So if the Sun JVM were forced down on users, this would be bad.
Is something "bad" happening here? Yes. But it's not the act of forcing Java on users. It's the act of forcing users to be unable to install both an actual Java engine and MS's pseudo-Java engine at the same time. And the blame for that is entirely Microsoft's. Had Microsoft wanted to make a different Java-like VM that was incompatable, they could have done so under a different namespace so the library files on the machine don't clash with actual Java. It was their decision to make their incompatable changes PREVENT actual Java from existing on the machine at the same time that is the problem, combined with the contract they signed that agreed to ship actual Java. If this makes it impossible to have programs that only work on the old broken JVM operate under new service packs, then tough. Deal with it. It's Microsoft's fault for breaking their contract, and their customer's fault for choosing to use the broken JVM that everyone in the industry knew was not up to the standard. Maybe the mess this causes will make them think twice the next time they try to help prop up a monopoly with the short-sighted "standards aren't important" attitude.
Remember on a dial-up even a 100 KB file is Pain in the A$$ to download.
Remember:
Dial-up is obsolete already and "dead". Granted, it will last a long time, but as long as you started the stupid practice of predicting some technology is already "dead" I figured I'm allowed to do the same;-)
"Java on the client" doesn't have to mean "Java being run for the very first time on the client". After the first time, that 100Kb of jar is going to be cached for a week or so, so unless the software's timestamp is actually changed in that time, the subsequent uses won't repeat the download.
Downloading a Jar file isn't any slower than downloading an.EXE file to run a client application. Remember that Java clients are for more than just web stuff. To make a fair comparasin, compare with downloading and installing software client executables, not just non-interactive web pages.
You're right - it is a bad thing that the program you have to support was developed for Microsoft's broken implementation only. But don't make the world pay for this mistake by asking for that broken implementation the standard.
Before you turn Slashdot into a political special interest group, you've got to find the common ground all slashdotters agree on. You seem to know this and I wish you good luck, because I don't think that common ground exists. A large subset of Slashdot could be gathered that has a few ideas they agree on, but not the whole community, and not very many ideas. It would be more appropriate to try to form a SEPERATE site that is slashdot-like, but has a particular political bent to it. That way whatever the potical bent of the group ends up being, those who don't fit into it don't have to participate just to get their fix of "News for Nerds".
Probably the part you put in BOLD that he did not. Remove the BOLD and it parses differently, since the "ASK SLASHDOT" doesn't look like a title for a forum and instead looks like a command to the reader. And that makes for a confusing statement who's meaning is hard to fathom.
Despite what you may have learned from playing Civilization, Democracy and Republic are not mutually exclusive forms of government. You imply that the difference is in what people vote on (just picking leaders vs voting on every issue), but that's not true. A system where you pick a representative to act as your local proxy is a republic, but it can still be a democracy or not depending on how that representative is picked. Consider, a system like the Roman Empire had was a republic but not a democracy. There was a senate, but the members of the senate were chosen only by those with signifigant money, and even then only by those who's money was invested in land ownwership, not other forms of wealth. It was not a general election of the masses. The difference between a democratic republic and a non-democratic republic is in how the population is involved in the process of picking the representatives. What you are thinking of - a system without any representatives at all where every issue is voted on by the whole population, is called a DIRECT democracy, which is just one of many forms of democracy.
News flash: Without patents, the big companies will fuck you. End of story. Nothing you can do about it, you don't have the money to stop them.
News Flash: This is already true. There was no need to phrase your statement in the future tense. With the CURRENT patent system in place this already happens. You claim this is *abuse* of patents rather than *use* of patents, as if there was some mystical difference. As far as the courts care, there isn't any difference between using a law in the way it was intended versus using a law counter to the way it was intended.
I have to assume you are thinking about this case [ snip description of case ] but, as it is not the case being discussed, your rant is also irrelevent to the discussion.
Of course I was. But until your post, I was unaware that there were two seperate coffee-spilling suits against McDonalds. Everyone else assumes people are always talking about the more recent case, and I assumed they were talking about the less recent case, since I didn't realize there were two independant incidents and I'd already known about the first one when the story first came out. Did I screw up by assuming there was only one suit? Yes. But no more so than everyone else who assumes there was only one suit, and is thinking of the more recent one.
