Right now you can insert a non-GPL module into the kernel and the kernel will just give you a warning and use that module. This gives the choice to the end-users, where it should be. The GPL allows me to make all the closed modifications to the kernel I want as long as those modifications are not distributed. So as an end-user, I have every right to put in some binary-only, non-GPL module such as the NVidia driver (which I use). I would actaully think that the GPL would not allow the kernel devs to restrict my personal usage of the Linux kernel as you have suggested, though IANAL.
ummm... Why would the platform the app was compiled on matter? It's still gcc. It's going to compile to the same exact bytes as if you used gcc on Linux. Unless I am totally missing something. Is gcc totally rewritten for Cygwin?
gcc was written for *nix. It does not produce the same exact bytes. Linux executables are different then Win32 executables. I would seriously doubt that Cygwin and it's libraries have been as tuned and optimized as native libs under *nix. Testing gcc under cygwin under Win32 would be like me compiling and running a Win32 app under Linux using Wine. Wine's implementation of Win32 has not been around as long as native Win32 and in many cases is not as efficient.
Oh, and garbage collection in all but some weird situations runs during otherwise idle time and should have a very minimal effect on app performance.
Huh? If you have an active application, just when would those idle times come? For example, a server application written in Java/.Net, you would notice GC. On your average desktop running MS Win XP with 256MB of memory running a larger desktop app written in Java/.Net you would notice the GC do to lower available memory. I run a lot of Java and.Net applications and do notice the slight stutters from GC, especially on server applications that are extremley busy.
The way to peace requires us to respect and practice other people's laws
That all depends on the laws. There are some places in the Middle East where you can be sentenced to death for trying to spread a non-Muslim religion (that is just insane). Over here in the USA we have all kinds of religions, so I don't think practicing other peoples laws would be the best bet. A better approach would be all nations dropping their own laws and creating common laws that all nations agree on and uphold. Out with the old and in with the new. Obviously this would be almost impossible to achieve given the great social/moral diversity around the globe.
It even destroyed gcc C in trig calculations, though, got slaughtered by gcc C's 'double' math tests.
From the article: compiled using gcc within the Cygwin bash shell emulation layer for Windows.
A much more fair comparision would have been gcc under a *nix environment instead of the Win32 port. This "benchmark" also didn't take into consideration slower startup times, pauses due to garbage collection or code being JITed. All in all, this benchmark is useless. Though from personal experience, I do agree that C# and Java both have very good performance on modern hardware to make their use a much better alternative over lower level and error prone languages like C/C++. Java and C# both showed good numbers, except for that strange regression in Java's Trig functions.
How can they claim fees for the past ten years when they have not owned the patent for that long? The purchased it, so I would assume that they could only charge royalty fees from the time they owned the patent. Think about it. If some company comes along and buys Dell and thinks that Dell did not charge consumers enough money for their PC's, would that company be allowed to send a bill to all past purchasers?
Yes, but this new company can only sue for the time that they owned the patent and collect damages for that time. They cannot sue for use from 5 years ago if they did not own the patent then. As for the Gimp, they can just remove JPEG support like they did with gif until the patent expires later this year. If someone wants JPEG support in the Gimp, they can download an extra module and compile it for now, and later this year the Gimp folks can release a new build with JPEG back in.
This was the same deal with JPEG. When JPEG 2000 comes around and becomes popular, one of the patent holders can sell that patent, like we have with this/. story, and wham, we are right back to people/companies being sued for using JPEG 2000. Just because some company says they will not charge royalties for JPEG 2000 _today_ does not mean they will not _tomorrow_. All any of the patent holders of JPEG 2000 has to do is start up another small company and sell that patent and start sueing. I personally feel that any public "standard" like JPEG 2000 should have a clause that forbids selling the patent or if the patent is sold, the new patent holder is not allowed to charge royalties.
My previous company was a small under-funded startup. They developed a cool technology and patented it. If patents were 'abolished', then they would easily have been wiped out by a pet project of Microsoft or Sony or somebody who likes fiddling around with technology and seeing who's interested in it.
