I am fair
Microsoft obviously stopped development of that dreck five years ago.
The reason why I am saying this is, that no new features have been integrated. No newer w3c standards have been added, old broken implementations (cough png transparency, several css tags which allow positioning, so that you can get rid of table layouts) never have been fixed.
As for the ties to the os, there is only one tie, and that is active X where Sun and others warned already at the time of introduction that this is due to the missing sandboxing a huge security leak.
Most exploits are related to ActiveX and its ties to active scripting one way or another!
Just because the browser makes some things right, does not mean the browser is good, it os even worse than netscape 4.7 in my opinion, the problems are just somewhere else.
Keep your ufo and lost civilizations theories out.
The illuminati were a group of people who basically were built upon philosophical ideas around the 15th or 16th century.
It basically was an organisation like others, to gather elite people.
Today the probably have died out and only still live in conspiracy theories.
No matter if they still live or not, they dont have any serious link to the lost past (which probably never existed anyway, since there arent too many indications for lost unknown civilizations on the earth, whereas there are lots of indications that civilization started around 5000 years ago with the invention of writing)
As for the rest of your comments, yes, I agree, technology is some kind of pyramid, if you take out the base then it crumbles, with high tech being the first going down.
But it all is a matter of the ability of the survivors of such a catastrophy if civilization can be rebuilt.
If there are enough survivors and parts of the world which can keep a proper infrastructure then a rebuild of a civilization is a matter of years.
A typical example is post war germany, which basically back then was bombed into the middle ages, but due to factory infrastructure kept alive.
Survivors with lots of technical knowlegde, germany 10 years later already was an economical superpower.
Although if there is a global nuclear catastrophe, then I would assume we would fall back 1600 years into the middle ages with some knowledge of advanced civilization within some survivors, and remnants of the civilization all over the place.
Then it depends on the future societies if a new civilization would arise out of it (probably not, since survivors of such a catastrophe, probably would stay away from technology entirely for many generations)
You should give the Gothic series a serious look, excellent games with dense story and lots of nonlinearity going on.
The gothic series is somehow a blend of fallout and ultima gamingwise.
Actually I was not talking about adding this stuff to the system, but to overhaul the system entirely so that it can be put back to its original purpose.
To grant a limited time monopoly for exchange of publication.
The problem why the system does not work, is because it is abused entirely and somewhat was perverded into some kind of streetrobber system.
The main problem we have to face currently, is to force the USPTO and other patent offices, to stop the current sellout of existing ideas, which the courts have to clean up afterwards.
That basically would mean, either punish the USPTO or give them the incentive that it is financially better to not to grant a patent then to grant one unless it is pretty clear that this is a patent in the classical sense.
The second problem are the patent leeches, who basically just feed on the work of others. They only produce thin air and lawsuits and run producing companies with their lawsuits into the ground.
Either make that behavior a criminal offence, or force them to produce themselves and only grant to them what they really produce in a meaningful sense.
The third major problem is the running time of patents, which is 20 years, and way too much for many fields where patents are applied. This has to be regulated on a field base with 1-10 years depending on the field.
Fourth, keep the patent system ouf of fields which prospered without it and developed without it.
Where is there an adamnent to the current totally abused system. All of this is basically an alteration of the system to a more and sane base.
Of course the most radical approach would be to kill off the patent system entirely but nobody probably will dare that.
Of course.. with product I meant something physical, which has commercial or research value.
Much like most patents in other engineering fields basically just protect more or less an actual implementation not a method.
Yes, one solution would be to place heavy costs onto the uspto for every patent which is shot out in court.
Another better system would be to revisit patents once in a while in an open non commercial discussion (cough internet forums) so that bogus patents can be shot out in time without causing costs left and right.
Third a patent should be connected to an actual product which already has been sold seriously. This would push non producing patent grabbers who only produce court cases, out of the system.
Fourth, patent times should be altered to different running times in different field. 20 years makes sense in the medical field, in software nothing makes sense more than five years.
