This IS being reported in non-geek media and people ARE starting to get the picture. This will hurt the RIAA.
I doubt that. Most of the people who are upset by this are the kinda people who rip music instead of buying it anyway -- the ones who, as they so often claim, wouldn't be giving the music companies any money whether or not they ripped the CDs. The average guy buying a CD in HMV or Virgin on Saturday afternoon doesn't give a damn, and why should he?
I think the RIAA is getting off rather light. What they're doing is illegal and they know it.
Apparently, thus far, the legal system disagrees with you.
This is why this whole issue has gotten so silly. We live in a society that has a legal system. If you don't like the way something works, the correct answer is to act to get the legal system changed, and then to act within the changed legal system to prevent the behaviour you find objectionable, whether it be complex monopoly abuse, intellectual property theft or whatever.
However, as of right here and right now, our legal system provides for the concept of intellectual property. It has sound reasons for doing so, however dubious the results when faced with the ??AA at present. These guys knew damn well that they were breaking the law, and now they're damn well going to have to face the consequences, and so they should.
Copyright breach is not a victimless crime. You may not like the current legal system and the fact that it says the copyright holder is entitled to compensation if you want to copy their work, but that does not give you the right to put yourself above the law and ignore that system.
If you want to see what the world would be like without copyright, write to your representatives, use your vote, campaign for change, and make it happen. If everyone who ripped CDs voted for candidates who stood on an anti-copyright platform, you'd soon see the law changed to match.
Until then, you and your ilk are breaking the law, and you are the people who deserve whatever punishment the legal system deems appropriate.
I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of deterministic finalization, but I really have to wonder why people care so much about when the memory is actually freed for a particular object.
It's not the freeing of memory that's relevant in most cases, it's any other clean-up logic that the object runs on destruction. In particular, GC deals with memory release, while deterministic destruction allows idioms for handling any resource, be it dynamic memory, files, locks for thread synchronisation, sockets... Delaying the release of these things is not clever.:-/
Most complaints center around the fact that you don't know when your destructor is going to execute. That's a valid concern, but there is nothing that really separates a destructor from a regular method. If you have some clean-up that needs to happen, put it into a Dispose() method and call it yourself. Pretty simple.
But now you need to remember to call it manually, and remember to put it in your finally block so you don't miss it if you're exiting via an exception. If you have deterministic destruction semantics, then once you've created an object, you know that not only its memory, but all of its resources, will be released, and you can tell exactly when if it's relevant, or even speed the process along if your object owns scarce resources. You can't forgot to call a "release" method, and you don't need to call such a method in multiple or special places to make sure it works properly. This approach is safer and more general than the GC/Dispose/finally approach used by some languages.
Whether people who profit *should* have damages levied against them or not, does not have much to do with US Law.
True, but then many places have a more sensible legal system than the US, and surely the purpose of debates like this thread is to provoke thought and, potentially, lead to changes in that law?
In answer to your question, certainly most EULAs I've seen state that no liability shall exceed the purchase price, yada yada yada. Then again, we all know how much legal weight EULAs aren't known to have and that this has never been tested in court, and we all know that in the US the words are meaningless until a court decides what they mean...
Isn't product liability normally limited to what you paid for the product?
I guess it depends on your particular locality's laws, any licensing agreements in force, etc. Whether that should be the case, rather than whether it legally is, may be a different question, of course; as you suggested, I think negligence in claims made etc. have to be considered here as well.
The point the parent poster was making was that punitive dammages could (theoretically) be levied again the original author, but that is just wrong any way you look at it.
My view is a simple one: as with anything else, the damages should be levied against the people who (a) take the money/other compensation, and/or (b) make the promises associated with the product.
Especially when you consider that open source software is reviewed by many more sets of eyes than any proprietary piece of software, and consequently *is* of much higher quality.
I think it's best to stay away from statements like that in a discussion like this. There may well be some truth to it in some cases, but I'm not at all convinced that it holds in general (my experiences with major open source alternatives to things like browsers and office suites certainly haven't supported your claim) and there's precious little hard evidence to rely on in discussions anyway.
