is this the time for Microsoft to stop making software and instead focus all their efforts on using their mighty and impressive patent portfolio to make money my dropping lawsuits down left, right and centre on the tech industry?
oh wait, thats been tried before...
and actually, looking at what I just typed and considering the patent protfolio that they possess thats really not so funny anymore.
deeply flawed meetings with deeply flawed decisions about a proposed deeply flawed standard that exisits solely to further the commercials aims of one particular company.
in the meantime it risks destroying the credibilty of a mahor standard body (to further the commercial aims of one company).
and, of course, it reduces the possible impact of a simpler, superior standard (to further the commercial aims of one company).
the more I read about this the madder I become.
there is an old saying if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is probably a duck. the simplest explanation in all cases points beck to some seriously disturbing manipulation by one particular company - and the brazen bare faced manor in which it is done is simply breathtaking. sure there is nothing *illegal* in padding up membership of committees to get the votes that you want - but by any measure it is underhanded and a dirty tactic.
bad comparison. because the IBM PC did soooo badly - look what I am typing this on.
then again.. the clones did well, they reverse engineered the BIOS, the all ran DOS and IBM did not get that much of the profit - so perhaps there is a long term message for Apple here about short term versus long term gains. they have everything in place here to be the proud owners of a new standard in interface, layout, design and overall system - if only they would relax their grip to allow a few systems^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h grains of sand out.
Much of Lexx series 4 had a back story like that. (snip)in the fourth season of the Sci-Fi TV series Lexx, a mad scientist developes a machine to detect and measure the Higgs boson. The result of the experiment causes a massive singularity to form, threatening to destroy the Earth.(/snip)
Still, great publicity for the hadron, at least people will be watching the experiments with great attention, nothing like a "scientists might destroy the planet to solve lunch money argument" headline to promote paper sales.
I'd of thought it would of said "testing, testing, testing.."
Hell, he could of recorded anything he wanted as long as there was no method of playing it back.
It reminds me of that clever SW speech recognition that decoded audio from the Berghof films of Hitler and Eva Braun - I bet they did not realise that technology would one say be able to decode their speech, HAL would of loved it. Alternatively there were some very clever approaches to scanning vinyl recordings and cleaning up the signal digitally before recontructing the audio without hisses and scratches. This is not new, but its certainly clever.
On the historical front, it once again proves that in the world of science many people generally work on the same this simultaneously and behind every great man there are many almost great men who got there at the same time or earlier. Of course, everybody knows that Newton got there first...
Not under NDA no, I'll throw in a hint - they sold off their semi conductor business in the last couple of years for a new site in India.
To be fair to them - its only what every single consumer electronics company out there was doing. Mass manufactuting down to the cheapest budget with a design life span of ~1.5 years to force repeat business. Hell, even the top range systems (think well known brands with swizzy glass sliding doors) use only cheap electics inside them, because at the end of the day its impossible to but quality components anymore. And the companies involved in such rubbish practices were not actually the one I was working for but purchased many, many units from them and as such could demand on site support from my department.
Its sad really, the reference CD designs from >15 years ago had glass optics, rotating arms for the optics and really nice components throughout - good for a lifetime. Current mechs are made out of plastic, with a worm drive of plastic, and resin optics - the firmware is expected to hide all the manufacturing tolerance. Naturally it is not as good in the slightest and performance suffers. Anyhow, I digress....
In all fairness to my former employer they refused to implement any changes to follow the numerous CD any copy regimes floating around five or six years ago and stuck to red/orange book standards (though maybe this was more to do with cost of implementing anything clever).
Its kinda obvious, and other posters have stated it, but its important enough to state again.
BitTorrent the company is NOT BitTorrent the protocol.
This is much like the MS Gambit of saying that that as there are other OSes then they do not have a monopoly. It is like the **AA saying that their own pet DRMware internet services exist so they cannot be against music on the internet. It is like drugs companies saying that even though the patents have expired they still have the copyright on the name and process.