Fifth, why patents in software at all? The field has prospered much more than other technical fields, without having them. And now patents are all over the place, the whole field is in a commercial crisis.
because they embrace fair business tactics, they have good products and they simply do a good job with improving their technology and they dont try to kill off the competition.
Arm is a company in good old European style, which seem to die out more and more and being replaced with get rich quick no matter how bad it is for everybody companies.
Short answer...
Trusted Computing my ass, TCPA is another developers lock in scheme, once code signing is mandatory and keys have to be purchased.
So still no trust from my side.
Sorry this is a little bit longer but I have to give my two euro cents to this debate.
Well not being a patent attourney, but being directly affected by it. Yes there are thousands of software patents in europe, most of them illegally and sloppily granted.
(Guess the only exception to this is the UK where SWPATS already are legalized on a national level)
Ive read several of them most go like. System and machine implementation - this is the wrapup, then a vague description of the algorithm to cover as many fields as possible.
They were illegally granted (especially in germany) because there was a clear decision years ago, and nobody really currently tries to contest them seriously, at least not outside of the UK. To contest a software patent in the current field could bring down all software patents currently granted by the EPO.
This is also the cause of the pressure of many US multis and the commission for the legalization of the status quo, because 80% of this stuff belongs to IBM Microsoft and Co (with Siemens being the only european corporation having a severe number of SWPATs in the field)...
The problem with the dependency of the US is not really that problematic, the system is currently in the US severely misused and probably will be altered over time once the patent leeches become too dominant, unless they gain too much power, the problem is that nobody wants to have Europe repeating the mistakes of the US (which are court rulings based). But the major parties already signed contracts on the WIPO level years ago, so European politicians feel obligated to follow the bad lead of the US in this case.
An overruling of the WIPO decisicions in Europe basically in the long term would shake the US system and the USPTO to its grounds and basically would in the long run put the patent system on a more sane foundation. The patent in the long term, because Europe and the US are and that is right in my opinion economically dependend on each other. On the other hand a US like patent system all over Europe basically would case a legalized sellout of the entire european software industry (which is 99% small shops anc companies) to patent vulture companies and multinational corporations which mostly are US based and outsourcers to asia.
As for the court thing, this is rather problematic, because if you look at the us, many bogus patents have been tested in court (amazon one click for instance), it all goes down to good laywers and being able to get through it.
Therefore you can see the rise of patent vultures in the US currently which produce nothing but court cases. Those usually have something broad and meaningless on their hand and usually go after the small ones who cannot defend themselves and once knowlegde and funds are improved, go after the big ones.
It is clear that if you apply for a patent law company, that they have a different stance on this issue, because those are the vultures in the system who will or are already feeding on the works of others.
Well the problem with the EU is different.
A first the council of ministers, representatives of the governments. In most cases ministers were not elected directly (dont know for uk)
secondly the parliament, directly elected but if you check it out more or less just a democratic facade with only limited power. There is not too much interest to change that, because the parliament is too big to install mechanisms like some local governments have them to control to 100% the voting process (yes some european governments have that and therefore are a facade too)
And then there is the commission, clearly bearocrats, and lots of corruption on this level.
Also one commission already was kicked out because of severe corruption a few years ago. And given the recent works I have a strong feeling that the current council is not that much better in many ways. Well to give credits, it could also be, that the council simply is agnostic and the corruption is one level below.
The biggest problem, but that changes slowly is, that the people and the press still dont have their eyes on Brussels yet how they still have it on their local governments. Therefore many things can pass their with basically would cause an uproar on the local level. Some people probably feel quite save in Brussels and do things they would never dare on a local level. But if there is one good thing about the whole patent issue, it is that the people in Brussels are watched much more closely than they used to be. They simply are not aware of this yet.
So what we have is a mixture of a parliament with limited powers which is not really controllable by others (which would be a good thing but is hated by the decision makers), a council of people who are indirectly elected and think nobody watches them in Brussels (therefore it happens often that the same people critizice decicions on a local level which they voted yes for or abstained for in a council level and blaming the EU of having forced the decicion onto them)
And a commission which already with other people has been kicked out of office for severe corruption several years ago, and who sometimes still acts like being on the payrolls of lobbyists (I guess it says a lot that the first commissional draft of the EU SWPAT legislative was directly written by the BSA)
So we have a triangular system where only one weak angle is elected directly.
