Tom Cruise's evil twin?
Or is it the other way around?
Re:a glossary
on
Rails Recipes
·
· Score: 3, Informative
low-flash coding - The 'flash' is a small area that keeps things around until the next transaction. You should use it just to pass error messages from a failure of some type. Some programmers try to get tricky and use the flash as a psuedo session. Rails supports sessions fully and you should use the session for your needs. Getting tricky is usually a sign you don't really know what your doing in Rails.
So just have your legal department contact MS and work through the licensing that will allow you to do this.
What? You don't have a legal department, and you can't afford to hire a law firm for something as trivial as setting up a virtual machine.
Gee, I guess that means that you won't be able to test the software you are writing against the Vista HOME platform in a cost effective manner. So you will either have to get out of that business, or release substandard software for that platform.
Microsoft's rule change will result in either increasing your costs, or decreasing your quality of product. either way they are reducing your ability to effectively compete with them in the free market. They are undercutting competition by manipulating the legal rules, as opposed to using direct head to head competition in the free market. Your product may not even compete directly with any of their existing products, but you still form a potential threat. You may be the next Linus Torvalds or David Heinemeier Hansson.
Reducing competition helps to protect their monopoly, or so they believe.
Of course, you may want to contact a lawyer that specializes in Class Action lawsuits. Get them to think of all of the web developers they can represent who are have their product's cost effectiveness reduced by this anti-competitive move from a convicted monopolist who is known to settle lawsuits quickly out of Court. Heck, you could make some law firm rich, and maybe even see a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars in settlement money!
I think its more that Dvorak is almost completely clueless, but is very well spoken and is a good writer. He sounds competent to the PHB's, but to anylone who is familiar with the GPL and open source, he sounds like a complete ignoramous.
All GPL'd code must be copyrighted. The GPL cannot be applied to public domain software, and it cannot make proprietary code into public domain code. Just read the GPL. The GPL and Copyright go hand in hand.
So no matter how well he writes, he just comes off as an idiot.
Since so many paople take him seriously, this leads to the flame wars over the well written non-sense he prints.
classify anything that detects their malware as malware
rent space on all the zombified Windows boxes to spammers
profit
retire early
Thanks Microsoft, you are working so hard to make all those black hat crackers life easy! (and for finally removing that pesky ???? that kept getting in the way of profit here at slashdot)
I think I'll invest in retirement villas in the Caspian Sea area.
"We are glad that Microsoft has made this commitment."
We at Google plan on spending less than 10% of what Microsoft does in the next year.
We also plan on more than doubling our revenue in the next year."
My favorite Bill G. quote is his support of software piracy in China and the third world:
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Just like the neighborhood pusher. "Come on kids, the first hit is free..."
Talk of a framework to replace J++ started in late 1998/ early 1999, but Visual Studio.NET was released in January of 2002.
So if any developer claims to have more than 4 years experience they are either lying, or they worked with Omni VM. If they know about Colusa and Omni VM, they are probably telling the truth about their experience level.
Those nifty AJAXified updating stock quotes are using an XmlHTTPRequest.
The XmlHTTPRequest was developed by Microsoft and later implemented in other browsers.
Its been around a long time, and MS never really did much with it.
It took a bunch of open source coders to make anything cool or useful with it.
But MS should get the props for inventing it.
It is the one example of innovation I can think of from them that has ever amounted to something.
I think the fact that Microsoft avoids innovation like the plague is actually one of their secrets to profit and success.
Bill gates stole the code for his first basic compiler out of a dumpster at Dartmouth. Let others innovate, and just sell their hard work as yours. Kaching$$
Bill gates says he bought QDOS, Digital says he just licensed it. Let others innovate, and just sell their hard work as yours. Kaching$$
Ie? Spyglass. Let others innovate, and just sell their hard work as yours. Kaching$$
NT? OS/2 and VAX. Let others innovate, and just sell their hard work as yours. Kaching$$
Access? Foxpro? Let others innovate, and just sell their hard work as yours. Kaching$$
Let others waste their time and money innovating. Innovation is for the losers. Wait, stall, and make empty vaporware promises, then buy someone else's finished product at the last minute and rebrand it as yours.
It has always made them the most profitable software vendor in the past, why should they change now?
I live in Chicago. There ar e a lot of great neighborhoods with parks, great schools(the parochial ones), houses have backtards and there's great public transportation. Why people who work in the city want to live in the suburbs is a complete puzzle to me.
I have a half an hour commute each way by bike spring through fall, and ride the el in the winter for a 40 minute commute.
