You still are afforded with the convenient pointer clobbering facility of C, however. In general, the closer the code is to the machine, the nastier stuff it can do with things go wrong...and they will go wrong at some point.
The article was going along well (well, besides the Heston mention), until he starts blathering about piracy. Piracy? What does Open Source/Free Software have to fear from *piracy*? Does he mean that corporations will take Free Software and use it in proprietary products, hence "stealing" the IP of the original authors? Or instead, is he blabbing incoherently about how Free Software is itself a threat to intellectual property of proprietary content producers? Seems like the latter...and if so, what type of advocate is he? Isn't the whole basis for a lot of the copyright and IP reform that digital content is different from physical objects in *type* not just *degree*? I.e., because "taking" a digital creation does not deprive the owner of the original, theft does not apply, and we are in a whole different ballpark.
Ok, it may sound like a buzzword, but I think what a lot of popular (commercial) operating systems (including Unix) have, and what Linux will need, is this gestaltic "consistent user experience".
What I mean by that is that the operating system feels self-contained. Each program, each application, works in a consistent fashion. The standard command line syntax, utilities, and man pages seem to fulfill part of this. But what about configuration files? Init methods? Filesystems? Desktop? (yes, we are finally getting this, albiet with two de facto and only partially compatible "standards"). Each part feels like it goes with each other. Currently, IMHO, Linux still feels like a kernel plus a bunch of utilities and applications which may come in any permutations...but not yet like an entire unified "system". When you talk about Linux, you are really only talking about the kernel...everything else is pretty much up for grabs, and dependent on distribution. And while you may justly counter that Open Source is all about flexibility and choices, I think that if Linux is to break into the mainstream (if that's actually what we want...I do), then it's going to have to pay attention to what the mainstream wants. I think this feeling as an integrated, unified system is what the mainstream, in which "user" may not be synonymous with "developer", wants. They don't want a kernel from here, and utilities from there, and applications from over there. And I understand organizations like the LSB are trying to do just this. I just hope they have some teeth.
Sure there is some middle ground, but the RIAA and MPAA go *way* too far. They want not only to "protect" their copyright, but also to dictate to you in which way you may use a product you own yourself under fair use, whether it is *legally* time-space shifting it, or viewing a movie wherever you want without being forced to see ads. These are not copyright "rights". These are not intellectual property "rights". Profit is not a "right". These companies have no "right" to arbitrarily control your usage of a product you buy and own. This is a simple matter of greed, where the content industry sees that a consumer's rights, coupled with the internet/ may deprive them of profits that they think they have a right to. So they spend megabucks lobbying the government to pass ridiculout and arguably unconstitutional laws, under a very thin veil of "protecting copyright", when they are really all about "controlling usage".
(p.s. if you don't like my overuse of quotes - you know where you can stick it;)
Uh oh...Lessig fell for the "Read Aloud" "right" in the eBook. I think we covered that a while ago and concluded that it was actually phrased ambiguously and should have been more like: "This book is not able to be read aloud by a text-to-speech program".
Re:What if the DOJ Wins ...
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
I know...it's sort of hard to argue that Microsoft isn't squelching competition, when this very thing, OS X on x86, would be a terrific boon to consumers.
OS X on Intel site statistics
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
Ha ha. Click the "Statistics" button to see the Slashdot effect in action. The Slashdot article was posted at 6:54 AM. The "Signature Submissions" jumps drastically on the 6 AM hour.;)
(ya ya, given that they're in the same time zone...still a huge effect)
Could someone possibly explain why this could be a good idea?
Um, the amount of money they make is not only dependent on *what* they sell, but *how much* they sell. Even if OS X took only a fraction of the OEM PC desktop market (Dell, Gateway, etc.), that's still *a lot* of money. The question then is: will people buy enough copies of an OS X x86 machine to make up for the loss in sales of Apple hardware based machines? I don't have the numbers but maybe somebody would like to make some estimates and calculate the smallest fraction of the x86 PC market with which Apple would break even. Considering that a lot (most?) of Apple fans are diehards who would never consider buying an x86, I don't think there would be *all* that high an attrition rate.
I think the first target would be Microsoft Windows. All of a sudden, all those people who just want a computer and are nudged toward Dell or Gateway don't have to get married to Windows. They could buy a Dell or Gateway with OS X. Really, I don't think many of these first time consumers care what flavor of OS it is running, as long as they get internet access and can play games. If Apple got even a tiny fraction of the OEM software market, that still millions and millions of dollars...plus it starts edging out Microsoft on the desktop which reduces its power to leverage through the network effect.
Anyway, I thought the linchpin for Apple was Microsoft Office. With a move to OS X, what happens now? Is Microsoft really going to develop Office (or IE for that matter) for a Unix? If not, then what does Apple have to lose by challenging Microsoft on the x86 desktop?
