Using COM is easy in C++ with good compiler support (Visual C++ can automagically import COM definitions just like C++ Builder can, although it lacks a handy wizard to use, so some people never learn about it). WRITING a COM server, and especially an ActiveX control is a pain in C++, although IDE wizards can help. Debugging them is even harder.
I'll claim it. a.NET assembly is NOT a COM component. They have similarities in design, because they address much of the same problem space, but thats as far as it goes..NET provides wrappers for COM interop. These wrappers are needed because (suprise).NET isn't COM and can't interact with it directly.
... because COM has alot of technical advantages over static linking. Like not needing to worry about binary compatability, for example, just interface compatability. Thats a massive gain for anyone who cares about backwards compatability, which is a big deal to Microsoft.
Here's whats confusing me: How did Eolas get its hands on this patent? The patent application says it's owned by the Regents of UC Oakland. I don't know what the W3Cs policy with regard to patented standards was in 1994, but the guy who invented this patent was certainly involved - he's listed as presenting some lectures at W3C confrences in 1995. The patent makes explict reference to the EMBED tag. This seems similiar to the Rambus fiasco, where they push for the adaption of something they knew they owned patents on without disclosing it.
Furthermore, the patent seems trivial - the hard work of a plugin based system like this is the underlying plugin architecture (COM, CORBA, OLE, whatever), not the trivial task of choosing the helper plugin based on the mime type. And the fact that the patent specifically limits itself to hypermedia means that a generic interface like COM shouldn't be covered.
The "control path for user interaction" would imply to me that the helper app has to be hosted within the browser to qualify. Someone else probably owns the patent on spawning a registered external application based on the MIME type of the file.
Untrue, actually - it's much faster to diff the files. You're forgetting the overhead of calculating the MD5 itself.
The main reason people use MD5s for downloads and such is to ensure that your local copy is the same as the remote copy. This is a savings because you download the MD5, not the whole remote file to compare to your local one. I'm with the parent here - it'd make more sense to diff the actual files, unless Kazaa exposes MD5s of local files or something (which would make some sense, I suppose - I know some P2P networks work this way).
His retort is actually suprisingly topical, since IP patents have allowed Monsato to sue farmers for growing corn. Oh, you didn't know that corn was patented?
Parents description of the drug market is accurate for many, many classes of drugs, especially now that the USPTO allows process patents. There AREN'T any alternatives. Most people don't directly pay the costs because of health insurance, which is one reason nobody without health insurance can afford to get sick in this country and why theres such a thriving black market in medication from Canada.
Here's something to keep in mind everyone from Pfizer or whatever talks about how the pricing is justifiable and you're taking money out of thier pockets if you're against patented drugs or whatever: Like all companies, they want to make as MUCH profit as possible - in fact are legally obligated to do so. They won't settle for 12% ROI. They won't settle for anything less than the maximum ROI they can leverage from thier monopoly.
That's reasonable as far as it goes, but especially in the real of health care there's a societal benefit that needs to be considered as well.
Oh, and it's not even the length of the patent thats the main issue here as it is the classes of things that can be patented.
I use (and adore) wxWindows now, but one thing I always liked about Qt was that any widget could be it's own top-level frame - made testing custom widgets and the like much easier. Price tag was the kicker for me, but I've grown to prefer the wxWindows API anyway.
Actually, if you want to develop on windows, #2 isn't even an option, which is something I'm sure limits uptake in some cases. But like you said, I'm sure they sleep okay regardless.
"... without the right to keep and bear arms". Are you saying the 2nd amendment is why we don't have slavery and child labor in the US today? Are you feeling alright? Have you ever read a history book, ever?
I'm not sure that a single line of small-font off-gray text is "clearly" labelled - I was looking for it and still didn't see it.
On top of that, the if you click on the "about" link, the "Featured Sites" (the top 4 links, none of which point to a Linux site) are supposedly hand-selected by editors to match your results (ie, a hand-tuned index). No mention of pay-for-placing is made.
Featured Sites are links that MSN Search editors believe are likely to be particularly relevant and useful. These sites are chosen from ones published by MSN affiliates, partners, sponsors, and advertisers, as well as other sites proven to be especially popular among our users.
MSN is going to have to get alot better than this if they ever expect to get me to use them instead of Google.
I just signed up with vonage, and for what its worth, it does go to moderate-to-great lengths to make sure you understand the 911 issues with regards to it's service and what you have to do to get it working.
