You're losing $ We're losing $ Lets swap spit.
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Boy, now there's a winning strategy. Two companies bleeding red ink out their corporate asses decide to merge with stock swaps (no hard assets, no strategy, no intelligence exchanged or used.)
This is a deal to stir up stock prices and bugger all else.
So what'll happen?
Tata Alpha...
Compaq's clients will get irritated by the loss of corporate focus.
HP's clients (who are HP's clients?) will do the same.
The stock market, still reeling from the trillion dollar loss of Y2K will get irritated at the sheer pointless attempt to maniputate stock prices in some direction other than the death spiral they have been in.
I have moved three times in five years, and coincidentally changed jobs just as often (different months,) and kept the same mailing address and phone number all this time by using a mail box service and a cell phone.
I'm mobile and its my responsibility to pick up my mail and amswer my phone. Its not the phone company's, or the bank's, or my 401k's or the government's hassle where I am, just as long as they can get in touch with me.
You want to move around, go ahead and move around but leave a stable point of reference and you'll have no problems with anybody.
Now when I come at you with a cattle prod later and threaten your testicles with its repeated and forceful application, I'm sure you'll remember my site's IP address.
Then again, it could just be a made up number. But you won't care either way. You'll be too busy "moo"ing for me.
How about just using my fuckin' finger-prints? (And the differences in skin temperature between the different parts of the print?)
Security based on what can be counterfeited is no security at all. Base it on something existential and you might have a chance.
Who's the fuckin' imbecile of a post-pubescent, pre-menopausal, unpreoccupied, '4F', tea-totaling bitch who came up with that shit.
I know people who can't remember if its their third or fourth martini. A four didit PIN number at the ATM dictates whether they buy or bum another round.
fucking mess of cables, power bars and machines which show about as much REAL 'I' as their designers lack there of, I can tell you that we have such a LONG way to go before we get the the real "me" in intelligence that these kinds of discussions rank as sheer mental masturbation.
Read "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders, smoke a joint and see that he's absolutely right about the.5 second gap between the "me" and the "I".
We have so far to go in creating intelligence, conscious or not, that this kind of crap is, uh, crap.
Yeah, most tech-jouralism consists of towing the corporate line in a futile quest for goodies. It fuckin' blows.
You have 'evangelists' who give only one one side of any issue and if the truth gets bent, well, so what? Eh?
AOL buys NetScape at a fire sale and M$'s lawyers declare than the domain is "vibrant and alive." Yeah. With maggots and blow-flies feeding off the corpse of another ex-competitor.
The software field needs a few "Deep Throats" in Redmond, Cupertino and everywhere else you get suck-dick regurgication of press releases. I want to see a Ralph Nader with a huge hard-on bashing these lying cock-suckers in the head with cinder-blocks.
All we get to read are articles of faith written by the uneducated and underpaid to deceive, obfuscate and distort the qualifications of the pageant contestants. "She got great measurements does't she?" Yeah. I'm supposed to LIKE a girl with three tits and multiple rows teeth like a shark's? That blows but she won't... She'd better not ever try.
Tech manuals aren't much better than hard-copy of the man pages. Choke and puke until you feel like a baby bird. You end up with a sour taste in your mouth (not your own) and screw all left in your wallet at $39.95 to fuck knows how much a pop, for some out-dated hunk of dead tree.
Nobody writes how to USE anything because they don't have a clue what any crap is used for or by whom or how or when and certainly not why. They're liberal arts majors and write on Underwood manual typewriters. (I KNOW some okay?)
I'm going to start a wiki on my site dedicated to everything that's WRONG with this shit. I'll flame the shit out of every ass-hole who cobbles some crap together without a clue as to what its for of how its used or why.
They'll hate me. I don't give a crap.
1 out of 2? Who the fuck did they survey?
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RIAA To Target CD-R
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· Score: 2
I want names. This statistic crap without sources is not worth the phosphor its glowing on.
Everybody goes for the big brass ring but they don't go for the gold nuggets. Nobody wants to limit their sales. Its the "accounttant" in their soul.
That's what M$ counts on. So far, M$ is right, on the x86.
They way out of that is to out do the x86.
Write a killer game for the Itanium (imagine some REAL horsepower to do some stunning, jaw-dropping avatar AI and some absolutely awesome, fearsome, mind-boggling rendering.)
Give the monsters and fellow flesh meat on a networked game ears that work and mouths that speak in response to the player. Is the avatar next to you real or an AI? That's what should be the level of play.
The level of architectural detail should be on the scale of Myst but real-time.
