Well, it depends on what definition you take. The Dragon book, which is pretty much the standard CS book on compilers, defines strongly typed as "a language where type errors cannot occur at runtime".
I'm not sure how useful that definition is. Most languages that don't catch type errors in a distinct compilation phase don't actually have "type errors", as such, anyway. In Ruby, for example, situations which you might expect to cause a "type error" caught at compile time in a language like C may produce runtime exceptions because a particular object's implementation of the send method throws an exception with the parameters given, but it's not clear that that is a "type error" so much as it is "an exception occurring in a situation analogous to one in which some other language would produce a type error."
But, if we look at things that way, is C really strongly typed? Given the limitations of its type system, situations which might produce a "type error" caught at compile time in a language with a richer type system like Haskell (or even Ada) may instead produce a runtime error of some kind in C.
Verbosity? It's called code completion, folks. Which you can do that with any good IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, and my personal fave, IntelliJ).
If a "good IDE" can automatically complete the code from less-than-complete code, it means that the code doesn't need to be so verbose in the first place, and the language implementation (interpreter or compiler) could instead be taking a more concise representation.
And then you wouldn't need the slow, heavyweight IDE to do development.
Need to change code around? Java refactoring is a cinch!
Compared to what? Certainly not compared to Ruby or Python.
Don't want to reinvent the wheel? Millions of open source libraries out there, and 'cause it's Java, it's actually easy to read and understand.
Again, Java is not "easy to read and understand" compared to Ruby and Python, though it may be compared to C++. But, as far as using the existing libraries on the Java platform, Ruby and Python implementations for the Java platform allow you leverage them painlessly.
And any good language that accesses a database had better have a damned good ORM. That means Java and C#, and I'm allergic to Microsoft.
The utility and desirability of ORMs is infinitely debatable, but there are high-quality ORMs for Ruby and Python (and probably plenty of other languages), not just Java and C#.
JRuby is ok but it adds extra overhead; it's an interpretation layer.
The JRuby distribution includes a compiler which compiles Ruby to Java bytecode (jrubyc), and the interpreter by default attempts to do per-method JIT compilation on frequently called methods.
So here is the question I have for many of you who own iphones and such. If you pay for an app and your phone dies, or something, will that app be transferred to a replacement phone or do you need to re-purchase the app for the new phone?
Usually, apps are tied to your iTunes account and can be used on any iPhone linked to that iTunes account (so not only can you transfer them to a new phone, you can use them on more than one phone simultaneously.)
I recall seeing a notice somewhere in the user agreements, disclaimers, etc., attached to the App Store that there are apps that allow only a single download to a phone per purchase, but I've never actually encountered one.
Well my interpretation of the patent was that:they cite SGML and RTF as examples of embedding style and structure directly into the content stream, and their patent is for "an improved method" which emphatically does not put that metadata into the content but keeps the two separate. So it's explicitly not like XML (which is an application of SGML).
Actually, their claim has nothing to do with the format, it has to do with the mechanism by which data (whatever format it is serialized in) is handled internally. The examples show it being used with data which is stored externally as SGML.
I fail to see what this patent has to do with Word or XML, and the complaint doesn't exactly point out the similarities.
One would presume it would have to be in the way that Word works with XML internally, just from what is claimed by the patent, but without the trial record or better reporting than I've been able to find, the details are murky.
I still stand by what I said, the amount is outrageous for an open source standard that is being infringed upon.
No open source standard was infringed upon. A patented mechanism, which predates XML and which has nothing to do with XML except that the court found that Microsoft had used it with XML, was found to be infringed.
As for the XML, yes it was not the XML per se, more so the writing of XML containing special tags making it custom counter to the present standard.
No, that wasn't it, either; what the patent covers is the mechanism used internally to process the XML. Microsoft was found to have used it in the context of the "Custom XML" feature in Office, but really the mechanism has little to do with which tags are used.
You reinforce the last part of my comment - the judge didn't say "the DMCA supercedes the previous statute." She affirmed the previous statute and ruled that they do no conflict.
That's because they don't conflict.
The fair use provision limits the scope of applicability of the exclusive rights provided in one section of copyright law. It has no bearing on the applicability of the DMCA restrictions, which are completely different provision than the one it limits.
You are defending the judge's decision based on principles that the judge did not herself use.
No, I'm not. I was pointing out that the argument you made, which had as a premise that there was a conflict, would fail even if one assumed that premise to be correct, because new statutes can change rights granted under existing ones.
