It's more frequently than that. I used to work for a place whose contracts administrator was a CPA that did tax work on the side. The IRS sent him a BOX (not some measly little envelope) of changes to the tax code at least every quarter. This amounted to, usually, hundreds of pages that he had to replace in his tax manuals. (And I used to complain about the 1-2 dozen pages of corrections to the DEC manuals that I'd get from time to time.)
I'd truly hate to be writing tax software. Talk about trying to hit a moving target.
Better grab that patent on 64-bit second counters quick. That give us time stamps for (approx.) 585 billion years. By the time 128-bit counters would be useful I suspect that the universe will have died out, let alone any humans who give a second thought to petty ownership of ideas.
Maybe it's a good idea, though, to issue the call to arms on getting the Y2038 ``bug'' fixed. (Yah, I know it's not a bug but that's what the press will call it.) We'll all be running on 64-bit processors in a couple of years anyway. Hopefully, 38 years will be enough time to migrate all those older UNIX systems to 64-bit versions of the libraries. It might seem a bit early to be working on it now, but think how much fun it'll be when you can say you got the problem solved with 35 years (or whatever) to spare.
``I have at least a couple of physical injuries that have affected the way I can live my life. I can't really see anyone being able to run 1000 miles any way?
Yah... I had a couple of those too (actually not related to running) and, as a result, I don't do that kind of running anymore. BTW, for me that was only about 11 mi/day over the summer. A nice hour and a half or so to be alone in your thoughts (when you're not watching out for crazy drivers, that is.)
``Being in sports is a very conformist thing at least where I stand in the world. Everyone likes sports, watches sports, fantasizes about sports, therefore it is safe to assume that sports are in the norm.''
Reminds me of the old Bonze Dog Band song that includes the line ``It's the odd boy that doesn't like Sport''. I find that attitude a bit odd. Not that I minded being encouraged to participate in sports, mind you. Probably kept from becoming some sort of juvenile delinquent.:-) I would have preferred that something like basebase be played all year 'round instead of football (George Carlin's old comparison of those two sports was always a favorite of mine).
``Since they are so aggresive maybe we should profile all of the football, track, and cheerleaders.''
Interesting... So being interested in or participating in any sports makes you some sort of conformist? When I was in high school, the people who were on the track team and especially those of us who were also on the cross country team were the geeks. Of course, this was long enough ago that if you wanted to work on a computer you had to know how to use a keypunch machine (I suspect that a majority of Slashdot readers were even born then). Being a geek meant that you had good grades, had more than a passing interest in science, and didn't fall into the ``jock'' (mostly football players), ``freak'' (hippy wannabees), or ``gearhead'' (the auto shop crowd). Oddly, we were jocks but not considered part of the jock crowd. We were just the brainy guys (most of us were in the top percentiles in GPA and in NHS) that ran 1000 miles over the summmer; something that marked you as extremely wierd.
I find your sort of profiling (stereotyping, really) nearly as bad as that being employed by the FBI.
IMHO, the Caltech hack of the card section at the Rose Bowl was the greatest and better than the MIT football game hack. (This one's also listed in the Jargon File.)
What utter BS! Call me an idealist but, IMHO, there's no such thing as a necessary evil. You either accept the evil or you turn away.
BTW, I have more applications installed on my Linux box at home than most people's PCs have here at work. The only time I've had problems is when I decide to delve into parts of the kernel or device drivers (neither of which is a specialty of mine) and do something experimental. I don't blame Linux for that; it was my mistake.
And I strongly disagree that it's ``not the operating system that crashes''. If I'm going into the NT tool to add a user and it locks the machine, then it's the OS that crashed, pal. I've yet to have any flavor of UNIX seize when editing/etc/passwd. I guess adding users to NT is something you should schedule downtime for since NT might lock up on you while you're performing such a simple task.
There is no such thing (at least I've not encountered one) as an unconditionally stable operating system. You can always do something to make even the most rock-solid of them tip over. My major beef with NT is that it claims that it's stable but, heck, just getting the damned thing installed can make it blue screen. It shouldn't take an MSCE to install the operating system. I never had to take a vendor course or be certified to install any of the DEC operating systems I used to use. All it took was reading the manual (you really haven't installed a real operating system until you've done a SYSGEN of RSX on a fully loaded PDP-11/70:-). Hell, my first VMS install was done after reading a few magazine columns about the process. Just what the heck are they teaching in these certification classes, anyway?
I read Cities in Flight when I was in my early teens. The book had just come out in paperback. It still ranks up there near the top of my list of the greatest Sci-Fi novels.
Never read any of the Star Trek novels (none of 'em -- never looked interesting) so I can't hold them against Blish.
I loved the part in CIF where the main character asks ``What city has two names twice?''.
Getting a bit off-topic but...
I was reminded of the part where the cities took off when I saw the movie Silent Running. Does anyone remember the little robots (Huey, Dewey, and Louie if memory serves) in that movie? They made reappearance in the original Star Wars movie when R2D2 and C3PO are in the trader's sand crawler before they got sold to Luke's uncle. One of these robots was walking around in the sand crawler. Must have still been sitting around in the props department.
``I've never thought much of most computer magazines - they have too much stake in promoting the products of their advertisers to be believable.''
But it doesn't have to be that way and, at one time, it wasn't that way.