In otherwords it is a fanciful fiction that makes people think one thing while hiding another in plain sight. I bet my (metaphorical) hat this they will continue to throttle the bandwith for non-approved or non-compliant P2P.
build this diagnostic into paving slabs and fit it in the far East and you could test 98% of the population in a couple of hours I reckon. Seriously, what is it with spitting in the street out there? Yeah, yeah - kinda off topic.
I used to make CD players for one of the tech giants, as such I was in China alot. When I say "make" I'll be more specific - I wrote the firmware.
I remember vividly a conversation with one of the chinese project managers. I was discussing the build quality of a new CD player for the US markets. It had that brown cardboard like PCB that the racks leap off if you wave a soldering iron in the general vicinity. The PCBS, the unit front, the enfire casework was glued together with a hot glue gun. The radio tuning circuit was wire wrapped around a pencil and then "frozen" in place with dripped wax whilst the software was expected to adapt to mask any tolerance issues. The manager and his team gave it a projected life span of 18 months, then the consumer would be back to buy another, he was really enthusiastic about the repeat business.
*That* is why old tech survives because it was built to last, not with built in obsolescence. And no, I never brought a CD player from my employer ever again.
Thats great, now all we need is a heuristic computer with a suitable monitoring alogrithm to look after them whilst they are sleeping/hibernating.
Still, good luck looking for volunteers for those trials.
In some ways competition is good. I would not quite support OOXML, but maybe not actively despise it, if it was on a level playing field.
That is - if the votes were free and fair and based purely on technical merit I would have no problem with OOXML at all. In the spirit of free competition let the best format win to the benefit of all.
But the vote ARE NOT fair. Clearly and demonstrably so, see the past history on this subject. There is the stench of political and commercial interference in decisions that really do need to be taken on unbiased technical grounds. Mr. Durusou is clearly caught between a rock and hard place here - see the posts about the MS interference above - and something has to give, unfortunately that something appears to be his integrity and reputation* (*thats my narrow minded viewpoint based on TFA and others).
Bottom line, I don't think anybody will give this much thought apart from MS who will attempt to spin this six ways from sunday.
Whenever I visited China, I always had a feeling of playing cat and mouse with the unseen and much hypothesised great firewall. BBC back then? no chance. but you could hunt around and use other UK based new sites - daily main, guardian, thesun (if desperate), the times. Sometimes they would grind to a halt and I imagined my unseen monitor in the great firewall office checking what I was doing - then, as if he/she decided I was not a subversive threat, it would spring back into life. Other times I would VPN or proxy and find any site I wanted - but at a pitifully slow rate as if everything I did was intercepted and checked by my unseen intermediary. Other fun things that had odd effects on the speed on which pages would load would be to proxy them through the dialectizer - I always imagined one severly culterally puzzled state firewall operator calling his boss. The 'net access was always different depending on where I hooked up - im the 5* hotel in shezhen was always the fastest, in the office soso, in a street cafe you could forget it.
My conclusion was that the firewall was very very definately real, and the moment it found a foreign news story, the wrong keyword then suddenly wierd timelags and delays in page lookups would occur as my unseen companion blocked or cleared at whim. I also could of sworn that the system could tell the difference between the net being accessed from a posh hotel occupied by Western Engineers and a street cafe.
I really don't get this. It seems (from my outsiders layman prospective) that MS is being treated differently here.
Naturally the whole ISO system is running the risk of losing a massive amount of credibility on this issue.
So why do they do it? I mean they are not fools - they must read all the comments on the web.
The only reason I could come up with is that they are afraid of the possibility of the next big standard being non-ISO approved and thus them being diminished in importance and relevence.
If you assume the USA + Europe = The World and ignore the rest of it. And I don;t think I've heard anyone talk about velociraptors playing with children outside of jokes and few kooks.
Not all all. My comment was only at religious fundamentalists, not the millions of perfectly normal religious people going about their daily business. Which is more dangerous in the long run? blowing up a bomb and killing 40 people or changing the law to ruin the education* and bias the development of an entire generation in a whole state? (*yup, my narrow minded viewpoint). The bomb is tragic, senseless and pointless, and sells newspapers - but which does more damage?
