MS has been doing this for years in the IT industry, and succeeding at it. Why should this be any different? Microsoft says Jump, and the IT industry asks "How high?"
Hmmmm... Not in this world it hasn't... You must be thinking of some parallel universe.
Microsoft very rarely "says Jump" to the IT industry - it's usually the other way around.
Let's look at some history. BASIC was their first product, and that was a copy of work already done elsewhere. Microsoft was not a player in the OS market until they struck a deal with IBM to sell them something called "DOS" which they hadn't written and didn't own at the time. The dominant OS retailer at that time was Digital Research with CP/M. All of their applications were essentially copies of other products back then, and that remains the case to date, with the exception of those that they got through acquisition. When it came to creating Windows they copied the concepts (not the code) from prototype Macs they had from Apple for application development.
Most recently we have the Internet, a party that Microsoft was notoriously very late to join.
Microsoft are the great followers of the IT industry. They are generally extreemly conservative players and take very few risks. They look at the trends that are going on around them and they respond. Leading is not their thing. Innovating is not their thing. That is what history shows us.
Yes, Microsoft has a dominant position, but the implication of "Jump" and "How high?" is that they lead, and this simply is not the case, and nor has it ever been.
If anything the IT industry as a whole is that one that says "Jump!". Microsoft though is a hulking behemoth these days so it never asks "how high" - it just jumps a little and says "that's good enough - live with it".
I wonder though if governments will stand idly by and let Microsoft create a private encryption channel between everyone's computer and Microsoft. I strongly doubt it.
Of course they will!
There are many reasons why.
Firstly you're talking about a relatively complex rights management system. It takes quite a while to understand this and all the implications thereof. Your average senator/representative/MP does not have the time to get to understand this kind of thing properly. Some will, but most will not.
Secondly Microsoft can potentially do this relatively quickly. It will take several years after this is introduced for authorities to percieve that it may be a problem. It will take a while after then for legislation to be drafted and put in place for something to be done to curb abuses of this kind of technology. Whilst we may know that this is potentially a very serious problem right now it will take governments much longer to come to that realisation and longer still to act. For example we've known that spam is a problem for many many years but only recently have laws been passed against it.
Thirdly DRM is in the interests of big business. Governments listen to business because governments believe that business is good for the people, since business earns money, pays taxes, and contributes to their electioneering funds. Businesses also have plenty of money to lobby governments.
Then there is the complacency of individuals. The general population could lobby the government to resolve issues like this, however it takes organisation and money. Most people don't care though, since like our politicians they too don't understand the issues, so organisations that can bring these kind of problems to light are generally under-funded.
You make a good point here. Of course virtually all the comments you've received so far have been disagreeing with you. What good capitalists the Slashdot crowd are.:-)
Of course, as I'm sure you're aware, one big flaw with what you put forward is that the concept of "public domain" has been virtually completely destroyed. These days just about everything is owned by a corporation somewhere. Even things that are ostensibly developed as government projects for the people are actually owned by corporations.
It is also true that as some have pointed out what you are proposing is basically communism. In an ideal world what you propose would be possible, but as you know we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of selfish SOBs who don't give a damn about anyone apart from themselves. They're more worried about lining their own pockets than ensuring their neighbours are not starving to death - our governments are full of people just like this. We're essentially trained to think this way throughout our whole lives starting from a very young age. Unfortunately that's modern capitalism for you, and changing that mindset is very difficult indeed.
Until recently, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities in the UK were completely free for citizens to attend. This was not true in the 1960's, when I lived in the UK and my sister was attending University. I don't believe it was ever free.
First up were you a UK citizen?
Universities in the UK have never, to my knowledge, been free for foreign students.
A long long time ago (maybe the 1960's, I'm not sure) I believe that some (maybe even all) UK universities charged their students. However during the 1970s-1990s universities in the UK were free to UK citizens. Indeed for much of that time students could also get a student grant from the government to help assist them through university.
Things were starting to change when I attended uni in 1990. The grant had been reduced quite heavily and was in the process of being replaced with student loans (low interest government loans to students). Grants disappeared totally about 12 years ago. There was even a while when students could claim unemployment benefit as well as their grant.
These days all but the very poorest students in the UK must pay annual tuition fees which is currently standardised for all universities. Hardly anybody qualifies for free tuition now. The universities though are still subsidised. This is likely to change again in the not too distant future with more presigious universities such as Oxford or Cambridge charging higher fees.
It would make the net a safer place for the rest of us if they did so...
How do you figure that?
There's plenty of people that buy PCs these days that have anti-virus software pre-installed. Many of them think that makes them safe. Many of those people don't bother to regularly update their anti-virus software - they don't understand that they need to do this. They therefore get viruses and spread them about.
Those same people don't update their OS to patch security holes. Things would be no different than now if Microsoft built anti-virus software into Windows.
The only difference would be a massive decrease in anti-virus software sales from other vendors. This would be a clear additional abuse of Microsoft's monopoly position.
They were arguing that by adding copy protection measures to a program on a CD-ROM they change the nature of that CD-ROM. The CD-ROM itself becomes part of the device that allows access to the software. The CD-ROM drive is not sufficient.
