Some may recall that Microsoft had already offered a "royalty free license" for use of their XML schema's which claimed "field of use" restrictions that specifically claim to permit Microsoft to specifically state the terms of software that could access their file formats and that was specifically incompatible with free software, as well as requiring the user to disclaim certain legal rights.
Microsoft has no way of dictating to you what you do with the data once it's in a non-patented format. So, you write a BSD-licensed bidirectional XML converter (XSLT is probably sufficient) to an open format and then use it with a GPL'ed word processor.
It means nothing for WinFS. But, then, WinFS itself means nothing. WinFS is the kind of "really nifty idea" a CS sophomore would dream up. It's something that has been tried before and failed in the real world. Sadly, CS sophomores seem to be responsible for Microsoft's long term planning.
Microsoft hasn't maintained a monopoly for two decades. They have had a monopoly for maybe a single decade. Still, that's a long time: market mechanisms take a while to whittle away at a company of Microsoft's size. But Microsoft is in deep trouble.
You could use AOP tools (e.g., aspectj.org), which generally let you implement design-by-contract as a special case of more general mechanisms.
In any case, between unit tests and the regular use of assertions, you pretty much get all the benefits of design-by-contract in just about any language. Explicit language support for design-by-contract is not needed, and design-by-contract is really just selling old ideas under a new name.
I fail to see the opposition between the terms. Copyleft is one particular license that is enforced through copyright. If copyright ceased to exist, so would copyleft. The fact that the creators of copyleft would like copyright to stop existing doesn't change that, and many people who use copyleft probably don't care much whether copyright should or should not continue to exist. I certainly don't: I think copylefted software is succeeding no matter what other licenses people come up with under copyright because copyleft simply makes more economic sense.
Having rtfm - unusual for/. I know - this is a complex example that neatly encapsulates the privacy dilemma.
I see no "dilemma" nor anything particularly complex. The stores are collecting detailed purchase records, down to individual lot numbers and consumers. They clearly keep the data for a long time and sell them to many different people. Do you understand all the implications of that, all the possibilities for abuse? I don't. And I think most people don't think that through--many people probably can't afford to think it through because the discounts are substantial.
Now, what about the notifications? They clearly run counter to what you thought you signed up for when you signed up for your card (if you thought anything at all). By the time you are notified, you probably have already eaten the meat. Do you really want to know about it? Do you really want to worry for 10 years whether you might come down with vCJD? The probability is tiny, but if you get that call, I guarantee you will worry no matter how rational you may be. Some people will suffer serious and unnecessary mental consequences. Did you consent to being subjected to that kind of mental anguish when using your card? I didn't.
But don't kid yourself: that's not the reason the stores agonize over this decision. They don't notify consumers because they worry about bad publicity and they worry that consumers might realize the extent of their data collection.
Sorry, but it's no invasion of privacy if the customer gives their contact information to the supermarket voluntarily.
Legally, it isn't. Legally, very little is an invasion of privacy in the US. But practically, it clearly is. And that's what we are talking about here.
It may have been intended for that, but a language that for years didn't even support type-safe separate compilation clearly wasn't designed for large-scale programming.
All in all it is a well-designed language
No, it is not a well-designed language and it never was. It is a language that sounds appealing to a software engineer because it seems to embody good software engineering practices (whether it does or does not is a separate debate). But in order to be a well-designed language, it first needs to get the basics right: the type system, separate compilation, a reasonable set of language constructs, etc., and Eiffel fell short there for years.
The Eiffel model and syntax is actually much more logical (and some would say better) than C and Java.
Not really. During its adoption phase, Eiffel was a complete mess: it lacked important features (e.g., method pointers), it lacked type-safe separate compilation, and the language definition had other serious bugs. The language failed because it was poorly designed.
The only reason people talked about Eiffel at all was because Meyer was also an advocate of what was considered sound software engineering principles--a vendor of silver bullets--and people thought they'd get a bit of that automatically if they used Eiffel. Without that gimmick, Eiffel wouldn't even be used to the limited extent that it is used today.
