At least give them 10 days or so to get their stuff in order, THEN post about how they're screwing stuff up.
I can't agree with this. In my opinion, they started screwing up at the point when they started trying to assimilate GPLed software into their commercial product. They could have read the GPL at that point and understood the requirements of the licence and then decided whether they still wanted to proceed. There must have been a significant amount of time between starting the process of creating DRDOS 8.1 and actually releasing the software; if there's a clock ticking, it starts when they started, not when the FreeDOS guys found them out. I don't think that the thing about not understanding the GPL holds water for a commercial company - it beggars belief that you would create a product based on code from someone outside the organisation without involving a lawyer at some point to check it out.
The big deal is that Intel, the market leader by a country mile, is way behind AMD on power consumption and performance. They may be ahead in vapourware, but you can't buy (or run software) that.
I would call that a comprehensive misunderstanding of the debate. I agree far more with Hitchens than with Galloway, but Galloway won the debate hands down. It wasn't even close, nor could it ever have been. Hitchens is a different kind of person than Galloway and Galloway has decades of experience of thinking and debating on his feet. Had they done a debate-by-newspaper-column, the outcome might well have been different.
I felt that the old Doctor Who programmes were very variable and I was never a huge fan. However, the latest series was stupendous in my opinion, with some quite excellent writing - "The Empty Child I" and "Boom Town" were particular favourites.
While MI5's Myths/FAQ section explicitly states that MI5 does not assassinate people, the question is not present in MI6's FAQs. (Incidentally, I personally don't believe that MI6 assassinates people, but I wonder if they deliberately left the question out).
The headline refers to the original article on the Fox News website, which attacked the decision to adopt Open Document. That is when they were spinning. The new article on the Fox News website effectively acknowledges that the original article was merely political spin.
You're nearly there now. You said that "people would be all for it" if this legislation was directed at Microsoft. To back this up, you need to find some comments which support your view. (You should also define "people" in the context in which you used it). To help you out, here is what you wrote:
Seriously, if this story mentioned Microsoft as the target, people would be all for it and that scares me. In fact, there have been stories in the past that show this.
All I'm asking to do is to back up that assertion. You made the assertion, so it's not for me to trawl through those messages to find how many people are all for the idea (of holding developers responsible for bugs) when it is directed at Microsoft. I'm not asking you to do anything special or out-of-the-ordinarey; this is simply how grown-ups debate things.
However, certification of medics excludes random hobbyists from doing cancer treatment from their back yard. That has both a social cost and a social benefit. It's perhaps possible to define classes of software which would require and not require high degrees of certification, but today the stuff that causes the pain is often running on consumer machines.
I think that this is already possible, you just have to draw up a contract. At the moment we have EULAs, which say, "if you want to use the software, you have to accept that there might be bugs in it and that we (the authors of the software) are not liable for any damage that might be done to you or your business if these bugs turn out to be serious". If you really wanted a word-processor that is guaranteed to be bug free, you just have to find a software developer that will quote you for one. I would have thought that the price would be astronomical, but perhaps there are some people or organizations who would be willing to provide you with a quote at least.
I think that it is the flexibility of software which makes it impossible to force people to take responsibility for bugs. The supplier (particularly of package software) simply can't anticipate all the ways that people will use their software, so they can't possibly say that they will accept responsibility for problems. The best example I can think of for this is the SMS texting software that is included on mobile phones. Even the mobile phone companies never anticipated how popular texting would be. Now, I have heard of cases of RSI which have been blamed on excessive texting; would SMS have been included on a phone if there was a danger that the phone supplier might have to pick up the medical bills for over-enthusiastic texters? I suspect that nobody would have anticipated it and many mobile phone manufacturers would have unknowingly risked of going out of business!
You have to do better. You said that if such a story was posted here with Microsoft the target of the legislation, "people" would be all for it. Surely you wouldn't have said that without some evidence? Let's see some actual comments. All you did was to search for stories about software liability in which microsoft was mentioned.