I've lost weight since I started riding, and feel great. My kids love the city, and when we visit friends in the burbs they do that 'are we there yet?' thing because of all the traffic snarls out in that suburban wasteland.
I've lived in a rural town with fewer than 10,000 people. I've lived in a city with several million people. You won't get me to live in the suburbs. It has nothing good to offer.
Sadly the idea of 'defensive patents' only works against other high tech companies with product based revenue streams to protect. It doesn't provide a defense against patent trolls.
The big software companies thought they had a great way to protect them selves from any up and coming, young, innovative start-ups that might compete with them. Create huge war chests of silly software patents and form an old-boys club. All the usual suspects IBM, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others joined in. They've got what they've got and they want to keep it.
If you were already established, you could cross license your patents with the other already established old-boys, and keep doing business. But if some upstart comes along you could charge them money to license your patents, reducing their profitability. That would reduce their ability to threaten your profitability. If the up-start couldn't afford to pay, buy them out cheap. If the people behind the upstart wanted profit, they would either pay or sell because they couldn't profit or gain investors if people thought their products infringed one of the old-boy's patents.
This works against upstarts that have actual products to sell, but the patent trolls just want money. Now that the old-boys have created a system that grants and enforces silly software patents, the patent trolls can buy up defunct tech companies for pennies on the dollar just for their patent portfolios. If the old-boys threaten to use their 'defensive patents' to stop the trolls from selling their products, the trolls just laugh. The trolls don't sell any products. They just sue rich old-boys.
The old-boys created a system of software patents that they thought would help them cripple innovative young competitors, and it does work the way they intended. However they also created a system that could be exploited by patent trolls that have nothing to lose. The old-boys have to decide if the benefits of the added government regulation provided by software patents outweighs the cost of paying tolls to the trolls.
Remember what patents are. Patents are government granted, time limited monopolies. Patents are anti-competitive tools. They are anti-free market devices used to reduce competition in the market place. Supporting increased "Intellectual Property" rights is not a conservative economic position, it is definitely a socialist position that believes the government is better at picking winners and losers in the market place than market forces are. If you support increases in patents copyrights and trademarks, you support liberal economic theories. The constitution already set limits on the length of patents. Patents need to be non-obvious and original. I've seen laws that have changed the way patents work, but I haven't seen any constitutional amendments.
When the mac book pros first came out one of the mac journalists did a compare with the Dell dual core 17" laptop and found the Dell to be more expensive than the 15.4" mac.
Dell now offers a 15.4" dual core laptop. If you configure it with Windows media edition and similar hardware it is about $300.00 less than the mac book pro.
My guess would be that the Apple hardware is probably a little higher end than the Dell, accounting fo rthe difference. Still $300.00 bucks is a small difference for a top of the line mac OS/x machine compared to a Dell with Windows. You get all the developer tools on the OS/x dvd. Do Windows users get a full version of Visual Studio.net?
You can get the Hyundai for $1699.00, or the Mercedes for $1999.00. Which one is the better bargain?
There still out of my price range.
All I know is that Rails works well on Macs, Windows and Linux. So I've got an amd64 3000 Turion w/1Gb ram (self upgraded from 256MB), running Mepis Linux for under $900.
I do have TextMate envy, though!
The 13" mac book will be out in a few months, and that will start around $999.
In the Windows/Linux world, Amd64 notebooks seem to be tthe best bang for the buck right now. I don't think OS/X software is taking full advantage for the Intel dual core processor yet. Heck, Win xp doesn't take advantage of the 64 bit stuff in the AMD64 yet. For that you need Linux or BSD. The gentoo / slackware crowd probably has a port to the dual core optimized. Thy're pretty quick.
I am waiting for Vincente Fox to make a speech echoing Ronald Reagan's speech to Gorbachev...
"Señor Bush, tear down that wall, and set your people free."
You are half right. Our Intelligence groups are too busy spying on their own citizens. So The NSA, the CIA and Military Intelligence groups have decided to outsource much of this work to Chinese subcontractors.
Of Course many non-intelligence government workers are worried about the Chinese intelligence agencies using Chinese made PC's to spy on Americans, so The CIA, et all, had to make sure that our citizens and officials would be willing to accept laptops from China.
So that is why they cooked up this investigation. The investigation will conclude that there is no way the Lenovo laptops could be used as spying devices, and they will all be given some high level sounding acronym to stamp them as 'approved'.