There's no M$ on Itanium or G4s, G5s and G6s.
And the DOJ should nail M$ to the x86 and we'll all move on while M$ stays there, by law, until the problem goes away like DRI did on the x80 platform.)
That's actually the simplest solution to the Anti-trust situation. ANY M$ product appears on ANY other platform and ALL M$ officers stay in jail until they're gone from the shelves.
The DMCA tells you that if your vehicle is broken, its illegal for you to make or own a wrench to fix it or to hire a mechanic.
Furthermore, its illegal for you to look under the hood.
That would be a brilliant defense. Cuts through the technobabble BS in a couple of sentences.
BTW: People who spend real money, like a couple of mil for a package, get all the tools, all the source code. There is no DMCA.
The DMCA is only being pressed on by penny-ante people over penny-ante ephemera. Its basically against the consumer.
The (RI & MP)AAs members pollute the environment and beg you to buy the record or come to the theatre now but six months later, its in the deep discount bin as a last gasp halt on its way to the landfill. Where it belonged in the first place.
I'm just waiting until somebody arrests somebody from M$ under the DMCA.
The law is a nice lad donkey with a ribbon around her eyes. While its okay when she's just holding some scales, (who knows what she's weighing?) I KNOW I wouldn't let my kids swing a double edged sword around blindfolded.
Somebody will get miffed and being reverse-engineered and take M$ to court. Then the DMCA will be quickly made un-enforcable.
The DMCA and CSS don't even slow down pirates, They make faithful bit copies right down to the FBI warning on the material they're duping.
But its not them the DMCA and CSS are after. Its you and your money and odds are you don't know enough to build yourself the hardware or write the software to get around the protection rack.., uh, schemes. (Or they want to nail your ass if you aren' smart enough to shut up about it.)
The criminals and the people in the power structure who hire them, will always have access. They just want to restrict YOUR access.
In the city-states of ancient Greece, it was knowledge of the dodecahedron that was considered too dangerous for the common man.
In the commerce-states of RIAA and MPAA its this week's top grosser that has to be protected from the common man, unless he paid admission.
They're both deluded. Information is a perishable comodity. If you wait, you'll get it for free and you'll realize that it was worth what you just paid.
The internet is being Balkanized as nations reassert hegemony and as virtual nations (large corporations) extend their control over the communications networks.
I hope you enjoyed the last half of the '90s because it may never happen again.
There are two extremes and one middle road in controlling the Net.
One extreme end of the spectrum can be seen in the Taliban, who are tearing down their infrastructure and returning to a midieval level of existence.
The other extreme can be seen in China which is modernizing its infrastructure but increasing its control over access. In effect firewalling the country and stonewalling the internet cafes.
Either of these methods are done at tremendous cost to their citizenry. Its not that they don't care, its that they care about keeping control more. In Afghanistan, its cheap. In China its not as cheap but there are only a few key poi9nts that have to be controlled.
The middle road is making lawyers rich in every second and first world country by trying to apply technological solutions (with results ranging from poor to execrable,) to enforce nationalism and censorship.
The problem is that civilization (key word civil) doesn't scale up well to the larger aggregate of nation states.
Bejing was fine under emperor Chin but it quickly degenerated into an insular court culture. Germany was okay until the reunification which preceeded and then almost inevitably led to two world wars.
Early history in Greece is the story of city states.
The renaissance in Europe happened in and because of city states.
The story of money starts in Amsterdam and is still concentrated in and around a few mercantile exachanges. This leads to certain very large accumulations of wealth on localized centres which almost behave in a civilized manner.
Civilization is a local phenomenon. There are millions of dead and millions more dying because it doesn't scale well.
We'd do well to remember that and try more localized approaches.
The tactile pleasure of a book is being able to make it look and feel well read.
The content rarely merits the respect due learned tomes kept in archives and handled with white cotton gloves. Face it, with the acid washed paper used by publishers now, the books will all be dust in 50 years anyway.
I buy paperbacks because I can afford them and don't want to pay much because I know they're going into the land-fill eventually when I'm done with them unless the author is particularly entertaining.
I have kept my Terry Pratchett books and have reread these because I liked them. But Border's charging US$11.95 for a re-issue of "Dark Side of the Sun" was sheer exploitation. When the price goes too high, I don't buy.
What the publishers are trying to do is change the medium to something that is evanescent, hang on to the content and charge us for every time we look at something we thought we'd bought.
I can reread a book wherever, whenever and why-ever I want to. I'm not going to trust an e-book to let me finish a book unless I've got enough batteries. The technological dependency is too high.