The problem is two sided.
First of all the council of ministers, directly elected people, who basically in several cases openly or indirectly betrayed their own parliaments.
Then the council of ministers, who basically had drafts for this issue written by the BSA themselves, or at least just gave statements that they are not amused by the votings of the parliament and are going to overrule and/or ignore it.
What this situation reminds me of is good ole rome,
where the emperor was overruling the votings of the local parliament at his will.
And then the EU constantly wonders itself why the people of Europe are so fed up with Brussels. All they want to live in is a decent non corrupt democracy and what we are in is a system equally bad or even worse than the one in the united states, with lobbyism being legalized corruption!
sincerely
A European by heart who believes in a unified Europe but is saddened by the current situation
You have obviously no clue on what you are talking about.
a) Java if you go the self extracting binary route just expands itself wherever you want it to be and follows from one top level dir into its subdirs, there is no spawning itself over the entire system, just one java dir with its subdirs, thats it.
b) nobody prevents you to use make it is just ant is so much better and therefore everybody uses it
c) you can use zip instead of jar, jar is just a zip file with some extra data in a manifest file
d) face it ant is currently ported to.net and probably will become the standard make tool there as well
e) how much more alien is a zip file with the extension ant to linux compared to an exe file?
f) the classpath thing is not that far away from unix either, in fact java cannot deny its unix heritage, many unix tools use environment variables and classpath is just one which can be set optionally within a.bashrc or given to the command line tools
Well DS9 was heavily influenced by the excellent works of JMS in Babylon 5. It started basically as the typical star trek technobubble series and as then over the time lots of ideas of the far superior B5 went into DS9...
In my opinion while DS9 was good B5 basically was the only sci fi series in the recent past which didnt insult the brains of the viewers.
Since Epyx went belly up with their handheld console, they produced for Atari. Who is getting the royalties for those Epyx games sold over the net.
I have sever doubts the developers of those games will see a single cent....
Collect defunct one way discs and dump them into the backyards of the ceos who produce this dreck and also into the backyards of the ceos of the movie studios.
Problably about two days later those disks are outlawed by congress...
Not quite true either.
The java VM is quite sophisticated. First it compiles via a JIT compiler the native code into
the platform code.
But secondly and much more important, it does a statistical runtime analysis of the code it runs and optimizes it during runtime.
You can see that effect very often with java programs gaining almost 100% more speed within the first half minute or minute of execution.
Dynamic inlining and other optimization methods java starts to perform at that time give a huge speed boost.
The darwinian reason for homosexuality, might be that, it might be a natural barrier to prevent certain species from overproducing itself.
I am not sure if homosexuality develops more often once a species becomes more dominant.
The father of modern computers, the funny thing is that a patent on his machines in post war germany was denied.
Another thing was that he did not invent this machine for war purposes (I dont think Zuse was a Nazi) he just was so fed up with construction calculation that he built his own calculation machine after his needs and thus invented the programmable computer.
IBM back then used its influence in post war germany so that Zuse never got patents on its machine.
His company which he founded upon his inventions probably would never had go cease to exist in the sixties if he would have been granted the patents which IBM grabbed.
Another typical case of an inventor who basically was a genious but was ripped off by a major corporation by the misusage of the patent system.
Another thing he also invented one of the first programming languages, in existence Plankalkuel.
And after the war he founded his own company which produced computers, it ceased to exist in the mid sixties, when IBM took over the market with almost total control.
dont bother downloading it. The game uses AGS, and this one is ported to linux, but it relies on a plugin written in C++, which cannot be ported, since the Linux AGS version does not support plugins.