I appreciate your arguments about capitalism and market choice, but I think they fall down because we don't really have a free market. You say:
In this case, the market has decided that most applications don't warrant software guaranteed for a particular purpose.
That's not really true, though, because the market has no choice. This "no guarantees" condition is clearly in the interests of any software supplier, and can never be a benefit to a software consumer. However, because everyone adds it (for your typical OS or office apps, say) the consumer/free market principles don't apply.
Under these circumstances, I think it is beneficial for the legal system to wade in and redress the consumer/supplier power balance. Otherwise, just as in any monopoly type situation, you have an imbalanced system where there's no incentive to change. The costs of being the first (and, for some time, only) supplier to offer genuine guarantees could be huge compared to any modest financial benefits.
All this will do is make them add a clause to the shrink-rap EULAS "I accept responsibility for any loss off blah blah as a result of software defects"
What they should do is remove any legal weight from clauses along the lines of "This software comes with no warranty of any kind, including fitness for any particular purpose..."
If you're taking my money for it, it should be fit for something, just the same as any other product, and just the same as any other sales pitch, I should be given a fair and accurate description of what the software I'm paying for is or isn't fit to do.
Part of the problem here is that most people on this thread seem to be thinking in absolutes: "if Word crashes, I can sue MS for [evil grin and pinkie finger to mouth] one million dollars!" It's not about 100% reliability, it's about reliable enough. A word processor doesn't need to be bug-free, it just needs to be reliable enough to write my documents under normal circumstances. MS might reasonably be expected to pay some compensation for excessive downtime due to their carelessness with the recent product activation issue, but not if Word crashes because of some incompatibility with other software on your machine about which they can do nothing.
Surely it should all come down to fair and reasonable marketing claims (don't say it's 100% reliable if it ain't) and fair and reasonable compensation when those claims are found to be erroneous (if you said it was in good faith, but it turned out not to be, you give me back some reasonable amount in compensation, depending on how effectively you addressed the problem once it was discovered).
If you want 99.99999% up-time for your server, you can buy from someone who claims to provide it, paying whatever the going rate is for it, and expect to get it (or compensation). However, you aren't entitled to assume that WinXP is suitable for running operating theatre laser surgery algorithms "just because" and then sue MS when it doesn't live up to the job you've foolishly given it.
This just means that the laws should special case free software.
In most places, free-as-in-beer stuff is already fundamentally a special case, because unless something of value changes hands in both directions, you don't have a contract.
Of course, free-as-in-speech software neither deserves nor should get any special privileges. If you make money by selling me an OS that happens to be GPL'd, open source, or otherwise "free", that's still something you're selling me. "Oh, you should have looked at all the source code for Linux and spotted the critical bug for yourself" isn't much of an excuse at that point; I'm paying you to have done that for me.
For the record, I've never served on a jury. In my country of birth I was never called to serve and in my current domicile I'm legally not allowed to serve. Does that mean I have no experience of my peers?
No, of course not. However, I've noticed that those who have been thrown into a position of power with a genuinely random selection of their peers -- jury service being the most obvious example I could think of -- generally take a less positive view of approaches like the one you mention after the experience.
Self selects? How?
Well, in the absence of any better ideas, at least the typical voting system today does this to some degree. It allows anyone who wants to to have their say. Further, by not forcing everyone to vote, only those who want to express an opinion do so. There tends to be a high correlation between those who are informed on a subject and those who have an opinion on it. Ergo, you have an unbiased, self-selecting system in which no-one is disadvantaged, but you tend to get a more informed group voting than the general population.
The current system elects old white rich guys, my idea would elect a wider spread of the population. Gender, religion, race would be expressed pretty much how they are in the population.
True. However, IMHO this is a problem with party politics, particularly in the US where there are only two realistic candidates, rather than with voting in general.
It is also confused by having voting systems where you elect a single person both to represent local interests, and to have a say in the overall running of government. It's quite possible that you would want a particular individual who is dedicated and has solid ethics as your personal representative, while at the same time disagreeing with the politics of the party that this person represents.
These are the things that encourage the "old boy network" and non-representative representation, but they aren't a necessary by-product of a one-man, one-optional-vote system.