According to this law if it is no longer possible to obtain the access device, i.e. the CD-ROM itself, then according to this law it may be legitimate to bypass the copy protection.
Of course to enable the use of this law the CD-ROM would have to be defective such that the copy protection rendered the disc unusable.
Ummmm... Why do people bitch about the beer not being free?
Yeah, especially when the cost is only a name. Since there's no financial transaction going on here it sounds like it's free to me.
Honestly if I was at my local pub offering beers to anybody that would tell me there name and show me a piece of ID to confirm it I don't think anyone there would argue that the beer wasn't free. I don't think they'd give a damn.
The NY Times has never sent me a single email, since I asked them not to. Can't complain there.
Maybe people should read the privacy agreements before they bitch that the "beer" isn't free.
Back in the days, making a demo was about showing off "software"-skills. A demo was all about coding fancy effects on a broad range of hardware with no support for hardware acceleration whatsoever.
Back in the days of demos the main demo scene revolved mostly around the Commodore Amiga. It was about showing off software skills, but they most definitely made use of hardware acceleration. The graphics processor in the Amiga ended up doing most of the graphics work in a demo with the 68000 working essentially in a management role. No broad range of hardware on the Amiga though - all the variants were very similar.
Now the PC demo scene inevitably did not have any hardware acceleration as part of their demos, since back then there was none. Video cards in those days on PCs only showed video - even 2D acceleration facilities to speed up drawing windows weren't around... It's only recently with the introduction of more sophisticated GPUs on PCs that some of the kind of things that Amigas could do in hardware are technically possible to do in hardware on PCs. PC demos therefore had to be about software skills rather than what nifty things the hardware could do for you.
History has shown that when a country is controlled by one person or an elite few, the distance to the sword in any situation is shortened.
Ironically this gives an explaination of sorts as to why the USA and Britain were so keen to go to war in Iraq. Both countries have political systems dominated by the few, where the guy at the top has too much power.
This is better demonstrated for the Iraq war by the UK than the USA where the majority of the population was against the war and didn't buy the lies they were being fed by the government, yet Blair sent the army in to Iraq anyway.
On the surface you seem to make a good point here, but unfortunately since the US doesn't recognise the authority of the World Court or the UN the point isn't exactly valid, and I believe that is in part why you've been modded as a troll.
The Life of Brian quote would also be a good one if you could genuinely replace "Romans" with "Americans", but unfortunately history seems to indicate that you cannot. The USA hasn't exactly brought peace to Afghanistan, and it certainly hasn't yet to Iraq. It also failed to bring a genuine peace to Korea and Vietnam.
The Life of Brian quote works slightly better for the British Empire, but even then many would argue that the peace was illusory, as is witness by the fact that the peace that the British Empire brought to many countries in the middle east in the late 19th century and early 20th did not last.
And whilst the US has shown a respect for liberty in the past, that respect is now firmly in the past. Recent laws passed by the US government show no respect for the liberty of those that are not US citizens, and less respect for the liberty of its own citizens. This has been discussed at great length here before on Slashdot.
If you strongly feel that their advertisments are making false claims then complain to the appropriate authorities. This isn't exactly the venue to make such complaints.
As has been pointed out you may as well call for people to boycott Slashdot at the same time.
If you follow this path then you'll have to boycott just about the whole internet, you won't be able to walk down any street that has advertising billboards, watch any commercial TV channels, or visit the cinema.
Whilst not a true Unix BeOS did have a degree of compatibility. If memory serves most of the GNU tools got ported to it. Other Unix apps also made the transition. So to say that this would have doomed Apple isn't true.
What I think would have been a greater problem is developer tools. The NeXT developer tools were great, as was the OpenStep API. Apple have improved on these significantly with XCode and Cocoa.
Do you really think that the likes of Cisco, Intel and Microsoft really like having to fork out millions of dollars to lawyers for patents?
Yes, these companies file patents that should not be granted. I would suggest that file them knowing that these patents shouldn't be granted. Having a large library of patents means that when they are challenged they have the option of cross-licensing patents they hold to make law-suits go away.
Unfortunately we are in a situation where bogus patents get granted, and this creates a vicious cycle, meaning that more patents get filed that also should not be. The only way to rectify this situation is a complete review of the patent system, and a comprehensive review of patents issued. Obvioiusly in an ideal world only truely novel and original ideas should be patentable.
As far as I can see fixing the problem does not require a change in patent law, it merely requires a complete review of the patent issuing process. That involves ensuring that patent offices are sufficiently funded to properly investigate patent applications, and also to review existing patents. Unfortunately the US patent office seems to have been underfunded for some time.
It is in the interests of big business to fix the patent system in order to reduce their costs. I am sure that Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, et al. don't enjoy having to fork over millions of dollars to lawyers. Remember this doesn't just cost them money - engineers that are valuable for development work end up having to deal with lawyers for the purposes of defending patents when they could/should be doing other work.
Yep, Britain has a long and proud history of inventing things and then not capitalising on those inventions. Transistors, ICs, and LCDs were all invented in the UK, to name a few.
The UK is also the only country ever to have developed a rocket program capable of launching satellites and then abandon it. Clearly there's no strategic advantage in being able to put things into space. ??? For more info on this search for Black Arrow.
Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD?
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Stallman vs Ken Brown
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· Score: 1
"...He confuses the Linux kernel, which I had nothing to do with, and the GNU OS project, which I launched," said Stallman
And this is where we have a bit of a problem, and why there's confusion.
What is an OS without a kernel?
Now the GNU project did indeed have a kernel project (Hurd) for many years (it was announced in 1991), but did not manage to actually produce anything that was even considered a "0.0" release until August 1996. (From what I understand this kernel is/was itself built on-top of the Mach microkernel.) Having checked the web site I can't see a date for their last release, which is version 0.2.
In contrast Linus released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel in 1991, and reached 1.0 by 1994 - two years before the 0.0 release of Hurd.
As far as I can see the "GNU OS project" has yet to get to version 1.0 - ten years after Linux reached that milestone.
Of course there's the old GNU claim that Linux would be nothing without the GNU tools. Well, Linux also relies on a great many tools that were not developed as part of the GNU project. Many tools were developed independent of the GNU project in response to the release of the Linux kernel. If every organisation that contributed to the development of the Linux OS insisted on being credited we'd end up with a name something like X/MIT/CalTech/OpenGL/Sun/IBM/BSD/Apache/GNU/Linux. (My apologies to the many universities, organisations and companies I missed out in that little list.)
Indeed it's almost certainly the case that these days a minority of the Linux OS has a heritage in the GNU project.
To my mind merely having a GPL attached to a project does not make something part of the GNU OS project. It's just a license choice.
What is an OS without a kernel? Nothing but a collection of tools.
Do American confiscate Arabic posessions? Do they put all Arabs into concentration camps and gas chambers? You Arabs should stop exploiting Holocaust in your own dirty political purposes (and don't pretend you don't know that Mufty Al-Husseini of Jerusalem was a big friend and supporter of Hitler)
Why do you assume that I'm an Arab? (I'm European - English, with no Arabic or Jewish heritage at all.)
By all accounts in the mainstream media, Camp X-Ray is not all that dissimilar than a concentration camp, and the way that some prisoners have been treated in Iraq has also been similarly disgusting. I wasn't saying that it's got as bad as things did in the holocaust, but don't pretend that what's been going on is acceptable. There's a slippery slope here, and the USA has been sliding down it for some time.
What I was saying is that America has been becoming similar to Nazi Germany before the start of the holocaust. Have a look into the history of this and you might see what I mean. Things in the USA are nowhere near as overt as they became in Germany, but people have been singled out and detained purely because of their name and/or ethnic origin. Numerous mainstream news sources have covered this.
American law has gone as far as to allow the government to confiscate posessions of anyone they suspect of certain forms of illegal activity, especially terrorism and certain forms of computer crime. There have been many documented cases of this hapenning. This also can happen without due process - the FBI merely has to decide they suspect you of a crime and without having to supply any kind of justification to any authority they can raid your home. The legal system is supposed to be based on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty".
I have no "dirty political purposes of my own". I am not so naiive as to believe that all Arabs are innocent of terrorism, and nor did I say that - clearly some are involved, and there has been clear evidence of that. Don't pretend though that white Americans are totally innocent of terrorism either - remember that it wasn't al-Quaeda that blew up the Oklahoma FBI building. It's also believed by the authorities that "domestic terrorists" were responsible for the anthrax letters.
Re:I'm with linus torvalds on this one
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Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not sure why the parent post rates a +5 Insightful.... Maybe it's because the subject line has a magic name within it, giving rise to the thought "somebody's agreeing with Linus so this must be an insightful comment, since Linus is our god." Come on people - Linus is just a guy, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
All of the web browsers I have used only render HTML and plain graphics formats. Yes, Flash displays, and so does embedded video and music, but that is actually done by external video and audio players like Quicktime, Real, or Windows Media. It's certainly not the browser itself - it's just a container for this stuff.
What do you think plug-ins are all about?
As for the secure bit, well, most browsers could do a much better job of sandboxing plugins.
After Sept 11 all Arabic young men were potential terrorists. Now this has been expanded to include all young/middle aged/fathers/European looking Arabic men.
Hey, numb-nuts, who exactly do you think has declared war on the USA?
As I understand it one man, who happens to be an Arab. Yes, he happens to have support from other people, and many of them are from Arabic descent, but they do not represent all Arabs. Only a complete fool would think they did.
Arguably the USA declared war on Arab states much earlier than he declared war on them anyway. The US government has had a policy of interference in middle-eastern affairs for much longer than Al-Quaeda has been around. This has included supplying arms and supporting organisations that could be considered terrorists, some of which gave rise to Al-Quaeda. They also have a long-standing policy of supporting Israel even when every other country in the world has condemned their actions.
Don't believe me? Check out this timeline of events that led up to the terrorist attacks of 11/9/01. The evidence presented is from well respected news sources.
One could even argue that, given this policy of interference in middle-eastern affairs which severely decreases the trust many people around the world have in the USA and the passing of restrictive laws such as the Patriot act, it is the US government themselves that has declared war on the people of the USA.