Of course, the truth is that the laptops will be crammed full of spy technology. The spying on American citizens will be outsourced to the Chinese. And, of course, the CIA and NSA can get back to spending their time surfing Russian porn sites, Uhm, I mean collecting intelligence.
The Chinese will be allowed to keep 10% of the data collected for their own use as payment for their services.:)
If you think this is far fetched, you should look into the real purpose of the Glomar Challenger in the 70's and the press cover stories on searching for 'silicon nodules' on the sea floor use to give cover to the operation.
In the SCO v IBM lawsuit, after the pipe deals between SCO and RBC and SCO and Baystar became known, and the fact that Microsoft pointed the RBC and Baystar Pipe faries in SCO's direction, IBM made 4 patent claims against SCO.
IBM has since dropped those claims in order to expedite the case (get it over in 100 years instead of 300).
One of the patents was for displaying information in a hierarchical format. Surely SCO UNIX displays data in a hierarchical format, as can most OS's.
So what's the point?
Well, I believe the patent claims were not aimed at SCO, but were shots across the bow of anyone trying to back SCO. The pipe deals, Microsoft, and Sun started to pump money into SCO. Next thing you know IBM steps up and says we have a patent that covers displaying information in a hierarchical format.
Suddenly Microsoft and Sun loose interest in SCO. Could you imagine an injunction on the sale of Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Office? Do you think Microsoft really wants to try to go toe to toe with IBM. IBM has a pretty serious set of grudges to settle wih Microsoft, and can probably ante up 10 patents for each 1 that MS can put up.
IBM's patent claims were never aimed at SCO, but at any one that might back SCO.
Heck this is IBM. The probably have a patent on using bytes with eight bits!
OIN is trying to create the same kind of reprisal situation for open source. If Monkey Boy and his minions want to take Linux or Mono to Court, let him. He might have to explain to Microsoft's shareholders why Vista will have to be delayed another 12 or 18 months while Microsoft re-writes code that potentially infringes on OIN held patents.
Lets see Ballmer try. I think I know who'll blink first.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Linux (I know, blah blah blah).
I have never used itunes or their drm'd music.
I just copy songs from my linux computer or my cd's to the ipod.
gtkpod does just fine.
There are about three or four other Linux apps that let you use your ipod as well.
If you don't like Apple's DRM policies, just don't use itunes. I'm sure there must be Windows and Mac apps that work with the ipods other than itunes.
If you don't like Microsoft's DRM use the competition. If there is not an equivalent app for your needs, try sponsoring one.
That's what BSD is for!
Tom Cruise's evil twin? Or is it the other way around?
So just have your legal department contact MS and work through the licensing that will allow you to do this.
What? You don't have a legal department, and you can't afford to hire a law firm for something as trivial as setting up a virtual machine.
Gee, I guess that means that you won't be able to test the software you are writing against the Vista HOME platform in a cost effective manner. So you will either have to get out of that business, or release substandard software for that platform.
Microsoft's rule change will result in either increasing your costs, or decreasing your quality of product. either way they are reducing your ability to effectively compete with them in the free market. They are undercutting competition by manipulating the legal rules, as opposed to using direct head to head competition in the free market. Your product may not even compete directly with any of their existing products, but you still form a potential threat. You may be the next Linus Torvalds or David Heinemeier Hansson.
Reducing competition helps to protect their monopoly, or so they believe.
Of course, you may want to contact a lawyer that specializes in Class Action lawsuits. Get them to think of all of the web developers they can represent who are have their product's cost effectiveness reduced by this anti-competitive move from a convicted monopolist who is known to settle lawsuits quickly out of Court. Heck, you could make some law firm rich, and maybe even see a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars in settlement money!
MS is already shaking down the school kids.
I think its more that Dvorak is almost completely clueless, but is very well spoken and is a good writer. He sounds competent to the PHB's, but to anylone who is familiar with the GPL and open source, he sounds like a complete ignoramous. All GPL'd code must be copyrighted. The GPL cannot be applied to public domain software, and it cannot make proprietary code into public domain code. Just read the GPL. The GPL and Copyright go hand in hand. So no matter how well he writes, he just comes off as an idiot. Since so many paople take him seriously, this leads to the flame wars over the well written non-sense he prints.
For your point #2 you can check this list of manufacturers that sell pc's with Linux pre-installed and with no os installed.
Now the black hats can
Thanks Microsoft, you are working so hard to make all those black hat crackers life easy! (and for finally removing that pesky ???? that kept getting in the way of profit here at slashdot)
I think I'll invest in retirement villas in the Caspian Sea area.
