Yes it would be wonderful to be able to replace damaged body parts from the same genetic stock, but if the price of doing so is maiming another Human being (a human clone is still human), then it's not worth it.
There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly, this is anti-trust, which is when you have monopoly or near monopoly, you leverage that to keep your monopoly.
An example, Standard Oil in the 19th century. They had a near monopoly in the Oil business. If a competitor would appear, then Standard would undercut the competitor's prices until the competitor could not afford to stay in the business.
This is similar to what MS did with IE, give it away for free to kill Netscape.
It's the anti-competative behavior that is illegal.
The way I see it, Netscape introduced the DOM to web browsers, as a way to allow JavaScript to manipulate the browser and documents within it.
The W3C decided that the DOM should be handled differently, that's what made Netscape's approach proprietary.
Sure Netscape has introduced a number of proprietary things into browsers, like background colors and images, alot of them eventually became standards. Think of how bland looking web pages were before Navigator 1.1. If we had relied upon standards bodies to come up with this stuff, we probably would have to wait a few years longer.
Maybe they could give Mozilla the intelligence to launch Nav 4, if available when it encounters a site using Netscapes old object model.
While this is good news for the long term, I think that there are many sites using the Netscape DOM, (I'm guilty myself). Doesn't Rive's cool Window Maker simulator, for instance, rely on it?
in general I have found them very powerful elements of programming.
Indeed. I don't think C and C++ would have become dominant without them. You need pointers to do low-level hardware programming. Java doesn't provide a way to do this. Hence you couldn't write a device driver in Java, or an OS.
In short pointers are not a bad thing, just a scary thing to many people.
Kaffe is not 100% Java compliant. (Either that, or Sun's JVM is not 100% compliant). I wrote some Java apps that didn't work correctly with Kaffe, but they were fast!
COM will never be an open standard as long as MS controls it. Given their past, I wouldn't put it past them to leverage it to their advantage in the future.
Also, ODBC is NOT a Microsoft standard. It is only associated with them because it is prevalant on Windows, and rather rare on other platforms.
Massacres happen all over the world, however Littleton became a major media event in the US, so that is why the US is sensitized to that particular tragedy. I don't know how the story was treated in Canada.
If I shoot my own cheesy TV show, and send it to WB for airing, and they refuse to show it, is that censorship? No, of course not. In this case neither does the production company have the right to have their show shown.
Implied in WB's "First broadcast rights" is the right not to broadcast. It isn't "First broadcast obligation" after all.
After you get down off your soapbox, don't forget that the TV networks, by their nature decide what we can and can't watch. They decide what gets produced, what gets shown, and what gets cancelled, they decide what news stories will generate enough ratings, and therefore are worth showing. Just because a network has made a programming decision based on something besides money, people get upset.
So we are living in the dark ages because WB decided not to air the final episode of Buffy?
I didn't realize that "Buffy" was a source of enlightened information, here I thought it was a boring, mindless, TV show that appealed to adolescent insticts.
No you are exactly right. WB has every right to do with "Buffy" as they see fit, it's their intellectual property. The freedom of speech includes the right not to speak, for whatever reason you wish.
The thing MS hates most is anything that allows programs to run on different platforms without modification, this makes Windows irrelevant, which is what gives MS its power.
They will make their own version of Perl, and try to convince people that the other versions of Perl are substandard.
They could pull something like they did with their "Frontpage" strategy. If the Web server did not have "Frontpage Extensions" (IE, did not run MS IIS), a "helpful" alert box would appear and inform the user that their ISP 'sucks' and they should choose a different (MS-friendly, of course) ISP. Of course they eventually allowed 'Frontpage' extensions to be incorporated into other web servers, once they were found out.
Companies don't reverse engineer anything. They buy a software package to do the work, and they use it. This is true today, and it will be true tomorrow. Companies are smart enough to sign clear legal agreements, and would never let their data be held hostage to 'anyone.' This arguement belongs in/dev/null
If you are talking about small companies that have no IT department and rely on off-the-shelf software, then what you say is true.
However, bigger companies often buy software packages that require lots of customization, and they often want it integrated into existing systems. The more open the product is, the easier this is to accomplish.
As for the "held hostage" comment. If your documents are stored in the latest MS word/excel formats, it works fine if you only use word and excel to view them, but if you want to do anything tricky with the data, maybe export it every sunday evening, and email a summary to certain employees who are logged into a certain system at the time, you are stuck using MS tools which may or may not be available to accomplish your task. If you use non-proprietary formats, you will never be "locked-in" or held hostage by a certain vendor.
