Bush is one of, if not THE, worst president in US history, but not because of this issue, not even close. This issue is completely insignificant compared to his real misdeeds and utter incompetence (i.e. starting war over false pretense, stealing elections, sleeping on the job during aftermath of Katrina, etc). That you cite this very minor issue as the reason to label Bush as worst president rather than the very important reasons shows that you need to get some perspective. Around slashdotters, the goings on of Microsoft, Google, Apple, FSF, etc may be of greatest import; the general population doesn't give a damn.
Would you write a damn piece of software for Mac? Before saying yes, see what happened to the authors of Konfabulator and Sherlock (the former, Apple copied, the latter Apple completely ripped off).
Sigh, Google is not complaining about XP. It is about Vista and the built-in search that cannot be disabled.
Good grief man, how many times are you (and your allies) going to repeat this lie, after it's been pointed out multiple times that Vista's search can be disalbed? Hell, there've even been pics posted showing the service disabled, yet the lie keeps getting repeated, as if saying it over and over makes it true. Is there some Google astroturfing going on here?
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Google Inc. (GOOG)'s privacy practices are the worst among the Internet's top destinations, according to a watchdog group seeking to intensify the recent focus on how the online search leader handles personal information about its users.
In a report released Saturday, London-based Privacy International assigned Google its lowest possible grade. The category is reserved for companies with "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."
None of the 22 other surveyed companies - a group that included Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and AOL - sunk to that level, according to Privacy International....
Who cares what Google's "Privacy Policy" says? They also claim that they "Do no evil". Are we to buy that too, just because Google says it?
Apple is certainly a monopoly on its own systems. Spotlight (in theory) harms competing desktop search engines on the Mac platform, yet Google seems not to care about that. Might have something to do with what the OP of this sub-thread mentioned, the deal Apple and Google made to lock other search providers out of Safari; can you spell "collusion"?.
"The problem is, the license doesn't forbid extension, it forbids "working around technical limitations" which is so vague as to be completely un-enforcable. "
You honsetly think that a judge will be so stupid as to not understand the spirit of the license regarding VS Express (i.e. VS Express, being free, has fewer features than its brethren, and has technical limitations so as to remove features, and that those technical limitations aren't to be worked around in order to reenable said features)? "Spirit" of the contract counts just as much as the "letter", sometimes even more so. And that Jamie used the readily available AddIn managager to get his code to work with VS Standard, VS Pro, and VS Team Edition, but had to and did go out of his way to work around VS Express's limitaions in order to trick VS Express into loading his software, shows that he knows damn well what the spirit of the license is.
My point is that the spirit of the license is quite clear. I'm surprised that slashdotters, of all people, would be trying to find loopholes or claim that something is unenforceable when the underlying intent of the license is quite clear. And you can be sure that the intent will be clear to a judge, and the judge will not believe that Jamie didn't know the intent when he agreed to the EULA.
Since when does unit testing need to be part of the IDE? Unit testing is very much doable without some IDE module. All TestDriven.NET does is wrap unit test libs (ones provided by Microsoft and GPL devs) into an IDE plugin. Those unit test libs are quite usable without the IDE plugin.
Personally, I think this clause is overly broad and Microsoft's action on it is quite worrying. If they win here, basically all they need to do is claim that something you've written is 'working around a technical limitation' and they can control your product distribution. Let's not forget that the MSTest functionality in the pricey VS 2005 Team Edition is effectively in competition with Jamie's TestDriven.NET.
But since Micrsosoft has zero problem with the version of TestDriven.NET that works with Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team editions, the "competition" between MSTest and TestDrivin.NET is irrelevant to this case. (Note that MSTest doesn't work with VS Express.)
I know that most slashdotters don't even want to hear Microsoft's side of the story, but for the few that might, read these two blog entries by Dan Fernandez:
Friday, June 01, 2007 3:20 PM by danielfe TestDriven.NET and Express - Technical Information I quickly wanted to respond to questions or misconceptions raised in the comments of my previous blog post.
A common question or misconception in the comments is saying that if didn't want extensibility we should have provided technical limitations to prevent extensibility (see comments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18).
Express Extension Workarounds To respond, Visual Studio Express extensibility is limited in a number of ways. One way it is limited is that it does not permit extensibility through Macros, Add-Ins, or Packages. It attempts to reserve these limitations by technical means. Some examples of these technical limitations are that there is no Macros IDE, there is no Add-In manager, and registered Add-In's and Packages are not loaded at startup. The only way to even extend Express is to work around these in-built technical limitations and that is prohibited by the License.