No, we need a lottery for elected officials. [...] My way if you're eligable to vote your name is entered in a lottery if you win you get the job. [...] This system would elect a representitive cross cut of the US population.
I'm guessing you've never been called up for jury duty and had to work with a truly representative sample of your peers, right?
The problem with democracy, as realised by most voting systems in the world today, is that it only works in the presence of an informed and rational population.
I would far rather have a system that self-selects an informed and rational subset of the population to an acceptable degree, and then trust them to vote, run the country or whatever, than have a completely random system that forced people who really couldn't care less to make decisions on behalf of those who could.
But dude, you simply cannot be thinking that the Lothlorien scenes were not greatly improved in the Special Edition of LOTR.
I don't dislike all of the scenes, but I'm not convinced they all improved the film, either. It's long already, and you don't need yet more plodding introduction in the first half of the film if it's not furthering the plot. As I said, I'd be interested to know which version (or combination of versions) Jackson would have preferred to make, without any external pressures on time, extras, etc.
Dude, rent the first release, buy the second release to see how the movie SHOULD have looked
It think there's an assumption in there that not everyone will agree with. I didn't think the new versions of the original Star Wars films were an improvement, and I'm not completely convinced by all of the extra footage in the FotR Special Edition, either. I'd be interested to know whether Jackson and co actually wanted to add the extra footage and didn't because it would have made for too long a cinematic release, or whether they've just added it because, like most DVDs, the powers that be demand extra material whether it's any good or not.
Crucial aren't perfect -- we've had the odd dodgy thing from them at work -- but their service is excellent and their quality is generally high, so I'd recommend them without hesitation. They're well worth the small price premium over no-name brands without the same quality, compatibility guarantee, etc, IMHO.
There are other makes, Corsair for example, which are claimed to have even higher specs. You do pay a lot for that tiny bit extra, though. Unless you're heavily into overclocking (in which case I'm sorry, but you have to accept any problems you get) it's hardly worth spending nearly twice as much to get kit like Corsair rather than a good, solid bet like Crucial.
First, VSS is a crap version control system (if only because it's not client/server), but it doesn't corrupt itself randomly. You need to keep your database sizes to under 1GB or so, run ANALYZE on the thing at least every week (or more, depending on the activity) and generally keep binaries (especially large ones) off of it.
Actually, for practical purposes, SourceSafe does randomly corrupt your database. This is the reason for all the restrictions you mention. It fundamentally requires safe clients, and that fundamentally isn't a reliable thing to do. Requiring regular back-ups and running Analyze frequently (great, several hours of downtime when no-one can use the DB) is not an acceptable solution in a professional development environment. Hell, even MS won't use it for serious projects...
Chalk me up as one more CVS advocate, please. It ain't perfect, but we never had a problem with it we couldn't fix.
This is a idiosynchonism (is that even a word?) of a particular set of languages, and it's a holdover from a past where RAM and cpu time were much more limited.
If you're referring to the header/source file separation, then yes, I agree. It's an irritating implementation detail that ought to be hidden away by more powerful development tools.
(BTW, FYI, it's "idiosyncrasy", at least in the UK.)
More moden (OO) languages don't use seperate header & source files, using modular or namespace based scoping instead.
I'm not sure the side-effects of that are necessarily good things, either. Writing function definitions, constant values etc. all in-line, as Java, C# etc. do, has its own disadvantages. Most significantly, you lose the nice "summary" documentation that a well-written header file provides. And you still have a lot of the same problems I mentioned anyway: if you implement an interface or inherit from a base class in Java, you still have to duplicate the name, parameters, return type etc. of that interface in the implementing class.
I guess my point is that I think worrying about the header/source separation is shooting for the wrong target. What we ought to be doing is allowing programmers to write a simple, self-documenting interface (as you'd typically find in a good header file), but then having the sort of development environment where you can just open up the implementation of a particular function without having to retype all of its signature information. Similarly, a class that inherits base class functionality in whatever guise shouldn't have to duplicate the signatures of things it overrides or implements, there should just be some indication that all functionality of the base class has been inherited, and a means to open that up directly as well.
