Anything that discriminates so flagrantly against people with vision or cognitive disabilities may get companies in trouble with the law.
Not if they provide alternatives (sign-up by mail or telephone, for example). After all, we don't outlaw street signs or telephones just because there are blind or deaf people around.
At least one of the flops isn't the OS the entire company is based on. Just sayin'.
That depends on your definition of "flop". Apple looked initially like they were going to own the entire PC business because their GUI was more appealing than other PCs. But then they lost lots of market share with their systems up to OS9, and they were having more and more problems with the software. It got so bad that they dumped the OS and bought themselves a new one.
You may not consider that a "flop" in the PC world (Microsoft did the same thing), but people actually were capable of designing and implementing operating systems correctly even in the 1980s. Even OS X technologies are technologies (UNIX, Postscript, Objective-C) from around the time when the original Mac was created, so Apple can't plead ignorance.
How many people buy a computer and think "Oh I gotta get this because it runs on x86 architecture."?
No, but lots of them say "I gotta get this because it runs lots of software that I want to run", and for that, it matters whether it has an x86 or a PPC.
You get a patent license, you just can't sub-license.
Yes. This means that nobody else can modify the code and redistribute it unless they also obtain a license from Microsoft.
Everyone who downloads/uses the program is covered by the license.
No, they aren't. They don't have a license. Only the programmer has a license and he can't sublicense.
Considering that the patent license is available to anyone, free of charge, just by linking to the license and printing the notice of included code, I don't see the issue.
It is available right now, on a web site, and with conditions attached. Those conditions are already a problem, but they may not even stay the same over time.
However, the license itself plainly states you are not allowed to sub-license
OK, then it's completely useless.
I can see an LGPL library for handling MS-OFFICE formats.
And how do you propose people use code under the LGPL if they don't get a patent license to go with it?
Also, remember the GPL addresses copyrights and NOT patents, which this license covers. You right your own code, it is your copyright, not Microsoft's.
The GPL/LGPL very much addresses patents. In particular, if the code is patented, it can't be distributed under the GPL/LGPL.
The GPL is about linking, not distribution. If the license is incompatible, OOo could still include an external import/export filter, even as part of the OOo distribution.
A granting of a "perpetual, royalty-free license" on a case-by-case basis or through a web site or download is not enough. Either Microsoft dedicates the patents to the public domain (why don't they?), or we need clear, binding, written legal agreements between Microsoft and an independent standards body; that is the best way to guarantee that a format is and remains open.
Interface Builder (and GORM, the GNUstep clone[1]) allow you to create serialised object graphs which are instantiated at run time (not jut for UIs, by the way)
In different words: a complex process that exposes large parts of the internal representation of the GUI library to the external world. The modern approach to these problems is via a well defined configuration language (usually based on XML) combined with reflection. The configuration language gets transformed by the GUI into its internal state. That not only insulates developers from changes to the GUI toolkit, it allows GUI designs and tools to be used and reused with many different toolkits. Gnome supports that, Mozilla does, and so will Longhorn eventually.
practically forcing you to use a Model-Controller-View pattern
Yes, another problem with it: it forces particular design patterns on people. That's related to the fact that object serialization exposes internals of the GUI toolkit that just have no business being exposed.
That's why drag-and-drop works seamlessly between apps on GNOME/KDE/Windows
It doesn't work "seamlessly" on OS X either: many things that make sense to drag and drop can't be dragged and dropped on OS X. On the other hand, Gnome and KDE each have extensive support for data transfer in all their native applications.
Pretty remarkable that 12 or so years later, it's still just coming together, and other OSs are still catching up.
Scalable antialiased graphics exists on all major platforms, richly formatted mail is standard (HTML or Microsoft), network interoperability existed long before NeXT, the dock is a standard misfeature of most desktops, interface builder is clunky compared to modern visual IDEs, and WYSIWYG word processing is standard and was invented long before NeXT even was conceived. So, other systems aren't "catching up", they "caught up" a long time ago.
These are most likely inherited traits. [...] This is not an acquired disease, this is who these people are.
We all have inherited traits that may cause problems, but that doesn't mean we have to just accept them. Human beings have the capacity to change, and it may well be the right thing to help your kid change who he is.
