Reading stories like this must make the last few europeans that still generally have sympathetic feelings towards the US 'defect'.
I recon myself to be one of those. And yes I do know that not every american is to blame for such arrogant and stupid behaviour, but still, I begin to understand why the USA are so much hated in many parts of the world.
The arrogance and one sidedness (unilateralism) is getting to the point that it is simply unacceptable, also to people who always felt that the US are our allies such as myself.
The US may think they don't need anyones sympathy, that they can 'rule the world' on their own. That laws of others don't apply to the US, but that US laws are somehow more just and apply anywhere in the world (and if not, such countries must be pressured into modifying their laws under threat of trade boycotts etc). I however think this is a big mistake and gets the US into deeper trouble.
I know some 'patriotic' people will qualify this as flamebait, but remember whether you agree or not, whether you like it or not, what I write still in very mild terms (coming from a european with over-average sympathetic feelings towards the US) what more than 90% of europeans are feeling by actions like this.
Criticising other peoples for such 'infidelity' (i.e. being arrogant in the eyes of people with constructive criticism) won't cause such feelings to go away, on the contrary. I don't think it is helpful for the US to loose its last remaining allies in the world.
Structurally, China resembles Japan more than Japan resembles the USA. Both China and Japan (even if they call themselves quite differently) have a privatized system, but with a lot of influence and regulation by the government. In Japan, the ministry of economic affairs regulates everything, make sure no important companies go bankrupt (massive interventions and subsidies if necessary), coordinates and forces companies to cooperate in order to strengthen Japans position in the world etc.
Really, there is virtually no difference in Japan and China these days. If any, I'd say China's system is more dynamic.
Even if they don't feel bound to the license, they still might desire code release- either to take some worldwide market-share from Microsoft (and hurt a leading symbol of US capitalism),
Ironically, MSFT's condemnation of the GPL as being 'communist' might have gotten the Chinese thinking about it. For them, this condemnation must have sounded as a recommendation.
If China proves it can do without Wintel, it will be a huge example for other parts of the world. In a way, MSFT's 'condemnation' of the GPL might have been the beginning of their end.
Not always the law is changed when massively broken: In Holland they introduce measuring your average speed on a certain trajectory (so shortly breaking for a camera won't help), everything detected fully automatically, even sending out the bill to pay the fine. If you don't pay, the fine is raised.
This works very well (it would not work if everybody would refuse to pay the fine). Which only shows that with very well organized law enforcement and heavy penalties you can make it very hard to reach the critical mass.
I use VNC to display vmware (running win2k) on, so I can disconnect and reconnect at a later time (while rebooting my client PC:).
However, for real interactive GUI work VNC is absolutely no match to a decent X11 implementation. VNC is nice to remotely control and disconnect/reconnect to sessions, but for GUI over LAN access, X11 is the only sensible option.
1. windows client with X-window server, linux server
2. vmware, run either windows + linux in vmware or linux + windows in vmware (depending on the operating system where you need native I/O and graphics speed the most).
I use both option 1 and 2. A windows desktop for games etc., and fullscreen X-window access to my linux server (running X-windows fullscreen you get a 100% illusion that you're working directly on a linux/unix system). The server also runs vmware with a win2000, for some long-running windows programs such as P2P leeching or mpeg2 rendering. I prefer to do that on the server, since running games tends to cause frequent reboots/crashes on my windows client.
While acknowledging that.Net is still in its early stages, HP Services chief Ann Livermore said now is the time to start selling companies on the idea of using Web services to automate their businesses.
This suggests that web services ==.net, which is nonsense. One of the selling points of web services allegedly is that it is platform independant and portable, not depending on a single technology such as.net.
Deceitful strategy, first they try to sell web services because of said platform independance, then the next step is to suggest that you need.net to build web services, leading to vendor lock in.
USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property.
The purpose of any university should be to promote and foster the advance of knowledge/science. Whether knowledge as a property (IP) is the best method to do so is, at best, of secondary importance, a means to reach that goal. It cannot be a goal in itself.
