So the game of "release a $20 album with 1 good song on it, 7 crap songs, copy protection so that you cant make the backup copy you are entitled to and keeping 50% of the profit for ourselves even though we didnt do anything" is perfectly ok?
You're looking for the game of "Somewhat Hungry Record Companies". (It's a real shame that we Yanks don't have the term "peckish" like the Brits.) I don't see Eminem out on the streets. I do see record company CEOs not making their latest yearly bonus, though.
And how, exactly, is Microsoft going to compensate Seagate for forgoing an interesting opportunity to sell a ton of hard drives? Paying them for their potential losses each quarter? Not going to happen.
Also, Microsoft and Seagate are big tech companies. Like any of the major tech companies, they already talk, have plenty of discussions, blah, blah, blah. Seagate execs are not going to say "gee golly, I completely didn't consider the fact that Microsoft might object" *after* making a product announcement.
That's silly. There's nothing objectionable in his post to anyone but the most ardent Sun fanatic or Sun salesperson. The guy got pissed off that a vendor was trying to pressure him into making a purchase, he found a better solution, and moved.
That's the most fucking idiotic comment I've read in a long time.
The systems "must not be used for much if you can change the OS and the architecture and still have those systems provide the same services"? *What*? Yeah, there are a *few* apps that exist only on SPARC, but Solaris has been eating it *hard* in the market for a while, and a lot of Solaris software vendors have been working on x86 Linux versions. The writing's on the wall.
It's like farmaceutical industry (a total fuckup too by now) who need pattents to make sure they get return of investment over a period of several years. Unfortunate as it is, a lot of indistrial & technological progress would not have been made if pattents didn't exist.
Pharmaceuticals are a totally different story. First, it's *far* more expensive to test and get a new drug okayed for consumer use than to write a piece of software (unless you're overpaying your developers out the wazoo). Second, it's generally relatively trivial to clone a drug, given the legal freedom to do so. Reimplementing a piece of software takes time. If the original software is constantly improving, you have a moving target. Very tough to compete with.
I can think of very, very few niche ideas that could not have succeeded without patents. Perhaps photomosaics (which were cloned anyway). It's just not that easy to clone software.
"Right to use of patented techniques without authorization or royalty, if needed solely to achieve software interoperatibility"?
Wow. The closest US equivalent (a clause in the DMCA) only applies to legitimate copy control bypassing, and only applies to interhost network protocol interoperation.
This is *incredible*, and could have a sweeping impact on patents. It's a *huge* lever.
I am not so sure about the stupidity. Internally, software patents may be bad for individuals (but generally good for corporation.) Similarly, patents are good for a country so long as all other countries abide by intellectual property rules. They kind of need to do this in order to ensure trade. Therefore, the only way countries can compete is to enact the same kind of patent legislation and then encourage it's citizens to invent.
I work at a corporate research lab, FWIW. Patents *may* have value, though that's being questioned. At the very least, they should not be thrown out out of hand.
Software patents are a different story. I don't know any researchers or engineers that think software patents are a good idea, and that includes a number of people that *produce* software patents.
The patent system didn't exist, not that long ago. It didn't seem to stifle or destroy new ideas and products from hitting the world.
As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.
You do realize that every press release during every purchase and merger over the years has *always* said that no changes will be made, no employees will be fired...
It's an A record, not an MX record. Pretty easy to scan for only domains that have MX entries. I'd be quite irritated if mailservers dropped support for delivering to @ A records, but most spammers don't care.
Besides, sitefinder is a pretty obvious address. Even if you wanted to keep addresses @ A records, you could just filter out a single IP.
* You may not *like* portions of it. There isn't a very convincing reason to use a single combined API to do both 3d graphics and sound (at least that I can think of). If you use smaller, more modular APIs, you can use precisely what you like the most.
That being said, it's well supported and tested by Microsoft, and it's free.
Fine -- it may be convenient for you, but the way they implement it is the wrong way from a technical standpoint (though the only way they'd be able to impose their own page). The technically correct approach is to have your browser query a website (sitefinder, if you want) if the DNS resolution fails. The approach they're using breaks valid systems Internet-wide.
I use LaTeX for writing my documents. I rather like the approach of being able to write documents in emacs with raw text.