Still you are just as entitled to your point of view as I am, but they are different. No offense intended.
from the viewpoint of a UK reader, the best way to promote science in the US seems to be to pass it off as a wonderful invention of God.
I mean come on, intelligent design? evolution as a theory? velociraptors and children playing happily together? That sort of muddy clouded rubbish is surely out of date in todays world. Except in the US.
Mod me to hell and back for all I care - thats what I think. Okay, my views may not be representative of society as a whole - but possibly/. will be as sympathetic an audience as I can find.
The mere fact that you can pack a room, for seven speakers on "Communicating Science in a Religious America." tell me that there is something wrong. These idiots want to have their cake and eat it - on one hand they want to rubbish scientific thinking and deny evolution on the other they want bluray discs, microwaves and nuclear tipped bombs. Get real.
From my viewpoint all religious fundamentalists are just as dangerous as each other - no matter what they preach, what religion they follow, what they wear or what country they come from. Sometimes the danger is more subtle then other times. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.
I'll exit my soapbox quietly and get my coat then.
duck and cover, they are reaching for their lawyer.
sounds like this story is a might fine basis for some good ole' fashioned DMCA action. Pffffft, that was the sound of sequoia credibility dying a death...
of course the study was finished when one of the researchers "accidently" slipped the viagra logo into the projector. the rest, as they say, is history and nobody ever mentioned that study or the brick ever again.
Rama1 was no romp. It was an early story that embedded mysteries inside mysteries, and they were never resolved. It invited the reader to draw his own conclusions about the story and to imagine it in his head as he so desired. The book itself ended in a mystery and possibly a promise of more to come. It will always be a classic in all most sci-fi lovers collections.
Of course Rama2, 3 tried to reveal those "mysteries", were written by somebody else and fit inside the Rama storyline like a turd in a shoe. They do nothing but distract from the genius of Rama1. It has always been a firm favorite of mine.
And in 2009 it will be a movie with Morgan Freeman, I'm not sure what I think about it. I like the idea, but I'm terrified that I will not be able to read the book again without imagining it like it was in the film.
"non compliant analysis"? whats the betting that the only compliant analysis gives it an A-OK rating.
thats like car salesperson attempting to sell you a car but only if you agree to take his word that it works and he'll sue anybody that you bring in to check the engine. if ever there was a warning bell not to buy their equipment that was it.
whats next? DMCA action against/. for this thread? absolute cobblers.
* 35 minutes about campaigns and elections
* 36 minutes about the debate over U.S. foreign policy
* 26 minutes or more of crime
* 12 minutes of accidents and disasters
* 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment
On the other hand, one would have seen:
* 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment
* 1 minute and 22 seconds about education
* 1 minute about science and technology
* 3 minutes and 34 seconds about the economy
Or to put that in perspective...
1 hour 11 minutes of campaigns. elections and foreign policy and then..
only 4 minutes 56 seconds on education and economy!!?
I would of thought the two would of gone hand in hand. How else to the politicians intend to persuade you lot to vote?
Is it just me or is it tricky to tell if the car behind them in the photo is facing left or right - kinda looks the same both ways.
While the geek in me thinks this is kinda cool in a retro way - they thing will never pass modern safety tests or even corner at speed, so I'm guessing they are just using the brand name. Right? (Please tell me I'm right).
Lets hope this is the start of a new phase of electric vehicles, hydrogen cars just seem plain crazy to me. That is unless you are a car exec at which point they make perfect sense: maintenance, parts, control over the fuel source, engines need constant service and exchange of filters and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
is this the time for Microsoft to stop making software and instead focus all their efforts on using their mighty and impressive patent portfolio to make money my dropping lawsuits down left, right and centre on the tech industry?
oh wait, thats been tried before...
and actually, looking at what I just typed and considering the patent protfolio that they possess thats really not so funny anymore.
deeply flawed meetings with deeply flawed decisions about a proposed deeply flawed standard that exisits solely to further the commercials aims of one particular company.
