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Slashback: Books, Spooks, Violence, Recovery
Library of Congress will have online items o'plenty. franimal wrote in reaction to the report that the Library of Congress does not plan to digitize its collection. "Even though reading online may be 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' the Library of Congress plans to have 5 million 'items' posted by the end of the year."
Twice as close to the middle of nowhere. HerringFlavoredFowl pointed out that "Ikonos 1 has just raised the bar on Area 51 images. As we all remember, terraserver just released a set of two meter images taken in 1998. Space Imaging snapped this set on April 4th, 2000. The Federation of American Scientists [has posted] a wonderful side by side interpretation of these images. Thank you John Pike for clueing me in on the FAS update. Space.com also has some color images and an the steps Mr. Pike went through to obtain these images. "
One lump or two? Or three? Scott Marks and hordes of fellow travelers let us know that "The US DOJ U.S. v. Microsoft web site has all the gory legal details on the Proposed Final Judgment as well as a number of other interesting tidbits. Not the least is the ability to comment on the trial directly: 'If you would like to send the Antitrust Division your comments on this case, please direct your correspondence to Microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov .'"
What kind of power is that? After the latest brouhaha both on Slashdot and in the rest of the world about the link between violence and video games, Jer Davis wrote: "The Tech Report has an article up written by Andy Brown dissecting some of the psychological studies that have been released recently regarding correlations between real-life violence and violent video games. ... This is a very important issue, and Andy does an excellent job at dissecting the very suspect results these studies have claimed."
And speaking of violence ... Deadli contributed the news that the secretary of education opposes mechanical profiling programs according to this Washington Post article. Perhaps he's been reading the reaction to Jon Katz' article on WAVE.
Once in a while, some good news slips through. In this case, it's from TheGreek, who wrote, "Jason Haas is out of the hospital and well on his way to recovering." Congratulations, Jason.
I think you are mixing up a couple things.
(1) Without an application line-up, there will be no reason for Windows Inc to have an undocumented or obscured API. They should be more than happy to provide complete documentation. With a breakup, that problem will solve itself.
(2) The Apps company will still have no incentive to provide open file formats. The MSOffice document problem is not going to go away, as much as you might like it to. (The Govt. case did not directly address Office, and no evidence was presented about the document lock-in as far as I know.) Hell, Unix office suite vendors haven't even standardized on open formats with their fractional marketshare - why should MSApps do it with a 90% monopoly.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though -- The Office formats are documented on MSDN, as some might know. The big problem is that they rely on some OLE Stream on-disk format that isn't documented, and might require a port of COM to achieve. The Windows company would own COM, and might document this disk format enough that it could be reverse engineered.
Of course, there is also a big problem that I alluded to. XML file formats are the future, and pretty soon corporations and the government are going to require them from vendors. However, right now the DOJ plan has all of the XML stuff being owned by the Apps company, which means that they will have the incentive to twist the standards to support their Office monopoly. Internet Explorer, HTML, DOM, XML, and so on are really an API, and should be controlled by the Windows company, which will have an interest to keep these specs open and in conformance. Politically, that ain't going to happen, though.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well it looks like even if the DOJ gets its way George W. Bush if elected will make do his best to make sure MSFT is not harmed. You can find information about this on Reuters.
That's the idea - to make this a weekly thing, with its own icon and section. We get a *lot* of follow-ups to stories we've already run that are too important to be buried in the comments on the original story or get attached (as updates) to stories that have scrolled off the main page (which means that hardly anyone would see them), but that don't quite deserve a main page story of their own.
Hence Slashback (trial name only; suggestions happily accepted).
Tim is in charge of this. If you have ideas on how to make it better, send e-mail directly to timothy@slashdot.org.
- Robin
I often wish I had a degree in psychology, then I could go around saying, "I'm a psychologist, obey me" like these types do.
I wonder how long it will be before I see them on Sally Jesse Raphael (is that still on TV, I remember they used to have the anti-D&D fanatics on there during the 80's), touting there new book, Columbine: Why video games were the cause..
I'm always happy when someone who knows about video or computer games can attack the integrity of the anti-gamer people by pointing out that the anti-gamer people never bother to do any investigation into the subject they are studying, video and computer games, before making their sweeping condemnations.
I'm just surprised these two psychologists didn't try to set up a competitive Myst deathmatch...All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Hopefully we can see more followups on stories that slashdot posts in the future. This is an excelllent example of resposible journalism.
