The incorrectly guessed company would first have to approach cell phone manufacturers to attempt to get their OS installed in order to even test the browser, let alone install it as the default.
I'm quite certain I do not agree.
Cheaper appliances will have a larger target demographic, and therefore quite enough money will be available for the development of high-end ones.
Ok so we've established that software should be an exception to the rule that he who creates something novel shouldn't be rewarded.
No, we haven't.
We've established that mathematics should not be patentable.
Oh, BTW: you probably meant "an exception to the rule that he who creates something novel should be rewarded".
Otherwise it just doesn't make sense, with or without Chewbacca.
Any other fields of endevour we should exempt? Not that anyone here doesn't have a personal stake in the outcome.
Well, let's first see if patents even work as intended.
Apparently the EU makes a lot of exceptions when it comes to Microsoft. They seem to be working on an entire Applicable-Only-To-Microsoft body of law, like the whole "When MS bundles a web browser, it's bad and teh evil, but when Apple does it, or Teh Lunix does it, it's a great feature!" lawsuit they are pushing. Same thing with the lawsuit MS lost, in which apparently it's teh evil when a Microsoft operating system includes a means of watching video... but it's a really great innovation when when Apple or Teh Lunix do it (and especially when Apple ties it in to an entire store, and a line of portable devices, too).
The EU must view Microsoft as this really great cash cow for them, and every year or so they can simply extort a few billion from them.
I don't know who modded Insightful such an obvious Flamebait, but since I have a few minutes to burn, I'll bite.
When Microsoft bundles a web browser or a media player with the OS, we're talking about leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain market dominance (or even another monopoly) in another, i.e. abuse of monopoly.
Neither Apple nor Linux vendors are in a position to do something like that, so your point is moot.
And BTW, Linux distributions do not bundle just one browser; if some do, they do not all pick the same one. So your point is even mooter.
From the know-nothing parent post:
OTOH, pirate copies of Windows and Office are known to work much better than The Original Thing(TM).
Umm... no. I don't know where you are getting your bullshit ideas from, but pirated copies of Windows and Office are not "know to work much better" than legit copies. Feel free to cite a source on that one.
Pirated copies work just the same as regular ones and are able to download updates, yet do not have WGA.
Therefore they are never reported by the WGA as illegitimate and subsequently deactivated, which has happened to users of legitimate copies on at least two occasions.
I'd call it a Q.E.D.
The only thing Microsoft should be afraid of is that the off-brand retailer should improve Microsoft's reputation, then demand pay for services rendered.
Well, despite over a decade of Teh Lunix trying to make a "wanna-be Windows", this supposed better OS maker hasn't materialized yet. Teh Lunix, in all flavors, has a marketshare under 2%. Vista exceeded the Lunix installed base on it's first day of commercial release. The iPhone now has a larger install base than Teh Lunix. Please note, all the hot new products are closed source, and stay as far away from FOSSies and Stallmanistas as humanly possible.
Apples and oranges.
Linux is only a still rather insignificant minority in the desktop market.
The server market and the embedded market are quite a different story.
If you have complaints about MS's support, it's pretty obvious you've never dealt with them in a professional capacity. I've been working in IT for over 10 years, and any contact I've had with Microsoft has been great. Well, except for having to call them to activate Windows when it wouldn't work over the internet, that was just boring. But it was very brief, so overall it wasn't a big deal.
Pirated copies, I repeat once again, never require activation and henceforth I've had no need to contact Microsoft's support and suffer endless minutes of elevator music.
So... where's these really awesome, must-have things coming from the FOSS community? Any really big and fun games? And by games, I don't mean text editors (which is a pity, because Teh Lunix has at least a million different text editors). Despite the delusional FOSS talking points, I just can't see any tangible results of FOSS even existing, much less being an influence in the marketplace (either financial or intellectual).
