To be honest, I'd still rather buy a release every 5 years for substantial changes than every year for minimal changes.
Okay, that's a valid preference. I'd rather get most features as soon as possible, and the cost is not important to me. Can you accept that my preference is equally valid? Now, supposing the two of us are given a choice what would be ideal (not regarding the particular OS). Is it better that the vendor release new features once every 5 years, so that you're happy and I'm unhappy. Or is it better that the vendor release an OS every 1.5 years so that you can buy a version every 4.5 years and I can buy a version every 1.5 years making both of us happy? The latter method (Apple's method) lets us both choose what we prefer and I certainly know people that skip one or two or even three versions before upgrading.
if there was a single feature that is a quantifiable improvement on anything other than visuals; it's UAC.
UAC is a somewhat castrated implementation, of an old concept. I applaud MS for heading in that direction, but like almost all things MS, I don't expect it to actually work for another two or three revisions. The current implementation looks like a disaster to me. They almost completely ignored the human interaction component, did not provide the trust determination component, failed to make the system ubiquitous to handle thread hijacking, failed to provide ACLs templates for known trusted applications, and did not make it granular to a meaningful filesystem subsets and did not apply it to services, just accounts.
I'm all for limiting user accounts and programs run by those users, I just think this particular implementation is a train wreck that will do little good and some undetermined level of harm.
Antitrust abuse involves markets, not formats. MS has been convicted in the EU of illegally tying their media player software and its accompanying format and DRM to the Windows OS. Technically, that means MS should have to stop bundling it and/or provide some other way in which competing players/formats can be promoted in the exact same way. Unfortunately, the courts dropped the ball entirely and imposed useless penalties.
Apple is currently under investigation for tying their media playing software (iTunes) not to their OS, but to their portable players. If convicted, it is anyone's guess what will happen and I don't know who to cheer for. If they impose another useless penalty, then users will have very limited choices in the market. If they stop Apple, they are basically handing the market to MS, since they failed to stop MS's bundling. The only real hope is that they mandate Apple's format/DRM, but as an opened standard thus denying lock-in for the format at least to any company.
And if so, how does the average joe turns the attention of (say) DOJ to this issue?
First donate a few million bucks to the republican party... or create a huge media sensation about the issue so that political figures become concerned about being re-elected. Otherwise, I don't think the DoJ cares, MS already paid their masters.
To be frank, you're flat out wrong. It's not a matter of opinion, or some kind of "west vs east" brainwashing. It's a simple matter of definition.
You're mistaking "communism" with "marxism." Marxism is a political system based upon extreme socialism, but which usually misleadingly refers to "communism" instead. Marxism, in fact, advocated democracy as part of the theory, but later political figures who paid lip service to the concept paid that same lip service to democracy.
Communism, is an economic method that is very easily explained. Quite simply communism is the concept that a smaller group (commune or communist cell) within a larger economy can share some or all resources and the decision making regarding those resources. Theoretically this shared resource allocation and decision making results in greater efficiency. In practice this works very well for small cell sizes and very poorly for large cell sizes. This is because as cell sizes increase to the point where decision making is affecting strangers, people stop caring about them and act disinterestedly or selfishly. As a result correct decision making is not motivated and further the consolidation of so much power into so few hands lends itself easily to that power being seized by a totalitarian regime.
I would willingly admit that the communism, as defined by those who derived from the theories of Karl Marx, is not the opposite of democracy. In practice, it certainly is.
This is not the case. You are trying to define "communism" as only extreme applications of communism with very large cell sizes or in fact socialism, where everyone is in one cell. This is completely wrong. All states subscribe to a blend of capitalism, socialism, and communism and the communist component is applied almost everywhere in ways that are not Marxism. The atomic family within the US completely fits the definition of a communist cell. A family shares a home, utilities, food, etc. and the decision making is made collectively, although not necessarily equitably. Aside from that, within the US, co-ops, communes, and monasteries are all communist cells. For example, I know a lot of people in a server colocation co-op. They all donate time or old servers or money to maintain a number of co-located servers which they share for Web hosting, e-mail, IRC, and a number of other services. Together they get better rates, to the point of being absurdly cheap. That also fits the definition of a communist cell, even though they only share one given resource. In many places around the world villages act as officially recognized communist cells, most of which are democratically operated. To claim that all applications of communism are anti-democratic is simply uninformed.
Moreover, automatically assuming someone is brainwashed because you didn't bother to consider what communism really implies kind of detracts from whatever point you thought you were making.
The US was subjected to a planned and directed campaign of propaganda designed to confuse and misinform the public about what communism is, ironically, in a cold war against socialists. Claiming that people are brainwashed is not so far fetched. Economists recognize that every economy is to some degree socialist and to some degree communist or it is unlikely to be stable for any length of time. China and Cuba both practice more socialism than is the norm. The US is about average, but applies it in uncommon ways. China and Cuba are also both capitalist to a large extent and both are moving more and more in that direction.
If you're looking for extremely communist countries (as opposed to socialist), look to countries with very large communist cell sizes. Madagascar, for example, theoretically has three layers of government: communes, states, and national. Realistically, the states basically do not exist. Most of the country lives in small villages and each village, acts as a communist cell sharing a large number of resources. Whether that extreme cell size is benefici
What I don't get is why communists in India don't have mandatory public education.
