I've been watching this situation as it developed... I'm a very.. avid Trillian user. I highly doubt that the sole purpose of this was to block alternative clients. Why would they give a two weeks' warning, when the Trillian developers especially are known for releasing connectivity patches right when the problem occurs? (Remember back when AIM blocked Trillian... February 2002? There were five patched versions of Trillian released within a three-week period. That seems to say that there's not much chance in keeping alternative clients out by simply changing the protocol.
I consider the MSN deal a completely different one from the Yahoo issue. MSN has publicly announced that there will be licensing for their protocol - which is great by me. That ensurance that I'm using completely legal software is always a plus.
Yahoo, on the other hand, is a different story. They've not really made much comment about alternative IM aside from the "byproduct" comment. They seem to really be avoiding the issue. My theory here is that they decided it was time to upgrade everything... maybe spammers were the driving force, maybe not. Then, someone noticed that it was causing these alternative clients to have fits. Was it a byproduct of their changes? Yes. Was it unwanted? No. I think this was simply a case of "accidental genius."
SCO won't want to settle on this one. If they do that, it makes it look like everything else they've said is a lie. This issue is really at the core of the whole SCO debate.
Those may be more stable, but X itself has problems. If there's a problem with the underlying support libraries to a program, there's problems with that program - whether or not the code of that program is actually where the problem lies.
Those are the real problems. I just got a new HP (complain all you want, it was cheap and it had a DVD burner) with an 80 GB drive... open it up and look at the size of C: (D: was a backup) and we've got 71 GB. Luckily I moved the 80 GB hard drive from my older computer into that one. That 9 GB doesn't hurt me so much anymore.
Yeah, they've been having issues ever since 2.0 came out a week ago. They've decided to give priority to downloads over the forums. They were hitting user counts on the forums that hadn't been approached since February of 2002, when AIM was blocking Trillian from connecting.
I've heard the same from a lot of people. I wish that the prices of Tablet PCs would come down, because they seem to be a lot more viable than your everyday PDA, and the size isn't as bad as dragging around your laptop. They are obviously much more powerful, and can do nearly anything that your home PC can... you just have to pay for it.
Technology amazes me. One of my computers that I still actively use is actually slower than that PDA there that is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than it. Wow.
I do know that my large amount of time spent on IRC in the past has helped my reading skills... both with normal reading and reading the often-found typos on IRC. You learn to decipher these things a lot better, especially when you spend a lot of time explaining things to AOL lusers. I wonder what kind of results you would get from people who have never used the Internet before... those who haven't acquired a habit of dealing with mistyped words... It would definitely be an interesting experiment.
Why do you have to write code and documentation to be a member of the free software community? A few people willing to do some "tech support" (i.e. answering questions) on a free software project's mailing list or message board can be invaluable to the general public's satisfaction with the project. It allows the developers to focus their energies on development, while still providing some modicum of help to those who need it.
Many people are citizens of the United States. A lot of them don't vote in elections. Does that make them not be a citizen? How about those who don't work in politics? Are they not citizens?
However, you still have X and KDE taking up space on the disc, where there may be other things you'd rather have on a true text-only disc. I, for one, would love to see a "Toppix."
The point is that there are claims by SCO that Linux developers changed little elements of the code that they allegedly stole from SCO (similar to how you would plagiarize a report in middle school and change a few words so it wasn't a verbatim copy;). It would be much harder to discover using a computer program that such code was the same.
What I see from the article is that it can only compare whether two code snippets are exactly alike (which makes sense from the standpoint of MD5 - they're really only useful for equality checks) - and from the claims that are being thrown around about obfuscating the supposedly legal code, that isn't going to help much of anything.
the real solution to this is to always do boolean expressions like: if(NULL = myPointer) {..} that way you always get an error if you forget == instead of =.
You mean like how you forgot to use ==, right?
On the other hand, that lost business has to go somewhere. As in, to the other companies. So it follows that since all of the companies are losing business over this, they will all get it back, just as different customers... in other words, this is really offset by everyone who will be leaving their other providers.