Probably a terrible precendent, actually. Imagine some off-brand European retailer selling 'Windows XP' that they've compiled and pressed to disk. People would think they're getting A Microsoft Product but actually its someone else who made it. Then Microsoft's reputation would be tarnished if the copy is bad.
If I built soapbox racers in my garage at home and branded them BMW, then someone lost a head in a collision in my not-quite-safe car, don't you think that BMW would be less than thrilled?
OTOH, pirate copies of Windows and Office are known to work much better than The Original Thing(TM).
The only thing Microsoft should be afraid of is that the off-brand retailer should improve Microsoft's reputation, then demand pay for services rendered.
What James Burke pointed out was that the difference between Science and Humanities is that Science is involved with discovering that which has never been known before, while Humanities is merely the re-arrangement of previously expressed thoughts.
This is the reason I still do not know whether linguistics belongs to science or humanities.
I do so prefer the scientific approach, though.
And if you really think that those 'easy' courses are easy, you should try a few of the upper level courses in a subject you don't like. Then you'll see what 'easy' really is...
Here, here!
My majors (well, if I were studying in the USA, they would be called majors) are English, Linguistics and Information Science, all with a reputation of being "easy".
Information Science, the way it is taught here, really is an easy major, no question there.
Linguistics is a field that is relatively obscure and, in a small country such as Croatia, not very profitable.
As for English — well, everyone speaks English, so everyone can teach English and everybody can be a translator or even an interpreter. Yet for some reason most of them would still make a mistake such as "here, here!" instead of "hear, hear!" (yeah, that was on purpose), or even "shoe, shoe!" instead of "shoo! shoo!" (I kid you not).
I dropped out from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science once upon a time and switched to these "easy" majors, and let me tell you: the only subject that really is easy is the one you enjoy doing. I flunked certain courses in EE and CS even though some of my colleagues, who subsequently graduated, would come to me for explanations — I was simply no longer interested in doing the hard work necessary to pass the exams. And even now, studying the "easy stuff", I see very few people really good at it.
It's mostly due to the perception of the american public that anything that doesn't directly affect them is not terribly important--hence, the American Idol winner, the winner of the presidential election, and the price of gas are 'news'
Not to split hairs, but how does American Idol directly impact the public, especially those of us that refuse to watch it?
Google it. POS on linux is not at all new, on *nix it is positively ancient.
Quite.
Konzum, the largest Croatian supermarket chain, runs all POSs on Red Hat.
The owner of the chain saved millions on Windows licences alone.
I don't like the store, but I was mightily impressed when I first saw the Red Hat login screen on their POS.
I considered it quite uncommonly sensible business practice, at least for Croatian standards.
Besides, intX and complexNumberX examples you gave are almost exactly the same: they just tell you what kind of number you are dealing with, not what it means within your program.
You get my nitpicky point about Hungarian notation with respect to semantic typing. But the consequences don't seem to have sunk in. As we know from our university days, a type is (roughly -- it depends on the axiomatization of your type theory) the extension of a predicate. Equivalently, the type is the predicate. We are free to choose our predicates when defining our types for a program. Perhaps complex numbers weren't a good choice for the example (I happen to think they are, because of the ambiguity). The question is, who is to say that a program doesn't use complex numbers as "primary" objects? Who is to say that a program doesn't use integers as primary objects? You can't tell that just by looking at the Hungarian notation prefix.
In that case, it is redundant.
Check what I've said about redundancy.
But what's the point? If you don't have to refer to many instances of either by name in a given scope/block/context, you might as well drop the X. And in most cases, you shouldn't have to refer to many variables by name in a given scope/block/context.
The case introduced in the text still seems valid to me.
The best solution I've found so far is to just use typing information in your variable names. The "abstract" we-define-the-predicate kind of type is the important part of the variable name. You don't add temperatures to weights unless you know what you're doing, so you really shouldn't expect to see a line like temperature += weight; in any program.