The fear that the US government has created of Arabic and muslim people is not all that dissimilar from the fear that the Nazi government of Germany created of Jewish people. Please note though that I do not believe that this is their intent.
One could also argue that the government creates a greater feeling of terror than Al-Quaeda does by regularly putting out incredibly vague "terror alerts". I am also not convinced that this is intentional.
Firstly as other people have said there is no surprise in the fact that you could program a currency converter app in another environment. The two main reasons are that you are not yet familiar with XCode and Interface Builder (IB), and secondly that the Currency Converter example is overdesigned to demonstrate the principles behind MVC.
As for the dynamic screen that adjusts itself to the data inside it, of course you can do this. This has always been fairly easy to accomplish, but 10.3 adds a concept called "bindings" which builds on the MVC paradigm to allow UIs to automatically update whenever the underlying data model changes.
As for re-usable database linked components, of course you can do that too, and if you do it right you don't need to write any code to reuse them. WebObjects is designed to do that kind of stuff, although of course there's a license fee involved. There's a few other frameworks available to for this which interface with Cocoa.
What personal computer functions, other than gaming, and perhaps IM, would function well in a living room environment?... Remember WebTV?... Classic computing functions like web surfing and word processing are ill-suited for the big screen.
WebTV and other similar set-top box products weren't great. Surfing on a TV wasn't a pleasant experience. However there was a big reasons for this: NTSC and PAL resolutions really don't cut it, and the interlacing can make for flickery text and blurry images. Surfing for a while like that can give you a nasty headache. This is the biggest limiting factor.
It is no longer an issue. We're talking here about a high-definition flat-screen. No resolution or flicker problems there, so this thing would be well suited to web browsing, email, and even word processing would be tolerable.
I don't think web surfing on your TV will ever be the most popular of activities, but don't underestimate the possibility. Whilst digital interactive TV services have been very slow to appear in the USA the dominant satellite service in the UK is a DITV service from Sky. Although it doesn't include web browsing it does carry several web-like services, including BBC News, and Dominos Pizza. Using these services are fine even on a low-resolution TV (I don't think Sky does HD yet). It's pretty popular.
Indeed Teletext services have been broadcast in the UK for over 2 decades, providing hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of news, reviews, cinema listings, etc. (Teletext signals are sent in the "return" scan line of PAL broadcasts, so each TV channel can carry a teletext service.) Teletext is being used less now that interactive digital services are taking off but it's still there. It was limited though since it was one-way (although some interaction could be done by phone) and was basically a 40x24 text-based system . All but the cheapest PAL TVs support teletext. It was very popular, and as far as I know nobody has ever complained that it wasn't suited to TV screens.
And you can't even argue that Gore wouldn't have gone to war. The American public demanded it.
From what I understand a significant proportion of the American public did not even realise that Saddam Hussein and Ossama Bin Laden were two different people. Most were convinced by the twin lies put forward by Bush and his buddies that Iraq had weapons of mass distruction that were a danger to US citizens and that there were strong links between Iraq/Hussein and Al Quaeda/Bin Laden. The reality always was that these were at best suspicions with no real evidence. Lies may be a bit of a strong word here, but at best Bush put forward these suspicions as truth, and the American public bought this. There was far too little public (media) scrutiny of the arguments being put forward. Unfortunately it seems to me that the rampant patriotism in the wake of 11/9/01 seemed to stop all kind of rational debate in America. That doesn't say much either for Bush or the American public now does it?
Who knows how Gore would have handled this? He may have bought and sold a completely different set of lies, and America could today be in a completely different war, but no more/less respected around the world. We simply cannot tell.
Shatner co-wrote a series of Star Trek books featuring Kirk *after* his death on Veridian III... The basic premise by which those books happen is that whilst he did die the Nexus ribbon somehow brought him back to life, I think. I can't remember exactly though since it's been a number of years now since I read some of them. The books that I did read were quite good fun and did make sense.
I had heard that these books were being considered as "canon" by those that count within Star Trek / Paramount.
So Shatner *could* appear as James T. Kirk - remember Star Trek is very fond of time travel.
I've been an ARM fan for many, many years, so it's great to see this development. I've always thought this kind of thing should happen with ARM chips, and that the ARM should be well suited for this kind of application.
ARM cores have a great advantage of having an incredibly low transistor count. As a result the simpler ARM chips tend to have incredibly good production yields. I don't know if that's true for the more complex ARM variants like XScale. This multi-core processor should also be an order of magnitude less complicated than a Pentium, so it too should get good yields and thus for volume production be very cheap.
However it's also always struck me that the low transistor count of ARM chips could be of use in very high performance computing applications. It is difficult to build high transistor count chips in exotic materials, but an ARM-based chip needn't have those problems. This is of course why most chips are still made on silicon.
Also the low transistor count means that even in high speed situations you shouldn't have the clock-skew problems that plague larger processors. (Clock-skew is the problem whereby it takes longer than a single clock tick for a signal to reach from one side of the processor to the other.) A good proportion of the transistors in Pentium IVs and PowerPC G5s are there to deal with that very issue.
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MS has been doing this for years in the IT industry, and succeeding at it. Why should this be any different? Microsoft says Jump, and the IT industry asks "How high?"
