon after the fix was released.
Lots of luck keeping up with Microsoft. Once they find they have competition they'll undoubtably come up with some stinky way to break your applications.
In this case, I doubt it. What Xamlon is doing is helping Microsoft's technology gain mindshare. It's not like they're creating a similar, but different technology that is threatening to shut Microsoft out of a particular market.
For reference, see Chili!Soft ASP (although I think Sun might have bought that product out), which existed for many years despite being a "competing" implementation of Microsoft's ASP platform. There were probably also other implementations that I'm not aware of.
In the end, I don't think the existence of any implementation of a Microsoft technology produced by third parties are seen in any way as a threat to Microsoft. They're still going to make their money off Visual Studio whether the third parties exist or not. This is exactly why I don't think Mono is going anywhere either: it only helps Microsoft increase awareness and mindshare of C#/.NET, and they know that when someone wants to develop a commerical Windows app, they're going to use Microsoft's product, not Mono.
SlashdotTV wouldn't even need Bittorrent, seeing as how there would only be one episode that gets repeated every day.
I've heard this said before and wondered why they don't use a combination of SDL/Alsa/OpenGL to keep it cross platform.
Perhaps -- and I know this may be shocking to some -- iD doesn't find SDL to be as advanced as DirectX when it comes to sound and input.
Besides which, since SDL sits on top of DirectX (note that this does not necessarily mean that SDL can do everything that DirectX does), that means they've got to deal with one extra level of abstraction, which hinders speed, if even slightly.
Wrong. Just because something is standardized does NOT mean it isn't patented or patent pending. The two are orthogonal issues, there are many patented standards out there. With a patented standard, you ned to license the patent to legally use the standard.
Can you name a case where something similar (let's say an API or language spec) was submitted as, let's say, an ECMA spec and later the implementor(s) was sued into oblivion? I find it highly unlikely that Microsoft would legally be able to make publicly available, to a standards body, documents describing the bytecode file format and syntax of the language and then suddenly be able to say "no no, you aren't actually allowed to implement any of this."
Wrong again. You can patent APIs. I don't know if it has been done by MS, I haven't been wasting my time following all their C# moves. And if it was a submarine patent, we wouldn't know yet anyway.
Sure you can patent APIs. But there's nothing stopping me from making a functionally and API-equivalent clone of your, let's say, LinkedList class. BTW, you better warn those Wine guys, seeing as how they've been cloning the Win32 API for years.
ANything that makes it easier to switch OSes they care about.
You're missing the point. The ONLY part of the APIs that keeps people locked in to Windows IS NOT the mundane 90%, but the ~10% of stuff that can only be found on Windows.
Let's get a few things straight about Mono:
To summarize: Mono isn't going anywhere. There's plenty that Mono can't reasonably implement to allow Microsoft to retain its platform lock-in without any nasty tricks.
My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
Well, seeing as how this is Slashdot, it's obvious that anything released by Microsoft could in no way be as good as or even better than an Open Source project. Duh.
Right, because all those office workers are going to think "Oh God, we're using non-standard XML?!"
Neither Office nor any other Microsoft product uses "non-standard" XML. They simply use XML with Base64-encoded sections for images, raw data, etc. Completely standardized. Please check your facts before making baseless assertions.
Oh God, IE doesn't support CSS properly
In the interest of being completely accurate, Mozilla doesn't support CSS properly, if by "support properly" you mean it doesn't absolutely implement 100% of the CSS1-3 specs. What you mean to say is that Mozilla supports MORE of the CSS specs than IE does.
Because it's unrealistic. The cost of all that would far exceed any price that geeks deem "reasonable".
Just because there's an "open standard" document format doesn't mean that all word processors will magically become compatible with one another and render every document flawlessly. Standards can be and often are hard to understand and even harder to implement.
My prediction is that with this standard there will be many open source programs implementing the most basic parts of the standard mostly correct, while the nastier bits are either left unimplemented or poorly implemented. The net result? You'll have big apps like OpenOffice that implement about 90% of the features (let's be realistic here, 100% standards compliance for anything moderately complex is very hard to achieve) and smaller apps like AbiWord supporting about 30-60% of the standard in bits and pieces.
In the end, most word processors will all be able to handle basic documents of this format with simple formatting. Come to think of it, that's about how it is with MS Word documents today!
I could be wrong though. There might someday be a movie download service that offers
Wow, so much hate and distrust of Fox News. Perhaps they should follow the lead of more trustworthy news outlets and put forged documents on the air.
Ahem, please re-read:
Why is the cheapest LCD capable of anything higher than 1280x1024 nearly $1000?
Again, a 19" CRT capable of 1600x1200 costs half than that or less.
That's still more than what a 19" CRT costs. And you STILL can't get an LCD that does 1600x1200 unless you buy a monitor that's 20" or larger or a laptop.
Speaking of which, if my laptop, which is at least three years old, can do 1400x1050 on a 15" LCD, why can't I buy a 17" LCD monitor that can do that resolution or higher? Why is the cheapest LCD capable of anything higher than 1280x1024 nearly $1000?
There have been several IBM repairmen from the time who report doing this on a regular basis.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that someone who reportedly didn't type memos would know how to do this or was even inclined to do so. We could ask Mr. Killian, but he's dead. Very convenient.
Again, the claim made was false, the similarities disappear when you do a comparison at a decent resolution.
I don't follow. I tried this, and you can try it yourself. Find a website that has the MS Word file of the memo, then print it and the CBS memo PDF out and overlay them (turning the Word memo every so slightly to compensate for the CBS memo being scanned at a slight angle) and you will clearly see that the spacing is remarkably similar.
you still don't come up with the uneven baseline that is very clear on the CBS copy.
The memo was scanned in at a slight angle...
I wonder why so many Bush appologists preferred to make demonstratively untrue statements such as 'typewriters cannot do proportional fonts' rather than perform the simple test that would be decisive.
I think you heard a lot of people who were simplifying the issue, that's all. And haven't people been TRYING to perform the "simple" decisive test? Didn't CBS admit that they can't vouch for the authenticity of the memos (in other words, they're sugarcoating "these memos are forged")? Their source even refuses to identify where the got the memos from -- it's just a little bit suspicious, don't you think?
Whoever took the trouble to create the documents definitely used a typewriter to do so.
Well, which typewriter is it? No one has provided a definitive answer, only stating the obvious fact that "this typewriter can do superscripts IF you go to the trouble of replacing a type ball and this other typewriter can do proportional spacing" or even pointing out that very expensive typesetters that only experienced people could operate COULD actually produce this document (but not necessarily with the exact same spacing and fonts that a brand new copy of MS Word possesses). Honestly, it should be very easy for those among us who are not convinced of MS Word forgery to identify THE EXACT typewriters that could have been used (and more importantly, likely to have been used) and compare National Guard purchase records. Even with THAT simple, decisive test, CBS still has to acknowledge that they don't believe the memos are authentic anymore.