The piece of history in question is close enough that most of us are able to make up our own minds about it.
The point is that these instances of incompatibility are most likely explained by simple human error rather than malice. (The neglect, which prevents these errors from being fixed, is probably what is deliberate.) The point is that the reason "webpages only load in IE" may not have that much to do with Microsoft's evil plan than it does with stupid web designers and honest Microsoft misinterpretations, etc.
OSS can't work with MSFT stuff for the same reason that some websites only load in IE...microsoft doesn't like to follow the rules
Allow me to quote Ian Hickson, who was commenting on this specific topic. Hickson works for Opera, and should be nearly as bitter as they come.
The odds of anyone intentionally "sabotaging" a standard or proposal in
this way is basically zero, and not really worth any thought, IMHO.
As far as I am aware, every occurance of a "sabotage" in the Web world in
the past 15 years has been due to misunderstandings, an accident,
oversight, or plain stupidity, and none were intentional or malicious.
In other words, Microsoft is probably guilty of deliberate neglect in the past few years with IE, but don't be so quick to attribute to malice what can be explained otherwise.
Be careful with things like that. It's against the law in some places to record a telephone conversation without the knowledge of the other party. Linda Tripp, the infamous friend of Monica Lewinsky, faced criminal charges for that.
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
So is BMW. Not all business models are alike.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money. Apple makes money. Apple is a successful company. Just because Microsoft makes even more money doesn't mean that Apple (or any other successful company) is a failure.
(You can't import a file, and then export that file with edits, if your word processor does not support all the features that file uses!)
Sure you can. Let's take tables as a feature, for example. A word processor that doesn't support tables will obviously not be able to display or let you edit them. However, it still can let you edit the rest of the document while saving any table exactly as it was read, provided that the file format was designed to do that. I don't know anything about the Word.doc format, but this concept is not a recent invention. The IFF format circa 1985, for example, can contain images, sound clips, and various other data types. A processor is expected to skip over chunks it doesn't understand, and just preserve them verbatim if it needs to change the file.
Right now there are MANY P'o'd execs at Apple, and a bunch of engineers going crap [...] now I might actually buy one.
Why would Apple execs or engineers be unhappy now that they might have one more customer than before? It's not as if they have to support Linux or the applications that you run on the iPod.
So therefore, if your creation is indeed useful, and non-trivial then you will likely be paid, depending on how useful and innovative the idea is, and how much quality you put into the implementation.
You will be paid an amount that is, at best, slightly less than the amount it would take to reverse engineer and clone your product. In other words, you will be paid the cost of reverse-engineering or development, and not be entitled to the profit that is determined by market value.
Make sure you understand this part before you reply. The big company will pay you about as much as it would cost them to build the product to compete with you. With a patent, you will get paid what the product is worth to the marketplace, or a percentage of that if you choose to license instead of build. Big difference, particularly with software where NRE is basically fixed and profit depends almost entirely on units sold.
If you don't want to code and test the idea, then why do you think everyone should be forced to pay you for the privilege of coding and testing it?
Because it encourages me to invent without requiring me to build and market a product. What the society gets out of it is free use of my invention after the patent expires.
Are software patents too easily granted? Absolutely. Are they too hard even for experienced engineers to read and understand? Absolutely. Do they last too long? Absolutely. Today, there are too many patents to review, they are too hard to read, and many last until the technology itself is obsolete (and therefore having no value as it lapses into the public domain).
But does it help the industry to require every good inventor to also be a good entrepreneur just to make a profit? I don't think so. What I want to see are few patents (thanks to a high bar) that are easily readable (and thus avoidable) and last just long enough for the entrepreneur to establish the product in the market.
Throwing out the software patent system entirely can't help but improve the situation immensely. (unless you are a lawyer of course)
Or a research institute that wants to get paid, but doesn't really want to run a business.
In fact, off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of that is really off-limits in the west is kiddie-porn
You are forgetting many things, probably because they are too obvious. Detailed plans to airports, government buildings, security arrangements, nuclear weapons design, and plenty of other things are entirely off limits. Another obvious class of information are trade secrets, and you may be in violation of related laws if somebody leaves a folder in a conference room and you open it to read. A third obvious class cover personal medical information, library records, and such.