The violation of privacy is that they collect and keep the personal information in the first place. Not using it to help consumers is then just a way of avoiding bad publicity and demonstrating to their customers that they actually have the data and can contact them. I.e., the concern is a PR concern, not a legal one. (Most likely, their agreement says that they can change it at any time anyway.)
Having an extra ALU around will surely push more 32bit numbers through the pipe
That's an additional reason. There are probably many other places that neither of us has thought of that have been scaled up to make a true 64bit processor and that benefit 32bit applications running on the same hardware in 32 bit mode.
I'm beginning to wonder these days how much CPU speed even matters though.
It matters a great deal for digital photos, graphics, speech, handwriting recognition, imaging, and a lot of other things. And, yes, regular people are using those more and more.
Unless you are running photoshop, SETI, Raytracing, etc., you probably wouldn't notice if I replaced your 3GHz processor with a 1GHz.
You probably would. Try resizing a browser window with "images to fit" selected (default in IE, I believe). Notice how that one megapixel image resizes in real time? CPU-bound functionality has snuck in in lots of places.
Both 32bit and 64bit binaries running on the same processor get the same data paths and the same amount of cache on many processors. But, for one thing, 64bit binaries use up more cache memory for both code and data. So, yes, if you run 32bit binaries on a 64bit processor with a 32bit mode, then the 32bit binaries will generally run faster. But the reason why they run well and all the data paths are wide is because the thing is a 64bit processor in the first place--that's really what "64bit" means.
64bit may help with speed only if software is written to take advantage of 64bit processing. But the main reason to use 64bit processing is for the larger address space and larger amount of memory you can address, not for speed. 4Gbytes of address space is simply too tight for many applications and software design started to suffer many years ago from those limitations. Among other things, on 32bit processors, memory mapped files have become almost useless for just the applications where they should be most useful: applications involving very large files.
If you get caught in a honeypot, you are still guilty. The same applies here. If political machinations are limited to setting up honeypots to catch unethical politicians of the other party, I'm all for it: maybe it will clean up things in politics at least a little bit.
Your stereotype is wrong. There is nothing "redneck" about Republican politicians. Republican politicians are well educated and even better connected, often with lots of money. They cultivate a folksy public persona because it gets rednecks, who don't know any better, to vote for them. Smarter people see through the charade and either don't vote at all or pick the lesser of two evils.
While it sounds like the Dems' tech guy is missing his distro of Clue, I wonder... what if he/she left the backdoor open on purpose?
I fail to see what difference it would make. Whether the Democrats laid a trap or not, the Republicans would have still violated computer fraud statutes and behaved unethically.
The Republican behavior would be particularly reprehensible because they keep running on "values" and "ethics". Unlike blow jobs in the White House, which are amusing but otherwise irrelevant, stealing political strategy memos is something that cuts to the heart of ethics in politics. If these allegations are confirmed, they would show the people involved to be completely unethical, and I would hope they'd get thrown in jail for it and barred from public office.
Whether the earth is flat or spherical is a hot topic. There are zealot proponents in both camps.
I.e. The existence of zealot proponents proves nothing. Polygraphs are junk science. If you want to waste your money on them, that's your business. But if your science-phobia starts interfering with my air travel, you can expect a that your nonsense is exposed for what it is.
It's worse than that: because each subject is asked multiple questions, everybody gets a bunch of lies flagged, but not enough even to determine statistically whether all their responses are lies. So, even if 78% were right, the device would still be useless.
If the-most-hated-invention equals the-most-indispensable-invention, that's a completely different thing from determining the-invention-you-hate-most-but-find-indispensable . The former would be really surprising, the latter is just an odd factoid.
Well, maybe music reproduction would be even "better" if it came with a personal, intimate massage. But that has nothing to do with music either and shouldn't be advertised as improved audio.
Most recordings these days are an entirely artificial product. If they tried to approximate the live experience, what 7.1 would give you is mainly being surrounded by coughing and seat-shifting. Is that better?
