The NYT is the same paper that knowingly printed false WMD stories to justify Bush's illegal war. Cheney, Miller, and Chilabi were partners in spreading WMD propaganda. Chilabi would feed Miller false WMD stories (stories that she knew were false as she was in the inner circle of Cheney, Libby, Chilabi), she would print the stories in the NYT, and Cheney would appear on the Sunday news shows citing those NYT stories as evidence of WMDs, knowing that the stories were fabricated by his man Chilabi.
The NYT is also the same paper that purposely held off on publishing Bush's "spying" policy for over a year, saying "We didn't want to affect the outcome of the election." Hello? They're supposed to print relevant stories, and if a story might have affect an election, then all the more reason it should be printed. Otherwise the public is voting out of ignorance.
NYT has no business criticizing anyone for placating the Chinese govt when the NYT does everything in its power to prop up the Bush government and its illegal policies home and abroad.
If they can cut 25% with no problems, then there's no "monopoly" at all. This is grandstanding. It's also stupid policy. They should try to get the best value for their money. If Microsoft offers the best value for their money, then they should go with it. If not, then they should go with something else. But arbitrarily eliminating a company's products from consideration only allows the competing products to charge more and/or get away with offering less functional products.
"Actually it is a little deeper then that. MS also tries to leverage licensing and purchase power to prevent third parties (Dell, HP, Toshiba etc.) from adding specific additional software that competes with a MS version or removing software that MS included."
Yep, that's why Dell bundles Corel Office by default, HP bundles Corel Office as an option, and HP bundles iTunes as the default music player. *rolls eyes*
Go browse Dell or HP's site, and note of 3rd party software that they bundle. For example, Dell's default "office" suite that they bundle is Corel. Dell bundles MS Office only if you explicitly select it and pay extra. HP bundles iTunes as the default music player. For "office" functionality, HP's default bundle is MS Works, but you can alternatively choose Corel or MS Office. Dell and/or HP bundle other 3rd party apps from Sonic and the like.
Microsoft isn't preventing OEMs from installing any 3rd party apps that they want to.
There are several reasons why it makes sense for Google not to bow to the Open Source movement and users....
Exactly. After all, Google is the primary company that uses the GPL "loophole" for web apps, where they use tons of GPL code but don't release any of their own code since their apps are web apps rather than local apps. Why you guys insist on worshipping Google is beyond me. Actually it isn't; I know that you worship Google because they represent your latest Great White Hope to destroy Microsoft. They really don't give a damn about the OSS religion.
You actually bought that "Microsoft threatened to sue" malarky? LOL BTW, slashdot's general Microsoft icon (the one used for non-Windows stuff) is the Bill Gates Borg picture, which is another icon that shows that this site has zero cred whan reporting Microsoft "news".
What's amusing about this is that many of you guys that blasted Microsoft for designing this flaw into the WMF api are now defending the Wine devs with, "Well, they had to implement the whole api, so it's not their fault!!"
But the facts are that the original design was made pre-Win3.0, long before the rise of the internet as we know it today. It's not surprising that the design flaw arose in that environment, and the design was used to deal with the hodge-podge of various printer behaviors from those days. And I don't particularly blame the actual handful of Wine devs that implemented the "whole API" and therefore inherited this design flaw.
Another piece of Open Source philosophy is characterized as "many eyes make all bugs shallow." The continual review process used by Open Source communities produces a "many eyes" effect of massively parallel peer review that has been demonstrated to produce very high quality oversight of the software development process and products. Constant, repetitive peer review, coupled with a release schedule tied to objective software quality rather than marketing deadlines, consistently results in Open Source software quality orders of magnitude higher than that of commercial releases of similar software.
This flaw was staring the OSS community right in the face for all this time, yet the OSS community failed to find it. Of course, I'm being too hard on the OSS community. I wouldn't expect that community to find this problem. But nor should you. The "many eyes" claim is a canard because in truth very few people not involved in the actual development of a particular piece of code actually examine that code for flaws, and even fewer can identify a flaw even if it's staring them in the face as clearly as this one.