Slashdot Mirror
I am fair Microsoft obviously stopped development of that dreck five years ago. The reason why I am saying this is, that no new features have been integrated. No newer w3c standards have been added, old broken implementations (cough png transparency, several css tags which allow positioning, so that you can get rid of table layouts) never have been fixed. As for the ties to the os, there is only one tie, and that is active X where Sun and others warned already at the time of introduction that this is due to the missing sandboxing a huge security leak. Most exploits are related to ActiveX and its ties to active scripting one way or another! Just because the browser makes some things right, does not mean the browser is good, it os even worse than netscape 4.7 in my opinion, the problems are just somewhere else.
Keep your ufo and lost civilizations theories out. The illuminati were a group of people who basically were built upon philosophical ideas around the 15th or 16th century. It basically was an organisation like others, to gather elite people. Today the probably have died out and only still live in conspiracy theories. No matter if they still live or not, they dont have any serious link to the lost past (which probably never existed anyway, since there arent too many indications for lost unknown civilizations on the earth, whereas there are lots of indications that civilization started around 5000 years ago with the invention of writing) As for the rest of your comments, yes, I agree, technology is some kind of pyramid, if you take out the base then it crumbles, with high tech being the first going down. But it all is a matter of the ability of the survivors of such a catastrophy if civilization can be rebuilt. If there are enough survivors and parts of the world which can keep a proper infrastructure then a rebuild of a civilization is a matter of years. A typical example is post war germany, which basically back then was bombed into the middle ages, but due to factory infrastructure kept alive. Survivors with lots of technical knowlegde, germany 10 years later already was an economical superpower. Although if there is a global nuclear catastrophe, then I would assume we would fall back 1600 years into the middle ages with some knowledge of advanced civilization within some survivors, and remnants of the civilization all over the place. Then it depends on the future societies if a new civilization would arise out of it (probably not, since survivors of such a catastrophe, probably would stay away from technology entirely for many generations)
You should give the Gothic series a serious look, excellent games with dense story and lots of nonlinearity going on. The gothic series is somehow a blend of fallout and ultima gamingwise.
Actually I was not talking about adding this stuff to the system, but to overhaul the system entirely so that it can be put back to its original purpose. To grant a limited time monopoly for exchange of publication. The problem why the system does not work, is because it is abused entirely and somewhat was perverded into some kind of streetrobber system. The main problem we have to face currently, is to force the USPTO and other patent offices, to stop the current sellout of existing ideas, which the courts have to clean up afterwards. That basically would mean, either punish the USPTO or give them the incentive that it is financially better to not to grant a patent then to grant one unless it is pretty clear that this is a patent in the classical sense. The second problem are the patent leeches, who basically just feed on the work of others. They only produce thin air and lawsuits and run producing companies with their lawsuits into the ground. Either make that behavior a criminal offence, or force them to produce themselves and only grant to them what they really produce in a meaningful sense. The third major problem is the running time of patents, which is 20 years, and way too much for many fields where patents are applied. This has to be regulated on a field base with 1-10 years depending on the field. Fourth, keep the patent system ouf of fields which prospered without it and developed without it. Where is there an adamnent to the current totally abused system. All of this is basically an alteration of the system to a more and sane base. Of course the most radical approach would be to kill off the patent system entirely but nobody probably will dare that.
Of course.. with product I meant something physical, which has commercial or research value. Much like most patents in other engineering fields basically just protect more or less an actual implementation not a method.
Yes, one solution would be to place heavy costs onto the uspto for every patent which is shot out in court. Another better system would be to revisit patents once in a while in an open non commercial discussion (cough internet forums) so that bogus patents can be shot out in time without causing costs left and right. Third a patent should be connected to an actual product which already has been sold seriously. This would push non producing patent grabbers who only produce court cases, out of the system. Fourth, patent times should be altered to different running times in different field. 20 years makes sense in the medical field, in software nothing makes sense more than five years. Fifth, why patents in software at all? The field has prospered much more than other technical fields, without having them. And now patents are all over the place, the whole field is in a commercial crisis.
because they embrace fair business tactics, they have good products and they simply do a good job with improving their technology and they dont try to kill off the competition. Arm is a company in good old European style, which seem to die out more and more and being replaced with get rich quick no matter how bad it is for everybody companies.
