It is quite sufficient to be able to sue and ruin a company/individual/group reputation. Involving government is just a way to waste more of our money extracted at gunpoint from us while creating yet another excuse for corruption and stealing freedom from the people.
Did anyone but politicians really believe that introducing computers would be sufficient to cure the deep illness afflicting government run youth indoctrination in the US? The schools are more concerend with youth detention, indoctrination and drugging if they student is unruly than with teaching. No amount of hardware will fix the result disaster.
The extract is highly biased in a seeming attempt to make Sun look as bad as possible. The truth is that the OpenOffice project was one of the best breaks for Linux on the desktop every and some very heavy hitters in ironing out Open Source licensing issues with corporate players were involved in setting this up. There was a remaining flaw that Sun insisted on ownership of the copyright if you wanted to contribute code. This was against LGPL as far as I am concerned. LGPL makes no conditions on who owns the copyright. They have now corrected this problem. They should be being congratulated both for the initial offering and for paying attention and fixing a flaw in their licensing.
We don't need no stinkin' variables! Really, "modern" languages that make variable assignment and the checking and massaging of variable types a large percentage of the code are very seriously flawed to start with. In decent languages a much more functional approach would be taken. Of course then you have the problem of properly naming functions. Even in so called "modern" programming inanities, it is much, much more important to me to have classes, methods and functions have good readable names that tell me the one (only one, thanks) purpose the function is for rather than worrying much over variable names.
In my not so humble opinion, being hung up on variable names shows just how backwards software engineering is in practice today. A well designed system is designed and decomposes according to classes, methods and functions not according to variables! In a well designed and implemented system, function/methods are generally short enough that the names of the variables are just not that important.
And calling for coding standards including standardized comments? I've seen a lot of attempts at this in my 22 yrs in the business and all of them are tedious when detailed enough to generalize comments. They tend to lower code to a LCD that everyone either agrees on or just got tired of the entire process. They don't generally do anything for real code quality (which isn't a matter of standards) or for real readability either all too often. As a geek I am much more interested in how to design and write code more beautifully and powerfully. I am hardly at all interested in 'coding standards'.
Believing in X or the possibility of X that does not yet have good scientific evidence for its existence does not make one inept at science or at understanding science and scientific findings. Only a view which is known as "scientism" asserts that only those things that can be studied and proved by science exist at all or have any validity could be behind the loose implications of the summary for this item. Scientism is not itself able to be validated by science. It is a philosophical theory in the area of epistemology. So what does that have to do with whether people appreciate and understand science? Nothing necessarily.
If you knew a bit more about languages and had worked in a few more then you would understand how it could be considered an idiot language. It has been stated by its inventor that the language was designed to make average programmers reasonably productive and their efforts relatively safe. It succeeds admirably at that but it frankly bores above average and expert designers and programmers to death!
Garbage collection and embedded thread support are fine features but the former has been present in other language for more than a few decades and the latter is not enough by itself to justify the limitations and lack of power of the language. Automatic loading and distribution of packages and classes? Not new although arguably more uniformly done than in many other places.
is not against "terrorism". The real battle is against continued expansion of State power over all of us. Terrorism cannot be stopped short of having each and every person observed and controlled 24x7 OR by working on the roots of terror. Hint, blowing the shit out of people's homes because you can make some weak association between them and some terrorist or another does not address terrorism, it only creates more of it. Cutting back on our freedoms for our "protection" is no protection at all of what is important. I would rather take my chances with terrorists than with a growing abrogation of freedom and rights such as is developing in the US.
Replacing high tech advances in a broad range of fields making all of our lives arguably richer with high tech geared to warfare and surveillance is NOT at all a happy story. Especially when many of those tools will be used by the government against its own citizens. Those who work at these things because the same government has wreaked the economy long before 9/11 and they have nothing much else to chose from, are literally selling their rights and freedom for a bit of porridge today.
Also, turning Cyberia into a battlefield is the best way for the government and attendant Military Industrial Complex to utterly own and control the very tools and spaces so many of us have dreamed of making a place of great freedom and benefit to all. This is perhaps the saddest part of the story.
We need to get our heads out of this endless war mode and get back on track to making a viable future for everyone. And we need to do it NOW.
What makes for a Big Brother state is being too busy arguing minutae to notice what the technology is being used for and by whom. And when we do notice far to few of us are willing to raise enough of a stink to be inconvenient to those making the rules. So they increase in power and capability and we whine more until we make ourselves sick of whining and then we pick at each other's posts instead. Wonderful, heh?
WHAT new literacy??? Some 25% of the US adult population is illiterate. Technology by itself will not fix this or anything else.
If MS or any other company starts leaning on all makers of services I need and is big enough to get away with it then I have no choice but to take them to court or live with whatever they hand me. Having laws that prevent such business extortion techniques is a damn good thing imho and is certainly not "running to Mama". Laws exists so you have some recourse other than open warfare.
