You're smoking pot if you think JBuilder is written in Java, it's probably actually Delphi, like all the other Borland IDEs.
The Java gui components suck ass on Windows. They seem much better in linux (and probably on Mac, I haven't tried one). They still suck with the Sun VM. Don't ask me why, I don't care. They just do. Thats why I hate tools written in Java, and why I don't use them unless I have no choice.
VB is actually a very powerful language - for example, there's no easier way to write a COM server. It's not really suited for systems programming, of course, or for writing servelets or something, and it's certainly not cross platform (VB.NET and Mono excluded) but it's excellent for slapping out quick & dirty forms. If Mono can really get off the ground,.NET will most likely start kicking Java around - it's like Java with the advantage of 10 years of hindsight.
Qt is an excellent toolkit. It's downsides are that it's only free for X11, and very pricey on other platforms. For an alternative for people without 2 grand to blow on licenses, check out wxWindows
It's not as polished, but it's very good, with excellent support via the mailing list.
It's not being charged a fee to get into the club. It's being charged an extra fee to take a taxi to the club because you might slip in the backdoor and avoid the cover. More than that - it's a tax on cab fare, because of all the people going to clubs! It's not a fee that you can avoid by not downloading music - it's a flat fee that everyone will pay, just like the tax of blank tapes and audio CDs.
It's still utter nonsense. Oracle doesn't send over a team of it's best engineers to make sure that my database is configured properly (unless I pay them alot of money), and MS certainly doesn't do it for SQL Server. Therefore, any benchmarks that WERE tuned in such a way have nothing to do with MY use of the product, so are misleading at best. I WANT to see how database X performs out of the box.
Tough nookie, I say. No other industry has this kind of problem and they get along fine. Note that knowingly inaccurate reviews would probably be libel, and they could do something about them through other laws.
There's still a variety of things you can't do - there are some responsibilities that come with the creation of a public space (yes, it's a public space, no it's a publicly owned space). There's been a variety of 1st amendment cases, for example.
Not that they can't ban him. And I would say that repeated attempts to avoid the ban would be considered a form of harrasment, and thus actionable. And 5 grand is actually a quite reasonable amount of money in a suite like this (No amazingly inflated claims of the amount of money they might have made), so I'm not totally against them.
I'm not sure I buy into the idea that more and more CDs are being produced - for one thing, once the initial production is paid for, maintaining a catalog is essentially free. So the only real cost is new albums. Second, the major cost of procuding an album is (I assume) promotion - I don't know the actual breakdowns, but I know how much advertising spots cost, and I know how much experienced engineers cost, and the first will be a shitload more for the major promotion that goes into a pop album. Third, the industries obvious response to a situation like this is to stop signing artists they don't think they can sell - in other words, who aren't worth boatloads of promotional money. This has already happened, as you can see by the plethora of pre-produced bands - these aren't musicians who worked the scene and sent out demos and eventually got a major record deal, they're concept bands that are designed and polished from day one for success. Stuff like American Idol and that thing with Puffy.
I also disagree rather strongly with your definition of a healthy industry - a total lockin like that is enormously UN-healthy. A healthy insdustry is one that consistently makes a profit, that's all. It doesn't have to keep growing, it doesn't have to continually make more money, all it has to do is consistently make money. If it's doing that, it's health, and the recording industry certainly is that.
BLeh, stupid submit button is right there next to preview:(
I was never trying to claim that wxWindows is some catchall solution for cross platform development, there is no such thing, but it is a) better than Qt on any platform besides X11, assuming you're making free software, and b) quite effective in it's own right. Wrapping rather than emulating is a design choice, and some cases it might hurt you, in others is's exactly what you want.
If you really want a 100% identical interface on all platforms, you can use wxUniversal, which emulates all the widgets. The trade off is that you don't get platform specific functionality that people expect without lots of extra work - you won't match the system colors, or the system fonts, you might have different default keybindings, you won't match themes, etc, etc, etc.
You're either confused or were doing something wrong, because wxWindows uses native widgets (except in a couple cases like wxUniversal). Certain widgets are emulated when there's no native one to wrap (Tree view on GTK, for example), but where there's a native control, wxWindows uses it.
A shitload more of it, since copyright would have expired when it was supposed to instead of some nebulous time in the future. And it'd be cheaper, too, since there wouldn't be a cartel controlling prices. And there'd be more diversity, since distribution channels wouldn't be controlled by a single source. Any other questions?
Look at wxWindows for a LGPL, cross platform (GTK, X11, Windows, Motif, some others) toolkit. It's sort of a cross between Qt and the MFC (no preprocessor, so no signals/slots, uses MFC style event tables), but it's (much) cleaner than MFC. It's not as polished as Qt, but it's open source on all platforms without spending lots of money (You have to pay for a commercial Qt license if you want to work on windows, or use the sadly outmoded NC version), and help is very forthcoming on the wx-users mailing list.
