Lacking multiple inheritance is understandable, but they didn't go far enough -- they should have removed all implementation inheritance, and allow delegation to any class that's inferrable as a subtype.
That doesn't make sense. Surely you'd want to delegate to a supertype, not a subtype?
Type inference in Java. Oh sorry, I dropped the brown acid again.
Java already has type inference. What do you think type-checking x.y().z() does, guesswork?
The problem with creating a new protocol for email is always going to be: how do you get people to use it?
Can you imagine going to a party, making an important business/personal connection with someone, and then saying "Oh sorry I don't have an email address, I have this new EMAIL-PLUS address - it's much better, but it's completely incompatible!"
Get back to me when you work out the back-compatibility problem.
The patent laws and procedures are very clear about not being able to patent anything that has been published or publicly exists (that is, for sale) as prior art.
Actually, that's not quite true. Bizarrely, in the US you are allowed to publish up to 12 months before filing. Which doesn't make any sense, but there you go.
Most of the stuff that gets deprecated is fixable with a trivial rewrite. Also, most deprecation warnings can be ignored for years and years (possibly "for ever").
4 certainly isn't easiest (without the Office source code, anyway). Word on Crossover today is already miles better than OpenOffice Writer at working with Word documents (unsurprisingly).
It means "fake grassroots". Kind of obvious when you think about it. As to wear it comes from, I don't know, but it used to be a fairly common term of abuse on Slashdot in the early years.:)
So trying to draw an arbitrary distinction between anonymous cowards on slashdot and anonymous cowards in email is just that, arbitrary.
Actually, there is no need for such a distinction. I can filter out anonymous cowards posting crap on Slashdot if I want to. Why shouldn't I be able to do the same with email? It annoys me that I can't.
The features in C# 2.0 have either been in Lisp for decades (lambdas, closures) or are not necessary in Lisp (iterators, enumerators --- which, btw, are theoretically not necessary in C# 2.0 either because of lambdas and closures!)
Lambdas are just an aesthetics/keystrokes issue. In my opinion, Lisp-lovers need to stop focusing so much on petty, marginal issues like that, and start focusing on really useful subjects - like formal verification and strong typing (which go very well together).
Part of the reason people stop listening the moment somebody says Lisp is that the Lisp community is *so* rabid and *so* unyielding.
That's probably because the only people who think Lisp Is The Answer to Everything are a little bit insane.
No, that only applies to preliminary injuctions, which are applied for before the case proper. Permanent injuctions can still be obtained without compensating the violator.
I work for an investment bank and IB analysts pull information from EVERY source.
That may or may not be so. Analysts also sometimes lie, as the New York Attorney General recently demonstrated in a successful court case. I won't speculate on whether it's more of a case of ignorance, lying, or a cynical evaluation of the ignorance of the market on the part of certain investors, that has been driving up the price in this case.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
Let's apply Occam's Razor here: I move that they are getting lots of attention because (a) they are sqwarking a lot; (b) they are scaring some Fortune 500 companies, at least temporarily until the CxOs talk to their legal advisors; (c) there is a lot of money and a catastophic harm to the Linux market puportedly at stake here, if you believe SCO.
Attention does not imply correctness. Popularity does not imply correctness.
The GPL has never been tested in court, I haven't seen anything indicating that this is 100% reliable.
Well, admittedly there is a flaky argument prevalent on Slashdot and Groklaw. The arguments runs that if the GPL were "invalidated" it would revert to "no rights to copy", which would kill SCO in punitive damages. Not necessarily. Another possibility is that the court might try to find the "nearest charitable purpose" that is similar to the spirit of the GPL but doesn't break the law.
So that counter-argument doesn't really work. But the problem with your argument is more fundamental. In order to talk about this sensibly we have to speculate on what precisely the judge might try to strike down. No-one, to my knowledge, has put forward a good argument for why any law or constitutional amendment would invalidate any aspect of the GPL - least of all SCO.
Granted, the least popular aspect of the GPL is the copyleft idea. But it is a completely logical fallacy to argue that because it is unpopular with some, then it is somehow legally dubious. Yes, it is perhaps the most likely aspect for SCO to attack. But without a visible chink in the armour, why should we worry?
I think the onus is on you to suggest an actual argument for why the GPL might fail in court.
There are good reasons why they wouldn't release this code. If they did, the Linux community would make sure that the offending code wasn't in the next kernal release (which would probably be all of a week in coming) and then SCO could only go after users for past use of their code. That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out. That's much more enforcable as well.
Note that SCO (both predecessors in interest, old SCO and Caldera) has contributed to Linux massively, and even sold it, and continued to offer it for months after evidence of infringement was allegedly discovered. So what we have here is a company spending years giving out its own product for free and misleadingly giving the impression - in a very clear license, the GPL! - that the product being given out is unencumbered in all relevant respects. Even if SCO could persuade a judge that the infringements were not noticed due to gross incompetence on SCO's part, any reasonable judge would give all parties a reasonable grace period to wait for the patch to come out and apply it.
And the law (and IBM's contract with SCO, incidentally) obliges SCO to reveal what code is infringing before it can claim damages. Damages incurred by users prior to that time are innocent infringements, and although they may be technically liable, would any judge in the land award SCO money based on its own failure to mitigate the alleged damages? No, it would not. There is no successful precedent that I have heard of for such abusive rent-seeking towards innocent third-
Software engineering is a social science[*], and therefore a difficult science. There's too many variables to know for sure whether your lauded Factor X was really responsible for an increase in productivity. In fact, it's sometimes impossible to prove that there was an increase in productivity, when projects being compared are really different.
