When it comes to the mobile phone arena and its numerous operating systems, the lack of cross-platform ability becomes even more of a problem. Microsoft has never been into making their tools cross-platform because their real interest is in promoting their own platform. As long as they continue down that route, I think the user base of their development tools will continue to dwindle.
Ah, I see - like the lack of cross-platform tools/ability is causing the Cocoa Touch/iOS platform to dwindle?
This is rubbish. If Microsoft had had a good mobile strategy 5 years ago, instead of flogging (with a stylus) the dead horse that is Win CE/WiMo, they would own this market now. Instead Apple & RIM (both emphatically not cross-platform or open) have thrashed them by producing good products that people want to buy. Astonishingly, this is what it takes to succeed in business today.
There are some parts of the.NET BCL that are wrappers around Win32 (File I/O, Windows.Forms etc), but I don't think it's valid to say the entire BCL is 'basically the managed version of Win32'. Where is IEnumerable<T> in Win32?
Surely a faster / better built fiber network would have a queue of customers beating down their door?
Not without running the service at a loss. Telstra offers 'fast enough' service for most users over fully-written-down infrastructure and should totally spank a commercial greenfields national FTTP network on price. The government can't run the NBN non-commercially (at a loss), otherwise the expenditure has to come on-budget.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
Whats her secret?
Um... reading glasses? I guess the point is that the iPad, with its larger display, is even more suitable for this scenario.
...hating to have to quit whatever they are doing to respond to a message or lose whatever they are doing when someone calls them.
Hmm.. if an iPhone app doesn't remember what you were doing when it quits, then it's poorly written. I personally haven't come across any (although I haven't used a large number of apps). There are valid reasons for wanting multi-tasking, but in my opinion, having apps invisibly doing nothing in the background because you don't like the idea of them having to relaunch, isn't one.
Your business rant appears to be an argument against businesses ever upgrading anything. While I've certainly come across a lot of businesses that think that way, good ones tend to ask relevant questions like: "What's the return on investment for this project", "What are the risks of continuing our current approach", "How can technology better support our business processes" etc. For some, the answer may well be that an iPad solution is the best option for them.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
I call bullshit on the 'grandparents won't like it' argument. My Grandma has an iPhone instead of a computer. She uses it for email, internet (3G - she doesn't have a fixed internet connection), photos and SMS. She's had laptops and adsl on several previous occasions, and consistently ended up giving them away because she never used them.
And having to quit whatever they are doing to use a second program...
I see this argument a lot from people who have clearly never used an iPhone. Substitute 'alt-tab' wherever you use the word 'quit' and you'll get a better picture of how this works in practice. Given the likely high percentage of computer users who run all their apps maximised on a single monitor, I'm struggling to understand why people see this as such a deal-breaker.
$100 or so dollars per unit
The iPhone Developer Enterprise Program may help out with those crippling costs. I doubt iPads would see any significant adoption in clerical work environments, but areas like warehousing, stock management, transport, mobile sales - everywhere that mobility and ease of use are important - may see some activity. Despite Apple's almost total disinterest in the sector.
FWIW I don't think it's fair to characterise the NASA guys as 'faking' the data - they just stuffed up. It doesn't reflect particularly well on them that they attempted to quietly & retrospectively correct it though. Note that it also only affected US temperature readings.
NB: I'm sure Steve McIntyre doesn't count as a 'reputable' source as he's a heathen denialist who clearly doesn't understand climate science (despite being the one to find & report the anomoly). There would be other references, I'm just too lazy to look.
Because he's used to Winforms, which (by default) generates a private instance variable in your form subclass for every control you've dropped onto the designer. IMO it's an ugly carryover from the 'put all your code in the UI' VB6 days - I much prefer the arms length interaction between controller & view in Cocoa, notwithstanding it requires more manual connections.
I was always convinced that Moses' next door neighbour chowed down on a bunch of mussels & crabs & whatnot and left them in the sun out the front of his house for week. "Bad news, guys, God just told me we're not allowed to eat those any more".
Clean, well-separated code should be able to be ported to a new database platform at least three times before it starts to approach the break-even point that would have made building your own general purpose database abstraction layer worthwhile. This is the sort of false economy that you commonly find rearing its head with developers who are attempting to solve problems that don't exist yet.
If avoiding vendor lock-in is such an important requirement, it would generally be cheaper to buy a database abstraction framework (or, thinking outside the box here, sticking to standard SQL) rather than attempting to roll your own. However, in practice I think vendor lock-in on the database platform is less of a concern than vendor/technology lock-in on your web application framework, so to my mind it's questionable that you're getting a great deal of value by going down this path.
