I think this would actually impact higher level languages like Java and.NET alot more than "normal" C and C++ programmers - heavily OO languages like those tend to create lots and lots of small references and probably have a higher pointer count.
On the other hand, 64bit pointers make certain tradeoffs less desirable - for example, if you're passing around pointers to structs that are larger than 32 bits but smaller than 64, it's now more efficent to pass by value. Thats a pretty borderline case, though....:P
We are actually NOT talking about the second case. This is a SEARCH engine, and it's delivering context-related marketing. It's just like how the top/sponsored link for a "linux" search at MSN is the Microsoft site telling you why you shouldn't use it. In addition, the article mentions this was about banner ads - they clearly wouldn't misrepresent themselves as being for playboy.com (otherwise the advertisers would be getting sued directly...)
Whats happening here is the same thing thats happening in all areas of IP law - the rights and protections are becoming broader and broader and more and more important. Trademarks are supposed to be specific, but if you get famous enough, you can just claim that since you MIGHT market in that area, any trademark infringes (try selling a computer called "coke", even without the distinctive logo), and more and more uses are considered infringing.
Playboy is called that BECAUSE of the association. To be fair, I'm not sure if it was neccesarily associated with naked women (the first Playboys didn't feature nudity), but it was associated with a certain class of rich, young man, the sort of guy who'd go to the Playboy club. We'd probably call them jetsetters today.
Playmate was a clever play on words (the word existed before the magazing, obviously). The sexual connotations of playmate are pretty much from the magazine, though.
That said, regardless of context I have a hard time thinking that it's 'fair' to be able to prevent people from using a common english word in advertising, without even having your logo or mark involved, particularly when it's simple search results.
The fact that you rant without listening to what other people are saying (see your previous rant against roll overs for an excellent example, because you jumped on a high horse without thinking the problem through) also rather detracts from you point.
Not to mention that XHTML isn't some magic potion that'll make your site work properly. CSS and stylesheets are great for that sort of thing, but the various cross browser issues force all sorts of hackery that reminds me a great deal of the stupid crap we did to work around bugs in table rendering in the 90s (@import to "hide" from old browsers? Bah). At the sites that oh-so-helpfully explain these tricks sound so proud, as they talk about the advantages of web standards.
Yes, I know that using tables for layout is evil. Of course, theres a variety of layouts that CSS is simply incapable of, and the cross-platfrom CSS you need to properly implement even some relatively simple layouts is far larger than the comparable table code, and it'll work (not even degrade to simple text, but actually WORK) on non-CSS compliant browsers, and it'll render faster (and often in a more user-friendly manner) than the CSS...
I use CSS alot for effects and styling. It's really handy for some layout stuff (like a static menu). It's makes a great addition to a table based layout, where you used to have to play games with single pixel cells and whatnot. But it's a nightmare for overall layout. Call me when CSS 3 is finalized and has at least 80% support in all major browsers.
At least 75% of the scripts I find at all the popular Javascript sights are ridiculously heavy for what they do - they also tend to be enormously slow (check out the DHTML menus at mta.info for an example). They rarely degrade gracefully, instead spending hundreds of lines of browser detection and browser specific behavior. Stock scripts like the kind you're advocating have probably cause me more pain in my web programming career than anything else.
This use to drive me insane also. To get around it, select "Detach from process" from the debug menu before closing the debugger.
Incidently, it's not ALL IE windows, just the ones that share the same root process (created via the "New Window..." menu or by opening links in a new menu).
I'll put this simply: You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Go read any MS EULA (we'll just use them as an example). Notice all the stuff about prohibition of reverse engineering, modifaction, creation of backups, reviewing, publishing of benchmarks, etc.
Practically none of the EULA has anything to do with distribution (which isn't suprising because all it has to say is "you can't do it").
An EULA is a USER license (thats the U part). It sets the terms and conditions for your USE of a software product.
It's questionable whether internal distribution actually is or not (I'm not aware of any case law on this) but it doesn't matter for proprietary software because, again, it's a use license and not a distribution one.
You're largely correct about the roles that patents play in IT, but I should point out that MS has not, to date, used it's signifigant patent portfolio to shut projects down. They like to compete in all kinds of other (often unfair or underhanded) ways, but not with patents.
Patent law being used like this on a large scale basis would be the doom of the IT industry - thats why all the big players cross license after all, they know they'd be screwing themselves in the long run if they try to play hardball.
I don't know if you've really been following this issue, but it IS in court RIGHT NOW. This IS the time to show the cards - because the judge presiding on the case specifically said, "Okay, enough fucking around, lets get down to buisness." SCO is essentially refusing to even enumerate its claims against IBM! Honestly, if these "more than 60 pages" is all there actually is, it would not suprise me if SCOs case was thrown out of court.
