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Comment Similar Concepts (Score 1) 234

It's worth noting that Microsoft Research had the exact same idea back in 2007 with Volta, which was an implemention of the .NET CLR in Javascript so you could take the same .NET compiled assembly files that you run on your PC and run them without any plugins in a Javascript-capable browser.

They eventually ditched the idea in favor of a different approach with Script#, which is a C# compiler that compiles to Javascript instead of .NET bytecode; similar in concept to Google' GWT Java source to Javascript compiler.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 355

> You mean as opposed to when he had the DoJ stand down over DOMA and got DADT repealed or used a tremendous amount of political capital to get healthcare reform?

A nearly full term presidency and you can only name three things he's done well (only one of which was a legislative 'victory', and I put 'victory' in quotes because healthcare reform should have ended up a lot less compromised than it ended up being; whereas DOMA and DADT were both Executive imperatives that he hemmed and hawed about for years -- and you can damn well expect the next Republican in the White House will just perform a complete about-face on DOMA enforcement and defense). So... talk about damning with faint praise.

Obama's problem is that he's been so anxious to compromise with the right on *everything*, that he starts the conversation with a compromise plan, which just ends up getting pulled even further to the right when the inevitable cries of "no that's not enough!" come out from the Repubs in response to it.

He needs to grow a backbone.

Comment Re:further proof D. Knuth was right (Score 1) 234

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to have dynamic content in a document description language?
Notice you never hear about exploits-of-the-week like this for LaTeX !

That's a good question. Someone should be asking the people who put Javascript in Netscape the same thing! I mean, there's absolutely no use cases for having dynamic documents!

Comment Re:Choosing the correct abstraction layer (Score 1) 542

Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it.

Windows has had a retained-mode graphics system for the past 3 years as long as you don't disable desktop composition.

Comment Re:No Really Definite Confirmation of This Yet (Score 1) 465

So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before.

Unless you're saying that you need Microsoft technology to provide useful software in the general sense, there's no reason to say that not being able to use ADO.NET makes C# any less useful of a language or Mono any less useful of a platform than the fact you can't use ADO.NET with C++ in GCC. Or with CPython. Or with Perl.

The CLI outlines a pretty thorough P/Invoke system which Mono supports, so you can use any DB library or GUI library you want with Mono. You're in no worse of a situation than you are with any other language.

Comment Re:Slippery slope to non-free (Score 2, Interesting) 747

GPL is certainly not the only free license. And what about people that go the "GPL\0for files in the \"GPL\" directory" way?

Well for the latter, obviously we'd fix the bug that allows poison null bytes to break a string, since that's a pretty serious security vulnerability in a web browser.

For the former, all of the following are valid in both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0:

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html" />

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php" />

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx#Ms-PL" />

And all of the following work in any included ECMAScript file:

// License: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

// License: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

// License: http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx#Ms-PL

You certainly have the freedom to alter your user agent to require any set of licenses you're comfortable with.

Comment Re:Slippery slope to non-free (Score 1) 747

Stallman is perfectly happy avoid using your service and resources. His issue is that he doesn't have an easy way to tell whether or not he *should* avoid you.

Sure he does. If Stallman wants to know whether a site's Javascript is under the GPL, he can just look for the text of the GPL included as a comment on the webpage or in the included JS file; since you're supposed to distribute a copy of the GPL along with any GPL'd code, right? I mean the requirement that the license is distributed along with the program is right there in section 1 of GPLv2.

It'd be fairly trivial for someone to put together a browser extension that refuses to execute any code that doesn't come with a copy of the GPL attached.

If the fact that nearly every HTTP response would end up at least 17k larger if the idea were to take off is too large to swallow; then just include a link to the GPL in one of a page's tags. It'd be just as easy for a user agent to check that as well.

Media

Theora 1.0 Released, Supported By Firefox 310

YA_Python_dev writes "The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is a free/open source video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively Ogg/Theora videos with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, and ffmpeg2theora offers an easy way to create content. Theora developers are already working on a 1.1 encoder that offers better quality/bitrate ratio, while producing streams backward-compatible with the current decoder." Adds reader logfish: "Since its bit-stream freeze in June of 2004 there have been numerous speed-ups and bug-fixes. Although Nokia claimed it to be proprietary almost a year ago, nothing has been proven. So now it's time to help it take over the internet, and finally push for video sites filled with Theora encoded vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense."
Space

Submission + - NOAA Requires License for Photos of the Earth

Teancum writes: "In an interesting show of the level of regulations private spacecraft designers have to go through, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has demanded that American participants of the Google Lunar X Prize obtain a license if their spacecraft are "capable of actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including bodies of water, from space by making use of the properties of the electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected, or diffracted by the sensed objects". What prompted NOAA to ask for this license came from a visit by the XPrize staff to the NOAA offices in Maryland. What is going to happen when "space tourists" bring their private cameras along for the ride?"

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