I think it's probably a terminology issue, but if a web developer came to me and said "I'm going to write a database abstraction layer for this website in case we want to switch databases one day", I would smack them round the head. It's a clear violation of the YAGNI principle - significantly extra work for something that probably won't ever be required.
On the other hand, I suspect you're not talking about a full-blown database abstraction layer, just a separation of data access code from business logic (like a Repository pattern). This I would view as simply good design, with more realistic benefits like easier testing, more understandable code, and better separation of concerns.
If it's a derivative work of the Linux kernel because it implements a Linux API, then by that rationale and the description you quoted, it's also a derivative work of the Windows kernel. Do Microsoft know about this?
I can only imagine how the code must feel, conflicted over whether it's free-as-in-freedom or evil and proprietary. I see lots of therapy in its future.
As the other replies state, the clause (in the Express EULA) is: 'may not work around technical limitations of the software'. Microsoft are assuming:
Jamie at some point clicked through the Express EULA and is forevermore bound by it (ie uninstalling wouldn't terminate the contract).
The 'no plugins' directive will be construed by the court as a technical limitation. Given they've published APIs, this is probably open to interpretation. Someone in the dupe discussion mentioned that the one-sided nature of EULAs means the UK courts must interpret it in the way most favourable to the party that had no input - no idea how accurate this statement is.
Distributing the software to others constitutes 'working around the technical limitations'. IANAL, but on the face of it I can't see how this applies to Jamie.
Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft think his original alleged violation of the license (during development) somehow disqualified him from distributing a VS.NET plugin - this would probably require proving the plugin is a derived work as Microsoft would have no authority over its distribution otherwise. I can't see them doing this as I would think it would have serious repercussions for their other customers.
Personally, I think this clause is overly broad and Microsoft's action on it is quite worrying. If they win here, basically all they need to do is claim that something you've written is 'working around a technical limitation' and they can control your product distribution. Let's not forget that the MSTest functionality in the pricey VS 2005 Team Edition is effectively in competition with Jamie's TestDriven.NET.
As TFA states there are.aero for aviation, and.museum, so why not.bank to actually help protect your, and other peoples money...
This annoyed me when I read TFA - you can't use the proliferation of similarly idiotic TLDs as a valid argument for another idiotic TLD. How does the fact that ICANN has caved to special interest groups in the past make an argument for better security?
Name ONE genuinely negative aspect of this to the individual consumer.
Probably the US-centrism. I'm struggling to find an aspect that couldn't be done better via an international body maintaining an anti-phishing whitelist of domains/IPs. I'm fairly sure suitable international banking associations already exist.
I can just see banks worldwide falling all over themselves to hand their online trustworthiness over to a US organisation that promises to delete their domain the first time someone complains about it (or gets a court order requiring its deletion, or the US government decides that country doesn't deserve to bank online any more, etc).
Calls to cellphones must be cheaper wherever you are than here in Australia. Particularly if you have relatives regularly calling you from OS, it's pretty rude to give them a cellphone number and expect them to pay 10x as much to call you.
If you only collected the works and did not add any writing of your own, you cannot claim a copyright on it.
Yes, which is why I explicitly said 'annotated anthology'. I can't tell if you're also struggling with reading comprehension, or you're wilfully misinterpreting my posts in order to make your point.
In a world where the Public Domain was universal, by this I mean applied to everything or a world without copyright, the GPL and the Public Domain would be the same.
Yes, this is what I guessed was probably your intent (see the comment about 'replace "public domain" with "world without copyright"' - I don't think the term 'public domain' would have any meaning in that world).
I disagree with this interpretation. The GPL has provisions which I feel attempt to recreate a particularly rosy and unrealistic worldview of how a copyrightless society would work, enforced through the mechanism of copyright. This is largely succeeding, as a) people/organisations who don't ascribe to that worldview don't generally choose to modify or redistribute GPLed software, and b) for those who do, the copyright enforcement mechanism allows the FSF to add additional conditions to the license to force them to 'play fair' - conditions that would not exist in a world with no restrictions on copying. I'm referring here to things like binary drivers, locked hardware, software-as-a-service etc. I think everyone would be surprised at how inventive organisations would get in locking up software in the absence of copyright protection.
I would like somebody to prove the existence of any benefits.
