When I've tried to use open source, I've been told that there's too great a liability: if we used code that was stolen from somewhere then we could be sued as well.
What I haven't heard are any numbers showing expected losses from such an unlikely event vs costs of buying a solution.
They aren't mutually exclusive, but different values do lead to different allocation of (limited) resources.
If you value making money, you'll spend more on sales and marketing, customer goodies and rewarding developers who align with those goals. Developers who cause schedule slips because they're unsatisfied with the design of the system will tend to be rewarded less.
If you value a solid OS, first off, you'll probably have less money, and the process will tend to reward developers who provide good designs and solid implementation.
Clearly the two aren't exclusive (MS has people very concerned with design issues and Linux has people very concerned with Market Share, if not Making Money). But it's difficult to pursue both values with equal intensity.
I'm a uncomfortable spending this money and lives on a cause that's justified by a bumper-sticker length rationalization that applies equally to a Mars trip, climbing mountains or jumping off tall cliffs without parachutes.
Is there any meat to this? You must see some benefits, if only some vague notion of species pride. Could you articulate these thoughts? I'm not trying to bait you (flame or troll, either one). I trust high-minded, but essentially empty, phrases less and less these days as I see those phrases used to justify wars, idiotic TV reality shows and ever-so-cool hi-tech products.
At the risk of sounding narrow minded and provincial, I want to know what's in it for us, what's it gonna cost us (in lost opportunities as well as $$$), and what's the salesman going to get out of it.
My daughter plays with the bionicles, and she doesn't feel as limited as people seem to believe they are.
The Bionicle pieces can be mixed to create different monster-like-critters (She's even created a six-legged beastie). They have a variety of gears and rubberbands that can be used with other pieces to articulate those things. And, of course, there are opportunities to mix different realms (Bionicle & K'nix or marble runs or even MindStorms).
Kids aren't limited by the intended packaging of this things, nor even by the adult asthetics of not mixing different universes. Give them some building blocks, a little imagination and no TV and they'll have a good time!
Oh, yes, I'm disappointed too to see that MindStorms will be discontinued. We've enjoyed it, even though I haven't got it to work under Linux at this point. But then MindStorms has always been kind of the odd child in the Lego house. I don't know that the Lego execs ever really knew what to do with (even if there was a world-wide community ready to tell them).
A tool set comparable to Linux, free. That is, compilers and interpreters for C, C++, Fortran, Ada, Pascal, Objective C, Prolog, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, Python, Awk, lex, yacc, Basic, etc., etc. Debuggers, libraries, editors, profilers. Libraries for test scaffolding like CppUnit and JUnit.
I haven't used all those languages on Windows XP, but I have run open source (or otherwise free) versions of C++, Prolog, Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java with JUnit.
A promise that existing formats will be readable and losslessly convertable to future formats, forever.
Seems like MS is fairly good about this. It is kind of the other way that's a pain - future formats probably break current SW, hence the need for awkward downgraders.
I could go on, but my belief is that, technically, MS XP and.NET are reasonable alternatives to Linux, especially for the non-geek user.
Personally I spit on MS products, use Linux at home and advocate it at work. But I recognize that much of my avoidance of MS is based on lack of trust of their ethics and a distaste for their business practices.
In short, the only way Windows could be improved from my perspective is for MS to stop being MS. Which is rather unlikely and wouldn't provide much in the way of useful feedback to them.
Older Mont Blancs are nice. I think in recent years Mont Blanc has become a pen to show off more than something to use for writing. Pelikan Pens are so smooth and elegant that they're easily Mont Blanc's equal. In addition, they have a better guarantee and are made of better materials (a nice brass piston for the ink filling mechanism).
In terms of best value, I tend to prefer Parkers - a Parker 55 fine point is unbeatable and can be picked up for $80. The Lamys the OPer mentioned are pretty good too.
As far as refill ink goes, I use Parker Quink that I pick up either at a local art supply store (Walzers) or from various places on the net (google to the rescue again).