Whether it's a "good time" depends on your needs. Do you need a laptop, a web browser, and MS Office, but little more? The mac is the machine for you. Do you need a particular commercial software package that runs on mac and windows only? Buy a mac.
Other than that, don't expect too much: macs have their share of installation and management problems, the hardware is pokey, and battery life of the laptops is not competitive anymore either. Fink is supposed to give you many linux packages, but linux software still feels out of place on the mac. And OOo is at best an emergency solution on the mac, given its poor x11 performance.
On the desktop, it' not even a question really: installing something like SuSE is so easy and gives you so much great software that the mac really pales in comparison.
So, unless you have a specific reason to get a mac, like software that runs nowhere else and that you have to have, I think you are better off buying a laptop with linux preinstalled: you get far more software and it all just works out of the box; no installation or fiddling required. Whatever you do, be prepared to pay a big premium in hardware and software merely to match what you get with linux.
Incidentally, I said that the current emission levels are not safe, and that is true even if your simple linear reasoning were correct; current emission levels lead to a steady, inexorable increase of absolute greenhouse gas concentrations, and we cannot afford that no matter what model of global warming you use.
But seeing as preindustrial levels were 280 ppm and we've only increased global temperature by up to 0.8 degrees Celsius,
There is an immediate, small rise in temperatures due to increasing CO2 concentrations. But this rise causes other changes if it persists: melting of the polar ice caps, changes in forest coverage, changes in ocean productivity, changes in ocean currents, changes in weather patters. Those changes take decades and may actually constitute positive feedback and even lead to the release of more greenhouse gases.
There is a good chance that if even current CO2 levels persist long enough, we are in deep trouble.
What makes this increase in insulation more critical than what came before?
Your reasoning presupposes that the effects of CO2 are roughly linear and that they are fast. But it's not a linear process and it's not necessarily a fast process. There is probably some threshold above which we get runaway effects, and that threshold may be crossed at lower concentrations if they are just allowed to persist long enough.
how are we going to get another 11 degrees of warming?
We don't need 11 degrees of warming in order to have serious problems. In fact, with the changes in the arctic, we already have enormous changes at current levels of CO2, changes whose consequences may be devastating to large populations as it is.
Only after both groups have approved the bill does it get sent to the President to be signed into law. This means that the PATRIOT act did not pass due to GWB. The PATRIOT act passed because a majority in the House and Senate thought it was a good idea, and the President agreed.
Hitler and his laws were passed by a democratically elected house of representatives, too.
It would seem that I understand my freedoms and democracy better than you.
You may know about your freedoms; for example, your freedom to screw yourself in the US system of government is indeed nearly unlimited, and it is being taken increasing advantage of by the electorate. But you apparently don't know shit about democracy, because democracy is not about unrestrained rule of the majority.
I guess I shouldn't exist according to your logic.
Oh, there are plenty of people like you in every nation: people who eventually, out of irrational fear, nationalism, or greed, end up killing democracy.
"Freedom [...] Democracy [...] Human rights [...] Equality under the law [...] All of these are basic rights for all human beings"
Oh, I agree. But perhaps the US should first practice what it preaches, because it is far from a shining example for these human rights. The US got democracy rather late compared to other nations, formal equality under the law was not achieved even only for African Americans until the 20th century (and still hasn't been achieved for others), the US government is getting more and more drive by religious fundamentalism, and the US record on freedom and human rights is pretty mixed (in many areas, including prison conditions, prison labor, health care, education, poverty, child mortality, etc.).
Geez, both your arguments are just so off-base. No, an 11 degree rise in temperatures will probably not make the atmosphere unbreathable. Neither will it magically transform the tundra into farmland.
An 11 degree rise in average global temperature is, however, extremely serious: it would radically alter weather patterns, create far more weather related natural disasters than we have now that destroy cities and infrastructure, flood and destroy the coastal areas, where most people live, and destroy most agriculture without creating new arable land (other areas may eventually become arable, but that takes centuries or millennia). The result would likely be an end to civilization, although humans would probably survive as nomadic tribes with stone age technology.
We don't know what's safe, but we know that at some level it becomes bad, so that means at any level it's bad right?