This is something that I would /love/ to see more of. It shows some continuity and flow to the stories and proves that you are following up. With the follow up with Be over their BeOS being dropped and I see some very positive signs that Slashdot perhaps has no place else to go but up.
Thank you.
man...we had violence in video games when i was growing up. I remember when i was playing the oregon trail on the apple II e at school one day, and the fucking ox got stuck in the mud, and then i went into the bushes to go exploring and fucking Sarah got scarlet fever and it took us FOREVER to get across idaho and i just wanted to kick that fucking box and i hit the kid that was playing with me cause he wanted to ford the river and i said let's float the wagons and then we forded it but all our shit tipped over and i just wanted to kill someone!!!!!!!!!!!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
btw, personally, I would like to see the current directors (and other high-level types) fired, and outsiders brought in... After all, it's mostly those guys who broke the law.
Actuallying assuming 'mechanical profiling' means 'mechanical' then that wouldn't have much to do with WAVE at all. He says he doesn't think it's right to just put behaviors in a formula to pick out the 'dangerous' people.
He's more talking about profiling software, not profiling in general.
Though I bet there could be an automated search-engine function which scanned for other posts mentioning a certain story, updating /all/ stories which deserve it would really be an order of magnitude more difficult -- because really, *every* story usually deserves more than a quick paragraph, but that's (hopefully) what the comments are usually for :) This was an attempt to collate a few of the ones which drew some really interesting / informative new info that readers might not get by skimming the page the first time ...
In the case of information that is misleading or could be damaging, you'll certainly continue to see corrections right in the story if it's still on the page (try /that/ with your copy of the morning paper!) but for more follow-up stories (like these), I think the time spent is hard to justify ... also, I don't want to try to update stories that are already far off the front page, like the one to which the above mention of Jason Haas was a happy update.
I know it's not perfect, but until I can work out the deal with the millions of monkeys on the roof ... ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I was a little puzzled when I first heard of the two company breakup plan. Like a lot of other people, I was sure that there was going to be at least three companies, although some really blood thirsty people wanted 10 or 32 companies all destined to go out of business.
But upon some further reflection, the basic plan makes sense -- The only two significant profit centers they have are Windows and Office, and there's quite a bit of cross-subsidies going on between product lines. In the early days, Office subsided Windows (remember when Windows came free with Excel?), but now days the both stand on their own with billions of dollars of revenue, supporting the rest of the product lineup. There is not a third company (like "Internet") that could reasonably be as successful by itself.
Without OEM 'bundling' contracts, the Apps side would be unlikely to make all of those cheesy multimedia and game titles, for example. Without a 'content' business, the OS side wouldn't be making investments in cable tv systems, etc etc. The division can get murky -- to what extent does SQL Server and Exchange subside Windows 2000 or visa versa? Without the OS business, will Apps even bother taking on Oracle and IBM? Without the Apps business, will OS worry about scalability on server hardware? The price lists are going to be up in the air if a breakup happens, although both companies will still make plenty of money in the short term.
However, in the long run the Windows company faces several very unfair provisions. The big one is that Dev Tools is going to the Applications side, not the Windows side. Every other OS provider (including 'GNU') seems to feel that development tools are essential to OS development, but now the Windows corporation is going to have to figure out how to expand the API without good dev tools support. Like or not, things like MFC and COM would not have happened if VisualStudio wasn't part of the OS business. My guess is that Windows Inc. goes and buys Borland or someone or starts building their own (gcc-based?) development environment first thing if this goes through.
And while I want to see MS broken up as much as any persecuted nerd, I have to agree that in the long run Netscape and Microsoft were right. Web APIs are the platform of the future, and Win32 will eventually be a stagnant, commodity product much like POSIX. The Windows company should really be able to keep IIS and IE -- the future of the platform (DCOM, SOAP, XML) depends on it; although with the pretexts of the case that solution is impossible. Without a web application framework, Windows Inc. will be gone soon enough, maybe replaced by a Linux solution where Apache and Mozilla are seen as intregal parts of the total solution.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Many thanks. Please stick to this format--maybe make a new story category for it, with a nifty icon.
Actually, here's an idea: Make a new category and start a contest for the best icon. I promise to make lots of contributions. :)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
If any of you are wondering who Jason Haas is, go to the original slashdot story here...also, if youre interested in other stuff about him, go here. It has a bunch of links that tell you about what happened to him
Go back and read again. Specifically:
"In the case of such Intellectual Property that is related to the Internet browser, the license shall not grant the Operating System Business any right to develop, license, or distribute modified or derivative versions of the Internet browser."
