A Tivo competitor could indeed create their own hardware and run Tivo's code on it.
But that wouldn't do any damn good! Ever since the beginning, the point of the GPL was to enable users to control their own property. For example, the whole Free Software movement started because of RMS's printer. Would RMS have been satisfied getting that source code to his printer if he couldn't modifiy it and make it run on the original device? Obviously not! By that example, it follows that TiVo's strategy has been unethical from day one -- it's not just contrary to the GPLv3, but to v2 and even v1 as well.
Well, Microsoft is pathological. But the question remains: if BSD is really so superior, why are so many companies (not just the "big guns" like Novell, Red Hat, and IBM, but also ones like Trolltech, MySQL, etc.) betting the farm on the GPL instead?
And the companies that try Linux (Tivo, Cisco) are treated as the enemy by GPLv3.
First of all, what's Cisco's problem with the GPLv3? Second of all, what TiVo did was always wrong. The GPLv3 only gives legal weight to the ethos that existed all along.
There's already a fork - samba-tng - and we don't know what's happening to that yet.
Uh, yeah we do. According to its Wikipedia entry, it's pretty much dead. It's at version 0.4.99, which was released almost two years ago, and apparently hasn't had more than "minimal" development since it was forked:
Samba TNG was forked in late 1999...
Since 2000, development on Samba TNG has been minimal...
Microsoft will never sue - they know that the only thing they can do is amke noises. Actually suing would be the equivalent of a first strike in a MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - scenario, which they would ultimately lose.
Not to mention that it would be like Alas, Babylon, where near the end of the story it talks about the US getting aid from places like Latin America: this kind of fight would destroy the computing industry in countries that upheld software patents but wouldn't affect anywhere else.
Maybe it's not as "bad" as Zero Wing in terms of insufficient development, but considering more recent events concerning the main character, the premise(rescuing little girls) is hilariously wrong! I figured that it deserves amention here.
One of our strengths is that enlisted men and field-grade officers are in control of the day-to-day things. If the shit hits the fan, as long as they are decent men and women, we can trust that it won't get but so bad.
At the risk of Godwin-ing myself, the WWII concentration camps (and, for that matter, POW camps with horrible conditions in e.g. the Civil War, etc.) were run by enlisted men and field-grade officers too.
Reminds me.. a friend of mine in college had multiple professors (I think it was department policy) who would only accept document submissions in PDF format.
If I were a college professor, I'd do the same thing. The reason is simply that PDF (and Postscript, but that's essentially the same thing) is the only document format designed for that purpose. Besides, once you start getting up into level that you're writing real research papers, you are (or should be) using LaTeX along with tools that generate eps (encapsulated postscript) anyway, so it's easier to generate PDF output than it would be to use kindergarden formats to begin with.
Stuff like Publisher and Pagemaker describes what everything looks like and where it goes.In contrast, stuff like XHTML ignore that and instead specify what everything (semantically) is, which is why it's not a problem that it looks different in different contexts (e.g. a Firefox window vs. a cellphone browser vs. a printout). In other words, say you had a page with a title. XHTML would mark this up as <h1>[title text]</h1> while a publishing format might describe it as a sequence of bezier splines at particular coordinates relative to the paper.
So what does this mean for formats like ODF and OOXML? Well, they're sort of a "hybrid" between the publishing formats and the semantic formats -- they try to have a mix of layout and stucture. But that's not really possible, so instead of doing one thing well they end up doing neither, or ending up mediocre at best.
It reads like Microsoft putting into words every single quirk their products have ever had
I'm convinced that OOXML is not the result of somebody at Microsoft actually designing a standard, but rather the result of somebody reverse-engineering and documenting the existing Office software.
The purpose they serve is to provide a means for converted legacy documents to retain information that would otherwise be lost.
But that's the wrong way to do it! You don't say "do it the way Word 95 did," you actually specify how it did it and then mark it up with the appropriate tags. For example, say italics in Word 95 were tilted 20 degrees. You don't mark that up as "<Word95Italics>[foo]</Word95Italics>", you mark it up as "<italics tilt="20 degrees">[foo]</italics>"!
Besides, backwards compatibility doesn't belong in the document format, it belongs in the software that translates between the formats. It's only in OOXML because the "document format" is a glorified memory dump of the software that implements it, and are thus inseperable.