And even if you wanted to reproduce sound localization, not for music, but for games, where is the evidence that 7.1 does it well and does it cost effectively?
Does this mean that the combined might and resources of the advertising world will now work towards open sourcing every video format there is? Or will they stick to well-documented and free formats, finally driving the likes of RealVideo out of the market?
I figure, either way it's good for me. And if they do neither, well, I guess I'm just going to miss out on the commercials.
That would be a trademark violation, not a copyright violation. The two are completely different legally. Among other things, microsoft is legally obligated to defend its trademark or face losing it.
However, if Mike Rowe's use is non-commercial, Microsoft's action is unnecessary and the shouldn't prevail (but it's probably too costly to fight them).
For practical purposes, this thing has comparable capacity to one of those mini-iPods: it can hold far more songs than you can play on one charge, but it is far too small to hold one's entire music library. This really looks like a nice evolution of the disk-based player and technically like a great improvement over the mini-iPod.
The fact that it doesn't work with "major music download services" isn't surprising either: major music download services are proprietary and they are trying to create and leverage monopolies. Their creators have neither the interest nor the engineering skills to support a large number of clients--it's both easier and financially more interesting to them to tie their services to players running their own software.
Of course, if I pointed out that if Apple released this, people would be falling all over themselves saying how innovative the company was, I'd get modded down instantaneously by Apple's mod-squad, so I won't point that out.
44 KHz sampling rate only lets you record frequencies up to 22KHz if you had a PERFECT d/a convertor and a PERFECT filter.
Yes, but you don't need to record frequencies up to 22KHz perfectly because they already don't matter. Standard CD audio already gives engineers plenty of room to play with in their filter designs.
Besides, good music is a lot like a good speech: it matters far more what is being said than the acoustic quality. And CD quality audio is already way overkill for getting every bit of meaningful musical information out of a recording.
I get the impression that there is a strong negative correlation between someone's degree of audiophilia and their musical aptitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Some may recall that Microsoft had already offered a "royalty free license" for use of their XML schema's which claimed "field of use" restrictions that specifically claim to permit Microsoft to specifically state the terms of software that could access their file formats and that was specifically incompatible with free software, as well as requiring the user to disclaim certain legal rights.
Microsoft has no way of dictating to you what you do with the data once it's in a non-patented format. So, you write a BSD-licensed bidirectional XML converter (XSLT is probably sufficient) to an open format and then use it with a GPL'ed word processor.
It means nothing for WinFS. But, then, WinFS itself means nothing. WinFS is the kind of "really nifty idea" a CS sophomore would dream up. It's something that has been tried before and failed in the real world. Sadly, CS sophomores seem to be responsible for Microsoft's long term planning.
Microsoft hasn't maintained a monopoly for two decades. They have had a monopoly for maybe a single decade. Still, that's a long time: market mechanisms take a while to whittle away at a company of Microsoft's size. But Microsoft is in deep trouble.
You could use AOP tools (e.g., aspectj.org), which generally let you implement design-by-contract as a special case of more general mechanisms.
In any case, between unit tests and the regular use of assertions, you pretty much get all the benefits of design-by-contract in just about any language. Explicit language support for design-by-contract is not needed, and design-by-contract is really just selling old ideas under a new name.
I fail to see the opposition between the terms. Copyleft is one particular license that is enforced through copyright. If copyright ceased to exist, so would copyleft. The fact that the creators of copyleft would like copyright to stop existing doesn't change that, and many people who use copyleft probably don't care much whether copyright should or should not continue to exist. I certainly don't: I think copylefted software is succeeding no matter what other licenses people come up with under copyright because copyleft simply makes more economic sense.
Having rtfm - unusual for /. I know - this is a complex example that neatly encapsulates the privacy dilemma.
I see no "dilemma" nor anything particularly complex. The stores are collecting detailed purchase records, down to individual lot numbers and consumers. They clearly keep the data for a long time and sell them to many different people. Do you understand all the implications of that, all the possibilities for abuse? I don't. And I think most people don't think that through--many people probably can't afford to think it through because the discounts are substantial.