I have a rather fine syringe (saved from Easter egg coloring kits for my kids) that I use to refill the cartridges with the ink & color of my choice. Although in light of the recent court decisions about refilling printer cartridges, this may not be an option;).
This keeps Linux "Free as in Beer" and "Free as in speech" at the same time. And what is wrong with that?
This (so far) won't bother me since I don't download Madrake for free. But the concept does seem to present an interesting loophole in the "Free as in Beer" credo: if a Nefarious Linux Vendor wanted to encourage people to buy installation media, the NFV could make the downloaded version so painful that people would tend to buy rather than download (assuming there was something sufficiently attractive about the distro to begin with). It's still FAIB, so who could complain?
So, wonder if we'll see a distro in which the bought version displays...er... suitably enticing images during installation but the downloadable version displays an animated goatse.cx guy.
I'm not wanting to downplay the interest or importance of this, but it would have been interesting to see what percentage of breakin attempts were successful against the different OSs.
I don't think he was saying that he didn't like C/C++ , but rather that his experience was that using C++ caused problems (some of which he listed). To be sure, it would have been nice to see what his recommended alternative(s) is/are (Python? Ruby?) and to see more meat explaining the problems they encountered.
Keep in mind that they did the development in C++. And they had problems.
To reject his experience-based advice because you like C++ (and he must've started out like C++ to have selected it) is to risk going down the same rocky road he did.
For what it's worth, I'm a C++ developer - I recognize that the language has its... quirks..., but it's basically a good one. I would have thought that it would be a reasonable language for the project. But I'd like to learn from the problems he encountered rather that insist that, because I'm comfortable with it, it must be a language for everyone.
Let's see - the guy dropped out at eighth grade. He probably wasn't a great student to begin with. Think his grasp of percent might be a bit weak?
For that matter, if each mail item is approx. 4KBytes (for easy mental arithmetic), that comes to a sustained rate of roughly 10MBytes/second. Certainly not impossible, but high enough to make you wonder, especially when you consider that he needs to conduct "research" on open relays, etc.
They may be a fact, but the terms and conditions of the site may restrict you from scraping.
A few years ago I went into a (real life) gocery store and was writing down prices on a notepad.
I was asked to leave. When I protested that this was just for my personal info (it was), they said that didn't matter. When I said that I could buy the stuff and get the info from the tape, they said fine but put down the notepad or leave the store.
I didn't push it (after all, it's their property, their rules).
I've used AspectJ a fair amount. I'm not sure if it is the next hot thing, but it is more interesting than rpeppe gives it credit for being.
When will people realise that the most important thing in a programming language is to make it possible to reason about one part of it independent of another part?
Actually, this is precisely what AOP seeks to do. By gather all the logging or DB transaction logic into one place and giving rules to the compiler for determining when/where to insert that code, you achieve a very clean separation of concerns.
The business logic writer doesn't have to know about logging or transations, trusting that the aspect writer it correctly specified. However, if the business logic writer comes upon a special case, that could be handled outside the general Aspect covering that.
...hence the "horribly easy to accidentally create infinite recursion" reference...
Attempting to apply Aspects to Aspects can get a bit dangerous. But then so can recursion, reflection or any other powerful tool.
I think AspectJ is an interesting technology that you ought to check out before sneering at. Certainly it does have problems - my biggest problems with AspectJ spring from it not being tightly integrated with the language. When I used it, there were issues with debugging, building large projects and with non-hacker acceptance. With any luck, these have been dealt with.
Right. I believe I grasp fundaments as well as the next person.
Anyway. The point isn't "Is Palladium loathsome and does it deserve to be spit upon by all right-thinking folk?" but rather, "Will this ploy force MS to disclose any of their strategy?"
I agree with the former but am dubious of the latter.
You're not getting it. He doesn't need to defend it. He just needs to have it either attacked or not attacked.
Not quite. He needs to have it attacked head-on by MS in particular.