Its the barely veiled attempts to dig craters into our already depleted bank accounts that are really insulting.
Do they honestly think we're that dumb? We've seen what happens to content with television. Fear of the cost of talent development why they stay the safe course of Seinfeld reruns rather than giving somebody else a crack at entertaining us.
Now you can't discuss the weaknesses you find in an open forum so they can be addressed. You can only discuss it illegally through encrypted e-mail with others who will exploit them.
Boy, I hate it when somebody starts with utter BS: "What began as a deliberately decentralized network to promote the exchange of research ideas and data became a poor network for commercial applications. "
That's was NOT the intent of the work at all. It was a scalable communication network designed to survive even massive disruption caused by nuclear war.
The web was designed to provide a means of interactively linking documents and references.
What business wants was entirely immaterial as they were were too busy saying it wouldn't work or utterly, nonchalantly not involved.
What they want now is a seperate, secure network. Authentication, and commercial traffic in total security.
But they keep skimping on the basics so they are victims of M$ security hole exploiters.
The sooner they wake up to the fact that the "Internet Worms," viri and other parasites that are gibing their pocket books the runs, the better off we will ALL be.
p are being reasonable, people should NOT bend over.
The trick is to ask for punishment so draconian, so outrageous and so indefensible that it can't possibly get accepted. It can't even be considered.
If I was Putin, I'd've put in a call or two to Bush asking for the kid. He's only in jail on technicalities that aren't worth bothering about..
But he's only in jail on technicalities that aren't worth bothering about. For all we know, he may get off with time served and get a ticket home on the next Aeroflot.
But threaten to have him sit in the "big chair" (a fitting punishment involving electrons, don't cha think?:-) and Putin might feel a little different about one of his citizens being snatched, jailed, and threatened with death over his being helpful to Adobe.
That might also cause a BIG chill in overseas software sales. Nobody wants to buy American since M$ will reverse-engineer everything. bundle it into Windows and then haul your ass from Nor-fuckin'-way and throw it in jail under threat of death if you try the same thing.
That would get Linux adpoted everywhere that Windows isn't and where programmers are.
The body of law is the aggregate weigh of the totality of human cupidity, stupidity, control-freak-ism and special-interests.
Its killing itself and burning us all on its funeral pyre.
The flaw is simple and singular, laws never expire, and the remedy obvious, laws need to have a built-in expiry date.
But the political system is filled with and controlled by lawyers so its never going to happen until the same thing happens to it that happens to all water kingdoms, a drought comes along and the kingdom gets wiped out.
that most American managers are not competent enough to manage a geographically widely dispersed work force.
1) The communication infrastructure is available, (this I know from using it.)
2) The server-side processing power is available. (this I know from using it.)
3) The client-side processing power is available (this I know from using it.)
4) The foreign workers are available, out there, (this I know personally.)
5) Fund transfers can be made account-to-account anywhere on the planet, (this I know, I work in banking systems.)
6) Local and federal taxes are taken care of by subcontractors. The only responsibility of the contractor is to report to the local and federal governments the gross amount paid to the subcontractor, (this I know from working in payroll systems.)
7) Most governments would love to have sources of hard-currency apart from material goods exports. Leveraging of their services instead of just their goods would constitute a very attractive foreign revenue stream, (this I know from having worked on the GST system in Canada and from living there.)
But most managers here in the 'States and elsewhere aren't able to leverage their resources or to communicate effectively enough to make use of what's available.
Hands-on managers are hands-on because they skate on the thin ice of chaos. Micro-managers are hands-on managers who don't even know what they're doing or have sufficient reporting channels to know and trust that their resources are doing what they're supposed to.
That's the real reason that the US has H1-B and other types of visas. The shortage is caused by the business schools who don't equip anyone to deal effectively with anything other than in face-to-face.
Apart from large multi-nationals (of which there are only a few thousand,) most companies are being directed by people without effective communication skills. This costs them locally in wasted effort and acts as a limit to growth or even to serving their clients effectively and efficiently while maximizing the profits that they can derive from their revenue.
The real management lesson of the Linux operating system is not the OS, but the communication and control system that created it from a group of people dispersed world-wide.
M$ is entirely dependent on hardware sales. Unlike Apple they aren't producing any but they're tied (and hamstrung) by the old x86 architecture that is or will soon be interfering with their plans to insinuate themselves into every transaction occurring over the 'net via.NET
Biometric authentication will force us all off the 32-bit architecture. And Linux is already on the 64-bit and its free, as in no acquisition expense.