The article and many like it are more than a little inflammatory. By "communist government" they mean "democratic government run by a political party that favors the ideals of communism." Communism is not even a form of government, it is a economic method. When people talk about "communist governments" they are often referring to places that instituted extreme amounts of socialism which resulted in a totalitarian government, so it is more than a little bit of a misnomer. That is not at all the case in Kerala, as I understand.
I do not know or understand why the courts did not do someting equally draconian with Microsoft when they had the chance. History seems to suggest that it is the most likely method to succeed.
The original ruling against MS actually called for them to be broken up. They then went on to lose the appeal on all major points, but between losing the appeal and being sentenced the second time, there was an election and MS was one of the largest contributors in that election to both major parties election funds. Basically, they bribed politicians to give them a useless sentence and the politicians replaced the people in charge of the DoJ who then handed down the new, useless, sentence.
It seems to me without adequate political pressure, the DOJ will probably ignore this permission.
I'm convinced there will be legal pressure to push for a better solution to MS's actions, because the Democrats who just grabbed a lot of power know a good thing when they see it. That same political pressure will evaporate once they are paid.
I love people who do this. This is not even comparable to something like raping someone.
Sure it's comparable. He just compared them. It is not, however, a particularly good or tasteful comparison. Burglary would be a much better comparison. It causes short term damage to differing people and has the potential for serious long term damage. MS is like a repeat offender burglar that is supposed to be on probation. The problem is, this burglar spent most of the money, a large chunk of which went to campaign contributions to help elect the local judge, chief of police, and mayor.
That's the reason for all the "render like WordPerfect 5.x" options that people have complained about, because they have to allow people to convert to the XML format and then convert back without reducing the document to an unreadable mess.
There is no reason I know of why the XML format cannot support all the features of Word and round trip, without relying on nasty hacks like this, it just takes more work. The problem with "Open"XML that I've seen is the concentrate entirely on supporting only the features of.doc files and their interactions with other programs to the exclusion of anything else. Rather than "render like WP 5.x" you need to define how WP 5.x renders that feature, then incorporate it into your conversion script in a way that makes sense in general for documents.
The whole format is built upon the assumption that only MS and Word will be using it and it is not designed to abstract word processing documents in general, but to kowtow to the eccentricities of Word.
The alternative is to not support roundtripping and then wait for slashdot headlines like "Users find that the new Office XML format mangles their documents".
No, the alternative is to do it right and build hacks like the ones you mention into the import and export routines, rather than embedding them, without any definition, into the format.
You're claiming Java and QT are generic solution to the multi-OS problem...
Actually Java and QT are examples of possible solutions to easy cross-platform development. Almost all major software development houses maintain portable code because it makes for better code even if you never target another platform. It provides more flexibility for the future and other platforms are profitable right now. The real problem with cross-platform applications is not that the technology is not possible. It is that in many cases there is little motivation to use them and some artificial incentives to not use them. Because of MS's monopoly on desktop OS's and the technological decisions they've made to try to make cross platform programming harder, in some market segments it does not make sense to aim at multiple platforms. That does not mean that if the desktop OS market was not more evenly divided among 3 or more competing platforms, cross-platform programming tools would not be a whole lot better and better supported by those platforms. It would be the default way to work and I don't know of any technical reasons why it would not work just fine.
Basically, I think you're mistaking the effect (cross platform tools are not used as widely as they could be and are not mature and well supported on all OS's) for the cause (there is one dominant OS).
This is a little more general and less about this particular instance of abuse but... Does anyone here have any confidence that MS will stop breaking the law unless the courts effectively intervene? Does anyone here think that MS's huge contributions to the political campaigns of those corrupt people in charge of enforcing said laws will be able to prevent them from being effectively punished for a given abuse? Does anyone think the courts can act quickly enough so that they stop all the existing players in a market from being destroyed?
The courts are slow as molasses when lots of high priced lawyers get involved. The justice department is directed by corrupt politicians who will do anything they can get away with for money. MS has piles of money. As a result MS can break the law and suffer little or no repercussions. Sure they pay a fine here and settle a lawsuit there, but at nowhere near an expense equalling the amount of money they make from their crimes. They built their business model upon the assumption that breaking the law and then buying their way out of it would be more profitable than obeying the law, and they've been 100% correct.
I don't think it will ever be possible for a bureaucracy like most governments to deal with MS on a micro-managing level. The only way to repair the destroyed markets and make sure MS does not have motivation to commit more crimes is to break their business model for them. The best way I can see to do this is the classic way, destroy their monopoly by breaking them into competing factions. You can't abuse a monopoly if you don't have one.
Here is what I think would work. Assign all intellectual property, copyrights, and patents relating to Windows to two new companies MS-A and MS-B. Split the workforce and financial resources between them. Investors get a stock split. Now you have two companies both of whom can sell Windows and make changes to Windows and both of whom have some of the manpower needed to do that. Forbid the two companies from any non-public communication with one another. Every single MS lock-in is instantly destroyed. Dell can buy Windows from MS-A or MS-B and can take bids from both. Dell can also choose based upon competition on features. Windows A now has improved graphics performance for OpenGL and DirectX and is great for gamers. Windows B, however, concentrated on developing the best anti-virus and security solution possible mitigating almost all malware without the user ever doing a thing. Dell can buy either version or both for different customers, but they have a choice. Both new companies are actually motivated to deliver what they think customers want, instead of anti-features that provide MS with what MS wants and ignores the customers under the assumption that they will have to buy from MS.
