I'm still not too good to say that IE is by far the best browser.
I disagree. It might be reasonable to describe IE as the best HTML renderer (depending on your point of view). But there's a big bug in IE whereby if its market share exceeds about 70%, it hands control of the HTML standard to a company who wants to pollute it. Then IE will rapidly become the only browser, and after a while it will even become crap as an HTML renderer (because no competition to beat). That's a pretty big bug IMHO.
The use of the term "alpha" to describe it is worse than meaningless. Alpha can represent ANYTHING
So do you also object to using "pi" to represent a particular number close to 3.141592653589793238462643383279? Pi can represent ANYTHING, including products, probabilities, planes, the number of primes below a number, and my granny's phone number. It's not "pi", it's "the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter".
Mozilla gets its ass kicked by Opera in nearly every imaginable test (even IE 5.0 is better than Mozilla)
How about the test of "will I have to abandon this platform if a single company goes bust / decides to discontinue development"? Especially for businesses, this is important. It costs time to change the browser on 100 machines, and it costs a hell of a lot of time to answer the support queries of 100 users who've just been handed a new browser.
Opera and IE may be alright now, but they're not open-source so you may get left high and dry. That's a problem if you've just spent a fortune developing an intranet which relies on one of them.
Given that there's only 2 (3? 4? a handful anyway) of "them" actually in the market, you're quite right. Whether the free market is enough in these conditions to ensure that "they" are not anticompetitive is a completely different question.
Autocompletion is possible with Cooledit. Doesn't automatically pick up your custom C++ classes, but that's a mixed blessing anyway. I know people that type the full word without the dot, then go back and put the dot in, so that the autocompletion doesn't freeze the machine for a couple of secs.
What about the part where he defines the 'relevant market' that MS supposedly has a monopoly in?
Seems fine to me. He looks at what MS sells and then looks at what could replace MS's product.
Server OSs. "Nope they cost too much".
Non-intel compatible PC OSs. "Nope, they'd have to buy a new computer, and even for people buying their computer now it would be expensive cos Mac hardware is specialist and costly." (But he says MS has a monopoly even if you include MacOS, cos it's a niche product)
Information appliances. "Nope, they're not powerful enough yet."
Network computers. "Nope, the market is tiny and immature, and there's network problems".
Etc. It's as rigourous as something that hypothetical can be.
BTW, is "gotten" preterite? Can you only use it for things that happened in the past, or can you use it about things that are still happening now? I.e. can you say "We've gotten money from the government every week since February"?
The only reason this might *seem* illogical is that no one uses the English language correctly anymore
No. It's because when you want to say "The car of X" the other way round in English, you normally say "X's car". An *exception* to this is if X is a pronoun. So it is an exceptional rule, which was the previous poster's point.
BTW is "anymore" valid in American? Don't think it is in British. (I am merely curious).
Mac, so praised for the greateness of its UI [...] technically is even more behind than Windows.
Remember that Microsoft got their monopoly position using Windows 3.x and only consolidated it with Windows 9x. You'd be hard-pressed to say that Windows 3.x was better than the best of the competition in any way apart from ubiquity of applications - and that happened because MS was big and already had a DOS monopoly to leverage.
Microsoft cannot abandon their user base and start from scratch (like BeOS.)
Yes they can. The only difference is that they'll have bad publicity and they'll be half a trillion dollars richer.
Personally, I've found that this whole sham of a trial has greatly lessened my faith in the intelligence, circumpsectness, and wisdom of the judiciary.
I challenge you to find one unambiguous hole in PJ's finding of fact. It was a monster document but I read it and couldn't find one place where its accuracy was inferior to Microsoft's proposed version.
The remedy is more controversial, but that's partly the nature of the thing. Hindsight's easier than foresight.
the auction [...] was a compilation of bootlegs and songs that were not commercially available by the artist and [...] as such, there was no financial impact on the artists themselves. You do not need to be a lawyer [...] to realise that this is most likely still very wrong.