Changing their business model this way only makes sense. They're now a monopoly, damn-near a utility like the electric company, but they are not in control of the demand side.
The margins are not getting slimmer but the demand is drying up. PC sales are dipping. The rate and their income is going to stabilize at maintenance levels. That's maybe 10% of their halcyon days.
The difference in revenue is like the difference between a gas-bar which pumps gas versus the income of a General Motors who stir up demand with novelty and styling (and with grudging compliance with safety and fuel economy regulations.)
Unlike other industries (automobile or appliances, [or even Apple computer,]) which produce a real product which can be made obsolete by a variety of means, M$ produces a product which is already good enough for common business.
Their claims of adding to the feature set is falling on deaf ears and people who don't need or can't use the features anyway don't have the money to waste.
EG: My employer used to install NT 4.0 SP5 and the full M$ suite per box on all desktops. They now have ONE machine with M$ access running on it. A lot of the extras that came with even NT 4.0 are being stripped out. We use Lotus Notes (4.6 'cause that all we need.) We are paring, trimming, dropping licensed seats and license fees because we HAVE to. We don't even care if its 'built-in.' Its taking up space we'd rather use for data and taking up administration resources. We didn't upgrade 100 desktop boxes, we upgraded ONE Citrix server.
Linux is a definite wall in one direction (*nixes are far more reliable for server business,) And its cost of acquisition is $0.00 while its cost of maintenance is the same. If its your company and your money, you'll opt to keep it by buying cheaper.
M$ wants new markets to exploit. Transaction processing is IT. Even worse, they can predict that their OS won't survive the move to a platform that they themselves would need to make their transformation successful.
Why do they want to change markets? Even a fraction of a penny per multiplied by trillions of transactions per year will make M$ even richer then before.
They can leave the OS 'garage' business reality behind to people like the Linux competition and Ximian who's price of entry is much lower (they don't have all that old software to support,) and who are being favored "de jure" if not "de facto" by antitrust investigations of governments world-wide.
And from a sufficient multi-dimensional sample. Nothing else works.
Try running a different kind of Turing test. Not one where you're trying to prove how intelligent or self-aware or witty or urbane you are but just who you really are.
That test immediately requires a web of trust, that someone or something we can trust be able to vouchsafe for you, and a web of deceit, that that someone or something we can trust be able to recognize you somehow in such a way that we can all trust the process.
The current authentication schemes usually fail by having a web of deceit that's too broadly woven. The senses we have provided to our systems are ridiculously inadequate. For now.
Lets create a system which can authenticate that you are you. It has to know who you are by virtue of your having been presented to it once under trustworthy circumstances.
What you know is useless.
It should be able to authenticate your cadaver. So much for all the password schemes in the world. Period.
It should be able to identify you AS a cadaver. That means that the bio-metric data must include measurements of things like temperature, heart-beat rate, eye movement, involuntary tremors and other things which correlate to identify you as you.
Listening to a "Rich Little"-caliber mimic on one of his good days will fool the blind but the disguise is blown the moment you open your eyes. Therefore the bio-metric data must be multi-dimensional.
Listening to you say a common phrase as you stand in front of it (actually you'll be potentially surrounded by its sense organs,) it should be able to identify you from anyone else on the planet and tell not only if you're you, but if you're angry, in distress or just inebriated.
And if it doesn't recognize you, you can go suck an egg or spend a night waiting for your attorney.
M$ is not losing any sleep over releasing the source code. Go forbid that somebody look at it and tell them where the security divots are.
And its WinCE. Their answer to the Palm OS (ROTFL). Its not exactly the crown fuckin' jewels.
But it is indicative of their ability to talk out of both sides of their mouths at once while lying out of either about what the other side is saying: Source code is Talibanese, uh, anti-American. Here want our WinCE source code?
Who reported this? Why? I'm sure the Taliban'd be much happier being ignorant clods of dirt smelling of goat cheese and wondering "where the wimin is!" (Answer: You shot them all jack-offs)
Gotta love the religious fundamentalists. The zealots are even worse than the hippocrites.
Remember the teary-eyed "Ah have sinned!" The Taliban would have shot his fat pink ass and not seen the irony in doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, now there's a winning strategy. Two companies bleeding red ink out their corporate asses decide to merge with stock swaps (no hard assets, no strategy, no intelligence exchanged or used.)
This is a deal to stir up stock prices and bugger all else.
So what'll happen?
Tata Alpha...
Compaq's clients will get irritated by the loss of corporate focus.
HP's clients (who are HP's clients?) will do the same.