(Annoying slashdot feature: The part of your post I wanted to cut and paste was at the very bottom, after the "Read the rest of this comment" break line. But there's no way to read the full comment without that break on the same page as the "post a reply" form. So I had to have two windows open - one to reply in and the other to view the entire post so I could cut and paste the bit at the end.)
That proves nothing other than the willingness of ESR to buck the party line on this subject - a good mental trait I must say (I don't trust people who don't have at least SOME disagreements with their own political parties' platforms on occasion.) But that isn't relevant in a discussion about what the party happens to put forward as their opinion. The fact that there exist libertarians who don't agree doesn't change the fact that that IS the party position.
Yeah. I suspected I'd get a literal-minded prick like you who'd read my words with the least charitable interpretation possible,
If you don't mean it, don't say it. I apologise for falsely attributing to you the willingness to be honest.
You are ascribing to the libertarian party the exact opposite of their views.
No. The libertarian party favors Microsoft in their various legal anti-trust battles. That is evidence enough by itself to prove they DO believe a corporation making money must necessarily be doing the public good.
But the Dwarves shaped, melted, and crafted that gold. They didn't just let it sit there in ugly rocky lumps.
And where did all that armor everyone wore come from? Grown from armor trees? No, Gondor was also industrial, and definately portrayed as good guys.
What Tolkien rants about was the use of technology to replace natural breeding, specificly the creation of races through magics. The Ents are NOT portrayed as heroic nice guys. They are portrayed as a rather neutral force of nature that only cares about themselves, who were only helping the "good guys" because they had a common enemy.
When the Orcs attack the Humans, both at Helm's deep and at Minas Tirith, it is quite obvious that the Humans have equal or better tech than the Orcs. What makes the orcsa major threat is their gigantic numbers achieved through unnatural means.
Reading Shakespere in the original is also a waste of time, at least if entertainment is what you are looking for. The style dates from a time when spending an excessively long time to say a simple idea was considered fun entertainment. Conversation was the primary form of entertainment. I've never been impressed with his plays and only read some of the plays because it was required for various courses. They are important to learn, for the sake of historical cultural context, but they are not entertainment.
And as the English language naturally evolves further and further, the plays will become harder and harder to read in the original, until eventually it's like trying to read Beowulf in the original Pre - Battle of Hastings anglo-saxon language that's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English.
Hobbits are shorter than Dwarves, but treated with more respect in the movies than the dwarf. It's not a short-person thing. It's a "Peter Jackson wanted to add comic relief to a story that wasn't ever meant to have any so he ruined the dignity of one character to do it" thing.
Tokien created a mythology based on his catholic beliefs, where there was always a good vs evil fight, and in all chapters good prevailed.
Uhh - were we reading the same book? Good did not prevail when the Riders found where the ring was. Good did not prevail when Gollum succumbed to his evil side and decided to lead the nasty little Hobbittses to Shelob. Good did not prevail when Ferney sold the Hobits out in Bree. Good lost during many of the chapters. Good prevailed more toward the end, not so much at the beginning, as behooves a fun story.
It might set a precedent about illegally applying US law outside its jurisdiction by communicating to other countries the message that, "Hey, you don't *have* to bend over and take it when the MPAA applies US law to the world - we said "no", and so can you."
I'm so sick of this misrepresentation that she "spilled the coffee on herself". That's how it gets phrased by people who want to use the case as a vehicle for complaining about lawyers and over-suing in America. But the facts of the case were that the coffee got spilled during the TRANSFER from the McDonald's Employee to the woman. The employee let go before the customer had gotten a full grip on the cup, and thus the cup was fumbled. And THAT is why she won. Had she actually spilled the coffee on herself through nothing but her own incompetence, as people keep misrepresenting when they talk about the case, the jury would not have been as sympathetic.
I agree that the US is way to sue-happy. But this classic example people keep using isn't an appropriate example of that, and it's not fair to the woman that this urban legend of her klutzyness keeps spreading.
Yes, but somehow I missed the reference to BSD the first time. Sorry about that. Still, you *are* aware that that BSD license is in lots of other stuff to besides unixes, right? The TCP/IP stack of Windows, for example, is directly derived from the BSD TCP/IP stack, and so the University of California license notice appears buried somewhere inside the legal stuff you get with Windows.