Microsoft has no choice because China continually threatens to use Red Flag Linux, which was Slashdot's Great White Hope of 2001 (or thereabouts).
(Of course, many here would love to see Microsoft defy China's government in hopes that it would lead to Linux' userbase instantly growing by a billion. j/k;-))
FYI, HP's MCE machines allow you to play iTMS music through MCE. They supply an iTunes plugin for WMP that adds references to the music in your iTunes library to the WMP library so that they show up in MCE. And HP also supplies an MCE applet that appears in the MCE "More Programs" list that plays iTMS music directly within MCE.
I do agree, however, that MCE could consider also offering a remote design with some level of button overloading like the FrontRow remote has (up/down/left/right shared perhaps with volume/channel/skip as approproate) but it would actually be pretty annoying if this was the only design available since there are definite downsides to button overloading.
Actually, HP's MCE control does overload the channel up/down and page up/down buttons.
The MCE controller is no more complicated than my TV or DVD controllers. In fact, I'd add a few buttons, such as Audio Track (for selecting Stereo, 5.1, different languages) and Subtitles for DVDs; these are accessible by menu but not directly by buttons.:(
Don't all modern TV controllers allow you to add/remove the channels that are accessed by the Channel Up/Down button? I know the MCE remote allows this as do all the TV controllers in my home. So your point is meaningless.
Instead they should just be holding back on patents, fighting for fair-term copyrights (e.g., 50 years maximum).
Sounds good, but largely meaningless since 99.999% of pirated stuff (be it music, movies, games, software) is younger than 50 years. Besides that, if I write a hit song and 51 years later a company uses that song in as a jingle in a commercial, what's so terrible about my getting some royalties from that? So I would modify your statement so that if someone is making use of copyrighted material for commercial gain (e.g. using an old hit song as a commercial's jingle), then that someone must pay royalties to the owner of the song's copyright, regardless of how old it is, as long as the copyright owner can be determined (and we do need a centralized database with which one can determine who owns which copyright (suggested by Lessig); we currently lack such). I could be persuaded to limit this provision against free commercial use of ip to the lifetime of the creator and the lifetimes of his immediate heirs (whichevwer is longer).
(I'd be tempted to limit the copyright to the lifetime of the original creator. But I've seen cases where the decendents of the creator have used their ownership of the copyright to eliminate "abuse" of the created content. The Gershwin family prevented the NY Metropolitan Opera from doing Porgy and Bess with an all white cast, a use of copyright that I approved of, a use exercised by the Gershwin family long after the deaths of George and Ira Gershwin.)
and fair-use rights (purchased music is owned and can be copied by the owner as many times, but not redistributed unless all other copies are destroyed/included in the redistribution) and to not have spyware installed on the computer regardless of how they respond to the EULA.
I see no argument with the above, but many do demand the right to redistribute copies, and that is the root of the problems.
Tell me, if a company appropriated the trade secrets of a rival company without permission (what is commonly known as "stealing" trade secrets) would you consider that "stealing" even though the wronged company still has possession of copies of said secrets? If not "stealing", then what would you call it? I assume you would admit that it falls under one of the basic categories of "wrong", namely "lie", "cheat", "steal", "injure", "kill". So if not "stealing", then perhaps you'd be willing to call it "cheating"; I guess that eases your conscience when browsing for warez - "I'm not stealing, just cheating!!". LOL
BTW, dictionary definition of "steal": To take or appropriate without right or leave, with intent to keep or use wongly. Sounds like copyright infringement fits the bill.
So now Microsoft goes to a court, gets the monopoly status officially terminated, and the gloves come off.;-) (Actually, the gloves don't come off, it's just that Microsoft gets to act like every other company that doesn't have a "monopoly" again.)
There once was a Mac clone market but the clones out-competed Apple buy delivering better functionality at lower price. Rather than compete, Jobs killed of the market (refusing the internal OS/PPC specs of future systems to the clone makers). Dell would also out compete Apple when it came to selling hardware. Why would Apple go down this road again, having already failed?