Do you think that patent would stop MS or any other large company? Do you know how many times MS has been sued for patent infringement? A large company like MS, etc can just use your patented technology without paying you royalties by making their own implementation. When you sue them, they will unleash their lawyers and your small company will go bankrupt. Sure you _may_ get a settlement in the end, however your company will be no more. Patents do not protect the little company. They are for big business. Patents should not be allowed on software, there is no reason for that. There has been no software that has come out that has not used some prior knowledge. If a company develops some compression algorithm, their programmers learned from previous algorithms in school and improved on them. Again, there is nothing truly unique in software that deserves a patent. All knowledge is based on previous knowledge from the "knowledge pool". That is how we as humans have progressed. One step at a time from the "knowledge pool" that those before us have left us. Why should any one person or company be allowed to selfishly claim an idea and claim it as their own when it is based on prior knowledge that we all share?
Sorry, I don't see the value in removing patents from the mix. Rather, I think they need to get a checks and balances system going.
And who do you think would be in charge of that checks and balances system? The government. Which would be influenced by big business through bribes (campaign contributions). So again, the small business will be stepped on. There can be no fair way for patents to be granted and administered. The granting process would be overwhelmed as they are today and you end up with tons of bogus patents like today. The enforcement process will, like today, come down to which company can out litigate the other.
Copyrights suffer from similar problems. Thought most of those could be eliminated by making copyrights last for no more then 10 years. Patents may be fair if they were limited to only 3 to 5 years. This way, people could pay to use them to be at the front of the pack, or wait the three years and then advanced knowledge based on those now expired patents. By having patents and especially copyrights last so long, you are guaranteeing that the only companies that will benefit from them are large enterprises.
As Thomas Jefferson said:
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That is only true for trademarks, if you do not protect them, you can lose them. Patents can be enforced as the patent holder wishes. So basically a patent holder could wait until the patented technology is in wide use and then set the dirt bag lawyers loose.
Yet another reasons how patents are blatantly misused. First of all, its not even sure if they have the rights that they claim to have. At the very least, they could have spared non-commercial entities.
You can thank big government and big business in the USA for that : ) Not to mention the lack of a real democracy where we have more then two parties to vote for. Think about it. When was the last time we had more then one rich white republican vs one rich white democrat running for president? And no, that Ross guy does not count sine he dropped out.
Yet another reasons how patents are blatantly misused. First of all, its not even sure if they have the rights that they claim to have.
This is the other huge problem here in the USA. You don't need proof of anything to sue. A patent holder just need to threaten litigation and most companies will pay since the royalties are usually far less then the costs of lawyers.
I think we need a major restructuring of our governement here in the USA. Either by force or voting, I don't care, but it needs to happen.
There were hacks in there for Borland and other companies to make thier products work
That is BS.
MS knows that companies won't upgrade to the latest version if the sotware (microsoft or not) that they run doesn't work, which means a lot of lost operating system revenue.
Again, I call BS. MS Windows Server 2003 broke many applications, including some of MS's. Have you been living in a hole? MS doesn't fix their latest OS to work with previous versions of their non-OS products. They want you to upgrade to those as well. MS Exchange 2003 does not support Outlook 98, so your theory of "MS knows that companies won't upgrade to the latest version if the sotware (microsoft or not) that they run doesn't work" does not hold water. There are plenty more example. For example, if you go here and download the.doc, you will see that if you are running Exchange 2000 and want to upgrade to MS Windows Server 2003, you also have to upgrade to MS Exchange 2003, I can go on and on.
I see the point you are trying to make, and yes, MS should have slightly different "rules" because it is an illegal monopoply. However your points about Apple are incorrect as this/. poster pointed out
MS has one superior tool for information workers, MS Office. By having an illegal monopoly and access to the undocument API's and protocols of their OS, it gives them and unfair advantage for delivering these types of applications. If the API's and protocols for just their OS were open and freely available for all to use, the playing field would be level and we most likely would have greater competiton and thus better products for information workers. The leaked MS source code showed MS makes fixes/tweaks to their OS for their non-OS products like MS Office. Now how can any competitor compete with that?
