NVidia has every reason to want OpenGL to succeed - if it doesn't, Microsoft will rule supreme over the API to NVidia's hardware, and that isn't a healthy situation to be in. As it is, OpenGL gives them some freedom to do their own thing.
However, having mentioned Microsoft... If *someone* does want OpenGL to succeed it is them... If and when OpenGL 3.0 ever appears, I bet there will be some talk of some "unknown party" threatening patent litigation...
Destroying OpenGL is of paramount important to Microsoft, since it will grant them total dominance over 3D graphics. Apple, Linux, Sony (PS3), and other vendors that rely on OpenGL will completely lose their ability to compete.
Sure, that's part of it. But what bothers people is that they couldn't even be bothered to do it properly: write a decent standard, follow proper procedure. They had to go and write a crappy standard, one that is hard to implement, protected with patents, and isn't even followed by their own software, and they resorted to corruption and fraud to get it pushed through the various national standards bodies and ISO.
This is not just about the 800 pound gorilla protecting his turf, it is doing it in a way that shows just how powerful they are. And all those procedures and institutions that are supposed to protect the little man, to ensure fair play? Well, I guess this gorilla is just a little bit to big for them.
Standing around crying because Microsoft bought a standard is only counterproductive and makes you come off looking like a bunch of whiners. This is the important bit, I think: M$ is trying damn hard to get people to believe that all this whining is simply because of *them* instead of their flawed standard or corrupt practices. And they are succeeding, unfortunately. "You are against OOXML? Oh, you are just another rabid Microsoft hater then" --> at that point you have already lost that discussion; no argument of yours will be listened to.
You are apparently involved with KDE, so maybe you can help me understand: what is plasma? I have read a lot of "vision", I have seen a few toys applets, but I cannot seem to get a feel for what is really is and what it will mean.
I don't think having puzzle toys and the weather channel on my desktop is a great revolution, so I must be missing something. But what?
I wasn't talking about risk to the infected computer. When that computer is used in a DoS attack, or a mass mailing, the victim is not the owner of that computer. The owner has already been negligent in not cleaning up the mess, and in doing so it is causing harm to others.
While I don't think this merits harsh punishments, the *possibility* of having to reinstall his system is a fair trade off against the *certainty* of the botnet being used to cause harm to others.
Your confusion is easily explained by stepping back and inspecting your premise. That premise is that people pour money into SCO with the expectation of profit through sales and licensing. In that context there is no sense in pouring more money into them.
Assuming that those investors are not total nitwits, we must therefore look for another premise. I propose this one: "people pour money into SCO with the expectation of profit through delay of Linux take up". You see, that makes sense: SCO casts a shadow of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt over all things Linux (and by extension, over all things Open Source). That shadow is highly beneficial to some parties, since Linux represents a serious threat to their business model.
is it better to allow the botnet to continue unabated, or perhaps to risk crashing a computer controlling a heart monitor somewhere?" I would suggest that if a mission-critical system like that is already infected with a bot, the damage is done -- might as well attempt to clean it at that point. The botnet itself is not harmless, and could just as easily overload or crash the computers in a hospital or powerplant. In other words, doing nothing could potentially be far more harmful than trying to wipe out the botnet.
In light of this, and the tremendous resources being wasted by these botnets, I am strongly in favor of eliminating them entirely.
I wouldn't boast about it on slashdot (or anywhere else) though...
Although "everyone" is not a person and thus does not have a meaning, I think the majority of people would be happy to see a balance here: the artists get paid, and their customers get the type of access they desire. Ask around: I wager almost everyone here is happy to pay for content that they like, even if they have already downloaded it earlier.
And in return for paying for that content, those customers want certain freedoms to deal with it in their own way. That means transferring it to another device, storing it for later replay, and the ability to resell the content later if so desired. It typically does not involve the right to put it on bittorrent though: most of us don't actually care for that. If we give a copy to a friend or neighbour it is because we were raised to be good people, and that means sharing what you own.
Organized content producers see things differently: they want to be paid for every single use, every space- and time-shift, every resale, in perpetuity. They want to be able to take anything they like without paying for it, and incorporate it into their work (or even sell it as their own work). They want huge penalties to deter would-be copyright violators from "stealing" or "pirating" their content. And they want legislative and technical support to stop copyright violation, and push that agenda at the cost of all progress.