Sometimes I wonder whether Microsoft can implement the standard either. I suspect that the reason they say "like Word 95 does" is that they have a functional code base that works that way, and they couldn't possibly tell you the details of *how* it works (if you've worked at large enough software company this will sound familiar).
Not only is this exactly what I believe is happening, it's exactly what I've been trying to tell you for the last two posts!
However, most people find most standards really hard to read and complain that they can't possibly be implemented, so I hesitate to take such claims at face value.
I'm not complaining about it being hard to read, I'm talking about it literally saying things like "format the text the way Word 95 does it," which would require somebody wanting to implement the standard to reverse-engineer Word 95! The reason Microsoft is the only entity that can possibly implement the standard is because the standard is just (incomplete) documentation of how Office already works, hacks to provide a semblence of version compatibility and all.
Maybe it's just me, but It seems that the OOXML format is intentionally large/bloated and hard to implement.
Intentional? No. It's merely the result of some poor sod documenting the Office formats, which are essentially dumps of the programs' internal state. What you see is merely the consequence of the fact that Office is held together with spit, bailing wire, and the curséd blood of sacrificed Microsoft H1-b programmers.
Now Microsoft is at least willing to describe "what Microsoft did" in this new arena.
No, it's not! Even with infinite allowance for ugliness, the sewage that Microsoft is trying to foist upon everyone isn't even sufficiently complete enough to write an independent implementation with! You can't have a standard that says "do it the way $foo did it;" you have to at least actually describe how $foo did do it. Microsoft has failed to do even that!
Ah, how I would love to take advantage of "location, location, location"... too bad the vast majority of laptops and digital cameras don't come with it built-in!
(On that note, does anybody happen to know of a reasonably-priced Type II PC card GPS that doesn't stick out of the slot? I'd like to get one that I can just leave in the slot at all times (including when it's in my bag, hence the need for it not to stick out).
non-CO2 emmiting technology (nuclear, solar, wind, "clean coal" if that isn't just pure hype)
As far as "non-CO2 emitting" goes, "clean coal" is hype -- it has carbon in it to begin with; where do you think it's gonna go? IIRC, what "clean coal" actually means is just burning coal with reduced soot (particulates), sulfur, and NOx output.
Ooooo... seven thousand! Wow, that sure is a heck of a lot of people!
Oh, wait, no it's not -- even my university has more people than that, even if you only count students! You don't see us whining about a billion-dollar bridge (paid for by other people, of course), now do you?!
A bridge that big and expensive might -- might -- be justified for a real city like Fairbanks or Anchorage, but it sure as hell isn't justified for a podunk little shithole like that!
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But that wouldn't do any damn good! Ever since the beginning, the point of the GPL was to enable users to control their own property. For example, the whole Free Software movement started because of RMS's printer. Would RMS have been satisfied getting that source code to his printer if he couldn't modifiy it and make it run on the original device? Obviously not! By that example, it follows that TiVo's strategy has been unethical from day one -- it's not just contrary to the GPLv3, but to v2 and even v1 as well.
Well, Microsoft is pathological. But the question remains: if BSD is really so superior, why are so many companies (not just the "big guns" like Novell, Red Hat, and IBM, but also ones like Trolltech, MySQL, etc.) betting the farm on the GPL instead?
First of all, what's Cisco's problem with the GPLv3? Second of all, what TiVo did was always wrong. The GPLv3 only gives legal weight to the ethos that existed all along.
Uh, yeah we do. According to its Wikipedia entry, it's pretty much dead. It's at version 0.4.99, which was released almost two years ago, and apparently hasn't had more than "minimal" development since it was forked:
Not to mention that it would be like Alas, Babylon, where near the end of the story it talks about the US getting aid from places like Latin America: this kind of fight would destroy the computing industry in countries that upheld software patents but wouldn't affect anywhere else.
Maybe it's not as "bad" as Zero Wing in terms of insufficient development, but considering more recent events concerning the main character, the premise(rescuing little girls) is hilariously wrong! I figured that it deserves amention here.
At the risk of Godwin-ing myself, the WWII concentration camps (and, for that matter, POW camps with horrible conditions in e.g. the Civil War, etc.) were run by enlisted men and field-grade officers too.