You can get in various degrees of serious trouble for trying to access any of these.
I will assume that the poster is an American citizen working in China, since he/she did not mention being there before. There is such a thing as extradition. Yes, that means they can't just randomly arrest US citizens for surfing the BBC and proceed with a closed-door trial w/ US Embassy intervention.
I don't think you have much of an idea what extradition means. It works like this: you commit a crime in country A, and escape to country B. Because countries A and B have an extradition treaty, you can be arrested in B for your crime in A, and returned to A for trial.
There are many underlying assumptions here. Countries A and B basically trust that each other's legal systems are just. Country B may also refuse to extradite on various exceptions, such as the possibility of capital punishment in A (fair trial or otherwise), or hints of political persecution.
What is does not mean is that if you're a citizen of country A living in country B, that you have any right to be tried in A for a crime committed in B.
Unauthorized jailing of US citizens is equal to an international incident and it would just be easier to deport the offender.
No, a sovereign state does not require permission to jail a foreign national under its jurisdiction. That's exactly what the word "sovereign" means. How else would the FBI arrest, say, a Chinese spy in Washington if you need permission from the Chinese government?
I disagree with your assertion about patents not being necessary in any form. In your patent-free world, every good inventor who wishes to profit off the invention must also be a good entrepreneur. In other words, your world punishes good entrepreneurs who are not inventors, as well as good inventors who are not entrepreneurs. Patents allow the possibility of inventors licensing the invention to entrepreneurs, so that each can continue doing what they are good at, but both profit.
The second important aspect of patents is protection from established big guys. I don't think this needs much explaining.
Now, this isn't to say that the patent system isn't pretty broken, particularly in the area of software. However, throwing it out entirely isn't going to improve the situation much.
My rhetorical question points out that the US military can be used in humanitarian missions as well as ones of conquest and occupation, and that there is no requirement whatsoever to take one with the other. Since you refer to the notion as "moronic", then presumably you agree that the two are entirely separate uses.
So why did you even bring it up (with quite a bit of sarcasm, I might add), when it was pretty clear to me that the "keep your military in your own damn country" demand is not talking about humanitarian aid missions? Just to point out that one statement was too broad?
The problem is when this lack of evidence is used as an excuse to do nothing. Sure, we shouldn't shut down all our factories and go back into caves, but neither do we need to drive monsters that get 8 miles per gallon.
Want a fact that is not in dispute? Fossil fuel will run out. How about we use it more efficiently, for starters?
If you come across an apple tree full of apples, you'll surely pick the best ones too.
Yes, because we can always blame our unethical decisions on somebody else. I'm particularly fond of the "if I don't do it, they'll find somebody who will" excuse that goes all the way to the very top.
Truth is, you are responsible for your choices, how ever many apples there are on the tree.
A linux kernel tree (without any object files) is about 230MB.
Doing deltas between different versions is much faster if both versions are in memory. This means you need at least half a gig for the page cache, with nothing else running.
Huh? If you want to diff two kernel trees, you do it one file at a time. When you're done with file1.c, you move on to file2.c and will not need file1.c in RAM anymore.
About the only scenario I can think of to really want both trees in RAM from your description is if you are picking files from the two trees randomly and repeatedly for comparisons. Why would you do that?
So what? How about treating the very serious issue of poverty and overpopulation with a bit more compassion than mowing the front lawn, for a start? How about not referring to humans whose pitiful conditions today probably provided for your comfort through sins of your forefathers as a "shitload"?
You can send food to an area plagued year after year by famine and make yourself feel good about yourself or you can get those people to leave an area that is obviously uninhabitable or overpopulated.
Where did I say that all we should do is to keep the poor barely alive? You will note that the post I was responding to proposed that the Gates funding be diverted (with the specific intention of letting the "weak" die off) instead to the education of those who survive. Do I have to explain that opposing this "genetic engineering" does not mean that I think education or relocation efforts should not be funded?
Re:How about a cheap, non-disposable phone?
on
Cell Phone On A Chip
·
· Score: 1
I think there's a growing population who just wants a plain cell phone now.
Where do you observe this population? From what I can see, people really don't mind paying roughly the same amount every so often to get a phone with more features than their old phone.