I think this is an interesting approach, but I'm not going to hold my breath on seeing interesting results. If a third party were to attack it, either from a feeling of outrage over abuse of the patent system or with MS's surreptitious help, he (we) would be no better off than before.
Well, except for time and money spent. But money's cheap, right?
Or MS may be able to go to their Congressperson and ask for rules limiting "frivolous" patent applications. We might extrapolate from that MS's interest, but it would be murkier.
If I can spend a few seconds thinking of ways to muddy the view, I'm sure well paid lawyers taking their time could bury him under a lot of... um,... dirt.
Unless, of course, the aircraft has expended 99% of its fuel - in which case the temperature of the remaining 1% of the fuel would raise by 100 degrees.
If the aircraft has expended 99% of its fuel, it'd better be taxiing at a friendly airbase. It probably wouldn't be flashing its lasers at that point!
Well, unless of course the jerk ahead of him is taking a little too long at the pump.
50% of Americans DO afterall think that the first amendment gives them too much freedom.
I'm not trying to argue, but do you have a reference for this?
I can imagine people saying that Others have too much freedom, but it seems surprising to have a majority / plurality say that they themselves have too much freedom.
I am certainly concerned about DRM and how it is curtailing our choices.
However, when you say
The countermeasure that we MUST be prepared to do is this: we must configure our web pages, content, and programs to require that it be off. That is, we must force users to choose whether they want to see our stuff or DRM stuff.
well, I get nervous.
You're forcing average consumers to pick between seeing their HotMail accounts, cruising various Disney sites and playing cool games vs seeing the websites of a few malcontents who don't want to keep up with progress (and that is how we'd be labeled by the powers that be).
At best this would polarize the camps even more than they are today.
So you'd rather trust your life savings to a minimum wage clerk's handwriting
interpretation... than to a sophisticated computer system which has a remote chance of error?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, in some circumstances I would.
If I believe a mistake has been made, it will be much easier to get a bank, the authorities, or the store to investigate a clerk's mistake/malfeasance than to have them investigate a charge that their database hasa been breached or their technology has problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you prefer Linux over Mac OS X?
How do you feel about the Software patent debate in the EU?
The speed is impressive and it is great that .cs, .cpp, .h files are considered text (I was afraid it was just .txt files).
Indexing is taking a while (it stops until the PC is idle - wish it would optionally run at a lower priority in the background).
Anyone know if it provides the SOAP API that the "real" google does?
When I've tried to use open source, I've been told that there's too great a liability: if we used code that was stolen from somewhere then we could be sued as well.
What I haven't heard are any numbers showing expected losses from such an unlikely event vs costs of buying a solution.
They aren't mutually exclusive, but different values do lead to different allocation of (limited) resources.
If you value making money, you'll spend more on sales and marketing, customer goodies and rewarding developers who align with those goals. Developers who cause schedule slips because they're unsatisfied with the design of the system will tend to be rewarded less.
If you value a solid OS, first off, you'll probably have less money, and the process will tend to reward developers who provide good designs and solid implementation.
Clearly the two aren't exclusive (MS has people very concerned with design issues and Linux has people very concerned with Market Share, if not Making Money). But it's difficult to pursue both values with equal intensity.
Is there any meat to this? You must see some benefits, if only some vague notion of species pride. Could you articulate these thoughts? I'm not trying to bait you (flame or troll, either one). I trust high-minded, but essentially empty, phrases less and less these days as I see those phrases used to justify wars, idiotic TV reality shows and ever-so-cool hi-tech products.
At the risk of sounding narrow minded and provincial, I want to know what's in it for us, what's it gonna cost us (in lost opportunities as well as $$$), and what's the salesman going to get out of it.
Me? Cynical?! Pshaw!
My daughter plays with the bionicles, and she doesn't feel as limited as people seem to believe they are.
The Bionicle pieces can be mixed to create different monster-like-critters (She's even created a six-legged beastie). They have a variety of gears and rubberbands that can be used with other pieces to articulate those things. And, of course, there are opportunities to mix different realms (Bionicle & K'nix or marble runs or even MindStorms).