What you are saying amounts to claiming MS really did and does nothing wrong. I cannot credit you with enough intelligence to be worth responding to if that is your opinion.
So, the way to make your product a household word is to add the "tm"? And this is claimed to be necessary to protect the investment? In what way? As long as the trademark is enforced then its use without "TM" should not be any big deal. Maybe they can add (PBUs) - "praise be unto Sun" instead.
Why reply posting a quote you are supposedly replying to and then rant about something totally different than what you quoted?
Funny, I haven't noticed Open Source suffocating.
The way these things work is that interference of any substantial amount is illegal for all radio operators, including amateurs. You have to prove interference not just wave the possibility around. The FCC has no reason to take any action against 802.11b after allowing this spectrum for this purpose in this first place. Sirius will only gather a lot of ill-will from cluefull would-be customers. Dumb move!
We can easily do this much for this price in such a period of time. Hell, I expect it to be on a regular size wristwatch with skin conductance to a patch into the visual cortex at the speed things are moving. So this story is actually about how unimaginative the Census folks are.
to have an excuse to not remember that this story is OLD news on slashdot. Even I remember that much. Or was it just a s-l-o-w day and you needed the filler?
CNN is a lackey of the government through and through. I no longer trust anything I read on CNN. They used to be one of the best. Now they rarely give any real dissenting views on anything and sugarcoat whatever the government is doing and saying.
In the US, many laptops at or below 1Ghz in speed cost little $1/Mhz NEW. So it is beyond my comprehension why anyone would charge twice that for a used machine.
You guys are having a feeding frenzy against a person who has done more for open source and online rights than many. I would think that he is at least owed enough respect to start an online dialog giving a chance for response to balance the mud-slinging. This sort of one-sided attack does not belong here and I am utterly disgusted to see it.
If this passes then I become a criminal. So does anyone and everyone who believes in, builds and uses true Open Source. Because there is no way that these protocols will be open or if they are open, that you can force all utilities and programs to be instantly updated or track even track down the ones that aren't.
Besides, when your country passes utterly stupid and dangerous laws it is the responsibility of all truly patriotic and freedom loving citizens to break them. If they pass this and try to enforce it then decent people will either be in jail, committing "crime" in breaking this law, or out of the country.
For once in my long career I actually like my manager and even his manager and (egad!) even the CEO. Maybe I am getting soft in my old age (well for a software nerd anyway). However, I think the entire commercial software industry has very serious problems that make the life of developers in their organization suck almost as much as the majority of the software they put out. I think that the mixture of proprietary code, software patents, and what passes for capitalism result in a lot of duplicated effort, landmines galore and products pushed out as quickly as possible without infuriating the customers too badly. Under the standard proprietary software company model there is not much else you can do and be successful. As an industry we sell a lot of sizzle and very little steak. We can't build good tools for ourselves because there is always some emergency catch-up mode either fixing our existing buggy mess or writing more slap-dash code to be competitive or slogging through "process" that doesn't help really produce anything except busywork and documents that are forgotten soon after they are finally approved. Also, tools companies can't generate enough revenue for the effort and money invested generally speaking. So our development tools haven't improved significantly in over a decade and a half! Software methodologies are used more as panaceas than with some wisdom. Turning software into a manufacturing process simply does not work as the analogy is totally bogus.
Often managers will act in stupid ways because they are responding to the emergency of the moment and because they are constrained to do something cost-effective right now even if the problem is not of the type that can be addressed in such a manner. Companies are also constrained by industry hype to satisfy even quite bogus and inapplicable "requirements" before potential customers will even let them in the door. The entire industry keeps getting caught in brain-dead standards (not that all standards are brain-dead) that totally screw the creation of real viable solutions to the actual problems. One such idiotic "standard" is the notion that everything for business users must be done server side and the server side should build web-pages to tell the dumb client web browser to draw something. Huge amounts of the industry are perverted to do everything in this manner even where it makes absolutely no real sense because this is "what sells". Real effective GUIs and efficient division of work over available resources are almost toally absent in this "standard".
Personally I think that Open Source is the only type of software that stands a chance of getting beyond some of the current evils. But I am not holding my breath as currently very little is being done there either to actually make software development, reusue, design, design extraction and so on stronger. Without that the wheel gets reinvented over and over again still and the process is just as buggy and inefficient as in closed-source projects.
If any open source projects are built on any.NET knockoff that uses any patent-bearing main.NET library routines then that project could be vulnerable. Actually, I'm not altogether sure of this as it is a type of library/component usage.
Help anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't think the lawyers could say anything if the name changed to "ICP-backwards". :-)
It is quite sufficient to be able to sue and ruin a company/individual/group reputation. Involving government is just a way to waste more of our money extracted at gunpoint from us while creating yet another excuse for corruption and stealing freedom from the people.