It also fails because there is no conflict in the first place. An argument can be wrong for more than one reason.
What she didn't say is that the law fundamentally conflicts with previously established and adjudicated law.
New laws are allowed to do that.
If we have a right to make a backup copy of a DVD, how can it then be illegal to make and distribute the means to back it up?
It can't, because it being illegal is the same thing as not having the right. However, insofar as the right is statutory in origin, a new statute can eliminate the right.
In Miranda, the Supreme court established that a right is useless, and therefore abridged, if there is no means to execute that right.
Miranda was a ruling on a Constitutional right. There is an important difference between statutory and Constitutional rights, since a later statutory enactment can alter, restrict, or eliminate a statutory right, but cannot do so to a Constitutional right.
Either copying DVD's under fair use is a right [...]
Its not. "Fair use" is not a right, it is a limitation on the exclusive rights given to copyright holders under copyright. It overlaps with first amendment rights, but backup copies aren't protected by the First Amendment.
Anyhow, even if it were a right under statute law existing before the DMCA, it would be a statutory right, which means that the DMCA, as a newer statute, would be free to modify or even eliminate the right.
Say what? Can we try that with a little closer touch with reality?
You mean abstract speculation has a greater touch with reality than, you know, actually having done something in reality?
What you are referring to is not creating a serious document, it is the same as editing a SMS message.
Strange, the actual serious documents I've actually done it with were nothing like SMS messages.
An "outline" done on a phone properly involves some hefy processing and is not something that can be done easily without a mouse or touchscreen/hauptics.
No, it doesn't.
That could be as simple as positioning of a clipart or attaching a spreadsheet to a word doc, neither of those which are likely to be very functional on the average T9 cellphone (on the business phones with full keypads/enterprise software, touchscreens, or an iphone, or a G1, the solutions already exist). This is why this nokia-microsoft partnership is just a redundancy, and why people won't care in the long run.
The solutions that already exist aren't Microsoft solutions (except on WinMobile phones), which may not make a difference to some users, but will make a difference to others. Admittedly, I think the people that are going to care are (1) Nokia, (2) Big firms that have a policy of preferring Microsoft product for general use, and (3) All the companies making money selling works-with-office mobile solutions now that are going to have to compete with Microsoft to keep doing that.
It's more than that - the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA are expressly designed to eliminate fair use (as we see here) and "work around" the copyright expiration clause of the US Constitution.
The "limited term" provision of the US Constitution with regard to copyrights is a dead letter, anyway, since the Supreme Court has okayed unlimited, retrospective increases to copyright terms, so long as there is a fixed term of years applied when the increase is implemented. So using the DMCA to circumvent it is superfluous.
Parody is a derivative work and yet it's guaranteed by the 1st amendment.
Yes it is.
As I said before, fair use overlaps with Constitutional protections, and (while they've failed in the courts) one could make an argument that First Amendment concerns invalidate parts of the DMCA. But you can't argue that older statutes invalidate the DMCA.
Aside from XML, doesn't CSS violate this ridiculous patent?
Neither XML nor CSS violates the patent, and since CSS doesn't specify structure, but how style applies to a structure specified in some other language, something that processes CSS wouldn't violate the patent unless the mechanism it applied to the basic structured document to which the CSS applies violated the patent: the handling of CSS itself would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether it violated the patent.
I am glad that the courts are being stern enough to enforce their ruling, anyone not following through on a verdict should be held accountable, that being said, I do feel very bad for M$, as the amount given for the fine is way outrageous seeing as the XML format is an open source format, and belongs to the people anyways.
There is no "fine" here. There is a damage award. They are very different things.
And the problem wasn't using XML, it was the mechanism with which they use XML. (The patent was filed in 1994, before XML even existed.)
The judge was misguided when he came up with a number, and I am sure needed a new courtroom, with maybe some new staff and decided that M$ should foot his bill.
The damage award was decided by a jury, and goes to i4i, the patent holder, not the judge or the government.
No IT personnel in their right mind would have come up with this number!
I wouldn't consider computation of damages an area in which IT personnel are generally particularly experts.
I would like to see the breakdown of how he came up with this number, and I can also see why M$ has not given any money yet.
$200 million in actual damages for the basic act of infringing the patent, $40 million in what amount to punitive damages for willful infringement, and the rest is various interest and similar charges, IIRC; its been a few hours since I read the breakdown.