in the meantime it risks destroying the credibilty of a mahor standard body (to further the commercial aims of one company).
and, of course, it reduces the possible impact of a simpler, superior standard (to further the commercial aims of one company).
the more I read about this the madder I become.
there is an old saying if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is probably a duck. the simplest explanation in all cases points beck to some seriously disturbing manipulation by one particular company - and the brazen bare faced manor in which it is done is simply breathtaking. sure there is nothing *illegal* in padding up membership of committees to get the votes that you want - but by any measure it is underhanded and a dirty tactic.
bad comparison. because the IBM PC did soooo badly - look what I am typing this on.
then again.. the clones did well, they reverse engineered the BIOS, the all ran DOS and IBM did not get that much of the profit - so perhaps there is a long term message for Apple here about short term versus long term gains. they have everything in place here to be the proud owners of a new standard in interface, layout, design and overall system - if only they would relax their grip to allow a few systems^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h grains of sand out.
Much of Lexx series 4 had a back story like that. (snip)in the fourth season of the Sci-Fi TV series Lexx, a mad scientist developes a machine to detect and measure the Higgs boson. The result of the experiment causes a massive singularity to form, threatening to destroy the Earth.(/snip)
Still, great publicity for the hadron, at least people will be watching the experiments with great attention, nothing like a "scientists might destroy the planet to solve lunch money argument" headline to promote paper sales.
I'd of thought it would of said "testing, testing, testing.."
Hell, he could of recorded anything he wanted as long as there was no method of playing it back.
It reminds me of that clever SW speech recognition that decoded audio from the Berghof films of Hitler and Eva Braun - I bet they did not realise that technology would one say be able to decode their speech, HAL would of loved it. Alternatively there were some very clever approaches to scanning vinyl recordings and cleaning up the signal digitally before recontructing the audio without hisses and scratches. This is not new, but its certainly clever.
The Hitler tapes are darn right creepy, I saw a great documentary on it, in fact you can watch the whole thing here:-
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763127556620650689&q=hitler+speaks+duration%3Along&total=36&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
On the historical front, it once again proves that in the world of science many people generally work on the same this simultaneously and behind every great man there are many almost great men who got there at the same time or earlier. Of course, everybody knows that Newton got there first...
Not under NDA no, I'll throw in a hint - they sold off their semi conductor business in the last couple of years for a new site in India.
To be fair to them - its only what every single consumer electronics company out there was doing. Mass manufactuting down to the cheapest budget with a design life span of ~1.5 years to force repeat business. Hell, even the top range systems (think well known brands with swizzy glass sliding doors) use only cheap electics inside them, because at the end of the day its impossible to but quality components anymore. And the companies involved in such rubbish practices were not actually the one I was working for but purchased many, many units from them and as such could demand on site support from my department.
Its sad really, the reference CD designs from >15 years ago had glass optics, rotating arms for the optics and really nice components throughout - good for a lifetime. Current mechs are made out of plastic, with a worm drive of plastic, and resin optics - the firmware is expected to hide all the manufacturing tolerance. Naturally it is not as good in the slightest and performance suffers. Anyhow, I digress....
In all fairness to my former employer they refused to implement any changes to follow the numerous CD any copy regimes floating around five or six years ago and stuck to red/orange book standards (though maybe this was more to do with cost of implementing anything clever).
Its kinda obvious, and other posters have stated it, but its important enough to state again.
BitTorrent the company is NOT BitTorrent the protocol.
This is much like the MS Gambit of saying that that as there are other OSes then they do not have a monopoly. It is like the **AA saying that their own pet DRMware internet services exist so they cannot be against music on the internet. It is like drugs companies saying that even though the patents have expired they still have the copyright on the name and process.
In otherwords it is a fanciful fiction that makes people think one thing while hiding another in plain sight. I bet my (metaphorical) hat this they will continue to throttle the bandwith for non-approved or non-compliant P2P.
build this diagnostic into paving slabs and fit it in the far East and you could test 98% of the population in a couple of hours I reckon. Seriously, what is it with spitting in the street out there? Yeah, yeah - kinda off topic.