For a high-level overview on how TestDriven.NET works around technical limitations, here's a response from our development team:
** The TestDriven.NET product is implemented as a Visual Studio Add-In. In the Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team System SKUs, TestDriven.NET is installed as an Add-In and gets loaded into the IDE through the Add-In Manager. In the Visual Studio Express SKUs, because we disabled extensibility (macros, Add-ins, and VS Packages), the Add-In Manager is removed and therefore Add-Ins are not detected or loaded. Jamie has created additional components specifically for the Express SKUs to work around this technical limitation. He takes advantage of an extensibility point that allows user controls (such as a button class) to customize entries in the Properties window. When his property extender gets called, he executes code that finds, loads and injects the TestDriven.Net assembly into the Express SKU's running process, thus replacing the functionality of the removed Add-In Manager. This explains why he instructs Visual Studio Express users to open the Properties window in order to enable TestDriven.NET. Once his code is injected into the Express SKU's running process it can add menu items, enable features that were disabled, and in general take over that instance of Express. These special loading mechanisms that Jamie has built exclusively for the Express SKUs are unauthorized workarounds to the SKUs' technical limitations. **
For an analogy, this would be comparable to someone working around the technical limitations in the personal version of TestDriven.NET to unlock features in the professional or enterprise versions for free.
What complicates this even further is that this isn't a developer doing this for his or her personal use or experimenting with our product, this is a business trying to sell a product. We tried for close to two years to get Jamie to stop releasing the Express version of TestDriven.NET without success.
I hope this helps clarify some of the questions or misconceptions surrounding this issue.
Filed under: Visual Studio Express Comment Notification
Two problems with your theory: 1. Hackers can post to message boards messages containing innocent-looking links to "bad" sites. This happened to me years ago at IGN's boards, before I started checking the status bar to see what the actual URL of a link was before clicking it.
2. Hackers sometimes hack legit sites and inject script code into them (normally at the end of the page), so that visiting a legit sites runs mal-script.
Novell may be getting "blackballed by the community" but recent earnings reports show that since the Novell/MS deal, Novell has gained share at Red Hat's expense. The "community" of which you speak might be good at "blackballing" but so what? That community doesn't pay the bills. It's not like you guys actually buy any distros or sign up for support contracts anyway, so you can "blackball" whomever you want. It makes no difference since distros aren't seeing any money from you anyway.
(I accidentally hit Submit before I finished) The second half of the season didn't deal much with love triangles, rather it focused on the Hawkins character, who was much more interesting than the Jake character.
This almost makes me, a commie Linux user, hope for M$ to destroy them.
I'm not keen on companies getting "destroyed". But it would be better if Google didn't have a quasi-monopoly on search/ads; as it is right now, they do have the power to destroy companies at their whim.
I have a feeling that at least some of Microsoft's 250 patent claims would hold up (you've seen the ridiculous patents that have been upheld in court; do you really think that zero of Microsoft's 250 claims are valid?). Even if you guys "code around" the patents (which might not even be possible in some cases), you'd still have to pay punitive damages for past infringement.
Now, Microsoft doesn't want to sue anyone. It'd be bad PR. They just want to make cross-licensing agreements, just as they and others do as a normal business practice. Microsoft, in particular, has made such deals with Apple, Sun, IBM, etc in the past. They want to hold up the big OSS companies (i.e. Red Hat) to the same standards.
They really couldn't care less about some hobbiest, or even some small company. Many of those small companies admit to violating patents, but pass that responsibility on to the user. For example, VideoLan admits that VLC violates MPEGLA patents, but say on their website that since they're an OSS non-profit developer, it's up to the users themselves to pay the MPEGLA license fees, in effect daring MPEGLA to sue VLC's users in order to get the fees. But Red Hat can't make the claim that they're a non-profit company, and would further receive horrible PR if they explicitly told their users to pay license fees themselves.
As I said, Microsoft doesn't want to sue, not because the patents are invalid, but because of the bad PR. But if you FORCE a suit, then the bad PR is on you, and you'll likely lose at least some of the 250 claims.
Here's an idea - let the big OSS companies act like grown ups, and license the patents in question. Problem solved.
Monopoly or no monopoly, there was NOTHING preventing OEMs from simply buying Windows licenses at the normal OEM prices (which are still much, much lower than retail prices). Microsoft simply offered discounts to OEMs that allowed them to obtain Windows licenses at prices lower than the normal OEM price. OEMs were not forced to accept these discounts. They accepted them, and went along with the terms that accompanied them. "Monopoly" has NOTHING to do with that.
Stanford might have the "clout to ignore RIAA", but why should they use their clout in that way? Stanford isn't about defending piracy, and shouldn't waste political capital on such nonsense.
Microsoft was on the ISO committee that ratified ODF as an ISO standard, and Microsoft voted "YES". Microsoft isn't the one that's advocating one format to rule them all and is blocking usage of certain formats, that's IBM's thing wrt OOXML (IBM was the sole "NO" vote for OOXML ECMA ratification and is the one that's most trying to block OOXML ISO ratification).
Yeah, the Office team always does their own thing, and then the Windows UI Guidelines are updated accordingly.