Did anyone but politicians really believe that introducing computers would be sufficient to cure the deep illness afflicting government run youth indoctrination in the US? The schools are more concerend with youth detention, indoctrination and drugging if they student is unruly than with teaching. No amount of hardware will fix the result disaster.
The extract is highly biased in a seeming attempt to make Sun look as bad as possible. The truth is that the OpenOffice project was one of the best breaks for Linux on the desktop every and some very heavy hitters in ironing out Open Source licensing issues with corporate players were involved in setting this up. There was a remaining flaw that Sun insisted on ownership of the copyright if you wanted to contribute code. This was against LGPL as far as I am concerned. LGPL makes no conditions on who owns the copyright. They have now corrected this problem. They should be being congratulated both for the initial offering and for paying attention and fixing a flaw in their licensing.
You can't go from LGPL to GPL generally without all the involved parties permission. So I don't see your point.
We don't need no stinkin' variables! Really, "modern" languages that make variable assignment and the checking and massaging of variable types a large percentage of the code are very seriously flawed to start with. In decent languages a much more functional approach would be taken. Of course then you have the problem of properly naming functions. Even in so called "modern" programming inanities, it is much, much more important to me to have classes, methods and functions have good readable names that tell me the one (only one, thanks) purpose the function is for rather than worrying much over variable names.
In my not so humble opinion, being hung up on variable names shows just how backwards software engineering is in practice today. A well designed system is designed and decomposes according to classes, methods and functions not according to variables! In a well designed and implemented system, function/methods are generally short enough that the names of the variables are just not that important.
And calling for coding standards including standardized comments? I've seen a lot of attempts at this in my 22 yrs in the business and all of them are tedious when detailed enough to generalize comments. They tend to lower code to a LCD that everyone either agrees on or just got tired of the entire process. They don't generally do anything for real code quality (which isn't a matter of standards) or for real readability either all too often. As a geek I am much more interested in how to design and write code more beautifully and powerfully. I am hardly at all interested in 'coding standards'.
Believing in X or the possibility of X that does not yet have good scientific evidence for its existence does not make one inept at science or at understanding science and scientific findings. Only a view which is known as "scientism" asserts that only those things that can be studied and proved by science exist at all or have any validity could be behind the loose implications of the summary for this item. Scientism is not itself able to be validated by science. It is a philosophical theory in the area of epistemology. So what does that have to do with whether people appreciate and understand science? Nothing necessarily.
If you knew a bit more about languages and had worked in a few more then you would understand how it could be considered an idiot language. It has been stated by its inventor that the language was designed to make average programmers reasonably productive and their efforts relatively safe. It succeeds admirably at that but it frankly bores above average and expert designers and programmers to death! Garbage collection and embedded thread support are fine features but the former has been present in other language for more than a few decades and the latter is not enough by itself to justify the limitations and lack of power of the language. Automatic loading and distribution of packages and classes? Not new although arguably more uniformly done than in many other places.
You would if you knew more about languages.
is not against "terrorism". The real battle is against continued expansion of State power over all of us. Terrorism cannot be stopped short of having each and every person observed and controlled 24x7 OR by working on the roots of terror. Hint, blowing the shit out of people's homes because you can make some weak association between them and some terrorist or another does not address terrorism, it only creates more of it. Cutting back on our freedoms for our "protection" is no protection at all of what is important. I would rather take my chances with terrorists than with a growing abrogation of freedom and rights such as is developing in the US. Replacing high tech advances in a broad range of fields making all of our lives arguably richer with high tech geared to warfare and surveillance is NOT at all a happy story. Especially when many of those tools will be used by the government against its own citizens. Those who work at these things because the same government has wreaked the economy long before 9/11 and they have nothing much else to chose from, are literally selling their rights and freedom for a bit of porridge today. Also, turning Cyberia into a battlefield is the best way for the government and attendant Military Industrial Complex to utterly own and control the very tools and spaces so many of us have dreamed of making a place of great freedom and benefit to all. This is perhaps the saddest part of the story. We need to get our heads out of this endless war mode and get back on track to making a viable future for everyone. And we need to do it NOW.
What makes for a Big Brother state is being too busy arguing minutae to notice what the technology is being used for and by whom. And when we do notice far to few of us are willing to raise enough of a stink to be inconvenient to those making the rules. So they increase in power and capability and we whine more until we make ourselves sick of whining and then we pick at each other's posts instead. Wonderful, heh? WHAT new literacy??? Some 25% of the US adult population is illiterate. Technology by itself will not fix this or anything else.