How do you measure productivity anyway? LOC doesn't really work, because rewriting code to make it smaller does not mean negative productivity.
--
[*] Forgive the abuse of terminology here, please. You know what I'm getting at.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, why should catching Osama have any measurable impact on Bush's support? I simply don't understand it.
That doesn't make sense. Surely you'd want to delegate to a supertype, not a subtype?
Type inference in Java. Oh sorry, I dropped the brown acid again.
Java already has type inference. What do you think type-checking x.y().z() does, guesswork?
"Free" trade does not exist to help the poor.
The EU already spends proportionally more on development aid than the US.
Can you imagine going to a party, making an important business/personal connection with someone, and then saying "Oh sorry I don't have an email address, I have this new EMAIL-PLUS address - it's much better, but it's completely incompatible!"
Get back to me when you work out the back-compatibility problem.
Actually, that's not quite true. Bizarrely, in the US you are allowed to publish up to 12 months before filing. Which doesn't make any sense, but there you go.
More to the point, you're wrong.
Make Backups!!!!
Remind me again, just what is the difference between functional and non-functional languages?
This is a popular misconception.
Count the number of non-free packages available from Debian.
Now count the number of non-free packages in Fedora.
Actually, there is no need for such a distinction. I can filter out anonymous cowards posting crap on Slashdot if I want to. Why shouldn't I be able to do the same with email? It annoys me that I can't.
Lambdas are just an aesthetics/keystrokes issue. In my opinion, Lisp-lovers need to stop focusing so much on petty, marginal issues like that, and start focusing on really useful subjects - like formal verification and strong typing (which go very well together).
Part of the reason people stop listening the moment somebody says Lisp is that the Lisp community is *so* rabid and *so* unyielding.
That's probably because the only people who think Lisp Is The Answer to Everything are a little bit insane.
Clue #2: They're not very impressive, where they exist at all.
No internet cafes in your area? Unlucky. Work disallows HTTPS? Unlikely to happen.
Scratch "time" and replace it with "forever", and you just might be onto something.
That may or may not be so. Analysts also sometimes lie, as the New York Attorney General recently demonstrated in a successful court case. I won't speculate on whether it's more of a case of ignorance, lying, or a cynical evaluation of the ignorance of the market on the part of certain investors, that has been driving up the price in this case.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
Let's apply Occam's Razor here: I move that they are getting lots of attention because (a) they are sqwarking a lot; (b) they are scaring some Fortune 500 companies, at least temporarily until the CxOs talk to their legal advisors; (c) there is a lot of money and a catastophic harm to the Linux market puportedly at stake here, if you believe SCO.
Attention does not imply correctness. Popularity does not imply correctness.
The GPL has never been tested in court, I haven't seen anything indicating that this is 100% reliable.
Well, admittedly there is a flaky argument prevalent on Slashdot and Groklaw. The arguments runs that if the GPL were "invalidated" it would revert to "no rights to copy", which would kill SCO in punitive damages. Not necessarily. Another possibility is that the court might try to find the "nearest charitable purpose" that is similar to the spirit of the GPL but doesn't break the law.
So that counter-argument doesn't really work. But the problem with your argument is more fundamental. In order to talk about this sensibly we have to speculate on what precisely the judge might try to strike down. No-one, to my knowledge, has put forward a good argument for why any law or constitutional amendment would invalidate any aspect of the GPL - least of all SCO.
Granted, the least popular aspect of the GPL is the copyleft idea. But it is a completely logical fallacy to argue that because it is unpopular with some, then it is somehow legally dubious. Yes, it is perhaps the most likely aspect for SCO to attack. But without a visible chink in the armour, why should we worry?
I think the onus is on you to suggest an actual argument for why the GPL might fail in court.
There are good reasons why they wouldn't release this code. If they did, the Linux community would make sure that the offending code wasn't in the next kernal release (which would probably be all of a week in coming) and then SCO could only go after users for past use of their code. That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out. That's much more enforcable as well.
Note that SCO (both predecessors in interest, old SCO and Caldera) has contributed to Linux massively, and even sold it, and continued to offer it for months after evidence of infringement was allegedly discovered. So what we have here is a company spending years giving out its own product for free and misleadingly giving the impression - in a very clear license, the GPL! - that the product being given out is unencumbered in all relevant respects. Even if SCO could persuade a judge that the infringements were not noticed due to gross incompetence on SCO's part, any reasonable judge would give all parties a reasonable grace period to wait for the patch to come out and apply it.
And the law (and IBM's contract with SCO, incidentally) obliges SCO to reveal what code is infringing before it can claim damages. Damages incurred by users prior to that time are innocent infringements, and although they may be technically liable, would any judge in the land award SCO money based on its own failure to mitigate the alleged damages? No, it would not. There is no successful precedent that I have heard of for such abusive rent-seeking towards innocent third-
How do you measure productivity anyway? LOC doesn't really work, because rewriting code to make it smaller does not mean negative productivity.
--
[*] Forgive the abuse of terminology here, please. You know what I'm getting at.