Also, another example is Alladin. It was a filter to convert from postscript to the various proprietary printer codes used by vendors. Until ghostscript became ready, it was the primary print driver used by both FreeBSD and Linux distributions. It was a "Copyright University of Wisconsin" program, and you had to download it directly from the main site. The only restriction on the license was that people could only get a stripped down old version from others and to get the full recent versions you had to visit the Alladin homepage and download from there. I guess that was done so they could have a record of how much it was being used. (This is typically the case with groups funded by grants - the granting agencies want to see how many people are making use of the work done with the grant money - to see if continued funding is justified.)
The second slide already showed how broken their perception of open source is. Their second slide was a comparasin of "commercial" source vs "open" source as if they were mutually exclusive groups when they are not. Take a Linux distro company like Redhat for example. They are commercial. They make money reselling stuff that's open source. Whether something is Commercial or not is not really a property of the code itself, but of how people obtain it. Redhat's SRPM of the linux kernel that lives on the install CD is commercial. A downloaded tarball from www.kernel.org is not, even if it's exactly the same version number, with the same verbatim GPL boilerplate licenses all over the source code, and 'diffs' show it to be identical code to what's in the Redhat SRPM. Whether it's commercial or not is a property of the distribution technique by which you obtained the product, not a property of the end product itself.
If a study is trying to compare two or more products, and it *claims* that that is what it is doing, then that is *ALL* it should be doing. When it also tries to take on the additional task of defining what the typical business is like, it is making implicit claims outside the scope of the study, without people realizing it. And that's the problem I have with all TCO guesses (I refuse to call them "studies) I have seen - they start from the mythical assumption that there is a "typical" company, define parameters for that "typical" company, and then compare TCO's under those allegedly "typical" circumstances. By picking different parameters as "typical", they can swing the result any way they like.
What I really wish these studies would do is start from the assumption that there will always be some cases where Foo beats Bar and other cases where Bar beats Foo, depending on the circumstances. (which is always true because someone imaginative can always come up with bizaare circumstances where even the most ludicris product comes out on top. "The Drive-across-town-and-talk(tm) network messaging protocol is over 100 times faster than video conferencing in the circumstance where your company is in a city that is currently experiencing an all-day power outage.")
Then the *interesting* thing for these studies to do would be to find what those conditions are and make a list. ASSUME there will be cases where one side wins and cases where the other side wins. The job of the study should then be to FIND those circumstances and make the comparasin by listing the circumstances that tip the balance. Then the reader can get useful information because the reader knows which of those circumstances fit his company. The tech magazine doesn't.
(So in the infamous Mindcraft study from a few years back that claimed IIS was faster than Apache-on-Linux, instead of just making that claim and leaving it at that, state the circumstances that tip the balance: If you want to spread the network load over multiple network interface cards on one webserver machine, and are serving only static pages, and serving heavy traffic, IIS on NT was faster, but if the circumstances are the same as above but you only want to use one network card in the machine, Apache-on-Linux was faster. When the load was small enough not to flood one NIC, we didn't notice any appreciable difference. - Then it would be an excercise of the reader to decide if they are in the very small group of people that are running a site where the speed of the NIC is the major bottleneck.)
Typically the languages mentioned in the ad for a position are a superset of the languages you actually use in the job. There are several reasons I can think of for why this is done:
The employer thinks they MIGHT begin using some of those other languages in the future and wants someone who could transition if that happened.
The employer is thinking that the more languages the programer knows, the more likely it is that the programmer is competent in general, so listing many languages gets you better applicants (or so the employer thinks).
The employer is trying to woo applicants by putting the latest trendy language buzzwords into the job description regardless of what the job really entails.
***Big one*** The employer is playing to the one-upmanship resume inflation game, asking for a lot of unreasonable things because the applicant will probably list a lot of unreasonable things as experience. Applicants eggagerate their qualifications and apply to jobs that they aren't really up to, so if you inflate the job requirements to compensate, you get applicants that are right at the level you wanted. But then the applicants exaggerate further, so the employees exaggerate further, and so on and so forth until eventually employers will be asking for N years of experience with language Foo, where N is about three times the typical human lifespan, and Foo is a language first implemented last year.
That last one bothers me a lot. It means you *have to* become part of the problem in order to get noticed. Being honest on your resume means not getting any calls. Employers assume you are exaggerating whether you are or not, so if you don't exaggerate they picture you being a lot less qualified than you are. At least that's the way it seemed the last time I was looking to change jobs, which admittedly was over six years ago so things may have changed.