In that sense I think this is a very very strange statement.
The only valid reason to not allow it is that a public institution should abide by the law, and the law forbids it (just like murder, rape etc). So whether the universtity agrees with this law or not (that is irrelevant) it cannot tolerate students and staff to break the law using their facilities.
Therefore, the first sentence in the quote is redundant.
Actually, the keyboard could have been much more useful, like in Opera. In Opera amost any normal key is bound to some useful operation. The con is that incremental search must be activated before (by pressing ctrl-f). Since in mozilla no plain key (without alt or control) has a function, it was possible to use them directly for type ahead find.
I think it is a waste of keys. It is better to activate type ahead find with some key (such as/) so that any other plain key could be bound to some operation.
Linux didn't succeed commercially because of the GPL, but in spite of.
BSD could and would have done better, were it not for the License problems they were having with AT&T in the early 90's. This held them up a lot, and in the meantime Linux got the attention and popularity.
Look in VS.NET, all documentation and sample code for C# and VB.NET comes from the same source.
C++ samples are completely different (it is a really different language, with templates, MI etc).
In the VS.NET sample code there is a toggle that switches between VS.NET and C#. Really, the two are 100% equivalent, only the syntax differs.
I think that most traditional VB programmers shall stumble with VB.NET. Superficially they may think it is still the same language, but in reality it is totally different from what they knew. Only few of those can grasp VB/C#.NET.
The survivors come mainly from C++ background; for those, the C# syntax shall have more appeal.
The other 'features' like ACL and other control-freak tings, they were only an annoyance (in fact ACL still is one of the things I generally despise; they encourage an admin to make a quick permission exception, leading to a mess without concept in a short time).
I remember end of the 80s, every physics department was dumping VMS and moving to UNIX (sometimes on new hardware, sometimes on VAX hardware). We all were so relieved to get a nice and elegant environment instead.
For VMS with its lead-heavy process model for example, the "UNIX building box" philosophy is alien. You don't have a shell starting small subprocesses all the time, possibly combining them using pipes. The 'everything is a file' concept doesn't exist, so you have different system calls for handling each kind of device (i.e. multitudes of system calls compared to the small and orthagonal well though out set of UNIX system calls). In short, it is just like WNT:)
I don't think Apple would suddenly be just another PC vendor. Porting OS-X to Intel CPU's does not mean Apple would adopt the complete PC architecture for their future hardware. I am almost certain they would make non-PC compatible Intel hardware.
Apple has no reason to stop their excellent strategy of close marriage between non-commodity, thus predictable, hardware and their operating system. I do think they develop the Intel version in order to be able to switch CPU, should the Power PC CPU not work out well, not in order to become just another PC vendor.
And of course they want to keep it highly secret, since it would be very damaging to current hardware sales once people start to think another CPU switch (like 680x0 -> power in the past) making the current hardware obsolete.
And this article brings back bad memories, nightmares. I have always hated this unelegant, bulky and heavy operating system.
At the time I didn't know better, but had a vague idea that it must be possible to make something better. Luckily other VAX users had thought so a long time ago, and ported UNIX to VAX.
Then after 1 year of VMS we got our first UNIX machine (a Convex minisuper) and then I saw the light. In my opinion, UNIX and VMS were two opposites in almost any aspect. Using UNIX was a joy, it was elegant, efficient and interesting.
I have never been able to understand how (later) in a single company two such opposite culters could stay together (in DEC, the UNIX and VMS groups) and it turned out, not surprisingly, they could not.
Everyone who likes UNIX and who knows both UNIX and VMS well cannot but hate VMS. I bet many, like me, still wake at night sometimes due to a nightmare about VMS. In that respect, WNT is a worthy VMS++ indeed.