The stock market, still reeling from the trillion dollar loss of Y2K will get irritated at the sheer pointless attempt to maniputate stock prices in some direction other than the death spiral they have been in.
Great. Another lose-lose situation.
I have moved three times in five years, and coincidentally changed jobs just as often (different months,) and kept the same mailing address and phone number all this time by using a mail box service and a cell phone.
I'm mobile and its my responsibility to pick up my mail and amswer my phone. Its not the phone company's, or the bank's, or my 401k's or the government's hassle where I am, just as long as they can get in touch with me.
You want to move around, go ahead and move around but leave a stable point of reference and you'll have no problems with anybody.
Now when I come at you with a cattle prod later and threaten your testicles with its repeated and forceful application, I'm sure you'll remember my site's IP address.
Then again, it could just be a made up number. But you won't care either way. You'll be too busy "moo"ing for me.
How about just using my fuckin' finger-prints? (And the differences in skin temperature between the different parts of the print?)
Security based on what can be counterfeited is no security at all. Base it on something existential and you might have a chance.
Who's the fuckin' imbecile of a post-pubescent, pre-menopausal, unpreoccupied, '4F', tea-totaling bitch who came up with that shit.
I know people who can't remember if its their third or fourth martini. A four didit PIN number at the ATM dictates whether they buy or bum another round.
11 digits... Yeah right.
fucking mess of cables, power bars and machines which show about as much REAL 'I' as their designers lack there of, I can tell you that we have such a LONG way to go before we get the the real "me" in intelligence that these kinds of discussions rank as sheer mental masturbation.
.5 second gap between the "me" and the "I".
Read "The User Illusion" by Tor Nørretranders, smoke a joint and see that he's absolutely right about the
We have so far to go in creating intelligence, conscious or not, that this kind of crap is, uh, crap.
KILL M$. Limit them to the x86. Amd then just wait.
Yeah, most tech-jouralism consists of towing the corporate line in a futile quest for goodies. It fuckin' blows.
You have 'evangelists' who give only one one side of any issue and if the truth gets bent, well, so what? Eh?
AOL buys NetScape at a fire sale and M$'s lawyers declare than the domain is "vibrant and alive." Yeah. With maggots and blow-flies feeding off the corpse of another ex-competitor.
The software field needs a few "Deep Throats" in Redmond, Cupertino and everywhere else you get suck-dick regurgication of press releases. I want to see a Ralph Nader with a huge hard-on bashing these lying cock-suckers in the head with cinder-blocks.
All we get to read are articles of faith written by the uneducated and underpaid to deceive, obfuscate and distort the qualifications of the pageant contestants. "She got great measurements does't she?" Yeah. I'm supposed to LIKE a girl with three tits and multiple rows teeth like a shark's? That blows but she won't... She'd better not ever try.
Tech manuals aren't much better than hard-copy of the man pages. Choke and puke until you feel like a baby bird. You end up with a sour taste in your mouth (not your own) and screw all left in your wallet at $39.95 to fuck knows how much a pop, for some out-dated hunk of dead tree.
Nobody writes how to USE anything because they don't have a clue what any crap is used for or by whom or how or when and certainly not why. They're liberal arts majors and write on Underwood manual typewriters. (I KNOW some okay?)
I'm going to start a wiki on my site dedicated to everything that's WRONG with this shit. I'll flame the shit out of every ass-hole who cobbles some crap together without a clue as to what its for of how its used or why.
They'll hate me. I don't give a crap.
I want names. This statistic crap without sources is not worth the phosphor its glowing on.
Hot game demos are pulled off the Net and then the game itself is ordered on-line direct from the publisher.
The local store is for shovel-ware. That's like saying that the 99cent store doesn't seem to stock any Baccarat crystal.
Everybody goes for the big brass ring but they don't go for the gold nuggets. Nobody wants to limit their sales. Its the "accounttant" in their soul.
That's what M$ counts on. So far, M$ is right, on the x86.
They way out of that is to out do the x86.
Write a killer game for the Itanium (imagine some REAL horsepower to do some stunning, jaw-dropping avatar AI and some absolutely awesome, fearsome, mind-boggling rendering.)
Give the monsters and fellow flesh meat on a networked game ears that work and mouths that speak in response to the player. Is the avatar next to you real or an AI? That's what should be the level of play.
The level of architectural detail should be on the scale of Myst but real-time.
There's no M$ on Itanium or G4s, G5s and G6s.
And the DOJ should nail M$ to the x86 and we'll all move on while M$ stays there, by law, until the problem goes away like DRI did on the x80 platform.)