Subject lines that work will spread. Subject lines that don't will not. If there's only a small probability of using a new subject line (rather than using the one you used to infect this host), then, over generations, the most effective subjects will be used the most.
The question, of course, is whether or not it's a good idea to make a IM a public service - or at least regulate it (requiring publishing of specs so that third party clients can connect is pretty minimal regulation, and is probably better for consumers in the long run anyway - open protocols tending to be more secure and all that).
I'd argue that it should be - that any medium of communication should be at least minimally regulated, either by the goverment or by itself, so as to ensure things like freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Now, I understand thats a fairly extreme view to alot of people here. But it's my point of view that ANYONE should have access to communications media, in all forms. That includes subsidised POTS for people and areas that wouldn't have it in an unregulated market. That means keeping public access TV around, even though everyone says its a waste of money. It means limiting media consolidation so that people can have multiple sources for news. Yeah, yeah, I'm a liberal. So damn what - your free market hasn't done me a whole hell of a lot lately.
That's both wrong and stupid. If you're designing a massive 3d model, but your card & hardware are pushed to the limits rendering it so you can't easily manipulate it and operations affecting it are time consuming, it will take you longer to complete this model. If working on these models is what you do all day, then you'll be more productive with high end hardware.
Try thinking about this another way - people who provide public communications have a responsibility to make connectivity as broad as possible. This is why you can do things like go to Radio Shack to buy a phone. Is it fair that commercial companies like Samsung can piggyback on the service proviced by all the baby bells for free?
It sounds stupid when you phrase it that way, but thats one of the things at the heart of the FCCs decision to force AOL to allow third party clients on it's network.
Now, I don't know if you're naive or a an MS shill - but, in the past, whenever MS has talked about things like encouraging third party clients or open connectivity, they're talking about licensed partners, not OSS projects. Even when the docs are available for free, you often have to agree to an NDA that precludes an open source implementation. So it's possible that I'm making wrong assumptions, but based on past behavior I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in MS playing nice with open source developers.
Of course, this arguably has issues for the monopoly settlement, too - Messenger is (supposedly) integral to the OS now. You can't remove it unless you're willing to spend time fighting the OS.
I'd like a nice listing of all the things you've done with your 12 guage shotgun that a) have protected you or your family from harm and b) couldn't have been done with anything else.
I've taken a gun away from someone who wanted to hurt me with it. I'd say that gives me about 1000% times more right to be against them than almost anyone else on slashdot.
Lets stop trying to relate this to physical objects because there is no meaningful correlation - the closest I can come would be RFID tags in books that identify themselves to photocopiers so that the photocopier can turn you in for making illegal copies of the book. This is almost as nonsensical as Jack Valenci and his idea for digital watermarks that camcorders wouldn't record.
Actually, as anyone in the military will tell you, the high likelyhood of you having a gun doesn't make me any less likely to jack you. It just means that I'm that much more likely to shoot in the head without warning than I am to try to scare you off. This is one of the reasons people like hostage negotiators don't show guns - because pulling your own gun escalates the situation and something that you were going to walk away from becomes much more serious.
The biggest problem I have with these schemes is that they're almost always implemented very poorly - I've had applications that refuse to run because I was behind a proxy server, applications that refused to run because the first instance had crashed and didn't clean up it's lockfiles, applications that wouldn't run because it thought it was being used multiple times on the same LAN (it was detecting itself via a virtal loopback adapter...), etc etc.
And thats not even counting the problems I've had with things like demo periods not working correctly and valid licenses being lost.
While I'm on the subject, demos that expire and then don't let you get another demo with a newer version of the product annoy me - if I didn't buy your product the first time, maybe it's because of bugs or features that are fixed/present in your new version!
When I was 13 years old, I wrote programs in Basic with embedded assembler on my Arari 800. I kinda knew how to drive.
One of my friends, on the other hand, couldn't have written a line of assembler to save his life, but could rebuild a carb. There's always people who're interested in things. They tend to get grumpy when the unwashed masses discover them. Go talk to a movie critic sometime, they're good examples.
I'm not sure what this "gap" you're talking about is. Oh, and if the rumours are true, Longhorn will use a DirectX based desktop similar to OS Xs Quartz, so, at least if you have a modern graphics card, you should get better performance than you do with current Windows versions. X had better start catching up:P
If you don't like GUIs, don't use Windows. Windows is built around the concept of a GUI and a message based architecture. Deal with it.