Kids aren't limited by the intended packaging of this things, nor even by the adult asthetics of not mixing different universes. Give them some building blocks, a little imagination and no TV and they'll have a good time!
Oh, yes, I'm disappointed too to see that MindStorms will be discontinued. We've enjoyed it, even though I haven't got it to work under Linux at this point. But then MindStorms has always been kind of the odd child in the Lego house. I don't know that the Lego execs ever really knew what to do with (even if there was a world-wide community ready to tell them).
I haven't used all those languages on Windows XP, but I have run open source (or otherwise free) versions of C++, Prolog, Haskell, Lisp/Scheme, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java with JUnit.
Seems like MS is fairly good about this. It is kind of the other way that's a pain - future formats probably break current SW, hence the need for awkward downgraders.
I could go on, but my belief is that, technically, MS XP and .NET are reasonable alternatives to Linux, especially for the non-geek user.
Personally I spit on MS products, use Linux at home and advocate it at work. But I recognize that much of my avoidance of MS is based on lack of trust of their ethics and a distaste for their business practices.
In short, the only way Windows could be improved from my perspective is for MS to stop being MS. Which is rather unlikely and wouldn't provide much in the way of useful feedback to them.
My first thought was to wonder what kind of drug dealer would rely on the USPS to deliver? (Unless he wanted confirmation of delivery?).
Then it occurred to me that the kind of illegal drugs might be those sent from (cheaper) Canadian pharmacies to retired communities in Florida.
Perhaps I'm paranoid or maybe I'm just in need of adjusting my medication.
Older Mont Blancs are nice. I think in recent years Mont Blanc has become a pen to show off more than something to use for writing. Pelikan Pens are so smooth and elegant that they're easily Mont Blanc's equal. In addition, they have a better guarantee and are made of better materials (a nice brass piston for the ink filling mechanism).
;).
In terms of best value, I tend to prefer Parkers - a Parker 55 fine point is unbeatable and can be picked up for $80. The Lamys the OPer mentioned are pretty good too.
As far as refill ink goes, I use Parker Quink that I pick up either at a local art supply store (Walzers) or from various places on the net (google to the rescue again).
I have a rather fine syringe (saved from Easter egg coloring kits for my kids) that I use to refill the cartridges with the ink & color of my choice. Although in light of the recent court decisions about refilling printer cartridges, this may not be an option
This (so far) won't bother me since I don't download Madrake for free. But the concept does seem to present an interesting loophole in the "Free as in Beer" credo: if a Nefarious Linux Vendor wanted to encourage people to buy installation media, the NFV could make the downloaded version so painful that people would tend to buy rather than download (assuming there was something sufficiently attractive about the distro to begin with). It's still FAIB, so who could complain?
So, wonder if we'll see a distro in which the bought version displays
I think I'll check out debian now.
I'm not wanting to downplay the interest or importance of this, but it would have been interesting to see what percentage of breakin attempts were successful against the different OSs.
I don't think he was saying that he didn't like C/C++ , but rather that his experience was that using C++ caused problems (some of which he listed). To be sure, it would have been nice to see what his recommended alternative(s) is/are (Python? Ruby?) and to see more meat explaining the problems they encountered.
Keep in mind that they did the development in C++. And they had problems.
To reject his experience-based advice because you like C++ (and he must've started out like C++ to have selected it) is to risk going down the same rocky road he did.
For what it's worth, I'm a C++ developer - I recognize that the language has its... quirks..., but it's basically a good one. I would have thought that it would be a reasonable language for the project. But I'd like to learn from the problems he encountered rather that insist that, because I'm comfortable with it, it must be a language for everyone.
> ...getting 1-2 percent return...
Let's see - the guy dropped out at eighth grade. He probably wasn't a great student to begin with. Think his grasp of percent might be a bit weak?