And I was not suggesting that Apple is/was a monopoly. The EU is just barking up the wrong tree here. MS has far greater infractions then including a media player just as their competition does. By focusing on the media player, the EU is givning MS too much ammunition to say, "Look, Apple is doing the same thing". As an illegal monopoly, MS should be forced to either be broken up into OS and non-OS companies or release API',s, protocols for their OS not remove a dumb media player.
Apple was much better then Win 3.1 at that time. And as for "whipping out business info systems" fater under MS Windows, where are your links to studies? You don't have any. I will assume that what you are refering to is MS Visual Basic and or MS Access forms. Sure, they are fast for small database front-end apps, but they do not have the power or functionality for large enterprise grade information systems. Visual Basic 6 is an extremely poor language. What is the extent of your Mac and Linux development experience? I would assume none based on your comments. There is nothing more funny then someone with no experience making an "informed" statement like you did. Way to go.
I have been developing for 8 years now and have worked on MS Windows, Linux and Solaris. All three platforms have thier pros and cons for development. Trying to say one is easier over the other is sheer stupidity and I usually only hear those kind of statements from MS only developers with no experience on other platforms, hence why those other platforms seem "harder" to develop for. Have you developed with QT? QT is very nice to develop with, has great documentation and an extensive framework of helper clases to do all kinds of task in a cross-platform manner. How about your experience with GTK+? GTK+ has more language bindings they you can shake a stick at. Perl, Python, C, C++, Java, C#, you name it. Many people sware by Python as a RAD tool. How much Phython GUI development work have you done under Linux to make statments? How much Perl code have you written? You can connect to many different databases with Perl with great ease. Perl has so many CPAN modules it is not even funny. Those modules handle anythign you could want to do, database, CGI, HTTP, FTP, you name it. Blanket statements like yours only shows your ignorane with other platfroms, tools and frameworks.
It has nothing to do with making a good product or not. It has everything to do with illegal monopolistic practices. MS has the source to their OS. They make tweaks/fixes in the OS code for their non-OS products as revealed by the leaked MS Code. This is a huge advantage to MS. For MS to play on a level playing field, they need to make all the specs, protocols and API's to the OS open and freely usable by all. They can keep the source code for their OSes closed. For all of their non-OS products, they can keep them as locked up as they like since if competitors can leverage MS's OS as much as Microsoft can, then the playing field is now level.
The whole "DirectX" thing is a sham -- only Microsoft gets to use it.
Does MS release DirectX for Apple, Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris? No. DirectX is a tie-in to MS platoforms and sadly, like 90% of commercial games use it and thus are MS Windows only games. In contrast, OpenGL is available for all of these platforms.
I am playing devils advocate here since I do not care for MS the company.
Just where can I go and get the open specs for Sorenson used in just about all of Apple's QuickTime files?
It is real easy to see that Apple is doing most of the stuff that MS is doing, with the only difference being that Apple has an extremely small market share. I personally think this EU ruling is silly and will only strengthen MS's position. The EU had the chance to make some real progress in stopping the MS monopoly and they blew it. The EU should have ruled that MS can include what they will, however since they are a monopoly, thus MUST INSURE interoperability by opening up specs to audio/video formats, office formats, API's and protocols. Otherwise, MS's products have an unfair advantage in the marketplace since they have access to the OSes hidden "stuff" whereas the competition does not. And actually some of the leaked MS source showed just this. There were tweaks/fixes made in the OS code for non-OS products such as MS Office. I would not have a problem with that if any competitor were allowed to have tweaks and fixes put into Microsoft's OS code for their products. Since no competitor can get tweaks/fixes into MS's OS, it gives MS an extreme advantage in the market place.
If the EU made a ruling along these lines, I would stand behind that. The EU's current ruling is just silly and will have no effect.