Is the sign of a profession as opposed to a trade or a craft. If we want software 'engineering' to become a true discipline we need to hold software 'engineers' accountable. In every other engineering profession insurance for errors and ommisions is required to practice, basically malpractice insurance. Even contractors, plumbers and electricians often must be licensed and/or post bond. Why not programmers?
Think about what you're asking here. If I'm a plumber and I fix your toilet and it leaks, then I (or my insurance) would have to pay for the damage to your home and the cleaning up etc. As a programmer, my program might be installed on hundreds or even thousands of computers. How am I going to be able to compensate everyone who uses my software? Specifically, how is someone who offers free software going to be able to continue to do that?
Seriously, if this story mentioned Microsoft as the target, people would be all for it and that scares me. In fact, there have been stories in the past that show this.
You really have to back that up. You can't just say it. You need to provide a link which shows a story which suggests that this be applied to Microsoft and which shows that "people" are all for it. We can negotiate about how many responses represent "people".
If the law simply said that software products much be tracable to a company with more than X% (for X>80) software developers who are certified, and that the certification must be in a territory where the sanctions are credible, you'll see off-shoring end. Grandfather in existing developers and you're all sorted.
Wouldn't this utterly destroy the Free Software movement? (Incidentally, we'd probably lose the internet too).
I could be wrong of course. Perhaps it's a heat issue? Using a slower hard disk means less heat which means you can get away without a noisy cooling fan. To be honest, I'd love to play with a Mac Mini, but I don't need one and I can't find anyone who I can persuade to buy one and let me set it up.
One of the major selling points of the Mac Mini is that it is quiet. Even thought 4200 RPM drives are slower, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages for this type of machine.
Who cares about broadband? I'm pretty sure that this is aimed at corporations who roll out thousands of MS Windows desktops for the express purpose of running MS Office. There's no motivation for those people to adopt network computing type models if everyone needs a kick-ass PC on their desk to run MS Vista and Office 12. This technology will be offered for running on intranets ("Google recommends Sun servers for serving OfficeNet!") and the web-based model will be for publicity and technology demos. After all, OpenOffice.org or current versions of MS Office 10 work perfectly well on modern PCs, so there's no need for a home user to use the internet for an office suite. I think that the purpose of this is to give corporations an alternative to upgrading their hardware for running MS Vista; I suspect that Sun believes that if they buy Vista, they're likely to also by Office 12 at the same time and then they've got another huge investment in Windows which will tend to push them towards Microsoft server solutions etc.
Sad to say, I suspect that they don't care in the least about hobbyists. They want to sell to PDA/ebook/mobile phone manufacturers. They would hope to sell a couple of hundred to this market in the hope that one of their customers will make a popular product and order several thousand of the screen (without the devkit) later on.
Someone in a marketing company is going in for a little viral support to a relaunch.
No. The two articles actually come from different newspapers. The science one comes from The Guardian (a daily newspaper), which gets relaunched in a new format today. The iPhone one comes from The Observer (a Sunday newspaper), which is the sister paper of The Guardian. The Observer's relaunch happens next year. It looks like two article from the same newspaper because they both shared the same URL.
patent = bullshit because 'hand' feedback of users actions has prior art in video games, and how old is the patent he [did not specify which] mentioned.
When you grow up you will come to learn that things are not true just because you believe them to be true.
My claim to fame is I patented showing miniature hands on the screen. Bullshit.
Anyone played any driving game on an 8bit platform?
Hands that show your movements on the steering wheel are there, so surely prior art(even if it isn't a button controller, they even changed gears).
Presumably you're not claiming that he did not say this? If you are claiming that, you certainly were not there. If you mean that he did say that and he was mistaken, then that is possible, but it seems more likely to me that you are mistaken.