The/. threads themselves regarding MS have gotten less bias over the past year, but until/. stops using the Borg icon for Microsoft stories and broken stained glass for Windows stories,/. has no credibility regarding Microsoft stories. Every other topic has a neutral icon without editorial spin.
This is something that most geeks would think quite cool, but because Microsoft is involved, this thread is filled with negative comments. Oh, it's too dangerous!! Good grief...
Here are a few ObjC problems off the top of my head. 1. No proper namespace support. If multiple teams are working on a project, each team is advised to prepend the method names of its classes with a two or three letter abbreviation to avoid name-collision. WTF?? Hence, why all Cocoa methods are prepended with "NS" (short for NextStep). Apple should fix this asap.
2. Horrible constructor support for derived classes. ObjC makes one proclaim one or more of a class's init methods to be "designated initializers", and these are the init methods that derived classes must override, no more, no less. Oh, and the proclamation of "designated initializers" is informal; there's no formal support by the language or runtime.
3. All methods are public. To implement private methods, one must "simulate" them by not declaring them in the interface header file, but they're still accessible. Implementation of protected methods is even more of a hack, where one must create class Categories that are only known internally, and place the "protected" methods in those Categories. But the Categories are still accessible, and there's nothing stopping a third party from implementing a Category of the same name on his own, causing namespace-collision.
4. Lack of proper support for abstract classes. One has to use [self doesNotRecognizeSelector:_cmd] to implement abstract classes (either in the init method or the individual abstract methods), another ugly hack.
(Lack of garbage collection may also be a problem, although refcounting never bothered me and I rather do like autoRelease, by which one can achieve something akin to garbage collection (for objects, at least).:-))
There are some other problems, all of which (and the above) stem from ObjC being an "old" language, having not added any of the advancements in language and runtime design that other languages adopted in the 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
The NYT is the same paper that knowingly printed false WMD stories to justify Bush's illegal war. Cheney, Miller, and Chilabi were partners in spreading WMD propaganda. Chilabi would feed Miller false WMD stories (stories that she knew were false as she was in the inner circle of Cheney, Libby, Chilabi), she would print the stories in the NYT, and Cheney would appear on the Sunday news shows citing those NYT stories as evidence of WMDs, knowing that the stories were fabricated by his man Chilabi.
The NYT is also the same paper that purposely held off on publishing Bush's "spying" policy for over a year, saying "We didn't want to affect the outcome of the election." Hello? They're supposed to print relevant stories, and if a story might have affect an election, then all the more reason it should be printed. Otherwise the public is voting out of ignorance.
NYT has no business criticizing anyone for placating the Chinese govt when the NYT does everything in its power to prop up the Bush government and its illegal policies home and abroad.
If they can cut 25% with no problems, then there's no "monopoly" at all. This is grandstanding. It's also stupid policy. They should try to get the best value for their money. If Microsoft offers the best value for their money, then they should go with it. If not, then they should go with something else. But arbitrarily eliminating a company's products from consideration only allows the competing products to charge more and/or get away with offering less functional products.
The "length=1" could've been a debugging hook that a dev neglected to remove.
except for the self-righteous holier-than-thou hypocrisy. ;-)
"Actually it is a little deeper then that. MS also tries to leverage licensing and purchase power to prevent third parties (Dell, HP, Toshiba etc.) from adding specific additional software that competes with a MS version or removing software that MS included."
Yep, that's why Dell bundles Corel Office by default, HP bundles Corel Office as an option, and HP bundles iTunes as the default music player. *rolls eyes*
You really are clueless.
Go browse Dell or HP's site, and note of 3rd party software that they bundle.
For example, Dell's default "office" suite that they bundle is Corel. Dell bundles MS Office only if you explicitly select it and pay extra.