As a matter of principle. First, many Linux developers are not from the US, and software patents don't apply there (in many places). Second, ignoring them on a high-profile and highly respected project as the Linux kernel is an excellent way to show lawmakers how damaging and morally wrong these patents are. It is much clearer than whining and avoiding them, which has already been proven to be ineffective.
It would be great if, maybe in a year, with many businesses already depending on Linux (including many jobs), suddenly it turns out that Linux is heavily infringing on a number of software patents. What do you think would happen: would the US ban Linux from the US (it would remain legal in lots of other countries). That would really look good and be a huge catalyst for a public debate on this issue (it has failed to get the public's attention up to now).
And no matter what they try, noone can stop the volunteer developers all over the world. Only US businesses would be hit.
Look smart-ass, usually I use emacs for almost everything (it is almost my operating system), and syntax coloring is no problem with emacs either.
But since I have to work in a real company with real 'normal' java coders, and it has advantages that all developers use the same tools, JBuilder does have its use. Do you really think the average (read mediocre) developer can set up his own environment to run a development servlet engine and use emacs with JDE or whatever?
Bad developer productivity?!? Not at all. We develop using JBuilder, which comes with tomcat built in and allows for very effective development.
Since I like the development and production environment to be as much alike as possible, we also run tomcat for production (on an important 1000-user intranet application for a large bank). We run it stand alone to avoid problems with the connectors. I see no reason not to, since all our pages are dynamic so Apache would not bring any speed advantage, it would only be an extra relay/bottleneck between the servlet engine and the browser.
Don't worry about your DVD+R drive with more expensive media: This will change soon.
In Europe, where DVD-R never took off and DVD+R is already more common, media prices are about the same.
At the moment, DVD-R stocks are being sold, which is why DVD-R is cheaper temporarily.
What is much more important in the long term is what PC vendors are currently shipping; that will become the real mass market and thus cheaper. All but Apple chose DVD+R.
MD exists in europe (here in switzerland and also in germany) but it has not taken over, definately not. In switzerland, MP3 players are more common, cassettes are still in use, and MD reach its top maybe 2 years ago. It is slowly dying out.
Some of the big players also sell those players. For example this site shows how to "hack" philips players.
Philips sold its (music) content business some years ago (Polygram); I think they saw coming the problems that the content providers would get in the digital age, and as a traditional HW vendor they didn't want to get into conflict with themselves.
At least it is beneficial to the 'researcher'. It is an interesting and challenging research topic, one must admit. And it gives good chance for generous grants from certain industries.
Yes, and there are also order of magnitude more dbm installations (namely every unix system in existance) than any other SQL RDB.
I once needed a 'quick and dirty', mainly fast database, and used perl + tied hash files (dbm) to put my 'tables' in. Just as similar to a real RDBMS as mysql is (apart from superficial sql-like syntax), and even much more widespread in terms of installations.
If you really already have SQL, then chances that it runs on Mysql are very small. Really, for the limited subset of SQL that Mysql supports, using something SQL based is not worth the trouble.
In that case, better use some kind of file-based storage yourself (such as dbm files) and do it really fast and low level.
This 'free market' principle does not always work. Sometimes the free market is in a deadlock between
consumers don't want something that is no supply for
producers don't want to produce something that is no demand for
This is called the 'network effect' (which is the reason why software, being very susceptible by this effect, very much tends to monopolism and why free market principles do not work well for software).
In such cases, regulators must help the market to take a hurdle. Same for digital TV: as soon as the market has been pushed over the hurdle, a mass market is created where there is enough supply for digital TV, thus also enough demand from consumers. The mass market shall also make it cheap very quickly, removing the objectives that some may have now. In the end people get better products (quality), and less bandwidth is wasted.
Digital TV has taken off in the satellite market on its own, because this market was still so young that it wasn't locked into a current situation (i.e. the network effect). Digital TV for satellite has clearly shown the advantages for everybody.