Windows fans will get a temporary slowdown in development during the reorganization, then a huge boom in development as the new companies streamline and invest in giving users what they want in order to compete with the other new MS. People who think bundling is critical to innovation can likewise be happy, since both new companies are now free to bundle anything and everything they want, as that does not lock anyone in.
Both new companies are motivated to provide interoperability and play nice with others to a much greater extent since they will be trying to win customers from one another. Application developers will no longer be motivated to write non-portable code and thus applications that run on many platforms will become more common. Java VM applications, for example will get a lot better and a lot more common. All of this will make Linux distributions, OS X, and other OS players more viable and more likely to be adopted. Apple will probably be forced to de-couple their OS and hardware in order to compete and will no longer be assured of destruction from monopoly abuse if they take that action. Users and OEMs will have choices and investment in the OS market will skyrocket with accompanying rapid improvements in the sta
There's a difference between APIs internal to the operating system, and APIs intended to provide a userland interface. If Microsoft userland products are using the internal APIs, then those APIs ought to be released. Otherwise, I don't see the probelem.
I think you're considering this a little too much from the programmer's point of view and not enough from the legal/economic point of view. The real distinction that needs to be determined is which APIs are being used by MS in conjunction with some offering that competes in a separate, existing market. For example, APIs that interoperate with MS's Web browser, virus detection, and allow for communication with their server offerings may be categorized as internal to the operating system, but they provide functionality for bundling and tying from an economic point of view.
...I'd be interested to see which APIs are being discussed here before I go off on an anti-Microsoft rant...
Don't worry, even not knowing what APIs are being discussed we can always go off on anti-microsoft rants on other topics. That's the fun of it, they're doing so many things that are unethical and criminal that there is always something to rant about.
Agree with your general sentimenet[sic] but I want to point out that free, compulsary, public education benefits the rich enormously more than if it didn't exist. It benefits every one, I cant think of any big losers.
I'd say that point is very arguable. It certainly benefits society as a whole, but if the wealthy can be relatively more educated than the general populace, by a greater degree, then they have an additional advantage when competing with the rest of the populace. The more ignorant the people are, the more easily led they will be.
They just aim to create EU-wide unified criteria for judging violence in games. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with banning games!
Slashdot summaries are often misleading interpretations of articles. That is not the case here. From TFA, "The Commission wants to see a combination of outright bans on the most violent games, together with minimum age rules on other titles." If you're asserting the summary is wrong because you read the article, your comment would be fine as the reference is already there. As it is you're making an assertion that contradicts the article. For that you need to provide a real reference if you want anyone to believe you.
Suffice it to say that anyone who wants to post to slashdot would definately have to register.
Listen just because we're posting from work, doesn't mean we're being paid to post political commentary on Slashdot. Unless you're an astroturfer getting paid to post here, this legislation does not apply to you.
The market would have failed far earlier without regulation.
That depends entirely upon what you mean by "failed."
The free market system breaks down in the face of externalities, imbalanceof information, or natural monopoly. In this case, the issues are externalities and imbalance of information. The externalities are the potential harms caused by poorly tested drugs...
Poorly tested drugs can be solved by the market as companies lose business as their reputation is destroyed by dangerous drugs and as independent testing and validation companies come into existence. I disagree with your point in this case.
...and the imbalance of information is due to the fact that no average buyer will have nearly enough information to make an informed decision about what drug to take.
Providing information and testing is a socialist program, but it is not the interruption of the free market we were discussing, which is the banning of drugs based upon government tests and the government enforcement of patents that stop other companies from making the same drugs and providing competition. It is the job of doctors in conjunction with the info from the FDA or a more free market replacement for the FDA to provide buyers with information. That is why we pay doctors, to be experts on that subject.
Thus the need for government regulation.
You're completely missing the point. The FDA or some other body providing information is needed. That is not the same as regulation. I'm all in favor of the FDA telling me drug X is dangerous and likely to kill me. I'm not in favor of them taking away my freedom to choose to take it anyway because I disagree with them. That said, it was the patent system that was the restriction of the free market to which I was referring. Our patent system is quite broken, but I'm not advocating doing away with it, only doing away with referring to any market in which the government enforces patents as a "free market" which it patently is not.
Every country is socialist and communist and capitalist in some blend.
What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich.
Public schools are socialism, but the rich could more effectively pay for private schools and benefit more by denying that education to the poor. Medicare, social security, welfare, public roads, etc. etc. are all socialist policies in the USA. Sure socialism in the US is really messed up, but not only to benefit the rich.
When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.
A market in which the government enforces time limited monopolies in the form of patents can hardly be called a free market. I think what you mean to say is the heavily regulated and controlled market may or may not be failing in this instance and the government may want to step in and pick up the ball.
Sun makes a big deal about adding licenses and not replacing them, so merely adding a v3 option to the CDDL one would do nothing for developers not wanting to help Tivoization a la Linux. In general, new contributors want to know their benefit in exchange for assigning copyright to Sun.