If he's been using it for 5 years, with them knowing about it, and they haven't said anything (all of which are true), then they're likely to get thrown out of court if it ever comes to that. Of course, that preculdes him both wanting and being able to afford a legal battle. And, as other people have mentioned, trademark law makes a specific exception for using the trademark descriptively (as in a Ford truck).
Utter nonsense, we had corporations long before they were granted "personhood". It would, however mean that corporate officers would be personally liable for decisions they make. And it would likely be the end of all/most of the current IP corporations, since they largely rely on corporate ownership of IP, rather than personal ownership and corporate stewardship. I don't see a proble with that, either.
It's your window manager sucking, then. That's not googles fault. Even windows doesn't move a background window to the front just because the input focus changed (and in win2k+, applications [usually] can't give themselves the focus anyway)
That would be a sever side optimization. You can't do that on the client.
As for the 780,000 lines of code, thats probably including all the MFC and windows headers - I agree with the (grand?)parent that this is probably just an IE wrapper with the WMP and MS Agent interfaces tossed in.
It's not really that complex. When you're speaking in your official capacity, on company time, then the company is liable for your speech. That's actually as it is now, with regards to things like lawsuits. When you're talking in a bar after work, then you can say whatever you want. As for the definitions, I'm sure that will be one of the things Nike brings up.
That's actually untrue - Nike, as a corporation, has a "personhood" which is independent of it's individual members. This is one of the things that people are always complaining about corporate law.
Amusingly, the first result for "big fucking waste of time and money" is titled "carreers" [sic]. And the sponsored link is E-Bay. I don't know what amuses me more.
I strongly suspect it works something like this: Google knows the algorithm is vulnerable to linkfarms. It would very hard, if not impossible, to algorithmicly detect a linkfarm rather than a legitimtely widely linked site. Therefore, Google added the ability for them to manually specify known linkfarms and have them downgraded. So it is a specific attack against SearchKing in one sense, and a general one in another. On the other hand, I've seen your name an awful lot on this topic. Are you sure you aren't involved in this or other cases in some way? How about some disclosure here, buddy!
You don't. This is called a "buisness secret". They could very well be letting people to pay for rank. However, they probably aren't, since people would have noticed. As far as regulating how they decide page rank, it's about as likely, and about as important, as regulating what you eat every day. Why the hell should Google have to do anything to support anyone elses buisness? Either your trust Google to have an objective pagerank (or at least biased in a way that aids your personal searches), or you don't, in which case you don't use or care about it.
Unless you agree and sign that BEFORE you get the cartridge, it's not binding in any way. Notice that they don't say anything about copyright, they mention the "patented cartridge", as if that gives them some sort of power over your use of it.
I wouldn't put too much credence in that, since Borldand has been promising a.NET compiler for Delphi ever since.NET was announced and it's not ready yet (it was supposed to be in Delphi 7, instead you get a beta "demo" compiler, with the opportunity to buy it as a seperate product when it's finally released).
And while the Delphi IDE has some nice features (ctr-shit-c to generate stub code from your object declaration is great), but I wouldn't exactly say it makes VC look clunky and outdated.
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The Java gui components suck ass on Windows. They seem much better in linux (and probably on Mac, I haven't tried one). They still suck with the Sun VM. Don't ask me why, I don't care. They just do. Thats why I hate tools written in Java, and why I don't use them unless I have no choice.
VB is actually a very powerful language - for example, there's no easier way to write a COM server. It's not really suited for systems programming, of course, or for writing servelets or something, and it's certainly not cross platform (VB .NET and Mono excluded) but it's excellent for slapping out quick & dirty forms. If Mono can really get off the ground, .NET will most likely start kicking Java around - it's like Java with the advantage of 10 years of hindsight.
It's not as polished, but it's very good, with excellent support via the mailing list.
It's not being charged a fee to get into the club. It's being charged an extra fee to take a taxi to the club because you might slip in the backdoor and avoid the cover. More than that - it's a tax on cab fare, because of all the people going to clubs! It's not a fee that you can avoid by not downloading music - it's a flat fee that everyone will pay, just like the tax of blank tapes and audio CDs.
Ha! It's not theft if I pay 10 bucks a month to my ISP to pay for it.
It's still utter nonsense. Oracle doesn't send over a team of it's best engineers to make sure that my database is configured properly (unless I pay them alot of money), and MS certainly doesn't do it for SQL Server. Therefore, any benchmarks that WERE tuned in such a way have nothing to do with MY use of the product, so are misleading at best. I WANT to see how database X performs out of the box.
Tough nookie, I say. No other industry has this kind of problem and they get along fine. Note that knowingly inaccurate reviews would probably be libel, and they could do something about them through other laws.