By default, in this naming scheme, things of the Record class are called 'record' unless there's a name collision in a block/scope/context. Collections of records (with a few benign restrictions) are called 'records'. Adjectives can be used. And so on. Obviously, Hungarian notation wouldn't add to this.
My opinion about Apps Hungarian notation is that it is a good, but incomplete idea. Yes, it gets at the notion of using "semantic typing". But it misses the key insight: usually, semantic typing information is enough.
There is some irony there, given that Microsoft (as a group of people) is probably a lot less unfriendly towards open source than open source is towards Microsoft.
Maybe that's because Microsoft has worked much harder to antagonize open source than open source developers tried to antagonize Microsoft.
Wine, Samba et al. are clear examples of open source trying to interoperate with Microsoft's products.
I can't think of many examples of Microsoft trying to interoperate with anyone.
Microsoft can only hate open source for what it is.
Open source people can hate Microsoft not only for what it is, but also for what it does.
JFTR, someone else already pointed out that even this interoperability attempt is published in a.docx document.
I don't call that an interoperability attempt; I call it spitting in my face.
Remember: it's the "suits" who make the business strategy decisions and the press releases, NOT the "little people" writing the code.
But you can't say the little people don't know about that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that the suits are responsible. But the Microsoft label is tainted, and thus the innocent suffer.
I see here that some people don't feel comfortable even saying that once upon a time they worked for Microsoft. Granted, that's mostly in front of FOSS fanboys, but the name is still tainted. FUD cuts both ways.
So when the name becomes so tainted that people start refusing to work for or with them on principle, maybe the suits start making different decisions.
If you want to read a book for free - go to a library. Does reading the book for free promote the author? Maybe. But you also just took a royalty (that YOU owe them) out of their pocket.
I'm an adult now. I pay for things. I'm not defending the industry and their actions/tactics; I'm just saying the artists deserve to be paid. Too bad I can't collect two cents from you for my opinion, I think you owe it to me.
If artists enabled me to download their music from their site for twice the price they're earning per track now — which is, AFAIK, a few cents — I would gladly do it.
Since I cannot, and my loss would be disproportionately bigger than their gain, I say the hell with it.
MAFIAA's business model is outdated, no longer in step with available technology.
If it were about the artists, they would have adapted the business model to fit modern conditions. Instead, they are trying to adapt us to fit their existing business model.
Some artists have already offered their music on their websites. Many more will follow in their track. When that happens, I'll gladly buy music from them.
As I said, I'm barely a programmer. But I'm a linguist, so I know a thing or two about morphology, syntax and semantics. And guess what: some natural languages have similar features. And natural languages abhorr semantic redundancy.
Admittedly, I was wrong when I said "nothing to do with typing"; I meant the typing your language of choice already enorces.
Hungarian notation is not needed in all contexts, but can be a useful tool for semantic typing beyond the scope of what your language of choice allows you. Besides, intX and complexNumberX examples you gave are almost exactly the same: they just tell you what kind of number you are dealing with, not what it means within your program.
Still, Photoshop is a very commonly pirated product nonetheless; I could bet none of my friends own a legit copy.
Maybe we should start using the system to our advantage, just like the GPL does... refuse to install pirated products, report every single instance of piracy we notice... and then offer people some of the free programs.
I wonder how many would choose to shell out the cash.
Companies that sell their software (or licences to use it, whatever) rely on piracy to get mindshare. That's why they turn a blind eye to casual piracy.
At the same time, they do want everyone to buy their software. Multiple copies, if in any way possible.
It's a paradox, really: those who sell software profit immensely from not profiting. Those who give it out free can only compete by making sure that the guys from the previous sentence actually turn a greater profit.
Therefore, the GPL helps proprietary software industry. Q.E.D. </tongueincheek>
Or in more general terms: Strict rules are good, as long as you use the right rules. Whether you choose Hungarian notation or not, the important thing is to use common sense, not Hungarian notation.
While we obviously use different meanings of the term "type", I most heartily agree with this part; this is precisely what I was aiming for.