Ironic conclusion, given that the patent (unsurprisingly, given that it was filed more than two years before the first XML specification working draft was produced) doesn't mention XML at all, but gives several examples of using the mechanism it claims with SGML.
I wonder if the patent could be broadly interpreted to apply to HTML also.
The main format referred to in the patent (which is used only as an example, nothing in the patent is specific to any format, but to a particular mechanism for dealing with data that is used simultaneously as structured data and a stream of raw content) is SGML, so it would apply to HTML as much as it does to XML.
If so it would mean that anything that manipulated HTML in any way would need to pay up also.
No, it wouldn't, and it doesn't mean that with regard to XML either.
Since this is likely to affect Open Office and every other XML capable word processor, maybe it's time to come up with something else.
The patent has nothing more than tangential to do with XML or word processing, as such. It has to do with using a particular mechanism for dealing with data that can simultaneously be viewed as structured and as a string of text. Please explain your basis for concluding that Open Office (and, for that matter "every other XML capable word processor") uses the particular method covered by the patent.
To be honest, the way I understand it is that every piece of software that produces an XML stream is infringe this patent.
You understand it wrong. Anything that uses XML as a way of storing structured data that doesn't need to simultaneously work on the concatenation of all the text nodes in the XML as if it were a plain text document wouldn't even perform the function that the system and method contained in this patent does, much less use the actual system and method claimed in the patent to perform that function.
And, even for something that performs the function performed by the patented system and method, its certainly possible to perform that function using a different mechanism.
2) I meant "US," did not stop to think that the comment would be taken outside of the citation context. US, by itself, does refer to the US Supreme Court, in the sense that the preferred Bluebook citation format to the US Supreme Court is in the form of "x US y."
No, it doesn't refer to the US Supreme Court, it refers to the United States Reports (actually, its "U.S.", not "US", but that's, in the context of a Slashdot discussion -- though not in the context of actual legal writing -- a minor point) which is a reporter (the preferred one in both ALWD and Bluebook style) of US Supreme Court cases. v U.S. p is an appreviation for "Page p of volume v of the United States Reports".
Can anyone even imagine creating a serious document on any cellphone?
Yes. I've even occasionally done it; sure, I wouldn't want to do too detailed layout on a smartphone, but most "serious" documents don't need a lot more than a text editor with the ability to put basic structural features (multilevel headings, mostly, and maybe some tables) for most of the work you do with them (i.e., everything you do while its in the "working draft" phase.) Sure, to finalize something, for certain audiences, you may want to get in the weeds with tweaking the styles and layout, but that's not most of the work.
You don't want to do heavy work on a smartphone, but both for initial creation (which is often at an outline level), and for doing on-the-go text revisions to serious documents that are in the "working draft" stage, its not a horrible platform, and it has the advantage that your phone is more likely to be with you whenever you have an update you want to make than, say, your laptop (and much more likely than your desktop).
I'd rather work on a document on my home desktop with my 20" monitor, which is great for two-page editing. But I'd rather have the ability to edit a document when all I have with me is my phone than not at all.
The way i4i's patent sounds, this would also affect other things like OpenOffice.org and anything else that uses XML formatted documents.
i4i's patent does not claim any document format (including XML) at all. It claims a particular mechanism for working with a marked-up document (which doesn't depend on that document being XML, either; the examples given in the patent use SGML), which they claim (and the court found) Microsoft uses in their handling of the custom XML feature in Microsoft Word.
Key word is "protected computer". Not sure how something sharing *.* on limewire is considered "protected".
"Protected", in this context, probably means "within the scope of protection of the particular law under which he was charged", not "protected by technical security measures."
Lately it seems that the big companies are getting affected by patent trolls more than the little guys (they have more money). And the big corps have enough political clout to push through patent reform laws. So if they are getting hammered like this, why aren't they lobbying for patent reform? Are they just not getting hit hard enough?
The hits to the little guys are less visible, and come from the big guys as much as the "patent trolls": it results in them either not entering particular fields at all for fear of patent litigation, or caving and leaving as soon as a big guy with a patent shows up and waves it around, since they don't have the resources to fight. The big guys are willing to whether the costs of patent trolls in order to keep the barrier to entry (and thus, competition) that software patents provide them.
Slashdot Mirror
And there are some very nice modern Logo derivatives (StarLogo and NetLogo, for instance.)
A well-documented, open federation protocol.
That too.
