In a brief statement issued Wednesday, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell confirmed only that the delays came '
because management and the company's independent auditors continue to examine certain matters related to the issuance of shares of the company's common stock pursuant to its equity compensation plans.'
My emphasis. Wey hey! Put the champagne on ice, guys, I think we may have a result here!
In a brief statement issued Wednesday, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell confirmed only that the delays came '
because management and the company's independent auditors continue to examine certain matters related to the issuance of shares of the company's common stock pursuant to its equity compensation plans.'
My emphasis. Wey hey! Put the champagne on ice, guys, I think we may have a result here!
The company said it has not filed its annual 10-K report with the SEC because it is examining matters related to stock issued as part of its compensation plans.
Does this essentially mean 'our auditors refused to sign off on it'? Is there anything more innocent it could mean?
25 million browsers (including mine) are still unable to properly render Slashdot.
That's not Mozilla's problem. Slashdot's markup is atrocious, really shamefully and embarassingly bad. It's for the Slashcode team to fix the problem, not for the Mozilla team. And it's pretty shameful that they don't. The fact that Slashdot explicitly blocks the W3C validator proves they know this.
Don't expect exhaustive feature lists soon. The purpose of this post was to communicate to large clients that they shouldn't switch to firefox because IE7 will be here "soon". It's classic tried and true delaying strategy from MS. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen them do this tons of times.
Indeed. And seeing this new IE is going to be out when Longhorn is ready, we can expect it in May. May 2008, maybe, or possibly May 2012.
He was a programmer. But really it doesn't matter. Everybody who works at MS in any capacity shares in the responsibility for their corporation does. Not 100%, not mostly but some. Even if it's a tiny little bit they have to share some of the blame.
I just perceive them as being unethical people working for an unethical company. Look at the way MS has stabbed so many of its friends in the back, who is to say an MS employee won't stab his friends in the back too?
Capitalism is inherently unethical. Corporations have no ethical imperative; instead they exist solely to maximise the return for their shareholders. Some individual companies may buck this trend and behave ethically, but it's very hard once a company is publicly quoted.
Yes, Microsoft is an ethically dubious company. But so are 90+% of other companies out there. People have to make a living somehow, and there are few places you can work (particularly in the high tech industry) that are really ethically clean. So worry about the beam in your own eye.
Its a test of how far the DMCA can be applied to enforce the fact that people have purchased media and an associated license for the software, and as such have no rights beyond what are granted by the software owner. I'd doubt very many people on/. have ever really bought software.
That's what the software vendors want you to believe, but I don't believe it's true in law anywhere; certainly not here in Scotland. Unless you physically signed -- on the paper -- the agreement before you paid your money, it's a purchase, it's yours, and you can do what you like with it.
Perl is a very powerful language to write small tools in the UNIX philosophy. It works very well. It requires some level of competence in the user, but so does every advanced tool.
It's not much good requiring an ee-fscking-normous interpreter to interpret your small tool, though. On my system
sed is 41Kb;
awk is 311Kb;
perl is over a megabyte.
There's nothing you can do with perl that you can't do with awk and sed. perl is, let's face it, a collection of cheap hacks in a bag hung off the side of a kluge. It's an embarrassment to anyone who values elegance in software.
Yeah, I know, flamebait. I suppose it is. I'd dislike perl less if it were not the programming language of choice of the computer-illiterate. I've even written some reasonably clean, well structured code in perl myself (because a customer required it). But I've very rarely seen a programming problem to which perlwas the right solution.
After all, patents are meant as an enticement for inventors to disclose their inventions to the world, instead of hiding it in the basement using it themselves. The revenue potential from a UI enhancement that's displayed in a customer-facing product is thousands or millions of times greater than if it were kept secret. Therefore, the inventor needed no incentive to disclose the idea, so the fact that it was patentable didn't promote progress in any way.
Exceedingly good point. Mod that post up, somebody.
I hate to say it, but this really is a minimal event for the overall market-- no one I know has used Ichitaro for years. MSWord is fully entrenched here, and will be for the forseeable future.
The issue is not Ichitaro. The issue is being able to develop software without having to look over your shoulder at the big corporations with their patent portfolios all the time. If decisions like this are allowed to stand, then small businesses cannot create software - because if anything they produce is any good, they will be sued out of existence by corporations with portfolios they can't match.
It's my view that software patents should not be allowed at all. But if they are going to be allowed the bar for non-obviousness and novelty has to be very high indeed.
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
A patent should not be granted unless the idea being patented is not obvious. Having a standardised icon to invoke help is obvious.