Slashdot Mirror
... who was confused by "drinkable languages" in the headline? Do I need to, like, RTFA?Nope.
IAALinguist, and that was the main reason I even opened this TFThread. And I'm still WTFing.
The incorrectly guessed company would first have to approach cell phone manufacturers to attempt to get their OS installed in order to even test the browser, let alone install it as the default.
First I used Hotmail and the Linux dudes told me BSD was evil.
Sorry, that was a typo.
BSD is a devil.
I'm quite certain I do not agree.
Cheaper appliances will have a larger target demographic, and therefore quite enough money will be available for the development of high-end ones.
There is a market for everything.
No, we haven't.
We've established that mathematics should not be patentable.
Oh, BTW: you probably meant "an exception to the rule that he who creates something novel should be rewarded".
Any other fields of endevour we should exempt? Not that anyone here doesn't have a personal stake in the outcome.Otherwise it just doesn't make sense, with or without Chewbacca.
Well, let's first see if patents even work as intended.
Apparently the EU makes a lot of exceptions when it comes to Microsoft. They seem to be working on an entire Applicable-Only-To-Microsoft body of law, like the whole "When MS bundles a web browser, it's bad and teh evil, but when Apple does it, or Teh Lunix does it, it's a great feature!" lawsuit they are pushing. Same thing with the lawsuit MS lost, in which apparently it's teh evil when a Microsoft operating system includes a means of watching video... but it's a really great innovation when when Apple or Teh Lunix do it (and especially when Apple ties it in to an entire store, and a line of portable devices, too).
The EU must view Microsoft as this really great cash cow for them, and every year or so they can simply extort a few billion from them.
I don't know who modded Insightful such an obvious Flamebait, but since I have a few minutes to burn, I'll bite.
When Microsoft bundles a web browser or a media player with the OS, we're talking about leveraging a monopoly in one area to gain market dominance (or even another monopoly) in another, i.e. abuse of monopoly.
Neither Apple nor Linux vendors are in a position to do something like that, so your point is moot.
And BTW, Linux distributions do not bundle just one browser; if some do, they do not all pick the same one. So your point is even mooter.
From the know-nothing parent post:
Umm... no. I don't know where you are getting your bullshit ideas from, but pirated copies of Windows and Office are not "know to work much better" than legit copies. Feel free to cite a source on that one.
Pirated copies work just the same as regular ones and are able to download updates, yet do not have WGA.
Therefore they are never reported by the WGA as illegitimate and subsequently deactivated, which has happened to users of legitimate copies on at least two occasions.
I'd call it a Q.E.D.
Well, despite over a decade of Teh Lunix trying to make a "wanna-be Windows", this supposed better OS maker hasn't materialized yet. Teh Lunix, in all flavors, has a marketshare under 2%. Vista exceeded the Lunix installed base on it's first day of commercial release. The iPhone now has a larger install base than Teh Lunix. Please note, all the hot new products are closed source, and stay as far away from FOSSies and Stallmanistas as humanly possible.
Apples and oranges.
Linux is only a still rather insignificant minority in the desktop market.
The server market and the embedded market are quite a different story.
If you have complaints about MS's support, it's pretty obvious you've never dealt with them in a professional capacity. I've been working in IT for over 10 years, and any contact I've had with Microsoft has been great. Well, except for having to call them to activate Windows when it wouldn't work over the internet, that was just boring. But it was very brief, so overall it wasn't a big deal.
Pirated copies, I repeat once again, never require activation and henceforth I've had no need to contact Microsoft's support and suffer endless minutes of elevator music.
So... where's these really awesome, must-have things coming from the FOSS community? Any really big and fun games? And by games, I don't mean text editors (which is a pity, because Teh Lunix has at least a million different text editors). Despite the delusional FOSS talking points, I just can't see any tangible results of FOSS even existing, much less being an influence in the marketplace (either financial or intellectual).