I'm not sure how useful that definition is. Most languages that don't catch type errors in a distinct compilation phase don't actually have "type errors", as such, anyway. In Ruby, for example, situations which you might expect to cause a "type error" caught at compile time in a language like C may produce runtime exceptions because a particular object's implementation of the send method throws an exception with the parameters given, but it's not clear that that is a "type error" so much as it is "an exception occurring in a situation analogous to one in which some other language would produce a type error."
But, if we look at things that way, is C really strongly typed? Given the limitations of its type system, situations which might produce a "type error" caught at compile time in a language with a richer type system like Haskell (or even Ada) may instead produce a runtime error of some kind in C.
If a "good IDE" can automatically complete the code from less-than-complete code, it means that the code doesn't need to be so verbose in the first place, and the language implementation (interpreter or compiler) could instead be taking a more concise representation.
And then you wouldn't need the slow, heavyweight IDE to do development.
Compared to what? Certainly not compared to Ruby or Python.
Again, Java is not "easy to read and understand" compared to Ruby and Python, though it may be compared to C++. But, as far as using the existing libraries on the Java platform, Ruby and Python implementations for the Java platform allow you leverage them painlessly.
The utility and desirability of ORMs is infinitely debatable, but there are high-quality ORMs for Ruby and Python (and probably plenty of other languages), not just Java and C#.
The JRuby distribution includes a compiler which compiles Ruby to Java bytecode (jrubyc), and the interpreter by default attempts to do per-method JIT compilation on frequently called methods.
Usually, apps are tied to your iTunes account and can be used on any iPhone linked to that iTunes account (so not only can you transfer them to a new phone, you can use them on more than one phone simultaneously.)
I recall seeing a notice somewhere in the user agreements, disclaimers, etc., attached to the App Store that there are apps that allow only a single download to a phone per purchase, but I've never actually encountered one.
Actually, their claim has nothing to do with the format, it has to do with the mechanism by which data (whatever format it is serialized in) is handled internally. The examples show it being used with data which is stored externally as SGML.
One would presume it would have to be in the way that Word works with XML internally, just from what is claimed by the patent, but without the trial record or better reporting than I've been able to find, the details are murky.
No open source standard was infringed upon. A patented mechanism, which predates XML and which has nothing to do with XML except that the court found that Microsoft had used it with XML, was found to be infringed.
No, that wasn't it, either; what the patent covers is the mechanism used internally to process the XML. Microsoft was found to have used it in the context of the "Custom XML" feature in Office, but really the mechanism has little to do with which tags are used.
That's because they don't conflict.
The fair use provision limits the scope of applicability of the exclusive rights provided in one section of copyright law. It has no bearing on the applicability of the DMCA restrictions, which are completely different provision than the one it limits.
No, I'm not. I was pointing out that the argument you made, which had as a premise that there was a conflict, would fail even if one assumed that premise to be correct, because new statutes can change rights granted under existing ones.
It also fails because there is no conflict in the first place. An argument can be wrong for more than one reason.
New laws are allowed to do that.
It can't, because it being illegal is the same thing as not having the right. However, insofar as the right is statutory in origin, a new statute can eliminate the right.
Miranda was a ruling on a Constitutional right. There is an important difference between statutory and Constitutional rights, since a later statutory enactment can alter, restrict, or eliminate a statutory right, but cannot do so to a Constitutional right.
Its not. "Fair use" is not a right, it is a limitation on the exclusive rights given to copyright holders under copyright. It overlaps with first amendment rights, but backup copies aren't protected by the First Amendment.
Anyhow, even if it were a right under statute law existing before the DMCA, it would be a statutory right, which means that the DMCA, as a newer statute, would be free to modify or even eliminate the right.
You mean, "prototype-based, not class-based", right? Prototype-based OOP is at least as much object-based as class-based OOP is.
You mean abstract speculation has a greater touch with reality than, you know, actually having done something in reality?
Strange, the actual serious documents I've actually done it with were nothing like SMS messages.
No, it doesn't.
The solutions that already exist aren't Microsoft solutions (except on WinMobile phones), which may not make a difference to some users, but will make a difference to others. Admittedly, I think the people that are going to care are (1) Nokia, (2) Big firms that have a policy of preferring Microsoft product for general use, and (3) All the companies making money selling works-with-office mobile solutions now that are going to have to compete with Microsoft to keep doing that.