If MS or any other company starts leaning on all makers of services I need and is big enough to get away with it then I have no choice but to take them to court or live with whatever they hand me. Having laws that prevent such business extortion techniques is a damn good thing imho and is certainly not "running to Mama". Laws exists so you have some recourse other than open warfare. What you are saying amounts to claiming MS really did and does nothing wrong. I cannot credit you with enough intelligence to be worth responding to if that is your opinion.
So, the way to make your product a household word is to add the "tm"? And this is claimed to be necessary to protect the investment? In what way? As long as the trademark is enforced then its use without "TM" should not be any big deal. Maybe they can add (PBUs) - "praise be unto Sun" instead.
Why reply posting a quote you are supposedly replying to and then rant about something totally different than what you quoted? Funny, I haven't noticed Open Source suffocating.
The way these things work is that interference of any substantial amount is illegal for all radio operators, including amateurs. You have to prove interference not just wave the possibility around. The FCC has no reason to take any action against 802.11b after allowing this spectrum for this purpose in this first place. Sirius will only gather a lot of ill-will from cluefull would-be customers. Dumb move!
We can easily do this much for this price in such a period of time. Hell, I expect it to be on a regular size wristwatch with skin conductance to a patch into the visual cortex at the speed things are moving. So this story is actually about how unimaginative the Census folks are.
to have an excuse to not remember that this story is OLD news on slashdot. Even I remember that much. Or was it just a s-l-o-w day and you needed the filler?
CNN is a lackey of the government through and through. I no longer trust anything I read on CNN. They used to be one of the best. Now they rarely give any real dissenting views on anything and sugarcoat whatever the government is doing and saying.
In the US, many laptops at or below 1Ghz in speed cost little $1/Mhz NEW. So it is beyond my comprehension why anyone would charge twice that for a used machine.
You guys are having a feeding frenzy against a person who has done more for open source and online rights than many. I would think that he is at least owed enough respect to start an online dialog giving a chance for response to balance the mud-slinging. This sort of one-sided attack does not belong here and I am utterly disgusted to see it.
If this passes then I become a criminal. So does anyone and everyone who believes in, builds and uses true Open Source. Because there is no way that these protocols will be open or if they are open, that you can force all utilities and programs to be instantly updated or track even track down the ones that aren't. Besides, when your country passes utterly stupid and dangerous laws it is the responsibility of all truly patriotic and freedom loving citizens to break them. If they pass this and try to enforce it then decent people will either be in jail, committing "crime" in breaking this law, or out of the country.
For once in my long career I actually like my manager and even his manager and (egad!) even the CEO. Maybe I am getting soft in my old age (well for a software nerd anyway). However, I think the entire commercial software industry has very serious problems that make the life of developers in their organization suck almost as much as the majority of the software they put out. I think that the mixture of proprietary code, software patents, and what passes for capitalism result in a lot of duplicated effort, landmines galore and products pushed out as quickly as possible without infuriating the customers too badly. Under the standard proprietary software company model there is not much else you can do and be successful. As an industry we sell a lot of sizzle and very little steak. We can't build good tools for ourselves because there is always some emergency catch-up mode either fixing our existing buggy mess or writing more slap-dash code to be competitive or slogging through "process" that doesn't help really produce anything except busywork and documents that are forgotten soon after they are finally approved. Also, tools companies can't generate enough revenue for the effort and money invested generally speaking. So our development tools haven't improved significantly in over a decade and a half! Software methodologies are used more as panaceas than with some wisdom. Turning software into a manufacturing process simply does not work as the analogy is totally bogus. Often managers will act in stupid ways because they are responding to the emergency of the moment and because they are constrained to do something cost-effective right now even if the problem is not of the type that can be addressed in such a manner. Companies are also constrained by industry hype to satisfy even quite bogus and inapplicable "requirements" before potential customers will even let them in the door. The entire industry keeps getting caught in brain-dead standards (not that all standards are brain-dead) that totally screw the creation of real viable solutions to the actual problems. One such idiotic "standard" is the notion that everything for business users must be done server side and the server side should build web-pages to tell the dumb client web browser to draw something. Huge amounts of the industry are perverted to do everything in this manner even where it makes absolutely no real sense because this is "what sells". Real effective GUIs and efficient division of work over available resources are almost toally absent in this "standard". Personally I think that Open Source is the only type of software that stands a chance of getting beyond some of the current evils. But I am not holding my breath as currently very little is being done there either to actually make software development, reusue, design, design extraction and so on stronger. Without that the wheel gets reinvented over and over again still and the process is just as buggy and inefficient as in closed-source projects.
They are sterile. No mutation from the radiation, if any, can take hold in the general fly population. No B-grade plots please.
If any open source projects are built on any .NET knockoff that uses any patent-bearing main .NET library routines then that project could be vulnerable. Actually, I'm not altogether sure of this as it is a type of library/component usage.
Help anyone?