More than six years ago -- more like 12. I remember playing with it before there *were* RS/6000s -- AIX ran on some other early IBM workstation hardware at that time.
Not only that, but you could run multiple copies of the SAME OS, just like one of those Russian nesting doll sets. So you could debug mods to your own OS in a virtual environment before deploying them to the real machine.
"So you don't think Micro$oft telling Compaq, "If you ship Netscape on your desktop you will lose your OEM discount" is "predatory, ruthless, monopolistic, etc" then you might want to look those terms up in the dictionary."
You know, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Compaq or Dell had had the balls to tell Microsoft to get stuffed, they'd buy windows on the retail market and install it themselves. I mean, come on -- do you REALLY think Redmond would have followed through, and cut off a fifth of their revenue?
Part of the problem here is not just that Gates may be an agressive asshole, but that everyone else in the industry doesn't have two nads between them!
Actually, I believe that AT&T is the most widely held stock, by a large margin. But they might have recently been passed by Lucent (stands to reason -- all AT&T shareholders got Lucent stock recently)
Let me just say that, compared to many many many other industries (such as the telecommunications industry, of which I am part), or even industries like agriculture or the medical community, the computer industry *IS* a bastion of laissez-faire behaviour.
Hey, pick all the examples you want -- Standard Oil, AT&T, IBM, whatever -- in those cases the government DID NOT look at the particulars of the PRODUCT to make their decisions. They did not regulate how Standard Oil refined their oil, they did not tell AT&T how to engineer their switching systems, they did not tell IBM what color to paint their mainframes. But by telling MS what bits they can ship on their CD-Roms, they have crossed a very real boundary here. What's next, the Justice Department telling Red Hat they can't ship a finger program?
Once the goverment gets the taste of something like this, like a wild animal getting the taste of blood, they will not stop. Shall we take some bets to see who is next? My guess is AOL.
As to IBM and the false marketing practices, I think that's a horse of a different color. The suits against IBM were eventually dropped, and the only end effect was that IBM ceased bundling its software with its hardware. False advertising is a case made against many industries and many products -- obviously computer companies are going to be sued on those grounds.
But the issue of litigation (specifically, litigation this significant) revolving around whether a product is or is not a particular thing is extremely frightening. It's the technical equivalent of the pornography "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it" argument. It's far too subjective to be defined, let alone determined, by anything other than the marketplace.
This may be a finding of fact, but the judge is saying what is illegal here. Had MS not been found to be a monopoly, everything would have ended on Friday. This is definitely a guilty verdict.
[actually, if I can be allowed to contradict myself (hey, this *is* Slashdot!), the one case I can think of where the government has been consistently interfering in product design is crypto software, but I think we're all on the same page there!]
Not a fair comparison -- see my posting above. Win2k is not a replacement in that lineage. Your average consumer will not be buying it to replace their aging Win9x OS.
FYI, they are NOT marketing Win2k as a replacement for Win9x. It's a case of bad nomenclature -- Win2k is not targetted as a consumer OS, there will be another OS, called "millenium", that will continue the Win9x thread. Win2k is a corporate system.
The hidden message in all of this has very little to do with Microsoft, in my opinion. I don't think anyone else has mentioned this on Slashdot (hey, they might have, but there are like 700 postings in various threads now!), but:
Doesn't anyone realize that the camel's nose is in the tent now? There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the computer industry. Until now, this industry has been LEFT ALONE. I don't know if McNealy, Barksdale, et al realize it, but they've made a deal with the devil. How will Sun act when SGI is bankrupt, H-P and IBM are out of the unix workstation market, and the justice department comes after them? How would any of us react?
The thing that set the hairs on the back of my neck to crawling was not Jackson's findings that MS has engaged in questionable business practices, but the findings that said "clearly a browser is a separate product", and other statements that are matters of either opinion or engineering, NOT LAW! The government has decided that they can step in, re-arrange our industry, and even re-arrange a company's products.
Don't think that they won't do it again. And again. And again. Which one of us will be next? I can tell you, Microsoft is NOT going to be the last.
Actually, it's not the amount of revenue his company makes -- but I bet you if he blew Comdex for 10k or so he'd get in. These trade shows are licensed extortion. You can "buy" your company's logo on a piece of paper they wrap around the programs for usually $25,000 to $50,000 -- the assumption being that the attendees have to see it/rip it to read the program. Want a large banner hanging over your booth? That's another $25k. These prices are real examples, from Internet world, 3 years ago.
On another note, has anyone else noticed a real similarity between matrixcubed.net and dreamhost.com? I mean, even the plans and the automated administration are very similar. Or is this more common than I thought?