Hmmmm... Not in this world it hasn't... You must be thinking of some parallel universe.
Microsoft very rarely "says Jump" to the IT industry - it's usually the other way around.
Let's look at some history. BASIC was their first product, and that was a copy of work already done elsewhere. Microsoft was not a player in the OS market until they struck a deal with IBM to sell them something called "DOS" which they hadn't written and didn't own at the time. The dominant OS retailer at that time was Digital Research with CP/M. All of their applications were essentially copies of other products back then, and that remains the case to date, with the exception of those that they got through acquisition. When it came to creating Windows they copied the concepts (not the code) from prototype Macs they had from Apple for application development.
Most recently we have the Internet, a party that Microsoft was notoriously very late to join.
Microsoft are the great followers of the IT industry. They are generally extreemly conservative players and take very few risks. They look at the trends that are going on around them and they respond. Leading is not their thing. Innovating is not their thing. That is what history shows us.
Yes, Microsoft has a dominant position, but the implication of "Jump" and "How high?" is that they lead, and this simply is not the case, and nor has it ever been.
If anything the IT industry as a whole is that one that says "Jump!". Microsoft though is a hulking behemoth these days so it never asks "how high" - it just jumps a little and says "that's good enough - live with it".
I wonder though if governments will stand idly by and let Microsoft create a private encryption channel between everyone's computer and Microsoft.
I strongly doubt it.
Of course they will!
There are many reasons why.
Firstly you're talking about a relatively complex rights management system. It takes quite a while to understand this and all the implications thereof. Your average senator/representative/MP does not have the time to get to understand this kind of thing properly. Some will, but most will not.
Secondly Microsoft can potentially do this relatively quickly. It will take several years after this is introduced for authorities to percieve that it may be a problem. It will take a while after then for legislation to be drafted and put in place for something to be done to curb abuses of this kind of technology. Whilst we may know that this is potentially a very serious problem right now it will take governments much longer to come to that realisation and longer still to act. For example we've known that spam is a problem for many many years but only recently have laws been passed against it.
Thirdly DRM is in the interests of big business. Governments listen to business because governments believe that business is good for the people, since business earns money, pays taxes, and contributes to their electioneering funds. Businesses also have plenty of money to lobby governments.
Then there is the complacency of individuals. The general population could lobby the government to resolve issues like this, however it takes organisation and money. Most people don't care though, since like our politicians they too don't understand the issues, so organisations that can bring these kind of problems to light are generally under-funded.
You make a good point here. Of course virtually all the comments you've received so far have been disagreeing with you. What good capitalists the Slashdot crowd are. :-)
Of course, as I'm sure you're aware, one big flaw with what you put forward is that the concept of "public domain" has been virtually completely destroyed. These days just about everything is owned by a corporation somewhere. Even things that are ostensibly developed as government projects for the people are actually owned by corporations.
It is also true that as some have pointed out what you are proposing is basically communism. In an ideal world what you propose would be possible, but as you know we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of selfish SOBs who don't give a damn about anyone apart from themselves. They're more worried about lining their own pockets than ensuring their neighbours are not starving to death - our governments are full of people just like this. We're essentially trained to think this way throughout our whole lives starting from a very young age. Unfortunately that's modern capitalism for you, and changing that mindset is very difficult indeed.
Until recently, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities in the UK were completely free for citizens to attend.
This was not true in the 1960's, when I lived in the UK and my sister was attending University. I don't believe it was ever free.
First up were you a UK citizen?
Universities in the UK have never, to my knowledge, been free for foreign students.
A long long time ago (maybe the 1960's, I'm not sure) I believe that some (maybe even all) UK universities charged their students. However during the 1970s-1990s universities in the UK were free to UK citizens. Indeed for much of that time students could also get a student grant from the government to help assist them through university.
Things were starting to change when I attended uni in 1990. The grant had been reduced quite heavily and was in the process of being replaced with student loans (low interest government loans to students). Grants disappeared totally about 12 years ago. There was even a while when students could claim unemployment benefit as well as their grant.
These days all but the very poorest students in the UK must pay annual tuition fees which is currently standardised for all universities. Hardly anybody qualifies for free tuition now. The universities though are still subsidised. This is likely to change again in the not too distant future with more presigious universities such as Oxford or Cambridge charging higher fees.
It would make the net a safer place for the rest of us if they did so...
How do you figure that?
There's plenty of people that buy PCs these days that have anti-virus software pre-installed. Many of them think that makes them safe. Many of those people don't bother to regularly update their anti-virus software - they don't understand that they need to do this. They therefore get viruses and spread them about.
Those same people don't update their OS to patch security holes. Things would be no different than now if Microsoft built anti-virus software into Windows.
The only difference would be a massive decrease in anti-virus software sales from other vendors. This would be a clear additional abuse of Microsoft's monopoly position.
You've misunderstood the original post.
They were arguing that by adding copy protection measures to a program on a CD-ROM they change the nature of that CD-ROM. The CD-ROM itself becomes part of the device that allows access to the software. The CD-ROM drive is not sufficient.
According to this law if it is no longer possible to obtain the access device, i.e. the CD-ROM itself, then according to this law it may be legitimate to bypass the copy protection.
