Not at all true. In some places, and in some times, the Mafia (or other organized crime) have essentially been the government. The difference is mainly one of perception and comfort. There's an implict threat of violence in every governmental action - go ask an anarchist about this sort of thing, they'll blab your ear off. The threat of violence, implicit or explicit, is often used in political negotiations.
They aren't the same, obviously. But it's a matter of degree and custom, not that they're totally different. Coercion is coercion is coercion.
This isn't some appeal to morals or pedantry, this is just common business sense.
It's interesting you say that since a) the common business wisdom seems to disagree with you and b) a company that has been enormously succesfull, by any business standard seems to disagree with you.
Portable GUIs aren't too hard these days, with several high quality toolkits. Writing these toolkits is much harder, but GTK and Win32 are similiar enough that it's not too hard. Sockets are pretty easy at this point, although there's some behavior differences that can bite you. Threads are a big problem, Linux (and Unix) threading has traditionally sucked, and while Linux has a high quality system now I don't know that any of the cross platform libraries take advantage of it.
Reliance on COM/ActiveX controls and libraries can make porting quite a chore - even when similiar functionality exists on Linux (and it usually does), the API is totally different and that affects the basic application architecture..
There's some minor case law that might be extended to support this sort of thing. I can't remember the exact case, and I don't have time to go look right now, but it was one of the classic screen scraping/deep linking cases where someone was scraping results off a web page to drive their own site. The judge did say in his ruling that a company (or whoever, I presume) had the right to present reasonable conditions on the use of their resources (website) and that they had the right for those to be respected. I have no idea how far they could push that sort of idea. I'm sure there's some sort of argument to be made for "community standards".
... by committee, with all the political problems, design inefficencies, and contradicting goals that would indicate. People have this idea that "years of reasearch" neccesarily means "better", let me tell you it ain't neccesarily so.
Furthermore, even if XML were the best way to markup text, and it was the easiest for software to parse and process, and it had the best support for extensibility and i18ln (and I wouldn't neccesarily grant any of those things), XML could still suck because of all it's design warts that are unrelated to those features.
If you're reading too and from files, and performance is such a factor that your XML parser is too slow (by the way, expat is *amazingly* fast and will often beat hand-rolled parsers that are not written by experts, even for simple grammars), then you probably shouldn't use a text file. XML has a huge share of warts. I'll go so far to say that it sucks. But it does have very clear and real advantages over raw text files. Data exchange is the most obvious and the most real, although the hype makes it bigger than it is, and it's realistically not a concern for many people. The other advantages are the saving in developer time of a consistent, well known set of APIs and file formats.
On the other hand, Wikipedia suffers from intermittent timeouts and editing errors. Perhaps the lesson here is not that MySQL is optimal for enterprise scalability, but that it can be leveraged into it, although there may be better options?
Some people actually do care about their kids, and use the welfare money for its intended purpose, but more often than not, it is used for beer or drug money.
Isn't politics fun? See, you can just make shit up. Class paranoia is the best kind!
If you buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi, you just deprived Pepsi of a sale. That doesn't make it theft. Loss of a sale, for whatever reason, isn't theft. That's aside from the usual (often self-serving) arguments that very few sales are actually lost to P2P (although I'm certain the number is greater than zero).
Many people do use theft in this way, ie "That store down the street is stealing my customers". It's a common, emotional way of reacting when you feel like you're owed something. It's also wrong, because nobody owes you anything, least of all thier money or patronage.
Even if they didn't copy MS, this was a known issue that wasn't fixed until people used it as a malware vector. That's reactive and not superior design.
Granted that it's reactive, and it's hardly optimal. On the other hand, it took Microsoft 5 years after people started using ActiveX as an infection vector to implement a solution, and even then they only did on one of 3 supported operating systems, and bundled it with a massive OS service pack rather than making it a standalone patch. While certainly not perfect, I think the Mozilla/Firefox teams process is superior.
If you like Blizzards graphical style in general, you will like WoW. It's very similiar, for obvious reasons, to Warcraft 3. For example, the buildings in towns look like the equivilent buildings in Warcraft. The engine is average, it's not Half Life 2. But the quality of the art, as opposed to the quality of the engine, is top notch.
You legally can't print up large sections of data from the CD to hang on your wall. Not saying anyone would care, but you legally can't. You're not allowed to transfer content from one medium to another without the copyright owner's permission. The only legal reason you can edit the data on the CD is to get it to work on your machine as well as it was intended. You can't just go and edit it to your heart's content, whether you distribute that or not.