HP bundles iTunes as the default music player. For "office" functionality, HP's default bundle is MS Works, but you can alternatively choose Corel or MS Office. Dell and/or HP bundle other 3rd party apps from Sonic and the like.
Microsoft isn't preventing OEMs from installing any 3rd party apps that they want to.
How old are you, twelve?
So you picked a bunch of loser stocks to invest in and you're blaming Gates? LOLOLOL
There are several reasons why it makes sense for Google not to bow to the Open Source movement and users....
Exactly. After all, Google is the primary company that uses the GPL "loophole" for web apps, where they use tons of GPL code but don't release any of their own code since their apps are web apps rather than local apps. Why you guys insist on worshipping Google is beyond me. Actually it isn't; I know that you worship Google because they represent your latest Great White Hope to destroy Microsoft. They really don't give a damn about the OSS religion.
You actually bought that "Microsoft threatened to sue" malarky? LOL
BTW, slashdot's general Microsoft icon (the one used for non-Windows stuff) is the Bill Gates Borg picture, which is another icon that shows that this site has zero cred whan reporting Microsoft "news".
But the facts are that the original design was made pre-Win3.0, long before the rise of the internet as we know it today. It's not surprising that the design flaw arose in that environment, and the design was used to deal with the hodge-podge of various printer behaviors from those days. And I don't particularly blame the actual handful of Wine devs that implemented the "whole API" and therefore inherited this design flaw.
But I do place blame on the OSS community.
Allow me to quote from Engaging with The Open Source Community:
This flaw was staring the OSS community right in the face for all this time, yet the OSS community failed to find it. Of course, I'm being too hard on the OSS community. I wouldn't expect that community to find this problem. But nor should you. The "many eyes" claim is a canard because in truth very few people not involved in the actual development of a particular piece of code actually examine that code for flaws, and even fewer can identify a flaw even if it's staring them in the face as clearly as this one.
Microsoft has no choice because China continually threatens to use Red Flag Linux, which was Slashdot's Great White Hope of 2001 (or thereabouts).
;-))
(Of course, many here would love to see Microsoft defy China's government in hopes that it would lead to Linux' userbase instantly growing by a billion. j/k
FYI, HP's MCE machines allow you to play iTMS music through MCE. They supply an iTunes plugin for WMP that adds references to the music in your iTunes library to the WMP library so that they show up in MCE. And HP also supplies an MCE applet that appears in the MCE "More Programs" list that plays iTMS music directly within MCE.
I do agree, however, that MCE could consider also offering a remote design with some level of button overloading like the FrontRow remote has (up/down/left/right shared perhaps with volume/channel/skip as approproate) but it would actually be pretty annoying if this was the only design available since there are definite downsides to button overloading.
:(
Actually, HP's MCE control does overload the channel up/down and page up/down buttons.
The MCE controller is no more complicated than my TV or DVD controllers. In fact, I'd add a few buttons, such as Audio Track (for selecting Stereo, 5.1, different languages) and Subtitles for DVDs; these are accessible by menu but not directly by buttons.
Don't all modern TV controllers allow you to add/remove the channels that are accessed by the Channel Up/Down button? I know the MCE remote allows this as do all the TV controllers in my home. So your point is meaningless.
Instead they should just be holding back on patents, fighting for fair-term copyrights (e.g., 50 years maximum).
Sounds good, but largely meaningless since 99.999% of pirated stuff (be it music, movies, games, software) is younger than 50 years. Besides that, if I write a hit song and 51 years later a company uses that song in as a jingle in a commercial, what's so terrible about my getting some royalties from that? So I would modify your statement so that if someone is making use of copyrighted material for commercial gain (e.g. using an old hit song as a commercial's jingle), then that someone must pay royalties to the owner of the song's copyright, regardless of how old it is, as long as the copyright owner can be determined (and we do need a centralized database with which one can determine who owns which copyright (suggested by Lessig); we currently lack such). I could be persuaded to limit this provision against free commercial use of ip to the lifetime of the creator and the lifetimes of his immediate heirs (whichevwer is longer).