That's actually the simplest solution to the Anti-trust situation. ANY M$ product appears on ANY other platform and ALL M$ officers stay in jail until they're gone from the shelves.
The DMCA tells you that if your vehicle is broken, its illegal for you to make or own a wrench to fix it or to hire a mechanic.
Furthermore, its illegal for you to look under the hood.
That would be a brilliant defense. Cuts through the technobabble BS in a couple of sentences.
BTW: People who spend real money, like a couple of mil for a package, get all the tools, all the source code. There is no DMCA.
The DMCA is only being pressed on by penny-ante people over penny-ante ephemera. Its basically against the consumer.
The (RI & MP)AAs members pollute the environment and beg you to buy the record or come to the theatre now but six months later, its in the deep discount bin as a last gasp halt on its way to the landfill. Where it belonged in the first place.
I'm just waiting until somebody arrests somebody from M$ under the DMCA.
The law is a nice lad donkey with a ribbon around her eyes. While its okay when she's just holding some scales, (who knows what she's weighing?) I KNOW I wouldn't let my kids swing a double edged sword around blindfolded.
Somebody will get miffed and being reverse-engineered and take M$ to court. Then the DMCA will be quickly made un-enforcable.
That there are ways around things is obvious.
The DMCA and CSS don't even slow down pirates, They make faithful bit copies right down to the FBI warning on the material they're duping.
But its not them the DMCA and CSS are after. Its you and your money and odds are you don't know enough to build yourself the hardware or write the software to get around the protection rack.., uh, schemes. (Or they want to nail your ass if you aren' smart enough to shut up about it.)
The criminals and the people in the power structure who hire them, will always have access. They just want to restrict YOUR access.
In the city-states of ancient Greece, it was knowledge of the dodecahedron that was considered too dangerous for the common man.
In the commerce-states of RIAA and MPAA its this week's top grosser that has to be protected from the common man, unless he paid admission.
They're both deluded. Information is a perishable comodity. If you wait, you'll get it for free and you'll realize that it was worth what you just paid.
The internet is being Balkanized as nations reassert hegemony and as virtual nations (large corporations) extend their control over the communications networks.
I hope you enjoyed the last half of the '90s because it may never happen again.
There are two extremes and one middle road in controlling the Net.
One extreme end of the spectrum can be seen in the Taliban, who are tearing down their infrastructure and returning to a midieval level of existence.
The other extreme can be seen in China which is modernizing its infrastructure but increasing its control over access. In effect firewalling the country and stonewalling the internet cafes.
Either of these methods are done at tremendous cost to their citizenry. Its not that they don't care, its that they care about keeping control more. In Afghanistan, its cheap. In China its not as cheap but there are only a few key poi9nts that have to be controlled.
The middle road is making lawyers rich in every second and first world country by trying to apply technological solutions (with results ranging from poor to execrable,) to enforce nationalism and censorship.
The problem is that civilization (key word civil) doesn't scale up well to the larger aggregate of nation states.
Bejing was fine under emperor Chin but it quickly degenerated into an insular court culture. Germany was okay until the reunification which preceeded and then almost inevitably led to two world wars.
Early history in Greece is the story of city states.
The renaissance in Europe happened in and because of city states.
The story of money starts in Amsterdam and is still concentrated in and around a few mercantile exachanges. This leads to certain very large accumulations of wealth on localized centres which almost behave in a civilized manner.
Civilization is a local phenomenon. There are millions of dead and millions more dying because it doesn't scale well.
We'd do well to remember that and try more localized approaches.
The tactile pleasure of a book is being able to make it look and feel well read.
The content rarely merits the respect due learned tomes kept in archives and handled with white cotton gloves. Face it, with the acid washed paper used by publishers now, the books will all be dust in 50 years anyway.
I buy paperbacks because I can afford them and don't want to pay much because I know they're going into the land-fill eventually when I'm done with them unless the author is particularly entertaining.
I have kept my Terry Pratchett books and have reread these because I liked them. But Border's charging US$11.95 for a re-issue of "Dark Side of the Sun" was sheer exploitation. When the price goes too high, I don't buy.
What the publishers are trying to do is change the medium to something that is evanescent, hang on to the content and charge us for every time we look at something we thought we'd bought.
I can reread a book wherever, whenever and why-ever I want to. I'm not going to trust an e-book to let me finish a book unless I've got enough batteries. The technological dependency is too high.
Its the barely veiled attempts to dig craters into our already depleted bank accounts that are really insulting.
Do they honestly think we're that dumb? We've seen what happens to content with television. Fear of the cost of talent development why they stay the safe course of Seinfeld reruns rather than giving somebody else a crack at entertaining us.