All of these things are false, providing that you don't redistribute the results of what you do. Go re-read that copyright text.
Printing out the binary code on a CD and hanging it on your wall falls well under personal use. Format shifting is explicitly protected.
You can't (now, but soon) develop Windows applications under the GPL with Qt. No doubt this is not what you want to do, but it is almost certainly what the parent was referring to.
Punishments that are not commesurate with the crime are stupid, whether the law itself is just or not. I'll also take issue with whether or not p2p is a more pressing problem - shoplifting, which is literal outright theft, costs *billions* every year. It can cripple a small business. The indirect costs, in the form of store security are huge. P2P is simple a) newer b) more high profile. The reason it's high profile is because it's a) new and b) directly affects the companies responsible for deciding what gets pushed in the public eye.
I understand what you are saying. I do not agree, and I see no reason why it should be. Now, using trademarks in the actual advertisement would be a no-no. But using a trademarked term as a cue to show the advertisment should not be.
Why *shouldn't* they be allowed to use it as a search term? Trademarks are intended to prevent confusion (intentional or not) and counterfeiting. Hitachi can't market a Z3 because it would be confused with the BMW Z3. Nobody searching for "BMW" is going to be confused by an ad for Hitachi products. I see no rational reason why search terms should fall under trademark protection.
In the US, companies avoid doing this because it opens them to liability if they (accidently or on purpose) misrepresent the abilities of the competing product. The do compare themselves when the comparison is subjective (taste tests) or when it's very simple (MSRP for our car is $5000 less than some other car). This is also a totally different issue than simply creating an equal ground in advertising. In fact, at least in the US, it's more common than not - the exit gates at any airport will have tons of adds for hotels and car rentals, from all different companies.
I'm boggled by the idea that a country would actually make it illegal to compare oneself to a competitor based on actual criteria. How else are you supposed to make informed buying decisions?
I think it is unreasonble, because it essentially makes Google liable for litigating trademark claims. Remember that trademarks are only within a certain market, but that the scope of that market can vary considerably depending on the court and the company involved - you aren't going to get away with marketing a Coca-Cola anything, but a Compaq washing maching is much more reasonable. Does BMW compete with Hitachi? I don't know. Do you? How about IBM? And, more likely, who does Anderson Computing compete with? Fred's Computing? Jack's Repair Shop?
I don't see whats unethical about this practice. It's called competition - it's not like they're picketing your business or something, they're creating a way for them to gain equal time in customer mindshare. More importantly, you're still ahead, because they're searching for *your* name, but your competitor has to pay to get his name out there. Trademark creep is just as annoying as all the other kinds of creep out there - it's supposed to ensure that you can do business under your mark without the risk of someone else masquerading as you. That's all, it's not supposed to be some sort of stick you can use to beat away competition.
It's technically a violation of professional ethics for a lawyer to prosecute a case he knows is unreasonable or invalid. I don't believe that this gets much more than lip service these days, if indeed it ever did.
It's a legal concept. In the introductory stages of the trial, which is where the trial is now, the plaintiff has to show that there is a real disupte over the facts of the case. An undisputed fact is one which both sides accept to be true, and for purposes of the case is assumed to be. A disputed fact is one which is to be decided by the trial. The judge is saying that SCO hasn't presented any information or evidence by which they can make a reasonable claim of copyright infringment.
Re:No trying to troll but is safari ever better?
on
Mapping Google Maps
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Kmeleon still relies on XUL (just take a look in it's application directory), it simply modifies XUL to generate native widgets. Although I'm actually not too sure of that anymore, the recent version of Kmeleon I looked at did *not* use native menus or toolbars. I'm not aware of any project that manages to totally divorce Gecko from XUL, although I'll take a look at Epiphany.
IE doesn't have support for --let's be honest here --a very few, very specific parts of the vast and damn near impenetrable specification because the demand for them isn't there. You're saying that the demand isn't there because IE doesn't support those far-out parts of the spec.
The demand *is* there. It's not seen as demand because people work around the flaws, so IE still works, because if IE doesn't work people don't view their pages. It *is* a chicken and egg problem. IE, with it's dominant market share, directly affects the usage of new web techniques. If IE can't do something, you either don't do it or you find a workaround.
Also, lets be really clear. IE lacks a lot more than "a few pieces" of CSS support. It has most of CSS 1. It has a tiny bit of CSS 2 (although practically none of the positioning styles). It has none of CSS 3.
Internet Explorer is a value-add on top of Windows, and serves to advance the Windows platform.
