I dont know about that. If you are a computer technician then a certain percentage of problems you arent going to know how to fix regardless of how smart you are. Its just a question of where that threshold is. 90% of problems that people have can be fixed by reinstalling windows. (notice that this is the problem that the stores in the story got right 100% of the time) When you go to the other 10% things get kind of fuzzy for most technicians, the only thing these guys really know how to do is reinstall windows. And in their defense, note that several of the guys in the story admitted that they didnt know what the problem was and didnt charge the woman anything.
Thats actually a pretty good theory. Especially in light of the fact that this appears to be a display bug. (ie the data thats actually in the cell is correct, its just printing wrong) Of course, we will never actually know.:)
Surprised noone has pointed this out yet, but this is likely a hardcoded constant being used when excel converts from a 16 bit number to a 32 bit. It should have been "0x10000" but instead was 100000. Speculation sure, but it looks pretty likely, I mean how else would 100000 randomly appear when you did that computation?
I dont know about that, I attended a top 5 engineering school and I saw the material in the CS department getting dumbed down considerably. I have friends that have attended other good schools who say the same thing about their CS departments as well. It isnt just "rubbishy" universities that are doing this.
A CS degree really should teach basic computer architecture. If you are meeting CS grads who dont know "how the machine works" then that is more of a problem with the school that they went to.
It seems like since CS covers such a broad range of stuff universities are constantly trying to remove material in order to make the degree easier to obtain. If they arent dumbing down the architecture component of the degree they are removing theory, design, or something else that is perceived as being difficult. I dont really understand why this seems to happen so much more often in CS than in any engineering majors.
You always could. Apple has been selling PCs since before most slashdotters were born. Noone is forcing you to buy a windows pc. The issue isnt whether or not non-windows computers are avaiable. The issue is whether or not MS is unfairly using its dominant consumer OS position to gain market share in other applications.
It may be in -their- best interest. But that doesnt mean its in the best interest of Viacom (the holders of the copyright). Stewart and Colbert no doubt benefit from all the free publicity. But comedy central does not benefit from people watching clips on youtube when it is pulling traffic away from comedy central's own website.
They agreed to accept a huge sum of money to produce that content for viacom. If they wanted to give that content away for free then they should not have entered into that agreement. Viacom paid them for producing the content, they own the copyright and are entitled to protection of copyright law.
From that page they express anger that when you sign the license you agree to the following "ridiculous" item:
"You give Microsoft the right, through programs like Windows Defender, to delete programs from your system that it decides are spyware."
I mean what on earth is it supposed to do? They act as though Windows Defender is deleting competing products or something. (obviously false) Deleting spyware is a "good thing". Yet they are clearly implying that "Oh, that sneaky windows defender, Microsoft must have some list somewhere of programs it doesnt want you to have and is covertly deleting them!" Talk about spin, yeesh. The entire rest of the page is arguably fuddish as well, but I dont really have the time to argue over ever single sentence on there. And this is just one quote out of a gazillion from people who will interpret everything MS does as being evil and sneaky.
Do you think that post makes the free software foundation look good?
You mean Linus isnt a rabid MS-hating fanboy? I feel so disillusioned.
In all seriousness though it is nice to hear someone who actually matters in the open source community coming out against fud that comes from his own 'side'. (as if open source was about taking sides) The zealots who spread fud on the pro-linux side get way too much publicity and really make everyone associated with them look foolish.
"""Unfortunatly none of us here on/. have the large amounts of time, manpower and the judicial powers to obtain all the information on Microsoft's most recent actions so as to reach a perfectly fair conclusion on what they're trying to accomplish: the best we can do is use our opinions formed on our interpretation of Microsoft's past action (and also based on the opinion of others) as a rough guide towards evaluations MS' latest action, then (maybe) dig a little bit on the publicly available information on this action and then form a conclusion and present it."""
