Incidently, wxWidgets provides functionlity to do exactly what you're saying - an abstracted widget you can use to provide correctly ordered stock buttons on any platform.
Writing good cross platform applications is hard. A good cross platform toolkit can make it a lot easier - then you only need to understand the behavior differences, rather than the entire native toolkits of every platform. And it's certainly a heck of a lot better than the abomination of Gtk/Win32.
This sort of reverse analysis is actually a lot harder than you'd think. The composition of the result, sure, but not the ingredients used to create it. Compare trying to figure out the exact ingredients in a cake just from the finished cake.
(why should software installation require changes to the central registry?)
It generally does on Linux too, fyi... And it's because most modern software has a fair amount of global "stuff" to install or set, like application global preferences, shared libraries, even it's un-install information. Software which doesn't require installation in this manner works fine without Admin privledges under Windows.
Unless your method of downloading patches involves surfing porn and trolling for free iPods, yes, a hardware firewall will absolutely keep you safe long enough to install patches.
Of course, it it wasn't your kernel, but libc that was infected, re-installing your kernel won't help....
Either OS can be (at least) verified via a boot CD with a "last known good" snapshot on it. Neither can be 100% verified (or corrected) from within. In either case, re-installation is probably faster than the 100% verification/correction method anyway.
Traditionally, "adhering to their enemies" only applies in a state of war (otherwise any sort of crime would be treason - after all, all criminals are enemies of the US from some perspective, right?). Since the US has gone out of it's way to avoid actual declarations of war for 50 years, it's in a bit of a legal tangle when it comes crimes like treason. Of course, as far as I know there's no legal definition of war in the sense of "levying war against them", either.
Who're you talking about? The US hasn't been at war for 50 years. Note that I try to avoid yellow journalism of all sides, so I'm not really up on the latest "Bush had sex with a moose in college" vrs "Kerry sucked off Gorbaschev in a DC restroom" slanderfest, and I honestly don't know who you're talking about.
Regardless, it's hardly "treason" to meet with officials of an opposing country. War doesn't neccesarily preclude negotiations, formal or informal. If you meant to say that he was a collaborator or spy of some kind, then maybe you should say that directly.
Grandparent is wrong about how illegal it is to recieve trade secrets. It's illegal to induce someone to reveal trade secrets - I'm not an expert on trade secret law, so I'm not sure what exactly is considered inducement.
The disadvantage of a trade secret as opposed to a patent is that trade secrets have no legal protection once they aren't secret anymore - that's why you have to have NDAs and contractual guarantees that your employees won't reveal them. If you embedd your trade secret IP in a product, and it's reverse engineered out, you have no protection. Trade secrets basically give you the power to keep things secret, as long as you actively do so. Once you stop keeping it secret, the information is no longer protected. The formula for Coke, for example is (famously) a trade secret rather than a patent. If published, it would no longer be protected and anyone could make something identical to Coke.
Anyone who can't see the difference between an optional feature in an opt-in addon and a default feature installed on 90% of the worlds PCs need a good smacking.
Which is trademarked in a context where the word is not generic. You won't get far trying to trademark your Apple(tm) brand apples. Trademarking "GAME" might be fine if you make, say, cars.
Blizzards reps are full of shit, because you I'm sure you can't re-active an account that has been banned for cheating or doing any of the other things listed in the TOS.
The Blizazrd EULA makes several references to the online TOS, and how you have to accept those as well as the EULA to play, but it does not explicitly spell out that the opportunity for online play is a right granted by the EULA. However, it'd be a pretty reasonable argument that there is an implied right granted by the retail sale - if a hypothetical account key generator were used, and someone got a retail copy that had been "activated" by this keygen, the retail purchaser should be entitled to a new key. Same in this case.
I don't believe that Blizzard doesn't have the ability to delete accounts, because accounts closed for reasons other than cancellation are (or should be) gone for good, or at least not re-activatable. Keep calling and asking to talk to supervisors, I guess. Make some threats. Small claims court may be your friend.
The license for Windows explicitly locks the OS and the hardware it was sold with together permanently. This is a GOOD thing because it prevents assholes from installing the same copy of windows on every machine they own and giving it to their friends and family as well.
Actually, *copyright* law is what does this. The EULA is what makes you buy a new version of windows every time you upgrade your computer. It's informative to note that this is not the standard in *any* industry except computing, and even there it's specific to a few players with the clout to get away with it. In any other industry, a company that tried to irrevocably bind a retail product like that would be laughed out of existence.