Wow, I've heard of some weird, kinky shit, but that's a new one!
If I were a college professor, I'd do the same thing. The reason is simply that PDF (and Postscript, but that's essentially the same thing) is the only document format designed for that purpose. Besides, once you start getting up into level that you're writing real research papers, you are (or should be) using LaTeX along with tools that generate eps (encapsulated postscript) anyway, so it's easier to generate PDF output than it would be to use kindergarden formats to begin with.
Stuff like Publisher and Pagemaker describes what everything looks like and where it goes.In contrast, stuff like XHTML ignore that and instead specify what everything (semantically) is, which is why it's not a problem that it looks different in different contexts (e.g. a Firefox window vs. a cellphone browser vs. a printout). In other words, say you had a page with a title. XHTML would mark this up as <h1>[title text]</h1> while a publishing format might describe it as a sequence of bezier splines at particular coordinates relative to the paper.
So what does this mean for formats like ODF and OOXML? Well, they're sort of a "hybrid" between the publishing formats and the semantic formats -- they try to have a mix of layout and stucture. But that's not really possible, so instead of doing one thing well they end up doing neither, or ending up mediocre at best.
I'm convinced that OOXML is not the result of somebody at Microsoft actually designing a standard, but rather the result of somebody reverse-engineering and documenting the existing Office software.
But that's the wrong way to do it! You don't say "do it the way Word 95 did," you actually specify how it did it and then mark it up with the appropriate tags. For example, say italics in Word 95 were tilted 20 degrees. You don't mark that up as "<Word95Italics>[foo]</Word95Italics>", you mark it up as "<italics tilt="20 degrees">[foo]</italics>"!
Besides, backwards compatibility doesn't belong in the document format, it belongs in the software that translates between the formats. It's only in OOXML because the "document format" is a glorified memory dump of the software that implements it, and are thus inseperable.
Hey, nobody ever said you couldn't attribute malice and stupidity!
Also, by the way: you're ranting at the choir. Cut it out.
WTF?! Open-note tests are one thing, but open-Internet?!
Not only is this exactly what I believe is happening, it's exactly what I've been trying to tell you for the last two posts!
I'm not complaining about it being hard to read, I'm talking about it literally saying things like "format the text the way Word 95 does it," which would require somebody wanting to implement the standard to reverse-engineer Word 95! The reason Microsoft is the only entity that can possibly implement the standard is because the standard is just (incomplete) documentation of how Office already works, hacks to provide a semblence of version compatibility and all.
Intentional? No. It's merely the result of some poor sod documenting the Office formats, which are essentially dumps of the programs' internal state. What you see is merely the consequence of the fact that Office is held together with spit, bailing wire, and the curséd blood of sacrificed Microsoft H1-b programmers.
No, it's not! Even with infinite allowance for ugliness, the sewage that Microsoft is trying to foist upon everyone isn't even sufficiently complete enough to write an independent implementation with! You can't have a standard that says "do it the way $foo did it;" you have to at least actually describe how $foo did do it. Microsoft has failed to do even that!
It's in Nowhere, about 500 miles past Middle.
Ah, how I would love to take advantage of "location, location, location"... too bad the vast majority of laptops and digital cameras don't come with it built-in!
(On that note, does anybody happen to know of a reasonably-priced Type II PC card GPS that doesn't stick out of the slot? I'd like to get one that I can just leave in the slot at all times (including when it's in my bag, hence the need for it not to stick out).
Nah, Western Eurpoe would have lost entirely, and fallen under NAZIism instead.
As far as "non-CO2 emitting" goes, "clean coal" is hype -- it has carbon in it to begin with; where do you think it's gonna go? IIRC, what "clean coal" actually means is just burning coal with reduced soot (particulates), sulfur, and NOx output.
Do the people in Australia and NZ realize that humans could eat rabbits?
Ooooo... seven thousand! Wow, that sure is a heck of a lot of people!
Oh, wait, no it's not -- even my university has more people than that, even if you only count students! You don't see us whining about a billion-dollar bridge (paid for by other people, of course), now do you?!
A bridge that big and expensive might -- might -- be justified for a real city like Fairbanks or Anchorage, but it sure as hell isn't justified for a podunk little shithole like that!
A traditional touch-screen monitor can only read one touch at a time.