Let me remind you that a good number of these third world nations are poor today partly because the wealthier nations invaded, colonized, pillaged, or otherwise exploited them for decades or even centuries. Many of these countries are overpopulated in relation to their resources partly because the rich countries are hogging them. Consider that they only reason they live in overpopulated countries (and thus deserve death in your book) is because they were born there, and rich countries won't allow them to just move in. Oh, and way to go referring to humans as a "shitload". What have you done to deserve life?
Biologically, these children probably fought off more diseases to reach age 5 than you have to reach age 20 or 30, assuming you grew up in the first world. Odds are they are more resilient to disease than you are... so perhaps it is you who should think of stepping off the planet?
A choice quote, referring to the 80386: "I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long." [...] concerns about portability turned out to be unfounded as well.
That's because, in my feeble understanding of the Linux architecture, it wasn't actually designed for the 80386. The 80386 has a pretty unique paged-segmentation architecture, which means that addresses are organized first by arbitrary-size (up to 32-bit) segments which then map onto fixed size pages. If Linux had relied on this architecture heavily, it would not port well to many other architectures that only supported paging. (As it is, porting Linux to very small CPUs or even back to the 8086/80286 is difficult because Linux basically required a MMU.) Similarly, if Linux had taken advantage of the little-endianness of the 80386, then it would be that much harder to port to big-endian systems. Even more obviously, imagine if Linux had been written entirely in 80386 assembly language for "maximum speed". IOW, despite the supposed emphasis on the 80386, Linux was actually designed to be fairly portable. It was, and still is a "gross error" to design an OS for any specific architecture.
If the lesson isn't obvious enough, despite the confrontation, it is quite likely that Linus listened very carefully to his professors. As we all know, not all professors are worth listening to, but in this case Tanenbaum's point was not only right, but well proven by the ability of Linux to absorb unexpected growth. It is a stupid idea to tie your operating system to a single CPU.
Bush opponents regularly blow this totally out of proportion [...] the executive order in question is reprehensible [...] tenuous, illogical, religious [...]
Wow... exactly what are the "Bush opponents" saying so far beyond your "reprehensible, tenuous, illogical, and religious" that blow the issue so out of proportion?
The two types of customer really don't understand each other very well, and I think that's why there is so much passion between pro and anti-Apple factions. One point of view simply cannot understand the other.
It's worse than that. Each side thinks the other side is stupid.
If you have Office, you need Apple Office. If you have Adobe products, you need to upgrade them. And so on.
Largely true, but let me correct you on a small point. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, for example, shipped with both the Windows version and the MacOS version on the same CD-ROM (and worked with the same serial number). Unfortunately I don't think they do that anymore with their new version, but it clearly could've been done if the vendors wanted to. Myst II: Riven is another example that I know of.
Also, it depends on what kind of "need" you have with these Windows apps. Some needs can be satisfied by running under VirtualPC, which is still something you have to pay for, but at least isn't a total replacement of your software library.
I have never heard a remotely plausible theory regarding the origin of life.
That is because, I respectfully submit, you do not have an appreciation of cosmic scales. Put another way, the odds of you winning the lottery with one ticket are somewhere very near zero. However, the odds that somebody will win is very high. I hope that helps you understand how an extremely unlikely event can be all but inevitable as long as your universe is big enough.
But just because we can't figure out how it started doesn't mean we should accept "it just happened by accident".
In fact, we do just accept it. Acceptance doesn't mean that we will never challenge or overthrow that particular theory, just that at this point in time there isn't a better or comparable one. That's how science works.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever heard of the MP3 audio compression format?
The point is that these instances of incompatibility are most likely explained by simple human error rather than malice. (The neglect, which prevents these errors from being fixed, is probably what is deliberate.) The point is that the reason "webpages only load in IE" may not have that much to do with Microsoft's evil plan than it does with stupid web designers and honest Microsoft misinterpretations, etc.
The comment comes from the WHATWG mailing list. It was written yesterday.
Allow me to quote Ian Hickson, who was commenting on this specific topic. Hickson works for Opera, and should be nearly as bitter as they come.