Now, what about the notifications? They clearly run counter to what you thought you signed up for when you signed up for your card (if you thought anything at all). By the time you are notified, you probably have already eaten the meat. Do you really want to know about it? Do you really want to worry for 10 years whether you might come down with vCJD? The probability is tiny, but if you get that call, I guarantee you will worry no matter how rational you may be. Some people will suffer serious and unnecessary mental consequences. Did you consent to being subjected to that kind of mental anguish when using your card? I didn't.
But don't kid yourself: that's not the reason the stores agonize over this decision. They don't notify consumers because they worry about bad publicity and they worry that consumers might realize the extent of their data collection.
Sorry, but it's no invasion of privacy if the customer gives their contact information to the supermarket voluntarily.
Legally, it isn't. Legally, very little is an invasion of privacy in the US. But practically, it clearly is. And that's what we are talking about here.
Eiffel is designed for large-scale programming.
It may have been intended for that, but a language that for years didn't even support type-safe separate compilation clearly wasn't designed for large-scale programming.
All in all it is a well-designed language
No, it is not a well-designed language and it never was. It is a language that sounds appealing to a software engineer because it seems to embody good software engineering practices (whether it does or does not is a separate debate). But in order to be a well-designed language, it first needs to get the basics right: the type system, separate compilation, a reasonable set of language constructs, etc., and Eiffel fell short there for years.
The Eiffel model and syntax is actually much more logical (and some would say better) than C and Java.
Not really. During its adoption phase, Eiffel was a complete mess: it lacked important features (e.g., method pointers), it lacked type-safe separate compilation, and the language definition had other serious bugs. The language failed because it was poorly designed.
The only reason people talked about Eiffel at all was because Meyer was also an advocate of what was considered sound software engineering principles--a vendor of silver bullets--and people thought they'd get a bit of that automatically if they used Eiffel. Without that gimmick, Eiffel wouldn't even be used to the limited extent that it is used today.
The violation of privacy is that they collect and keep the personal information in the first place. Not using it to help consumers is then just a way of avoiding bad publicity and demonstrating to their customers that they actually have the data and can contact them. I.e., the concern is a PR concern, not a legal one. (Most likely, their agreement says that they can change it at any time anyway.)
Having an extra ALU around will surely push more 32bit numbers through the pipe
That's an additional reason. There are probably many other places that neither of us has thought of that have been scaled up to make a true 64bit processor and that benefit 32bit applications running on the same hardware in 32 bit mode.
I'm beginning to wonder these days how much CPU speed even matters though.
It matters a great deal for digital photos, graphics, speech, handwriting recognition, imaging, and a lot of other things. And, yes, regular people are using those more and more.
Unless you are running photoshop, SETI, Raytracing, etc., you probably wouldn't notice if I replaced your 3GHz processor with a 1GHz.
You probably would. Try resizing a browser window with "images to fit" selected (default in IE, I believe). Notice how that one megapixel image resizes in real time? CPU-bound functionality has snuck in in lots of places.
Both 32bit and 64bit binaries running on the same processor get the same data paths and the same amount of cache on many processors. But, for one thing, 64bit binaries use up more cache memory for both code and data. So, yes, if you run 32bit binaries on a 64bit processor with a 32bit mode, then the 32bit binaries will generally run faster. But the reason why they run well and all the data paths are wide is because the thing is a 64bit processor in the first place--that's really what "64bit" means.
64bit may help with speed only if software is written to take advantage of 64bit processing. But the main reason to use 64bit processing is for the larger address space and larger amount of memory you can address, not for speed. 4Gbytes of address space is simply too tight for many applications and software design started to suffer many years ago from those limitations. Among other things, on 32bit processors, memory mapped files have become almost useless for just the applications where they should be most useful: applications involving very large files.
Slashdot contributors have wives? You've got to be kidding.
If you get caught in a honeypot, you are still guilty. The same applies here. If political machinations are limited to setting up honeypots to catch unethical politicians of the other party, I'm all for it: maybe it will clean up things in politics at least a little bit.