Once you've got to that sort of level, basic manipulations like renaming or adding a parameter to a function or moving some function implementations up from a derived class up to a base should be trivial "minor UI trick" features that take a couple of seconds, instead of the ten minutes of error-prone search and replace they tend to involve with most tools today.
None of this is exactly rocket science, I'm sure you'll agree, and obviously you could write a good editor that worked with any of C++, Java, C#, Eiffel or whatever that provided this functionality. My argument is that this sort of thing should be the norm, not something that most programmers don't seem to use at all, and where even those tools that are available tend to be expensive and elaborate but not particularly powerful.
The law is not -1 redundant, unfortunately. There are several state agencies that can only aquire software from selected, approved vendors. If the vendor doesn't carry open source, you have to go proprietary.
Ironically enough, I think Microsoft's own spokeswoman called this one right. From the end of the article:
"We believe that procurement decisions should be based on the overall merits and value of the software under consideration," said Alex Mercer, a Microsoft spokeswoman.
Laws shouldn't take sides in trade competitions, either way. They should mandate that the governing bodies exercise due care in examining all relevant options and then choose the one that is most in the interests of those they represent, and leave it at that.
IMHO, they shouldn't say "you must/should/might consider open source" any more than they'd say anything about Microsoft, Dell, GPL or BSD licences, or any other specific named player in the field.
Oh goody, an AC slashbot who thinks they're clever because they can use a word with more than two syllables and link to a definition of the term, just in case I'm so illiterate that I don't understand it. How terribly original.
I'd love to think this was intended to be a rhetorical question. I might have hoped for it to be so, but in case you hadn't noticed, we're actually in a thread discussing people who are committing this particular fuckwitticism.
You mean there are Slashdot users who wouldn't have heard of Microsoft but for the submissions here that mention them?
No, but there are probably quite a few people here who didn't know as much about Microsoft's dubious business practices, or the details of how their software performs, as they do now. I imagine a lot more people who find that information switch away from the Microsoft route than towards it.
Resorting to things like e-mail flooding is childish at best, and downright damaging (and hopefully illegal) at worst.
This is the 21st century and we're supposed to adults. There are better ways to deal with disagreeing viewpoints than "My server's got more bandwidth than yours, so nyeeeah!"
This could also be just a smart move by the FirebirdSQL team. The project has been relatively obscure up until now, but with the/. articles people are much more aware of its existence.
I'm not sure the "any publicity is good publicity" mantra applies when you're talking about an informed and critical forum like/. though. Just ask Microsoft how many new users they've acquired through their publicity here -- and they even get their own icon...;-)
I installed OpenOffice on my new PC last Xmas, and have used it exclusively ever since. I pretty much totally agree with your assessment.
It's a product with a lot of potential, and it's fine as a "good enough" alternative for typical daily use, but it does have some major flaws compared to MS' offering. The spreadsheet is underpowered and graphing is hard to get right. (How do you update the source data range for a chart, anyway?) The word processor apparently offers no mechanism to assign keyboard shortcuts to styles or special characters, making both features absurdly unwieldy. And it is waaaay more buggy than any recent version of MS Office. In particular, it crashes and takes out any other OpenOffice applications that are running if you try to load the wrong MS Word document (and not necessarily a particularly complicated one, either).
All in all, I'm grateful for having the product -- it's saved me having to buy any more MS software, since I don't believe in ripping off commercial products -- but as an alternative to Microsoft for those who can afford it, it's definitely "7/10, must try harder" for now.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that. Most of the people who are upset by this are the kinda people who rip music instead of buying it anyway -- the ones who, as they so often claim, wouldn't be giving the music companies any money whether or not they ripped the CDs. The average guy buying a CD in HMV or Virgin on Saturday afternoon doesn't give a damn, and why should he?
Apparently, thus far, the legal system disagrees with you.
This is why this whole issue has gotten so silly. We live in a society that has a legal system. If you don't like the way something works, the correct answer is to act to get the legal system changed, and then to act within the changed legal system to prevent the behaviour you find objectionable, whether it be complex monopoly abuse, intellectual property theft or whatever.
However, as of right here and right now, our legal system provides for the concept of intellectual property. It has sound reasons for doing so, however dubious the results when faced with the ??AA at present. These guys knew damn well that they were breaking the law, and now they're damn well going to have to face the consequences, and so they should.
