For the love of [insert your favorite Deity here], do not go to comp.lang.objective-c without flame protection. The maintainer of the FAQ has some serious issues and an irrational hate for NeXT, Apple, and anyone who programs on those platforms. I don't think that most slashdotters could work up the same viciousness towards Microsoft. It is truly a sight to behold. Keep a logic book handy to see how many fallacies of thought are unleashed.
You mean David Stes is still spewing invective all over that newsgroup?! I stopped reading it years ago because he'd turned it into little more than a non-stop flame-fest, but I'd assumed he would have withered away and died after the huge influx of Cocoa/NeXTStep programmers who must have hit comp.lang.objective-c after OS X hit prime-time.
Is his major problem still the fact that NeXTStep/Cocoa uses +alloc/-init instead of +new?
I'll probably end up buying it and emulating a GameCube, but Unless the 4 players is something we can do while drinking (Hey I'm Canadian, it's our national pasttime!) I don't know if it will require me to buy a GameCube or not.
That will be a neat trick. You have a mini-dvd drive that will read the proprietary format of GCN games, do you? And you know of an actual emulator for the GameCube?
You might not get much compression, but at least you'll know that that 140 meg file you just hauled down isn't corrupt three-quarters of the way through.
Think hacking this stuff. Think adding a bios "upgrade" to allow booting of any OS. THINK, and don't limit yourself to M$'s intentions. (you could use M$'s bootloader to launch the linux kernel.)
Think DMCA. Think Dmitri. Think Jack-Booted FBI Agents. Think Five-To-Ten. THINK, and realize that M$ WILL exploit theses things.
You mean the IRAN backed shiites that want to install, you guessed it, an IRANIAN style government? Oh, I don't know why. Maybe we would like a country with less tolerance for terrorist organizations between Syria and Iran? Maybe we'd like to see a succesfull democracy between Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia? Isn't that what the Mid-East states fear the most?
Seeing as the majority of Iraqis are, in fact, shiite muslims, should they not be allowed to democratically choose to install an Iranian-style theocracy? Or when we say that we are "bringing democracy to the Iraqis", do we only mean democracy in-so-far as it results in decisions that we approve of?
It does smack a bit of Apple and Power Computing (remember them?). If a web site is selling their stuff cheaper than they are, and the do a better job of it, then they have to attack.
Funny, I thought the moral of the Apple / Power Computing scenario was:
If a buisness decision to license your technology to a competitor is killing your company, for god sake's stop licenseing the technology!
This situation with GW is just like the one with Apple because "they both stopped selling (different things) to (different people)".
...
You'll have to forgive me if I think that this comparison of GW with Apple amounts to little more than a sour grapes, "I don't like Apple, and I don't like this, so they must be similar" comparisson, rather than a particularly accurate or close one. The original poster could have chosen any company at random and made the same comparison, given the amazing vagueness of these criteria.
Apple has shut down potentially profitable business plans (such as the clone plan). GW is doing something similar, only with sales channels instead of licensed clones. IOW, GW is shooting themselves in the foot just like Apple did.
So Apple not liscensing their proprietary technology to other companies so that they could make Apple compatible computers is in your mind just like GW refusing to allow online retailers to sell GW products? Huh? There's only two things that I can think of that would make this situation like Apple's:
1) Apple could stop all retailers other than the online Apple Store from selling Apple products. That isn't true at all.
2) GW could be trying to stop the manufacture of products "compatible" with their own products. Not only is that not the case, it still wouldn't make them much like Apple, because Apple is simply not liscensing some proprietary tech to other companies, while there's nothing proprietary necessay to make minatures.
GW is no more like Apple for not liscensing their tech than it is like Microsoft for not liscensing the internals of WindowsXP to anyone who wants to make a compatible operating system.
I would imagine because Apple has traditionally tried to monopolize the production of their product. If you want a Mac, you have to buy the computer from Apple. If you want a Windows machine, you can buy from Dell, Gateway (ugh), etc, or make it yourself.
Everybody "monopolizes" the production of their product. You can't buy a Dell from Sony, or a Playstation from Nintendo.Games Workshop isn't trying to halt the production of Warhammer products by other companies, or to stop the sale of other companies' miniatures, so none of this is relevant, anyways.