Your stereotype is wrong. There is nothing "redneck" about Republican politicians. Republican politicians are well educated and even better connected, often with lots of money. They cultivate a folksy public persona because it gets rednecks, who don't know any better, to vote for them. Smarter people see through the charade and either don't vote at all or pick the lesser of two evils.
While it sounds like the Dems' tech guy is missing his distro of Clue, I wonder... what if he/she left the backdoor open on purpose?
I fail to see what difference it would make. Whether the Democrats laid a trap or not, the Republicans would have still violated computer fraud statutes and behaved unethically.
The Republican behavior would be particularly reprehensible because they keep running on "values" and "ethics". Unlike blow jobs in the White House, which are amusing but otherwise irrelevant, stealing political strategy memos is something that cuts to the heart of ethics in politics. If these allegations are confirmed, they would show the people involved to be completely unethical, and I would hope they'd get thrown in jail for it and barred from public office.
Whether the earth is flat or spherical is a hot topic. There are zealot proponents in both camps.
I.e. The existence of zealot proponents proves nothing. Polygraphs are junk science. If you want to waste your money on them, that's your business. But if your science-phobia starts interfering with my air travel, you can expect a that your nonsense is exposed for what it is.
Since each passenger is asked multiple questions, it's worse than that, since it can fail on any one of them.
It's worse than that: because each subject is asked multiple questions, everybody gets a bunch of lies flagged, but not enough even to determine statistically whether all their responses are lies. So, even if 78% were right, the device would still be useless.
If the-most-hated-invention equals the-most-indispensable-invention, that's a completely different thing from determining the-invention-you-hate-most-but-find-indispensable . The former would be really surprising, the latter is just an odd factoid.
Well, maybe music reproduction would be even "better" if it came with a personal, intimate massage. But that has nothing to do with music either and shouldn't be advertised as improved audio.
Most recordings these days are an entirely artificial product. If they tried to approximate the live experience, what 7.1 would give you is mainly being surrounded by coughing and seat-shifting. Is that better?
And even if you wanted to reproduce sound localization, not for music, but for games, where is the evidence that 7.1 does it well and does it cost effectively?
Does this mean that the combined might and resources of the advertising world will now work towards open sourcing every video format there is? Or will they stick to well-documented and free formats, finally driving the likes of RealVideo out of the market?
I figure, either way it's good for me. And if they do neither, well, I guess I'm just going to miss out on the commercials.
That would be a trademark violation, not a copyright violation. The two are completely different legally. Among other things, microsoft is legally obligated to defend its trademark or face losing it.
However, if Mike Rowe's use is non-commercial, Microsoft's action is unnecessary and the shouldn't prevail (but it's probably too costly to fight them).
For practical purposes, this thing has comparable capacity to one of those mini-iPods: it can hold far more songs than you can play on one charge, but it is far too small to hold one's entire music library. This really looks like a nice evolution of the disk-based player and technically like a great improvement over the mini-iPod.
The fact that it doesn't work with "major music download services" isn't surprising either: major music download services are proprietary and they are trying to create and leverage monopolies. Their creators have neither the interest nor the engineering skills to support a large number of clients--it's both easier and financially more interesting to them to tie their services to players running their own software.
Of course, if I pointed out that if Apple released this, people would be falling all over themselves saying how innovative the company was, I'd get modded down instantaneously by Apple's mod-squad, so I won't point that out.
44 KHz sampling rate only lets you record frequencies up to 22KHz if you had a PERFECT d/a convertor and a PERFECT filter.
Yes, but you don't need to record frequencies up to 22KHz perfectly because they already don't matter. Standard CD audio already gives engineers plenty of room to play with in their filter designs.
Besides, good music is a lot like a good speech: it matters far more what is being said than the acoustic quality. And CD quality audio is already way overkill for getting every bit of meaningful musical information out of a recording.
I get the impression that there is a strong negative correlation between someone's degree of audiophilia and their musical aptitude.