Um, I thought XP was all about creating a very lightweight methodology that respects that software "must be created by talented software engineers that understand what the customer's needs are". I mean, that is the whole basis of XP, with customer stories, iterative development, unit testing, etc. What are you complaining about? Anarchy (i.e., no methodology) simply optimizes the worst-case, at the expense of the average and best cases (clueful customers, talented programmers, etc.).
AWT and Swing have proven remarkably piss-poor at handing platform-native UIs in a cross-platform way.
Huh? Motif PLAF looks fine on my Windows box. Apple did release a Mac PLAF which did *very very dirty things and was not pure Java*, and would not run on anything but the Mac OS. This was bad of Apple, but certainly not Sun's fault or the fault of Swing. (AWT wasn't even designed for "cross-platform platform-native UIs", whatever that means).
Anyway, Apple has pledged that OS X will have a full 1.3 Java runtime (and beta testers can attest that this is currently working). If I were Apple I'd certainly go the Java route instead of the CLR/Microsoft route...no reason to be even *more* dependent on my #1 competitor.
Wow, I'd request a bunch of classified government documents explaining everything from the JFK assassination (you wanna wait until 2039?), ufos, black projects, FBI assassinations, misinformation, etc.
As far as I can tell,.Net uses SOAP, basically an RPC via XML over HTTP. There is also another spec called XML-RPC which is, you guessed it, RPC via XML over HTTP. SOAP is a W3 spec. XML-RPC does not appear to be a W3 spec...seems like SOAP-"light".
Anyway, with a cross platform VM (JVM/CRE), support for multiple languages, and RPC via XML, J2EE and.Net look very much alike. It seems like.Net is just Microsoft's attempt at J2EE, from the aspect of getting all its legacy C/C++/VB developers playing in a comfy enterprise world, which Java developers have been doing for a few years now.
Obviously the question is posed to someone more knowledgable than me, but my opinion (for what it's worth) is that "limited times" needs to be tied to the speed of change in the market. Sure, perhaps long-lived texts, or pretty mundane inventions can do with a pretty long limit...because there isn't much need to foster "incentive" in those markets. However a year in the software industry might as well be a decade in some other industries. Here, copyright, and patents, need to be proportional to the speed of the market. How can we possibly incentivize creativeness when we have copyright and patents that expire long after the idea or product has become obsolete? I don't think there is one, final, magical number that will work for everything. We just need some sensible legislature, and patent officers who have real brains, instead of being driven by silly throughput or profit motives (I put through 100 entirely frivolous patents this year! Gimme my raise!).
Given that it is a microsoft product, I didn't figure anybody would need help figuring out where to go for microsofts opinions. Actually my list was sort of tongue in cheek...you'll notice the last one is just a google search, which is basically saying "go find out yourself".
I would also like to think that for one fucking second we might actually care about the wellfare of fellow human beings (whatever their skin color, or language, or "crazy" custom), because they are simply human also. It always has to be about preventing something bad from happening to ourselves. I'll tell you something bad that is happening: millions of people are dying. Is that not enough? It should be.
Um, no, IP is specifically anti-capitalist. Having the government enforce and artifical "ownership" on ideas is anti-capitalist. We tolerate it, ostensibly only for the "incentive" to create it provides. However, I think millions of dying AIDs victims far, far, far outways any ridiculous incentive to create we might be affording the drug companies. Sure, African traditions may be helping the spread of the disease, but I, myself, am not so entirely insensitive and self-serving as to think that because this is the case we should not help at all. The chickens come home to roost eventually.
Your argument approaches irrelevancy if and when networking becomes "pervasive". Does Picard "run a program" on the computer? No, he just tells it what to do, and magically it works. At some point in the future, it is not only not improbably, but probably definate, that we will have pervasive, seamless, computing all around us. But by that time the very concept of installing a "software package" might become obsolete also;)
Instead of finding students and then seeing if they play games well, what about finding gamers, and seeing what their grades are? Wouldn't that be easier, than trying to introduce people to a game they may not have played before in their life?
"What are we to do when we discover code in the companies products that -really- needs a rewrite and management staunchly refuses to realize this fact?"
Simple. Do what I did. Give up. Spend all your time reading slashdot, working on pet projects, and learning cool new technologies that you might actually be able to use if and when you find a new, better job. I have literally refactored and rewritten this project I've been participating in several times. But I never have the guts to actually show my work, since it would obviously reveal my opinions of the current codebase. In contrast to the recent Ask Slashdot about finding beautiful code, I suggest you learn to live with unconscionable quagmirical morasses of code. Just put it out of your mind, or you will never get any sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
C++. You can easily contain buffers overflows.
You still are afforded with the convenient pointer clobbering facility of C, however. In general, the closer the code is to the machine, the nastier stuff it can do with things go wrong...and they will go wrong at some point.