You don't need one to overthrow the goverment, either, and even if you did, the current situation is such that it wouldn't help you alot.
Basically, the country is too large for that sort of thing - if we broke the US up into the states, and made the federal goverment a sort of UN, and did alot of other things that might be a good idea and might not, then it'd make more sense. As it stands, it really doesn't.
Why "should" it last longer than that? Because you want it to? The idea here is that you're getting products with a lower lifespan for a lower cost. If you'd wanted a machine that would run without failure for 10 years, you should have gotten one.
It's more complicated than that, of course - part of the issue is the commoditization of the PC market, so OEMs aren't willing to spend the money on heavily engineered parts. But I'm not convinced that it's a problem per se.
People get grumpy whenever they have something wear out. But you wouldn't be willing to pay 10x upfront (at least most people wouldn't) for something with a longer lifespan - and even that would eventually fail.
People say we're becoming a "throw-away" society. I say so what? It's good for companies because it's a steadier income stream (would you rather get weekly paychecks or just 1 lump sum at the end of the year?), it's good for consumers because of lower prices, and done properly it's not really wastefull (I realize the third point has some problems).
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VB makes it pretty simple.
I'll claim it. a .NET assembly is NOT a COM component. They have similarities in design, because they address much of the same problem space, but thats as far as it goes. .NET provides wrappers for COM interop. These wrappers are needed because (suprise) .NET isn't COM and can't interact with it directly.
... because COM has alot of technical advantages over static linking. Like not needing to worry about binary compatability, for example, just interface compatability. Thats a massive gain for anyone who cares about backwards compatability, which is a big deal to Microsoft.
Furthermore, the patent seems trivial - the hard work of a plugin based system like this is the underlying plugin architecture (COM, CORBA, OLE, whatever), not the trivial task of choosing the helper plugin based on the mime type. And the fact that the patent specifically limits itself to hypermedia means that a generic interface like COM shouldn't be covered.
The "control path for user interaction" would imply to me that the helper app has to be hosted within the browser to qualify. Someone else probably owns the patent on spawning a registered external application based on the MIME type of the file.
The main reason people use MD5s for downloads and such is to ensure that your local copy is the same as the remote copy. This is a savings because you download the MD5, not the whole remote file to compare to your local one. I'm with the parent here - it'd make more sense to diff the actual files, unless Kazaa exposes MD5s of local files or something (which would make some sense, I suppose - I know some P2P networks work this way).
His retort is actually suprisingly topical, since IP patents have allowed Monsato to sue farmers for growing corn. Oh, you didn't know that corn was patented?
Here's something to keep in mind everyone from Pfizer or whatever talks about how the pricing is justifiable and you're taking money out of thier pockets if you're against patented drugs or whatever: Like all companies, they want to make as MUCH profit as possible - in fact are legally obligated to do so. They won't settle for 12% ROI. They won't settle for anything less than the maximum ROI they can leverage from thier monopoly.
That's reasonable as far as it goes, but especially in the real of health care there's a societal benefit that needs to be considered as well.
Oh, and it's not even the length of the patent thats the main issue here as it is the classes of things that can be patented.
I use (and adore) wxWindows now, but one thing I always liked about Qt was that any widget could be it's own top-level frame - made testing custom widgets and the like much easier. Price tag was the kicker for me, but I've grown to prefer the wxWindows API anyway.
Actually, if you want to develop on windows, #2 isn't even an option, which is something I'm sure limits uptake in some cases. But like you said, I'm sure they sleep okay regardless.
"... without the right to keep and bear arms". Are you saying the 2nd amendment is why we don't have slavery and child labor in the US today? Are you feeling alright? Have you ever read a history book, ever?
On top of that, the if you click on the "about" link, the "Featured Sites" (the top 4 links, none of which point to a Linux site) are supposedly hand-selected by editors to match your results (ie, a hand-tuned index). No mention of pay-for-placing is made.
Featured Sites are links that MSN Search editors believe are likely to be particularly relevant and useful. These sites are chosen from ones published by MSN affiliates, partners, sponsors, and advertisers, as well as other sites proven to be especially popular among our users.
MSN is going to have to get alot better than this if they ever expect to get me to use them instead of Google.I just signed up with vonage, and for what its worth, it does go to moderate-to-great lengths to make sure you understand the 911 issues with regards to it's service and what you have to do to get it working.