There's your answer right there - MS doesn't view IE as a product to market to web users. IE is a platform-lockin tool. Don't forget that MS only got into the browser market as a way to combat the fear that web applications would render the OS irrelevant.
[...]t but that the majority of their customers don't care about.
I think that I'd like to hear from Microsoft exactly why they consider to be their customers and who they actually receive feedback from. I am totally positive that most people who use Windows don't provide any of that feedback. I am equally certain that web developers don't either.
?? What happened here, did you just decide at the end of your comment to start being a dickhead?
No, but I'm seeing a huge chain of posts from you basically flaming anyone for asking Microsoft why, when they could very easily be a leader in driving rich, cross platform, standard compliant functionality on the web, they're choosing not to. Don't forget that features like transparent PNG and CSS 2 support were dropped in favor of features even less commonly used.
Compare this with Programming Windows, an introduction and reference to writing applications with the Windows API. It's invaluable as a learning tool, but to write the really fancy stuff you'll need to exapand a lot on the knowledge it offers. It's 1479 pages.
In fairness, in most cases, those are a valid baseline. The "Get the Facts" campaigns are targetted toward people who're considering switching, not toward people who're creating new systems. I wonder what percentage of hardware/software/IT costs are for the development of wholy new systems as opposed to upgrades or replacements for new ones?
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They aren't the same, obviously. But it's a matter of degree and custom, not that they're totally different. Coercion is coercion is coercion.
It's interesting you say that since a) the common business wisdom seems to disagree with you and b) a company that has been enormously succesfull, by any business standard seems to disagree with you.
Reliance on COM/ActiveX controls and libraries can make porting quite a chore - even when similiar functionality exists on Linux (and it usually does), the API is totally different and that affects the basic application architecture..
There's some minor case law that might be extended to support this sort of thing. I can't remember the exact case, and I don't have time to go look right now, but it was one of the classic screen scraping/deep linking cases where someone was scraping results off a web page to drive their own site. The judge did say in his ruling that a company (or whoever, I presume) had the right to present reasonable conditions on the use of their resources (website) and that they had the right for those to be respected. I have no idea how far they could push that sort of idea. I'm sure there's some sort of argument to be made for "community standards".
Furthermore, even if XML were the best way to markup text, and it was the easiest for software to parse and process, and it had the best support for extensibility and i18ln (and I wouldn't neccesarily grant any of those things), XML could still suck because of all it's design warts that are unrelated to those features.
If you're reading too and from files, and performance is such a factor that your XML parser is too slow (by the way, expat is *amazingly* fast and will often beat hand-rolled parsers that are not written by experts, even for simple grammars), then you probably shouldn't use a text file. XML has a huge share of warts. I'll go so far to say that it sucks. But it does have very clear and real advantages over raw text files. Data exchange is the most obvious and the most real, although the hype makes it bigger than it is, and it's realistically not a concern for many people. The other advantages are the saving in developer time of a consistent, well known set of APIs and file formats.
On the other hand, Wikipedia suffers from intermittent timeouts and editing errors. Perhaps the lesson here is not that MySQL is optimal for enterprise scalability, but that it can be leveraged into it, although there may be better options?
Isn't politics fun? See, you can just make shit up. Class paranoia is the best kind!
Many people do use theft in this way, ie "That store down the street is stealing my customers". It's a common, emotional way of reacting when you feel like you're owed something. It's also wrong, because nobody owes you anything, least of all thier money or patronage.
Granted that it's reactive, and it's hardly optimal. On the other hand, it took Microsoft 5 years after people started using ActiveX as an infection vector to implement a solution, and even then they only did on one of 3 supported operating systems, and bundled it with a massive OS service pack rather than making it a standalone patch. While certainly not perfect, I think the Mozilla/Firefox teams process is superior.
If you like Blizzards graphical style in general, you will like WoW. It's very similiar, for obvious reasons, to Warcraft 3. For example, the buildings in towns look like the equivilent buildings in Warcraft. The engine is average, it's not Half Life 2. But the quality of the art, as opposed to the quality of the engine, is top notch.
All of these things are false, providing that you don't redistribute the results of what you do. Go re-read that copyright text.
Printing out the binary code on a CD and hanging it on your wall falls well under personal use. Format shifting is explicitly protected.
You can't (now, but soon) develop Windows applications under the GPL with Qt. No doubt this is not what you want to do, but it is almost certainly what the parent was referring to.