Of course to enable the use of this law the CD-ROM would have to be defective such that the copy protection rendered the disc unusable.
Ummmm... Why do people bitch about the beer not being free?
Yeah, especially when the cost is only a name. Since there's no financial transaction going on here it sounds like it's free to me.
Honestly if I was at my local pub offering beers to anybody that would tell me there name and show me a piece of ID to confirm it I don't think anyone there would argue that the beer wasn't free. I don't think they'd give a damn.
The NY Times has never sent me a single email, since I asked them not to. Can't complain there.
Maybe people should read the privacy agreements before they bitch that the "beer" isn't free.
Back in the days, making a demo was about showing off "software"-skills. A demo was all about coding fancy effects on a broad range of hardware with no support for hardware acceleration whatsoever.
Back in the days of demos the main demo scene revolved mostly around the Commodore Amiga. It was about showing off software skills, but they most definitely made use of hardware acceleration. The graphics processor in the Amiga ended up doing most of the graphics work in a demo with the 68000 working essentially in a management role. No broad range of hardware on the Amiga though - all the variants were very similar.
Now the PC demo scene inevitably did not have any hardware acceleration as part of their demos, since back then there was none. Video cards in those days on PCs only showed video - even 2D acceleration facilities to speed up drawing windows weren't around... It's only recently with the introduction of more sophisticated GPUs on PCs that some of the kind of things that Amigas could do in hardware are technically possible to do in hardware on PCs. PC demos therefore had to be about software skills rather than what nifty things the hardware could do for you.
History has shown that when a country is controlled by one person or an elite few, the distance to the sword in any situation is shortened.
Ironically this gives an explaination of sorts as to why the USA and Britain were so keen to go to war in Iraq. Both countries have political systems dominated by the few, where the guy at the top has too much power.
This is better demonstrated for the Iraq war by the UK than the USA where the majority of the population was against the war and didn't buy the lies they were being fed by the government, yet Blair sent the army in to Iraq anyway.
On the surface you seem to make a good point here, but unfortunately since the US doesn't recognise the authority of the World Court or the UN the point isn't exactly valid, and I believe that is in part why you've been modded as a troll.
The Life of Brian quote would also be a good one if you could genuinely replace "Romans" with "Americans", but unfortunately history seems to indicate that you cannot. The USA hasn't exactly brought peace to Afghanistan, and it certainly hasn't yet to Iraq. It also failed to bring a genuine peace to Korea and Vietnam.
The Life of Brian quote works slightly better for the British Empire, but even then many would argue that the peace was illusory, as is witness by the fact that the peace that the British Empire brought to many countries in the middle east in the late 19th century and early 20th did not last.
And whilst the US has shown a respect for liberty in the past, that respect is now firmly in the past. Recent laws passed by the US government show no respect for the liberty of those that are not US citizens, and less respect for the liberty of its own citizens. This has been discussed at great length here before on Slashdot.
As others have quite rightly pointed out the Segway option is most definitely more expensive than the van.
One more word on the Segway vs van thing...
Rain.
Dave,
Get over it mate.
Microsoft is a big company and they advertise.
If you strongly feel that their advertisments are making false claims then complain to the appropriate authorities. This isn't exactly the venue to make such complaints.
As has been pointed out you may as well call for people to boycott Slashdot at the same time.
If you follow this path then you'll have to boycott just about the whole internet, you won't be able to walk down any street that has advertising billboards, watch any commercial TV channels, or visit the cinema.
Whilst not a true Unix BeOS did have a degree of compatibility. If memory serves most of the GNU tools got ported to it. Other Unix apps also made the transition. So to say that this would have doomed Apple isn't true.
What I think would have been a greater problem is developer tools. The NeXT developer tools were great, as was the OpenStep API. Apple have improved on these significantly with XCode and Cocoa.
Do you really think that the likes of Cisco, Intel and Microsoft really like having to fork out millions of dollars to lawyers for patents?
Yes, these companies file patents that should not be granted. I would suggest that file them knowing that these patents shouldn't be granted. Having a large library of patents means that when they are challenged they have the option of cross-licensing patents they hold to make law-suits go away.
Unfortunately we are in a situation where bogus patents get granted, and this creates a vicious cycle, meaning that more patents get filed that also should not be. The only way to rectify this situation is a complete review of the patent system, and a comprehensive review of patents issued. Obvioiusly in an ideal world only truely novel and original ideas should be patentable.
As far as I can see fixing the problem does not require a change in patent law, it merely requires a complete review of the patent issuing process. That involves ensuring that patent offices are sufficiently funded to properly investigate patent applications, and also to review existing patents. Unfortunately the US patent office seems to have been underfunded for some time.
It is in the interests of big business to fix the patent system in order to reduce their costs. I am sure that Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, et al. don't enjoy having to fork over millions of dollars to lawyers. Remember this doesn't just cost them money - engineers that are valuable for development work end up having to deal with lawyers for the purposes of defending patents when they could/should be doing other work.
Yep, Britain has a long and proud history of inventing things and then not capitalising on those inventions. Transistors, ICs, and LCDs were all invented in the UK, to name a few.