C++ is not entirely a superset of C. C++ has more anti-shoot-self-in-foot features that will cause many C programs to give syntax errors if compiled with a C++ compiler. For example, in C you can assign any pointer to foo into a variable declared as pointer to bar, without a cast. In C++ the cast is mandatory. In C you don't need prototypes for functions - if the values passed in don't match the values the function was written to use, then it compiles but at runtime you get stack corruption as the data pushed on the stack before the call don't match the data popped from the stack by the function.
Now change "C" to "Ansi C" or "ISO C" and it's a bit closer to being a subset of C++, but even there there are still a few obscure gotchas.
Slashdot Mirror
Is something "bad" happening here? Yes. But it's not the act of forcing Java on users. It's the act of forcing users to be unable to install both an actual Java engine and MS's pseudo-Java engine at the same time. And the blame for that is entirely Microsoft's. Had Microsoft wanted to make a different Java-like VM that was incompatable, they could have done so under a different namespace so the library files on the machine don't clash with actual Java. It was their decision to make their incompatable changes PREVENT actual Java from existing on the machine at the same time that is the problem, combined with the contract they signed that agreed to ship actual Java. If this makes it impossible to have programs that only work on the old broken JVM operate under new service packs, then tough. Deal with it. It's Microsoft's fault for breaking their contract, and their customer's fault for choosing to use the broken JVM that everyone in the industry knew was not up to the standard. Maybe the mess this causes will make them think twice the next time they try to help prop up a monopoly with the short-sighted "standards aren't important" attitude.
Remember:
unless the software's timestamp is actually changed in that time, the subsequent uses won't repeat the download.
You're right - it is a bad thing that the program you have to support was developed for Microsoft's broken implementation only. But don't make the world pay for this mistake by asking for that broken implementation the standard.
Before you turn Slashdot into a political special interest group, you've got to find the common ground all slashdotters agree on. You seem to know this and I wish you good luck, because I don't think that common ground exists. A large subset of Slashdot could be gathered that has a few ideas they agree on, but not the whole community, and not very many ideas. It would be more appropriate to try to form a SEPERATE site that is slashdot-like, but has a particular political bent to it. That way whatever the potical bent of the group ends up being, those who don't fit into it don't have to participate just to get their fix of "News for Nerds".
Probably the part you put in BOLD that he did not. Remove the BOLD and it parses differently, since the "ASK SLASHDOT" doesn't look like a title for a forum and instead looks like a command to the reader. And that makes for a confusing statement who's meaning is hard to fathom.
Despite what you may have learned from playing Civilization, Democracy and Republic are not mutually exclusive forms of government. You imply that the difference is in what people vote on (just picking leaders vs voting on every issue), but that's not true. A system where you pick a representative to act as your local proxy is a republic, but it can still be a democracy or not depending on how that representative is picked. Consider, a system like the Roman Empire had was a republic but not a democracy. There was a senate, but the members of the senate were chosen only by those with signifigant money, and even then only by those who's money was invested in land ownwership, not other forms of wealth. It was not a general election of the masses. The difference between a democratic republic and a non-democratic republic is in how the population is involved in the process of picking the representatives. What you are thinking of - a system without any representatives at all where every issue is voted on by the whole population, is called a DIRECT democracy, which is just one of many forms of democracy.
News Flash: This is already true. There was no need to phrase your statement in the future tense. With the CURRENT patent system in place this already happens. You claim this is *abuse* of patents rather than *use* of patents, as if there was some mystical difference. As far as the courts care, there isn't any difference between using a law in the way it was intended versus using a law counter to the way it was intended.
Little guys need protection, and the patent office gives them that.
In theory, yes.
In practice, no.
To transform this trolling post into a truthful statement, replace the words, "the" and "the", as follows: "Humanism is a religion of some atheists."
Thank you.
Of course I was. But until your post, I was unaware that there were two seperate coffee-spilling suits against McDonalds. Everyone else assumes people are always talking about the more recent case, and I assumed they were talking about the less recent case, since I didn't realize there were two independant incidents and I'd already known about the first one when the story first came out. Did I screw up by assuming there was only one suit? Yes. But no more so than everyone else who assumes there was only one suit, and is thinking of the more recent one.
