So it tries to be relevant by breaking de facto code standards and trying to shove needless fixes on other people's code?
In this case, all it will accomplish is this:
#ifndef PATH_MAX
#define PATH_MAX some_arbitrary_value
#endif
How does that improve "the overall software quality a lot"?
No, the system was originally designed to encourage innovation. Today, the competitive pressure in the IT sector is what is driving innovation, and patents are used to lock down parts of the industry to reduce the competitive pressure, which will slow down innovation. The system is therefore working exactly opposite of how it was intended.
Giving a company in the IT sector a 20 year state enforced monopoly on any technology is totally absurd, and not in the public interest.
According to the press release itself: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." However, this is Microsoft, and we know how they operate. This is unlikely to be anything but a ploy to avoid objections from the authorities to the purchase. Once it is too late to stop it, I predict not a single update will go into the Linux and Android versions, and the Mac and iPhone versions will lag behind in features. So the question is what alternatives there are now.
Another question is what Google, Facebook and Cisco will do now. If I were on the board of any of them, I'd certainly be pushing for pooling resources to create a joint venture to compete with Skype on all fronts. Could set up quite the consortium for the money they intended to spend buying Skype themselves.
Interesting times.
Dying from smoking tends to be very expensive. It is not like dying from a car accident or bungee jumping, where you either die or cost a fortunate in medical expenses due to long rehabilitation, but you die and it costs a fortunate to keep you hospitalised while you cough your lungs out or wither away to chemo/radiation therapy. I was in a lung ward for two weeks and saw enough of that stuff to be permanently immunized to the idea of taking up smoking for whatever reason.
Selling smoke to people under 18 + N years should be illegal, where N is increased every year. There is no excuse to keep that substance legal, except that it is sometimes too hard to stop for some people already hooked on it.
Ever since the Qt acquisition by Nokia, Qt on the desktop has been neglected in favour of the latest shiny mobile thing. Now that commercial customers finally get someone to talk to who do not have years to catch up on their competition (and are understandably a bit busy), we might expect desktop features to move forward as well.
Granted, some of the things that is coming out of the mobile efforts also do greatly benefit the desktop side, but still, the focus has clearly been elsewhere.
Also, what is up with that grossly misleading headline, Taco? I haven't seen any others yet go that much overboard on the hyperbole on this. And this is part of a trend here that has been getting increasingly bad lately, with misleading headlines and submissions become more and more the norm. I've been with Slashdot since the beginning, but I think it is soon time to part ways...
While Kinect looks really cool, I am impatiently awaiting the Asus Xtion, which is the same hardware as the Kinect except it is not an XBox accessory, and you do not have to give any money to Microsoft for it. The developer version , the Xtion Pro, should be out any time now according to their official schedule. There is also now an OpenNI API for communicating with Kinect family devices, which is available for Linux as well. Hobby robotics vision never seemed as promising as now.
I used to have some respect for Florian Mueller, but this article is a piece of trash. You absolutely cannot measure the impact or worth of a patent portfolio in a patent war in terms of a sheer number of patents. Especially when all parties involved have enough money to burn in the judicial system to contest any weak patents at will. In theory you only need one strong patent that can shut down your competitor as a deterrence. On the other hand, you can have a thousand patents yet lose a patent stand off if they can all be contested in court or easily worked around. To get an idea of who has actual patent strength, you need to read the patents. But I guess that takes actual work.
Unfortunately, Linux in this respect is not a "Modern OS". The ability to sandbox user applications is extremely poorly developed. I have been looking at portable sandboxing lately, and it is a horrible nightmare. The Chrome developers created some fancy hacks for each OS, and they have pulled it off quite nicely, but they remain hacks, not elegant designs. The platform with the best current sandboxing API is, ironically, Windows Vista/7, with their configurable integrity levels. An API dubbed "Seatbelt" is being developed on MacOSX, but it is still in its barely-can-walk infancy, and the Chrome devs used undocumented parts of the API to make it all work. On LINUX there is a set of competing security modules for the kernel, with SELinux being the most used. Unfortunately, not only do some distros not use it, but a lot of users who have it disable it immediately (or set it to permissive mode, which from a sandboxing point of view is the same thing). And SELinux is a horrible beast to program for. It is insanely complex, and has non-existent documentation on how to use it to confine user programs.
What is needed is some generally agreed upon extension to POSIX on how to easily allow a user process to drop privileges it does not need. One experimental OS I looked at once (VSTa) had the ability for all users to create subgroups to their GID by adding more numbers. If your UID.GID was 500.500, you could create a new directory owned by 500.500.2, and allow the process owned by 500.500.2 only to access to this directory (some documentation on this is still up at http://www.vsta.org:8080/VSTa_2fDocumentation_2fCapabilities). I wish some similar, dead simple scheme could be created for Linux that ordinary users could understand themselves. Only a dedicated security elite could possibly wrap their heads around the SELinux rules -- everyone else just turn it off as soon as it gets in the way.
Malaria is only transferred by some species of mosquito. One thing governments in affected regions have been doing is to release mosquitoes from species that can out-compete the malaria-carrying species. These are typically larger and bite harder, but it is still better than being infected by malaria. I visited one such region recently, and while the larger mosquitoes are more frightening, they are still nothing compared to the horror that is tsetse flies.
That made my day. I work in a highly regulated industry, and buying anything with the right standards conformance paperwork costs many times the standard cost, even when we get exactly the same item that is sold to ordinary consumers for the fraction of the price. You want a small batch with special paperwork from a large supplier? Be prepared to pay a ridiculous amount of money. A normal certificate of conformity usually lists only the absolutely minimal amount of safety claims, both to reduce liability and to force those who need more to pay up for it. Since I suspect science kit makers are not exactly thriving these days, this is the kind of thing that would put them out of business. It would probably be cheaper for them to set up a testing and validation framework for off-the-shelf products, but depending on the standards they have to conform to, they may not be allowed to go that route.
Not to mention that the non-gratis android market still has not been rolled out to a lot of countries yet. And I am talking about first-world countries here, like the Scandinavian countries.
When only patent trolls use patents, the patent law will be changed. The problem now is that the big corporations are lobbing for the insane patent system because they think it is a net benefit to them. If this new license pool can make it not in their interest to do so, we all win.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