No, not at any level. But, when it comes to toxins, the conservative and prudent thing to do is to go far below the levels that we know are dangerous, because we already have seen many examples that toxins are dangerous at far lower levels than at those where we first observed toxicity.
When it comes to greenhouse gases, there isn't even a question: we are far above the emission levels that are safe. In fact, enough CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere already, and it is persistent enough (halflife of the order of centuries), that anything we add is a problem, and any reduction we can make is going to make things better.
So, what you try to portray as fear and hysteria is the prudent and conservative thing to do, both in the case of toxins and in the case of greenhouse gases.
I don't think that alarmist, over-the-top "reports" are doing any real good
Seems to work for "super-sized fries", "extreme gaming consoles", "the drug crisis", "the missile gap", and all the other marketing bullshit we get exposed to every day.
If the government sells its military and anti-terrorist programs with overblown fears and exaggerations, if soft drink, food, and technology companies hype up and oversell their products, where do you think science would be if it didn't make a lot of noise.
And global warming is a much bigger threat than war or terrorism, or anything else: global warming looks on track to erasing civilization from this planet within this century. Even with global thermonuclear war, we have to decide to push buttons and it's unlikely to get everything, but global warming is happening by default and will affect the whole globe.
The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic.
The term "prejudice" implies an irrational dislike. But our dislike of pollution (including many plastics) is quite rational: it has negative effects on our health and our quality of life.
The earth doesn't care whether we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, poison ourselves with pollution, or live in filth. People do care, though, and people have a brain that, at least in principle, lets them foresee and avoid those consequences.
Actually, they did have WMD. Sarin gas for starters. What else went over the border to Syria and Iran, we'll probably never know. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Funny that you should say that, because the entire argument that the US had that there were WMDs was based on absence of proof. The inspections found definitive proof of the disposal of almost all WMDs in Saddam's arsenal. For only a tiny number of WMDs could they not find definitive proof of their destruction, but it was their expert judgement that those weapons had actually been destroyed as well.
The Bush administration took the completely unreasonable position that absence of ironclad proof of the destruction amounted to proof of their presence, contrary to all expert opinion.
Sad to tell you this, but if Iraq gets a taste of democracy and it catches on in the middle east, Bush is going to be the Reagan of the 21st century.
Well, that's a big "if". Right now, it looks like Iraq is going to be a quagmire.
As for Reagan, you may well be right. However, I think your implicit assumption that both of them are going to be considered good presidents in the long term is wrong: Reagan and the two Bushes will probably be seen as the presidents that started the downfall of the US.
I suppose out of "principle" we should have left Afgahanistan in the shit-hole state it was in under theocratic islamic rule by the Taliban. Am I right?
The US was, in large part, responsible for fostering Islamic fundamentalism and creating that shit-hole state in the first place.
Despite that, the world actually was supporting the US in its action in Afghanistan. Iraq is the big problem, where the US has outright lied in order to justify its military action.
Afghanistan was a total sucess. They have freedom and democrocy now.
You are so naive. Afghanistan is probably better off than it used to be under the Taliban, but it will take decades before it has any semblance of "freedom and democracy", and that is only if nothing else goes wrong.
Actually, in the US and other places where patents already exist, the burden of proof would be on the people who want to change the law and not the people who want to keep the current system.
From a practical point of view, you are right: it will require extraordinary effort to get rid of the current system. That's not because it there is any rational justification for that, it's because there are lots of special interests that want to keep the current system--it's a multi-billion dollar handout from taxpayers to special interests.
But that doesn't change the burden of proof: people who want to have laws that grant 20 year monopolies to companies ought to be able to justify that choice, at all times. If they can't do that, the law needs to be abolished.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything that discriminates so flagrantly against people with vision or cognitive disabilities may get companies in trouble with the law.
Not if they provide alternatives (sign-up by mail or telephone, for example). After all, we don't outlaw street signs or telephones just because there are blind or deaf people around.
At least one of the flops isn't the OS the entire company is based on. Just sayin'.
That depends on your definition of "flop". Apple looked initially like they were going to own the entire PC business because their GUI was more appealing than other PCs. But then they lost lots of market share with their systems up to OS9, and they were having more and more problems with the software. It got so bad that they dumped the OS and bought themselves a new one.
