I don't see where forcing Microsoft to include Sun's VM provides any benefit to the majority of Windows users. I can see where it benefits open-source developers, and where it definitely benefits Sun. But client-side Java apps are on the wane on the Windows platform and this merely adds to the bloat.
Perhaps both VMs should be removed and only be installed at the users option, if it's necessary for software to function, but otherwise, it's useless.
So, who benefits? This decision should have been about what's best for users, not Sun or Microsoft. There are other ways to punish MS for failing to live up to a written contract.
Really? There is no historical evidence to back your claim - the lawsuit against Lindows was on the basis of trademark infringement. The lawsuits against Sun, and vice-versa, are corporate meat-down match-ups, proving little and in the end signifying even less.
Microsoft seems to pretty much ignore efforts like this because they are more interested in the future of computing, not the past, which is definitely where NT4 belongs. The reason they have gone after Linux hammer and tongs is because it cuts into their market heavily, whereas ReactOS is aimed at those who probably were customers at one time but are not anymore and most likely won't be again.
I would be very, very surprised if Microsoft even gives a damn about the ReactOS project, since there is no way to provide the type of support that the customers that buy into NT and derivatives are used to dealing with.
They've got one - it's called RTF. It's pretty much embedded in the system. If that's not good enough, there's also the option to encode documents as PDF. Additionally, you have XML.
Admittedly, these won't cover every application under the sun, but they can certainly handle the most common of office application requirements.
The way the programming environment is set up, you don't really need Open Office for OS X, since the native classes can build a word processor or a spreadsheet with very little effort.
Take a look at Mellel. If you can ignore the hype about all the new, innovative features (which is pretty much marketing hyperbole), something like that can be cooked up in a weekend or two without much coding at all. And it will be able to save in a format that's readily interpreted by some other application on just about every platform.
As an example, books that cost $100 in the US usually cost $25 in Asian countries. They are identical in every respect. How do you explain that?
I would say that you are ignorant of economics, among other things. The cost of a good or service is determined not only by it's relative value in a given society (in this case, the US vs. Asia), but also by the cost of production. Wages and overhead are lower in some Asian industries than in the US, as is the cost of marketing. Then there is the demand for a given item - the same textbook which cost $100 in the US and $25 in Asia has these price values because that's what the market will bear. This is the basis of a capitalist economy.
When you complain about things not being as cheap here as in Asia, consider taking a basic economics class as an adjunct to your CS studies so that you understand the reason why.
Failing that, I suggest you go to Asia to buy your textbooks.
For all you paranoid types out there, this GEOUrl thing is remarkably easy to defeat
1. don't participate - it ain't mandatory, so you have no reason to bitch. 2. lie - hell, it could even help. make it look like you live someplace glamorous rather than in the basement of your parent's house in Poughkeepsie.
Getting them to commit to a product based on ogg is a very risky business, especially if it's based on the reader base of Slashdot.
If you figure that/. has a million individual readers, then only a small percentage of those are going to have the money or the interest in purchasing a portable ogg player, which means that the production run is a one-time thing with very little chance of permanence.
The market might build over time, but by then the company owuld probably have gone under. They should save their money until ogg is at least as big as quicktime or avi.
Re:What ever happened to...
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But are you distributing code or information? I would think that SourceForge would be well within their rights to pull code from the various projects and keep use of entirely in-house. Their primary purpose is to distribute other's code, not their own.
It might be a different matter ethically, but failure to follow a certain ethical code is not necessarily an actionable offense.
Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?
Sorry, sport, but your answer doesn't wash. In-house tools are designed to be exactly that: in-house.
A product released to the general public that expects to have a large following must take into consideration users of all levels of experience when designing the UI.
Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve
You don't try to actually sell your software to a large audience, do you? UI design is absolutely essential to any program, whether it be a graphic-based or text-based.
That is not to say that Blender should be dumbed down for the sake of newbies, but a little more care in designing the UI would have gone a long way to pushing it to the forefront of 3D design software.
Most people don't know about paper quality. HP inkjet paper has a higher density and brightness than the standard paper you run through your laser printer. It is designed to hold the ink better.