And therein lies the problem with debate on slashdot. For any topic there are enough readers that there will be a minority who is familiar with the issue at hand and has a strong understanding of it. But if you read the posts 90% of the arguments and counterarguments are primarily "company X shouldnt be allowed to do Z for unrelated reason Y". Rambling about how MS shouldnt be allowed to use swarming protocols because of some monopoly stuff in the past is just one example of that.
Why isnt anyone involved in this case pointing out that a patent has to be non-obvious? Is there something I am missing here? Legally that patent shouldnt be worth poop. At least in theory.
It really is not logical to look at things that way though. You can make a case against any large organizations ethics.
What you are doing is kind of like a democrat proposing a policy and then someone yelling "Well your party used to support slavery so I dont think we should listen to anything you say."
Or when Google tries to get its way with net nuetrality the telecoms shouting "Well you guys are censoring content in China so I dont think anything you want with net nuetrality should be granted."
Or when Apple tries to sell you a sell phone you could say "You guys had that options scandal where you defrauded shareholders, if I buy this iPhone I will be supporting corruption!"
See? Can you find any organization of any size that you cant use that sort of logic against? This is why the legal system and just about everyone with common sense looks only at the issues at hand rather than using their preexisting biases and stereotypes.
Nice FUD. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they ever have or ever will do that with windows updates. You are just making wild speculation. I suggest you read the article to see where this is actually being used. Just like in the Blizzard example they are using it for some products that noone "needs" to use the way they need to use windows. So it is essentially the same thing.
Have you ever tried turning it off? It will take an ungodly amount of time to download. For all practical purposes they are forcing you to either use peer to peer or download directly from a third party.
Well, that actually makes quite a bit of sense. Why would you need to download and install bittorrent just for a few ISOs? If I were them I wouldnt want a product which is used extensively for downloading copyrighted material running around on my network either. Way too many liability issues. If we stop and look at this honestly for a moment I think everyone realizes that 99% of bittorrent use is in violation of copyright laws. The same isnt really true of FTP. So even though from a technical standpoint their limitations may be the same, in practical use you are much more likely to see someone with a bittorrent client grabbing copyrighted material off of the internet.
If I was your boss I would be wondering why you cared so much, its not like it takes a long time to download the ISO, you probably wasted more time by trying to get permission to install another piece of software.
And what on earth does that have to do with the issue at hand? They are coming out with their thing here, they arent "Embracing" bittorrent. It always amazed me how people will use the whole embrace extend extinguish thing when they are talking about a new MS product. Embrace, extend, and extinguish is meant to refer to a company embracing a standard they want to destroy for whatever reason. If they were extending the bittorrent protocol you would have a point.
But again, what on EARTH does any of this have to do with it being acceptable for one company to use your bandwidth when you are streaming files from them but when another does it they are 'stealing' your bandwidth or whatever?
Its like some people on here think that because MS was judged to legally be a monopoly that means they cant do things that are perfectly normal for other companies to do. I swear one day I will read on here that MS shouldnt be allowed to be registered in a phone book or something because they are a monopoly and should be held to a different standard. Utilizing a swarming protocol does not equate to abuse of monopoly powers.
Kind of like how the anti-MS crowd will come out with some spin like "Or, more likely, Microsoft will do XYZ" where XYZ is something bad every time MS puts out some kind of interesting software? Of course there is zero evidence MS is going to claim that their version is any different from bittorrent from some kind of a moral point of view, everything they have said on the subject is technical in nature. But lets not allow that to get in the way of anti-MS groupthink!
"How is it a double standard if someone doesn't want to support Microsoft while wanting support a company they like, such as Blizzard?"
The definition of a double standard is to apply one standard to judge two groups differently for the same infraction because of issues external to the matter at hand. In this instance you want to condemn MS and give Blizzard a free pass because of your stance on open standards. (this seems a bit dubious, every standard Blizzard has is closed, they have sued people in the past for trying to make servers that do the same thing as battle.net and so forth, but I digress) So what you are doing is prettymuch the classic example of a double standard, judging one group differently than another for the same infraction because you dont like them for whatever reason.
