Don't forget that these are only the OEM copies which are going to be phased out by the end of the year. You can't just go out and buy 4 or 5 OEM copies of windows, and its (as far as I know) illegal to sell them on eBay, as you aren't selling them with hardware.
At least in Germany (which is not a small market) this is not an issue. The German Federal Court has determined several years ago, that this hardware binding is not a legal restriction. So you are free to sell OEM-Versions without any hardware, no matter what is printed on the cover of the CD.
Just to make it clear: Java is going to have the GPL with the Classpath-exception, which explicitely allows to create closed source applications when using the standard libraries.
Americans often send us Australians instruction manuals in German because they think everyone speaks German in Austraya.
Is this so? I assumed, they think that people in Germany and Austria talk English with a funny accent, mixed in some strange words like "Achtung!", "Marsch! Marsch!"
Some 5MW wind turbines are being tested today - hmmm... let's see, 16 wind turbines vs. 150,000 solar panels...
Have you ever seen such a wind turbine? They are 150 to 200 meters high and the rotators have a diameter of about 100 meters. You can not just put them side by side. So, to place 16 of such things, you also need a lot of space. They are of course quite expensive and they are not easy to maintain (they have huge moving parts...).
Just a rough estimate: you get about 100 to 150 Watt per square meter. This means, for a Gigawatt (the equivalent of a nuclear power plant) you need about 10 square kilometers. This is a lot of space, but several orders of magnitude less than the 400 000 square kilometers California has to offer.
Obviously we cannot observe the entire process, but an agreed-upon mid-point would certainly do.
Ahem, yes something like - a planet inside a disk of dust for instance...
I hope there's already a general description for when a group of matter within a dust-cloud would be considered a planet, or planet-like, or at least planet forming. That would be a conclusive smoking gun to justify the theory as now being an observed working method.
Your notion of a "smoking gun" is a bit too simple. Scientific theories are nearly never proven by a single, and deceisive observation. I doubt, that it is possible with todays technology to tell a protoplanet from a planet in a system lightyears away. But a system in a stage as observed in this case is also a quite good evidence for the theory, as it is still somewhere inbetween just a dust disk and a planet system like ours.
and now they have a planet in a debris disk.
That's not what the article stated:
What to you criticise? The word "debris" as opposed to "dusk". Well, on such a scale it is hard to distinguish and the article uses both words for the disk. Or do you say, the planet is not inside this disk. Well, here is what the article says:
It is still surrounded by a disk of dust that extends 30 billion kilometers from
the star. [...] The planet's orbit is inclined 30 degrees to Earth, the same angle at
which the star's disk is tilted. [...] The planet is in an elliptical orbit that
carries it as close to the star as Earth is from the Sun, and as far from the
star as Jupiter is from the Sun. [i.e. between 100 and 500 million miles]
This put together describes a planet moving inside a disk of dust.
Windows wasn't a generic term until Microsoft trademarked it.
I wonder what the english speaking people called the holes in the walls of their houses, where the sun was coming through, before Microsoft trademarked it. But probably they were simply not able to call anything anyhow - as they hadn't any Word yet.
Until they find a dust cloud containing a proto-planet in the process of condensing, the theory is still unproven.
Due to the time scales on which this happens, this is just impossible. How do you want to oberserve a process, which takes longer as our civilization exists? (And btw: how would you tell a proto-planet from a planet?) Similar to the way astrophysicists have confirmed the theory of stellar evolution, you have to find examples of systems in different stages. They have planet systems without debris, just disks with debris but no planets and now they have a planet in a debris disk. This star is quite young, so this also fits the theory. If it would be an older star, it would be difficult to explain. On the other hand, he is not too young, which would make a planet formation unlikely. So, the theory of plantetary formation has found at least a further confirmation.
They don't say "propertary software" they say "commercial software".
I repeat a quote I brought in in earlier posting:
Commercial Licensing. This is the appropriate option if you are creating ***proprietary applications*** and you are not prepared to distribute and share the source code of your application.
(My emphasis). So, they clearly say: you need the Commercial Licensing for proprietary, closed source applications. On the other hand you will find no word on their site, that forbids you to build commercial, non-proprietary applications using the GPL-Version - they only say it has to be open source.
But more importantly, they can't require that you have done none of your development using the open source edition of their software as they are required by european law to sell licenses to anyone who wants them.
Is this so? I as copyright holder don't have the right to determine who can get a license from me? Interesting, I thought I am free to sell a product to everybody I like. So, if I would like to license my software only to people born in Brighton or people living in Monaco or people whos first name starts with a 'Q', I would be free to do so. I would be interested to know which law prohibits me to choose whomever I like to sell my license.