Copyright breach is not a victimless crime. You may not like the current legal system and the fact that it says the copyright holder is entitled to compensation if you want to copy their work, but that does not give you the right to put yourself above the law and ignore that system.
If you want to see what the world would be like without copyright, write to your representatives, use your vote, campaign for change, and make it happen. If everyone who ripped CDs voted for candidates who stood on an anti-copyright platform, you'd soon see the law changed to match.
Until then, you and your ilk are breaking the law, and you are the people who deserve whatever punishment the legal system deems appropriate.
But what that construction is doing is just giving someDisposableObject deterministic destruction semantics... :-)
It's not the freeing of memory that's relevant in most cases, it's any other clean-up logic that the object runs on destruction. In particular, GC deals with memory release, while deterministic destruction allows idioms for handling any resource, be it dynamic memory, files, locks for thread synchronisation, sockets... Delaying the release of these things is not clever. :-/
But now you need to remember to call it manually, and remember to put it in your finally block so you don't miss it if you're exiting via an exception. If you have deterministic destruction semantics, then once you've created an object, you know that not only its memory, but all of its resources, will be released, and you can tell exactly when if it's relevant, or even speed the process along if your object owns scarce resources. You can't forgot to call a "release" method, and you don't need to call such a method in multiple or special places to make sure it works properly. This approach is safer and more general than the GC/Dispose/finally approach used by some languages.
True, but then many places have a more sensible legal system than the US, and surely the purpose of debates like this thread is to provoke thought and, potentially, lead to changes in that law?
In answer to your question, certainly most EULAs I've seen state that no liability shall exceed the purchase price, yada yada yada. Then again, we all know how much legal weight EULAs aren't known to have and that this has never been tested in court, and we all know that in the US the words are meaningless until a court decides what they mean...
I guess it depends on your particular locality's laws, any licensing agreements in force, etc. Whether that should be the case, rather than whether it legally is, may be a different question, of course; as you suggested, I think negligence in claims made etc. have to be considered here as well.
My view is a simple one: as with anything else, the damages should be levied against the people who (a) take the money/other compensation, and/or (b) make the promises associated with the product.
I think it's best to stay away from statements like that in a discussion like this. There may well be some truth to it in some cases, but I'm not at all convinced that it holds in general (my experiences with major open source alternatives to things like browsers and office suites certainly haven't supported your claim) and there's precious little hard evidence to rely on in discussions anyway.
I appreciate your arguments about capitalism and market choice, but I think they fall down because we don't really have a free market. You say:
That's not really true, though, because the market has no choice. This "no guarantees" condition is clearly in the interests of any software supplier, and can never be a benefit to a software consumer. However, because everyone adds it (for your typical OS or office apps, say) the consumer/free market principles don't apply.
Under these circumstances, I think it is beneficial for the legal system to wade in and redress the consumer/supplier power balance. Otherwise, just as in any monopoly type situation, you have an imbalanced system where there's no incentive to change. The costs of being the first (and, for some time, only) supplier to offer genuine guarantees could be huge compared to any modest financial benefits.
Take a look at my first post to this thread. :-)
What they should do is remove any legal weight from clauses along the lines of "This software comes with no warranty of any kind, including fitness for any particular purpose..."
If you're taking my money for it, it should be fit for something, just the same as any other product, and just the same as any other sales pitch, I should be given a fair and accurate description of what the software I'm paying for is or isn't fit to do.
Part of the problem here is that most people on this thread seem to be thinking in absolutes: "if Word crashes, I can sue MS for [evil grin and pinkie finger to mouth] one million dollars!" It's not about 100% reliability, it's about reliable enough. A word processor doesn't need to be bug-free, it just needs to be reliable enough to write my documents under normal circumstances. MS might reasonably be expected to pay some compensation for excessive downtime due to their carelessness with the recent product activation issue, but not if Word crashes because of some incompatibility with other software on your machine about which they can do nothing.
Surely it should all come down to fair and reasonable marketing claims (don't say it's 100% reliable if it ain't) and fair and reasonable compensation when those claims are found to be erroneous (if you said it was in good faith, but it turned out not to be, you give me back some reasonable amount in compensation, depending on how effectively you addressed the problem once it was discovered).