That's not the point. In general the backbones have to pay for that and eventually you pay it because the backbones costs end up in your flat rate
In theory. However, I haven't seen that happening. In 1994, before Spam was a problem, I signed up for unlimited access with an ISP, and was paying $19.95/month. Today, I am still paying $19.95/month. If you factor in inflation, then I'm actually paying less today!
Since 1994, the cost of bigger pipes has come way down, today you can get cable modems for about $40, maybe up to twice that for DSL. I expect prices for bandwidth will continue to fall in the forseeable future
I suppose the argument can be made that bandwidth would be even cheaper today than it is if not for spam. This may be true, but such arguments are hard to prove.
I tend to agree, you either have to be for total free speech, or acknowledge that there are limits as to what constitutes "free speech". I'm bothered when I see websites, (including a certain Linux User Group) have a blue Internet ribbon on one side, and a "fight spam" on the other. To me, that sends a contradictory message. "I'm for free speech as long as I approve of it."
I know people argue that Spam costs them money... please! On my slow dialup connection it takes less than a second to download a spam mail, and even less time to delete said mail. In the US, most ISPs charge a flat monthly rate, so you can't even argue that you are being charged for the time to download it. I know the situation is different in other countries, but other countries don't have the first amendment either.
Now that you mention it, I remember the palm pilot ads... Still what I said goes for Palm Pilot, they didn't convince me to buy a Palm Pilot, worse, they created a campaign that I forgot about.:-)
Anyway if they wanted a good parody, how about Tux sitting in the same position as the naked woman wearing only a bra.:-)
So Red Hat Linux is that woman's excrement or flatuence?
I question the value of ads like that, I am a young, heterosexual male, but I've never used the amount of female flesh shown in a product or service ad as a basis on whether I buy a product. Am I the only one?
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Yes it would be wonderful to be able to replace damaged body parts from the same genetic stock, but if the price of doing so is maiming another Human being (a human clone is still human), then it's not worth it.
There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly, this is anti-trust, which is when you have monopoly or near monopoly, you leverage that to keep your monopoly.
An example, Standard Oil in the 19th century. They had a near monopoly in the Oil business. If a competitor would appear, then Standard would undercut the competitor's prices until the competitor could not afford to stay in the business.
This is similar to what MS did with IE, give it away for free to kill Netscape.
It's the anti-competative behavior that is illegal.
Eric, Eric, turn to the Dark Side, it is your destiny...
The way I see it, Netscape introduced the DOM to web browsers, as a way to allow JavaScript to manipulate the browser and documents within it.
The W3C decided that the DOM should be handled differently, that's what made Netscape's approach proprietary.
Sure Netscape has introduced a number of proprietary things into browsers, like background colors and images, alot of them eventually became standards. Think of how bland looking web pages were before Navigator 1.1. If we had relied upon standards bodies to come up with this stuff, we probably would have to wait a few years longer.
Maybe they could give Mozilla the intelligence to launch Nav 4, if available when it encounters a site using Netscapes old object model.
While this is good news for the long term, I think that there are many sites using the Netscape DOM, (I'm guilty myself). Doesn't Rive's cool Window Maker simulator, for instance, rely on it?
Because they are soooo hard!!! ;-)
in general I have found them very powerful elements of programming.Indeed. I don't think C and C++ would have become dominant without them. You need pointers to do low-level hardware programming. Java doesn't provide a way to do this. Hence you couldn't write a device driver in Java, or an OS.
In short pointers are not a bad thing, just a scary thing to many people.
Kaffe is not 100% Java compliant. (Either that, or Sun's JVM is not 100% compliant). I wrote some Java apps that didn't work correctly with Kaffe, but they were fast!
COM will never be an open standard as long as MS controls it. Given their past, I wouldn't put it past them to leverage it to their advantage in the future.
Also, ODBC is NOT a Microsoft standard. It is only associated with them because it is prevalant on Windows, and rather rare on other platforms.
Massacres happen all over the world, however Littleton became a major media event in the US, so that is why the US is sensitized to that particular tragedy. I don't know how the story was treated in Canada.
.
Actually, my wife makes me watch that show every week with her, I personally don't like the show much, other than for the girl who plays Buffy ;-)
The real tragedy in all of this is the amount of internet bandwidth being wasted passing copies of this show around.