You still don't get it. Here once again: Trolltech as the copyright holder has the right to release the software under whichever license they want. They opted for dual license, which is very common. You as a user can decide under which license you want to use their software. If you use their commercial license, you can distribute your work in closed form (so actually, what they call "commercial" is indeed, what the link you provided calls "proprierty"). If you chose the GPL-version, you have to distribute your code under the GPL as well, as the GPL tells you. You are not forbidden to make business with it according to the GPL (i.e. writing 'commercial' software) - and Trolltech does not forbid this anywhere as well, contrary to what you claimed, you may just not write closed source apps whith it - again, in complete accordance with the GPL. That you can not switch from GPL to closed source afterwards might be strange, inconvenient or whatever - but it's not against the GPL. If you want to produce closed source, you want the software under another license than the GPL. And Trolltech has all the freedom to deny you this right on their terms.
The problem is your inability to do a small amount of research on your own.
What you bring up here, doesn't contradict what I said. Again: if you use the GPL license, you have to release your app under the GPL. If you want to make business with it, it is as with any other GPLed software: it's possible (they nowhere state you are not allowed to), but probably not the classical off the shelf software. You still have to come up with a proof, that what they do is not correct.
So say I develop a nice open source app. Someone comes to me and wants a commercial license so they can distribute it without source. I go to Trolltech and ask for a commercial license for their library and they spring this shit on me. There goes my opportunity to fund my open source development. Moral of the story: don't use Qt for open source development if you ever want to be self funding by dual licensing.
Well, if you use a pure GPL licensed version, you don't even have the alternative up front to decide you want a closed source app. Try to get a closed source license for the GNU tools for instance, or the Linux kernel. That this is not suitable for many people can easily be seen. One can whine about the license strategy of Trolltech (as one can whine about the GPL), but the allegation, that they are doing something incorrect regarding the GPL or that their business model is not actually based on any legal concept of copyright is simply not true.
M$ MDSN pricing is $10,939 for the MSDN team suite. That includes up to 5 developers.
Which means, if you have 5 developers using QT you already pay a similar amount. And now, what comes with MSDN Team Suite:
Visual Studio, SQL Server, tools for software architecture, Business Solutions, all MS operating systems for different languages and more. You can absolutely not compare those two products. Even if you just take the MSDN Professional, which costs about 2000$ you get much more than just a library to create applications.
They specifically say that you can't use the open source version of their product to develop commercial software.
Can you give a quote for this allegation? What I found is the following:
Trolltech's Commercial licenses allow customers to develop, use and distribute their applications under standard commercial terms.
On the other hand they have this:
Trolltech's Open Source versions are available under the terms of the GPL - General Public License. The main obligation for software development under the GPL is that anyone using your software must have access to complete source code, and must be able to modify and redistribute that software to anyone free of charge.
If you want to make commercial software using the GPL-license - fine, just that your product has to be under the GPL as well, which is just fair. You can sell your software - as long as the customer gets your code and may distribute it for free. MySql has a similar dual licensing model. So, where's the problem?
Dude, I didn't say that Yau was a bad guy. I said that if the facts are as stated in the NY piece and I understood them correctly, then he would be sleazy.
I understood you correctly. But still the comment doesn't make too much sense. Of course the guy appears to be bad according to the article - this is the reason why his lawyer has written this letter and this is what the letter is about, and that's why the Slashdot title talks about "defaming".
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shing-Tung_Yau and the New Yorker piece. Yau supposledy tried to take credit for Perelmans work on the Poincare conjecture, publishing a solution after Perelman published his on arxiv, calling Perelmans 'incomplete' and saying he and his students didn't understand it.
This comment is utter nonsense. The letter in discussion is all about that what is in the New Yorker article is fabricated and not true. To summarize it: A says something bad about B, B says: "This is a lie!". And then you come and enter: "Well, this B must be quite some poor guy, look at what A says about him!" Come on!
And Wikipedia is absolutely not trustworthy here as a source, providing a quite bad example of its quality (The negative part in this entry was introduced only after the New Yorker article appeared and is clearly taken from there, an according comment criticising this fact is on the discussion page).
In which way? The article paints a very negative image. If it is actually fabricated and mostly tabloid-like sensationalism - isn't it comprehensible that he stands up against it?
While the New Yorker article was not particularly favorable to Dr. Yau, it didn't seem to me that it could be called defamation. Indeed, to the extent that it says negative things about him, they seem to be coming from his peers in mathematics - and not from the writer of the article. Is that a sufficient defense against a legal claim of defamation? I guess that is for the courts to decide.
The article painted a very negative picture of this man. According to the lawyer's letter this article is already used as ammunition by people in China against Yau. So, if this article is not true or can not stand a proof, it is surely defaming. And regarding those quotes: as the letter says several of the quotes were made as a reaction to a fabricated quote.
More importantly, by suing for defamation, Dr. Yau appears to be manifesting exactly the kind of behavior that he was described as having in the article.