You may not consider that a "flop" in the PC world (Microsoft did the same thing), but people actually were capable of designing and implementing operating systems correctly even in the 1980s. Even OS X technologies are technologies (UNIX, Postscript, Objective-C) from around the time when the original Mac was created, so Apple can't plead ignorance.
How many people buy a computer and think "Oh I gotta get this because it runs on x86 architecture."?
No, but lots of them say "I gotta get this because it runs lots of software that I want to run", and for that, it matters whether it has an x86 or a PPC.
You get a patent license, you just can't sub-license.
Yes. This means that nobody else can modify the code and redistribute it unless they also obtain a license from Microsoft.
Everyone who downloads/uses the program is covered by the license.
No, they aren't. They don't have a license. Only the programmer has a license and he can't sublicense.
Considering that the patent license is available to anyone, free of charge, just by linking to the license and printing the notice of included code, I don't see the issue.
It is available right now, on a web site, and with conditions attached. Those conditions are already a problem, but they may not even stay the same over time.
Which part of the MS licenst contradicts this?
The fact that you can't sublicense it.
According to the FAQ linked from the story, Microsoft gives you a perpetual patent license
It's useless if it's not transferable because Microsoft could stop handing out licenses to new users at any time.
However, the license itself plainly states you are not allowed to sub-license
OK, then it's completely useless.
I can see an LGPL library for handling MS-OFFICE formats.
And how do you propose people use code under the LGPL if they don't get a patent license to go with it?
Also, remember the GPL addresses copyrights and NOT patents, which this license covers. You right your own code, it is your copyright, not Microsoft's.
The GPL/LGPL very much addresses patents. In particular, if the code is patented, it can't be distributed under the GPL/LGPL.
The GPL is about linking, not distribution. If the license is incompatible, OOo could still include an external import/export filter, even as part of the OOo distribution.
A granting of a "perpetual, royalty-free license" on a case-by-case basis or through a web site or download is not enough. Either Microsoft dedicates the patents to the public domain (why don't they?), or we need clear, binding, written legal agreements between Microsoft and an independent standards body; that is the best way to guarantee that a format is and remains open.
Interface Builder (and GORM, the GNUstep clone[1]) allow you to create serialised object graphs which are instantiated at run time (not jut for UIs, by the way)
In different words: a complex process that exposes large parts of the internal representation of the GUI library to the external world. The modern approach to these problems is via a well defined configuration language (usually based on XML) combined with reflection. The configuration language gets transformed by the GUI into its internal state. That not only insulates developers from changes to the GUI toolkit, it allows GUI designs and tools to be used and reused with many different toolkits. Gnome supports that, Mozilla does, and so will Longhorn eventually.
practically forcing you to use a Model-Controller-View pattern
Yes, another problem with it: it forces particular design patterns on people. That's related to the fact that object serialization exposes internals of the GUI toolkit that just have no business being exposed.
That's why drag-and-drop works seamlessly between apps on GNOME/KDE/Windows
It doesn't work "seamlessly" on OS X either: many things that make sense to drag and drop can't be dragged and dropped on OS X. On the other hand, Gnome and KDE each have extensive support for data transfer in all their native applications.
Pretty remarkable that 12 or so years later, it's still just coming together, and other OSs are still catching up.
Scalable antialiased graphics exists on all major platforms, richly formatted mail is standard (HTML or Microsoft), network interoperability existed long before NeXT, the dock is a standard misfeature of most desktops, interface builder is clunky compared to modern visual IDEs, and WYSIWYG word processing is standard and was invented long before NeXT even was conceived. So, other systems aren't "catching up", they "caught up" a long time ago.
These are most likely inherited traits. [...] This is not an acquired disease, this is who these people are.
We all have inherited traits that may cause problems, but that doesn't mean we have to just accept them. Human beings have the capacity to change, and it may well be the right thing to help your kid change who he is.
Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel? Does Red Hat, for example, take responsibility?
.Net passport program."
I dunno. Who is accountable for the security of Windows? Nobody it seems.