Do it! Do it! Do it! (need any more encouragement?) There is a real real need for stuff like this on the web. Even what you wrote in your post is invaluable!
It's not just "far from a complete or useful system", it's a trivial system. Consider that I could write a 1-line piece of PERL code that achieved 50% accuracy disambiguating the words YES and NO. Also consider that if the human recognizers (the "base" case) weren't TOLD that the only two words they were listening to were "yes" and "no" one would expect their accuracy to degrade.
This kind of science is littered with cool ideas that worked for the simple problems, but just didn't work for anything bigger. We already HAVE good systems that have high accuracy (> 85%) for speaker independent recognition in the 60k vocabulary range. These guys should publish something when they get half that good on any axis.
This thing is a joke. There are virtually NO ramifications for speech recognition, because it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to build a neural net that recognizes 40,000-60,000 words! This stupid demo recognizes two (or in one case, four) words. Yes, No. Not much of an application there! Or at least, the applications are very limited.
File under: fluff. I work for a speech recognition group. We did.
I think you all need to step back and think a little bit about how the law works for big corporations.
Many big corporations (like the one I work for) are extremely leery about using freeware/whatever when it gets incorporated into a product (nb: this doesn't include the use of Perl/GCC/whatever). The reason? When the time comes that they sell or license whatever they have produced, the contract frequently includes terms that say "we warrent that what we are selling you is ours to sell, and in the event that that is not true, we will do everything to make you whole". It's like doing a title search on a house -- before you buy it, you get a document from the seller saying it's his/hers to sell.
Now, we were licensing a large software product (1m+ lines of code) to another company. We had used a number of off-the-net libraries in that product, and we were giving them an exclusive source license. We had to show, for each and every one of those libraries, its *exact lineage* to prove to the lawyers of both sides that we could legally redistribute it. In some cases, we had to rip the libraries out because they were marked "not for commercial use" (the product was originally developed for government research, so previously, we were ok). In one case, we had to rip the library out because we couldn't find the licensing terms, and couldn't find the author.
This is not silly, it is good business sense -- but it is/was time-consuming and a pain in the ass. I, for one, thought the lawyers were making too big a deal out of it, but we were lucky in that they had a technical background and helped grease the wheels to get the legwork done. Other companies might decide to take another approach, and not incorporate or redistribute freeware at all.
I forgot to add -- then next time you send off an invective-filled email to some unknown, try and picture that it's your sister or mom who has to answer them.
Ohoh -- I sense an imminent "comparison to Hitler" coming up. Hey, if you feel that Unisys is a monster, YOU go out and make an image format and free it to the world, you noble altruistic saint you:-)
...for doing some actual *RESEARCH* instead of instantly hitting the "flame" key.
He forgot to mention one thing, however -- patents are only valid for 17 years. The LZW patent was filed in 1985. This whole issue will be moot in three more years!
(if you want to see the LZW patent, it is available here: http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US04558302__ )
There have really been some excellent suggestions among the slashdotters on this topic -- obviously, quite a few grad students read the postings. Let me second the opinion that you should really choose your grad school based on the topics you wish to study -- every grad school will have its specialty, and if you wind up missing on that target, you will have a hard time advancing. Of course, the big (n) schools will make this easier on you (e.g. Stanford and MIT do research in everything), but they are also harder to get into and larger, so it may not be what you are looking for.
Let me suggest my undergraduate alma mater: The University of Rochester. They have done seminal work on parallel computation, vision, robotics, AI (mostly NL understanding), cognitive science, and theory. They are a PhD-centric department, and very small (about 50 grad students, and 25 faculty. They are very well endowed, and I think highly of the faculty there. I think this would be ideal for the prospective student that wanted a small, intimate department. For more info: http://www.cs.rochester.edu.
I find it very telling that Amazon is NOT a Trust-E member. I went looking for the gif and there wasn't one, then I checked http://www.truste.com, and sure enough, they are not a member.
It's even WORSE than that, though. They agglomerate by your ISP as well, for instance "Mindspring", "AOL", etc, and by geography. When I went to that page they had several specialized links "just for me" -- my local Boston ISP (a *small* one), and a "Boston, MA" link (presumably from my shipping address).
Although they claim these statistics are coming from group research, what if you have your own domain, with only one user at it! In that case, they clustering they are doing is equivalent to person profiling.
Slashdot Mirror
More than six years ago -- more like 12. I remember playing with it before there *were* RS/6000s -- AIX ran on some other early IBM workstation hardware at that time.
Not only that, but you could run multiple copies of the SAME OS, just like one of those Russian nesting doll sets. So you could debug mods to your own OS in a virtual environment before deploying them to the real machine.