I absolutely do not agree. Assume the content of the letter is correct, and the article is indeed garbage, it is absolutely comprehensible, that the man asks that the magazine takes action to make this point clear. Yau's first reaction was not: "we sue you", but he asks for adjustment and apology. He sees it only as a last ressort, and the letter makes this very clear.
Making them unreliable might not be necessary - just make it difficult or near impossible for laymen to fix little problems with their cars themselves. And this the car manufacturers have done.
Q: "When, exactly, did Slashdot become so retarded?"
A: During the Bush admistrations war on science, reason, morals and ethics.
It is very optimistic to think that retardation of a group of people can be explained by a single cause - which implies, that with the remedy of that cause chances are good, that things get better.
And BTW: you might blame Bush for many things, but hardly for the quality of posts from a french guy living in Paris.
In another story researchers found out, that human beings living in a time wildly known as the stone ages used fire - very likely for cooking. Fire is a fast chemical reaction which is basically atoms changing their quantum states. It's good to know that quantum physics has been widely used for a very - VERY - long time.
The basis of any machine translation is: finding the base form of a word (verb or what else), translate it and then bring it to the according form in the target language. This is basic stuff and anybody in the field of computer linguistics knows about it. You can read about it in any decent textbook covering this topic (and there you will also exactly find "how" to do it - which is not described in this patent). This has been around for decades. Building not a specific form but all is a no brainer once you have done the tool to create specific forms (actually my company for instance has exactly such a tool for internal purposes). Putting some kind of spell checking into the game is something I also would call "obvious".
Slashdot Mirror
At least in Germany (which is not a small market) this is not an issue. The German Federal Court has determined several years ago, that this hardware binding is not a legal restriction. So you are free to sell OEM-Versions without any hardware, no matter what is printed on the cover of the CD.
Just to make it clear: Java is going to have the GPL with the Classpath-exception, which explicitely allows to create closed source applications when using the standard libraries.
See Gosling's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jag/
and here you'll find the mentioned exception:l
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.htm
Is this so? I assumed, they think that people in Germany and Austria talk English with a funny accent, mixed in some strange words like "Achtung!", "Marsch! Marsch!"
Have you ever seen such a wind turbine? They are 150 to 200 meters high and the rotators have a diameter of about 100 meters. You can not just put them side by side. So, to place 16 of such things, you also need a lot of space. They are of course quite expensive and they are not easy to maintain (they have huge moving parts...).
Just a rough estimate: you get about 100 to 150 Watt per square meter. This means, for a Gigawatt (the equivalent of a nuclear power plant) you need about 10 square kilometers. This is a lot of space, but several orders of magnitude less than the 400 000 square kilometers California has to offer.
Ahem, yes something like - a planet inside a disk of dust for instance...
Your notion of a "smoking gun" is a bit too simple. Scientific theories are nearly never proven by a single, and deceisive observation. I doubt, that it is possible with todays technology to tell a protoplanet from a planet in a system lightyears away. But a system in a stage as observed in this case is also a quite good evidence for the theory, as it is still somewhere inbetween just a dust disk and a planet system like ours.
What to you criticise? The word "debris" as opposed to "dusk". Well, on such a scale it is hard to distinguish and the article uses both words for the disk. Or do you say, the planet is not inside this disk. Well, here is what the article says:
This put together describes a planet moving inside a disk of dust.
I wonder what the english speaking people called the holes in the walls of their houses, where the sun was coming through, before Microsoft trademarked it. But probably they were simply not able to call anything anyhow - as they hadn't any Word yet.
Where? Can you quote it? I would be intersted to see, where they ascribe an orbit to a disk.
Due to the time scales on which this happens, this is just impossible. How do you want to oberserve a process, which takes longer as our civilization exists? (And btw: how would you tell a proto-planet from a planet?) Similar to the way astrophysicists have confirmed the theory of stellar evolution, you have to find examples of systems in different stages. They have planet systems without debris, just disks with debris but no planets and now they have a planet in a debris disk. This star is quite young, so this also fits the theory. If it would be an older star, it would be difficult to explain. On the other hand, he is not too young, which would make a planet formation unlikely. So, the theory of plantetary formation has found at least a further confirmation.
I repeat a quote I brought in in earlier posting:
(My emphasis). So, they clearly say: you need the Commercial Licensing for proprietary, closed source applications. On the other hand you will find no word on their site, that forbids you to build commercial, non-proprietary applications using the GPL-Version - they only say it has to be open source.
Is this so? I as copyright holder don't have the right to determine who can get a license from me? Interesting, I thought I am free to sell a product to everybody I like. So, if I would like to license my software only to people born in Brighton or people living in Monaco or people whos first name starts with a 'Q', I would be free to do so. I would be interested to know which law prohibits me to choose whomever I like to sell my license.