These lates mainframes use air cooled chips, further reducing costs.
Funny how the highest end Intel based servers are now water cooled.
:)
Googles press release in response...
"We are glad that Microsoft has made this commitment."
We at Google plan on spending less than 10% of what Microsoft does in the next year.
We also plan on more than doubling our revenue in the next year."
"Does Microsoft plan on doubling their revenue?"
middle of this article.
Dan Bricklin mentions it.
I can't find the interview though.
My favorite Bill G. quote is his support of software piracy in China and the third world:
Just like the neighborhood pusher. "Come on kids, the first hit is free..."
They bought .NET and the CLR from Colusa Software.
It was called Omni VM.
Talk of a framework to replace J++ started in late 1998/ early 1999, but Visual Studio .NET was released in January of 2002.
So if any developer claims to have more than 4 years experience they are either lying, or they worked with Omni VM. If they know about Colusa and Omni VM, they are probably telling the truth about their experience level.
There is a two part answer to that.
Those nifty AJAXified updating stock quotes are using an XmlHTTPRequest.
The XmlHTTPRequest was developed by Microsoft and later implemented in other browsers.
Its been around a long time, and MS never really did much with it.
It took a bunch of open source coders to make anything cool or useful with it.
But MS should get the props for inventing it.
It is the one example of innovation I can think of from them that has ever amounted to something.
I think the fact that Microsoft avoids innovation like the plague is actually one of their secrets to profit and success.
Let others waste their time and money innovating. Innovation is for the losers. Wait, stall, and make empty vaporware promises, then buy someone else's finished product at the last minute and rebrand it as yours.
It has always made them the most profitable software vendor in the past, why should they change now?
Why should we complain?
We finally have a government that listens to us!
I live in Chicago. There ar e a lot of great neighborhoods with parks, great schools(the parochial ones), houses have backtards and there's great public transportation. Why people who work in the city want to live in the suburbs is a complete puzzle to me.
I have a half an hour commute each way by bike spring through fall, and ride the el in the winter for a 40 minute commute.
I've lost weight since I started riding, and feel great. My kids love the city, and when we visit friends in the burbs they do that 'are we there yet?' thing because of all the traffic snarls out in that suburban wasteland.
I've lived in a rural town with fewer than 10,000 people. I've lived in a city with several million people. You won't get me to live in the suburbs. It has nothing good to offer.
Sadly the idea of 'defensive patents' only works against other high tech companies with product based revenue streams to protect. It doesn't provide a defense against patent trolls.
The big software companies thought they had a great way to protect them selves from any up and coming, young, innovative start-ups that might compete with them. Create huge war chests of silly software patents and form an old-boys club. All the usual suspects IBM, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others joined in. They've got what they've got and they want to keep it.
If you were already established, you could cross license your patents with the other already established old-boys, and keep doing business. But if some upstart comes along you could charge them money to license your patents, reducing their profitability. That would reduce their ability to threaten your profitability. If the up-start couldn't afford to pay, buy them out cheap. If the people behind the upstart wanted profit, they would either pay or sell because they couldn't profit or gain investors if people thought their products infringed one of the old-boy's patents.
This works against upstarts that have actual products to sell, but the patent trolls just want money. Now that the old-boys have created a system that grants and enforces silly software patents, the patent trolls can buy up defunct tech companies for pennies on the dollar just for their patent portfolios. If the old-boys threaten to use their 'defensive patents' to stop the trolls from selling their products, the trolls just laugh. The trolls don't sell any products. They just sue rich old-boys.
The old-boys created a system of software patents that they thought would help them cripple innovative young competitors, and it does work the way they intended. However they also created a system that could be exploited by patent trolls that have nothing to lose. The old-boys have to decide if the benefits of the added government regulation provided by software patents outweighs the cost of paying tolls to the trolls.
Remember what patents are. Patents are government granted, time limited monopolies. Patents are anti-competitive tools. They are anti-free market devices used to reduce competition in the market place. Supporting increased "Intellectual Property" rights is not a conservative economic position, it is definitely a socialist position that believes the government is better at picking winners and losers in the market place than market forces are. If you support increases in patents copyrights and trademarks, you support liberal economic theories. The constitution already set limits on the length of patents. Patents need to be non-obvious and original. I've seen laws that have changed the way patents work, but I haven't seen any constitutional amendments.