It is good the government stimulates such good developments. In the end the government cannot make the economy, but it has the responsibility to create good conditions for the economy to flourish: take such hurdles, correct errors that free market may create such as monopolies, act against greedy topmanagers that undermine the publics trust in companies etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading stories like this must make the last few europeans that still generally have sympathetic feelings towards the US 'defect'.
I recon myself to be one of those. And yes I do know that not every american is to blame for such arrogant and stupid behaviour, but still, I begin to understand why the USA are so much hated in many parts of the world.
The arrogance and one sidedness (unilateralism) is getting to the point that it is simply unacceptable, also to people who always felt that the US are our allies such as myself.
The US may think they don't need anyones sympathy, that they can 'rule the world' on their own. That laws of others don't apply to the US, but that US laws are somehow more just and apply anywhere in the world (and if not, such countries must be pressured into modifying their laws under threat of trade boycotts etc). I however think this is a big mistake and gets the US into deeper trouble.
I know some 'patriotic' people will qualify this as flamebait, but remember whether you agree or not, whether you like it or not, what I write still in very mild terms (coming from a european with over-average sympathetic feelings towards the US) what more than 90% of europeans are feeling by actions like this.
Criticising other peoples for such 'infidelity' (i.e. being arrogant in the eyes of people with constructive criticism) won't cause such feelings to go away, on the contrary. I don't think it is helpful for the US to loose its last remaining allies in the world.
Structurally, China resembles Japan more than Japan resembles the USA. Both China and Japan (even if they call themselves quite differently) have a privatized system, but with a lot of influence and regulation by the government. In Japan, the ministry of economic affairs regulates everything, make sure no important companies go bankrupt (massive interventions and subsidies if necessary), coordinates and forces companies to cooperate in order to strengthen Japans position in the world etc.
Really, there is virtually no difference in Japan and China these days. If any, I'd say China's system is more dynamic.
Ironically, MSFT's condemnation of the GPL as being 'communist' might have gotten the Chinese thinking about it. For them, this condemnation must have sounded as a recommendation.
If China proves it can do without Wintel, it will be a huge example for other parts of the world. In a way, MSFT's 'condemnation' of the GPL might have been the beginning of their end.
Not always the law is changed when massively broken: In Holland they introduce measuring your average speed on a certain trajectory (so shortly breaking for a camera won't help), everything detected fully automatically, even sending out the bill to pay the fine. If you don't pay, the fine is raised.
This works very well (it would not work if everybody would refuse to pay the fine). Which only shows that with very well organized law enforcement and heavy penalties you can make it very hard to reach the critical mass.
I use VNC to display vmware (running win2k) on, so I can disconnect and reconnect at a later time (while rebooting my client PC :).
However, for real interactive GUI work VNC is absolutely no match to a decent X11 implementation.
VNC is nice to remotely control and disconnect/reconnect to sessions, but for GUI over LAN access, X11 is the only sensible option.
1. windows client with X-window server, linux server
2. vmware, run either windows + linux in vmware or linux + windows in vmware (depending on the operating system where you need native I/O and graphics speed the most).
I use both option 1 and 2. A windows desktop for games etc., and fullscreen X-window access to my linux server (running X-windows fullscreen you get a 100% illusion that you're working directly on a linux/unix system). The server also runs vmware with a win2000, for some long-running windows programs such as P2P leeching or mpeg2 rendering. I prefer to do that on the server, since running games tends to cause frequent reboots/crashes on my windows client.
This suggests that web services ==
Deceitful strategy, first they try to sell web services because of said platform independance, then the next step is to suggest that you need
The purpose of any university should be to promote and foster the advance of knowledge/science. Whether knowledge as a property (IP) is the best method to do so is, at best, of secondary importance, a means to reach that goal. It cannot be a goal in itself.
In that sense I think this is a very very strange statement.
The only valid reason to not allow it is that a public institution should abide by the law, and the law forbids it (just like murder, rape etc). So whether the universtity agrees with this law or not (that is irrelevant) it cannot tolerate students and staff to break the law using their facilities.