At this point, my faith in the legal system is almost zero. There are plenty of criminals out there, and many of them even broke laws I agree with, but the way we manage the system is so broken that I can't, in good conscience, advocate any increase of punishment or increase of law enforcement powers. On a similiar note, while I don't morally object to the death penalty as a concept, I object to it in practice for exactly the same reason. The authorities are *not* smart. Actual investigations aren't like CSI. Cases with little to no concrete/forensic evidence are the norm, not the exception. Politics and psychology play far more of a role in who gets arrested than evidence in many cases - cops don't like unsolved crimes, there's pressure to put someone away, cops rapidly get a jaded view that makes them assume guilt. Authorites aren't perfect, either, and we have practially zero overwatch to prevent abuse. Even worse, we often assume that the victims deserve it - look how hard it is to even get minimal prison reform supported. There was a warden in Texas who ran a county jail like a max security federal prison - several inmates were killed in fights with guards, including one pregnant woman. The prisoners were used as cheap labor for the wardens pet projects, like his dog kennels, they lived in open-air tents next to a crematorium, etc, etc. This was a county jail, a large percentage of the inmates were not even convicts, they were there awaiting trial! And yet this guys "tough on crime" attitude played very well and he leveraged it into considerable political clout.
If we had a legal system that I had confidence in, that I was sure that guilty people really were, and that had reasonable, articulated views about justice vrs. punishment vrs. rehabilitation that I could agree with, then I'd be far more open to more law enforcement power and more restrictive/invasive technology used on felons. As it is, I almost side with the criminals.
It's been a theme in a few movies. Fortress with Christopher Lambert is another one. There's been at least one other besides that and Running Man, but I can't recall.
People already stand to gain a great deal of money by tampering with odometers when selling cars. Dealers stand to gain the same way, to lower the mileage when selling used cars. Is this a signifigant problem today? If it's not, then tampering with odometers will probably not be a problem with an odometer-based tax system. If it is, then we should do something about it anyway.
That said, I don't approve of an odometer-based tax system, and I disagree that there is a need to do any more tracking of highway usage than we do already. Making highways into tollways is perfectly adequate.
I bought a 128MB FX 5200 for $45 from newegg a couple days ago. That's still plenty more than a GF2 MX. Which, incidentally, is what it will be replacing.
WoW addresses this by giving mobs a free regen once they drop out of combat (either because you died, or because you ran away). If you kill something, you need to do it all at once, no nickel and diming to death.
I'm familiar with the internal software (not *all* the internal software, granted, but many systems which are in widespread internal use) of several Fortune 500 companies, either first or second hand. While I can't reasonably call this a cross-section of the industry, it is representative of a heavily used internal software at very large companies. In general, these are not high quality systems. My experience with open source is as a small-scale developer and heavy user of a wide variety of OSS software, including most of the most widely used libraries.
I wouldn't presume to say that my experience defines the industry. On the other hand, anectodal evidence suggests that most of my peers have experiences similiar to mine. In addition, even if studies were done which showed the opposite of my experience, statistics which contradict the realities of my everyday life are not especially usefull.
In my experience, OSS is no more or less well documented than commercial, in house code. Some OSS projects have great docs. Most don't. Most in house software is poorly documented. The number of companies that actually have technical writers on staff for internal software is very, very small. Certainly I've never worked for one.
In fact, I'd go so far as to extend this to software in general. Even when the comments can really matter, like API docs for libraries, the documentation sucks as often as not. I see no advantage to OSS here, but I don't see a disadvantage either.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing good cross platform applications is hard. A good cross platform toolkit can make it a lot easier - then you only need to understand the behavior differences, rather than the entire native toolkits of every platform. And it's certainly a heck of a lot better than the abomination of Gtk/Win32.
This sort of reverse analysis is actually a lot harder than you'd think. The composition of the result, sure, but not the ingredients used to create it. Compare trying to figure out the exact ingredients in a cake just from the finished cake.
It generally does on Linux too, fyi... And it's because most modern software has a fair amount of global "stuff" to install or set, like application global preferences, shared libraries, even it's un-install information. Software which doesn't require installation in this manner works fine without Admin privledges under Windows.