For that matter, if each mail item is approx. 4KBytes (for easy mental arithmetic), that comes to a sustained rate of roughly 10MBytes/second. Certainly not impossible, but high enough to make you wonder, especially when you consider that he needs to conduct "research" on open relays, etc.
They may be a fact, but the terms and conditions of the site may restrict you from scraping.
A few years ago I went into a (real life) gocery store and was writing down prices on a notepad.
I was asked to leave. When I protested that this was just for my personal info (it was), they said that didn't matter. When I said that I could buy the stuff and get the info from the tape, they said fine but put down the notepad or leave the store.
I didn't push it (after all, it's their property, their rules).
Actually, this becomes a feature: feed the homeless, reduce the pigeon population and communicate data. What more could you ask?
I see a patent here someplace.
Actually, this is precisely what AOP seeks to do. By gather all the logging or DB transaction logic into one place and giving rules to the compiler for determining when/where to insert that code, you achieve a very clean separation of concerns.
The business logic writer doesn't have to know about logging or transations, trusting that the aspect writer it correctly specified. However, if the business logic writer comes upon a special case, that could be handled outside the general Aspect covering that.
Attempting to apply Aspects to Aspects can get a bit dangerous. But then so can recursion, reflection or any other powerful tool.
I think AspectJ is an interesting technology that you ought to check out before sneering at. Certainly it does have problems - my biggest problems with AspectJ spring from it not being tightly integrated with the language. When I used it, there were issues with debugging, building large projects and with non-hacker acceptance. With any luck, these have been dealt with.
I too use verbose logging as a debugging tool, so I'm curious if anyone has any interesting thoughts on how to do it efficiently.
In Java, I used AspectJ ( http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/ ) to instrument my code without modifying it.
Plus, I try to have my log file in XML format so that I can do different filtering / displaying things to help look for the interesting bits.
Does anyone have anything other than "Dump everything and use a good wild-card search editor"?
Ok, this may well be off-topic, a troll, redundant, and/or flamebait, but...
The thing isn't even over and you're calling it legendary? Seems like a waste of a good word.
I don't have karma to burn, but my pre-coffee indignation wouldn't let this pass.
Right. I believe I grasp fundaments as well as the next person.
Anyway. The point isn't "Is Palladium loathsome and does it deserve to be spit upon by all right-thinking folk?" but rather, "Will this ploy force MS to disclose any of their strategy?"
I agree with the former but am dubious of the latter.
Not quite. He needs to have it attacked head-on by MS in particular.
I think this is an interesting approach, but I'm not going to hold my breath on seeing interesting results. If a third party were to attack it, either from a feeling of outrage over abuse of the patent system or with MS's surreptitious help, he (we) would be no better off than before.
Well, except for time and money spent. But money's cheap, right?
Or MS may be able to go to their Congressperson and ask for rules limiting "frivolous" patent applications. We might extrapolate from that MS's interest, but it would be murkier.
If I can spend a few seconds thinking of ways to muddy the view, I'm sure well paid lawyers taking their time could bury him under a lot of
Well, unless of course the jerk ahead of him is taking a little too long at the pump.
I can imagine people saying that Others have too much freedom, but it seems surprising to have a majority / plurality say that they themselves have too much freedom.
However, when you say
well, I get nervous.
You're forcing average consumers to pick between seeing their HotMail accounts, cruising various Disney sites and playing cool games vs seeing the websites of a few malcontents who don't want to keep up with progress (and that is how we'd be labeled by the powers that be).
At best this would polarize the camps even more than they are today.
I personally prefer reading Scheme/Lisp to XML, but to be fair, XML in all its glory is a bit harder to represent than the little snippet given.
XML supports namespaces, entities, various links/references that could be mapped to lisp, but probably would begin to look pretty ugly.
If I believe a mistake has been made, it will be much easier to get a bank, the authorities, or the store to investigate a clerk's mistake/malfeasance than to have them investigate a charge that their database hasa been breached or their technology has problems.