In other words, Microsoft is probably guilty of deliberate neglect in the past few years with IE, but don't be so quick to attribute to malice what can be explained otherwise.Not to mention that unless you have square screens, even a four-sided desktop still wouldn't be a cube. ;)
Be careful with things like that. It's against the law in some places to record a telephone conversation without the knowledge of the other party. Linda Tripp, the infamous friend of Monica Lewinsky, faced criminal charges for that.
So is BMW. Not all business models are alike.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money. Apple makes money. Apple is a successful company. Just because Microsoft makes even more money doesn't mean that Apple (or any other successful company) is a failure.
Sure you can. Let's take tables as a feature, for example. A word processor that doesn't support tables will obviously not be able to display or let you edit them. However, it still can let you edit the rest of the document while saving any table exactly as it was read, provided that the file format was designed to do that. I don't know anything about the Word .doc format, but this concept is not a recent invention. The IFF format circa 1985, for example, can contain images, sound clips, and various other data types. A processor is expected to skip over chunks it doesn't understand, and just preserve them verbatim if it needs to change the file.
Why would Apple execs or engineers be unhappy now that they might have one more customer than before? It's not as if they have to support Linux or the applications that you run on the iPod.
You will be paid an amount that is, at best, slightly less than the amount it would take to reverse engineer and clone your product. In other words, you will be paid the cost of reverse-engineering or development, and not be entitled to the profit that is determined by market value.
Make sure you understand this part before you reply. The big company will pay you about as much as it would cost them to build the product to compete with you. With a patent, you will get paid what the product is worth to the marketplace, or a percentage of that if you choose to license instead of build. Big difference, particularly with software where NRE is basically fixed and profit depends almost entirely on units sold.
If you don't want to code and test the idea, then why do you think everyone should be forced to pay you for the privilege of coding and testing it?
Because it encourages me to invent without requiring me to build and market a product. What the society gets out of it is free use of my invention after the patent expires.
Are software patents too easily granted? Absolutely. Are they too hard even for experienced engineers to read and understand? Absolutely. Do they last too long? Absolutely. Today, there are too many patents to review, they are too hard to read, and many last until the technology itself is obsolete (and therefore having no value as it lapses into the public domain).
But does it help the industry to require every good inventor to also be a good entrepreneur just to make a profit? I don't think so. What I want to see are few patents (thanks to a high bar) that are easily readable (and thus avoidable) and last just long enough for the entrepreneur to establish the product in the market.
Throwing out the software patent system entirely can't help but improve the situation immensely. (unless you are a lawyer of course)
Or a research institute that wants to get paid, but doesn't really want to run a business.
You are forgetting many things, probably because they are too obvious. Detailed plans to airports, government buildings, security arrangements, nuclear weapons design, and plenty of other things are entirely off limits. Another obvious class of information are trade secrets, and you may be in violation of related laws if somebody leaves a folder in a conference room and you open it to read. A third obvious class cover personal medical information, library records, and such.
You can get in various degrees of serious trouble for trying to access any of these.
I don't think you have much of an idea what extradition means. It works like this: you commit a crime in country A, and escape to country B. Because countries A and B have an extradition treaty, you can be arrested in B for your crime in A, and returned to A for trial.
There are many underlying assumptions here. Countries A and B basically trust that each other's legal systems are just. Country B may also refuse to extradite on various exceptions, such as the possibility of capital punishment in A (fair trial or otherwise), or hints of political persecution.
What is does not mean is that if you're a citizen of country A living in country B, that you have any right to be tried in A for a crime committed in B.
Unauthorized jailing of US citizens is equal to an international incident and it would just be easier to deport the offender.
No, a sovereign state does not require permission to jail a foreign national under its jurisdiction. That's exactly what the word "sovereign" means. How else would the FBI arrest, say, a Chinese spy in Washington if you need permission from the Chinese government?
The second important aspect of patents is protection from established big guys. I don't think this needs much explaining.
Now, this isn't to say that the patent system isn't pretty broken, particularly in the area of software. However, throwing it out entirely isn't going to improve the situation much.
So why did you even bring it up (with quite a bit of sarcasm, I might add), when it was pretty clear to me that the "keep your military in your own damn country" demand is not talking about humanitarian aid missions? Just to point out that one statement was too broad?