Unless your method of downloading patches involves surfing porn and trolling for free iPods, yes, a hardware firewall will absolutely keep you safe long enough to install patches.
Either OS can be (at least) verified via a boot CD with a "last known good" snapshot on it. Neither can be 100% verified (or corrected) from within. In either case, re-installation is probably faster than the 100% verification/correction method anyway.
Traditionally, "adhering to their enemies" only applies in a state of war (otherwise any sort of crime would be treason - after all, all criminals are enemies of the US from some perspective, right?). Since the US has gone out of it's way to avoid actual declarations of war for 50 years, it's in a bit of a legal tangle when it comes crimes like treason. Of course, as far as I know there's no legal definition of war in the sense of "levying war against them", either.
Regardless, it's hardly "treason" to meet with officials of an opposing country. War doesn't neccesarily preclude negotiations, formal or informal. If you meant to say that he was a collaborator or spy of some kind, then maybe you should say that directly.
The disadvantage of a trade secret as opposed to a patent is that trade secrets have no legal protection once they aren't secret anymore - that's why you have to have NDAs and contractual guarantees that your employees won't reveal them. If you embedd your trade secret IP in a product, and it's reverse engineered out, you have no protection. Trade secrets basically give you the power to keep things secret, as long as you actively do so. Once you stop keeping it secret, the information is no longer protected. The formula for Coke, for example is (famously) a trade secret rather than a patent. If published, it would no longer be protected and anyone could make something identical to Coke.
Anyone who can't see the difference between an optional feature in an opt-in addon and a default feature installed on 90% of the worlds PCs need a good smacking.
Which is trademarked in a context where the word is not generic. You won't get far trying to trademark your Apple(tm) brand apples. Trademarking "GAME" might be fine if you make, say, cars.
Moderate skill in the English language, when applied to the quote, will reveal that Bill was explicitly addressing browser/IE development.
Blizzards reps are full of shit, because you I'm sure you can't re-active an account that has been banned for cheating or doing any of the other things listed in the TOS.
I know theres a whole bunch of words up there, and they're pretty scary, but maybe you should grit your teeth and try reading them. Seriously.
I don't believe that Blizzard doesn't have the ability to delete accounts, because accounts closed for reasons other than cancellation are (or should be) gone for good, or at least not re-activatable. Keep calling and asking to talk to supervisors, I guess. Make some threats. Small claims court may be your friend.
Actually, *copyright* law is what does this. The EULA is what makes you buy a new version of windows every time you upgrade your computer. It's informative to note that this is not the standard in *any* industry except computing, and even there it's specific to a few players with the clout to get away with it. In any other industry, a company that tried to irrevocably bind a retail product like that would be laughed out of existence.
Because somehow, deciding to not implement these features will magically make historically recalcitrant GPU vendors more open and willing to talk?
If we had a legal system that I had confidence in, that I was sure that guilty people really were, and that had reasonable, articulated views about justice vrs. punishment vrs. rehabilitation that I could agree with, then I'd be far more open to more law enforcement power and more restrictive/invasive technology used on felons. As it is, I almost side with the criminals.
It's been a theme in a few movies. Fortress with Christopher Lambert is another one. There's been at least one other besides that and Running Man, but I can't recall.
That said, I don't approve of an odometer-based tax system, and I disagree that there is a need to do any more tracking of highway usage than we do already. Making highways into tollways is perfectly adequate.
I bought a 128MB FX 5200 for $45 from newegg a couple days ago. That's still plenty more than a GF2 MX. Which, incidentally, is what it will be replacing.
WoW addresses this by giving mobs a free regen once they drop out of combat (either because you died, or because you ran away). If you kill something, you need to do it all at once, no nickel and diming to death.
I wouldn't presume to say that my experience defines the industry. On the other hand, anectodal evidence suggests that most of my peers have experiences similiar to mine. In addition, even if studies were done which showed the opposite of my experience, statistics which contradict the realities of my everyday life are not especially usefull.
This is Garrick Antikajian, the art director at Linux Journal. I'm starting to think that they leave those in as some kind of inside joke, because they sure do a lousy job of pulling them out. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=site:www.linuxjournal.com+garric k
Vilg, is that you?
In fact, I'd go so far as to extend this to software in general. Even when the comments can really matter, like API docs for libraries, the documentation sucks as often as not. I see no advantage to OSS here, but I don't see a disadvantage either.