I am not sure if you were being sarcastic or not by asking how applying different standards to different groups based on whether or not you liked them constitutes a double standard. If you were joking then my bad.:)
It's not a double standard for me. I think the blizzard downloader is terrible. You have a huge group of people who cant figure out how to set up their firewall to actually get the whole peer to peer thing working even when everything else is fine. That group is bound to be even larger when you go to all windows users. What percentage of the population will really be able to figure out what ports they need to be able to open on their router and how to do it? And thats assuming that the user is even allowed to modify such things.
Then Blizzard turns around and gives the patch away on FilePlanet, a site you have to pay for if you want to be able to actually download the thing directly. Paying another fee just to be able to download every time there is a patch when youve already got 15 dollars going to them every month? I always thought that was bogus.
Really, I dont care about whoever using my bandwidth for whatever (as long as its legal) but there is no way MS is going to release a downloader as bad as the blizzard downloader for their regular updates. It always surprised me that Blizzard gets away with that mess. I mean how expensive is it to actually pay for the bandwidth? I cant imagine it costs as much as all the tech support for that stupid downloader, the dollars lost in customer dissatisfaction, the R&D for the downloader, etc.
Cash on hand isnt really the best measurement. AT&T has a lot less cash because they do things like pay dividends and whatnot. If you look at the amount of revenue they bring in its still an order of magnitude greater. Since purchases will likely be paid for by going into debt, the total amount of cash they bring in is much more relevent than how much they have in the bank. Sort of like how someone who makes 500k a year but has 50k in the bank can get a much bigger loan for a house than someone who makes 50k a year and has 70k in the bank. If AT&T REALLY wanted to they could spend an amount that exceeds all the profit google would make over the next several years in their current advertising business.
Re:An argument for doing away with drug patents
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I have never heard of a research scientist making less than 60k in industry (and thats the very low end) although I am sure they exist. Most of the people I know who went into that whole research thing went to a highly regarded technical school though, so maybe my sample is flawed. But the talented ones are absolutely getting paid the big bucks. You want companies to run out and hire anyone who calls themselves a scientist?
Re:An argument for doing away with drug patents
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I have a tough time with this idea that basic research is underfunded. Why do you think this? I mean there is only so much basic research that can be done. There are only so many top notch scientists to hire. Usually there is intense competition between pharma companies to hire all the 'good' scientists. Although this is secondhand and anecdotal information from friends who work in this field.
Also, why do people not want to count applied research? I would argue that its logical for it to be larger percentage of a company that is focused on creating something real and valuable. Do people just not realize that applied research is not just a bunch of double blind tests? Its real "applied research" as the name would suggest.
Re:An argument for doing away with drug patents
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I compare the revenue to R&D because the cost of doing business may be different between industries. For example, Pfizer markets viagra to people on their television. Google doesnt spend as much on marketing, but spends heaping gobs on salesmen to call up people to convince them to buy their trendy little text based ads. I dont understand why you want to compare marketing to R&D rather than sales+marketing+other to R&D. Personally, I count myself lucky to be working at a company that spends over 30% of revenue on R&D.
The point I am trying to make here is that every company in the world spends more on non R&D costs than they do on their "bread and butter." Personally, I would think their bread and butter was applied+basic but we can go with this. Also, the industry's basic research budget is still in the billions, its not a small number. There is only so much basic research that a pharma company can be doing. Its not like they ever cut basic research, rather they add funding to it at every opportunity. The reason it isnt higher isnt that they are shortsighted and tightfisted, its because there are only so many world class scientists to hire and only so many fields out there that they can be researching. If they just threw more money into that column blindly they wouldnt necessarily get more results.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont know about that. If you are a computer technician then a certain percentage of problems you arent going to know how to fix regardless of how smart you are. Its just a question of where that threshold is. 90% of problems that people have can be fixed by reinstalling windows. (notice that this is the problem that the stores in the story got right 100% of the time) When you go to the other 10% things get kind of fuzzy for most technicians, the only thing these guys really know how to do is reinstall windows. And in their defense, note that several of the guys in the story admitted that they didnt know what the problem was and didnt charge the woman anything.