The laws are not always created with the best interests of man or society in mind.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
What does the GPL have to do with "piracy"? Most people who really support the GPL are using a Free/Open OS such as Linux or FreeBSD. There is no need for warez under those OSes. The majority of users who use warez use proprietary OSes such as MS Windows. So there is no connection between GPL and warez and trying to suggest that GPL advocates would be upset over a GPL violation and not a proprietary software violation is just silly. I don't know where people come up with the idea that GPL/OSS advocates are supporters of warez. In fact, it is the complete opposite. It is the users of proprietary systems that have resorted to warez and "piracy". I don't know if warez users feel that it is OK because of the high prices they pay for proprietary system or that they are owed this extra software because of the high prices they have alredy paid for proprietary software. Whatever the reasons may be, there is no need for warez with GPL/Open/Free software.
This was also posted on/. Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh with a story featured in Business Week magazine. It is OK. You can still be a fanboy of Apple even though Linux will have more market share on the desktop. Oh, and if you count Linux servers (which after all is part of Linux's market share), well, Apple share doesn't even come close.
and embraces not only mutually incompatible implementations of Linux
And just what is a mutually incompatible implementation of Linux?
There's a lot of contention among surveys. For example, while AstroDrabb's precious study found that 25% of the new servers bought ran Linux, The Register reports that the figure among servers actually in use is 8.6%. (The author of the piece is a NewsForge columnist and a Linux user herself.
Most studies show Linux to have 8% - 10% of all installed servers. That study showed the new growth of Linux which grabbed 25% of all new server sales. Just how much of those new server sales did Apple grab again?
Dude, don't worry about the pay. I was paid peanuts for my first programming job. I stayed for 1 1/2 years and went for another job. For my second job, my salary doubled and I stayed there for 1 year and went to another job where I again got another nice pay bump. Take the job and stick it out for 12 to 18 months and your next job your salary will go way up. Basically, you have no real world experience to the companies and they are not going to invest a lot of money in you up front. However, once you get that first 12 - 18 months under your belt, the fat salary times will begin.
Is the only solution. We American IT workers are being hit from every front. We have nasty companies like Dell that are shipping jobs overseas while they want to continue to make most of their money from the American people and companies. Oh, we can try to moan to our members of congress and senate, however, Dell and companies like Dell are moaning as well and also include a big fat check while they do it. Don't look to Bush for help. He just gave the OK for illegal Mexicans to work here in Florida. Voting won't help. Who are you going to vote for? All the politicians have their own financial future in mind and almost always give extra weight to big companies and special interest lobbying groups thanks to those entities being allowed to bribe the members of congress and the senate.
It is really sad how just about all big business only thinks of the current quarter. As they continue to strip jobs from Americans, that is that much less money in the economy to come back to them. Think about all the crap big business can get away with. They cannot vote, yet they can still bribe for laws through "campaign contributions". They try to maximize profits by charging the most that the market will bear for their products/services. Yet they drop American workers to save any tiny amount of money they can. They hire the most shady accountants to pay the least amout of taxes that they can get away with. They abuse patents and copyrights as a game to get ahead in business instead fo the purpose for which they were created, to enhance the public domain. Many of the CEO's even give themselves a million dollars or more for turning deals like laying off workers to save money. What was that one airline that recently asked their workers to take a pay cut while the CEO was going to give himself like a million dollar bonus for the deal?
We need a new political party in the USA that will clean up the politics and put big business back on track. The Republicans are all just about paid for by big bisness. The Democrats are all bought by other special interests and the Libertarians would just let everything go in a free-for-all. I don't see any solution in site, other then hitting the books and staying on step ahead of overseas workers.
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Right now you can insert a non-GPL module into the kernel and the kernel will just give you a warning and use that module. This gives the choice to the end-users, where it should be. The GPL allows me to make all the closed modifications to the kernel I want as long as those modifications are not distributed. So as an end-user, I have every right to put in some binary-only, non-GPL module such as the NVidia driver (which I use). I would actaully think that the GPL would not allow the kernel devs to restrict my personal usage of the Linux kernel as you have suggested, though IANAL.
compiled using gcc within the Cygwin bash shell emulation layer for Windows.