It would seem that GW thinks that by forcing people to come into their stores to buy their products, they will be able to sucker them into buying more than they need. I bet they just lose more customers than they gain
Apple allows retailors other than the Apple Store to sell their computers, so remind me how this is anything like Apple, again?
Dugeons and dragons responsible for society's violence. Yeah right, because we all know how renound ganst* thugs are for smoking crack, jacking cars, and then going back home to play some D&D.
Seriously, people really thought this. In the 80's D&D was a pretty controversial subject, with lots of news stations airing stories about how it caused kids to commit suicide, take up satanism, or take part in ritualistic/occult murder sprees because it "caused them to lose track of the difference between real life and the fantasy world" (sound familiar?). It got to the point where the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) commisioned a study into the game, which later concluded there was no significant link between the game and suicide in teenagers. There's a bit of information on the whole controversy here.
For a sample of the hysteria prevalent at the time, check this out.
Simpson was NOT found "innocent." No one in a US court is EVER found "innocent." He was found "not guilty" - meaning that the jury stated there was not enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Coupled with the fact that he is "innocent until proven guilty", a finding of not guilty is logically equivalent to saying: "Yup, you're innocent".
Seriously, you might as well say "All Sci-Fi movies suck!" just because of the incredible crapitude of Battlefield Earth.
Quick Question...
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 0, Troll
From the kesrith-shonjir-kutath dept.
...
Robert X. Cringely seems to think so. Forget the hardware side: what does this mean to the future of Java? Will there be enough incentive to continue to develop the language for whoever acquires Sun? Or will Java developers have to swallow hard and submit to the whims of the dark overlord? Maybe I'll switch to Mac development, after all.
What in the fuck are you talking about? Is it just me, or is this entire submission one big set of sentence fragments? Cringely thinks so about what? What does what mean to the future of Java??
Yes, reading the story associated with the submission is always a good thing, but do you think you could maybe give us some hint as to what it's about?
Ok... so what's behind the little door in the pyramid?
Another even smaller door. This would go towards my theory that the Ancient Egyptians were actually a race of tiny jack-asses, who built the Pyramids as a giant practical joke on future generations.
Yes, this language is recursively enumerable. But you probably meant to say regular. Recursively enumerable languages are the languages that are decidable by some Turing Machine - that includes a lot of languages. Regular languages are those that correspond to deterministic finite automata, or regexps. There are less of these. (Every regular language is also recursively enumerable, of course.)
Foghorn Leghorn says: Listen to me, I say, listen to me, son. It's, I say, It's a joke. Laugh.
Perl's use of == vs eq is just poor design and has nothing to do with dynamic or static typing.
It has to do with strong vs. weak typing. Using a string comparison operator (similar to perl's eq) on two ints in a strongly typed system would result in a compile error. Using it on two scalar variables in a weakly typed system may or may not result in a runtime error, depending on what kind of user input was read into them, for instance.
You are mistaken. The parent requested examples of occassions when Microsoft has actually pursued an incident of patent infringement by means of litigation, not claims that they would pursue them.
The parent was mistaken in thinking that I had said Microsoft had a history of using Patent litigation as a means to chill Free Software, and in thinking that only a past history of filing patent suits against other companies was relevant in determining their intentions. I had said we can infer Microsoft's intentions based upon their past predatory actions. Microsoft's repeated criminal abuse of its Monopoly status, its actions towards Netscape, Java, DR-DOS, Stac, and countless other products, along with the threatening language they've used towards free software projects like those cited in my post, can be used to easily infer Microsoft's likely intentions.
It's entirely acceptable for any corporation to publicly declare that they would pursue patent infringement in court, because otherwise they would be opening themselves up to shareholder lawsuits. They have a covenant with shareholders to earn money, and not piss it away by allowing their competition to infringe on their patents.
It's entirely legal and acceptable yes, but it is not necessary to prevent shareholder lawsuits. Patents do not need to be enforced to remain valid, unlike Trademarks. Microsoft holds a number of very broad patents which any number of companies could be said to violate, and yet they are not enforcing them. The CIFS licence patent mentioned above is available for use royalty-free, as long as the software is not covered by the GPL or LGPL. By your logic, the shareholders should be sueing Microsoft for not charging royalties to every company making use of that patent, but that hasn't happened at all. And the same example does demonstrate Microsoft's use of patents to hinder the Free Software community.