When the mac book pros first came out one of the mac journalists did a compare with the Dell dual core 17" laptop and found the Dell to be more expensive than the 15.4" mac. Dell now offers a 15.4" dual core laptop. If you configure it with Windows media edition and similar hardware it is about $300.00 less than the mac book pro. My guess would be that the Apple hardware is probably a little higher end than the Dell, accounting fo rthe difference. Still $300.00 bucks is a small difference for a top of the line mac OS/x machine compared to a Dell with Windows. You get all the developer tools on the OS/x dvd. Do Windows users get a full version of Visual Studio .net?
You can get the Hyundai for $1699.00, or the Mercedes for $1999.00. Which one is the better bargain?
There still out of my price range.
All I know is that Rails works well on Macs, Windows and Linux. So I've got an amd64 3000 Turion w/1Gb ram (self upgraded from 256MB), running Mepis Linux for under $900.
I do have TextMate envy, though!
The mac books have been out a few months: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/wo/0.RSLID?mco=7ADAF62A&nclm=MacBook Pro
The mac mini is a fine desktop starting under $600: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/wo/0.RSLID?mco=7DD91D41&nclm=Macmini
The 13" mac book will be out in a few months, and that will start around $999.
In the Windows/Linux world, Amd64 notebooks seem to be tthe best bang for the buck right now. I don't think OS/X software is taking full advantage for the Intel dual core processor yet. Heck, Win xp doesn't take advantage of the 64 bit stuff in the AMD64 yet. For that you need Linux or BSD. The gentoo / slackware crowd probably has a port to the dual core optimized. Thy're pretty quick.
I am waiting for Vincente Fox to make a speech echoing Ronald Reagan's speech to Gorbachev... "Señor Bush, tear down that wall, and set your people free."
You are half right. Our Intelligence groups are too busy spying on their own citizens. So The NSA, the CIA and Military Intelligence groups have decided to outsource much of this work to Chinese subcontractors.
Of Course many non-intelligence government workers are worried about the Chinese intelligence agencies using Chinese made PC's to spy on Americans, so The CIA, et all, had to make sure that our citizens and officials would be willing to accept laptops from China.
So that is why they cooked up this investigation. The investigation will conclude that there is no way the Lenovo laptops could be used as spying devices, and they will all be given some high level sounding acronym to stamp them as 'approved'.
Of course, the truth is that the laptops will be crammed full of spy technology. The spying on American citizens will be outsourced to the Chinese. And, of course, the CIA and NSA can get back to spending their time surfing Russian porn sites, Uhm, I mean collecting intelligence.
The Chinese will be allowed to keep 10% of the data collected for their own use as payment for their services. :)
If you think this is far fetched, you should look into the real purpose of the Glomar Challenger in the 70's and the press cover stories on searching for 'silicon nodules' on the sea floor use to give cover to the operation.
Good point despisethesun...
In the SCO v IBM lawsuit, after the pipe deals between SCO and RBC and SCO and Baystar became known, and the fact that Microsoft pointed the RBC and Baystar Pipe faries in SCO's direction, IBM made 4 patent claims against SCO.
IBM has since dropped those claims in order to expedite the case (get it over in 100 years instead of 300).
One of the patents was for displaying information in a hierarchical format. Surely SCO UNIX displays data in a hierarchical format, as can most OS's.
So what's the point?
Well, I believe the patent claims were not aimed at SCO, but were shots across the bow of anyone trying to back SCO. The pipe deals, Microsoft, and Sun started to pump money into SCO. Next thing you know IBM steps up and says we have a patent that covers displaying information in a hierarchical format.
Suddenly Microsoft and Sun loose interest in SCO. Could you imagine an injunction on the sale of Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Office? Do you think Microsoft really wants to try to go toe to toe with IBM. IBM has a pretty serious set of grudges to settle wih Microsoft, and can probably ante up 10 patents for each 1 that MS can put up.
IBM's patent claims were never aimed at SCO, but at any one that might back SCO.
Heck this is IBM. The probably have a patent on using bytes with eight bits!
OIN is trying to create the same kind of reprisal situation for open source. If Monkey Boy and his minions want to take Linux or Mono to Court, let him. He might have to explain to Microsoft's shareholders why Vista will have to be delayed another 12 or 18 months while Microsoft re-writes code that potentially infringes on OIN held patents.
Lets see Ballmer try. I think I know who'll blink first.
That just goes to show you...
If government bureaucrats Like Cheney would just privatize these things it would be much more efficient.
Why I'm sure that a private sector professional would have been able to shoot many more than one friend with a 28-gauge shotgun.
These politicians have to learn more about the inevitability of free market economics.