Given this extremist viewpoint, customers are rebelling and calling for a counter-movement. That's what you are seeing here. It is not that we don't believe in copyright (we do!), or that we don't want content creators to be paid (we do!), but we detest the extremes the content producers are pushing for and refuse to accept them. We hate the fact that you get off with less punishment if you commit armed assault than if you copy a song - because we can tell the difference between good and evil, and we know that copying a song is, at a fundamental level, a far lesser wrong - or even not wrong at all. Sharing information is, after all, part of the basic human design; we were writing down stories back when we lived in caves and hunted mammoths.
What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? If mathematics were invented, it would allow you to patent them. I wouldn't call that "nothing", it promises to revolutionize the field! And not in a good way...
What you call a matter of perception, others will call a matter of money. What you call people having too much time on their hands, others will call a deceptive push towards more patentability.
More annoying are the kind of people who think that there's some kind of famine of carriage returns.. so they write entire functions sometimes on one line, and *never* leave blank lines. Don't be too sure you will like
the alternative. Because it really isn't
very pretty. In fact it hurts the eyes.
It also makes it very hard to recognize
where the *actual* boundaries between
things are. Notice how the normal flow
of the text is lost here? And how you
completely missed the fact that there are
two paragraphs? Now imagine this happening on
30,000 lines of code that you have to maintain...
They're also often the people who have the 'functions must be x lines or less' mantra drummed into them. They respond by compressing it into less lines:p Yeah, well you know how it is. Just about any programmer (good or bad) can subvert *any* coding standard into utter unreadability.
Sometimes by doing nothing more than just following it, of course...
The TRUE_VAL/FALSE_VAL can be useful when you've got to write cross-platform code. Although why you wouldn't use TRUE and FALSE beats me. Just use "true" and "false" already! We have a standard for this sort of thing, it is called "ISO/IEC 14882:1998". It isn't politics, there is simply no need to expect things like the value of "true" to change;-)
Would you do this?
#define IF if// to defend against possible future changes in the "if" keyword
IF (...) {
}
Because I wouldn't. Not that I haven't encountered it in the wild:-(
The problems happen when someone cargo-cult copies the behavior of another program without understanding why it was done. Here's the weird thing: the person who did this had taught himself a certain pattern, and felt comfortable always working within that pattern. He wasn't actually a bad programmer, he had just picked up some weird habits that made his code look as if it were written by a raving moron.
As far as I can tell, all good programmers teach themselves a set of useful patterns and stick with them. The good thing is that if you review your own code, it is easy to recognize places that don't fit the pattern and thus merit extra consideration. And of course the patterns are easy to write as well, since you never have to think about it.
This is also, I suspect, why things like bracket placement are such a cause for holy wars: it breaks the pattern and therefore makes all the code using the 'wrong' style look like it is highly suspicious. When you hear those alarm bells all the time, of course you will think that code must be very bad - and it will be because of the brackets.
I also suspect that people who state they don't care (about things like bracket placement) don't have any built-in patterns, and tend to think of unique solutions for every little problem. In my experience that usually indicates they are pretty bad programmers, and their code will be messy and unworkable.
I worked with Captain Endif for a while. It gets very, very, VERY tiring at some point. Especially in cases like this:
#define TRUE_VAL true #define FALSE_VAL false// if theVar is true
if (theVar == TRUE_VAL) {// set theVar to false
theVar = FALSE_VAL; }// end if
(I made this up, but sadly it is not that far removed from actual examples...)
I also worked with a guy (another one) who left a blank line between every two lines of code. ALWAYS.
Anyway, if you are in the neighbourhood, feel free to come over to our office. If you forgot your golf club I'm sure we can rig something using parts from the paper cutter or something...
Honest question. With so much actual literature out there, what's the fascination with the second rate fantasy of Tolkein? Let me put it in a way you might understand: if Tolkien were a car, then the Lord of the Rings would be a big, shiny Rolls Royce. And The Hobbit would be a cute little Smart.
(for the humor impaired, look at the parent posters' username...)
AmigaOS had its kernel in ROM, and could be patched on the fly. That was back in 1985, so even if it was patented, it isn't now.
The patching function was not an accident either; there was an OS-function for this purpose. Originally it was intended to allow bug-fixed to be installed without having to change the ROM, but it was quickly coopted into a mechanism for enhancing the OS in various other ways as well.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why the opinion of a Star Trek character is at all newsworthy. What's next? Commander Data wants to be free? Wesley Crusher posting on slashdot?