That being said, LaTeX is grotty as hell and sucks in many ways. It produces nice output, but the syntax is fairly obfuscated, it's a lousy programming language, it gets unreadable quickly for some fairly common elements of documents, some very common characters need to be escaped, there's a lot of redundant functionality, it produces PS/PDF files that don't have extractable/searchable text (I'll buy into this if the goal is just to beat native PS kerning), it's a damned pain to use pdflatex and latex simultaneously (slightly different feature sets).
It'd be nice if someone made a much easier to use, cleaner typesetting language, but it'd probably be a tremendous amount of work.
As far as I can tell, this is about a hundred line Perl program. Get some nice smart cards and readers (they're quitecheap), use MUSCLE's Perl bindings, hook up to a Linux box, and dump times to a logfile/postgres db. On a successful read, beep.
Double buffering is not the bottleneck. It's layers of software involved. OS X has many. X has to ram most things through the networking system. Windows is compartatively direct.
Just so that you're aware of the fact, double-buffering takes the same amount of time on all the systems you mentioned. You're probably thinking of vsync-synching, which still doesn't produce perceptible response delay.
Heck, it's even more complex than that. Even systems with few layers of software involved can be slow. Look at the cooperatively-multitasking classic Mac OS. Not much between it and the pixels, but a click could take quite some time to be processed.
X needs to context-switch at least once for each chunk of drawing operations.
No. It does *unless you turn that option off*. Very large difference. The vast majority of desktops use the default.
Windows is considered a bastion of homogenized consistency (good or bad)
Wow. I'm not sure exactly who've you been talking to, but they either aren't HCI or were buzzed at the time. Windows is infamous for being used as Microsoft's testing grounds for the latest version of their widgets (which go first into Office, then into IE and Windows). MS has masses of odd little don't-quite-fit controls in their apps. Witness the big-Motif-looking-button above the mailbox list in Outlook Express, or the Start Menu -- the button that acts like a menu (but a menu that acts differently from all other menus on the system). Windows is up to three user-visible layers of filesystem (8.3, long filenames, Explorer-only features like shortcuts), which are hell from a consistency point of view.
That's just with core MS software. The really atrocious UIs come from third party VB apps. Say what you will about Linux, most volunteer efforts have a far more consistent interface than their Windows shareware equivalents.
Intel has been one of Linux's greatest supporters. It has helped Intel break into the risc dominated unix field with cheap lintel servers.
The problem is that the original article had a significant slant, and the Slashdot post warped this entirely out of context. Look at the original quote. Barrett is simply warning China that trying to *deliberately* produce incompatible systems to protect local tech companies is a bad idea. (If the only computer you can use in China is Chinese-made, it helps out local tech.) AFAIK, Intel isn't even at risk -- China's best efforts aren't anywhere near competitive to Intel. The statement is a pretty good, clear, reasonable technical argument.
If Barrett ever mentioned Linux, it wasn't part of the quote. The suggestion that he was pushing against Linux was introduced by the article author. We have no idea whether he was talking about hardware, application software, or what. Heck, even if he *was* talking about Linux, I'll happily buy into his quote. While using Linux may be a very good idea, using it because you're trying to deliberately introduce incompatibility to protect local industry is quite stupid in the long run.
The problems is that demos are used to whip people up into a must-buy state, and as such have to be released a while before the game's release. Generally, that means that everything isn't done. Things like AI, which are generally done last, may get the shart end of the stick.
If development companies released a "sample" post game release that contained only, say, the first level of the game (but really was from the full game) you might get what you want. Or you might get a lot of games with really good first levels...:-)
I *really* hate people who have a Playstation or similar that breaks, purchase a new one, swap the Playstations, and return the broken one. *That's* scummy.
Slashdot Mirror
So the game of "release a $20 album with 1 good song on it, 7 crap songs, copy protection so that you cant make the backup copy you are entitled to and keeping 50% of the profit for ourselves even though we didnt do anything" is perfectly ok?
You're looking for the game of "Somewhat Hungry Record Companies". (It's a real shame that we Yanks don't have the term "peckish" like the Brits.) I don't see Eminem out on the streets. I do see record company CEOs not making their latest yearly bonus, though.