A patent should not be granted unless the idea being patented is novel. I don't know when the alleged Matsushita patent was granted, but I was using an icon (a bitmap representation of a question mark, but hey - it may not be pretty but it's an icon) in 1986, and I know I wasn't the first - I'm pretty sure the Xerox STAR office software had a similar system, because that's where I think I filched it from.
Photographers create art because they put thought and composition into their photos.
So if you have an artefact (e.g. a photograph) in your hand, how do tell whether it's 'art' or the output of a random process? To be concrete about this, seeing you're a photographer, suppose I took a camera, linked its shutter release to an atom of something with a half-life of a week or two so that when the atom decayed the shutter was released, and strapped the camera to the back of a blind man who was instructed to walk wherever he liked. At the end of the process there would be a picture. That is, I'm sure you'd say, not art.
Now, suppose some self important pompous artist took a camera and carefully and pompously framed a particular image, capturing a particular instant in time. That is, I'm sure you'd say, art. Even if the 'artist' happened to be standing beside the blind man at the same time.
Now supposing the two photographs were dropped on the dark room floor, and when you picked them up you could not remember which was which. What intrinsic property does a work of art have which allows it to be distinguished from non-art? If there is no such property, then surely there can be no such thing as art, because it cannot be discriminated; if the property is in the eye of the beholder, then surely the product of the random process is just as much 'art' as the product of the artist.
Oh, and shouting and assertion does not make your point of view true. If you have an argument to advance, by all means advance it...
What a crass thing to do. Take something creative and interesting, point the seething hordes of Slashdot at it so it breaks horribly and causes the creator lots of stress as her system administrators and bandwidth providers come down on her like a ton of bricks. Probable outcome? Yet another genuinely interesting project will disappear from the net for ever, trampled under the hooves of a flash mob with no real interest in the project.
Of course computers can produce interesting and stimulating images. Consider the Mandelbrot set, for example, or a whole host of other functions which are highly sensitive to their inputs. Did Benoit Mandelbrot 'draw' or 'create' the Mandelbrot set image? Of course not. It is intrinsic in the concept of number, even though it required powerful computers to render it in any detail. Is it art? Human beings respond to it as if it was art.
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck it's a duck. The Mandelbrot set is art (and so are pictures automatically taken by the Hubble Telescope) because we respond to them as art. So is the output of Katharina Nussbaumer's program which you have been so thoughtless as to destroy.
[Guess what, dude, it cost millions of dollars] To write and document those APIs. So can you give me one reason why they should give them away for free?
How about 'they've been found guilty of criminal activity and have been ordered by the court to do so in partial restitution'?
Granted Emacs isn't in the modern idiom. But in its day it was one of the most powerful and sophisticated bits of software anywhere, and it is still vastly more capable than many modern 'Integrated Development Environments'.
Emacs, and the GNU project of which it is part, predates Microsoft. And it has always been free, as in beer as well as as in speech.
Then there are the BSDs. And the X Window System (and most of its window managers). And Linux. And Postgres. And so on and so on. All of these are big, complex and very useful bits of software. None of these were 'caused' by Microsoft, or arose as a reaction to Microsoft. And all of them have always been free. And now we have KDE and Gnome. You could argue that KDE is a conscious reaction to Microsoft, and Gnome is certainly a conscious reaction to KDE, but once again these things have always been, in both senses, free.
Microsoft didn't make them free. Microsoft didn't drive their prices down. They are free because they exist as acts of creativity and generosity, not of commerce. And the market can't compete with that.
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server.
Apple have always produced really high quality hardware, which is exactly what you want for a server. And considering the quality of the hardware, they've usually been good value for money even if you planned to junk the proprietary OS.
...but the railroad system exploded country-wide in 1845, then here in the US, it would be appropriate to say "the advent of the railroad in 1845." This would have a different meaning of "the invention of the railroad in 1836."
No, it would not. The advent happens before the beginning (as in, before the birth of Christ), not after it. The advent of the computer is Babbage's Analytical Engine, , not Compaq churning out desktop boxes.
That's how we use English in the US. You are welcome to tell us we're wrong, or otherwise argue with us some more.
If that were true, it would only prove that people in the US were by and large ignorant and uneducated, which would surprise no-one this side of the pond. But as even 'American English' dictionaries don't agree with you, I suggest that, even by US standards, you are a paragon of illiteracy.
For many of us the internet hadn't truly arrived until it became feasible for being more than just a toy for a bunch of geeks (which was long after 1989).