ASF: changing copyright rules by means of patents
Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software programmer from writing import/export filters for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The programmer wanted interoperability with a format that Microsoft is promoting. But for Microsoft, interoperability is in this case doubly disadvantageous: besides reducing the lock-in effect, on which Microsoft's platform strategy relies, it also can circumvent the locks on unauthorized copying, by which Microsoft wants to attract content providers to its ASF platform. Whereas in the DeCSS case a court ruling was necessary to enforce new draconian copyright provisions of the highly disputed Digital Millenium Act, in the ASF case a simple patent suffices to achieve the same legislative goal.
and
Microsoft bars GNU software from interoperating with CIFS
During the 1st week of April 2002, Microsoft published a license for its new specification CIFS which it is trying to establish as a de facto communication standard. This license says that free software under GNU GPL, LGPL and similar licenses may not use CIFS. It bases this ban on two broad and trivial US patents with priority dates of 1989 and 1993. Preliminary search results suggst that these patents to not have EP (European Patent) counterparts. But there is nevertheless an EP patent which could possibly be used by MS for the same purpose. Critical network infrastructure such as Samba as well as new projects such as Mono seem to be affected.
There's also this account from Linux User (Warning: It's a pdf file):
Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."
There are, I'm sure, other examples which could be provided, but this is just a small sample of Microsoft attitudes with respect to Patents and Free Software.
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of [insert your favorite Deity here], do not go to comp.lang.objective-c without flame protection. The maintainer of the FAQ has some serious issues and an irrational hate for NeXT, Apple, and anyone who programs on those platforms. I don't think that most slashdotters could work up the same viciousness towards Microsoft. It is truly a sight to behold. Keep a logic book handy to see how many fallacies of thought are unleashed.
You mean David Stes is still spewing invective all over that newsgroup?! I stopped reading it years ago because he'd turned it into little more than a non-stop flame-fest, but I'd assumed he would have withered away and died after the huge influx of Cocoa/NeXTStep programmers who must have hit comp.lang.objective-c after OS X hit prime-time.
Is his major problem still the fact that NeXTStep/Cocoa uses +alloc/-init instead of +new?
I'll probably end up buying it and emulating a GameCube, but Unless the 4 players is something we can do while drinking (Hey I'm Canadian, it's our national pasttime!) I don't know if it will require me to buy a GameCube or not.
That will be a neat trick. You have a mini-dvd drive that will read the proprietary format of GCN games, do you? And you know of an actual emulator for the GameCube?
You might not get much compression, but at least you'll know that that 140 meg file you just hauled down isn't corrupt three-quarters of the way through.
Well, everybody, now.
Think hacking this stuff. Think adding a bios "upgrade" to allow booting of any OS. THINK, and don't limit yourself to M$'s intentions. (you could use M$'s bootloader to launch the linux kernel.)
Think DMCA. Think Dmitri. Think Jack-Booted FBI Agents. Think Five-To-Ten. THINK, and realize that M$ WILL exploit theses things.
You mean the IRAN backed shiites that want to install, you guessed it, an IRANIAN style government? Oh, I don't know why. Maybe we would like a country with less tolerance for terrorist organizations between Syria and Iran? Maybe we'd like to see a succesfull democracy between Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia? Isn't that what the Mid-East states fear the most?
Seeing as the majority of Iraqis are, in fact, shiite muslims, should they not be allowed to democratically choose to install an Iranian-style theocracy? Or when we say that we are "bringing democracy to the Iraqis", do we only mean democracy in-so-far as it results in decisions that we approve of?
The more important question is when did the first porn site start?
That afternoon. Knowing college students, it was probably the first thing they created.
It does smack a bit of Apple and Power Computing (remember them?). If a web site is selling their stuff cheaper than they are, and the do a better job of it, then they have to attack.
Funny, I thought the moral of the Apple / Power Computing scenario was:
If a buisness decision to license your technology to a competitor is killing your company, for god sake's stop licenseing the technology!