The article was going along well (well, besides the Heston mention), until he starts blathering about piracy. Piracy? What does Open Source/Free Software have to fear from *piracy*? Does he mean that corporations will take Free Software and use it in proprietary products, hence "stealing" the IP of the original authors? Or instead, is he blabbing incoherently about how Free Software is itself a threat to intellectual property of proprietary content producers? Seems like the latter...and if so, what type of advocate is he? Isn't the whole basis for a lot of the copyright and IP reform that digital content is different from physical objects in *type* not just *degree*? I.e., because "taking" a digital creation does not deprive the owner of the original, theft does not apply, and we are in a whole different ballpark.
Ok, it may sound like a buzzword, but I think what a lot of popular (commercial) operating systems (including Unix) have, and what Linux will need, is this gestaltic "consistent user experience".
What I mean by that is that the operating system feels self-contained. Each program, each application, works in a consistent fashion. The standard command line syntax, utilities, and man pages seem to fulfill part of this. But what about configuration files? Init methods? Filesystems? Desktop? (yes, we are finally getting this, albiet with two de facto and only partially compatible "standards"). Each part feels like it goes with each other. Currently, IMHO, Linux still feels like a kernel plus a bunch of utilities and applications which may come in any permutations...but not yet like an entire unified "system". When you talk about Linux, you are really only talking about the kernel...everything else is pretty much up for grabs, and dependent on distribution. And while you may justly counter that Open Source is all about flexibility and choices, I think that if Linux is to break into the mainstream (if that's actually what we want...I do), then it's going to have to pay attention to what the mainstream wants. I think this feeling as an integrated, unified system is what the mainstream, in which "user" may not be synonymous with "developer", wants. They don't want a kernel from here, and utilities from there, and applications from over there. And I understand organizations like the LSB are trying to do just this. I just hope they have some teeth.
Sure there is some middle ground, but the RIAA and MPAA go *way* too far. They want not only to "protect" their copyright, but also to dictate to you in which way you may use a product you own yourself under fair use, whether it is *legally* time-space shifting it, or viewing a movie wherever you want without being forced to see ads. These are not copyright "rights". These are not intellectual property "rights". Profit is not a "right". These companies have no "right" to arbitrarily control your usage of a product you buy and own. This is a simple matter of greed, where the content industry sees that a consumer's rights, coupled with the internet/ may deprive them of profits that they think they have a right to. So they spend megabucks lobbying the government to pass ridiculout and arguably unconstitutional laws, under a very thin veil of "protecting copyright", when they are really all about "controlling usage".
;)
(p.s. if you don't like my overuse of quotes - you know where you can stick it
Uh oh...Lessig fell for the "Read Aloud" "right" in the eBook. I think we covered that a while ago and concluded that it was actually phrased ambiguously and should have been more like: "This book is not able to be read aloud by a text-to-speech program".
I know...it's sort of hard to argue that Microsoft isn't squelching competition, when this very thing, OS X on x86, would be a terrific boon to consumers.
Ha ha. Click the "Statistics" button to see the Slashdot effect in action. The Slashdot article was posted at 6:54 AM. The "Signature Submissions" jumps drastically on the 6 AM hour. ;)
(ya ya, given that they're in the same time zone...still a huge effect)
Could someone possibly explain why this could be a good idea?
Um, the amount of money they make is not only dependent on *what* they sell, but *how much* they sell. Even if OS X took only a fraction of the OEM PC desktop market (Dell, Gateway, etc.), that's still *a lot* of money. The question then is: will people buy enough copies of an OS X x86 machine to make up for the loss in sales of Apple hardware based machines? I don't have the numbers but maybe somebody would like to make some estimates and calculate the smallest fraction of the x86 PC market with which Apple would break even. Considering that a lot (most?) of Apple fans are diehards who would never consider buying an x86, I don't think there would be *all* that high an attrition rate.
I think the first target would be Microsoft Windows. All of a sudden, all those people who just want a computer and are nudged toward Dell or Gateway don't have to get married to Windows. They could buy a Dell or Gateway with OS X. Really, I don't think many of these first time consumers care what flavor of OS it is running, as long as they get internet access and can play games. If Apple got even a tiny fraction of the OEM software market, that still millions and millions of dollars...plus it starts edging out Microsoft on the desktop which reduces its power to leverage through the network effect.
Anyway, I thought the linchpin for Apple was Microsoft Office. With a move to OS X, what happens now? Is Microsoft really going to develop Office (or IE for that matter) for a Unix? If not, then what does Apple have to lose by challenging Microsoft on the x86 desktop?
Wasn't there a recent article on a MySQL file system? Wouldn't this be the best of both worlds?