Ahh, but who says that contributors will be assigning their copyright to Sun? If Solaris is GPL, then contributors can modify and add to it without reassigning copyright to Sun. Then Sun has a choice between trying to acquire those copyrights for the CDDL version, ignoring those contributions and risking the community forking and the popular version being one they don't ship, or maintaining two separate distributions a GPL one and a CDDL one with differing functionality.
The beauty of HTML is, is that any browser can read it.
Yeah, I'm thinking about trying to get more OSS used here at work, why don't you e-mail me a copy of that report as an HTML file and all the associated images and I'll forward it to my boss so he can read it offline while on the plane. And that will print perfectly on the same pages no matter what browser we use to print it right, cuz I have Safari and he has IE5 and we want to be able to reference the same page numbers while talking about it over the phone, right?
HTML is a great format for some things, but a really shitty format for other things. If you have a computer that can't read PDF files, you're probably about a decade out of date.
"Linux" refers to the kernel of the operating system. Nothing more, nothing less.
And what part of my original comment, "some other distro like RedHat, or Ubuntu, which has moved to GPLv3 for the code they contribute" lead you to think I was talking about the Linux kernel, instead of a distribution including the kernel, installer, applications, etc. ?
Releasing OpenSolaris under GPLv3 might be a good strategic move. Right now GPLv3 is in limbo, with some projects moving to it and some not. The main purpose of GPLv3 is to try to stop submarine patents from the industry in general, but Microsoft in particular, from being used to undermine the process. So imagine Suse using GPLv2 competing against some other distro like RedHat, or Ubuntu, which has moved to GPLv3 for the code they contribute. They get the added value of swapping code with OpenSolaris, which has some really cool stuff and Sun gets the benefit of undermining MS's new strategy, which of course is as detrimental to Sun as anyone else, by making Suse Linux an outdated distro.
Most PDF documents are tagged by the author to not allow copying.
What? Where do you come by this info? I produce PDFs as part of my job and probably read 1-3 a day from people outside my company. I don't recall ever seeing one I could not copy text from. I happen to have three professional publishing packages and several word processors on my workstation and none of them default to forbidding copying. I tried this particular file and it did not restrict me from copying and pasting. I went to google and grabbed the first 5 random PDF files it handed me (from the US DoJ, US NIH, EU, W3C, and MS) and none of them forbid me from copying and pasting. I know there are some DRM features in PDF files that can be used to make copying or even viewing them without a password difficult, but I've never seen them used in practice.
While I appreciate the potential, I suspect that there is some sort of misinformation going around as to the fact that, in general, PDFs don't let you copy and paste text. Could this, perhaps, be because the Adobe Acrobat reader and plugin don't make it easy enough by default as the cursor is set to move the page instead of copy text, and most users don't know how to change it?
For example, if the police find you dressed in a ninja outfit with a sword in your hands outside someone's house, and after subsequent investigation discover that you have been paid $10,000 by the occupant's bitter ex-husband to kill her, do you really think you would or should be let off scott free because you haven't actually managed to murder her? I know the Libertarian nutjobs here would say "yes you are innocent, you were exercising your right to dress how you like, carry any weapon you like, be where you like, and accept money from anyone without having to explain it" but in the real world, you'd go down for conspiracy to murder.
Ahh, but in such an instance the police have proof that you were hired to kill someone and you're being convicted of being hired to kill someone. That is what the conspiracy charge is. You're not being convicted of murdering someone, which you haven't done. To be clear though, I'm not arguing that intent can't be part of a law like manslaughter versus first degree murder, but merely that laws that rely upon such to determine if a law has been broken at all are very poor (and there are a number of them). You go to great pains to describe a scenario, but most of the details are misleading. Suppose I'm dressed in a ninja suit and have a drawn sword and I'm outside at a costume party. Do the police use their psychic powers to determine if I'm a murderer they stopped in the act or simply wearing a costume? What if someone pays me to murder their wife and I'm found outside her house at night without a sword and ninja outfit? Does that make any difference if they already know I was hired to kill her?
The law needs to deal with observable facts, not guesses about what someone really intended.
HTML is a markup language. It is fine for online viewing but a huge pain in the ass to e-mail to someone and it does not guarantee exact layout, and the ability to print it properly is questionable on a given machine.
Well I do, PDFs kill my laptop, more than a few open and it just dies.
One of the main advantages of open standards is that you have the ability to pick the best tool, rather than being tied to just one tool for the format. PDF is an open format and there are any number of applications to read and write that format. If you are using one that kills your laptop, why haven't you looked into other tools? Others have already mentioned Foxit if you are on Windows.
Maybe I'm my own irony-do pdfs work better on Linux than they do on X(pletitive)P?
In my experience PDFs work well on all platforms provided you avoid the combination of Windows+Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin+IE. Unfortunately, that is the most common combination of tools used to view them and it is complete crap. Even the Adobe Acrobat Reader, with all the extras turned off seems to work just fine on Windows. For some reason the above combination hits Window's weak resource allocation and IE's failure to multitask and Acrobat plug-in's failure to do anything while downloading and tendency to hog memory. As a result users tend to click a link then their whole Windows box just freezes until the PDF is finished downloading at which point if they have limited RAM everything slows to a crawl.
Just out of curiosity, what type of PDF reader can't copy and text to the clipboard? I have XPDF, Preview, and Acrobat Reader and all of them allow me to copy text.