This situation with GW is just like the one with Apple because "they both stopped selling (different things) to (different people)".
...
You'll have to forgive me if I think that this comparison of GW with Apple amounts to little more than a sour grapes, "I don't like Apple, and I don't like this, so they must be similar" comparisson, rather than a particularly accurate or close one. The original poster could have chosen any company at random and made the same comparison, given the amazing vagueness of these criteria.
How is that anything like GW not allowing online retailers to sell their products?
Apple has shut down potentially profitable business plans (such as the clone plan). GW is doing something similar, only with sales channels instead of licensed clones. IOW, GW is shooting themselves in the foot just like Apple did.
So Apple not liscensing their proprietary technology to other companies so that they could make Apple compatible computers is in your mind just like GW refusing to allow online retailers to sell GW products? Huh? There's only two things that I can think of that would make this situation like Apple's:
1) Apple could stop all retailers other than the online Apple Store from selling Apple products. That isn't true at all.
2) GW could be trying to stop the manufacture of products "compatible" with their own products. Not only is that not the case, it still wouldn't make them much like Apple, because Apple is simply not liscensing some proprietary tech to other companies, while there's nothing proprietary necessay to make minatures.
GW is no more like Apple for not liscensing their tech than it is like Microsoft for not liscensing the internals of WindowsXP to anyone who wants to make a compatible operating system.
I would imagine because Apple has traditionally tried to monopolize the production of their product. If you want a Mac, you have to buy the computer from Apple. If you want a Windows machine, you can buy from Dell, Gateway (ugh), etc, or make it yourself.
Everybody "monopolizes" the production of their product. You can't buy a Dell from Sony, or a Playstation from Nintendo.Games Workshop isn't trying to halt the production of Warhammer products by other companies, or to stop the sale of other companies' miniatures, so none of this is relevant, anyways.
It would seem that GW thinks that by forcing people to come into their stores to buy their products, they will be able to sucker them into buying more than they need. I bet they just lose more customers than they gain
Apple allows retailors other than the Apple Store to sell their computers, so remind me how this is anything like Apple, again?
Dugeons and dragons responsible for society's violence. Yeah right, because we all know how renound ganst* thugs are for smoking crack, jacking cars, and then going back home to play some D&D.
Seriously, people really thought this. In the 80's D&D was a pretty controversial subject, with lots of news stations airing stories about how it caused kids to commit suicide, take up satanism, or take part in ritualistic/occult murder sprees because it "caused them to lose track of the difference between real life and the fantasy world" (sound familiar?). It got to the point where the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) commisioned a study into the game, which later concluded there was no significant link between the game and suicide in teenagers. There's a bit of information on the whole controversy here.
For a sample of the hysteria prevalent at the time, check this out.
Simpson was NOT found "innocent." No one in a US court is EVER found "innocent." He was found "not guilty" - meaning that the jury stated there was not enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Coupled with the fact that he is "innocent until proven guilty", a finding of not guilty is logically equivalent to saying: "Yup, you're innocent".
Crappy Anime is crappy! News at Eleven!
Seriously, you might as well say "All Sci-Fi movies suck!" just because of the incredible crapitude of Battlefield Earth.
From the kesrith-shonjir-kutath dept.
...
Robert X. Cringely seems to think so. Forget the hardware side: what does this mean to the future of Java? Will there be enough incentive to continue to develop the language for whoever acquires Sun? Or will Java developers have to swallow hard and submit to the whims of the dark overlord? Maybe I'll switch to Mac development, after all.
What in the fuck are you talking about? Is it just me, or is this entire submission one big set of sentence fragments? Cringely thinks so about what? What does what mean to the future of Java??
Yes, reading the story associated with the submission is always a good thing, but do you think you could maybe give us some hint as to what it's about?
Ok... so what's behind the little door in the pyramid?
Another even smaller door. This would go towards my theory that the Ancient Egyptians were actually a race of tiny jack-asses, who built the Pyramids as a giant practical joke on future generations.
Yes, this language is recursively enumerable. But you probably meant to say regular. Recursively enumerable languages are the languages that are decidable by some Turing Machine - that includes a lot of languages. Regular languages are those that correspond to deterministic finite automata, or regexps. There are less of these. (Every regular language is also recursively enumerable, of course.)