Shouldn't the icon for this be a little tux rampant on a red background?
:-)
JUST KIDDING...! Sheesh!
"So you don't think Micro$oft telling Compaq, "If you ship Netscape on your desktop you will lose your OEM discount" is "predatory, ruthless, monopolistic, etc" then you might want to look those terms up in the dictionary."
You know, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Compaq or Dell had had the balls to tell Microsoft to get stuffed, they'd buy windows on the retail market and install it themselves. I mean, come on -- do you REALLY think Redmond would have followed through, and cut off a fifth of their revenue?
Part of the problem here is not just that Gates may be an agressive asshole, but that everyone else in the industry doesn't have two nads between them!
Actually, I believe that AT&T is the most widely held stock, by a large margin. But they might have recently been passed by Lucent (stands to reason -- all AT&T shareholders got Lucent stock recently)
Let me just say that, compared to many many many other industries (such as the telecommunications industry, of which I am part), or even industries like agriculture or the medical community, the computer industry *IS* a bastion of laissez-faire behaviour.
Hey, pick all the examples you want -- Standard Oil, AT&T, IBM, whatever -- in those cases the government DID NOT look at the particulars of the PRODUCT to make their decisions. They did not regulate how Standard Oil refined their oil, they did not tell AT&T how to engineer their switching systems, they did not tell IBM what color to paint their mainframes. But by telling MS what bits they can ship on their CD-Roms, they have crossed a very real boundary here. What's next, the Justice Department telling Red Hat they can't ship a finger program?
Once the goverment gets the taste of something like this, like a wild animal getting the taste of blood, they will not stop. Shall we take some bets to see who is next? My guess is AOL.
As to IBM and the false marketing practices, I think that's a horse of a different color. The suits against IBM were eventually dropped, and the only end effect was that IBM ceased bundling its software with its hardware. False advertising is a case made against many industries and many products -- obviously computer companies are going to be sued on those grounds.
But the issue of litigation (specifically, litigation this significant) revolving around whether a product is or is not a particular thing is extremely frightening. It's the technical equivalent of the pornography "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it" argument. It's far too subjective to be defined, let alone determined, by anything other than the marketplace.
This may be a finding of fact, but the judge is saying what is illegal here. Had MS not been found to be a monopoly, everything would have ended on Friday. This is definitely a guilty verdict.
[actually, if I can be allowed to contradict myself (hey, this *is* Slashdot!), the one case I can think of where the government has been consistently interfering in product design is crypto software, but I think we're all on the same page there!]
Not a fair comparison -- see my posting above. Win2k is not a replacement in that lineage. Your average consumer will not be buying it to replace their aging Win9x OS.
FYI, they are NOT marketing Win2k as a replacement for Win9x. It's a case of bad nomenclature -- Win2k is not targetted as a consumer OS, there will be another OS, called "millenium", that will continue the Win9x thread. Win2k is a corporate system.
The hidden message in all of this has very little to do with Microsoft, in my opinion. I don't think anyone else has mentioned this on Slashdot (hey, they might have, but there are like 700 postings in various threads now!), but:
Doesn't anyone realize that the camel's nose is in the tent now? There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the computer industry. Until now, this industry has been LEFT ALONE. I don't know if McNealy, Barksdale, et al realize it, but they've made a deal with the devil. How will Sun act when SGI is bankrupt, H-P and IBM are out of the unix workstation market, and the justice department comes after them? How would any of us react?
The thing that set the hairs on the back of my neck to crawling was not Jackson's findings that MS has engaged in questionable business practices, but the findings that said "clearly a browser is a separate product", and other statements that are matters of either opinion or engineering, NOT LAW! The government has decided that they can step in, re-arrange our industry, and even re-arrange a company's products.
Don't think that they won't do it again. And again. And again. Which one of us will be next? I can tell you, Microsoft is NOT going to be the last.
:-(
Actually, it's not the amount of revenue his company makes -- but I bet you if he blew Comdex for 10k or so he'd get in. These trade shows are licensed extortion. You can "buy" your company's logo on a piece of paper they wrap around the programs for usually $25,000 to $50,000 -- the assumption being that the attendees have to see it/rip it to read the program. Want a large banner hanging over your booth? That's another $25k. These prices are real examples, from Internet world, 3 years ago.
On another note, has anyone else noticed a real similarity between matrixcubed.net and dreamhost.com? I mean, even the plans and the automated administration are very similar. Or is this more common than I thought?
Do it! Do it! Do it! (need any more encouragement?) There is a real real need for stuff like this on the web. Even what you wrote in your post is invaluable!