I would like somebody to prove the existence of any benefits in abolishing copyright. Why would we risk such massive upheaval for such indistinct or theortical benefits? Or, an easier task - prove that the 'harm' you're attributing to copyright is unable to be rectified through copyright reform.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see - like the lack of cross-platform tools/ability is causing the Cocoa Touch/iOS platform to dwindle?
This is rubbish. If Microsoft had had a good mobile strategy 5 years ago, instead of flogging (with a stylus) the dead horse that is Win CE/WiMo, they would own this market now. Instead Apple & RIM (both emphatically not cross-platform or open) have thrashed them by producing good products that people want to buy. Astonishingly, this is what it takes to succeed in business today.
There are some parts of the .NET BCL that are wrappers around Win32 (File I/O, Windows.Forms etc), but I don't think it's valid to say the entire BCL is 'basically the managed version of Win32'. Where is IEnumerable<T> in Win32?
Not without running the service at a loss. Telstra offers 'fast enough' service for most users over fully-written-down infrastructure and should totally spank a commercial greenfields national FTTP network on price. The government can't run the NBN non-commercially (at a loss), otherwise the expenditure has to come on-budget.
Um... reading glasses? I guess the point is that the iPad, with its larger display, is even more suitable for this scenario.
Hmm.. if an iPhone app doesn't remember what you were doing when it quits, then it's poorly written. I personally haven't come across any (although I haven't used a large number of apps). There are valid reasons for wanting multi-tasking, but in my opinion, having apps invisibly doing nothing in the background because you don't like the idea of them having to relaunch, isn't one.
Your business rant appears to be an argument against businesses ever upgrading anything. While I've certainly come across a lot of businesses that think that way, good ones tend to ask relevant questions like: "What's the return on investment for this project", "What are the risks of continuing our current approach", "How can technology better support our business processes" etc. For some, the answer may well be that an iPad solution is the best option for them.
I call bullshit on the 'grandparents won't like it' argument. My Grandma has an iPhone instead of a computer. She uses it for email, internet (3G - she doesn't have a fixed internet connection), photos and SMS. She's had laptops and adsl on several previous occasions, and consistently ended up giving them away because she never used them.
I see this argument a lot from people who have clearly never used an iPhone. Substitute 'alt-tab' wherever you use the word 'quit' and you'll get a better picture of how this works in practice. Given the likely high percentage of computer users who run all their apps maximised on a single monitor, I'm struggling to understand why people see this as such a deal-breaker.
The iPhone Developer Enterprise Program may help out with those crippling costs. I doubt iPads would see any significant adoption in clerical work environments, but areas like warehousing, stock management, transport, mobile sales - everywhere that mobility and ease of use are important - may see some activity. Despite Apple's almost total disinterest in the sector.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/03/hansens-y2k-whopper/
and
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/23/nasa-hide-this-after-jim-checks-it/
FWIW I don't think it's fair to characterise the NASA guys as 'faking' the data - they just stuffed up. It doesn't reflect particularly well on them that they attempted to quietly & retrospectively correct it though. Note that it also only affected US temperature readings.
NB: I'm sure Steve McIntyre doesn't count as a 'reputable' source as he's a heathen denialist who clearly doesn't understand climate science (despite being the one to find & report the anomoly). There would be other references, I'm just too lazy to look.
"It's an election promise! Therefore, normal rules of legislative diligence do not apply!"
Unfortunately Stephen Conroy is at the top of the senate ticket in Victoria and even a targeted campaign has practically no chance of unseating him.
4. Need to work out which politicians to buy.
That's easy. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is already sympathetic to their cause and should be available for a bargain price.
Because he's used to Winforms, which (by default) generates a private instance variable in your form subclass for every control you've dropped onto the designer. IMO it's an ugly carryover from the 'put all your code in the UI' VB6 days - I much prefer the arms length interaction between controller & view in Cocoa, notwithstanding it requires more manual connections.
I was always convinced that Moses' next door neighbour chowed down on a bunch of mussels & crabs & whatnot and left them in the sun out the front of his house for week. "Bad news, guys, God just told me we're not allowed to eat those any more".
Clean, well-separated code should be able to be ported to a new database platform at least three times before it starts to approach the break-even point that would have made building your own general purpose database abstraction layer worthwhile. This is the sort of false economy that you commonly find rearing its head with developers who are attempting to solve problems that don't exist yet.
If avoiding vendor lock-in is such an important requirement, it would generally be cheaper to buy a database abstraction framework (or, thinking outside the box here, sticking to standard SQL) rather than attempting to roll your own. However, in practice I think vendor lock-in on the database platform is less of a concern than vendor/technology lock-in on your web application framework, so to my mind it's questionable that you're getting a great deal of value by going down this path.