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To be honest, I'd still rather buy a release every 5 years for substantial changes than every year for minimal changes.
Okay, that's a valid preference. I'd rather get most features as soon as possible, and the cost is not important to me. Can you accept that my preference is equally valid? Now, supposing the two of us are given a choice what would be ideal (not regarding the particular OS). Is it better that the vendor release new features once every 5 years, so that you're happy and I'm unhappy. Or is it better that the vendor release an OS every 1.5 years so that you can buy a version every 4.5 years and I can buy a version every 1.5 years making both of us happy? The latter method (Apple's method) lets us both choose what we prefer and I certainly know people that skip one or two or even three versions before upgrading.
if there was a single feature that is a quantifiable improvement on anything other than visuals; it's UAC.
UAC is a somewhat castrated implementation, of an old concept. I applaud MS for heading in that direction, but like almost all things MS, I don't expect it to actually work for another two or three revisions. The current implementation looks like a disaster to me. They almost completely ignored the human interaction component, did not provide the trust determination component, failed to make the system ubiquitous to handle thread hijacking, failed to provide ACLs templates for known trusted applications, and did not make it granular to a meaningful filesystem subsets and did not apply it to services, just accounts.
I'm all for limiting user accounts and programs run by those users, I just think this particular implementation is a train wreck that will do little good and some undetermined level of harm.
Antitrust abuse involves markets, not formats. MS has been convicted in the EU of illegally tying their media player software and its accompanying format and DRM to the Windows OS. Technically, that means MS should have to stop bundling it and/or provide some other way in which competing players/formats can be promoted in the exact same way. Unfortunately, the courts dropped the ball entirely and imposed useless penalties.
Apple is currently under investigation for tying their media playing software (iTunes) not to their OS, but to their portable players. If convicted, it is anyone's guess what will happen and I don't know who to cheer for. If they impose another useless penalty, then users will have very limited choices in the market. If they stop Apple, they are basically handing the market to MS, since they failed to stop MS's bundling. The only real hope is that they mandate Apple's format/DRM, but as an opened standard thus denying lock-in for the format at least to any company.
And if so, how does the average joe turns the attention of (say) DOJ to this issue?
First donate a few million bucks to the republican party... or create a huge media sensation about the issue so that political figures become concerned about being re-elected. Otherwise, I don't think the DoJ cares, MS already paid their masters.
To be frank, you're flat out wrong. It's not a matter of opinion, or some kind of "west vs east" brainwashing. It's a simple matter of definition.
You're mistaking "communism" with "marxism." Marxism is a political system based upon extreme socialism, but which usually misleadingly refers to "communism" instead. Marxism, in fact, advocated democracy as part of the theory, but later political figures who paid lip service to the concept paid that same lip service to democracy.
Communism, is an economic method that is very easily explained. Quite simply communism is the concept that a smaller group (commune or communist cell) within a larger economy can share some or all resources and the decision making regarding those resources. Theoretically this shared resource allocation and decision making results in greater efficiency. In practice this works very well for small cell sizes and very poorly for large cell sizes. This is because as cell sizes increase to the point where decision making is affecting strangers, people stop caring about them and act disinterestedly or selfishly. As a result correct decision making is not motivated and further the consolidation of so much power into so few hands lends itself easily to that power being seized by a totalitarian regime.
I would willingly admit that the communism, as defined by those who derived from the theories of Karl Marx, is not the opposite of democracy. In practice, it certainly is.
This is not the case. You are trying to define "communism" as only extreme applications of communism with very large cell sizes or in fact socialism, where everyone is in one cell. This is completely wrong. All states subscribe to a blend of capitalism, socialism, and communism and the communist component is applied almost everywhere in ways that are not Marxism. The atomic family within the US completely fits the definition of a communist cell. A family shares a home, utilities, food, etc. and the decision making is made collectively, although not necessarily equitably. Aside from that, within the US, co-ops, communes, and monasteries are all communist cells. For example, I know a lot of people in a server colocation co-op. They all donate time or old servers or money to maintain a number of co-located servers which they share for Web hosting, e-mail, IRC, and a number of other services. Together they get better rates, to the point of being absurdly cheap. That also fits the definition of a communist cell, even though they only share one given resource. In many places around the world villages act as officially recognized communist cells, most of which are democratically operated. To claim that all applications of communism are anti-democratic is simply uninformed.
Moreover, automatically assuming someone is brainwashed because you didn't bother to consider what communism really implies kind of detracts from whatever point you thought you were making.
The US was subjected to a planned and directed campaign of propaganda designed to confuse and misinform the public about what communism is, ironically, in a cold war against socialists. Claiming that people are brainwashed is not so far fetched. Economists recognize that every economy is to some degree socialist and to some degree communist or it is unlikely to be stable for any length of time. China and Cuba both practice more socialism than is the norm. The US is about average, but applies it in uncommon ways. China and Cuba are also both capitalist to a large extent and both are moving more and more in that direction.
If you're looking for extremely communist countries (as opposed to socialist), look to countries with very large communist cell sizes. Madagascar, for example, theoretically has three layers of government: communes, states, and national. Realistically, the states basically do not exist. Most of the country lives in small villages and each village, acts as a communist cell sharing a large number of resources. Whether that extreme cell size is benefici
What I don't get is why communists in India don't have mandatory public education.