That's why I'm only buying the hard copy.
They will shift to a fraction of a penny from a trillion transactions a year and leave the utility OS market to the lower cost competition.
.NET really needs 64-bits and I don't see them competing against Linux when its already on those platforms, free and easier to administer.
Besides
And that was the point.
Now you can't discuss the weaknesses you find in an open forum so they can be addressed. You can only discuss it illegally through encrypted e-mail with others who will exploit them.
The DMCA was NOT an improvement.
Boy, I hate it when somebody starts with utter BS: "What began as a deliberately decentralized network to promote the exchange of research ideas and data became a poor network for commercial applications. "
That's was NOT the intent of the work at all. It was a scalable communication network designed to survive even massive disruption caused by nuclear war.
The web was designed to provide a means of interactively linking documents and references.
What business wants was entirely immaterial as they were were too busy saying it wouldn't work or utterly, nonchalantly not involved.
What they want now is a seperate, secure network. Authentication, and commercial traffic in total security.
But they keep skimping on the basics so they are victims of M$ security hole exploiters.
The sooner they wake up to the fact that the "Internet Worms," viri and other parasites that are gibing their pocket books the runs, the better off we will ALL be.
p are being reasonable, people should NOT bend over.
:-) and Putin might feel a little different about one of his citizens being snatched, jailed, and threatened with death over his being helpful to Adobe.
The trick is to ask for punishment so draconian, so outrageous and so indefensible that it can't possibly get accepted. It can't even be considered.
If I was Putin, I'd've put in a call or two to Bush asking for the kid. He's only in jail on technicalities that aren't worth bothering about..
But he's only in jail on technicalities that aren't worth bothering about. For all we know, he may get off with time served and get a ticket home on the next Aeroflot.
But threaten to have him sit in the "big chair" (a fitting punishment involving electrons, don't cha think?
That might also cause a BIG chill in overseas software sales. Nobody wants to buy American since M$ will reverse-engineer everything. bundle it into Windows and then haul your ass from Nor-fuckin'-way and throw it in jail under threat of death if you try the same thing.
That would get Linux adpoted everywhere that Windows isn't and where programmers are.
The body of law is the aggregate weigh of the totality of human cupidity, stupidity, control-freak-ism and special-interests.
Its killing itself and burning us all on its funeral pyre.
The flaw is simple and singular, laws never expire, and the remedy obvious, laws need to have a built-in expiry date.
But the political system is filled with and controlled by lawyers so its never going to happen until the same thing happens to it that happens to all water kingdoms, a drought comes along and the kingdom gets wiped out.
that most American managers are not competent enough to manage a geographically widely dispersed work force.
1) The communication infrastructure is available, (this I know from using it.)
2) The server-side processing power is available. (this I know from using it.)
3) The client-side processing power is available (this I know from using it.)
4) The foreign workers are available, out there, (this I know personally.)
5) Fund transfers can be made account-to-account anywhere on the planet, (this I know, I work in banking systems.)
6) Local and federal taxes are taken care of by subcontractors. The only responsibility of the contractor is to report to the local and federal governments the gross amount paid to the subcontractor, (this I know from working in payroll systems.)
7) Most governments would love to have sources of hard-currency apart from material goods exports. Leveraging of their services instead of just their goods would constitute a very attractive foreign revenue stream, (this I know from having worked on the GST system in Canada and from living there.)
But most managers here in the 'States and elsewhere aren't able to leverage their resources or to communicate effectively enough to make use of what's available.
Hands-on managers are hands-on because they skate on the thin ice of chaos. Micro-managers are hands-on managers who don't even know what they're doing or have sufficient reporting channels to know and trust that their resources are doing what they're supposed to.
That's the real reason that the US has H1-B and other types of visas. The shortage is caused by the business schools who don't equip anyone to deal effectively with anything other than in face-to-face.
Apart from large multi-nationals (of which there are only a few thousand,) most companies are being directed by people without effective communication skills. This costs them locally in wasted effort and acts as a limit to growth or even to serving their clients effectively and efficiently while maximizing the profits that they can derive from their revenue.
The real management lesson of the Linux operating system is not the OS, but the communication and control system that created it from a group of people dispersed world-wide.
Think strategically...
.NET
:-)
M$ is entirely dependent on hardware sales. Unlike Apple they aren't producing any but they're tied (and hamstrung) by the old x86 architecture that is or will soon be interfering with their plans to insinuate themselves into every transaction occurring over the 'net via
Biometric authentication will force us all off the 32-bit architecture. And Linux is already on the 64-bit and its free, as in no acquisition expense.