And how, exactly, is Microsoft going to compensate Seagate for forgoing an interesting opportunity to sell a ton of hard drives? Paying them for their potential losses each quarter? Not going to happen.
Also, Microsoft and Seagate are big tech companies. Like any of the major tech companies, they already talk, have plenty of discussions, blah, blah, blah. Seagate execs are not going to say "gee golly, I completely didn't consider the fact that Microsoft might object" *after* making a product announcement.
OR SCO just had one of their best buddies knife them in the back. Your call.
That's silly. There's nothing objectionable in his post to anyone but the most ardent Sun fanatic or Sun salesperson. The guy got pissed off that a vendor was trying to pressure him into making a purchase, he found a better solution, and moved.
Might be offtopic, but sure wasn't flamebait.
That's the most fucking idiotic comment I've read in a long time.
The systems "must not be used for much if you can change the OS and the architecture and still have those systems provide the same services"? *What*? Yeah, there are a *few* apps that exist only on SPARC, but Solaris has been eating it *hard* in the market for a while, and a lot of Solaris software vendors have been working on x86 Linux versions. The writing's on the wall.
A lot of us don't like living in an "American America" either, mate.
Kind of fucks over North American, Asian, and South American developers, though, who may not be able to work on the same software projects any more.
It's like farmaceutical industry (a total fuckup too by now) who need pattents to make sure they get return of investment over a period of several years. Unfortunate as it is, a lot of indistrial & technological progress would not have been made if pattents didn't exist.
Pharmaceuticals are a totally different story. First, it's *far* more expensive to test and get a new drug okayed for consumer use than to write a piece of software (unless you're overpaying your developers out the wazoo). Second, it's generally relatively trivial to clone a drug, given the legal freedom to do so. Reimplementing a piece of software takes time. If the original software is constantly improving, you have a moving target. Very tough to compete with.
I can think of very, very few niche ideas that could not have succeeded without patents. Perhaps photomosaics (which were cloned anyway). It's just not that easy to clone software.
In the US (and, I would imagine, the EU), the only law that matters is that which is in place at the time the alleged crime took place.
"Right to use of patented techniques without authorization or royalty, if needed solely to achieve software interoperatibility"?
Wow. The closest US equivalent (a clause in the DMCA) only applies to legitimate copy control bypassing, and only applies to interhost network protocol interoperation.
This is *incredible*, and could have a sweeping impact on patents. It's a *huge* lever.
* The lawyer does his job, writing up patents.
* The researcher does his job, producing new ideas and working with the lawyer to produce patent applications.
* The corporate execs do *their* jobs, leveraging patents to improve their company's position and prevent competitors from entering the market.
And yet, somehow, the masses lose out.
I am not so sure about the stupidity. Internally, software patents may be bad for individuals (but generally good for corporation.) Similarly, patents are good for a country so long as all other countries abide by intellectual property rules. They kind of need to do this in order to ensure trade. Therefore, the only way countries can compete is to enact the same kind of patent legislation and then encourage it's citizens to invent.
I work at a corporate research lab, FWIW. Patents *may* have value, though that's being questioned. At the very least, they should not be thrown out out of hand.
Software patents are a different story. I don't know any researchers or engineers that think software patents are a good idea, and that includes a number of people that *produce* software patents.
The patent system didn't exist, not that long ago. It didn't seem to stifle or destroy new ideas and products from hitting the world.
As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.
You do realize that every press release during every purchase and merger over the years has *always* said that no changes will be made, no employees will be fired...
Apparently Mr. Vixie is involved with the .museum TLD, which has its own wildcard.
I'm dubious. I'm guessing that most current games today are written in C++ for DirectX with no assembly at all.
I'd probably personally prefer C with OpenGL, but such is life.
It's an A record, not an MX record. Pretty easy to scan for only domains that have MX entries. I'd be quite irritated if mailservers dropped support for delivering to @ A records, but most spammers don't care.
Besides, sitefinder is a pretty obvious address. Even if you wanted to keep addresses @ A records, you could just filter out a single IP.
* It doesn't run on anything but Windows.
* You may not *like* portions of it. There isn't a very convincing reason to use a single combined API to do both 3d graphics and sound (at least that I can think of). If you use smaller, more modular APIs, you can use precisely what you like the most.