If you want 99.99999% up-time for your server, you can buy from someone who claims to provide it, paying whatever the going rate is for it, and expect to get it (or compensation). However, you aren't entitled to assume that WinXP is suitable for running operating theatre laser surgery algorithms "just because" and then sue MS when it doesn't live up to the job you've foolishly given it.
In most places, free-as-in-beer stuff is already fundamentally a special case, because unless something of value changes hands in both directions, you don't have a contract.
Of course, free-as-in-speech software neither deserves nor should get any special privileges. If you make money by selling me an OS that happens to be GPL'd, open source, or otherwise "free", that's still something you're selling me. "Oh, you should have looked at all the source code for Linux and spotted the critical bug for yourself" isn't much of an excuse at that point; I'm paying you to have done that for me.
No, of course not. However, I've noticed that those who have been thrown into a position of power with a genuinely random selection of their peers -- jury service being the most obvious example I could think of -- generally take a less positive view of approaches like the one you mention after the experience.
Well, in the absence of any better ideas, at least the typical voting system today does this to some degree. It allows anyone who wants to to have their say. Further, by not forcing everyone to vote, only those who want to express an opinion do so. There tends to be a high correlation between those who are informed on a subject and those who have an opinion on it. Ergo, you have an unbiased, self-selecting system in which no-one is disadvantaged, but you tend to get a more informed group voting than the general population.
True. However, IMHO this is a problem with party politics, particularly in the US where there are only two realistic candidates, rather than with voting in general.
It is also confused by having voting systems where you elect a single person both to represent local interests, and to have a say in the overall running of government. It's quite possible that you would want a particular individual who is dedicated and has solid ethics as your personal representative, while at the same time disagreeing with the politics of the party that this person represents.
These are the things that encourage the "old boy network" and non-representative representation, but they aren't a necessary by-product of a one-man, one-optional-vote system.
I'm guessing you've never been called up for jury duty and had to work with a truly representative sample of your peers, right?
The problem with democracy, as realised by most voting systems in the world today, is that it only works in the presence of an informed and rational population.
I would far rather have a system that self-selects an informed and rational subset of the population to an acceptable degree, and then trust them to vote, run the country or whatever, than have a completely random system that forced people who really couldn't care less to make decisions on behalf of those who could.
I don't dislike all of the scenes, but I'm not convinced they all improved the film, either. It's long already, and you don't need yet more plodding introduction in the first half of the film if it's not furthering the plot. As I said, I'd be interested to know which version (or combination of versions) Jackson would have preferred to make, without any external pressures on time, extras, etc.
It think there's an assumption in there that not everyone will agree with. I didn't think the new versions of the original Star Wars films were an improvement, and I'm not completely convinced by all of the extra footage in the FotR Special Edition, either. I'd be interested to know whether Jackson and co actually wanted to add the extra footage and didn't because it would have made for too long a cinematic release, or whether they've just added it because, like most DVDs, the powers that be demand extra material whether it's any good or not.
Maybe not, but everyone I know who bought it, from fellow geeks to guys at work to my younger siblings, bought the extended edition.
Crucial aren't perfect -- we've had the odd dodgy thing from them at work -- but their service is excellent and their quality is generally high, so I'd recommend them without hesitation. They're well worth the small price premium over no-name brands without the same quality, compatibility guarantee, etc, IMHO.
There are other makes, Corsair for example, which are claimed to have even higher specs. You do pay a lot for that tiny bit extra, though. Unless you're heavily into overclocking (in which case I'm sorry, but you have to accept any problems you get) it's hardly worth spending nearly twice as much to get kit like Corsair rather than a good, solid bet like Crucial.
Everybody runs...
Actually, for practical purposes, SourceSafe does randomly corrupt your database. This is the reason for all the restrictions you mention. It fundamentally requires safe clients, and that fundamentally isn't a reliable thing to do. Requiring regular back-ups and running Analyze frequently (great, several hours of downtime when no-one can use the DB) is not an acceptable solution in a professional development environment. Hell, even MS won't use it for serious projects...