The unknown entry was actually NOT the same - in mplayer its called "dunknow" or something like that. That, combined with the difference in punctuation, looks to me like a re-implementation based off of mplayer rather than just copying. The order is not as coincidental as it would seem, if they're using the MPlayer file format and therefore referring to the MPlayer sources (is the file format documented formally anywhere besides the source?)
Theres obviously alot of things I don't know about both MPlayer and this product, but as a third party I find the evidence that MPlayer has posted to be worthy of investigation but not outright proof of wrongdoing.
Using the MPSub file format does not neccesarily imply that the code used to read it is taken from the MPlayer source. I haven't read the entire MPlayer website yet, but the sscanf() patterns they match don't convince me either - parsers for the same formats would neccesarily have similiar if not identical patterns. The other strings results are more suspicious, but I would call this reason for further investigation, not the 100% proof that the MPlayer people seem to be claiming it as.
The guy who wrote it might very have used the Mplayer code as inspiration (not suprising, if they're using the MPSub format), without direct copying. That'd explain things like the otherwise extreme coincidence of string names and order (once you've seen those you'll tend to put them in same order when you do it yourself).
I had the best possible experience with Compaq tech support - and on a refurb, at that. My laptop just died on me on a Thursday night (after buisness hours), and I had it back in my hands the following Tuesday morning. All around about the best experience I've ever had with support anywhere at ANY company.
Because the product description said "ATI Mobility Radeon 9200" and the actual product was an "ATI Mobility Radeon 9000". This is not a hard concept to follow.
No, I said "it's too expensive to live here on minimum wage". I (obviously) make more than that. You could not live in this area making minimum wage - at least not on your own, without other assistance.
And why exactly is your bill so high? I don't know for sure (of course), but I bet I can guess - it's cause your upstream is overcommited and strapped for cash, too. I'm not saying that it's (neccesarily) the local ISP who's responsible for the artificially high price, it's the people who actually own and are responsible for the pipe.
All you really need to do is just not oversell capacity. Then your costs and allowances are fixed, you know exactly how much you need to clear to make a profit, and theres no real worries with "power users". Take it slow and upgrade capacity as you grow your customer base and you'll be able to make a steady profit without having to send out all these letters and having annoying AUPs.
There's no real reason bandwidth has to be expensive - it's artificially rare, mainly because of the overly rapid infrastructure expansion during the boom. It's basic infrastructure and the cost of maintaing it is more or less fixed, it doesn't vary with the amount of people you have using it.
Raise noise about this if you need to. If it gets noisy enough then consumer protection legislation can get called upon, and then maybe we'll have some sort of baseline for what a reasonable contract with a local monopoly is - in fact, it'd be really spiffy if we could get a court ruling that invalidated those obnoxious "we can change any facet of this agreement at any time" clauses in general.
My rent and food (I get transportation for free) alone add up to signifigantly more than a minimum wage salary. Thats a 1 bedroom apartment and getting all our food at Costco, mind you. Learn a little bit more about what 'cost of living' means and how it varies from place to place before you go spouting off.
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On the other hand, 64bit pointers make certain tradeoffs less desirable - for example, if you're passing around pointers to structs that are larger than 32 bits but smaller than 64, it's now more efficent to pass by value. Thats a pretty borderline case, though.... :P
Of course, I don't know how "object oriented" is the same as "dated" in your head, so maybe it won't work for you.
Whats happening here is the same thing thats happening in all areas of IP law - the rights and protections are becoming broader and broader and more and more important. Trademarks are supposed to be specific, but if you get famous enough, you can just claim that since you MIGHT market in that area, any trademark infringes (try selling a computer called "coke", even without the distinctive logo), and more and more uses are considered infringing.
Playmate was a clever play on words (the word existed before the magazing, obviously). The sexual connotations of playmate are pretty much from the magazine, though.
That said, regardless of context I have a hard time thinking that it's 'fair' to be able to prevent people from using a common english word in advertising, without even having your logo or mark involved, particularly when it's simple search results.
Not to mention that XHTML isn't some magic potion that'll make your site work properly. CSS and stylesheets are great for that sort of thing, but the various cross browser issues force all sorts of hackery that reminds me a great deal of the stupid crap we did to work around bugs in table rendering in the 90s (@import to "hide" from old browsers? Bah). At the sites that oh-so-helpfully explain these tricks sound so proud, as they talk about the advantages of web standards.