This thing should have a Monty-Python-Foot icon for it... Real or not!
It's not just "far from a complete or useful system", it's a trivial system. Consider that I could write a 1-line piece of PERL code that achieved 50% accuracy disambiguating the words YES and NO. Also consider that if the human recognizers (the "base" case) weren't TOLD that the only two words they were listening to were "yes" and "no" one would expect their accuracy to degrade.
This kind of science is littered with cool ideas that worked for the simple problems, but just didn't work for anything bigger. We already HAVE good systems that have high accuracy (> 85%) for speaker independent recognition in the 60k vocabulary range. These guys should publish something when they get half that good on any axis.
This thing is a joke. There are virtually NO ramifications for speech recognition, because it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to build a neural net that recognizes 40,000-60,000 words! This stupid demo recognizes two (or in one case, four) words. Yes, No. Not much of an application there! Or at least, the applications are very limited.
File under: fluff. I work for a speech recognition group. We did.
Oh, yeah, and MySQL is real innovative. Buddy, there haven't been any "inventions" in relational databases in years.
I think you all need to step back and think a little bit about how the law works for big corporations.
Many big corporations (like the one I work for) are extremely leery about using freeware/whatever when it gets incorporated into a product (nb: this doesn't include the use of Perl/GCC/whatever). The reason? When the time comes that they sell or license whatever they have produced, the contract frequently includes terms that say "we warrent that what we are selling you is ours to sell, and in the event that that is not true, we will do everything to make you whole". It's like doing a title search on a house -- before you buy it, you get a document from the seller saying it's his/hers to sell.
Now, we were licensing a large software product (1m+ lines of code) to another company. We had used a number of off-the-net libraries in that product, and we were giving them an exclusive source license. We had to show, for each and every one of those libraries, its *exact lineage* to prove to the lawyers of both sides that we could legally redistribute it. In some cases, we had to rip the libraries out because they were marked "not for commercial use" (the product was originally developed for government research, so previously, we were ok). In one case, we had to rip the library out because we couldn't find the licensing terms, and couldn't find the author.
This is not silly, it is good business sense -- but it is/was time-consuming and a pain in the ass. I, for one, thought the lawyers were making too big a deal out of it, but we were lucky in that they had a technical background and helped grease the wheels to get the legwork done. Other companies might decide to take another approach, and not incorporate or redistribute freeware at all.
I forgot to add -- then next time you send off an invective-filled email to some unknown, try and picture that it's your sister or mom who has to answer them.
Ohoh -- I sense an imminent "comparison to Hitler" coming up. Hey, if you feel that Unisys is a monster, YOU go out and make an image format and free it to the world, you noble altruistic saint you :-)
...for doing some actual *RESEARCH* instead of instantly hitting the "flame" key.
_ )
He forgot to mention one thing, however -- patents are only valid for 17 years. The LZW patent was filed in 1985. This whole issue will be moot in three more years!
(if you want to see the LZW patent, it is available here: http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US04558302_
There have really been some excellent suggestions among the slashdotters on this topic -- obviously, quite a few grad students read the postings. Let me second the opinion that you should really choose your grad school based on the topics you wish to study -- every grad school will have its specialty, and if you wind up missing on that target, you will have a hard time advancing. Of course, the big (n) schools will make this easier on you (e.g. Stanford and MIT do research in everything), but they are also harder to get into and larger, so it may not be what you are looking for.
Let me suggest my undergraduate alma mater: The University of Rochester. They have done seminal work on parallel computation, vision, robotics, AI (mostly NL understanding), cognitive science, and theory. They are a PhD-centric department, and very small (about 50 grad students, and 25 faculty. They are very well endowed, and I think highly of the faculty there. I think this would be ideal for the prospective student that wanted a small, intimate department. For more info: http://www.cs.rochester.edu.
I find it very telling that Amazon is NOT a Trust-E member. I went looking for the gif and there wasn't one, then I checked http://www.truste.com, and sure enough, they are not a member.
It's even WORSE than that, though. They agglomerate by your ISP as well, for instance "Mindspring", "AOL", etc, and by geography. When I went to that page they had several specialized links "just for me" -- my local Boston ISP (a *small* one), and a "Boston, MA" link (presumably from my shipping address).
Although they claim these statistics are coming from group research, what if you have your own domain, with only one user at it! In that case, they clustering they are doing is equivalent to person profiling.
Glad someone pointed this out. Yes, years as in "> 3 years"... That's what, 42 internet years?
If you explore around the Sci-Fi site, it seems other readers of the site share your opinion :-)