Linux is not ready for mission-critical computing. There are fundamental things missing,' pointing out the lack of a development environment
Except for the dozen or so development environments that do exist, foremost, Eclipse, which beats the shit out of anything Microsoft has produced.
and no single 'sign-on system' giving reference to Microsoft's foundering
Probably, he means Kerberos and NIS. Oh, by the way, those were ported to Windows from UNIX (and, by extension, Linux).
On the other hand, talk to older folks and they see Microsoft as the company that brought usable and affordable personal computing to the masses
Yeah, isn't it amazing how a few billion dollars in marketing and advertising can so completely rewrite history?
Whether it's a "good time" depends on your needs. Do you need a laptop, a web browser, and MS Office, but little more? The mac is the machine for you. Do you need a particular commercial software package that runs on mac and windows only? Buy a mac.
Other than that, don't expect too much: macs have their share of installation and management problems, the hardware is pokey, and battery life of the laptops is not competitive anymore either. Fink is supposed to give you many linux packages, but linux software still feels out of place on the mac. And OOo is at best an emergency solution on the mac, given its poor x11 performance.
On the desktop, it' not even a question really: installing something like SuSE is so easy and gives you so much great software that the mac really pales in comparison.
So, unless you have a specific reason to get a mac, like software that runs nowhere else and that you have to have, I think you are better off buying a laptop with linux preinstalled: you get far more software and it all just works out of the box; no installation or fiddling required. Whatever you do, be prepared to pay a big premium in hardware and software merely to match what you get with linux.
Incidentally, I said that the current emission levels are not safe, and that is true even if your simple linear reasoning were correct; current emission levels lead to a steady, inexorable increase of absolute greenhouse gas concentrations, and we cannot afford that no matter what model of global warming you use.
But seeing as preindustrial levels were 280 ppm and we've only increased global temperature by up to 0.8 degrees Celsius,
There is an immediate, small rise in temperatures due to increasing CO2 concentrations. But this rise causes other changes if it persists: melting of the polar ice caps, changes in forest coverage, changes in ocean productivity, changes in ocean currents, changes in weather patters. Those changes take decades and may actually constitute positive feedback and even lead to the release of more greenhouse gases.
There is a good chance that if even current CO2 levels persist long enough, we are in deep trouble.
What makes this increase in insulation more critical than what came before?
Your reasoning presupposes that the effects of CO2 are roughly linear and that they are fast. But it's not a linear process and it's not necessarily a fast process. There is probably some threshold above which we get runaway effects, and that threshold may be crossed at lower concentrations if they are just allowed to persist long enough.
how are we going to get another 11 degrees of warming?
We don't need 11 degrees of warming in order to have serious problems. In fact, with the changes in the arctic, we already have enormous changes at current levels of CO2, changes whose consequences may be devastating to large populations as it is.
Only after both groups have approved the bill does it get sent to the President to be signed into law. This means that the PATRIOT act did not pass due to GWB. The PATRIOT act passed because a majority in the House and Senate thought it was a good idea, and the President agreed.
Hitler and his laws were passed by a democratically elected house of representatives, too.
It would seem that I understand my freedoms and democracy better than you.
You may know about your freedoms; for example, your freedom to screw yourself in the US system of government is indeed nearly unlimited, and it is being taken increasing advantage of by the electorate. But you apparently don't know shit about democracy, because democracy is not about unrestrained rule of the majority.
I guess I shouldn't exist according to your logic.
Oh, there are plenty of people like you in every nation: people who eventually, out of irrational fear, nationalism, or greed, end up killing democracy.
"Freedom [...] Democracy [...] Human rights [...] Equality under the law [...] All of these are basic rights for all human beings"
Oh, I agree. But perhaps the US should first practice what it preaches, because it is far from a shining example for these human rights. The US got democracy rather late compared to other nations, formal equality under the law was not achieved even only for African Americans until the 20th century (and still hasn't been achieved for others), the US government is getting more and more drive by religious fundamentalism, and the US record on freedom and human rights is pretty mixed (in many areas, including prison conditions, prison labor, health care, education, poverty, child mortality, etc.).
Geez, both your arguments are just so off-base. No, an 11 degree rise in temperatures will probably not make the atmosphere unbreathable. Neither will it magically transform the tundra into farmland.