Yeah. I work in the space industry. I am currently looking at equipment that needs to survive temperatures from -200C to +200C, in a 10-7mbar vacuum (i.e. there is no heat conduction through the atmosphere, so you can forget about fans). *That* is an extreme environment.
What is described here is merely the room temperature range preferred by my two colleagues (I think they are both weird, but that's another story).
Are we talking about the same thing here? I didn't mean ads in general, I meant ads on pages where luckless surfers misspell a subdomain for some reason. Surely it cannot be millions...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a better question is, "what player would Microsoft want you to buy when you buy a Bluray player?". I'm sure the answer is not "a PS3"...
So what choice do they have, really?
...NOT want to succeed. Microsoft does NOT want OpenGL to succeed.
But you knew that already.
NVidia has every reason to want OpenGL to succeed - if it doesn't, Microsoft will rule supreme over the API to NVidia's hardware, and that isn't a healthy situation to be in. As it is, OpenGL gives them some freedom to do their own thing.
However, having mentioned Microsoft... If *someone* does want OpenGL to succeed it is them... If and when OpenGL 3.0 ever appears, I bet there will be some talk of some "unknown party" threatening patent litigation...
Destroying OpenGL is of paramount important to Microsoft, since it will grant them total dominance over 3D graphics. Apple, Linux, Sony (PS3), and other vendors that rely on OpenGL will completely lose their ability to compete.
That's ONE word.
Sure, that's part of it. But what bothers people is that they couldn't even be bothered to do it properly: write a decent standard, follow proper procedure. They had to go and write a crappy standard, one that is hard to implement, protected with patents, and isn't even followed by their own software, and they resorted to corruption and fraud to get it pushed through the various national standards bodies and ISO.
This is not just about the 800 pound gorilla protecting his turf, it is doing it in a way that shows just how powerful they are. And all those procedures and institutions that are supposed to protect the little man, to ensure fair play? Well, I guess this gorilla is just a little bit to big for them.
The question is of course, how to counter this?
You are apparently involved with KDE, so maybe you can help me understand: what is plasma? I have read a lot of "vision", I have seen a few toys applets, but I cannot seem to get a feel for what is really is and what it will mean.
I don't think having puzzle toys and the weather channel on my desktop is a great revolution, so I must be missing something. But what?
I can already count the rooftiles on my house using Google Earth. Are you telling me there is a version that is even more high-res?
And you are forgetting one important use: it is *FUN* to look around the worlds' oceans!
Your post reads as if it were written for Don Lafontaine ;-) Not that that is a bad thing, of course...
"In a world...
Where 5 days last forever...
A week never goes by...
A lawn never gets mowed..."
I wasn't talking about risk to the infected computer. When that computer is used in a DoS attack, or a mass mailing, the victim is not the owner of that computer. The owner has already been negligent in not cleaning up the mess, and in doing so it is causing harm to others.
While I don't think this merits harsh punishments, the *possibility* of having to reinstall his system is a fair trade off against the *certainty* of the botnet being used to cause harm to others.
Your confusion is easily explained by stepping back and inspecting your premise. That premise is that people pour money into SCO with the expectation of profit through sales and licensing. In that context there is no sense in pouring more money into them.
Assuming that those investors are not total nitwits, we must therefore look for another premise. I propose this one: "people pour money into SCO with the expectation of profit through delay of Linux take up". You see, that makes sense: SCO casts a shadow of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt over all things Linux (and by extension, over all things Open Source). That shadow is highly beneficial to some parties, since Linux represents a serious threat to their business model.
In light of this, and the tremendous resources being wasted by these botnets, I am strongly in favor of eliminating them entirely.
I wouldn't boast about it on slashdot (or anywhere else) though...
Although "everyone" is not a person and thus does not have a meaning, I think the majority of people would be happy to see a balance here: the artists get paid, and their customers get the type of access they desire. Ask around: I wager almost everyone here is happy to pay for content that they like, even if they have already downloaded it earlier.
And in return for paying for that content, those customers want certain freedoms to deal with it in their own way. That means transferring it to another device, storing it for later replay, and the ability to resell the content later if so desired. It typically does not involve the right to put it on bittorrent though: most of us don't actually care for that. If we give a copy to a friend or neighbour it is because we were raised to be good people, and that means sharing what you own.