The "limited term" provision of the US Constitution with regard to copyrights is a dead letter, anyway, since the Supreme Court has okayed unlimited, retrospective increases to copyright terms, so long as there is a fixed term of years applied when the increase is implemented. So using the DMCA to circumvent it is superfluous.
Yes it is.
As I said before, fair use overlaps with Constitutional protections, and (while they've failed in the courts) one could make an argument that First Amendment concerns invalidate parts of the DMCA. But you can't argue that older statutes invalidate the DMCA.
Neither XML nor CSS violates the patent, and since CSS doesn't specify structure, but how style applies to a structure specified in some other language, something that processes CSS wouldn't violate the patent unless the mechanism it applied to the basic structured document to which the CSS applies violated the patent: the handling of CSS itself would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether it violated the patent.
There is no "fine" here. There is a damage award. They are very different things.
And the problem wasn't using XML, it was the mechanism with which they use XML. (The patent was filed in 1994, before XML even existed.)
The damage award was decided by a jury, and goes to i4i, the patent holder, not the judge or the government.
I wouldn't consider computation of damages an area in which IT personnel are generally particularly experts.
$200 million in actual damages for the basic act of infringing the patent, $40 million in what amount to punitive damages for willful infringement, and the rest is various interest and similar charges, IIRC; its been a few hours since I read the breakdown.
Ironic conclusion, given that the patent (unsurprisingly, given that it was filed more than two years before the first XML specification working draft was produced) doesn't mention XML at all, but gives several examples of using the mechanism it claims with SGML.
The main format referred to in the patent (which is used only as an example, nothing in the patent is specific to any format, but to a particular mechanism for dealing with data that is used simultaneously as structured data and a stream of raw content) is SGML, so it would apply to HTML as much as it does to XML.
No, it wouldn't, and it doesn't mean that with regard to XML either.
The patent has nothing more than tangential to do with XML or word processing, as such. It has to do with using a particular mechanism for dealing with data that can simultaneously be viewed as structured and as a string of text. Please explain your basis for concluding that Open Office (and, for that matter "every other XML capable word processor") uses the particular method covered by the patent.
You understand it wrong. Anything that uses XML as a way of storing structured data that doesn't need to simultaneously work on the concatenation of all the text nodes in the XML as if it were a plain text document wouldn't even perform the function that the system and method contained in this patent does, much less use the actual system and method claimed in the patent to perform that function.
And, even for something that performs the function performed by the patented system and method, its certainly possible to perform that function using a different mechanism.
No, it doesn't refer to the US Supreme Court, it refers to the United States Reports (actually, its "U.S.", not "US", but that's, in the context of a Slashdot discussion -- though not in the context of actual legal writing -- a minor point) which is a reporter (the preferred one in both ALWD and Bluebook style) of US Supreme Court cases. v U.S. p is an appreviation for "Page p of volume v of the United States Reports".
Yes. I've even occasionally done it; sure, I wouldn't want to do too detailed layout on a smartphone, but most "serious" documents don't need a lot more than a text editor with the ability to put basic structural features (multilevel headings, mostly, and maybe some tables) for most of the work you do with them (i.e., everything you do while its in the "working draft" phase.) Sure, to finalize something, for certain audiences, you may want to get in the weeds with tweaking the styles and layout, but that's not most of the work.
You don't want to do heavy work on a smartphone, but both for initial creation (which is often at an outline level), and for doing on-the-go text revisions to serious documents that are in the "working draft" stage, its not a horrible platform, and it has the advantage that your phone is more likely to be with you whenever you have an update you want to make than, say, your laptop (and much more likely than your desktop).
I'd rather work on a document on my home desktop with my 20" monitor, which is great for two-page editing. But I'd rather have the ability to edit a document when all I have with me is my phone than not at all.
i4i's patent does not claim any document format (including XML) at all. It claims a particular mechanism for working with a marked-up document (which doesn't depend on that document being XML, either; the examples given in the patent use SGML), which they claim (and the court found) Microsoft uses in their handling of the custom XML feature in Microsoft Word.
"Protected", in this context, probably means "within the scope of protection of the particular law under which he was charged", not "protected by technical security measures."
The hits to the little guys are less visible, and come from the big guys as much as the "patent trolls": it results in them either not entering particular fields at all for fear of patent litigation, or caving and leaving as soon as a big guy with a patent shows up and waves it around, since they don't have the resources to fight. The big guys are willing to whether the costs of patent trolls in order to keep the barrier to entry (and thus, competition) that software patents provide them.