Punishments that are not commesurate with the crime are stupid, whether the law itself is just or not. I'll also take issue with whether or not p2p is a more pressing problem - shoplifting, which is literal outright theft, costs *billions* every year. It can cripple a small business. The indirect costs, in the form of store security are huge. P2P is simple a) newer b) more high profile. The reason it's high profile is because it's a) new and b) directly affects the companies responsible for deciding what gets pushed in the public eye.
I understand what you are saying. I do not agree, and I see no reason why it should be. Now, using trademarks in the actual advertisement would be a no-no. But using a trademarked term as a cue to show the advertisment should not be.
Why *shouldn't* they be allowed to use it as a search term? Trademarks are intended to prevent confusion (intentional or not) and counterfeiting. Hitachi can't market a Z3 because it would be confused with the BMW Z3. Nobody searching for "BMW" is going to be confused by an ad for Hitachi products. I see no rational reason why search terms should fall under trademark protection.
I'm boggled by the idea that a country would actually make it illegal to compare oneself to a competitor based on actual criteria. How else are you supposed to make informed buying decisions?
I think it is unreasonble, because it essentially makes Google liable for litigating trademark claims. Remember that trademarks are only within a certain market, but that the scope of that market can vary considerably depending on the court and the company involved - you aren't going to get away with marketing a Coca-Cola anything, but a Compaq washing maching is much more reasonable. Does BMW compete with Hitachi? I don't know. Do you? How about IBM? And, more likely, who does Anderson Computing compete with? Fred's Computing? Jack's Repair Shop?
I don't see whats unethical about this practice. It's called competition - it's not like they're picketing your business or something, they're creating a way for them to gain equal time in customer mindshare. More importantly, you're still ahead, because they're searching for *your* name, but your competitor has to pay to get his name out there. Trademark creep is just as annoying as all the other kinds of creep out there - it's supposed to ensure that you can do business under your mark without the risk of someone else masquerading as you. That's all, it's not supposed to be some sort of stick you can use to beat away competition.
It's technically a violation of professional ethics for a lawyer to prosecute a case he knows is unreasonable or invalid. I don't believe that this gets much more than lip service these days, if indeed it ever did.
It's a legal concept. In the introductory stages of the trial, which is where the trial is now, the plaintiff has to show that there is a real disupte over the facts of the case. An undisputed fact is one which both sides accept to be true, and for purposes of the case is assumed to be. A disputed fact is one which is to be decided by the trial. The judge is saying that SCO hasn't presented any information or evidence by which they can make a reasonable claim of copyright infringment.
Kmeleon still relies on XUL (just take a look in it's application directory), it simply modifies XUL to generate native widgets. Although I'm actually not too sure of that anymore, the recent version of Kmeleon I looked at did *not* use native menus or toolbars. I'm not aware of any project that manages to totally divorce Gecko from XUL, although I'll take a look at Epiphany.
The demand *is* there. It's not seen as demand because people work around the flaws, so IE still works, because if IE doesn't work people don't view their pages. It *is* a chicken and egg problem. IE, with it's dominant market share, directly affects the usage of new web techniques. If IE can't do something, you either don't do it or you find a workaround.
Also, lets be really clear. IE lacks a lot more than "a few pieces" of CSS support. It has most of CSS 1. It has a tiny bit of CSS 2 (although practically none of the positioning styles). It has none of CSS 3.
Internet Explorer is a value-add on top of Windows, and serves to advance the Windows platform.
There's your answer right there - MS doesn't view IE as a product to market to web users. IE is a platform-lockin tool. Don't forget that MS only got into the browser market as a way to combat the fear that web applications would render the OS irrelevant.
[...]t but that the majority of their customers don't care about.
I think that I'd like to hear from Microsoft exactly why they consider to be their customers and who they actually receive feedback from. I am totally positive that most people who use Windows don't provide any of that feedback. I am equally certain that web developers don't either.
?? What happened here, did you just decide at the end of your comment to start being a dickhead?
No, but I'm seeing a huge chain of posts from you basically flaming anyone for asking Microsoft why, when they could very easily be a leader in driving rich, cross platform, standard compliant functionality on the web, they're choosing not to. Don't forget that features like transparent PNG and CSS 2 support were dropped in favor of features even less commonly used.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1572 31995X/qid=1107987162/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl 14/102-6770576-5407306?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 (no referrer link or anything)
In fairness, in most cases, those are a valid baseline. The "Get the Facts" campaigns are targetted toward people who're considering switching, not toward people who're creating new systems. I wonder what percentage of hardware/software/IT costs are for the development of wholy new systems as opposed to upgrades or replacements for new ones?