You still don't get it. Here once again: Trolltech as the copyright holder has the right to release the software under whichever license they want. They opted for dual license, which is very common. You as a user can decide under which license you want to use their software. If you use their commercial license, you can distribute your work in closed form (so actually, what they call "commercial" is indeed, what the link you provided calls "proprierty"). If you chose the GPL-version, you have to distribute your code under the GPL as well, as the GPL tells you. You are not forbidden to make business with it according to the GPL (i.e. writing 'commercial' software) - and Trolltech does not forbid this anywhere as well, contrary to what you claimed, you may just not write closed source apps whith it - again, in complete accordance with the GPL. That you can not switch from GPL to closed source afterwards might be strange, inconvenient or whatever - but it's not against the GPL. If you want to produce closed source, you want the software under another license than the GPL. And Trolltech has all the freedom to deny you this right on their terms.
As you didn't present any logic, there was not much to follow.
What you bring up here, doesn't contradict what I said. Again: if you use the GPL license, you have to release your app under the GPL. If you want to make business with it, it is as with any other GPLed software: it's possible (they nowhere state you are not allowed to), but probably not the classical off the shelf software. You still have to come up with a proof, that what they do is not correct.
Well, if you use a pure GPL licensed version, you don't even have the alternative up front to decide you want a closed source app. Try to get a closed source license for the GNU tools for instance, or the Linux kernel. That this is not suitable for many people can easily be seen. One can whine about the license strategy of Trolltech (as one can whine about the GPL), but the allegation, that they are doing something incorrect regarding the GPL or that their business model is not actually based on any legal concept of copyright is simply not true.
Sorry, but your comparison is ridiciluous.
Which means, if you have 5 developers using QT you already pay a similar amount. And now, what comes with MSDN Team Suite: Visual Studio, SQL Server, tools for software architecture, Business Solutions, all MS operating systems for different languages and more. You can absolutely not compare those two products. Even if you just take the MSDN Professional, which costs about 2000$ you get much more than just a library to create applications.
Can you give a quote for this allegation? What I found is the following:
On the other hand they have this:
If you want to make commercial software using the GPL-license - fine, just that your product has to be under the GPL as well, which is just fair. You can sell your software - as long as the customer gets your code and may distribute it for free. MySql has a similar dual licensing model. So, where's the problem?
No, it is not. From the page:
I understood you correctly. But still the comment doesn't make too much sense. Of course the guy appears to be bad according to the article - this is the reason why his lawyer has written this letter and this is what the letter is about, and that's why the Slashdot title talks about "defaming".
This comment is utter nonsense. The letter in discussion is all about that what is in the New Yorker article is fabricated and not true. To summarize it: A says something bad about B, B says: "This is a lie!". And then you come and enter: "Well, this B must be quite some poor guy, look at what A says about him!" Come on!
And Wikipedia is absolutely not trustworthy here as a source, providing a quite bad example of its quality (The negative part in this entry was introduced only after the New Yorker article appeared and is clearly taken from there, an according comment criticising this fact is on the discussion page).
In which way? The article paints a very negative image. If it is actually fabricated and mostly tabloid-like sensationalism - isn't it comprehensible that he stands up against it?
The article painted a very negative picture of this man. According to the lawyer's letter this article is already used as ammunition by people in China against Yau. So, if this article is not true or can not stand a proof, it is surely defaming. And regarding those quotes: as the letter says several of the quotes were made as a reaction to a fabricated quote.
I absolutely do not agree. Assume the content of the letter is correct, and the article is indeed garbage, it is absolutely comprehensible, that the man asks that the magazine takes action to make this point clear. Yau's first reaction was not: "we sue you", but he asks for adjustment and apology. He sees it only as a last ressort, and the letter makes this very clear.
Making them unreliable might not be necessary - just make it difficult or near impossible for laymen to fix little problems with their cars themselves. And this the car manufacturers have done.
It is very optimistic to think that retardation of a group of people can be explained by a single cause - which implies, that with the remedy of that cause chances are good, that things get better.
And BTW: you might blame Bush for many things, but hardly for the quality of posts from a french guy living in Paris.
In another story researchers found out, that human beings living in a time wildly known as the stone ages used fire - very likely for cooking. Fire is a fast chemical reaction which is basically atoms changing their quantum states. It's good to know that quantum physics has been widely used for a very - VERY - long time.
The basis of any machine translation is: finding the base form of a word (verb or what else), translate it and then bring it to the according form in the target language. This is basic stuff and anybody in the field of computer linguistics knows about it. You can read about it in any decent textbook covering this topic (and there you will also exactly find "how" to do it - which is not described in this patent). This has been around for decades. Building not a specific form but all is a no brainer once you have done the tool to create specific forms (actually my company for instance has exactly such a tool for internal purposes). Putting some kind of spell checking into the game is something I also would call "obvious".