A much more fair comparision would have been gcc under a *nix environment instead of the Win32 port. This "benchmark" also didn't take into consideration slower startup times, pauses due to garbage collection or code being JITed. All in all, this benchmark is useless. Though from personal experience, I do agree that C# and Java both have very good performance on modern hardware to make their use a much better alternative over lower level and error prone languages like C/C++. Java and C# both showed good numbers, except for that strange regression in Java's Trig functions.
What is the patent number?
Yes, but this new company can only sue for the time that they owned the patent and collect damages for that time. They cannot sue for use from 5 years ago if they did not own the patent then. As for the Gimp, they can just remove JPEG support like they did with gif until the patent expires later this year. If someone wants JPEG support in the Gimp, they can download an extra module and compile it for now, and later this year the Gimp folks can release a new build with JPEG back in.
This was the same deal with JPEG. When JPEG 2000 comes around and becomes popular, one of the patent holders can sell that patent, like we have with this /. story, and wham, we are right back to people/companies being sued for using JPEG 2000. Just because some company says they will not charge royalties for JPEG 2000 _today_ does not mean they will not _tomorrow_. All any of the patent holders of JPEG 2000 has to do is start up another small company and sell that patent and start sueing. I personally feel that any public "standard" like JPEG 2000 should have a clause that forbids selling the patent or if the patent is sold, the new patent holder is not allowed to charge royalties.
Copyrights suffer from similar problems. Thought most of those could be eliminated by making copyrights last for no more then 10 years. Patents may be fair if they were limited to only 3 to 5 years. This way, people could pay to use them to be at the front of the pack, or wait the three years and then advanced knowledge based on those now expired patents. By having patents and especially copyrights last so long, you are guaranteeing that the only companies that will benefit from them are large enterprises.
As Thomas Jefferson said:
That is only true for trademarks, if you do not protect them, you can lose them. Patents can be enforced as the patent holder wishes. So basically a patent holder could wait until the patented technology is in wide use and then set the dirt bag lawyers loose.
I think we need a major restructuring of our governement here in the USA. Either by force or voting, I don't care, but it needs to happen.
I thought that recently changed or is about to change? It would be sad if it does : (
I see the point you are trying to make, and yes, MS should have slightly different "rules" because it is an illegal monopoply. However your points about Apple are incorrect as this /. poster pointed out
MS has one superior tool for information workers, MS Office. By having an illegal monopoly and access to the undocument API's and protocols of their OS, it gives them and unfair advantage for delivering these types of applications. If the API's and protocols for just their OS were open and freely available for all to use, the playing field would be level and we most likely would have greater competiton and thus better products for information workers. The leaked MS source code showed MS makes fixes/tweaks to their OS for their non-OS products like MS Office. Now how can any competitor compete with that?
And I was not suggesting that Apple is/was a monopoly. The EU is just barking up the wrong tree here. MS has far greater infractions then including a media player just as their competition does. By focusing on the media player, the EU is givning MS too much ammunition to say, "Look, Apple is doing the same thing". As an illegal monopoly, MS should be forced to either be broken up into OS and non-OS companies or release API',s, protocols for their OS not remove a dumb media player.
I have been developing for 8 years now and have worked on MS Windows, Linux and Solaris. All three platforms have thier pros and cons for development. Trying to say one is easier over the other is sheer stupidity and I usually only hear those kind of statements from MS only developers with no experience on other platforms, hence why those other platforms seem "harder" to develop for. Have you developed with QT? QT is very nice to develop with, has great documentation and an extensive framework of helper clases to do all kinds of task in a cross-platform manner. How about your experience with GTK+? GTK+ has more language bindings they you can shake a stick at. Perl, Python, C, C++, Java, C#, you name it. Many people sware by Python as a RAD tool. How much Phython GUI development work have you done under Linux to make statments? How much Perl code have you written? You can connect to many different databases with Perl with great ease. Perl has so many CPAN modules it is not even funny. Those modules handle anythign you could want to do, database, CGI, HTTP, FTP, you name it. Blanket statements like yours only shows your ignorane with other platfroms, tools and frameworks.