Foghorn Leghorn says: Listen to me, I say, listen to me, son. It's, I say, It's a joke. Laugh.
Right about ... now.
Including Total Information Awareness thongs...
When they say they want to know everything, they mean Everything.
VME_RAND(r) ( (r)=((r)*0x19660du+0x3c6ef35fu)&VME_MAXINT )
Humor! Looks like a linear-congruential [google.com] generator with lot's and lot's of meaningless obfuscation around.
Christ, that's like finding out that a product advertised as "The World's Fastest Sorting Program" uses Bubble Sort internally.
A preview from next month's Dog House section of the Crypto-Gram.
A One Million bit key? Unbreakable? Schneier is going to have a field day with this one.
Perl's use of == vs eq is just poor design and has nothing to do with dynamic or static typing.
It has to do with strong vs. weak typing. Using a string comparison operator (similar to perl's eq) on two ints in a strongly typed system would result in a compile error. Using it on two scalar variables in a weakly typed system may or may not result in a runtime error, depending on what kind of user input was read into them, for instance.
You are mistaken. The parent requested examples of occassions when Microsoft has actually pursued an incident of patent infringement by means of litigation, not claims that they would pursue them.
The parent was mistaken in thinking that I had said Microsoft had a history of using Patent litigation as a means to chill Free Software, and in thinking that only a past history of filing patent suits against other companies was relevant in determining their intentions. I had said we can infer Microsoft's intentions based upon their past predatory actions. Microsoft's repeated criminal abuse of its Monopoly status, its actions towards Netscape, Java, DR-DOS, Stac, and countless other products, along with the threatening language they've used towards free software projects like those cited in my post, can be used to easily infer Microsoft's likely intentions.
It's entirely acceptable for any corporation to publicly declare that they would pursue patent infringement in court, because otherwise they would be opening themselves up to shareholder lawsuits. They have a covenant with shareholders to earn money, and not piss it away by allowing their competition to infringe on their patents.
It's entirely legal and acceptable yes, but it is not necessary to prevent shareholder lawsuits. Patents do not need to be enforced to remain valid, unlike Trademarks. Microsoft holds a number of very broad patents which any number of companies could be said to violate, and yet they are not enforcing them. The CIFS licence patent mentioned above is available for use royalty-free, as long as the software is not covered by the GPL or LGPL. By your logic, the shareholders should be sueing Microsoft for not charging royalties to every company making use of that patent, but that hasn't happened at all. And the same example does demonstrate Microsoft's use of patents to hinder the Free Software community.
Well, to begin with, there's the Halloween Documents, which include amongst other things the quote:
The effect of patents and copyright in combatting Linux remains to be investigated.
Examples from Here include:
ASF: changing copyright rules by means of patents Microsoft has prohibited a Free Software programmer from writing import/export filters for its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The programmer wanted interoperability with a format that Microsoft is promoting. But for Microsoft, interoperability is in this case doubly disadvantageous: besides reducing the lock-in effect, on which Microsoft's platform strategy relies, it also can circumvent the locks on unauthorized copying, by which Microsoft wants to attract content providers to its ASF platform. Whereas in the DeCSS case a court ruling was necessary to enforce new draconian copyright provisions of the highly disputed Digital Millenium Act, in the ASF case a simple patent suffices to achieve the same legislative goal.
and
Microsoft bars GNU software from interoperating with CIFS During the 1st week of April 2002, Microsoft published a license for its new specification CIFS which it is trying to establish as a de facto communication standard. This license says that free software under GNU GPL, LGPL and similar licenses may not use CIFS. It bases this ban on two broad and trivial US patents with priority dates of 1989 and 1993. Preliminary search results suggst that these patents to not have EP (European Patent) counterparts. But there is nevertheless an EP patent which could possibly be used by MS for the same purpose. Critical network infrastructure such as Samba as well as new projects such as Mono seem to be affected.
There's also this account from Linux User (Warning: It's a pdf file):
Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."
There are, I'm sure, other examples which could be provided, but this is just a small sample of Microsoft attitudes with respect to Patents and Free Software.