I would certainly agree that such an auction is illegal, which is what I imagine you meant. I'm not convinced it's a morally bad thing, though. It's not causing financial loss to the artist or the publishers (assuming they haven't intentionally kept supply scarce to drive the price up, a la Disney videos). It's not invading the artists' privacy, since the material is already available. It is, however, allowing fans to get hold of material which they couldn't otherwise obtain. If there is profit to be made here, and the publisher has failed to cash in on the opportunity, then it only has its own stupidity to blame.
The idea of allowing copyright holders to restrict the distribution of a work is so that they can reap some reward from it. If they withhold distribution of that work, without attempting to gain any reward from it, then the value of that work is being wasted.
"Intellectual property" isn't like real property. It's not a basic economic right, at least in most legal systems; it's a privilege which is granted so as to gain benefit for society.
TeX has a numbering system a bit like you just described: it's currently at 3.14159 (IIRC) and every time a new version comes out they stick the next digit of pi on the end.
If your eyes stop, it's not an ignorable grammar error; it takes away from your appreciation of the actual article,
But this would also apply if your eyes stop because the author uses a different dialect to your own, or if your eyes pause momentarily because the author uses a different register of formality to what you expected. It doesn't neccessarily mean the author should change their writing style.
"I is fine" may someday by correct, and is certainly "dynamic," [...] but the fact is that, right now, it's wrong.
It's wrong in standard American and standard British English. I believe it's valid in Black American Vernacular; it's certainly valid in some British dialects. Who are we to force an arbitrary dialect down the throat of a speaker who uses another one? Obviously it's no good if people just choose phrases from lots of dialects *because* they are different to Standard (American|British). But if [adult native] speakers use constructs which "feel" valid to them, there's little validity in correcting them just because Standard (American|English) is different. To a linguist, a construct is valid if it is "attested", i.e. if it gets used by native speakers who don't consider it erroneous.
Of course, completely different rules apply if writing formal language or deliberately attempting to speak in Standard (American|English).
An interesting aside: some linguists did a study of grammar as used by physicists at conferences, and compared it to Black American Vernacular, as spoken on the streets of many American cities. They found that the BAV speakers were using grammar which was far more regular and consistent than what the conference physicists used.
how will information-based web sites (especially smaller, independent ones) be generating revenue in five years?
It doesn't matter if these sites can't be profitable. People want to make information available. Over the last 20 years, people have put masses of information up on the Internet without hoping to make money from it. As long as putting stuff online isn't too expensive for an individual to fund with a bit of spare cash, people will always make information available.
The only threat to this is litigation. If a large organisation threatens to sue an individual because it doesn't like the contents of his website, there's not much he can do right now. As the law gets more biased towards those who can afford to litigate, it may mean that these volunteer sites can't reliably hold objective information against the will of a big company. Slashdot can respond defensively to cease-and-desist letters because it has lawyers. Smaller sites cannot risk it.
Why...why do people insist on matching plural verbs with singular nouns? [...] Microsoft is an "it". Not a "they".
<sigh> Why do you care? Even if you were correct about your grammatical point, and what you say didn't fly in the face of widespread accepted contemporary usage, what difference does it make? This is a news site, not a grammar site! The amendment you suggest doesn't make the paragraph easier to read.
Do you object every time "data" is used as a singular noun? Do you insist on referring to countries, cars and ships as "she"? If so, you're missing a profound point: language usage changes! It changes due to the unconscious use of new constructions by native speakers. And so it should. English is designed to be parsed by humans, not SGML parsers. Its grammar is not only more flexible, but also more dynamic, than that of SGML. When you ask people to "make the most of the language", you're really trying to persuade them to end this dynamic adaptation and relegate the language to something like SGML.
Given that the only thing the BSD license forces you to do is to keep their copyright on the files and to put the disclaimer you could as well put it in the public domain.
OTOH The University of California was greatly aided, when being sued by AT&T, by the fact that AT&T *had* violated the few requirements which the BSD license requires.
According to the BBC today, the dome was a few days away from bankruptcy when it last got some money from the National Lottery, so it ain't making money for itself.
I also doubt it's pulling tourists in from abroad very much, by itself - who'd travel to the UK just to see the dome? This applies too to far-flung parts of Britain - apparently only 800 people from Scotland visited the dome in one month. It might be attracting Londoners, but they'd probably spend their money elsewhere if they didn't visit the dome. From an economic point of view, the dome is a flop.