An 11 degree rise in average global temperature is, however, extremely serious: it would radically alter weather patterns, create far more weather related natural disasters than we have now that destroy cities and infrastructure, flood and destroy the coastal areas, where most people live, and destroy most agriculture without creating new arable land (other areas may eventually become arable, but that takes centuries or millennia). The result would likely be an end to civilization, although humans would probably survive as nomadic tribes with stone age technology.
We don't know what's safe, but we know that at some level it becomes bad, so that means at any level it's bad right?
No, not at any level. But, when it comes to toxins, the conservative and prudent thing to do is to go far below the levels that we know are dangerous, because we already have seen many examples that toxins are dangerous at far lower levels than at those where we first observed toxicity.
When it comes to greenhouse gases, there isn't even a question: we are far above the emission levels that are safe. In fact, enough CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere already, and it is persistent enough (halflife of the order of centuries), that anything we add is a problem, and any reduction we can make is going to make things better.
So, what you try to portray as fear and hysteria is the prudent and conservative thing to do, both in the case of toxins and in the case of greenhouse gases.
I don't think that alarmist, over-the-top "reports" are doing any real good
Seems to work for "super-sized fries", "extreme gaming consoles", "the drug crisis", "the missile gap", and all the other marketing bullshit we get exposed to every day.
If the government sells its military and anti-terrorist programs with overblown fears and exaggerations, if soft drink, food, and technology companies hype up and oversell their products, where do you think science would be if it didn't make a lot of noise.
And global warming is a much bigger threat than war or terrorism, or anything else: global warming looks on track to erasing civilization from this planet within this century. Even with global thermonuclear war, we have to decide to push buttons and it's unlikely to get everything, but global warming is happening by default and will affect the whole globe.
The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic.
The term "prejudice" implies an irrational dislike. But our dislike of pollution (including many plastics) is quite rational: it has negative effects on our health and our quality of life.
The earth doesn't care whether we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, poison ourselves with pollution, or live in filth. People do care, though, and people have a brain that, at least in principle, lets them foresee and avoid those consequences.
Actually, they did have WMD. Sarin gas for starters. What else went over the border to Syria and Iran, we'll probably never know. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Funny that you should say that, because the entire argument that the US had that there were WMDs was based on absence of proof. The inspections found definitive proof of the disposal of almost all WMDs in Saddam's arsenal. For only a tiny number of WMDs could they not find definitive proof of their destruction, but it was their expert judgement that those weapons had actually been destroyed as well.
The Bush administration took the completely unreasonable position that absence of ironclad proof of the destruction amounted to proof of their presence, contrary to all expert opinion.
Sad to tell you this, but if Iraq gets a taste of democracy and it catches on in the middle east, Bush is going to be the Reagan of the 21st century.
Well, that's a big "if". Right now, it looks like Iraq is going to be a quagmire.
As for Reagan, you may well be right. However, I think your implicit assumption that both of them are going to be considered good presidents in the long term is wrong: Reagan and the two Bushes will probably be seen as the presidents that started the downfall of the US.
I suppose out of "principle" we should have left Afgahanistan in the shit-hole state it was in under theocratic islamic rule by the Taliban. Am I right?
The US was, in large part, responsible for fostering Islamic fundamentalism and creating that shit-hole state in the first place.
Despite that, the world actually was supporting the US in its action in Afghanistan. Iraq is the big problem, where the US has outright lied in order to justify its military action.
Afghanistan was a total sucess. They have freedom and democrocy now.
You are so naive. Afghanistan is probably better off than it used to be under the Taliban, but it will take decades before it has any semblance of "freedom and democracy", and that is only if nothing else goes wrong.
Actually, in the US and other places where patents already exist, the burden of proof would be on the people who want to change the law and not the people who want to keep the current system.
From a practical point of view, you are right: it will require extraordinary effort to get rid of the current system. That's not because it there is any rational justification for that, it's because there are lots of special interests that want to keep the current system--it's a multi-billion dollar handout from taxpayers to special interests.
But that doesn't change the burden of proof: people who want to have laws that grant 20 year monopolies to companies ought to be able to justify that choice, at all times. If they can't do that, the law needs to be abolished.