That being said, it's well supported and tested by Microsoft, and it's free.
Fine -- it may be convenient for you, but the way they implement it is the wrong way from a technical standpoint (though the only way they'd be able to impose their own page). The technically correct approach is to have your browser query a website (sitefinder, if you want) if the DNS resolution fails. The approach they're using breaks valid systems Internet-wide.
I use LaTeX for writing my documents. I rather like the approach of being able to write documents in emacs with raw text.
That being said, LaTeX is grotty as hell and sucks in many ways. It produces nice output, but the syntax is fairly obfuscated, it's a lousy programming language, it gets unreadable quickly for some fairly common elements of documents, some very common characters need to be escaped, there's a lot of redundant functionality, it produces PS/PDF files that don't have extractable/searchable text (I'll buy into this if the goal is just to beat native PS kerning), it's a damned pain to use pdflatex and latex simultaneously (slightly different feature sets).
It'd be nice if someone made a much easier to use, cleaner typesetting language, but it'd probably be a tremendous amount of work.
As far as I can tell, this is about a hundred line Perl program. Get some nice smart cards and readers (they're quitecheap), use MUSCLE's Perl bindings, hook up to a Linux box, and dump times to a logfile/postgres db. On a successful read, beep.
Double buffering is not the bottleneck. It's layers of software involved. OS X has many. X has to ram most things through the networking system. Windows is compartatively direct.
Just so that you're aware of the fact, double-buffering takes the same amount of time on all the systems you mentioned. You're probably thinking of vsync-synching, which still doesn't produce perceptible response delay.
Heck, it's even more complex than that. Even systems with few layers of software involved can be slow. Look at the cooperatively-multitasking classic Mac OS. Not much between it and the pixels, but a click could take quite some time to be processed.
X needs to context-switch at least once for each chunk of drawing operations.
Jesus, that was over eight years ago.
Fair enough.
No, it doesn't. Only if you turn that option on.
No. It does *unless you turn that option off*. Very large difference. The vast majority of desktops use the default.
Windows is considered a bastion of homogenized consistency (good or bad)
Wow. I'm not sure exactly who've you been talking to, but they either aren't HCI or were buzzed at the time. Windows is infamous for being used as Microsoft's testing grounds for the latest version of their widgets (which go first into Office, then into IE and Windows). MS has masses of odd little don't-quite-fit controls in their apps. Witness the big-Motif-looking-button above the mailbox list in Outlook Express, or the Start Menu -- the button that acts like a menu (but a menu that acts differently from all other menus on the system). Windows is up to three user-visible layers of filesystem (8.3, long filenames, Explorer-only features like shortcuts), which are hell from a consistency point of view.
That's just with core MS software. The really atrocious UIs come from third party VB apps. Say what you will about Linux, most volunteer efforts have a far more consistent interface than their Windows shareware equivalents.
Strange.
Intel has been one of Linux's greatest supporters. It has helped Intel break into the risc dominated unix field with cheap lintel servers.
The problem is that the original article had a significant slant, and the Slashdot post warped this entirely out of context. Look at the original quote. Barrett is simply warning China that trying to *deliberately* produce incompatible systems to protect local tech companies is a bad idea. (If the only computer you can use in China is Chinese-made, it helps out local tech.) AFAIK, Intel isn't even at risk -- China's best efforts aren't anywhere near competitive to Intel. The statement is a pretty good, clear, reasonable technical argument.
If Barrett ever mentioned Linux, it wasn't part of the quote. The suggestion that he was pushing against Linux was introduced by the article author. We have no idea whether he was talking about hardware, application software, or what. Heck, even if he *was* talking about Linux, I'll happily buy into his quote. While using Linux may be a very good idea, using it because you're trying to deliberately introduce incompatibility to protect local industry is quite stupid in the long run.
The problems is that demos are used to whip people up into a must-buy state, and as such have to be released a while before the game's release. Generally, that means that everything isn't done. Things like AI, which are generally done last, may get the shart end of the stick.
If development companies released a "sample" post game release that contained only, say, the first level of the game (but really was from the full game) you might get what you want. Or you might get a lot of games with really good first levels...:-)
I *really* hate people who have a Playstation or similar that breaks, purchase a new one, swap the Playstations, and return the broken one. *That's* scummy.