Organized content producers see things differently: they want to be paid for every single use, every space- and time-shift, every resale, in perpetuity. They want to be able to take anything they like without paying for it, and incorporate it into their work (or even sell it as their own work). They want huge penalties to deter would-be copyright violators from "stealing" or "pirating" their content. And they want legislative and technical support to stop copyright violation, and push that agenda at the cost of all progress.
Given this extremist viewpoint, customers are rebelling and calling for a counter-movement. That's what you are seeing here. It is not that we don't believe in copyright (we do!), or that we don't want content creators to be paid (we do!), but we detest the extremes the content producers are pushing for and refuse to accept them. We hate the fact that you get off with less punishment if you commit armed assault than if you copy a song - because we can tell the difference between good and evil, and we know that copying a song is, at a fundamental level, a far lesser wrong - or even not wrong at all. Sharing information is, after all, part of the basic human design; we were writing down stories back when we lived in caves and hunted mammoths.
What you call a matter of perception, others will call a matter of money. What you call people having too much time on their hands, others will call a deceptive push towards more patentability.
the alternative. Because it really isn't
very pretty. In fact it hurts the eyes.
It also makes it very hard to recognize
where the *actual* boundaries between
things are. Notice how the normal flow
of the text is lost here? And how you
completely missed the fact that there are
two paragraphs? Now imagine this happening on
30,000 lines of code that you have to maintain... They're also often the people who have the 'functions must be x lines or less' mantra drummed into them. They respond by compressing it into less lines
Sometimes by doing nothing more than just following it, of course...
Would you do this?
#define IF if
IF (...) {
}
Because I wouldn't. Not that I haven't encountered it in the wild
As far as I can tell, all good programmers teach themselves a set of useful patterns and stick with them. The good thing is that if you review your own code, it is easy to recognize places that don't fit the pattern and thus merit extra consideration. And of course the patterns are easy to write as well, since you never have to think about it.
This is also, I suspect, why things like bracket placement are such a cause for holy wars: it breaks the pattern and therefore makes all the code using the 'wrong' style look like it is highly suspicious. When you hear those alarm bells all the time, of course you will think that code must be very bad - and it will be because of the brackets.
I also suspect that people who state they don't care (about things like bracket placement) don't have any built-in patterns, and tend to think of unique solutions for every little problem. In my experience that usually indicates they are pretty bad programmers, and their code will be messy and unworkable.
I worked with Captain Endif for a while. It gets very, very, VERY tiring at some point. Especially in cases like this:
// if theVar is true
// set theVar to false // end if
#define TRUE_VAL true
#define FALSE_VAL false
if (theVar == TRUE_VAL) {
theVar = FALSE_VAL;
}
(I made this up, but sadly it is not that far removed from actual examples...)
I also worked with a guy (another one) who left a blank line between every two lines of code. ALWAYS.
Anyway, if you are in the neighbourhood, feel free to come over to our office. If you forgot your golf club I'm sure we can rig something using parts from the paper cutter or something...
(for the humor impaired, look at the parent posters' username...)
AmigaOS had its kernel in ROM, and could be patched on the fly. That was back in 1985, so even if it was patented, it isn't now.
The patching function was not an accident either; there was an OS-function for this purpose. Originally it was intended to allow bug-fixed to be installed without having to change the ROM, but it was quickly coopted into a mechanism for enhancing the OS in various other ways as well.
I really need to work on my subtle delivery more ;-)
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why the opinion of a Star Trek character is at all newsworthy. What's next? Commander Data wants to be free? Wesley Crusher posting on slashdot?
This is a good start: http://web.mit.edu/lienhard/www/ahtt.html
Yeah. I work in the space industry. I am currently looking at equipment that needs to survive temperatures from -200C to +200C, in a 10-7mbar vacuum (i.e. there is no heat conduction through the atmosphere, so you can forget about fans). *That* is an extreme environment.
What is described here is merely the room temperature range preferred by my two colleagues (I think they are both weird, but that's another story).
So what does it do, apart from loading the XML?
Are we talking about the same thing here? I didn't mean ads in general, I meant ads on pages where luckless surfers misspell a subdomain for some reason. Surely it cannot be millions...