The article and many like it are more than a little inflammatory. By "communist government" they mean "democratic government run by a political party that favors the ideals of communism." Communism is not even a form of government, it is a economic method. When people talk about "communist governments" they are often referring to places that instituted extreme amounts of socialism which resulted in a totalitarian government, so it is more than a little bit of a misnomer. That is not at all the case in Kerala, as I understand.
I do not know or understand why the courts did not do someting equally draconian with Microsoft when they had the chance. History seems to suggest that it is the most likely method to succeed.
The original ruling against MS actually called for them to be broken up. They then went on to lose the appeal on all major points, but between losing the appeal and being sentenced the second time, there was an election and MS was one of the largest contributors in that election to both major parties election funds. Basically, they bribed politicians to give them a useless sentence and the politicians replaced the people in charge of the DoJ who then handed down the new, useless, sentence.
It seems to me without adequate political pressure, the DOJ will probably ignore this permission.
I'm convinced there will be legal pressure to push for a better solution to MS's actions, because the Democrats who just grabbed a lot of power know a good thing when they see it. That same political pressure will evaporate once they are paid.
I love people who do this. This is not even comparable to something like raping someone.
Sure it's comparable. He just compared them. It is not, however, a particularly good or tasteful comparison. Burglary would be a much better comparison. It causes short term damage to differing people and has the potential for serious long term damage. MS is like a repeat offender burglar that is supposed to be on probation. The problem is, this burglar spent most of the money, a large chunk of which went to campaign contributions to help elect the local judge, chief of police, and mayor.
That's the reason for all the "render like WordPerfect 5.x" options that people have complained about, because they have to allow people to convert to the XML format and then convert back without reducing the document to an unreadable mess.
There is no reason I know of why the XML format cannot support all the features of Word and round trip, without relying on nasty hacks like this, it just takes more work. The problem with "Open"XML that I've seen is the concentrate entirely on supporting only the features of .doc files and their interactions with other programs to the exclusion of anything else. Rather than "render like WP 5.x" you need to define how WP 5.x renders that feature, then incorporate it into your conversion script in a way that makes sense in general for documents.
The whole format is built upon the assumption that only MS and Word will be using it and it is not designed to abstract word processing documents in general, but to kowtow to the eccentricities of Word.
The alternative is to not support roundtripping and then wait for slashdot headlines like "Users find that the new Office XML format mangles their documents".
No, the alternative is to do it right and build hacks like the ones you mention into the import and export routines, rather than embedding them, without any definition, into the format.
You're claiming Java and QT are generic solution to the multi-OS problem...
Actually Java and QT are examples of possible solutions to easy cross-platform development. Almost all major software development houses maintain portable code because it makes for better code even if you never target another platform. It provides more flexibility for the future and other platforms are profitable right now. The real problem with cross-platform applications is not that the technology is not possible. It is that in many cases there is little motivation to use them and some artificial incentives to not use them. Because of MS's monopoly on desktop OS's and the technological decisions they've made to try to make cross platform programming harder, in some market segments it does not make sense to aim at multiple platforms. That does not mean that if the desktop OS market was not more evenly divided among 3 or more competing platforms, cross-platform programming tools would not be a whole lot better and better supported by those platforms. It would be the default way to work and I don't know of any technical reasons why it would not work just fine.
Basically, I think you're mistaking the effect (cross platform tools are not used as widely as they could be and are not mature and well supported on all OS's) for the cause (there is one dominant OS).
This is a little more general and less about this particular instance of abuse but... Does anyone here have any confidence that MS will stop breaking the law unless the courts effectively intervene? Does anyone here think that MS's huge contributions to the political campaigns of those corrupt people in charge of enforcing said laws will be able to prevent them from being effectively punished for a given abuse? Does anyone think the courts can act quickly enough so that they stop all the existing players in a market from being destroyed?
The courts are slow as molasses when lots of high priced lawyers get involved. The justice department is directed by corrupt politicians who will do anything they can get away with for money. MS has piles of money. As a result MS can break the law and suffer little or no repercussions. Sure they pay a fine here and settle a lawsuit there, but at nowhere near an expense equalling the amount of money they make from their crimes. They built their business model upon the assumption that breaking the law and then buying their way out of it would be more profitable than obeying the law, and they've been 100% correct.
I don't think it will ever be possible for a bureaucracy like most governments to deal with MS on a micro-managing level. The only way to repair the destroyed markets and make sure MS does not have motivation to commit more crimes is to break their business model for them. The best way I can see to do this is the classic way, destroy their monopoly by breaking them into competing factions. You can't abuse a monopoly if you don't have one.
Here is what I think would work. Assign all intellectual property, copyrights, and patents relating to Windows to two new companies MS-A and MS-B. Split the workforce and financial resources between them. Investors get a stock split. Now you have two companies both of whom can sell Windows and make changes to Windows and both of whom have some of the manpower needed to do that. Forbid the two companies from any non-public communication with one another. Every single MS lock-in is instantly destroyed. Dell can buy Windows from MS-A or MS-B and can take bids from both. Dell can also choose based upon competition on features. Windows A now has improved graphics performance for OpenGL and DirectX and is great for gamers. Windows B, however, concentrated on developing the best anti-virus and security solution possible mitigating almost all malware without the user ever doing a thing. Dell can buy either version or both for different customers, but they have a choice. Both new companies are actually motivated to deliver what they think customers want, instead of anti-features that provide MS with what MS wants and ignores the customers under the assumption that they will have to buy from MS.