Well, that's tough for you youngsters, but it doesn't make any difference to the Internet. I was using the Internet in '86. Plenty of people here were using it before that.
The Advent of the Railways didn't happen in 1990, you know, just because that was when you first became old enough to buy a train ticket.
This is just like writing Lisp. You have an s-expression like (+ 2 3) or (make-hash-table blah blah) that use functions from the language proper, and you have s-exprs like (render-cube blah blah) that are calling your own functions.
Just so.
XML is, and has always been, just a particularly prolix and awkward way of writing s-exprs. However, the great unwashed out there think that LISP is too difficult for them, so they have to have it bundled up into some form that they don't recognise as LISP before they can accept it.
"Advent" is commonly used to describe when something catches on and takes hold. "before the advent of the Internet" has a subtle yet distinctly different meaning than "before the Internet was invented" and that's why I think they chose to write it the way they did.
Bollocks. Advent means, and always has meant, the very beginning. Check any dictionary. 'Advent', for Christians, is the month before Christ was born - not the month when Christianity 'caught on'. You can't just just go around redefining words because you've made an arse of yourself in public.
One of the features of the recent PANIX domain hijacking which was
particularly egregious was that the gaining registrar, Melbourne IT, did not
have any technical staff on duty over a period of in excess of thirty six
hours who had authority to review the transfer.
It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require registrars to have
competent and authorised staff available at all times - '24/7' - to handle
problems that arise. It also seems to me that it would be reasonable to
require the gaining registrar to give the losing registrar and the registered
owner of the domain seven days clear notice before executing a transfer
request.
It is not as though the possibility of domain hijackings had not been flagged
up as a possible consequence of the new less stringent process for domain
transfer; ICANN has a duty to the Internet community to ensure that we don't
see a spate of PANIX-style incidents.
Slashdot Mirror
And to answer myself, this from Groklaw:
My emphasis. Wey hey! Put the champagne on ice, guys, I think we may have a result here!
And to answer myself, this from Groklaw:
My emphasis. Wey hey! Put the champagne on ice, guys, I think we may have a result here!
...just exactly what is meant by
Does this essentially mean 'our auditors refused to sign off on it'? Is there anything more innocent it could mean?
Tell you what, offer to invest them in SCOXE. He'll be so grateful!
That's not Mozilla's problem. Slashdot's markup is atrocious, really shamefully and embarassingly bad. It's for the Slashcode team to fix the problem, not for the Mozilla team. And it's pretty shameful that they don't. The fact that Slashdot explicitly blocks the W3C validator proves they know this.
Indeed. And seeing this new IE is going to be out when Longhorn is ready, we can expect it in May. May 2008, maybe, or possibly May 2012.
Does everyone who lives in the United States share responsibility for what their nation does?
Capitalism is inherently unethical. Corporations have no ethical imperative; instead they exist solely to maximise the return for their shareholders. Some individual companies may buck this trend and behave ethically, but it's very hard once a company is publicly quoted.
Yes, Microsoft is an ethically dubious company. But so are 90+% of other companies out there. People have to make a living somehow, and there are few places you can work (particularly in the high tech industry) that are really ethically clean. So worry about the beam in your own eye.
That's what the software vendors want you to believe, but I don't believe it's true in law anywhere; certainly not here in Scotland. Unless you physically signed -- on the paper -- the agreement before you paid your money, it's a purchase, it's yours, and you can do what you like with it.
It's not much good requiring an ee-fscking-normous interpreter to interpret your small tool, though. On my system
There's nothing you can do with perl that you can't do with awk and sed. perl is, let's face it, a collection of cheap hacks in a bag hung off the side of a kluge. It's an embarrassment to anyone who values elegance in software.
Yeah, I know, flamebait. I suppose it is. I'd dislike perl less if it were not the programming language of choice of the computer-illiterate. I've even written some reasonably clean, well structured code in perl myself (because a customer required it). But I've very rarely seen a programming problem to which perlwas the right solution.
Exceedingly good point. Mod that post up, somebody.
The issue is not Ichitaro. The issue is being able to develop software without having to look over your shoulder at the big corporations with their patent portfolios all the time. If decisions like this are allowed to stand, then small businesses cannot create software - because if anything they produce is any good, they will be sued out of existence by corporations with portfolios they can't match.
It's my view that software patents should not be allowed at all. But if they are going to be allowed the bar for non-obviousness and novelty has to be very high indeed.