Just to be clear about this, when he said it it looked like there were two sets of two hands on the screen and they moved forwards and backwards in response (presumably) to what he was doing with the controller. It definitely wasn't hands on a steering wheel and, as far as I could make out, it wasn't two hands and two controllers (which is what is shown in the gamasutra article which is linked in the story). I might be mistaken about that the two "pushing" hands, but I'm pretty sure that I am not.
One thing that the summary omitted was Takehashi's comment about patents. During the demo of two-player mode, he pointed out that the miniature hands which appeared at the bottom of the screen would not appear in the USA version because of a problem with a software patent. He said that we really need to sit down and sort this problem out.
By the way, my claim to fame is that I was the person who asked him why he didn't play games any more.
Normal debris and dust would certainly burn up, but this is a material that is specifically designed not to burn up on re-entry. AFAIU, the reason they want to get rid of it is that it might cause an increase in temperature because of the additional friction.
So after twenty years of denying the bleedin' obvious, Apple has responded to crticism that one mouse button is not enough by producing a mouse with no buttons at all?! Way to isolate the rest of the world, Apple!
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What has the government got to do with anything?
I can't agree with this. In my opinion, they started screwing up at the point when they started trying to assimilate GPLed software into their commercial product. They could have read the GPL at that point and understood the requirements of the licence and then decided whether they still wanted to proceed. There must have been a significant amount of time between starting the process of creating DRDOS 8.1 and actually releasing the software; if there's a clock ticking, it starts when they started, not when the FreeDOS guys found them out. I don't think that the thing about not understanding the GPL holds water for a commercial company - it beggars belief that you would create a product based on code from someone outside the organisation without involving a lawyer at some point to check it out.
The big deal is that Intel, the market leader by a country mile, is way behind AMD on power consumption and performance. They may be ahead in vapourware, but you can't buy (or run software) that.
Of course it's racist. Why are you even asking the question?
I would call that a comprehensive misunderstanding of the debate. I agree far more with Hitchens than with Galloway, but Galloway won the debate hands down. It wasn't even close, nor could it ever have been. Hitchens is a different kind of person than Galloway and Galloway has decades of experience of thinking and debating on his feet. Had they done a debate-by-newspaper-column, the outcome might well have been different.
I felt that the old Doctor Who programmes were very variable and I was never a huge fan. However, the latest series was stupendous in my opinion, with some quite excellent writing - "The Empty Child I" and "Boom Town" were particular favourites.
While MI5's Myths/FAQ section explicitly states that MI5 does not assassinate people, the question is not present in MI6's FAQs. (Incidentally, I personally don't believe that MI6 assassinates people, but I wonder if they deliberately left the question out).
The headline refers to the original article on the Fox News website, which attacked the decision to adopt Open Document. That is when they were spinning. The new article on the Fox News website effectively acknowledges that the original article was merely political spin.
All I'm asking to do is to back up that assertion. You made the assertion, so it's not for me to trawl through those messages to find how many people are all for the idea (of holding developers responsible for bugs) when it is directed at Microsoft. I'm not asking you to do anything special or out-of-the-ordinarey; this is simply how grown-ups debate things.
I think that this is already possible, you just have to draw up a contract. At the moment we have EULAs, which say, "if you want to use the software, you have to accept that there might be bugs in it and that we (the authors of the software) are not liable for any damage that might be done to you or your business if these bugs turn out to be serious". If you really wanted a word-processor that is guaranteed to be bug free, you just have to find a software developer that will quote you for one. I would have thought that the price would be astronomical, but perhaps there are some people or organizations who would be willing to provide you with a quote at least.
I think that it is the flexibility of software which makes it impossible to force people to take responsibility for bugs. The supplier (particularly of package software) simply can't anticipate all the ways that people will use their software, so they can't possibly say that they will accept responsibility for problems. The best example I can think of for this is the SMS texting software that is included on mobile phones. Even the mobile phone companies never anticipated how popular texting would be. Now, I have heard of cases of RSI which have been blamed on excessive texting; would SMS have been included on a phone if there was a danger that the phone supplier might have to pick up the medical bills for over-enthusiastic texters? I suspect that nobody would have anticipated it and many mobile phone manufacturers would have unknowingly risked of going out of business!