I used to make CD players for one of the tech giants, as such I was in China alot. When I say "make" I'll be more specific - I wrote the firmware.
I remember vividly a conversation with one of the chinese project managers. I was discussing the build quality of a new CD player for the US markets. It had that brown cardboard like PCB that the racks leap off if you wave a soldering iron in the general vicinity. The PCBS, the unit front, the enfire casework was glued together with a hot glue gun. The radio tuning circuit was wire wrapped around a pencil and then "frozen" in place with dripped wax whilst the software was expected to adapt to mask any tolerance issues. The manager and his team gave it a projected life span of 18 months, then the consumer would be back to buy another, he was really enthusiastic about the repeat business.
*That* is why old tech survives because it was built to last, not with built in obsolescence. And no, I never brought a CD player from my employer ever again.
Thats great, now all we need is a heuristic computer with a suitable monitoring alogrithm to look after them whilst they are sleeping/hibernating. Still, good luck looking for volunteers for those trials.
In some ways competition is good. I would not quite support OOXML, but maybe not actively despise it, if it was on a level playing field.
That is - if the votes were free and fair and based purely on technical merit I would have no problem with OOXML at all. In the spirit of free competition let the best format win to the benefit of all.
But the vote ARE NOT fair. Clearly and demonstrably so, see the past history on this subject. There is the stench of political and commercial interference in decisions that really do need to be taken on unbiased technical grounds. Mr. Durusou is clearly caught between a rock and hard place here - see the posts about the MS interference above - and something has to give, unfortunately that something appears to be his integrity and reputation* (*thats my narrow minded viewpoint based on TFA and others).
Bottom line, I don't think anybody will give this much thought apart from MS who will attempt to spin this six ways from sunday.
Whenever I visited China, I always had a feeling of playing cat and mouse with the unseen and much hypothesised great firewall. BBC back then? no chance. but you could hunt around and use other UK based new sites - daily main, guardian, thesun (if desperate), the times. Sometimes they would grind to a halt and I imagined my unseen monitor in the great firewall office checking what I was doing - then, as if he/she decided I was not a subversive threat, it would spring back into life. Other times I would VPN or proxy and find any site I wanted - but at a pitifully slow rate as if everything I did was intercepted and checked by my unseen intermediary. Other fun things that had odd effects on the speed on which pages would load would be to proxy them through the dialectizer - I always imagined one severly culterally puzzled state firewall operator calling his boss. The 'net access was always different depending on where I hooked up - im the 5* hotel in shezhen was always the fastest, in the office soso, in a street cafe you could forget it.
My conclusion was that the firewall was very very definately real, and the moment it found a foreign news story, the wrong keyword then suddenly wierd timelags and delays in page lookups would occur as my unseen companion blocked or cleared at whim. I also could of sworn that the system could tell the difference between the net being accessed from a posh hotel occupied by Western Engineers and a street cafe.
I really don't get this. It seems (from my outsiders layman prospective) that MS is being treated differently here.
Naturally the whole ISO system is running the risk of losing a massive amount of credibility on this issue.
So why do they do it? I mean they are not fools - they must read all the comments on the web.
The only reason I could come up with is that they are afraid of the possibility of the next big standard being non-ISO approved and thus them being diminished in importance and relevence.
From the creationist museum. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/ars-takes-a-field-trip-the-creation-museum.ars
I conclude you have no sense of scale.
Not all all. My comment was only at religious fundamentalists, not the millions of perfectly normal religious people going about their daily business. Which is more dangerous in the long run? blowing up a bomb and killing 40 people or changing the law to ruin the education* and bias the development of an entire generation in a whole state? (*yup, my narrow minded viewpoint). The bomb is tragic, senseless and pointless, and sells newspapers - but which does more damage?
Still you are just as entitled to your point of view as I am, but they are different. No offense intended.
from the viewpoint of a UK reader, the best way to promote science in the US seems to be to pass it off as a wonderful invention of God.