The trick here is that they want you to buy HP printer supplies, but reality is Hammermill and Weyerhauser have perfectly good inkjet paper that is just as bright and dense.
So whenever is says HP quality paper, think "bright and dense". That's all it takes.
Letting the Interent be run primarily by companies that have the bottom line on their mind, is not the way to foster freedom on the Internet
At best, and worst, the internet should be neutral to all ideology. It's not the job of the administrators to make a determination on who's right or wrong, we have government, the people, and their consciences for that.
A commercial business is no worse or better than a non-profit until it is proven in a court that they have broken the law. A non-profit is driven by ideology, which may be hostile to other ideologies, which (at least under our laws) have the same rights to speak and be heard.
Having a commercial company run a registry is a good way to ensure that the registry keeps running, as opposed to a non-profit, whose funding levels change at the whim of government and contributors.
Let the internet serve up information and leave the ideology to those who provide the information. Proactivity in a registrar can only lead to worse problems.
Well, there's also the planned lifecycle of software where companies plan for an upgrade every two to four years for stability, and absolutely refuse to upgrade otherwise. City government offices in particular.
Why did we ever waste time with civil rights legislation or constitutional protections, I wonder?
Because this is not a civil rights issue, dude. Look, it's pretty simple. If the company owns the equipment you use during work hours and pays for the bandwidth you use to access the internet, they get to say how you use it.
If the company is in a position that any sort of unapproved disclosure of corporate information could cause harm, then they certainly have the right to restrict access and monitor their employees. One good example - a bank. There's so much confidential information floating around a bank that it's a wonder they even allow a single internet connection.
Second, if a company is worried that an employee is going off the reservation, then they certainly have a right to monitor the activities of that employee vis-a-vis their computer use to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of corporate information.
Now, a reasonable company is not going to gripe about the occasional personal email, or the occasional surfing frenzy as long as you take care of business. A reasonable company is also going to state up front what the rules are so that these questions don't come up. But nothing requires a company to be reasonable to employees except a legally unenforceable social contract, a legally enforceable written contract, and state and federal labor laws.
you don't have to worry about Sun doing funky stuff to your box.
I was under the understanding that the best defense is to assume that the other guy is ALWAYS out to get you. This, like many other things, is something that should be left to the user to decide, not forced upon them by fiat. You can't have it both ways.
Besides, the agreement explicitly gives Sun the right to affect your machine without prior notification. That, in and of itself, is alarming, regardless of the end result. There is no way of knowing whether or not Sun includes malware in the download since you are not allowed to examine it first.
Actually, I would say sponsor sports events with real world equivalents
10, 20, and 50 meter Knife Throwing - target is a co-worker with a target on his back
1, 2, and 30 minute Coffee Chug - survivors of the caffeine overload get... well, to survive.
Fastest Flamer - not what it sounds like. First person to flame a positive remark about opponent's OS of choice gets the gold. Extra points for making them cry or commit suicide. All entries must be typed.
Well, you've also left out that there is no guaranteed formula for writing a "winning" game. The market is fickle - today's Quake maybe tomorrow's Jet Moto (I cry when I realize that it will never be available for Windows OR Linux).
Do problems like these ever occur in the real world? Why not a programming contest that solves real world issues - like optimizing payments for that overly large hospital bill? optimal routes to a pizza shop? or automated routing methods for maximum kills in Quake based on changing input data?
I think I see the problem. Somebody else better come up with real world programming problems (reordering 10 million record databases with field conversion and translation from flat file to relational).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see where forcing Microsoft to include Sun's VM provides any benefit to the majority of Windows users. I can see where it benefits open-source developers, and where it definitely benefits Sun. But client-side Java apps are on the wane on the Windows platform and this merely adds to the bloat.
Perhaps both VMs should be removed and only be installed at the users option, if it's necessary for software to function, but otherwise, it's useless.
So, who benefits? This decision should have been about what's best for users, not Sun or Microsoft. There are other ways to punish MS for failing to live up to a written contract.
Really? There is no historical evidence to back your claim - the lawsuit against Lindows was on the basis of trademark infringement. The lawsuits against Sun, and vice-versa, are corporate meat-down match-ups, proving little and in the end signifying even less.