(Annoying slashdot feature: The part of your post I wanted to cut and paste was at the very bottom, after the "Read the rest of this comment" break line. But there's no way to read the full comment without that break on the same page as the "post a reply" form. So I had to have two windows open - one to reply in and the other to view the entire post so I could cut and paste the bit at the end.)
That proves nothing other than the willingness of ESR to buck the party line on this subject - a good mental trait I must say (I don't trust people who don't have at least SOME disagreements with their own political parties' platforms on occasion.) But that isn't relevant in a discussion about what the party happens to put forward as their opinion. The fact that there exist libertarians who don't agree doesn't change the fact that that IS the party position.
If you don't mean it, don't say it. I apologise for falsely attributing to you the willingness to be honest.
No. The libertarian party favors Microsoft in their various legal anti-trust battles. That is evidence enough by itself to prove they DO believe a corporation making money must necessarily be doing the public good.
But the Dwarves shaped, melted, and crafted that gold. They didn't just let it sit there in ugly rocky lumps.
And where did all that armor everyone wore come from? Grown from armor trees? No, Gondor was also industrial, and definately portrayed as good guys.
What Tolkien rants about was the use of technology to replace natural breeding, specificly the creation of races through magics. The Ents are NOT portrayed as heroic nice guys. They are portrayed as a rather neutral force of nature that only cares about themselves, who were only helping the "good guys" because they had a common enemy.
When the Orcs attack the Humans, both at Helm's deep and at Minas Tirith, it is quite obvious that the Humans have equal or better tech than the Orcs. What makes the orcsa major threat is their gigantic numbers achieved through unnatural means.
Reading Shakespere in the original is also a waste of time, at least if entertainment is what you are looking for. The style dates from a time when spending an excessively long time to say a simple idea was considered fun entertainment. Conversation was the primary form of entertainment. I've never been impressed with his plays and only read some of the plays because it was required for various courses. They are important to learn, for the sake of historical cultural context, but they are not entertainment.
And as the English language naturally evolves further and further, the plays will become harder and harder to read in the original, until eventually it's like trying to read Beowulf in the original Pre - Battle of Hastings anglo-saxon language that's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English.
Hobbits are shorter than Dwarves, but treated with more respect in the movies than the dwarf. It's not a short-person thing. It's a "Peter Jackson wanted to add comic relief to a story that wasn't ever meant to have any so he ruined the dignity of one character to do it" thing.
Uhh - were we reading the same book? Good did not prevail when the Riders found where the ring was. Good did not prevail when Gollum succumbed to his evil side and decided to lead the nasty little Hobbittses to Shelob. Good did not prevail when Ferney sold the Hobits out in Bree. Good lost during many of the chapters. Good prevailed more toward the end, not so much at the beginning, as behooves a fun story.
Sounds like people who's house gets ruined by a tornado and then come out of the wreckage alive saying, "I'm thankful God saved our lives."
I'll have to remember that if I'm ever mugged. "I thank my mugger for choosing not to kill me. Thank's Mr. Mugger - you're such a good guy."
It might set a precedent about illegally applying US law outside its jurisdiction by communicating to other countries the message that, "Hey, you don't *have* to bend over and take it when the MPAA applies US law to the world - we said "no", and so can you."
I'm so sick of this misrepresentation that she "spilled the coffee on herself". That's how it gets phrased by people who want to use the case as a vehicle for complaining about lawyers and over-suing in America. But the facts of the case were that the coffee got spilled during the TRANSFER from the McDonald's Employee to the woman. The employee let go before the customer had gotten a full grip on the cup, and thus the cup was fumbled. And THAT is why she won. Had she actually spilled the coffee on herself through nothing but her own incompetence, as people keep misrepresenting when they talk about the case, the jury would not have been as sympathetic.
I agree that the US is way to sue-happy. But this classic example people keep using isn't an appropriate example of that, and it's not fair to the woman that this urban legend of her klutzyness keeps spreading.
Yes, but somehow I missed the reference to BSD the first time. Sorry about that. Still, you *are* aware that that BSD license is in lots of other stuff to besides unixes, right? The TCP/IP stack of Windows, for example, is directly derived from the BSD TCP/IP stack, and so the University of California license notice appears buried somewhere inside the legal stuff you get with Windows.