You have to do better. You said that if such a story was posted here with Microsoft the target of the legislation, "people" would be all for it. Surely you wouldn't have said that without some evidence? Let's see some actual comments. All you did was to search for stories about software liability in which microsoft was mentioned.
Think about what you're asking here. If I'm a plumber and I fix your toilet and it leaks, then I (or my insurance) would have to pay for the damage to your home and the cleaning up etc. As a programmer, my program might be installed on hundreds or even thousands of computers. How am I going to be able to compensate everyone who uses my software? Specifically, how is someone who offers free software going to be able to continue to do that?
You really have to back that up. You can't just say it. You need to provide a link which shows a story which suggests that this be applied to Microsoft and which shows that "people" are all for it. We can negotiate about how many responses represent "people".
Wouldn't this utterly destroy the Free Software movement? (Incidentally, we'd probably lose the internet too).
I could be wrong of course. Perhaps it's a heat issue? Using a slower hard disk means less heat which means you can get away without a noisy cooling fan. To be honest, I'd love to play with a Mac Mini, but I don't need one and I can't find anyone who I can persuade to buy one and let me set it up.
One of the major selling points of the Mac Mini is that it is quiet. Even thought 4200 RPM drives are slower, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages for this type of machine.
Who cares about broadband? I'm pretty sure that this is aimed at corporations who roll out thousands of MS Windows desktops for the express purpose of running MS Office. There's no motivation for those people to adopt network computing type models if everyone needs a kick-ass PC on their desk to run MS Vista and Office 12. This technology will be offered for running on intranets ("Google recommends Sun servers for serving OfficeNet!") and the web-based model will be for publicity and technology demos. After all, OpenOffice.org or current versions of MS Office 10 work perfectly well on modern PCs, so there's no need for a home user to use the internet for an office suite. I think that the purpose of this is to give corporations an alternative to upgrading their hardware for running MS Vista; I suspect that Sun believes that if they buy Vista, they're likely to also by Office 12 at the same time and then they've got another huge investment in Windows which will tend to push them towards Microsoft server solutions etc.
Sad to say, I suspect that they don't care in the least about hobbyists. They want to sell to PDA/ebook/mobile phone manufacturers. They would hope to sell a couple of hundred to this market in the hope that one of their customers will make a popular product and order several thousand of the screen (without the devkit) later on.
No. The two articles actually come from different newspapers. The science one comes from The Guardian (a daily newspaper), which gets relaunched in a new format today. The iPhone one comes from The Observer (a Sunday newspaper), which is the sister paper of The Guardian. The Observer's relaunch happens next year. It looks like two article from the same newspaper because they both shared the same URL.
When you grow up you will come to learn that things are not true just because you believe them to be true.
Presumably you're not claiming that he did not say this? If you are claiming that, you certainly were not there. If you mean that he did say that and he was mistaken, then that is possible, but it seems more likely to me that you are mistaken.
Just to be clear about this, when he said it it looked like there were two sets of two hands on the screen and they moved forwards and backwards in response (presumably) to what he was doing with the controller. It definitely wasn't hands on a steering wheel and, as far as I could make out, it wasn't two hands and two controllers (which is what is shown in the gamasutra article which is linked in the story). I might be mistaken about that the two "pushing" hands, but I'm pretty sure that I am not.
By the way, my claim to fame is that I was the person who asked him why he didn't play games any more.
Normal debris and dust would certainly burn up, but this is a material that is specifically designed not to burn up on re-entry. AFAIU, the reason they want to get rid of it is that it might cause an increase in temperature because of the additional friction.
No Switches!