Oh, if it's a gaming platform yo
If I built soapbox racers in my garage at home and branded them BMW, then someone lost a head in a collision in my not-quite-safe car, don't you think that BMW would be less than thrilled?
OTOH, pirate copies of Windows and Office are known to work much better than The Original Thing(TM).
The only thing Microsoft should be afraid of is that the off-brand retailer should improve Microsoft's reputation, then demand pay for services rendered.
Imagine the awesomeness if that were the desired effect.
I've known people who wore thick woolen socks in high summer.
They claimed it felt nice because wool isolated them from the heat outside.
This is the reason I still do not know whether linguistics belongs to science or humanities.
I do so prefer the scientific approach, though.
Interesting. I use Firefox and do not get any kind of warning when I visit the site in question.
So I reported it.
From now on, I shall refer to the site as thieving bastards.
Here, here!
My majors (well, if I were studying in the USA, they would be called majors) are English, Linguistics and Information Science, all with a reputation of being "easy".
Information Science, the way it is taught here, really is an easy major, no question there.
Linguistics is a field that is relatively obscure and, in a small country such as Croatia, not very profitable.
As for English — well, everyone speaks English, so everyone can teach English and everybody can be a translator or even an interpreter. Yet for some reason most of them would still make a mistake such as "here, here!" instead of "hear, hear!" (yeah, that was on purpose), or even "shoe, shoe!" instead of "shoo! shoo!" (I kid you not).
I dropped out from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science once upon a time and switched to these "easy" majors, and let me tell you: the only subject that really is easy is the one you enjoy doing. I flunked certain courses in EE and CS even though some of my colleagues, who subsequently graduated, would come to me for explanations — I was simply no longer interested in doing the hard work necessary to pass the exams. And even now, studying the "easy stuff", I see very few people really good at it.
It's all easy if you don't look harder into it.
Of course it is. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Not to split hairs, but how does American Idol directly impact the public, especially those of us that refuse to watch it?
You just commented on it.
Nothing funny about it.
In Yugoslavia, it was called Unikonzum; then it was bought up and its name was changed slightly.
It's not a coincidence; it's an example of prevailing terminology. A meme, if you will.
Ah. So I was not the only one to imagine the horrors of a Twitter in every household.
Imagine planting one (no pun intended) inside Microsoft campus...
Quite. Konzum, the largest Croatian supermarket chain, runs all POSs on Red Hat.
The owner of the chain saved millions on Windows licences alone.
I don't like the store, but I was mightily impressed when I first saw the Red Hat login screen on their POS.
I considered it quite uncommonly sensible business practice, at least for Croatian standards.
Since we're talking about multitouch gestures, I think the T-shirt should have both middle fingers on it.
You get my nitpicky point about Hungarian notation with respect to semantic typing. But the consequences don't seem to have sunk in. As we know from our university days, a type is (roughly -- it depends on the axiomatization of your type theory) the extension of a predicate. Equivalently, the type is the predicate. We are free to choose our predicates when defining our types for a program. Perhaps complex numbers weren't a good choice for the example (I happen to think they are, because of the ambiguity). The question is, who is to say that a program doesn't use complex numbers as "primary" objects? Who is to say that a program doesn't use integers as primary objects? You can't tell that just by looking at the Hungarian notation prefix.
In that case, it is redundant.
But what's the point? If you don't have to refer to many instances of either by name in a given scope/block/context, you might as well drop the X. And in most cases, you shouldn't have to refer to many variables by name in a given scope/block/context.Check what I've said about redundancy.
The case introduced in the text still seems valid to me.
The best solution I've found so far is to just use typing information in your variable names. The "abstract" we-define-the-predicate kind of type is the important part of the variable name. You don't add temperatures to weights unless you know what you're doing, so you really shouldn't expect to see a line like temperature += weight; in any program.By default, in this naming scheme, things of the Record class are called 'record' unless there's a name collision in a block/scope/context. Collections of records (with a few benign restrictions) are called 'records'. Adjectives can be used. And so on. Obviously, Hungarian notation wouldn't add to this.