This is a problem with the patent system, for two reasons:
So if you have an artefact (e.g. a photograph) in your hand, how do tell whether it's 'art' or the output of a random process? To be concrete about this, seeing you're a photographer, suppose I took a camera, linked its shutter release to an atom of something with a half-life of a week or two so that when the atom decayed the shutter was released, and strapped the camera to the back of a blind man who was instructed to walk wherever he liked. At the end of the process there would be a picture. That is, I'm sure you'd say, not art.
Now, suppose some self important pompous artist took a camera and carefully and pompously framed a particular image, capturing a particular instant in time. That is, I'm sure you'd say, art. Even if the 'artist' happened to be standing beside the blind man at the same time.
Now supposing the two photographs were dropped on the dark room floor, and when you picked them up you could not remember which was which. What intrinsic property does a work of art have which allows it to be distinguished from non-art? If there is no such property, then surely there can be no such thing as art, because it cannot be discriminated; if the property is in the eye of the beholder, then surely the product of the random process is just as much 'art' as the product of the artist.
Oh, and shouting and assertion does not make your point of view true. If you have an argument to advance, by all means advance it...
What a crass thing to do. Take something creative and interesting, point the seething hordes of Slashdot at it so it breaks horribly and causes the creator lots of stress as her system administrators and bandwidth providers come down on her like a ton of bricks. Probable outcome? Yet another genuinely interesting project will disappear from the net for ever, trampled under the hooves of a flash mob with no real interest in the project.
Of course computers can produce interesting and stimulating images. Consider the Mandelbrot set, for example, or a whole host of other functions which are highly sensitive to their inputs. Did Benoit Mandelbrot 'draw' or 'create' the Mandelbrot set image? Of course not. It is intrinsic in the concept of number, even though it required powerful computers to render it in any detail. Is it art? Human beings respond to it as if it was art.
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck it's a duck. The Mandelbrot set is art (and so are pictures automatically taken by the Hubble Telescope) because we respond to them as art. So is the output of Katharina Nussbaumer's program which you have been so thoughtless as to destroy.
As it happens I've already written a review of cloudscape; the google cache of it is here.
Brief summary: get the Apache version; reasonably full SQL92 syntax; performance OK; a bit lacking on security.
How about 'they've been found guilty of criminal activity and have been ordered by the court to do so in partial restitution'?
No, this isn't a troll.
Granted Emacs isn't in the modern idiom. But in its day it was one of the most powerful and sophisticated bits of software anywhere, and it is still vastly more capable than many modern 'Integrated Development Environments'.
Emacs, and the GNU project of which it is part, predates Microsoft. And it has always been free, as in beer as well as as in speech.
Then there are the BSDs. And the X Window System (and most of its window managers). And Linux. And Postgres. And so on and so on. All of these are big, complex and very useful bits of software. None of these were 'caused' by Microsoft, or arose as a reaction to Microsoft. And all of them have always been free. And now we have KDE and Gnome. You could argue that KDE is a conscious reaction to Microsoft, and Gnome is certainly a conscious reaction to KDE, but once again these things have always been, in both senses, free.
Microsoft didn't make them free. Microsoft didn't drive their prices down. They are free because they exist as acts of creativity and generosity, not of commerce. And the market can't compete with that.
Apple have always produced really high quality hardware, which is exactly what you want for a server. And considering the quality of the hardware, they've usually been good value for money even if you planned to junk the proprietary OS.
1825, actually, but never mind, it was a good try.
No, it would not. The advent happens before the beginning (as in, before the birth of Christ), not after it. The advent of the computer is Babbage's Analytical Engine, , not Compaq churning out desktop boxes.
If that were true, it would only prove that people in the US were by and large ignorant and uneducated, which would surprise no-one this side of the pond. But as even 'American English' dictionaries don't agree with you, I suggest that, even by US standards, you are a paragon of illiteracy.
Well, that's tough for you youngsters, but it doesn't make any difference to the Internet. I was using the Internet in '86. Plenty of people here were using it before that.
The Advent of the Railways didn't happen in 1990, you know, just because that was when you first became old enough to buy a train ticket.
Just so.
XML is, and has always been, just a particularly prolix and awkward way of writing s-exprs. However, the great unwashed out there think that LISP is too difficult for them, so they have to have it bundled up into some form that they don't recognise as LISP before they can accept it.
Bollocks. Advent means, and always has meant, the very beginning. Check any dictionary. 'Advent', for Christians, is the month before Christ was born - not the month when Christianity 'caught on'. You can't just just go around redefining words because you've made an arse of yourself in public.
... [here] on the transfer process.
I have sent them my comment as follows:
It's a European Airbus.