(I'd be tempted to limit the copyright to the lifetime of the original creator. But I've seen cases where the decendents of the creator have used their ownership of the copyright to eliminate "abuse" of the created content. The Gershwin family prevented the NY Metropolitan Opera from doing Porgy and Bess with an all white cast, a use of copyright that I approved of, a use exercised by the Gershwin family long after the deaths of George and Ira Gershwin.)
and fair-use rights (purchased music is owned and can be copied by the owner as many times, but not redistributed unless all other copies are destroyed/included in the redistribution) and to not have spyware installed on the computer regardless of how they respond to the EULA.
I see no argument with the above, but many do demand the right to redistribute copies, and that is the root of the problems.
Tell me, if a company appropriated the trade secrets of a rival company without permission (what is commonly known as "stealing" trade secrets) would you consider that "stealing" even though the wronged company still has possession of copies of said secrets? If not "stealing", then what would you call it? I assume you would admit that it falls under one of the basic categories of "wrong", namely "lie", "cheat", "steal", "injure", "kill". So if not "stealing", then perhaps you'd be willing to call it "cheating"; I guess that eases your conscience when browsing for warez - "I'm not stealing, just cheating!!". LOL
BTW, dictionary definition of "steal": To take or appropriate without right or leave, with intent to keep or use wongly.
Sounds like copyright infringement fits the bill.
So now Microsoft goes to a court, gets the monopoly status officially terminated, and the gloves come off. ;-)
(Actually, the gloves don't come off, it's just that Microsoft gets to act like every other company that doesn't have a "monopoly" again.)
There once was a Mac clone market but the clones out-competed Apple buy delivering better functionality at lower price. Rather than compete, Jobs killed of the market (refusing the internal OS/PPC specs of future systems to the clone makers). Dell would also out compete Apple when it came to selling hardware. Why would Apple go down this road again, having already failed?
The /. threads themselves regarding MS have gotten less bias over the past year, but until /. stops using the Borg icon for Microsoft stories and broken stained glass for Windows stories, /. has no credibility regarding Microsoft stories. Every other topic has a neutral icon without editorial spin.
Silly rabbit, don't you know that pirated warez sites is much more dangerous than browsing porn sites? This'll learn ya!!
Porn sites != "sites of ill repute", necessarily.
Warez sites are more of ill repute, and are the cause of most virus infection.
It's a very high price to pay considering I don't download WMFs. ;-)
This is something that most geeks would think quite cool, but because Microsoft is involved, this thread is filled with negative comments. Oh, it's too dangerous!! Good grief...
Here are a few ObjC problems off the top of my head.
:-))
1. No proper namespace support. If multiple teams are working on a project, each team is advised to prepend the method names of its classes with a two or three letter abbreviation to avoid name-collision. WTF?? Hence, why all Cocoa methods are prepended with "NS" (short for NextStep). Apple should fix this asap.
2. Horrible constructor support for derived classes. ObjC makes one proclaim one or more of a class's init methods to be "designated initializers", and these are the init methods that derived classes must override, no more, no less. Oh, and the proclamation of "designated initializers" is informal; there's no formal support by the language or runtime.
3. All methods are public. To implement private methods, one must "simulate" them by not declaring them in the interface header file, but they're still accessible. Implementation of protected methods is even more of a hack, where one must create class Categories that are only known internally, and place the "protected" methods in those Categories. But the Categories are still accessible, and there's nothing stopping a third party from implementing a Category of the same name on his own, causing namespace-collision.
4. Lack of proper support for abstract classes. One has to use [self doesNotRecognizeSelector:_cmd] to implement abstract classes (either in the init method or the individual abstract methods), another ugly hack.
(Lack of garbage collection may also be a problem, although refcounting never bothered me and I rather do like autoRelease, by which one can achieve something akin to garbage collection (for objects, at least).
There are some other problems, all of which (and the above) stem from ObjC being an "old" language, having not added any of the advancements in language and runtime design that other languages adopted in the 90's.