Microsoft seems to pretty much ignore efforts like this because they are more interested in the future of computing, not the past, which is definitely where NT4 belongs. The reason they have gone after Linux hammer and tongs is because it cuts into their market heavily, whereas ReactOS is aimed at those who probably were customers at one time but are not anymore and most likely won't be again.
I would be very, very surprised if Microsoft even gives a damn about the ReactOS project, since there is no way to provide the type of support that the customers that buy into NT and derivatives are used to dealing with.
They've got one - it's called RTF. It's pretty much embedded in the system. If that's not good enough, there's also the option to encode documents as PDF. Additionally, you have XML.
Admittedly, these won't cover every application under the sun, but they can certainly handle the most common of office application requirements.
The way the programming environment is set up, you don't really need Open Office for OS X, since the native classes can build a word processor or a spreadsheet with very little effort.
Take a look at Mellel. If you can ignore the hype about all the new, innovative features (which is pretty much marketing hyperbole), something like that can be cooked up in a weekend or two without much coding at all. And it will be able to save in a format that's readily interpreted by some other application on just about every platform.
As an example, books that cost $100 in the US usually cost $25 in Asian countries. They are identical in every respect. How do you explain that?
I would say that you are ignorant of economics, among other things. The cost of a good or service is determined not only by it's relative value in a given society (in this case, the US vs. Asia), but also by the cost of production. Wages and overhead are lower in some Asian industries than in the US, as is the cost of marketing. Then there is the demand for a given item - the same textbook which cost $100 in the US and $25 in Asia has these price values because that's what the market will bear. This is the basis of a capitalist economy.
When you complain about things not being as cheap here as in Asia, consider taking a basic economics class as an adjunct to your CS studies so that you understand the reason why.
Failing that, I suggest you go to Asia to buy your textbooks.
For all you paranoid types out there, this GEOUrl thing is remarkably easy to defeat
1. don't participate - it ain't mandatory, so you have no reason to bitch.
2. lie - hell, it could even help. make it look like you live someplace glamorous rather than in the basement of your parent's house in Poughkeepsie.
I fail to see a problem here.
Getting them to commit to a product based on ogg is a very risky business, especially if it's based on the reader base of Slashdot.
/. has a million individual readers, then only a small percentage of those are going to have the money or the interest in purchasing a portable ogg player, which means that the production run is a one-time thing with very little chance of permanence.
If you figure that
The market might build over time, but by then the company owuld probably have gone under. They should save their money until ogg is at least as big as quicktime or avi.
It's called IRC.
the important thing is ... WHEN ARE THEY GOING TO RELEASE THE NEXT FERSHLUGGINER BOXED SET?!??!!!?
AARRGGHH!!
(I don't EVEN want to hear about how they're already out in the UK. I KNOW they're out in the UK. I want them out in AMERICA!)
I'd be curious to know why he's looking at 10-year old boys asses.
So now I have to replace my perfectly good stereo equipment with something else?
Geez. I don't know why I even bother.
since publishing on the web is distributing
But are you distributing code or information? I would think that SourceForge would be well within their rights to pull code from the various projects and keep use of entirely in-house. Their primary purpose is to distribute other's code, not their own.
It might be a different matter ethically, but failure to follow a certain ethical code is not necessarily an actionable offense.
Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?
Sorry, sport, but your answer doesn't wash. In-house tools are designed to be exactly that: in-house.
A product released to the general public that expects to have a large following must take into consideration users of all levels of experience when designing the UI.
Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve
You don't try to actually sell your software to a large audience, do you? UI design is absolutely essential to any program, whether it be a graphic-based or text-based.
That is not to say that Blender should be dumbed down for the sake of newbies, but a little more care in designing the UI would have gone a long way to pushing it to the forefront of 3D design software.
It's free, it's Open Source, and it's got better adherence to the W3C specs than Opera.
I was an affirmed IE snob and I now use Mozilla for 90% of my surfing.
Most people don't know about paper quality. HP inkjet paper has a higher density and brightness than the standard paper you run through your laser printer. It is designed to hold the ink better.
The trick here is that they want you to buy HP printer supplies, but reality is Hammermill and Weyerhauser have perfectly good inkjet paper that is just as bright and dense.