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I've been watching this situation as it developed... I'm a very.. avid Trillian user. I highly doubt that the sole purpose of this was to block alternative clients. Why would they give a two weeks' warning, when the Trillian developers especially are known for releasing connectivity patches right when the problem occurs? (Remember back when AIM blocked Trillian... February 2002? There were five patched versions of Trillian released within a three-week period. That seems to say that there's not much chance in keeping alternative clients out by simply changing the protocol. I consider the MSN deal a completely different one from the Yahoo issue. MSN has publicly announced that there will be licensing for their protocol - which is great by me. That ensurance that I'm using completely legal software is always a plus. Yahoo, on the other hand, is a different story. They've not really made much comment about alternative IM aside from the "byproduct" comment. They seem to really be avoiding the issue. My theory here is that they decided it was time to upgrade everything... maybe spammers were the driving force, maybe not. Then, someone noticed that it was causing these alternative clients to have fits. Was it a byproduct of their changes? Yes. Was it unwanted? No. I think this was simply a case of "accidental genius."
If they concede this case, they might as well give up the whole deal. This is really the platform that their whole anti-Linux case is built upon.
SCO won't want to settle on this one. If they do that, it makes it look like everything else they've said is a lie. This issue is really at the core of the whole SCO debate.
It's about 68.35 miles.
Looks like evidence that the Verisign search is at least slightly tainted? ;)
If there was any doubt that Microsoft all but owns Intel, let it be resolved now.
Those may be more stable, but X itself has problems. If there's a problem with the underlying support libraries to a program, there's problems with that program - whether or not the code of that program is actually where the problem lies.
Those are the real problems. I just got a new HP (complain all you want, it was cheap and it had a DVD burner) with an 80 GB drive... open it up and look at the size of C: (D: was a backup) and we've got 71 GB. Luckily I moved the 80 GB hard drive from my older computer into that one. That 9 GB doesn't hurt me so much anymore.
Trillian's already there. Those guys are good.
Yeah, they've been having issues ever since 2.0 came out a week ago. They've decided to give priority to downloads over the forums. They were hitting user counts on the forums that hadn't been approached since February of 2002, when AIM was blocking Trillian from connecting.
I've heard the same from a lot of people. I wish that the prices of Tablet PCs would come down, because they seem to be a lot more viable than your everyday PDA, and the size isn't as bad as dragging around your laptop. They are obviously much more powerful, and can do nearly anything that your home PC can... you just have to pay for it.
Technology amazes me. One of my computers that I still actively use is actually slower than that PDA there that is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than it. Wow.
I do know that my large amount of time spent on IRC in the past has helped my reading skills... both with normal reading and reading the often-found typos on IRC. You learn to decipher these things a lot better, especially when you spend a lot of time explaining things to AOL lusers. I wonder what kind of results you would get from people who have never used the Internet before... those who haven't acquired a habit of dealing with mistyped words... It would definitely be an interesting experiment.
But can you actually make phone calls with it?
Why do you have to write code and documentation to be a member of the free software community? A few people willing to do some "tech support" (i.e. answering questions) on a free software project's mailing list or message board can be invaluable to the general public's satisfaction with the project. It allows the developers to focus their energies on development, while still providing some modicum of help to those who need it. Many people are citizens of the United States. A lot of them don't vote in elections. Does that make them not be a citizen? How about those who don't work in politics? Are they not citizens?
However, you still have X and KDE taking up space on the disc, where there may be other things you'd rather have on a true text-only disc. I, for one, would love to see a "Toppix."
The point is that there are claims by SCO that Linux developers changed little elements of the code that they allegedly stole from SCO (similar to how you would plagiarize a report in middle school and change a few words so it wasn't a verbatim copy ;). It would be much harder to discover using a computer program that such code was the same.
What I see from the article is that it can only compare whether two code snippets are exactly alike (which makes sense from the standpoint of MD5 - they're really only useful for equality checks) - and from the claims that are being thrown around about obfuscating the supposedly legal code, that isn't going to help much of anything.
the real solution to this is to always do boolean expressions like: if(NULL = myPointer) {..} that way you always get an error if you forget == instead of =. You mean like how you forgot to use ==, right?
It should actually give you much better bandwidth than a standard 802.11 antenna. 78 Mb/s??
On the other hand, that lost business has to go somewhere. As in, to the other companies. So it follows that since all of the companies are losing business over this, they will all get it back, just as different customers... in other words, this is really offset by everyone who will be leaving their other providers.