Thats actually a pretty good theory. Especially in light of the fact that this appears to be a display bug. (ie the data thats actually in the cell is correct, its just printing wrong) Of course, we will never actually know. :)
Surprised noone has pointed this out yet, but this is likely a hardcoded constant being used when excel converts from a 16 bit number to a 32 bit. It should have been "0x10000" but instead was 100000. Speculation sure, but it looks pretty likely, I mean how else would 100000 randomly appear when you did that computation?
Someone was slacking in the testing department.
I dont know about that, I attended a top 5 engineering school and I saw the material in the CS department getting dumbed down considerably. I have friends that have attended other good schools who say the same thing about their CS departments as well. It isnt just "rubbishy" universities that are doing this.
A CS degree really should teach basic computer architecture. If you are meeting CS grads who dont know "how the machine works" then that is more of a problem with the school that they went to.
It seems like since CS covers such a broad range of stuff universities are constantly trying to remove material in order to make the degree easier to obtain. If they arent dumbing down the architecture component of the degree they are removing theory, design, or something else that is perceived as being difficult. I dont really understand why this seems to happen so much more often in CS than in any engineering majors.
The submitter is obviously just trying to drum up traffic to his page with a troll post. The submitter linked to his own news site. Great for SEO.
You always could. Apple has been selling PCs since before most slashdotters were born. Noone is forcing you to buy a windows pc. The issue isnt whether or not non-windows computers are avaiable. The issue is whether or not MS is unfairly using its dominant consumer OS position to gain market share in other applications.
It may be in -their- best interest. But that doesnt mean its in the best interest of Viacom (the holders of the copyright). Stewart and Colbert no doubt benefit from all the free publicity. But comedy central does not benefit from people watching clips on youtube when it is pulling traffic away from comedy central's own website.
They agreed to accept a huge sum of money to produce that content for viacom. If they wanted to give that content away for free then they should not have entered into that agreement. Viacom paid them for producing the content, they own the copyright and are entitled to protection of copyright law.
Here is a totally random example: http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsof t-windows-vista
From that page they express anger that when you sign the license you agree to the following "ridiculous" item:
"You give Microsoft the right, through programs like Windows Defender, to delete programs from your system that it decides are spyware."
I mean what on earth is it supposed to do? They act as though Windows Defender is deleting competing products or something. (obviously false) Deleting spyware is a "good thing". Yet they are clearly implying that "Oh, that sneaky windows defender, Microsoft must have some list somewhere of programs it doesnt want you to have and is covertly deleting them!" Talk about spin, yeesh. The entire rest of the page is arguably fuddish as well, but I dont really have the time to argue over ever single sentence on there. And this is just one quote out of a gazillion from people who will interpret everything MS does as being evil and sneaky.
Do you think that post makes the free software foundation look good?
You mean Linus isnt a rabid MS-hating fanboy? I feel so disillusioned.
In all seriousness though it is nice to hear someone who actually matters in the open source community coming out against fud that comes from his own 'side'. (as if open source was about taking sides) The zealots who spread fud on the pro-linux side get way too much publicity and really make everyone associated with them look foolish.
"""Unfortunatly none of us here on /. have the large amounts of time, manpower and the judicial powers to obtain all the information on Microsoft's most recent actions so as to reach a perfectly fair conclusion on what they're trying to accomplish: the best we can do is use our opinions formed on our interpretation of Microsoft's past action (and also based on the opinion of others) as a rough guide towards evaluations MS' latest action, then (maybe) dig a little bit on the publicly available information on this action and then form a conclusion and present it."""