Short answer... Trusted Computing my ass, TCPA is another developers lock in scheme, once code signing is mandatory and keys have to be purchased. So still no trust from my side.
Sorry this is a little bit longer but I have to give my two euro cents to this debate.
Well not being a patent attourney, but being directly affected by it. Yes there are thousands of software patents in europe, most of them illegally and sloppily granted. (Guess the only exception to this is the UK where SWPATS already are legalized on a national level)
Ive read several of them most go like. System and machine implementation - this is the wrapup, then a vague description of the algorithm to cover as many fields as possible.
They were illegally granted (especially in germany) because there was a clear decision years ago, and nobody really currently tries to contest them seriously, at least not outside of the UK. To contest a software patent in the current field could bring down all software patents currently granted by the EPO.
This is also the cause of the pressure of many US multis and the commission for the legalization of the status quo, because 80% of this stuff belongs to IBM Microsoft and Co (with Siemens being the only european corporation having a severe number of SWPATs in the field)...
The problem with the dependency of the US is not really that problematic, the system is currently in the US severely misused and probably will be altered over time once the patent leeches become too dominant, unless they gain too much power, the problem is that nobody wants to have Europe repeating the mistakes of the US (which are court rulings based). But the major parties already signed contracts on the WIPO level years ago, so European politicians feel obligated to follow the bad lead of the US in this case.
An overruling of the WIPO decisicions in Europe basically in the long term would shake the US system and the USPTO to its grounds and basically would in the long run put the patent system on a more sane foundation. The patent in the long term, because Europe and the US are and that is right in my opinion economically dependend on each other. On the other hand a US like patent system all over Europe basically would case a legalized sellout of the entire european software industry (which is 99% small shops anc companies) to patent vulture companies and multinational corporations which mostly are US based and outsourcers to asia.
As for the court thing, this is rather problematic, because if you look at the us, many bogus patents have been tested in court (amazon one click for instance), it all goes down to good laywers and being able to get through it.
Therefore you can see the rise of patent vultures in the US currently which produce nothing but court cases. Those usually have something broad and meaningless on their hand and usually go after the small ones who cannot defend themselves and once knowlegde and funds are improved, go after the big ones.
It is clear that if you apply for a patent law company, that they have a different stance on this issue, because those are the vultures in the system who will or are already feeding on the works of others.
Well the problem with the EU is different. A first the council of ministers, representatives of the governments. In most cases ministers were not elected directly (dont know for uk) secondly the parliament, directly elected but if you check it out more or less just a democratic facade with only limited power. There is not too much interest to change that, because the parliament is too big to install mechanisms like some local governments have them to control to 100% the voting process (yes some european governments have that and therefore are a facade too) And then there is the commission, clearly bearocrats, and lots of corruption on this level. Also one commission already was kicked out because of severe corruption a few years ago. And given the recent works I have a strong feeling that the current council is not that much better in many ways. Well to give credits, it could also be, that the council simply is agnostic and the corruption is one level below. The biggest problem, but that changes slowly is, that the people and the press still dont have their eyes on Brussels yet how they still have it on their local governments. Therefore many things can pass their with basically would cause an uproar on the local level. Some people probably feel quite save in Brussels and do things they would never dare on a local level. But if there is one good thing about the whole patent issue, it is that the people in Brussels are watched much more closely than they used to be. They simply are not aware of this yet. So what we have is a mixture of a parliament with limited powers which is not really controllable by others (which would be a good thing but is hated by the decision makers), a council of people who are indirectly elected and think nobody watches them in Brussels (therefore it happens often that the same people critizice decicions on a local level which they voted yes for or abstained for in a council level and blaming the EU of having forced the decicion onto them) And a commission which already with other people has been kicked out of office for severe corruption several years ago, and who sometimes still acts like being on the payrolls of lobbyists (I guess it says a lot that the first commissional draft of the EU SWPAT legislative was directly written by the BSA) So we have a triangular system where only one weak angle is elected directly.