Of course, as you say, there's more to it than just economics, and there may be other things about the dome which are good. Personally I think they shouldn't have put it in London - London already has thousands of landmarks and adding just one more won't make much difference. It'd've been much more spectacular in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Newcastle or Glasgow (though the last two are probably less good because they're not very central in the UK).
Re:This is exceptionally cool
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 1
There are people running Windows/Intel machines that would find a winBIOS a good thing
It would not be a good thing for most Windows users if it were impossible to boot alternative OSes on most of the world's PCs without flashing the BIOS. It would be a huge blow to the freeness of the OS market. Given time, this would drive up prices / drive down efficiency in Windows/Intel, too.
Hardware vendors pay Microsoft a lot of money for the right to put those stickers on their boxes.
So, presumably, they'd appreciate being able to put a "Designed for GNU/Linux" sticker on for free. Presumably they could only do this if they didn't violate Linus's trademark rights, so they'd have to really be saying something about their hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. It might be reasonable to describe IE as the best HTML renderer (depending on your point of view). But there's a big bug in IE whereby if its market share exceeds about 70%, it hands control of the HTML standard to a company who wants to pollute it. Then IE will rapidly become the only browser, and after a while it will even become crap as an HTML renderer (because no competition to beat). That's a pretty big bug IMHO.
So do you also object to using "pi" to represent a particular number close to 3.141592653589793238462643383279? Pi can represent ANYTHING, including products, probabilities, planes, the number of primes below a number, and my granny's phone number. It's not "pi", it's "the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter".
How about the test of "will I have to abandon this platform if a single company goes bust / decides to discontinue development"? Especially for businesses, this is important. It costs time to change the browser on 100 machines, and it costs a hell of a lot of time to answer the support queries of 100 users who've just been handed a new browser.
Opera and IE may be alright now, but they're not open-source so you may get left high and dry. That's a problem if you've just spent a fortune developing an intranet which relies on one of them.
Given that there's only 2 (3? 4? a handful anyway) of "them" actually in the market, you're quite right. Whether the free market is enough in these conditions to ensure that "they" are not anticompetitive is a completely different question.
Yeah, the people at the top of those projects could emit more zany quotes to get easy publicity.
Waddayaneed more than 30gps for? a realtime tomographic video of her insides?
Autocompletion is possible with Cooledit. Doesn't automatically pick up your custom C++ classes, but that's a mixed blessing anyway. I know people that type the full word without the dot, then go back and put the dot in, so that the autocompletion doesn't freeze the machine for a couple of secs.
Seems fine to me. He looks at what MS sells and then looks at what could replace MS's product.
Etc. It's as rigourous as something that hypothetical can be.
BTW, is "gotten" preterite? Can you only use it for things that happened in the past, or can you use it about things that are still happening now? I.e. can you say "We've gotten money from the government every week since February"?
No. It's because when you want to say "The car of X" the other way round in English, you normally say "X's car". An *exception* to this is if X is a pronoun. So it is an exceptional rule, which was the previous poster's point.
BTW is "anymore" valid in American? Don't think it is in British. (I am merely curious).
Remember that Microsoft got their monopoly position using Windows 3.x and only consolidated it with Windows 9x. You'd be hard-pressed to say that Windows 3.x was better than the best of the competition in any way apart from ubiquity of applications - and that happened because MS was big and already had a DOS monopoly to leverage.
Yes they can. The only difference is that they'll have bad publicity and they'll be half a trillion dollars richer.
I challenge you to find one unambiguous hole in PJ's finding of fact. It was a monster document but I read it and couldn't find one place where its accuracy was inferior to Microsoft's proposed version.
The remedy is more controversial, but that's partly the nature of the thing. Hindsight's easier than foresight.
I would certainly agree that such an auction is illegal, which is what I imagine you meant. I'm not convinced it's a morally bad thing, though. It's not causing financial loss to the artist or the publishers (assuming they haven't intentionally kept supply scarce to drive the price up, a la Disney videos). It's not invading the artists' privacy, since the material is already available. It is, however, allowing fans to get hold of material which they couldn't otherwise obtain. If there is profit to be made here, and the publisher has failed to cash in on the opportunity, then it only has its own stupidity to blame.