Microsoft teams do their own things as well; to hell with the guidlines. But that's because Microsoft's teams have a lot of independence, almost as if they were their own companies, so it's no surprise that the Office team does what they think is best for them, regardless of what the Windows team thinks. But this same thing would've happened if they had been broken up, which everyone here wanted.
"The only thing they've proven so far, is Zune can't stand on its own."
?? How is offering a Zune download link proof that Zune can't stand on its own? iPod must *really* be struggling to stand on its own, given the number of iPod links and accessories out there.:|
As for the Silverlight "stream", what's wrong with Microsoft dogfooding its own stuff? MIX2007 was larely about Silverlight, so they use it. Good for them. What, do you think they should use Flash to show Silverlight vids?
BTW, the Silverlight "streams" at the MIX2007 site are actually just progressive downloads, just like the WMV Download links. The only difference is that Silverlight plays the videos within a web page. The actual.wmv url used is the same for both cases.
The solution is for companies like Sun to stop playing games with open source license. If Sun releases Java under a single open source license, then there is no problem and nobody is taken advantage of.
Sun might feel that they, themselves, would be taken advantage of. After all, they spent billions on Java R&D, and still have yet to see much return on the investment. Then to just open source the thing and throw away all hope of ROI - well that has some pain associated with it (as far as Sun sees it).
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's recent web initiatives already targete IE, FF, and Safari, so I don't see why Microsoft (besides the very small IE team) would care much.
Bush is one of, if not THE, worst president in US history, but not because of this issue, not even close. This issue is completely insignificant compared to his real misdeeds and utter incompetence (i.e. starting war over false pretense, stealing elections, sleeping on the job during aftermath of Katrina, etc). That you cite this very minor issue as the reason to label Bush as worst president rather than the very important reasons shows that you need to get some perspective. Around slashdotters, the goings on of Microsoft, Google, Apple, FSF, etc may be of greatest import; the general population doesn't give a damn.
Would you write a damn piece of software for Mac?
Before saying yes, see what happened to the authors of Konfabulator and Sherlock (the former, Apple copied, the latter Apple completely ripped off).
Good grief man, how many times are you (and your allies) going to repeat this lie, after it's been pointed out multiple times that Vista's search can be disalbed? Hell, there've even been pics posted showing the service disabled, yet the lie keeps getting repeated, as if saying it over and over makes it true. Is there some Google astroturfing going on here?
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070609/D8PLHML8
Who cares what Google's "Privacy Policy" says? They also claim that they "Do no evil". Are we to buy that too, just because Google says it?
Apple is certainly a monopoly on its own systems.
Spotlight (in theory) harms competing desktop search engines on the Mac platform, yet Google seems not to care about that. Might have something to do with what the OP of this sub-thread mentioned, the deal Apple and Google made to lock other search providers out of Safari; can you spell "collusion"?.
You might want to give some attribution to the original author of your post:0 67#315067
:p
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=315
You know, to avoid charges of plagiarism and all that.
"The problem is, the license doesn't forbid extension, it forbids "working around technical limitations" which is so vague as to be completely un-enforcable. "
You honsetly think that a judge will be so stupid as to not understand the spirit of the license regarding VS Express (i.e. VS Express, being free, has fewer features than its brethren, and has technical limitations so as to remove features, and that those technical limitations aren't to be worked around in order to reenable said features)? "Spirit" of the contract counts just as much as the "letter", sometimes even more so. And that Jamie used the readily available AddIn managager to get his code to work with VS Standard, VS Pro, and VS Team Edition, but had to and did go out of his way to work around VS Express's limitaions in order to trick VS Express into loading his software, shows that he knows damn well what the spirit of the license is.
My point is that the spirit of the license is quite clear. I'm surprised that slashdotters, of all people, would be trying to find loopholes or claim that something is unenforceable when the underlying intent of the license is quite clear. And you can be sure that the intent will be clear to a judge, and the judge will not believe that Jamie didn't know the intent when he agreed to the EULA.
Since when does unit testing need to be part of the IDE? Unit testing is very much doable without some IDE module. All TestDriven.NET does is wrap unit test libs (ones provided by Microsoft and GPL devs) into an IDE plugin. Those unit test libs are quite usable without the IDE plugin.
But since Micrsosoft has zero problem with the version of TestDriven.NET that works with Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team editions, the "competition" between MSTest and TestDrivin.NET is irrelevant to this case. (Note that MSTest doesn't work with VS Express.)
I know that most slashdotters don't even want to hear Microsoft's side of the story, but for the few that might, read these two blog entries by Dan Fernandez:
/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx
/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx
This gives MS's side of the story, including the two-year history of this issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31
This follow-up blog entry gives technical details on the hacking required to get TestDriven.NET to run in VS Express:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01
You might want to weigh both sides of the story before choosing one side or the other.