Also, another example is Alladin. It was a filter to convert from postscript to the various proprietary printer codes used by vendors. Until ghostscript became ready, it was the primary print driver used by both FreeBSD and Linux distributions. It was a "Copyright University of Wisconsin" program, and you had to download it directly from the main site. The only restriction on the license was that people could only get a stripped down old version from others and to get the full recent versions you had to visit the Alladin homepage and download from there. I guess that was done so they could have a record of how much it was being used. (This is typically the case with groups funded by grants - the granting agencies want to see how many people are making use of the work done with the grant money - to see if continued funding is justified.)
The second slide already showed how broken their perception of open source is. Their second slide was a comparasin of "commercial" source vs "open" source as if they were mutually exclusive groups when they are not. Take a Linux distro company like Redhat for example. They are commercial. They make money reselling stuff that's open source. Whether something is Commercial or not is not really a property of the code itself, but of how people obtain it. Redhat's SRPM of the linux kernel that lives on the install CD is commercial. A downloaded tarball from www.kernel.org is not, even if it's exactly the same version number, with the same verbatim GPL boilerplate licenses all over the source code, and 'diffs' show it to be identical code to what's in the Redhat SRPM. Whether it's commercial or not is a property of the distribution technique by which you obtained the product, not a property of the end product itself.
Does this phrase look familiar:
"Copyright (c) Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved."
That's on a hell of a lot of direct-to-consumer software. Everything that came directly or indirectly from BSD.
If a study is trying to compare two or more products, and it *claims* that that is what it is doing, then that is *ALL* it should be doing. When it also tries to take on the additional task of defining what the typical business is like, it is making implicit claims outside the scope of the study, without people realizing it. And that's the problem I have with all TCO guesses (I refuse to call them "studies) I have seen - they start from the mythical assumption that there is a "typical" company, define parameters for that "typical" company, and then compare TCO's under those allegedly "typical" circumstances. By picking different parameters as "typical", they can swing the result any way they like.
What I really wish these studies would do is start from the assumption that there will always be some cases where Foo beats Bar and other cases where Bar beats Foo, depending on the circumstances. (which is always true because someone imaginative can always come up with bizaare circumstances where even the most ludicris product comes out on top. "The Drive-across-town-and-talk(tm) network messaging protocol is over 100 times faster than video conferencing in the circumstance where your company is in a city that is currently experiencing an all-day power outage.")
Then the *interesting* thing for these studies to do would be to find what those conditions are and make a list. ASSUME there will be cases where one side wins and cases where the other side wins. The job of the study should then be to FIND those circumstances and make the comparasin by listing the circumstances that tip the balance. Then the reader can get useful information because the reader knows which of those circumstances fit his company. The tech magazine doesn't.
(So in the infamous Mindcraft study from a few years back that claimed IIS was faster than Apache-on-Linux, instead of just making that claim and leaving it at that, state the circumstances that tip the balance: If you want to spread the network load over multiple network interface cards on one webserver machine, and are serving only static pages, and serving heavy traffic, IIS on NT was faster, but if the circumstances are the same as above but you only want to use one network card in the machine, Apache-on-Linux was faster. When the load was small enough not to flood one NIC, we didn't notice any appreciable difference. - Then it would be an excercise of the reader to decide if they are in the very small group of people that are running a site where the speed of the NIC is the major bottleneck.)
That last one bothers me a lot. It means you *have to* become part of the problem in order to get noticed. Being honest on your resume means not getting any calls. Employers assume you are exaggerating whether you are or not, so if you don't exaggerate they picture you being a lot less qualified than you are. At least that's the way it seemed the last time I was looking to change jobs, which admittedly was over six years ago so things may have changed.
C++ is not entirely a superset of C. C++ has more anti-shoot-self-in-foot features that will cause many C programs to give syntax errors if compiled with a C++ compiler. For example, in C you can assign any pointer to foo into a variable declared as pointer to bar, without a cast. In C++ the cast is mandatory. In C you don't need prototypes for functions - if the values passed in don't match the values the function was written to use, then it compiles but at runtime you get stack corruption as the data pushed on the stack before the call don't match the data popped from the stack by the function.
Now change "C" to "Ansi C" or "ISO C" and it's a bit closer to being a subset of C++, but even there there are still a few obscure gotchas.