The idea of allowing copyright holders to restrict the distribution of a work is so that they can reap some reward from it. If they withhold distribution of that work, without attempting to gain any reward from it, then the value of that work is being wasted.
"Intellectual property" isn't like real property. It's not a basic economic right, at least in most legal systems; it's a privilege which is granted so as to gain benefit for society.
TeX has a numbering system a bit like you just described: it's currently at 3.14159 (IIRC) and every time a new version comes out they stick the next digit of pi on the end.
But this would also apply if your eyes stop because the author uses a different dialect to your own, or if your eyes pause momentarily because the author uses a different register of formality to what you expected. It doesn't neccessarily mean the author should change their writing style.
It's wrong in standard American and standard British English. I believe it's valid in Black American Vernacular; it's certainly valid in some British dialects. Who are we to force an arbitrary dialect down the throat of a speaker who uses another one? Obviously it's no good if people just choose phrases from lots of dialects *because* they are different to Standard (American|British). But if [adult native] speakers use constructs which "feel" valid to them, there's little validity in correcting them just because Standard (American|English) is different. To a linguist,
a construct is valid if it is "attested", i.e. if it gets used by native speakers who don't consider it erroneous.
Of course, completely different rules apply if writing formal language or deliberately attempting to speak in Standard (American|English).
An interesting aside: some linguists did a study of grammar as used by physicists at conferences, and compared it to Black American Vernacular, as spoken on the streets of many American cities. They found that the BAV speakers were using grammar which was far more regular and consistent than what the conference physicists used.
It doesn't matter if these sites can't be profitable. People want to make information available. Over the last 20 years, people have put masses of information up on the Internet without hoping to make money from it. As long as putting stuff online isn't too expensive for an individual to fund with a bit of spare cash, people will always make information available.
The only threat to this is litigation. If a large organisation threatens to sue an individual because it doesn't like the contents of his website, there's not much he can do right now. As the law gets more biased towards those who can afford to litigate, it may mean that these volunteer sites can't reliably hold objective information against the will of a big company. Slashdot can respond defensively to cease-and-desist letters because it has lawyers. Smaller sites cannot risk it.
<sigh> Why do you care? Even if you were correct about your grammatical point, and what you say didn't fly in the face of widespread accepted contemporary usage, what difference does it make? This is a news site, not a grammar site! The amendment you suggest doesn't make the paragraph easier to read.
Do you object every time "data" is used as a singular noun? Do you insist on referring to countries, cars and ships as "she"? If so, you're missing a profound point: language usage changes! It changes due to the unconscious use of new constructions by native speakers. And so it should. English is designed to be parsed by humans, not SGML parsers. Its grammar is not only more flexible, but also more dynamic, than that of SGML. When you ask people to "make the most of the language", you're really trying to persuade them to end this dynamic adaptation and relegate the language to something like SGML.
Doesn't have to be compressed real-time. Copy a tiny snippet of uncompressed PCM repeatedly.
OTOH The University of California was greatly aided, when being sued by AT&T, by the fact that AT&T *had* violated the few requirements which the BSD license requires.
We just need scaling down a bit. See here.
Hmm, dunno why I blockquoted the last paragraph.
According to the BBC today, the dome was a few days away from bankruptcy when it last got some money from the National Lottery, so it ain't making money for itself.
I also doubt it's pulling tourists in from abroad very much, by itself - who'd travel to the UK just to see the dome? This applies too to far-flung parts of Britain - apparently only 800 people from Scotland visited the dome in one month. It might be attracting Londoners, but they'd probably spend their money elsewhere if they didn't visit the dome. From an economic point of view, the dome is a flop.
It would not be a good thing for most Windows users if it were impossible to boot alternative OSes on most of the world's PCs without flashing the BIOS. It would be a huge blow to the freeness of the OS market. Given time, this would drive up prices / drive down efficiency in Windows/Intel, too.
So, presumably, they'd appreciate being able to put a "Designed for GNU/Linux" sticker on for free. Presumably they could only do this if they didn't violate Linus's trademark rights, so they'd have to really be saying something about their hardware.
It's a lot more tempting when you only have to type "idclip" and not "idspispopd".