Changing their business model this way only makes sense. They're now a monopoly, damn-near a utility like the electric company, but they are not in control of the demand side.
The margins are not getting slimmer but the demand is drying up. PC sales are dipping. The rate and their income is going to stabilize at maintenance levels. That's maybe 10% of their halcyon days.
The difference in revenue is like the difference between a gas-bar which pumps gas versus the income of a General Motors who stir up demand with novelty and styling (and with grudging compliance with safety and fuel economy regulations.)
Unlike other industries (automobile or appliances, [or even Apple computer,]) which produce a real product which can be made obsolete by a variety of means, M$ produces a product which is already good enough for common business.
Their claims of adding to the feature set is falling on deaf ears and people who don't need or can't use the features anyway don't have the money to waste.
EG: My employer used to install NT 4.0 SP5 and the full M$ suite per box on all desktops. They now have ONE machine with M$ access running on it. A lot of the extras that came with even NT 4.0 are being stripped out. We use Lotus Notes (4.6 'cause that all we need.) We are paring, trimming, dropping licensed seats and license fees because we HAVE to. We don't even care if its 'built-in.' Its taking up space we'd rather use for data and taking up administration resources. We didn't upgrade 100 desktop boxes, we upgraded ONE Citrix server.
Linux is a definite wall in one direction (*nixes are far more reliable for server business,) And its cost of acquisition is $0.00 while its cost of maintenance is the same. If its your company and your money, you'll opt to keep it by buying cheaper.
M$ wants new markets to exploit. Transaction processing is IT. Even worse, they can predict that their OS won't survive the move to a platform that they themselves would need to make their transformation successful.
Why do they want to change markets? Even a fraction of a penny per multiplied by trillions of transactions per year will make M$ even richer then before.
They can leave the OS 'garage' business reality behind to people like the Linux competition and Ximian who's price of entry is much lower (they don't have all that old software to support,) and who are being favored "de jure" if not "de facto" by antitrust investigations of governments world-wide.
That's what I would do.
This was inevitable. And there will now come into existence a second internet. One with trustworthy biometric authentication.
That's what business needs. That's what they're going to get. But it'll have to be better, more secure and better controlled than the telephone .
And from a sufficient multi-dimensional sample. Nothing else works.
Try running a different kind of Turing test. Not one where you're trying to prove how intelligent or self-aware or witty or urbane you are but just who you really are.
That test immediately requires a web of trust, that someone or something we can trust be able to vouchsafe for you, and a web of deceit, that that someone or something we can trust be able to recognize you somehow in such a way that we can all trust the process.
The current authentication schemes usually fail by having a web of deceit that's too broadly woven. The senses we have provided to our systems are ridiculously inadequate. For now.
Lets create a system which can authenticate that you are you. It has to know who you are by virtue of your having been presented to it once under trustworthy circumstances.
What you know is useless.
It should be able to authenticate your cadaver. So much for all the password schemes in the world. Period.
It should be able to identify you AS a cadaver. That means that the bio-metric data must include measurements of things like temperature, heart-beat rate, eye movement, involuntary tremors and other things which correlate to identify you as you.
Listening to a "Rich Little"-caliber mimic on one of his good days will fool the blind but the disguise is blown the moment you open your eyes. Therefore the bio-metric data must be multi-dimensional.
Listening to you say a common phrase as you stand in front of it (actually you'll be potentially surrounded by its sense organs,) it should be able to identify you from anyone else on the planet and tell not only if you're you, but if you're angry, in distress or just inebriated.
And if it doesn't recognize you, you can go suck an egg or spend a night waiting for your attorney.
Until then security is mere mental masturbation.
M$ is not losing any sleep over releasing the source code. Go forbid that somebody look at it and tell them where the security divots are.
And its WinCE. Their answer to the Palm OS (ROTFL). Its not exactly the crown fuckin' jewels.
But it is indicative of their ability to talk out of both sides of their mouths at once while lying out of either about what the other side is saying: Source code is Talibanese, uh, anti-American. Here want our WinCE source code?
Lets hope they never get off the x86.
But its NOT in the Koran.
Who reported this? Why? I'm sure the Taliban'd be much happier being ignorant clods of dirt smelling of goat cheese and wondering "where the wimin is!" (Answer: You shot them all jack-offs)
Gotta love the religious fundamentalists. The zealots are even worse than the hippocrites.
Remember the teary-eyed "Ah have sinned!" The Taliban would have shot his fat pink ass and not seen the irony in doing so.