I think it's probably a terminology issue, but if a web developer came to me and said "I'm going to write a database abstraction layer for this website in case we want to switch databases one day", I would smack them round the head. It's a clear violation of the YAGNI principle - significantly extra work for something that probably won't ever be required.
On the other hand, I suspect you're not talking about a full-blown database abstraction layer, just a separation of data access code from business logic (like a Repository pattern). This I would view as simply good design, with more realistic benefits like easier testing, more understandable code, and better separation of concerns.
If it's a derivative work of the Linux kernel because it implements a Linux API, then by that rationale and the description you quoted, it's also a derivative work of the Windows kernel. Do Microsoft know about this?
I can only imagine how the code must feel, conflicted over whether it's free-as-in-freedom or evil and proprietary. I see lots of therapy in its future.
There is - see System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider. People like GP really give .NET devs a bad name.
Yes, for instance, you'd think they would instruct .NET developers to use System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider instead of System.Random, in their .NET secure coding practices.
It's a shame other coding teams at Microsoft evidently don't follow their advice.
Are you advocating a drinking, smoking & bonking test? That would be cool.
As the other replies state, the clause (in the Express EULA) is: 'may not work around technical limitations of the software'. Microsoft are assuming:
Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft think his original alleged violation of the license (during development) somehow disqualified him from distributing a VS.NET plugin - this would probably require proving the plugin is a derived work as Microsoft would have no authority over its distribution otherwise. I can't see them doing this as I would think it would have serious repercussions for their other customers.
Personally, I think this clause is overly broad and Microsoft's action on it is quite worrying. If they win here, basically all they need to do is claim that something you've written is 'working around a technical limitation' and they can control your product distribution. Let's not forget that the MSTest functionality in the pricey VS 2005 Team Edition is effectively in competition with Jamie's TestDriven.NET.
What's your definition of 'good product'?
Bill Gates is going to give everyone who participates a trip to Disneyland at his own expense.
This annoyed me when I read TFA - you can't use the proliferation of similarly idiotic TLDs as a valid argument for another idiotic TLD. How does the fact that ICANN has caved to special interest groups in the past make an argument for better security?
Probably the US-centrism. I'm struggling to find an aspect that couldn't be done better via an international body maintaining an anti-phishing whitelist of domains/IPs. I'm fairly sure suitable international banking associations already exist.
I can just see banks worldwide falling all over themselves to hand their online trustworthiness over to a US organisation that promises to delete their domain the first time someone complains about it (or gets a court order requiring its deletion, or the US government decides that country doesn't deserve to bank online any more, etc).
It's got nothing to do with a US copyright standard - it's the Berne Convention. Signatories are not permitted to place barriers to 'implicit' copyright on works by authors/artists from other countries - this even extends to prohibiting the old copyright notice requirement (© such-and-such 2007). Theoretically, the US could require local artists/authors to register copyright, but this proposal has not met with much support.
sentences just get guessed from context?
Calls to cellphones must be cheaper wherever you are than here in Australia. Particularly if you have relatives regularly calling you from OS, it's pretty rude to give them a cellphone number and expect them to pay 10x as much to call you.
Yes, which is why I explicitly said 'annotated anthology'. I can't tell if you're also struggling with reading comprehension, or you're wilfully misinterpreting my posts in order to make your point.
Yes, this is what I guessed was probably your intent (see the comment about 'replace "public domain" with "world without copyright"' - I don't think the term 'public domain' would have any meaning in that world).
I disagree with this interpretation. The GPL has provisions which I feel attempt to recreate a particularly rosy and unrealistic worldview of how a copyrightless society would work, enforced through the mechanism of copyright. This is largely succeeding, as a) people/organisations who don't ascribe to that worldview don't generally choose to modify or redistribute GPLed software, and b) for those who do, the copyright enforcement mechanism allows the FSF to add additional conditions to the license to force them to 'play fair' - conditions that would not exist in a world with no restrictions on copying. I'm referring here to things like binary drivers, locked hardware, software-as-a-service etc. I think everyone would be surprised at how inventive organisations would get in locking up software in the absence of copyright protection.
I would like somebody to prove the existence of any benefits in abolishing copyright. Why would we risk such massive upheaval for such indistinct or theortical benefits? Or, an easier task - prove that the 'harm' you're attributing to copyright is unable to be rectified through copyright reform.