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01
Two problems with your theory:
1. Hackers can post to message boards messages containing innocent-looking links to "bad" sites. This happened to me years ago at IGN's boards, before I started checking the status bar to see what the actual URL of a link was before clicking it.
2. Hackers sometimes hack legit sites and inject script code into them (normally at the end of the page), so that visiting a legit sites runs mal-script.
Novell may be getting "blackballed by the community" but recent earnings reports show that since the Novell/MS deal, Novell has gained share at Red Hat's expense. The "community" of which you speak might be good at "blackballing" but so what? That community doesn't pay the bills. It's not like you guys actually buy any distros or sign up for support contracts anyway, so you can "blackball" whomever you want. It makes no difference since distros aren't seeing any money from you anyway.
That's your upper lip.
(I accidentally hit Submit before I finished)
The second half of the season didn't deal much with love triangles, rather it focused on the Hawkins character, who was much more interesting than the Jake character.
You stopped watching at "The Day Before", meaning you skipped the entire second half of the season, which was 10 times better than the first half.
I'm not keen on companies getting "destroyed". But it would be better if Google didn't have a quasi-monopoly on search/ads; as it is right now, they do have the power to destroy companies at their whim.
I have a feeling that at least some of Microsoft's 250 patent claims would hold up (you've seen the ridiculous patents that have been upheld in court; do you really think that zero of Microsoft's 250 claims are valid?). Even if you guys "code around" the patents (which might not even be possible in some cases), you'd still have to pay punitive damages for past infringement.
Now, Microsoft doesn't want to sue anyone. It'd be bad PR. They just want to make cross-licensing agreements, just as they and others do as a normal business practice. Microsoft, in particular, has made such deals with Apple, Sun, IBM, etc in the past. They want to hold up the big OSS companies (i.e. Red Hat) to the same standards.
They really couldn't care less about some hobbiest, or even some small company. Many of those small companies admit to violating patents, but pass that responsibility on to the user. For example, VideoLan admits that VLC violates MPEGLA patents, but say on their website that since they're an OSS non-profit developer, it's up to the users themselves to pay the MPEGLA license fees, in effect daring MPEGLA to sue VLC's users in order to get the fees. But Red Hat can't make the claim that they're a non-profit company, and would further receive horrible PR if they explicitly told their users to pay license fees themselves.
As I said, Microsoft doesn't want to sue, not because the patents are invalid, but because of the bad PR. But if you FORCE a suit, then the bad PR is on you, and you'll likely lose at least some of the 250 claims.
Here's an idea - let the big OSS companies act like grown ups, and license the patents in question. Problem solved.
Bullocks.
Monopoly or no monopoly, there was NOTHING preventing OEMs from simply buying Windows licenses at the normal OEM prices (which are still much, much lower than retail prices). Microsoft simply offered discounts to OEMs that allowed them to obtain Windows licenses at prices lower than the normal OEM price. OEMs were not forced to accept these discounts. They accepted them, and went along with the terms that accompanied them. "Monopoly" has NOTHING to do with that.
Stanford might have the "clout to ignore RIAA", but why should they use their clout in that way? Stanford isn't about defending piracy, and shouldn't waste political capital on such nonsense.
Microsoft was on the ISO committee that ratified ODF as an ISO standard, and Microsoft voted "YES". Microsoft isn't the one that's advocating one format to rule them all and is blocking usage of certain formats, that's IBM's thing wrt OOXML (IBM was the sole "NO" vote for OOXML ECMA ratification and is the one that's most trying to block OOXML ISO ratification).
Yeah, the Office team always does their own thing, and then the Windows UI Guidelines are updated accordingly.
Microsoft teams do their own things as well; to hell with the guidlines.
But that's because Microsoft's teams have a lot of independence, almost as if they were their own companies, so it's no surprise that the Office team does what they think is best for them, regardless of what the Windows team thinks.
But this same thing would've happened if they had been broken up, which everyone here wanted.
"The only thing they've proven so far, is Zune can't stand on its own."
:|
.wmv url used is the same for both cases.
??
How is offering a Zune download link proof that Zune can't stand on its own? iPod must *really* be struggling to stand on its own, given the number of iPod links and accessories out there.
As for the Silverlight "stream", what's wrong with Microsoft dogfooding its own stuff? MIX2007 was larely about Silverlight, so they use it. Good for them. What, do you think they should use Flash to show Silverlight vids?
BTW, the Silverlight "streams" at the MIX2007 site are actually just progressive downloads, just like the WMV Download links. The only difference is that Silverlight plays the videos within a web page. The actual
Sun might feel that they, themselves, would be taken advantage of. After all, they spent billions on Java R&D, and still have yet to see much return on the investment. Then to just open source the thing and throw away all hope of ROI - well that has some pain associated with it (as far as Sun sees it).