Not that they can't ban him. And I would say that repeated attempts to avoid the ban would be considered a form of harrasment, and thus actionable. And 5 grand is actually a quite reasonable amount of money in a suite like this (No amazingly inflated claims of the amount of money they might have made), so I'm not totally against them.
I also disagree rather strongly with your definition of a healthy industry - a total lockin like that is enormously UN-healthy. A healthy insdustry is one that consistently makes a profit, that's all. It doesn't have to keep growing, it doesn't have to continually make more money, all it has to do is consistently make money. If it's doing that, it's health, and the recording industry certainly is that.
I was never trying to claim that wxWindows is some catchall solution for cross platform development, there is no such thing, but it is a) better than Qt on any platform besides X11, assuming you're making free software, and b) quite effective in it's own right. Wrapping rather than emulating is a design choice, and some cases it might hurt you, in others is's exactly what you want.
If you really want a 100% identical interface on all platforms, you can use wxUniversal, which emulates all the widgets. The trade off is that you don't get platform specific functionality that people expect without lots of extra work - you won't match the system colors, or the system fonts, you might have different default keybindings, you won't match themes, etc, etc, etc.
You're either confused or were doing something wrong, because wxWindows uses native widgets (except in a couple cases like wxUniversal). Certain widgets are emulated when there's no native one to wrap (Tree view on GTK, for example), but where there's a native control, wxWindows uses it.
A shitload more of it, since copyright would have expired when it was supposed to instead of some nebulous time in the future. And it'd be cheaper, too, since there wouldn't be a cartel controlling prices. And there'd be more diversity, since distribution channels wouldn't be controlled by a single source. Any other questions?
Look at wxWindows for a LGPL, cross platform (GTK, X11, Windows, Motif, some others) toolkit. It's sort of a cross between Qt and the MFC (no preprocessor, so no signals/slots, uses MFC style event tables), but it's (much) cleaner than MFC. It's not as polished as Qt, but it's open source on all platforms without spending lots of money (You have to pay for a commercial Qt license if you want to work on windows, or use the sadly outmoded NC version), and help is very forthcoming on the wx-users mailing list.
If he's been using it for 5 years, with them knowing about it, and they haven't said anything (all of which are true), then they're likely to get thrown out of court if it ever comes to that. Of course, that preculdes him both wanting and being able to afford a legal battle. And, as other people have mentioned, trademark law makes a specific exception for using the trademark descriptively (as in a Ford truck).
Utter nonsense, we had corporations long before they were granted "personhood". It would, however mean that corporate officers would be personally liable for decisions they make. And it would likely be the end of all/most of the current IP corporations, since they largely rely on corporate ownership of IP, rather than personal ownership and corporate stewardship. I don't see a proble with that, either.
Handiest part of the Google toolbar for me is the interactive part - the highlighting & search on page functionality.
It's your window manager sucking, then. That's not googles fault. Even windows doesn't move a background window to the front just because the input focus changed (and in win2k+, applications [usually] can't give themselves the focus anyway)
As for the 780,000 lines of code, thats probably including all the MFC and windows headers - I agree with the (grand?)parent that this is probably just an IE wrapper with the WMP and MS Agent interfaces tossed in.
It's not really that complex. When you're speaking in your official capacity, on company time, then the company is liable for your speech. That's actually as it is now, with regards to things like lawsuits. When you're talking in a bar after work, then you can say whatever you want. As for the definitions, I'm sure that will be one of the things Nike brings up.
That's actually untrue - Nike, as a corporation, has a "personhood" which is independent of it's individual members. This is one of the things that people are always complaining about corporate law.
Amusingly, the first result for "big fucking waste of time and money" is titled "carreers" [sic]. And the sponsored link is E-Bay. I don't know what amuses me more.
I strongly suspect it works something like this: Google knows the algorithm is vulnerable to linkfarms. It would very hard, if not impossible, to algorithmicly detect a linkfarm rather than a legitimtely widely linked site. Therefore, Google added the ability for them to manually specify known linkfarms and have them downgraded. So it is a specific attack against SearchKing in one sense, and a general one in another. On the other hand, I've seen your name an awful lot on this topic. Are you sure you aren't involved in this or other cases in some way? How about some disclosure here, buddy!
You don't. This is called a "buisness secret". They could very well be letting people to pay for rank. However, they probably aren't, since people would have noticed. As far as regulating how they decide page rank, it's about as likely, and about as important, as regulating what you eat every day. Why the hell should Google have to do anything to support anyone elses buisness? Either your trust Google to have an objective pagerank (or at least biased in a way that aids your personal searches), or you don't, in which case you don't use or care about it.
Unless you agree and sign that BEFORE you get the cartridge, it's not binding in any way. Notice that they don't say anything about copyright, they mention the "patented cartridge", as if that gives them some sort of power over your use of it.
And while the Delphi IDE has some nice features (ctr-shit-c to generate stub code from your object declaration is great), but I wouldn't exactly say it makes VC look clunky and outdated.