Therefore, the first sentence in the quote is redundant.
Actually, the keyboard could have been much more useful, like in Opera. In Opera amost any normal key is bound to some useful operation. The con is that incremental search must be activated before (by pressing ctrl-f). Since in mozilla no plain key (without alt or control) has a function, it was possible to use them directly for type ahead find.
/) so that any other plain key could be bound to some operation.
I think it is a waste of keys. It is better to activate type ahead find with some key (such as
Linux didn't succeed commercially because of the GPL, but in spite of.
BSD could and would have done better, were it not for the License problems they were having with AT&T in the early 90's. This held them up a lot, and in the meantime Linux got the attention and popularity.
Look in VS.NET, all documentation and sample code for C# and VB.NET comes from the same source.
C++ samples are completely different (it is a really different language, with templates, MI etc).
In the VS.NET sample code there is a toggle that switches between VS.NET and C#. Really, the two are 100% equivalent, only the syntax differs.
I think that most traditional VB programmers shall stumble with VB.NET. Superficially they may think it is still the same language, but in reality it is totally different from what they knew. Only few of those can grasp VB/C#.NET.
The survivors come mainly from C++ background; for those, the C# syntax shall have more appeal.
Thus, VB shall die.
Yes, clustering was ahead of its time.
:)
The other 'features' like ACL and other control-freak tings, they were only an annoyance (in fact ACL still is one of the things I generally despise; they encourage an admin to make a quick permission exception, leading to a mess without concept in a short time).
I remember end of the 80s, every physics department was dumping VMS and moving to UNIX (sometimes on new hardware, sometimes on VAX hardware). We all were so relieved to get a nice and elegant environment instead.
For VMS with its lead-heavy process model for example, the "UNIX building box" philosophy is alien. You don't have a shell starting small subprocesses all the time, possibly combining them using pipes. The 'everything is a file' concept doesn't exist, so you have different system calls for handling each kind of device (i.e. multitudes of system calls compared to the small and orthagonal well though out set of UNIX system calls). In short, it is just like WNT
I don't think Apple would suddenly be just another PC vendor. Porting OS-X to Intel CPU's does not mean Apple would adopt the complete PC architecture for their future hardware. I am almost certain they would make non-PC compatible Intel hardware.
Apple has no reason to stop their excellent strategy of close marriage between non-commodity, thus predictable, hardware and their operating system. I do think they develop the Intel version in order to be able to switch CPU, should the Power PC CPU not work out well, not in order to become just another PC vendor.
And of course they want to keep it highly secret, since it would be very damaging to current hardware sales once people start to think another CPU switch (like 680x0 -> power in the past) making the current hardware obsolete.
And this article brings back bad memories, nightmares. I have always hated this unelegant, bulky and heavy operating system.
At the time I didn't know better, but had a vague idea that it must be possible to make something better. Luckily other VAX users had thought so a long time ago, and ported UNIX to VAX.
Then after 1 year of VMS we got our first UNIX machine (a Convex minisuper) and then I saw the light. In my opinion, UNIX and VMS were two opposites in almost any aspect. Using UNIX was a joy, it was elegant, efficient and interesting.
I have never been able to understand how (later) in a single company two such opposite culters could stay together (in DEC, the UNIX and VMS groups) and it turned out, not surprisingly, they could not.
Everyone who likes UNIX and who knows both UNIX and VMS well cannot but hate VMS. I bet many, like me, still wake at night sometimes due to a nightmare about VMS. In that respect, WNT is a worthy VMS++ indeed.
As a matter of principle. First, many Linux developers are not from the US, and software patents don't apply there (in many places). Second, ignoring them on a high-profile and highly respected project as the Linux kernel is an excellent way to show lawmakers how damaging and morally wrong these patents are. It is much clearer than whining and avoiding them, which has already been proven to be ineffective.