And therein lies the problem with debate on slashdot. For any topic there are enough readers that there will be a minority who is familiar with the issue at hand and has a strong understanding of it. But if you read the posts 90% of the arguments and counterarguments are primarily "company X shouldnt be allowed to do Z for unrelated reason Y". Rambling about how MS shouldnt be allowed to use swarming protocols because of some monopoly stuff in the past is just one example of that.
Why isnt anyone involved in this case pointing out that a patent has to be non-obvious? Is there something I am missing here? Legally that patent shouldnt be worth poop. At least in theory.
It really is not logical to look at things that way though. You can make a case against any large organizations ethics.
What you are doing is kind of like a democrat proposing a policy and then someone yelling "Well your party used to support slavery so I dont think we should listen to anything you say."
Or when Google tries to get its way with net nuetrality the telecoms shouting "Well you guys are censoring content in China so I dont think anything you want with net nuetrality should be granted."
Or when Apple tries to sell you a sell phone you could say "You guys had that options scandal where you defrauded shareholders, if I buy this iPhone I will be supporting corruption!"
See? Can you find any organization of any size that you cant use that sort of logic against? This is why the legal system and just about everyone with common sense looks only at the issues at hand rather than using their preexisting biases and stereotypes.
Nice FUD. There is absolutely no reason to believe that they ever have or ever will do that with windows updates. You are just making wild speculation. I suggest you read the article to see where this is actually being used. Just like in the Blizzard example they are using it for some products that noone "needs" to use the way they need to use windows. So it is essentially the same thing.
Have you ever tried turning it off? It will take an ungodly amount of time to download. For all practical purposes they are forcing you to either use peer to peer or download directly from a third party.
Well, that actually makes quite a bit of sense. Why would you need to download and install bittorrent just for a few ISOs? If I were them I wouldnt want a product which is used extensively for downloading copyrighted material running around on my network either. Way too many liability issues. If we stop and look at this honestly for a moment I think everyone realizes that 99% of bittorrent use is in violation of copyright laws. The same isnt really true of FTP. So even though from a technical standpoint their limitations may be the same, in practical use you are much more likely to see someone with a bittorrent client grabbing copyrighted material off of the internet.
If I was your boss I would be wondering why you cared so much, its not like it takes a long time to download the ISO, you probably wasted more time by trying to get permission to install another piece of software.
And what on earth does that have to do with the issue at hand? They are coming out with their thing here, they arent "Embracing" bittorrent. It always amazed me how people will use the whole embrace extend extinguish thing when they are talking about a new MS product. Embrace, extend, and extinguish is meant to refer to a company embracing a standard they want to destroy for whatever reason. If they were extending the bittorrent protocol you would have a point.
But again, what on EARTH does any of this have to do with it being acceptable for one company to use your bandwidth when you are streaming files from them but when another does it they are 'stealing' your bandwidth or whatever?
Its like some people on here think that because MS was judged to legally be a monopoly that means they cant do things that are perfectly normal for other companies to do. I swear one day I will read on here that MS shouldnt be allowed to be registered in a phone book or something because they are a monopoly and should be held to a different standard. Utilizing a swarming protocol does not equate to abuse of monopoly powers.
Kind of like how the anti-MS crowd will come out with some spin like "Or, more likely, Microsoft will do XYZ" where XYZ is something bad every time MS puts out some kind of interesting software? Of course there is zero evidence MS is going to claim that their version is any different from bittorrent from some kind of a moral point of view, everything they have said on the subject is technical in nature. But lets not allow that to get in the way of anti-MS groupthink!
"How is it a double standard if someone doesn't want to support Microsoft while wanting support a company they like, such as Blizzard?"
:)
The definition of a double standard is to apply one standard to judge two groups differently for the same infraction because of issues external to the matter at hand. In this instance you want to condemn MS and give Blizzard a free pass because of your stance on open standards. (this seems a bit dubious, every standard Blizzard has is closed, they have sued people in the past for trying to make servers that do the same thing as battle.net and so forth, but I digress) So what you are doing is prettymuch the classic example of a double standard, judging one group differently than another for the same infraction because you dont like them for whatever reason.