The problem is two sided. First of all the council of ministers, directly elected people, who basically in several cases openly or indirectly betrayed their own parliaments. Then the council of ministers, who basically had drafts for this issue written by the BSA themselves, or at least just gave statements that they are not amused by the votings of the parliament and are going to overrule and/or ignore it. What this situation reminds me of is good ole rome, where the emperor was overruling the votings of the local parliament at his will. And then the EU constantly wonders itself why the people of Europe are so fed up with Brussels. All they want to live in is a decent non corrupt democracy and what we are in is a system equally bad or even worse than the one in the united states, with lobbyism being legalized corruption! sincerely A European by heart who believes in a unified Europe but is saddened by the current situation
They should have used cork or plastic plugs instead of nightgoggles to plug the analog hole, much more effective...
Well, Final Fantasy died with 6 and Quake definitely died with 2 :-)
You have obviously no clue on what you are talking about. a) Java if you go the self extracting binary route just expands itself wherever you want it to be and follows from one top level dir into its subdirs, there is no spawning itself over the entire system, just one java dir with its subdirs, thats it. b) nobody prevents you to use make it is just ant is so much better and therefore everybody uses it c) you can use zip instead of jar, jar is just a zip file with some extra data in a manifest file d) face it ant is currently ported to .net and probably will become the standard make tool there as well
e) how much more alien is a zip file with the extension ant to linux compared to an exe file?
f) the classpath thing is not that far away from unix either, in fact java cannot deny its unix heritage, many unix tools use environment variables and classpath is just one which can be set optionally within a .bashrc or given to the command line tools
Well DS9 was heavily influenced by the excellent works of JMS in Babylon 5. It started basically as the typical star trek technobubble series and as then over the time lots of ideas of the far superior B5 went into DS9... In my opinion while DS9 was good B5 basically was the only sci fi series in the recent past which didnt insult the brains of the viewers.
Word 5.1 did not have clippy... the most important thing which was ever integrated into a word processor.
Uh no this vdr
Since Epyx went belly up with their handheld console, they produced for Atari. Who is getting the royalties for those Epyx games sold over the net. I have sever doubts the developers of those games will see a single cent....
Collect defunct one way discs and dump them into the backyards of the ceos who produce this dreck and also into the backyards of the ceos of the movie studios. Problably about two days later those disks are outlawed by congress...
Not quite true either. The java VM is quite sophisticated. First it compiles via a JIT compiler the native code into the platform code. But secondly and much more important, it does a statistical runtime analysis of the code it runs and optimizes it during runtime. You can see that effect very often with java programs gaining almost 100% more speed within the first half minute or minute of execution. Dynamic inlining and other optimization methods java starts to perform at that time give a huge speed boost.
VDR has not been portet yet, therefore a number of zero pvrs run on bsd yet, therefore it must be dead or at least smelling
The darwinian reason for homosexuality, might be that, it might be a natural barrier to prevent certain species from overproducing itself. I am not sure if homosexuality develops more often once a species becomes more dominant.
The father of modern computers, the funny thing is that a patent on his machines in post war germany was denied. Another thing was that he did not invent this machine for war purposes (I dont think Zuse was a Nazi) he just was so fed up with construction calculation that he built his own calculation machine after his needs and thus invented the programmable computer. IBM back then used its influence in post war germany so that Zuse never got patents on its machine. His company which he founded upon his inventions probably would never had go cease to exist in the sixties if he would have been granted the patents which IBM grabbed. Another typical case of an inventor who basically was a genious but was ripped off by a major corporation by the misusage of the patent system. Another thing he also invented one of the first programming languages, in existence Plankalkuel. And after the war he founded his own company which produced computers, it ceased to exist in the mid sixties, when IBM took over the market with almost total control.
dont bother downloading it. The game uses AGS, and this one is ported to linux, but it relies on a plugin written in C++, which cannot be ported, since the Linux AGS version does not support plugins.
Its alive, its alive, its alive.... bruhahahaha