Windows fans will get a temporary slowdown in development during the reorganization, then a huge boom in development as the new companies streamline and invest in giving users what they want in order to compete with the other new MS. People who think bundling is critical to innovation can likewise be happy, since both new companies are now free to bundle anything and everything they want, as that does not lock anyone in.
Both new companies are motivated to provide interoperability and play nice with others to a much greater extent since they will be trying to win customers from one another. Application developers will no longer be motivated to write non-portable code and thus applications that run on many platforms will become more common. Java VM applications, for example will get a lot better and a lot more common. All of this will make Linux distributions, OS X, and other OS players more viable and more likely to be adopted. Apple will probably be forced to de-couple their OS and hardware in order to compete and will no longer be assured of destruction from monopoly abuse if they take that action. Users and OEMs will have choices and investment in the OS market will skyrocket with accompanying rapid improvements in the sta
There's a difference between APIs internal to the operating system, and APIs intended to provide a userland interface. If Microsoft userland products are using the internal APIs, then those APIs ought to be released. Otherwise, I don't see the probelem.
I think you're considering this a little too much from the programmer's point of view and not enough from the legal/economic point of view. The real distinction that needs to be determined is which APIs are being used by MS in conjunction with some offering that competes in a separate, existing market. For example, APIs that interoperate with MS's Web browser, virus detection, and allow for communication with their server offerings may be categorized as internal to the operating system, but they provide functionality for bundling and tying from an economic point of view.
Don't worry, even not knowing what APIs are being discussed we can always go off on anti-microsoft rants on other topics. That's the fun of it, they're doing so many things that are unethical and criminal that there is always something to rant about.
Agree with your general sentimenet[sic] but I want to point out that free, compulsary, public education benefits the rich enormously more than if it didn't exist. It benefits every one, I cant think of any big losers.
I'd say that point is very arguable. It certainly benefits society as a whole, but if the wealthy can be relatively more educated than the general populace, by a greater degree, then they have an additional advantage when competing with the rest of the populace. The more ignorant the people are, the more easily led they will be.
They just aim to create EU-wide unified criteria for judging violence in games. Nothing more. It has nothing to do with banning games!
Slashdot summaries are often misleading interpretations of articles. That is not the case here. From TFA, "The Commission wants to see a combination of outright bans on the most violent games, together with minimum age rules on other titles." If you're asserting the summary is wrong because you read the article, your comment would be fine as the reference is already there. As it is you're making an assertion that contradicts the article. For that you need to provide a real reference if you want anyone to believe you.
Suffice it to say that anyone who wants to post to slashdot would definately have to register.
Listen just because we're posting from work, doesn't mean we're being paid to post political commentary on Slashdot. Unless you're an astroturfer getting paid to post here, this legislation does not apply to you.
The market would have failed far earlier without regulation.
That depends entirely upon what you mean by "failed."
The free market system breaks down in the face of externalities, imbalanceof information, or natural monopoly. In this case, the issues are externalities and imbalance of information. The externalities are the potential harms caused by poorly tested drugs...
Poorly tested drugs can be solved by the market as companies lose business as their reputation is destroyed by dangerous drugs and as independent testing and validation companies come into existence. I disagree with your point in this case.
Providing information and testing is a socialist program, but it is not the interruption of the free market we were discussing, which is the banning of drugs based upon government tests and the government enforcement of patents that stop other companies from making the same drugs and providing competition. It is the job of doctors in conjunction with the info from the FDA or a more free market replacement for the FDA to provide buyers with information. That is why we pay doctors, to be experts on that subject.
Thus the need for government regulation.
You're completely missing the point. The FDA or some other body providing information is needed. That is not the same as regulation. I'm all in favor of the FDA telling me drug X is dangerous and likely to kill me. I'm not in favor of them taking away my freedom to choose to take it anyway because I disagree with them. That said, it was the patent system that was the restriction of the free market to which I was referring. Our patent system is quite broken, but I'm not advocating doing away with it, only doing away with referring to any market in which the government enforces patents as a "free market" which it patently is not.
The west is socialist!
Every country is socialist and communist and capitalist in some blend.
What we have here in the good ol' USA is socialism for the rich.
Public schools are socialism, but the rich could more effectively pay for private schools and benefit more by denying that education to the poor. Medicare, social security, welfare, public roads, etc. etc. are all socialist policies in the USA. Sure socialism in the US is really messed up, but not only to benefit the rich.
When the free market fails, as in this case, why not let government do it? Most major scientific breakthroughs have come from government funding.
A market in which the government enforces time limited monopolies in the form of patents can hardly be called a free market. I think what you mean to say is the heavily regulated and controlled market may or may not be failing in this instance and the government may want to step in and pick up the ball.
Sun makes a big deal about adding licenses and not replacing them, so merely adding a v3 option to the CDDL one would do nothing for developers not wanting to help Tivoization a la Linux. In general, new contributors want to know their benefit in exchange for assigning copyright to Sun.