The UK is also the only country ever to have developed a rocket program capable of launching satellites and then abandon it. Clearly there's no strategic advantage in being able to put things into space. ??? For more info on this search for Black Arrow.
"...He confuses the Linux kernel, which I had nothing to do with, and the GNU OS project, which I launched," said Stallman
. (My apologies to the many universities, organisations and companies I missed out in that little list.)
And this is where we have a bit of a problem, and why there's confusion.
What is an OS without a kernel?
Now the GNU project did indeed have a kernel project (Hurd) for many years (it was announced in 1991), but did not manage to actually produce anything that was even considered a "0.0" release until August 1996. (From what I understand this kernel is/was itself built on-top of the Mach microkernel.) Having checked the web site I can't see a date for their last release, which is version 0.2.
In contrast Linus released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel in 1991, and reached 1.0 by 1994 - two years before the 0.0 release of Hurd.
As far as I can see the "GNU OS project" has yet to get to version 1.0 - ten years after Linux reached that milestone.
Of course there's the old GNU claim that Linux would be nothing without the GNU tools. Well, Linux also relies on a great many tools that were not developed as part of the GNU project. Many tools were developed independent of the GNU project in response to the release of the Linux kernel. If every organisation that contributed to the development of the Linux OS insisted on being credited we'd end up with a name something like X/MIT/CalTech/OpenGL/Sun/IBM/BSD/Apache/GNU/Linux
Indeed it's almost certainly the case that these days a minority of the Linux OS has a heritage in the GNU project.
To my mind merely having a GPL attached to a project does not make something part of the GNU OS project. It's just a license choice.
What is an OS without a kernel?
Nothing but a collection of tools.
Do American confiscate Arabic posessions? Do they put all Arabs into concentration camps and gas chambers? You Arabs should stop exploiting Holocaust in your own dirty political purposes (and don't pretend you don't know that Mufty Al-Husseini of Jerusalem was a big friend and supporter of Hitler)
Why do you assume that I'm an Arab? (I'm European - English, with no Arabic or Jewish heritage at all.)
By all accounts in the mainstream media, Camp X-Ray is not all that dissimilar than a concentration camp, and the way that some prisoners have been treated in Iraq has also been similarly disgusting. I wasn't saying that it's got as bad as things did in the holocaust, but don't pretend that what's been going on is acceptable. There's a slippery slope here, and the USA has been sliding down it for some time.
What I was saying is that America has been becoming similar to Nazi Germany before the start of the holocaust. Have a look into the history of this and you might see what I mean. Things in the USA are nowhere near as overt as they became in Germany, but people have been singled out and detained purely because of their name and/or ethnic origin. Numerous mainstream news sources have covered this.
American law has gone as far as to allow the government to confiscate posessions of anyone they suspect of certain forms of illegal activity, especially terrorism and certain forms of computer crime. There have been many documented cases of this hapenning. This also can happen without due process - the FBI merely has to decide they suspect you of a crime and without having to supply any kind of justification to any authority they can raid your home. The legal system is supposed to be based on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty".
I have no "dirty political purposes of my own". I am not so naiive as to believe that all Arabs are innocent of terrorism, and nor did I say that - clearly some are involved, and there has been clear evidence of that. Don't pretend though that white Americans are totally innocent of terrorism either - remember that it wasn't al-Quaeda that blew up the Oklahoma FBI building. It's also believed by the authorities that "domestic terrorists" were responsible for the anthrax letters.
I'm not sure why the parent post rates a +5 Insightful.... Maybe it's because the subject line has a magic name within it, giving rise to the thought "somebody's agreeing with Linus so this must be an insightful comment, since Linus is our god." Come on people - Linus is just a guy, and he puts his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us.
All of the web browsers I have used only render HTML and plain graphics formats. Yes, Flash displays, and so does embedded video and music, but that is actually done by external video and audio players like Quicktime, Real, or Windows Media. It's certainly not the browser itself - it's just a container for this stuff.
What do you think plug-ins are all about?
As for the secure bit, well, most browsers could do a much better job of sandboxing plugins.
After Sept 11 all Arabic young men were potential terrorists. Now this has been expanded to include all young/middle aged/fathers/European looking Arabic men.
Hey, numb-nuts, who exactly do you think has declared war on the USA?
As I understand it one man, who happens to be an Arab. Yes, he happens to have support from other people, and many of them are from Arabic descent, but they do not represent all Arabs. Only a complete fool would think they did.
Arguably the USA declared war on Arab states much earlier than he declared war on them anyway. The US government has had a policy of interference in middle-eastern affairs for much longer than Al-Quaeda has been around. This has included supplying arms and supporting organisations that could be considered terrorists, some of which gave rise to Al-Quaeda. They also have a long-standing policy of supporting Israel even when every other country in the world has condemned their actions.
Don't believe me? Check out this timeline of events that led up to the terrorist attacks of 11/9/01. The evidence presented is from well respected news sources.
One could even argue that, given this policy of interference in middle-eastern affairs which severely decreases the trust many people around the world have in the USA and the passing of restrictive laws such as the Patriot act, it is the US government themselves that has declared war on the people of the USA.