/. will be as sympathetic an audience as I can find.
I mean come on, intelligent design? evolution as a theory? velociraptors and children playing happily together? That sort of muddy clouded rubbish is surely out of date in todays world. Except in the US.
Mod me to hell and back for all I care - thats what I think. Okay, my views may not be representative of society as a whole - but possibly
The mere fact that you can pack a room, for seven speakers on "Communicating Science in a Religious America." tell me that there is something wrong. These idiots want to have their cake and eat it - on one hand they want to rubbish scientific thinking and deny evolution on the other they want bluray discs, microwaves and nuclear tipped bombs. Get real.
From my viewpoint all religious fundamentalists are just as dangerous as each other - no matter what they preach, what religion they follow, what they wear or what country they come from. Sometimes the danger is more subtle then other times. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that.
I'll exit my soapbox quietly and get my coat then.
oh dear, another "non compliant" analysis.
duck and cover, they are reaching for their lawyer.
sounds like this story is a might fine basis for some good ole' fashioned DMCA action. Pffffft, that was the sound of sequoia credibility dying a death...
ahh. good to see that next years Ig-Nobels are already hotting up.
of course the study was finished when one of the researchers "accidently" slipped the viagra logo into the projector. the rest, as they say, is history and nobody ever mentioned that study or the brick ever again.
Sir, I object to that!
Rama1 was no romp. It was an early story that embedded mysteries inside mysteries, and they were never resolved. It invited the reader to draw his own conclusions about the story and to imagine it in his head as he so desired. The book itself ended in a mystery and possibly a promise of more to come. It will always be a classic in all most sci-fi lovers collections.
Of course Rama2, 3 tried to reveal those "mysteries", were written by somebody else and fit inside the Rama storyline like a turd in a shoe. They do nothing but distract from the genius of Rama1. It has always been a firm favorite of mine.
And in 2009 it will be a movie with Morgan Freeman, I'm not sure what I think about it. I like the idea, but I'm terrified that I will not be able to read the book again without imagining it like it was in the film.
shame.
his earlier works were total classics. RIP.
"non compliant analysis"? whats the betting that the only compliant analysis gives it an A-OK rating.
/. for this thread? absolute cobblers.
thats like car salesperson attempting to sell you a car but only if you agree to take his word that it works and he'll sue anybody that you bring in to check the engine. if ever there was a warning bell not to buy their equipment that was it.
whats next? DMCA action against
I would have thought the two would have gone hand in hand.
There, fixed that for you. Maybe you should watch more educational programming.
Oh I totally agree.
But as I would need to watch 204.5 hours of cable for 1 hour of educational content I don't think my will power is up to it.
they might of got a different answer if they had surveyed /. readers.
thanks heavens I live in the UK where government spying on the populace is strictly for... oh wait.
FTFA: From 5 hours:
* 35 minutes about campaigns and elections
* 36 minutes about the debate over U.S. foreign policy
* 26 minutes or more of crime
* 12 minutes of accidents and disasters
* 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment
On the other hand, one would have seen:
* 1 minute and 25 seconds about the environment
* 1 minute and 22 seconds about education
* 1 minute about science and technology
* 3 minutes and 34 seconds about the economy
Or to put that in perspective...
1 hour 11 minutes of campaigns. elections and foreign policy and then.. only 4 minutes 56 seconds on education and economy!!?
I would of thought the two would of gone hand in hand. How else to the politicians intend to persuade you lot to vote?
Is it just me or is it tricky to tell if the car behind them in the photo is facing left or right - kinda looks the same both ways.
While the geek in me thinks this is kinda cool in a retro way - they thing will never pass modern safety tests or even corner at speed, so I'm guessing they are just using the brand name. Right? (Please tell me I'm right).
Lets hope this is the start of a new phase of electric vehicles, hydrogen cars just seem plain crazy to me. That is unless you are a car exec at which point they make perfect sense: maintenance, parts, control over the fuel source, engines need constant service and exchange of filters and so on.
http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F