Ahh, but who says that contributors will be assigning their copyright to Sun? If Solaris is GPL, then contributors can modify and add to it without reassigning copyright to Sun. Then Sun has a choice between trying to acquire those copyrights for the CDDL version, ignoring those contributions and risking the community forking and the popular version being one they don't ship, or maintaining two separate distributions a GPL one and a CDDL one with differing functionality.
The beauty of HTML is, is that any browser can read it.
Yeah, I'm thinking about trying to get more OSS used here at work, why don't you e-mail me a copy of that report as an HTML file and all the associated images and I'll forward it to my boss so he can read it offline while on the plane. And that will print perfectly on the same pages no matter what browser we use to print it right, cuz I have Safari and he has IE5 and we want to be able to reference the same page numbers while talking about it over the phone, right?
HTML is a great format for some things, but a really shitty format for other things. If you have a computer that can't read PDF files, you're probably about a decade out of date.
"Linux" refers to the kernel of the operating system. Nothing more, nothing less.
And what part of my original comment, "some other distro like RedHat, or Ubuntu, which has moved to GPLv3 for the code they contribute" lead you to think I was talking about the Linux kernel, instead of a distribution including the kernel, installer, applications, etc. ?
Releasing OpenSolaris under GPLv3 might be a good strategic move. Right now GPLv3 is in limbo, with some projects moving to it and some not. The main purpose of GPLv3 is to try to stop submarine patents from the industry in general, but Microsoft in particular, from being used to undermine the process. So imagine Suse using GPLv2 competing against some other distro like RedHat, or Ubuntu, which has moved to GPLv3 for the code they contribute. They get the added value of swapping code with OpenSolaris, which has some really cool stuff and Sun gets the benefit of undermining MS's new strategy, which of course is as detrimental to Sun as anyone else, by making Suse Linux an outdated distro.
Most PDF documents are tagged by the author to not allow copying.
What? Where do you come by this info? I produce PDFs as part of my job and probably read 1-3 a day from people outside my company. I don't recall ever seeing one I could not copy text from. I happen to have three professional publishing packages and several word processors on my workstation and none of them default to forbidding copying. I tried this particular file and it did not restrict me from copying and pasting. I went to google and grabbed the first 5 random PDF files it handed me (from the US DoJ, US NIH, EU, W3C, and MS) and none of them forbid me from copying and pasting. I know there are some DRM features in PDF files that can be used to make copying or even viewing them without a password difficult, but I've never seen them used in practice.
While I appreciate the potential, I suspect that there is some sort of misinformation going around as to the fact that, in general, PDFs don't let you copy and paste text. Could this, perhaps, be because the Adobe Acrobat reader and plugin don't make it easy enough by default as the cursor is set to move the page instead of copy text, and most users don't know how to change it?
For example, if the police find you dressed in a ninja outfit with a sword in your hands outside someone's house, and after subsequent investigation discover that you have been paid $10,000 by the occupant's bitter ex-husband to kill her, do you really think you would or should be let off scott free because you haven't actually managed to murder her? I know the Libertarian nutjobs here would say "yes you are innocent, you were exercising your right to dress how you like, carry any weapon you like, be where you like, and accept money from anyone without having to explain it" but in the real world, you'd go down for conspiracy to murder.
Ahh, but in such an instance the police have proof that you were hired to kill someone and you're being convicted of being hired to kill someone. That is what the conspiracy charge is. You're not being convicted of murdering someone, which you haven't done. To be clear though, I'm not arguing that intent can't be part of a law like manslaughter versus first degree murder, but merely that laws that rely upon such to determine if a law has been broken at all are very poor (and there are a number of them). You go to great pains to describe a scenario, but most of the details are misleading. Suppose I'm dressed in a ninja suit and have a drawn sword and I'm outside at a costume party. Do the police use their psychic powers to determine if I'm a murderer they stopped in the act or simply wearing a costume? What if someone pays me to murder their wife and I'm found outside her house at night without a sword and ninja outfit? Does that make any difference if they already know I was hired to kill her?
The law needs to deal with observable facts, not guesses about what someone really intended.
Why not HTML?
HTML is a markup language. It is fine for online viewing but a huge pain in the ass to e-mail to someone and it does not guarantee exact layout, and the ability to print it properly is questionable on a given machine.
Well I do, PDFs kill my laptop, more than a few open and it just dies.
One of the main advantages of open standards is that you have the ability to pick the best tool, rather than being tied to just one tool for the format. PDF is an open format and there are any number of applications to read and write that format. If you are using one that kills your laptop, why haven't you looked into other tools? Others have already mentioned Foxit if you are on Windows.
Maybe I'm my own irony-do pdfs work better on Linux than they do on X(pletitive)P?
In my experience PDFs work well on all platforms provided you avoid the combination of Windows+Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin+IE. Unfortunately, that is the most common combination of tools used to view them and it is complete crap. Even the Adobe Acrobat Reader, with all the extras turned off seems to work just fine on Windows. For some reason the above combination hits Window's weak resource allocation and IE's failure to multitask and Acrobat plug-in's failure to do anything while downloading and tendency to hog memory. As a result users tend to click a link then their whole Windows box just freezes until the PDF is finished downloading at which point if they have limited RAM everything slows to a crawl.
It's a PDF so I can't cut and paste...
Just out of curiosity, what type of PDF reader can't copy and text to the clipboard? I have XPDF, Preview, and Acrobat Reader and all of them allow me to copy text.