Chalk me up as one more CVS advocate, please. It ain't perfect, but we never had a problem with it we couldn't fix.
If you're referring to the header/source file separation, then yes, I agree. It's an irritating implementation detail that ought to be hidden away by more powerful development tools.
(BTW, FYI, it's "idiosyncrasy", at least in the UK.)
I'm not sure the side-effects of that are necessarily good things, either. Writing function definitions, constant values etc. all in-line, as Java, C# etc. do, has its own disadvantages. Most significantly, you lose the nice "summary" documentation that a well-written header file provides. And you still have a lot of the same problems I mentioned anyway: if you implement an interface or inherit from a base class in Java, you still have to duplicate the name, parameters, return type etc. of that interface in the implementing class.
I guess my point is that I think worrying about the header/source separation is shooting for the wrong target. What we ought to be doing is allowing programmers to write a simple, self-documenting interface (as you'd typically find in a good header file), but then having the sort of development environment where you can just open up the implementation of a particular function without having to retype all of its signature information. Similarly, a class that inherits base class functionality in whatever guise shouldn't have to duplicate the signatures of things it overrides or implements, there should just be some indication that all functionality of the base class has been inherited, and a means to open that up directly as well.
Once you've got to that sort of level, basic manipulations like renaming or adding a parameter to a function or moving some function implementations up from a derived class up to a base should be trivial "minor UI trick" features that take a couple of seconds, instead of the ten minutes of error-prone search and replace they tend to involve with most tools today.
None of this is exactly rocket science, I'm sure you'll agree, and obviously you could write a good editor that worked with any of C++, Java, C#, Eiffel or whatever that provided this functionality. My argument is that this sort of thing should be the norm, not something that most programmers don't seem to use at all, and where even those tools that are available tend to be expensive and elaborate but not particularly powerful.
Ironically enough, I think Microsoft's own spokeswoman called this one right. From the end of the article:
Laws shouldn't take sides in trade competitions, either way. They should mandate that the governing bodies exercise due care in examining all relevant options and then choose the one that is most in the interests of those they represent, and leave it at that.
IMHO, they shouldn't say "you must/should/might consider open source" any more than they'd say anything about Microsoft, Dell, GPL or BSD licences, or any other specific named player in the field.
Oh goody, an AC slashbot who thinks they're clever because they can use a word with more than two syllables and link to a definition of the term, just in case I'm so illiterate that I don't understand it. How terribly original.
I'd love to think this was intended to be a rhetorical question. I might have hoped for it to be so, but in case you hadn't noticed, we're actually in a thread discussing people who are committing this particular fuckwitticism.
No, but there are probably quite a few people here who didn't know as much about Microsoft's dubious business practices, or the details of how their software performs, as they do now. I imagine a lot more people who find that information switch away from the Microsoft route than towards it.
Resorting to things like e-mail flooding is childish at best, and downright damaging (and hopefully illegal) at worst.
This is the 21st century and we're supposed to adults. There are better ways to deal with disagreeing viewpoints than "My server's got more bandwidth than yours, so nyeeeah!"
I'm not sure the "any publicity is good publicity" mantra applies when you're talking about an informed and critical forum like /. though. Just ask Microsoft how many new users they've acquired through their publicity here -- and they even get their own icon... ;-)
I installed OpenOffice on my new PC last Xmas, and have used it exclusively ever since. I pretty much totally agree with your assessment.
It's a product with a lot of potential, and it's fine as a "good enough" alternative for typical daily use, but it does have some major flaws compared to MS' offering. The spreadsheet is underpowered and graphing is hard to get right. (How do you update the source data range for a chart, anyway?) The word processor apparently offers no mechanism to assign keyboard shortcuts to styles or special characters, making both features absurdly unwieldy. And it is waaaay more buggy than any recent version of MS Office. In particular, it crashes and takes out any other OpenOffice applications that are running if you try to load the wrong MS Word document (and not necessarily a particularly complicated one, either).
All in all, I'm grateful for having the product -- it's saved me having to buy any more MS software, since I don't believe in ripping off commercial products -- but as an alternative to Microsoft for those who can afford it, it's definitely "7/10, must try harder" for now.