If I shoot my own cheesy TV show, and send it to WB for airing, and they refuse to show it, is that censorship? No, of course not. In this case neither does the production company have the right to have their show shown.
Implied in WB's "First broadcast rights" is the right not to broadcast. It isn't "First broadcast obligation" after all.
After you get down off your soapbox, don't forget that the TV networks, by their nature decide what we can and can't watch. They decide what gets produced, what gets shown, and what gets cancelled, they decide what news stories will generate enough ratings, and therefore are worth showing. Just because a network has made a programming decision based on something besides money, people get upset.
So we are living in the dark ages because WB decided not to air the final episode of Buffy?
I didn't realize that "Buffy" was a source of enlightened information, here I thought it was a boring, mindless, TV show that appealed to adolescent insticts.
No you are exactly right. WB has every right to do with "Buffy" as they see fit, it's their intellectual property. The freedom of speech includes the right not to speak, for whatever reason you wish.
The thing MS hates most is anything that allows programs to run on different platforms without modification, this makes Windows irrelevant, which is what gives MS its power.
They will make their own version of Perl, and try to convince people that the other versions of Perl are substandard.
They could pull something like they did with their "Frontpage" strategy. If the Web server did not have "Frontpage Extensions" (IE, did not run MS IIS), a "helpful" alert box would appear and inform the user that their ISP 'sucks' and they should choose a different (MS-friendly, of course) ISP. Of course they eventually allowed 'Frontpage' extensions to be incorporated into other web servers, once they were found out.
Companies don't reverse engineer anything. They buy a software package to do the work, and they use it. This is true today, and it will be true tomorrow. Companies are smart enough to sign clear legal agreements, and would never let their data be held hostage to 'anyone.' This arguement belongs in /dev/null
If you are talking about small companies that have no IT department and rely on off-the-shelf software, then what you say is true.
However, bigger companies often buy software packages that require lots of customization, and they often want it integrated into existing systems. The more open the product is, the easier this is to accomplish.
As for the "held hostage" comment. If your documents are stored in the latest MS word/excel formats, it works fine if you only use word and excel to view them, but if you want to do anything tricky with the data, maybe export it every sunday evening, and email a summary to certain employees who are logged into a certain system at the time, you are stuck using MS tools which may or may not be available to accomplish your task. If you use non-proprietary formats, you will never be "locked-in" or held hostage by a certain vendor.
Didn't MS prove that IE can be separated from Win98 by failing to prove that it couldn't?
Wasn't this what the whole forged ("simulated" according to the MS lexicon) video was about?
In theory. However, I haven't seen that happening. In 1994, before Spam was a problem, I signed up for unlimited access with an ISP, and was paying $19.95/month. Today, I am still paying $19.95/month. If you factor in inflation, then I'm actually paying less today!
Since 1994, the cost of bigger pipes has come way down, today you can get cable modems for about $40, maybe up to twice that for DSL. I expect prices for bandwidth will continue to fall in the forseeable future
I suppose the argument can be made that bandwidth would be even cheaper today than it is if not for spam. This may be true, but such arguments are hard to prove.
I tend to agree, you either have to be for total free speech, or acknowledge that there are limits as to what constitutes "free speech". I'm bothered when I see websites, (including a certain Linux User Group) have a blue Internet ribbon on one side, and a "fight spam" on the other. To me, that sends a contradictory message. "I'm for free speech as long as I approve of it."
I know people argue that Spam costs them money... please! On my slow dialup connection it takes less than a second to download a spam mail, and even less time to delete said mail. In the US, most ISPs charge a flat monthly rate, so you can't even argue that you are being charged for the time to download it. I know the situation is different in other countries, but other countries don't have the first amendment either.
I've been hearing it for over a year on a Boston radio station, I'm glad I can finally have my very own copy.
Now that you mention it, I remember the palm pilot ads... Still what I said goes for Palm Pilot, they didn't convince me to buy a Palm Pilot, worse, they created a campaign that I forgot about. :-)
:-)
Anyway if they wanted a good parody, how about Tux sitting in the same position as the naked woman wearing only a bra.
So Red Hat Linux is that woman's excrement or flatuence?
I question the value of ads like that, I am a young, heterosexual male, but I've never used the amount of female flesh shown in a product or service ad as a basis on whether I buy a product. Am I the only one?
Nope, I've seen people run NT Server as their desktop OS.