Um, I thought XP was all about creating a very lightweight methodology that respects that software "must be created by talented software engineers that understand what the customer's needs are". I mean, that is the whole basis of XP, with customer stories, iterative development, unit testing, etc. What are you complaining about? Anarchy (i.e., no methodology) simply optimizes the worst-case, at the expense of the average and best cases (clueful customers, talented programmers, etc.).
AWT and Swing have proven remarkably piss-poor at handing platform-native UIs in a cross-platform way.
Huh? Motif PLAF looks fine on my Windows box. Apple did release a Mac PLAF which did *very very dirty things and was not pure Java*, and would not run on anything but the Mac OS. This was bad of Apple, but certainly not Sun's fault or the fault of Swing. (AWT wasn't even designed for "cross-platform platform-native UIs", whatever that means).
Anyway, Apple has pledged that OS X will have a full 1.3 Java runtime (and beta testers can attest that this is currently working). If I were Apple I'd certainly go the Java route instead of the CLR/Microsoft route...no reason to be even *more* dependent on my #1 competitor.
Wow, I'd request a bunch of classified government documents explaining everything from the JFK assassination (you wanna wait until 2039?), ufos, black projects, FBI assassinations, misinformation, etc.
;)
Or were you looking for "Windows source!"
As far as I can tell, .Net uses SOAP, basically an RPC via XML over HTTP. There is also another spec called XML-RPC which is, you guessed it, RPC via XML over HTTP. SOAP is a W3 spec. XML-RPC does not appear to be a W3 spec...seems like SOAP-"light".
.Net look very much alike. It seems like .Net is just Microsoft's attempt at J2EE, from the aspect of getting all its legacy C/C++/VB developers playing in a comfy enterprise world, which Java developers have been doing for a few years now.
Anyway, with a cross platform VM (JVM/CRE), support for multiple languages, and RPC via XML, J2EE and
Obviously the question is posed to someone more knowledgable than me, but my opinion (for what it's worth) is that "limited times" needs to be tied to the speed of change in the market. Sure, perhaps long-lived texts, or pretty mundane inventions can do with a pretty long limit...because there isn't much need to foster "incentive" in those markets. However a year in the software industry might as well be a decade in some other industries. Here, copyright, and patents, need to be proportional to the speed of the market. How can we possibly incentivize creativeness when we have copyright and patents that expire long after the idea or product has become obsolete? I don't think there is one, final, magical number that will work for everything. We just need some sensible legislature, and patent officers who have real brains, instead of being driven by silly throughput or profit motives (I put through 100 entirely frivolous patents this year! Gimme my raise!).
Fine, here ya go:
http://microsoft.com/net
Given that it is a microsoft product, I didn't figure anybody would need help figuring out where to go for microsofts opinions. Actually my list was sort of tongue in cheek...you'll notice the last one is just a google search, which is basically saying "go find out yourself".
here
here
here
But for TOTALLY SELFISH reasons
I would also like to think that for one fucking second we might actually care about the wellfare of fellow human beings (whatever their skin color, or language, or "crazy" custom), because they are simply human also. It always has to be about preventing something bad from happening to ourselves. I'll tell you something bad that is happening: millions of people are dying. Is that not enough? It should be.
doh
outways=outweighs
that's anti-capitalist
Um, no, IP is specifically anti-capitalist. Having the government enforce and artifical "ownership" on ideas is anti-capitalist. We tolerate it, ostensibly only for the "incentive" to create it provides. However, I think millions of dying AIDs victims far, far, far outways any ridiculous incentive to create we might be affording the drug companies. Sure, African traditions may be helping the spread of the disease, but I, myself, am not so entirely insensitive and self-serving as to think that because this is the case we should not help at all. The chickens come home to roost eventually.
Your argument approaches irrelevancy if and when networking becomes "pervasive". Does Picard "run a program" on the computer? No, he just tells it what to do, and magically it works. At some point in the future, it is not only not improbably, but probably definate, that we will have pervasive, seamless, computing all around us. But by that time the very concept of installing a "software package" might become obsolete also ;)
Yeah, but they couldn't call it "Linux" without Linus's approval, right?
IANAL
Instead of finding students and then seeing if they play games well, what about finding gamers, and seeing what their grades are? Wouldn't that be easier, than trying to introduce people to a game they may not have played before in their life?
"What are we to do when we discover code in the companies products that -really- needs a rewrite and management staunchly refuses to realize this fact?"
Simple. Do what I did. Give up. Spend all your time reading slashdot, working on pet projects, and learning cool new technologies that you might actually be able to use if and when you find a new, better job. I have literally refactored and rewritten this project I've been participating in several times. But I never have the guts to actually show my work, since it would obviously reveal my opinions of the current codebase. In contrast to the recent Ask Slashdot about finding beautiful code, I suggest you learn to live with unconscionable quagmirical morasses of code. Just put it out of your mind, or you will never get any sleep.
ha ha