The fear that the US government has created of Arabic and muslim people is not all that dissimilar from the fear that the Nazi government of Germany created of Jewish people. Please note though that I do not believe that this is their intent.
One could also argue that the government creates a greater feeling of terror than Al-Quaeda does by regularly putting out incredibly vague "terror alerts". I am also not convinced that this is intentional.
Firstly as other people have said there is no surprise in the fact that you could program a currency converter app in another environment. The two main reasons are that you are not yet familiar with XCode and Interface Builder (IB), and secondly that the Currency Converter example is overdesigned to demonstrate the principles behind MVC.
As for the dynamic screen that adjusts itself to the data inside it, of course you can do this. This has always been fairly easy to accomplish, but 10.3 adds a concept called "bindings" which builds on the MVC paradigm to allow UIs to automatically update whenever the underlying data model changes.
As for re-usable database linked components, of course you can do that too, and if you do it right you don't need to write any code to reuse them. WebObjects is designed to do that kind of stuff, although of course there's a license fee involved. There's a few other frameworks available to for this which interface with Cocoa.
What personal computer functions, other than gaming, and perhaps IM, would function well in a living room environment? ... Remember WebTV? ... Classic computing functions like web surfing and word processing are ill-suited for the big screen.
WebTV and other similar set-top box products weren't great. Surfing on a TV wasn't a pleasant experience. However there was a big reasons for this: NTSC and PAL resolutions really don't cut it, and the interlacing can make for flickery text and blurry images. Surfing for a while like that can give you a nasty headache. This is the biggest limiting factor.
It is no longer an issue. We're talking here about a high-definition flat-screen. No resolution or flicker problems there, so this thing would be well suited to web browsing, email, and even word processing would be tolerable.
I don't think web surfing on your TV will ever be the most popular of activities, but don't underestimate the possibility. Whilst digital interactive TV services have been very slow to appear in the USA the dominant satellite service in the UK is a DITV service from Sky. Although it doesn't include web browsing it does carry several web-like services, including BBC News, and Dominos Pizza. Using these services are fine even on a low-resolution TV (I don't think Sky does HD yet). It's pretty popular.
Indeed Teletext services have been broadcast in the UK for over 2 decades, providing hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of news, reviews, cinema listings, etc. (Teletext signals are sent in the "return" scan line of PAL broadcasts, so each TV channel can carry a teletext service.) Teletext is being used less now that interactive digital services are taking off but it's still there. It was limited though since it was one-way (although some interaction could be done by phone) and was basically a 40x24 text-based system . All but the cheapest PAL TVs support teletext. It was very popular, and as far as I know nobody has ever complained that it wasn't suited to TV screens.
And you can't even argue that Gore wouldn't have gone to war. The American public demanded it.
From what I understand a significant proportion of the American public did not even realise that Saddam Hussein and Ossama Bin Laden were two different people. Most were convinced by the twin lies put forward by Bush and his buddies that Iraq had weapons of mass distruction that were a danger to US citizens and that there were strong links between Iraq/Hussein and Al Quaeda/Bin Laden. The reality always was that these were at best suspicions with no real evidence. Lies may be a bit of a strong word here, but at best Bush put forward these suspicions as truth, and the American public bought this. There was far too little public (media) scrutiny of the arguments being put forward. Unfortunately it seems to me that the rampant patriotism in the wake of 11/9/01 seemed to stop all kind of rational debate in America. That doesn't say much either for Bush or the American public now does it?
Who knows how Gore would have handled this? He may have bought and sold a completely different set of lies, and America could today be in a completely different war, but no more/less respected around the world. We simply cannot tell.
Shatner co-wrote a series of Star Trek books featuring Kirk *after* his death on Veridian III... The basic premise by which those books happen is that whilst he did die the Nexus ribbon somehow brought him back to life, I think. I can't remember exactly though since it's been a number of years now since I read some of them. The books that I did read were quite good fun and did make sense.
I had heard that these books were being considered as "canon" by those that count within Star Trek / Paramount.
So Shatner *could* appear as James T. Kirk - remember Star Trek is very fond of time travel.
XNA consoles from Panasonic and Teac?
:-)
Sounds quite a bit like 3DO....
It's bound to succeed then.
I've been an ARM fan for many, many years, so it's great to see this development. I've always thought this kind of thing should happen with ARM chips, and that the ARM should be well suited for this kind of application.
ARM cores have a great advantage of having an incredibly low transistor count. As a result the simpler ARM chips tend to have incredibly good production yields. I don't know if that's true for the more complex ARM variants like XScale. This multi-core processor should also be an order of magnitude less complicated than a Pentium, so it too should get good yields and thus for volume production be very cheap.
However it's also always struck me that the low transistor count of ARM chips could be of use in very high performance computing applications. It is difficult to build high transistor count chips in exotic materials, but an ARM-based chip needn't have those problems. This is of course why most chips are still made on silicon.
Also the low transistor count means that even in high speed situations you shouldn't have the clock-skew problems that plague larger processors. (Clock-skew is the problem whereby it takes longer than a single clock tick for a signal to reach from one side of the processor to the other.) A good proportion of the transistors in Pentium IVs and PowerPC G5s are there to deal with that very issue.