My opinion about Apps Hungarian notation is that it is a good, but incomplete idea. Yes, it gets at the notion of using "semantic typing". But it misses the key insight: usually, semantic typing information is enough.
Usually != always.
I see your points. Do you even try to see mine?
Maybe that's because Microsoft has worked much harder to antagonize open source than open source developers tried to antagonize Microsoft.
Wine, Samba et al. are clear examples of open source trying to interoperate with Microsoft's products.
I can't think of many examples of Microsoft trying to interoperate with anyone.
Microsoft can only hate open source for what it is.
Open source people can hate Microsoft not only for what it is, but also for what it does.
JFTR, someone else already pointed out that even this interoperability attempt is published in a .docx document.
Remember: it's the "suits" who make the business strategy decisions and the press releases, NOT the "little people" writing the code.I don't call that an interoperability attempt; I call it spitting in my face.
But you can't say the little people don't know about that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that the suits are responsible. But the Microsoft label is tainted, and thus the innocent suffer.
I see here that some people don't feel comfortable even saying that once upon a time they worked for Microsoft. Granted, that's mostly in front of FOSS fanboys, but the name is still tainted. FUD cuts both ways.
So when the name becomes so tainted that people start refusing to work for or with them on principle, maybe the suits start making different decisions.
Yeah, I've always wondered why it is that the evil twin has a pointy beard.
I'd never have thought that the cause was genetic.
I'm an adult now. I pay for things. I'm not defending the industry and their actions/tactics; I'm just saying the artists deserve to be paid. Too bad I can't collect two cents from you for my opinion, I think you owe it to me.
If artists enabled me to download their music from their site for twice the price they're earning per track now — which is, AFAIK, a few cents — I would gladly do it.
Since I cannot, and my loss would be disproportionately bigger than their gain, I say the hell with it.
MAFIAA's business model is outdated, no longer in step with available technology.
If it were about the artists, they would have adapted the business model to fit modern conditions. Instead, they are trying to adapt us to fit their existing business model.
Some artists have already offered their music on their websites. Many more will follow in their track. When that happens, I'll gladly buy music from them.
If it is redundant, you're doing it wrong.
As I said, I'm barely a programmer. But I'm a linguist, so I know a thing or two about morphology, syntax and semantics. And guess what: some natural languages have similar features. And natural languages abhorr semantic redundancy.
Admittedly, I was wrong when I said "nothing to do with typing"; I meant the typing your language of choice already enorces.
Hungarian notation is not needed in all contexts, but can be a useful tool for semantic typing beyond the scope of what your language of choice allows you. Besides, intX and complexNumberX examples you gave are almost exactly the same: they just tell you what kind of number you are dealing with, not what it means within your program.
Still, Photoshop is a very commonly pirated product nonetheless; I could bet none of my friends own a legit copy.
Maybe we should start using the system to our advantage, just like the GPL does... refuse to install pirated products, report every single instance of piracy we notice... and then offer people some of the free programs.
I wonder how many would choose to shell out the cash.
Companies that sell their software (or licences to use it, whatever) rely on piracy to get mindshare. That's why they turn a blind eye to casual piracy.
At the same time, they do want everyone to buy their software. Multiple copies, if in any way possible.
It's a paradox, really: those who sell software profit immensely from not profiting. Those who give it out free can only compete by making sure that the guys from the previous sentence actually turn a greater profit.
Therefore, the GPL helps proprietary software industry. Q.E.D. </tongueincheek>
Or in more general terms: Strict rules are good, as long as you use the right rules. Whether you choose Hungarian notation or not, the important thing is to use common sense, not Hungarian notation.
While we obviously use different meanings of the term "type", I most heartily agree with this part; this is precisely what I was aiming for.