I am not sure if you were being sarcastic or not by asking how applying different standards to different groups based on whether or not you liked them constitutes a double standard. If you were joking then my bad.
It's not a double standard for me. I think the blizzard downloader is terrible. You have a huge group of people who cant figure out how to set up their firewall to actually get the whole peer to peer thing working even when everything else is fine. That group is bound to be even larger when you go to all windows users. What percentage of the population will really be able to figure out what ports they need to be able to open on their router and how to do it? And thats assuming that the user is even allowed to modify such things.
Then Blizzard turns around and gives the patch away on FilePlanet, a site you have to pay for if you want to be able to actually download the thing directly. Paying another fee just to be able to download every time there is a patch when youve already got 15 dollars going to them every month? I always thought that was bogus.
Really, I dont care about whoever using my bandwidth for whatever (as long as its legal) but there is no way MS is going to release a downloader as bad as the blizzard downloader for their regular updates. It always surprised me that Blizzard gets away with that mess. I mean how expensive is it to actually pay for the bandwidth? I cant imagine it costs as much as all the tech support for that stupid downloader, the dollars lost in customer dissatisfaction, the R&D for the downloader, etc.
Cash on hand isnt really the best measurement. AT&T has a lot less cash because they do things like pay dividends and whatnot. If you look at the amount of revenue they bring in its still an order of magnitude greater. Since purchases will likely be paid for by going into debt, the total amount of cash they bring in is much more relevent than how much they have in the bank. Sort of like how someone who makes 500k a year but has 50k in the bank can get a much bigger loan for a house than someone who makes 50k a year and has 70k in the bank. If AT&T REALLY wanted to they could spend an amount that exceeds all the profit google would make over the next several years in their current advertising business.
I have never heard of a research scientist making less than 60k in industry (and thats the very low end) although I am sure they exist. Most of the people I know who went into that whole research thing went to a highly regarded technical school though, so maybe my sample is flawed. But the talented ones are absolutely getting paid the big bucks. You want companies to run out and hire anyone who calls themselves a scientist?
I have a tough time with this idea that basic research is underfunded. Why do you think this? I mean there is only so much basic research that can be done. There are only so many top notch scientists to hire. Usually there is intense competition between pharma companies to hire all the 'good' scientists. Although this is secondhand and anecdotal information from friends who work in this field.
Also, why do people not want to count applied research? I would argue that its logical for it to be larger percentage of a company that is focused on creating something real and valuable. Do people just not realize that applied research is not just a bunch of double blind tests? Its real "applied research" as the name would suggest.
Also, I feel silly replying twice, but I want to point out that Applied Research != Safety Testing. Not at all. Here is a quick reference for you if you want: http://www.emory.edu/ACAD_EXCHANGE/1999/decjan00/a pplres.html
I compare the revenue to R&D because the cost of doing business may be different between industries. For example, Pfizer markets viagra to people on their television. Google doesnt spend as much on marketing, but spends heaping gobs on salesmen to call up people to convince them to buy their trendy little text based ads. I dont understand why you want to compare marketing to R&D rather than sales+marketing+other to R&D. Personally, I count myself lucky to be working at a company that spends over 30% of revenue on R&D.
The point I am trying to make here is that every company in the world spends more on non R&D costs than they do on their "bread and butter." Personally, I would think their bread and butter was applied+basic but we can go with this. Also, the industry's basic research budget is still in the billions, its not a small number. There is only so much basic research that a pharma company can be doing. Its not like they ever cut basic research, rather they add funding to it at every opportunity. The reason it isnt higher isnt that they are shortsighted and tightfisted, its because there are only so many world class scientists to hire and only so many fields out there that they can be researching. If they just threw more money into that column blindly they wouldnt necessarily get more results.