As for Bill talking to Bill:
"After Implementation of the Plan, and throughout the term of this Final Judgment, neither the Operating Systems Business nor the Applications Business, nor any member of their respective Boards of Directors, shall acquire any securities or assets of the other Business;"
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
First off, I agree that this story is a good idea, and I hope we see more like it in the future.
Now. Area 51, home of UFOs, Little Green (or is it Grey?) Men, Top Sekrit Projects, and possibly Will Smith. Has it occurred to anyone that the government may not have anything interesting down there?
Think about it. The Groom Lake facility is probably one of the most famous testing grounds. Everything going on is surrounded by serious security. Naturally, this means that we all think something big is going on and we spend a lot of time and money trying to get a peek. ("We" probably includes various national governments.) What if the whole thing is just bait? What if Area 51 is a big hoax with DoD-class special effects to keep us mesmerized while the real secret research is going on somewhere totally different?
Hell, if I wanted to keep nosy UFO nuts away from my captured alien specimens and anti-gravity drives, it's what I might do.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is pretty specific. AOL and and Cisco are monopolies, but AFAIK/IANAL have not committed the various acts necessary to be held accountable under Sherman.
Microsoft, on the other hand, violated a consent decree with the DOJ, has something like a 5% hidden API that gives it's own "clone" applications an advantage over anything their competitor's innovate, and then there's the gory history of settling out of court for:
stealing stacker code;
brain draining borland;
novell networking code distributed with win3.x;
code stolen from ibm;
modifying sun's java api;
apple look and feel.
since they settled these cases, none can be used against them in court. but clearly, they have broken a variety of laws to obtain a monopoly, and have continued to do so to maintain it. that behavior is *deep in sherman territory*.
if anyone is to blame for the drop in Microsoft's share price, there is one man : Bill Gates. he rubber stamped all the illegal behavior, and refused to back off even when faced with devastating lawsuits.
another group to blame are the Microsoft employees and shareholders who refused to stand up and say "Why the hell is this company doing these things?" For that, all of them deserve to lose their ass(ets).
I worked for a $40B company, and they were tightly regulated due to the nature of their business. When executives crossed the line, they were forced to retire or fired. Even without tangible proof. Why? because the company's image was at stake, and that company had an obligation to it's shareholders to follow the law.
Your problem is Bill Gates. He screwed Microsoft investors, other companies, the DOJ, the consumer and cost us all a lot of money in a huge lawsuit.
The myth about consumer benefit is ludicrous. Several years ago I could buy a copy of DR-DOS and Borland C++ for about $150 or so. Now, it's about $360 for Win2K and VC++ Pro.
Go write Gates an email, if you lost money of Microsoft. He's the guy who caused all this.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
"In the case of such Intellectual Property that is related to the Internet browser, the license shall not grant the Operating System Business any right to develop, license, or distribute modified or derivative versions of the Internet browser."
Bureaucracies tend / need to see all situations as fitting into their way of looking at the world. Discussions here on slashdot about "what *exactly* is an operating system" have drawn out the fact that there is no commonly accepted definition -- but there is a large gang of ones that are claimed to be universally accepted;)
Often it's tossed out as assertion that an operating system and a Web browser are inherently separate / separable things, which is why MS including IE integrated with their OS was seen as such a conniving move.
But ride with me down this slippery slope for a second ...
Can a /file/ browser be part of an OS? That is not to say whether it's vital to the IO functions, but say in the way that most Linux distros come with quite a few file browsers ... I think most people would say that a file browser is a legitimate / important part of a useable OS.
Given that, I don't see why a Web browswer oughtn't be a legitimate OS componenent -- just look at KDE, where nearly any window can be a Web browser, it seems:)
I'm not saying that a modern OS should of necessity have a Web browser, only that the DOJ isn't allowing enough room for ambiguity by defining OS and Web browser as irreconcilably different, when I don't think they have to be -- in fact, look at all the ways that people are planning to use / already using Mozilla. Definitions shift, tools get used differently, the impossible becomes the ordinary ... I think allowing oversight and market division by the government just sets some dangerous precedent.
I'm saying all this with a sense of wonderment rather than zealotry; I'd just rather seem companies succeed or fail on their merits and faults ... MS certainly would have plenty to worry about without masked men at the gate with guns -- no, wrong story;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5