It would be great if, maybe in a year, with many businesses already depending on Linux (including many jobs), suddenly it turns out that Linux is heavily infringing on a number of software patents. What do you think would happen: would the US ban Linux from the US (it would remain legal in lots of other countries). That would really look good and be a huge catalyst for a public debate on this issue (it has failed to get the public's attention up to now).
And no matter what they try, noone can stop the volunteer developers all over the world. Only US businesses would be hit.
Look smart-ass, usually I use emacs for almost everything (it is almost my operating system), and syntax coloring is no problem with emacs either.
But since I have to work in a real company with real 'normal' java coders, and it has advantages that all developers use the same tools, JBuilder does have its use. Do you really think the average (read mediocre) developer can set up his own environment to run a development servlet engine and use emacs with JDE or whatever?
Bad developer productivity?!? Not at all. We develop using JBuilder, which comes with tomcat built in and allows for very effective development.
Since I like the development and production environment to be as much alike as possible, we also run tomcat for production (on an important 1000-user intranet application for a large bank). We run it stand alone to avoid problems with the connectors. I see no reason not to, since all our pages are dynamic so Apache would not bring any speed advantage, it would only be an extra relay/bottleneck between the servlet engine and the browser.
Don't worry about your DVD+R drive with more expensive media: This will change soon.
In Europe, where DVD-R never took off and DVD+R is already more common, media prices are about the same.
At the moment, DVD-R stocks are being sold, which is why DVD-R is cheaper temporarily.
What is much more important in the long term is what PC vendors are currently shipping; that will become the real mass market and thus cheaper. All but Apple chose DVD+R.
MD exists in europe (here in switzerland and also in germany) but it has not taken over, definately not. In switzerland, MP3 players are more common, cassettes are still in use, and MD reach its top maybe 2 years ago. It is slowly dying out.
Some of the big players also sell those players.
For example this site shows how to "hack" philips players.
Philips sold its (music) content business some years ago (Polygram); I think they saw coming the problems that the content providers would get in the digital age, and as a traditional HW vendor they didn't want to get into conflict with themselves.
At least it is beneficial to the 'researcher'. It is an interesting and challenging research topic, one must admit. And it gives good chance for generous grants from certain industries.
Yes, and there are also order of magnitude more dbm installations (namely every unix system in existance) than any other SQL RDB.
I once needed a 'quick and dirty', mainly fast database, and used perl + tied hash files (dbm) to put my 'tables' in. Just as similar to a real RDBMS as mysql is (apart from superficial sql-like syntax), and even much more widespread in terms of installations.
Mysql with its lack of normal sql constructs will force you to write sql you would never ever use on real databases.
Therefore, this argument is void. You'll have to write/design from scratch anyway (if you want to take advantage of moving to a readl DBMS).
If you really already have SQL, then chances that it runs on Mysql are very small. Really, for the limited subset of SQL that Mysql supports, using something SQL based is not worth the trouble.
In that case, better use some kind of file-based storage yourself (such as dbm files) and do it really fast and low level.
- consumers don't want something that is no supply for
- producers don't want to produce something that is no demand for
This is called the 'network effect' (which is the reason why software, being very susceptible by this effect, very much tends to monopolism and why free market principles do not work well for software).In such cases, regulators must help the market to take a hurdle. Same for digital TV: as soon as the market has been pushed over the hurdle, a mass market is created where there is enough supply for digital TV, thus also enough demand from consumers. The mass market shall also make it cheap very quickly, removing the objectives that some may have now. In the end people get better products (quality), and less bandwidth is wasted.
Digital TV has taken off in the satellite market on its own, because this market was still so young that it wasn't locked into a current situation (i.e. the network effect). Digital TV for satellite has clearly shown the advantages for everybody.
It is good the government stimulates such good developments. In the end the government cannot make the economy, but it has the responsibility to create good conditions for the economy to flourish: take such hurdles, correct errors that free market may create such as monopolies, act against greedy topmanagers that undermine the publics trust in companies etc.