Yeah, but it's built into capitalism - logically, political influence is simply another commodity to be controlled by the free market.
Subject lines that work will spread. Subject lines that don't will not. If there's only a small probability of using a new subject line (rather than using the one you used to infect this host), then, over generations, the most effective subjects will be used the most.
I'd argue that it should be - that any medium of communication should be at least minimally regulated, either by the goverment or by itself, so as to ensure things like freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Now, I understand thats a fairly extreme view to alot of people here. But it's my point of view that ANYONE should have access to communications media, in all forms. That includes subsidised POTS for people and areas that wouldn't have it in an unregulated market. That means keeping public access TV around, even though everyone says its a waste of money. It means limiting media consolidation so that people can have multiple sources for news. Yeah, yeah, I'm a liberal. So damn what - your free market hasn't done me a whole hell of a lot lately.
That's both wrong and stupid. If you're designing a massive 3d model, but your card & hardware are pushed to the limits rendering it so you can't easily manipulate it and operations affecting it are time consuming, it will take you longer to complete this model. If working on these models is what you do all day, then you'll be more productive with high end hardware.
It sounds stupid when you phrase it that way, but thats one of the things at the heart of the FCCs decision to force AOL to allow third party clients on it's network.
Now, I don't know if you're naive or a an MS shill - but, in the past, whenever MS has talked about things like encouraging third party clients or open connectivity, they're talking about licensed partners, not OSS projects. Even when the docs are available for free, you often have to agree to an NDA that precludes an open source implementation. So it's possible that I'm making wrong assumptions, but based on past behavior I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in MS playing nice with open source developers.
Of course, this arguably has issues for the monopoly settlement, too - Messenger is (supposedly) integral to the OS now. You can't remove it unless you're willing to spend time fighting the OS.
I've taken a gun away from someone who wanted to hurt me with it. I'd say that gives me about 1000% times more right to be against them than almost anyone else on slashdot.
Lets stop trying to relate this to physical objects because there is no meaningful correlation - the closest I can come would be RFID tags in books that identify themselves to photocopiers so that the photocopier can turn you in for making illegal copies of the book. This is almost as nonsensical as Jack Valenci and his idea for digital watermarks that camcorders wouldn't record.
Actually, as anyone in the military will tell you, the high likelyhood of you having a gun doesn't make me any less likely to jack you. It just means that I'm that much more likely to shoot in the head without warning than I am to try to scare you off. This is one of the reasons people like hostage negotiators don't show guns - because pulling your own gun escalates the situation and something that you were going to walk away from becomes much more serious.
And thats not even counting the problems I've had with things like demo periods not working correctly and valid licenses being lost.
While I'm on the subject, demos that expire and then don't let you get another demo with a newer version of the product annoy me - if I didn't buy your product the first time, maybe it's because of bugs or features that are fixed/present in your new version!
One of my friends, on the other hand, couldn't have written a line of assembler to save his life, but could rebuild a carb. There's always people who're interested in things. They tend to get grumpy when the unwashed masses discover them. Go talk to a movie critic sometime, they're good examples.
I'm not sure what this "gap" you're talking about is. Oh, and if the rumours are true, Longhorn will use a DirectX based desktop similar to OS Xs Quartz, so, at least if you have a modern graphics card, you should get better performance than you do with current Windows versions. X had better start catching up :P
If you don't like GUIs, don't use Windows. Windows is built around the concept of a GUI and a message based architecture. Deal with it.
Basically, the country is too large for that sort of thing - if we broke the US up into the states, and made the federal goverment a sort of UN, and did alot of other things that might be a good idea and might not, then it'd make more sense. As it stands, it really doesn't.
It's more complicated than that, of course - part of the issue is the commoditization of the PC market, so OEMs aren't willing to spend the money on heavily engineered parts. But I'm not convinced that it's a problem per se.
People get grumpy whenever they have something wear out. But you wouldn't be willing to pay 10x upfront (at least most people wouldn't) for something with a longer lifespan - and even that would eventually fail.
People say we're becoming a "throw-away" society. I say so what? It's good for companies because it's a steadier income stream (would you rather get weekly paychecks or just 1 lump sum at the end of the year?), it's good for consumers because of lower prices, and done properly it's not really wastefull (I realize the third point has some problems).