Yes, I know that using tables for layout is evil. Of course, theres a variety of layouts that CSS is simply incapable of, and the cross-platfrom CSS you need to properly implement even some relatively simple layouts is far larger than the comparable table code, and it'll work (not even degrade to simple text, but actually WORK) on non-CSS compliant browsers, and it'll render faster (and often in a more user-friendly manner) than the CSS...
I use CSS alot for effects and styling. It's really handy for some layout stuff (like a static menu). It's makes a great addition to a table based layout, where you used to have to play games with single pixel cells and whatnot. But it's a nightmare for overall layout. Call me when CSS 3 is finalized and has at least 80% support in all major browsers.
At least 75% of the scripts I find at all the popular Javascript sights are ridiculously heavy for what they do - they also tend to be enormously slow (check out the DHTML menus at mta.info for an example). They rarely degrade gracefully, instead spending hundreds of lines of browser detection and browser specific behavior. Stock scripts like the kind you're advocating have probably cause me more pain in my web programming career than anything else.
Incidently, it's not ALL IE windows, just the ones that share the same root process (created via the "New Window..." menu or by opening links in a new menu).
Practically none of the EULA has anything to do with distribution (which isn't suprising because all it has to say is "you can't do it").
An EULA is a USER license (thats the U part). It sets the terms and conditions for your USE of a software product.
It's questionable whether internal distribution actually is or not (I'm not aware of any case law on this) but it doesn't matter for proprietary software because, again, it's a use license and not a distribution one.
Patent law being used like this on a large scale basis would be the doom of the IT industry - thats why all the big players cross license after all, they know they'd be screwing themselves in the long run if they try to play hardball.
I don't know if you've really been following this issue, but it IS in court RIGHT NOW. This IS the time to show the cards - because the judge presiding on the case specifically said, "Okay, enough fucking around, lets get down to buisness." SCO is essentially refusing to even enumerate its claims against IBM! Honestly, if these "more than 60 pages" is all there actually is, it would not suprise me if SCOs case was thrown out of court.
They would have been able to provide more evidence, but the computers were down.
Theres obviously alot of things I don't know about both MPlayer and this product, but as a third party I find the evidence that MPlayer has posted to be worthy of investigation but not outright proof of wrongdoing.
The guy who wrote it might very have used the Mplayer code as inspiration (not suprising, if they're using the MPSub format), without direct copying. That'd explain things like the otherwise extreme coincidence of string names and order (once you've seen those you'll tend to put them in same order when you do it yourself).
The crippled networking support in HOME is enough for me to use Pro at home. It makes sharing files a huge pain in the ass.
I had the best possible experience with Compaq tech support - and on a refurb, at that. My laptop just died on me on a Thursday night (after buisness hours), and I had it back in my hands the following Tuesday morning. All around about the best experience I've ever had with support anywhere at ANY company.
Because the product description said "ATI Mobility Radeon 9200" and the actual product was an "ATI Mobility Radeon 9000". This is not a hard concept to follow.
It's sorta like intellecutal welfare, then? Call the Republicans!
No, I said "it's too expensive to live here on minimum wage". I (obviously) make more than that. You could not live in this area making minimum wage - at least not on your own, without other assistance.
Because it's near where I can find work, of course. Is there any particular reason you don't live in any arbitrary third world country?
And why exactly is your bill so high? I don't know for sure (of course), but I bet I can guess - it's cause your upstream is overcommited and strapped for cash, too. I'm not saying that it's (neccesarily) the local ISP who's responsible for the artificially high price, it's the people who actually own and are responsible for the pipe.
All you really need to do is just not oversell capacity. Then your costs and allowances are fixed, you know exactly how much you need to clear to make a profit, and theres no real worries with "power users". Take it slow and upgrade capacity as you grow your customer base and you'll be able to make a steady profit without having to send out all these letters and having annoying AUPs.
There's no real reason bandwidth has to be expensive - it's artificially rare, mainly because of the overly rapid infrastructure expansion during the boom. It's basic infrastructure and the cost of maintaing it is more or less fixed, it doesn't vary with the amount of people you have using it.
Raise noise about this if you need to. If it gets noisy enough then consumer protection legislation can get called upon, and then maybe we'll have some sort of baseline for what a reasonable contract with a local monopoly is - in fact, it'd be really spiffy if we could get a court ruling that invalidated those obnoxious "we can change any facet of this agreement at any time" clauses in general.
Cost of living varies by at least a factor of 2 just within the US. I think it'll be more than 20 years before we've got a flat global economy.
My rent and food (I get transportation for free) alone add up to signifigantly more than a minimum wage salary. Thats a 1 bedroom apartment and getting all our food at Costco, mind you. Learn a little bit more about what 'cost of living' means and how it varies from place to place before you go spouting off.