What they should do is implement ACAP as a front-end to their existing robots.txt filtering capability
Of course, the correspondence would not be exact. To stay within the rules they would have to translate each ACAP restriction into one for robots.txt that was at least as restrictive (technically very easy since robots.txt allows little discrimination).
Any publisher who tried to use the new features would then risk not being listed at all.
(This only works while ACAP-enabled sites are a small minority, otherwise Google would be hurting themselves, but I think it would have a very good chance of preventing the system from achieving critical mass.)
I was rather hoping that he already had plans to do backups by some other means. If not then I agree completely that backups are more important than RAID.
The article smacks of false dichotomy. There are a number of solutions, not just Windows 7 or a hardware RAID controller.
Agreed.
As I see it, if you want guaranteed repairability then you basically have two options: enterprise-class hardware with a support contract (and price tag to match), or an Open Source software solution.
Put another way, either you pay someone to take responsibility for fixing it, or you take responsibility yourself. A Microsoft solution doesn't give you enough control to take full responsibility, because you can't be certain that it will be legally or technically possible to recreate your current setup in five years time.
If she had $1.92M to start with then that would be a good point, but by all accounts the original $222k award was already well beyond here means to pay.
I don't think her defence strategy has been a good one, but it does make more sense when you consider that even a (relatively) small award or settlement would be ruinous.
So it's bad when it's expensive, but also bad when it's cheap? Believe me, I'm as anti-Microsoft as 60% of the posters in here, but complaining that my new car I bought in 2001 for $9,000 is now selling for $5,000 isn't all that logical.
It's bad when a monopoly in one market segment is used to temporarily cross-subsidise another in order to kill off the competition.
In traditional markets you can deal with this by anti-dumping regulation. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well when the marginal cost producing of the product is near zero.
Left unchecked the benefits of monopoly could accrue to MS indefinitely. There is no fine that they would be able to pay now that would necessarily correct this. What do you want to do? Fine them indefinitely? What is so wrong with the concept of forcing a malfeasant to put right some of the harm that they have done?
We can argue about whether this particular remedy will work, or will harm the general public, or whether market forces will correct the problem quickly enough without help. I have my doubts on all three counts, but the objective at least is a sound one.
If this goes through it will be a specific punishment for a specific misdemeanor (MS using their desktop monopoly to corner the browser market). It would not mean that other types of application need to be treated in the same way. It would not affect other operating systems at all.
Of course, if MS were to extend their unlawful behaviour into other markets then the punishment might need to be extended too — but presumably one of the major objectives here is to deter them from doing that. If Windows installation were to end up as you suggest then Microsoft would have only themselves to blame.
They're measuring the number of client machines running Linux, not the number of servers.
You might get some effect as they change which sites they harvest statistics from, but for a step that large my money is on a change to their definition of what counts as 'Linux'.
BTW, when I said 'suspicious' I did not mean 'malicious' - only that there was more going on than met the eye.
I agree completely that you cannot place much trust in the percentage, for all of the reasons that get mentioned whenever we talk about OS or browser market share.
The trend, however, is much more interesting because it cancels out much of the systematic bias that will be present in any given series of results.
In this particular case Linux shows a fairly steady increase from 0.43% to 1.02% over the last two years, a compound annual growth rate of about 50% (albeit from a low starting point). I think that's good news.
(In fact the actual figure may be even better than that, because there was a suspicious 25% decline in October 2008. It could be that they changed methodology in some way, perhaps by reclassifying one of the embedded Linux-based platforms, because that month's change stands out as being very unusual.)
I tried this about a year ago with a mid-range disc-on-module device. For most purposes it worked well, and I use DOM in several of my servers now, but not in what was then my development machine. Subversion was one of the reasons - it was slower by more than a factor of two - but I could probably have lived with that. Much more serious was the effect on build times, which was not as large but happens much more often.
Extrapolating from my results I suspect that the Intel X25-M or similar would probably be OK, in the sense of not being worse than a conventional hard drive, but I've not tested it yet.
The strongest technical argument I can think of is that this breaks encapsulation: you are exposing your internal data structures to your customer, which could make it much more difficult to change them in the future should this be necessary.
It doesn't. According to the article the comments were made in the House of Commons (during PMQs), and as such they would be covered by parliamentary privilege - even if they could be shown to be both untrue and malicious.
Slashdot Mirror
What they should do is implement ACAP as a front-end to their existing robots.txt filtering capability
Of course, the correspondence would not be exact. To stay within the rules they would have to translate each ACAP restriction into one for robots.txt that was at least as restrictive (technically very easy since robots.txt allows little discrimination).