It has nothing to do with making a good product or not. It has everything to do with illegal monopolistic practices. MS has the source to their OS. They make tweaks/fixes in the OS code for their non-OS products as revealed by the leaked MS Code. This is a huge advantage to MS. For MS to play on a level playing field, they need to make all the specs, protocols and API's to the OS open and freely usable by all. They can keep the source code for their OSes closed. For all of their non-OS products, they can keep them as locked up as they like since if competitors can leverage MS's OS as much as Microsoft can, then the playing field is now level.
Just where can I go and get the open specs for Sorenson used in just about all of Apple's QuickTime files?
It is real easy to see that Apple is doing most of the stuff that MS is doing, with the only difference being that Apple has an extremely small market share. I personally think this EU ruling is silly and will only strengthen MS's position. The EU had the chance to make some real progress in stopping the MS monopoly and they blew it. The EU should have ruled that MS can include what they will, however since they are a monopoly, thus MUST INSURE interoperability by opening up specs to audio/video formats, office formats, API's and protocols. Otherwise, MS's products have an unfair advantage in the marketplace since they have access to the OSes hidden "stuff" whereas the competition does not. And actually some of the leaked MS source showed just this. There were tweaks/fixes made in the OS code for non-OS products such as MS Office. I would not have a problem with that if any competitor were allowed to have tweaks and fixes put into Microsoft's OS code for their products. Since no competitor can get tweaks/fixes into MS's OS, it gives MS an extreme advantage in the market place.
If the EU made a ruling along these lines, I would stand behind that. The EU's current ruling is just silly and will have no effect.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Taken from The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826 NO PATENTS ON IDEAS
What does the GPL have to do with "piracy"? Most people who really support the GPL are using a Free/Open OS such as Linux or FreeBSD. There is no need for warez under those OSes. The majority of users who use warez use proprietary OSes such as MS Windows. So there is no connection between GPL and warez and trying to suggest that GPL advocates would be upset over a GPL violation and not a proprietary software violation is just silly. I don't know where people come up with the idea that GPL/OSS advocates are supporters of warez. In fact, it is the complete opposite. It is the users of proprietary systems that have resorted to warez and "piracy". I don't know if warez users feel that it is OK because of the high prices they pay for proprietary system or that they are owed this extra software because of the high prices they have alredy paid for proprietary software. Whatever the reasons may be, there is no need for warez with GPL/Open/Free software.
Dude, don't worry about the pay. I was paid peanuts for my first programming job. I stayed for 1 1/2 years and went for another job. For my second job, my salary doubled and I stayed there for 1 year and went to another job where I again got another nice pay bump. Take the job and stick it out for 12 to 18 months and your next job your salary will go way up. Basically, you have no real world experience to the companies and they are not going to invest a lot of money in you up front. However, once you get that first 12 - 18 months under your belt, the fat salary times will begin.
It is really sad how just about all big business only thinks of the current quarter. As they continue to strip jobs from Americans, that is that much less money in the economy to come back to them. Think about all the crap big business can get away with. They cannot vote, yet they can still bribe for laws through "campaign contributions". They try to maximize profits by charging the most that the market will bear for their products/services. Yet they drop American workers to save any tiny amount of money they can. They hire the most shady accountants to pay the least amout of taxes that they can get away with. They abuse patents and copyrights as a game to get ahead in business instead fo the purpose for which they were created, to enhance the public domain. Many of the CEO's even give themselves a million dollars or more for turning deals like laying off workers to save money. What was that one airline that recently asked their workers to take a pay cut while the CEO was going to give himself like a million dollar bonus for the deal?
We need a new political party in the USA that will clean up the politics and put big business back on track. The Republicans are all just about paid for by big bisness. The Democrats are all bought by other special interests and the Libertarians would just let everything go in a free-for-all. I don't see any solution in site, other then hitting the books and staying on step ahead of overseas workers.