So whenever is says HP quality paper, think "bright and dense". That's all it takes.
the only cool thing i can think of is "Secret Service"
That's as maybe, but in the UK, you get to say the magic words: "What's all this, then?" and don't even have to sound pretentious!!!!!
Letting the Interent be run primarily by companies that have the bottom line on their mind, is not the way to foster freedom on the Internet
At best, and worst, the internet should be neutral to all ideology. It's not the job of the administrators to make a determination on who's right or wrong, we have government, the people, and their consciences for that.
A commercial business is no worse or better than a non-profit until it is proven in a court that they have broken the law. A non-profit is driven by ideology, which may be hostile to other ideologies, which (at least under our laws) have the same rights to speak and be heard.
Having a commercial company run a registry is a good way to ensure that the registry keeps running, as opposed to a non-profit, whose funding levels change at the whim of government and contributors.
Let the internet serve up information and leave the ideology to those who provide the information. Proactivity in a registrar can only lead to worse problems.
Well, there's also the planned lifecycle of software where companies plan for an upgrade every two to four years for stability, and absolutely refuse to upgrade otherwise. City government offices in particular.
Whatever works for them, I suppose.
The last time I checked, Google wasn't a democracy. If it was, I wouldn't have voted for that name. Since it isn't - oh, well.
There's one in every crowd.
Why did we ever waste time with civil rights legislation or constitutional protections, I wonder?
Because this is not a civil rights issue, dude. Look, it's pretty simple. If the company owns the equipment you use during work hours and pays for the bandwidth you use to access the internet, they get to say how you use it.
If the company is in a position that any sort of unapproved disclosure of corporate information could cause harm, then they certainly have the right to restrict access and monitor their employees. One good example - a bank. There's so much confidential information floating around a bank that it's a wonder they even allow a single internet connection.
Second, if a company is worried that an employee is going off the reservation, then they certainly have a right to monitor the activities of that employee vis-a-vis their computer use to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of corporate information.
Now, a reasonable company is not going to gripe about the occasional personal email, or the occasional surfing frenzy as long as you take care of business. A reasonable company is also going to state up front what the rules are so that these questions don't come up. But nothing requires a company to be reasonable to employees except a legally unenforceable social contract, a legally enforceable written contract, and state and federal labor laws.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
you don't have to worry about Sun doing funky stuff to your box.
I was under the understanding that the best defense is to assume that the other guy is ALWAYS out to get you. This, like many other things, is something that should be left to the user to decide, not forced upon them by fiat. You can't have it both ways.
Besides, the agreement explicitly gives Sun the right to affect your machine without prior notification. That, in and of itself, is alarming, regardless of the end result. There is no way of knowing whether or not Sun includes malware in the download since you are not allowed to examine it first.
Actually, I would say sponsor sports events with real world equivalents
... well, to survive.
10, 20, and 50 meter Knife Throwing - target is a co-worker with a target on his back
1, 2, and 30 minute Coffee Chug - survivors of the caffeine overload get
Fastest Flamer - not what it sounds like. First person to flame a positive remark about opponent's OS of choice gets the gold. Extra points for making them cry or commit suicide. All entries must be typed.
Well, you've also left out that there is no guaranteed formula for writing a "winning" game. The market is fickle - today's Quake maybe tomorrow's Jet Moto (I cry when I realize that it will never be available for Windows OR Linux).
Do problems like these ever occur in the real world? Why not a programming contest that solves real world issues - like optimizing payments for that overly large hospital bill? optimal routes to a pizza shop? or automated routing methods for maximum kills in Quake based on changing input data?
I think I see the problem. Somebody else better come up with real world programming problems (reordering 10 million record databases with field conversion and translation from flat file to relational).
it also allows the hardware vendors to become software distributors, i.e., allowing them to retain some control over their customers.
You know, I think you're onto something that everyone else missed.
Linux may free the corporation from the dependence on hardware and software vendors, but it puts the average consumer square in their grasp.
He then told me that there's no reason to switch if I'm comfortable with what I'm using.
/., your gonna get slapped at some point.
The same thing can apply to the use of another OS, you know. When you start throwing reason around here on