Any publisher who tried to use the new features would then risk not being listed at all.
(This only works while ACAP-enabled sites are a small minority, otherwise Google would be hurting themselves, but I think it would have a very good chance of preventing the system from achieving critical mass.)
I was rather hoping that he already had plans to do backups by some other means. If not then I agree completely that backups are more important than RAID.
The article smacks of false dichotomy. There are a number of solutions, not just Windows 7 or a hardware RAID controller.
Agreed.
As I see it, if you want guaranteed repairability then you basically have two options: enterprise-class hardware with a support contract (and price tag to match), or an Open Source software solution.
Put another way, either you pay someone to take responsibility for fixing it, or you take responsibility yourself. A Microsoft solution doesn't give you enough control to take full responsibility, because you can't be certain that it will be legally or technically possible to recreate your current setup in five years time.
Actually, the comment is (perhaps unintentionally) insightful. According to the current (25th June 2009) draft of the HTML 5 spec:
Because of the horse analogy? (That and an April 1st Slashdot story from 2006.)
If she had $1.92M to start with then that would be a good point, but by all accounts the original $222k award was already well beyond here means to pay.
I don't think her defence strategy has been a good one, but it does make more sense when you consider that even a (relatively) small award or settlement would be ruinous.
I look at it this way. Verbosity that I the programmer /choose/ to add in the interests of readability is generally good.
Verbosity required by the language, the standard libraries, or some sadist who happened to write the coding standard, is almost invariably bad.
So it's bad when it's expensive, but also bad when it's cheap? Believe me, I'm as anti-Microsoft as 60% of the posters in here, but complaining that my new car I bought in 2001 for $9,000 is now selling for $5,000 isn't all that logical.
It's bad when a monopoly in one market segment is used to temporarily cross-subsidise another in order to kill off the competition.
In traditional markets you can deal with this by anti-dumping regulation. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well when the marginal cost producing of the product is near zero.
Left unchecked the benefits of monopoly could accrue to MS indefinitely. There is no fine that they would be able to pay now that would necessarily correct this. What do you want to do? Fine them indefinitely? What is so wrong with the concept of forcing a malfeasant to put right some of the harm that they have done?
We can argue about whether this particular remedy will work, or will harm the general public, or whether market forces will correct the problem quickly enough without help. I have my doubts on all three counts, but the objective at least is a sound one.
If this goes through it will be a specific punishment for a specific misdemeanor (MS using their desktop monopoly to corner the browser market). It would not mean that other types of application need to be treated in the same way. It would not affect other operating systems at all.
Of course, if MS were to extend their unlawful behaviour into other markets then the punishment might need to be extended too — but presumably one of the major objectives here is to deter them from doing that. If Windows installation were to end up as you suggest then Microsoft would have only themselves to blame.
They're measuring the number of client machines running Linux, not the number of servers.
You might get some effect as they change which sites they harvest statistics from, but for a step that large my money is on a change to their definition of what counts as 'Linux'.
BTW, when I said 'suspicious' I did not mean 'malicious' - only that there was more going on than met the eye.
The 25% has already been made up, and then some.
I agree completely that you cannot place much trust in the percentage, for all of the reasons that get mentioned whenever we talk about OS or browser market share.
The trend, however, is much more interesting because it cancels out much of the systematic bias that will be present in any given series of results.
In this particular case Linux shows a fairly steady increase from 0.43% to 1.02% over the last two years, a compound annual growth rate of about 50% (albeit from a low starting point). I think that's good news.
(In fact the actual figure may be even better than that, because there was a suspicious 25% decline in October 2008. It could be that they changed methodology in some way, perhaps by reclassifying one of the embedded Linux-based platforms, because that month's change stands out as being very unusual.)
I tried this about a year ago with a mid-range disc-on-module device. For most purposes it worked well, and I use DOM in several of my servers now, but not in what was then my development machine. Subversion was one of the reasons - it was slower by more than a factor of two - but I could probably have lived with that. Much more serious was the effect on build times, which was not as large but happens much more often. Extrapolating from my results I suspect that the Intel X25-M or similar would probably be OK, in the sense of not being worse than a conventional hard drive, but I've not tested it yet.
The strongest technical argument I can think of is that this breaks encapsulation: you are exposing your internal data structures to your customer, which could make it much more difficult to change them in the future should this be necessary.
"At what point does it become libel/slander ..."
It doesn't. According to the article the comments were made in the House of Commons (during PMQs), and as such they would be covered by parliamentary privilege - even if they could be shown to be both untrue and malicious.
IANAL etc.