Want a fact that is not in dispute? Fossil fuel will run out. How about we use it more efficiently, for starters?
Are you suggesting that people who would rather not be invaded and occupied by America should not expect American aid in a time of natural disaster?
Yes, because we can always blame our unethical decisions on somebody else. I'm particularly fond of the "if I don't do it, they'll find somebody who will" excuse that goes all the way to the very top.
Truth is, you are responsible for your choices, how ever many apples there are on the tree.
Huh? If you want to diff two kernel trees, you do it one file at a time. When you're done with file1.c, you move on to file2.c and will not need file1.c in RAM anymore.
About the only scenario I can think of to really want both trees in RAM from your description is if you are picking files from the two trees randomly and repeatedly for comparisons. Why would you do that?
So what? How about treating the very serious issue of poverty and overpopulation with a bit more compassion than mowing the front lawn, for a start? How about not referring to humans whose pitiful conditions today probably provided for your comfort through sins of your forefathers as a "shitload"?
You can send food to an area plagued year after year by famine and make yourself feel good about yourself or you can get those people to leave an area that is obviously uninhabitable or overpopulated.
Where did I say that all we should do is to keep the poor barely alive? You will note that the post I was responding to proposed that the Gates funding be diverted (with the specific intention of letting the "weak" die off) instead to the education of those who survive. Do I have to explain that opposing this "genetic engineering" does not mean that I think education or relocation efforts should not be funded?
Where do you observe this population? From what I can see, people really don't mind paying roughly the same amount every so often to get a phone with more features than their old phone.
Biologically, these children probably fought off more diseases to reach age 5 than you have to reach age 20 or 30, assuming you grew up in the first world. Odds are they are more resilient to disease than you are... so perhaps it is you who should think of stepping off the planet?
That's because, in my feeble understanding of the Linux architecture, it wasn't actually designed for the 80386. The 80386 has a pretty unique paged-segmentation architecture, which means that addresses are organized first by arbitrary-size (up to 32-bit) segments which then map onto fixed size pages. If Linux had relied on this architecture heavily, it would not port well to many other architectures that only supported paging. (As it is, porting Linux to very small CPUs or even back to the 8086/80286 is difficult because Linux basically required a MMU.) Similarly, if Linux had taken advantage of the little-endianness of the 80386, then it would be that much harder to port to big-endian systems. Even more obviously, imagine if Linux had been written entirely in 80386 assembly language for "maximum speed". IOW, despite the supposed emphasis on the 80386, Linux was actually designed to be fairly portable. It was, and still is a "gross error" to design an OS for any specific architecture.
If the lesson isn't obvious enough, despite the confrontation, it is quite likely that Linus listened very carefully to his professors. As we all know, not all professors are worth listening to, but in this case Tanenbaum's point was not only right, but well proven by the ability of Linux to absorb unexpected growth. It is a stupid idea to tie your operating system to a single CPU.
Wow... exactly what are the "Bush opponents" saying so far beyond your "reprehensible, tenuous, illogical, and religious" that blow the issue so out of proportion?
It's worse than that. Each side thinks the other side is stupid.
If you have Office, you need Apple Office. If you have Adobe products, you need to upgrade them. And so on.
Largely true, but let me correct you on a small point. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, for example, shipped with both the Windows version and the MacOS version on the same CD-ROM (and worked with the same serial number). Unfortunately I don't think they do that anymore with their new version, but it clearly could've been done if the vendors wanted to. Myst II: Riven is another example that I know of.
Also, it depends on what kind of "need" you have with these Windows apps. Some needs can be satisfied by running under VirtualPC, which is still something you have to pay for, but at least isn't a total replacement of your software library.
That is because, I respectfully submit, you do not have an appreciation of cosmic scales. Put another way, the odds of you winning the lottery with one ticket are somewhere very near zero. However, the odds that somebody will win is very high. I hope that helps you understand how an extremely unlikely event can be all but inevitable as long as your universe is big enough.
But just because we can't figure out how it started doesn't mean we should accept "it just happened by accident".
In fact, we do just accept it. Acceptance doesn't mean that we will never challenge or overthrow that particular theory, just that at this point in time there isn't a better or comparable one. That's how science works.