Anyone around when microcomputers were new stuff can remember Creative Computing, the original Byte, and once the IBM PC came out, magazines like IBM PC Technical Journal (or was it just Tech Journal. It was always great looking forward to a new Don Lancaster or Steve Ciarcia article for new hardware ideas or some nifty assembly code tricks in ``Some Assembly Required'' (I can't remember now; was that column in IBMPCTJ?).
Once I moved into larger systems, the newspaper sized magazines like Digital Review were staples of your tech reading. It had great multipart articles on tuning VMS I/O performance, and stuff like that. Product reviews were geared toward those with a technical bent with real benchmarks (not puff pieces sponsored by vendors).
Then the technical magazines started insisting that there was a good reason for abandoning their newsprint publications in favor of the glossy paper versions. Instead of continuing their original mission of providing a place for the dissemination of technical information for the people involved in IT, they seemed to turn into vehicles for graphics artists and magazine layout designers to try and win design awards. Enter the age of content-free but visually exciting magazines. Here's a clue for the publishers: It's the content stupid! We're not interested in eye candy. Technical magazines aren't supposed to look like Vogue.
Also, for those of us who were attempting to be somewhat ``green'', this was disturbing because, for a long time, glossy paper magazines wouldn't be accepted for recycling. Even more troubling was that the format of the magazine always changed to more of an advertising rag than a magazine targeted for the technical person (that was, after all, the real reason for the shift to glossy paper -- increased advertising revenues are possible if the ads look fancier).
Now the ones that are left are, by and large, nothing more than product reviews targetted for non-technical management. Heck, the advertisements are so outdated that they're less than worthless. (The vast majority of the ads are all selling the same products but can't even publish actual prices, instead urging you to ``Call!!!'')
I can't even bring myself to read PC Magazine at the public library anymore let alone buy an issue.
``Imaging starting a new Newspaper and calling it "The New York Times" the real New York Times would have a good reason to say no you can't do that.''
Imagine you own a company called Infocom and you are known for selling a popular computer game called ``Zork''. Imagine that because of the popularity of your flagship product you decide to name your customer newsletter ``The New Zork Times''. Would you ever imagine that the New York Times' legal department would threaten you with legal action? Because it thought that people might mistake your newsletter for their newspaper? It happened. There is little in the way of logic passing through the minds of some lawyers.
I guess that the following publications would also run into trouble:
``The New Pork Times'' -- the monthly newsletter put out by the producers of the other beef.
``The New Cork Times'' -- the journal of trends in wine stopper technology.
``The New Bork Times'' -- former conservative judge comments on the major news events affecting you.
If this is the gist of the article then I suspect that explains why someone in our corporate IT department decided to block Salon labeling it ``inappropriate for business use''.
Methinks Tim O'Rielly is getting a little too full of himself. Equating Gates and Hitler? Nah, Gates and Henry Ford maybe (a big maybe).
...I'd settle for DSL availability. I'm within range of the local CO but no one seems to be able to tell me definitively whether or not I can get DSL. The phone company (Ameritech) only seems to want to sell me more cellular minutes, or caller ID, or telemarketer blocking, or a bunch of other crap that I don't want or need.
Oh, but they'll cheerfully sell me ISDN access for about the same cost as a T1!
I heard about this a couple of days ago on NPR. There was mention that professors were being told that they should copyright their lectures so that publishing them would constitute a copyright violation.
IMHO, IANAL, etc. etc., but unless you tape the lecture, type up an accurate transcript, and post it on this Web site, I cannot see how your lecture's being copyrighted helps the professor. Unless your students are the fastest damn note takers on the planet, they're not going to get the lecture down verbatim. Paraphrasing isn't a copyright violation as far as I remember.
All in all, I think this is pretty overblown. Unless the professor is the worst in the University, his students are going to get more out of the lectures than they will reading the transcripts. Of course, the prof's gotta lose the attitude that ``my time is too important to spend it talking with students, and my office hours aren't for discussions about class'', etc. Clowns like that should lose their tenure (tenure's supposed to protect academic freedom, not protect some anti-social boor dressed in tweed -- but that's another question altogether, eh?). My wife's currently struggling through a C class taught by a guy who, apparently, has too much else to do than prepare a decent lecture. She gets a lot more from the textbook. I doubt that transcripts of his lectures would be too helpful if found on the Web. (heh, heh)
[All of this, of course, reminds me of the old joke about the professor who was teaching a senior-level/first-year-grad course for the first time and asked another professor how to tell the seniors from the grad students. The answer was ``When you go in the first day, say 'Good morning!'. The seniors will reply back; the grad students will have already written it down.'']
``None seem to see the innovations Microsoft has made to Windows, which now incorporates dozens of items we used to buy from third parties.''
Let Microsoft innovate Windows all they want. There's a lot more to computing than Microsoft software.
Jerry Pournelle seems lately to think that all computing is done with Microsoft products and that those are the only innovations that count anymore. I know Jerry's used other software; his Chaos Manor columns in Byte used to describe his experiences with all sorts of other software. I used to read them regularly. Lately, though, if it doesn't come from Redmond, he barely mentions it. His attempts to use Linux are sometimes humorous. Otherwise, I barely bother to read him anymore.
I haven't read the entire series of replies to this story so I hope that I'm not repeating someone...
Does anyone else see this as a potential performance bottleneck?
Vendors are telling us that we will be able to plug everything from mice to hard drives into the USB. Do you really want to see your mouse freeze because you're in the middle of a large data transfer from a hard disk? Watch your mouse jump around jerkily because your scanner is transferring data?
I don't mind seeing ISA bus cards disappear so long as they increase the number of PCI slots!!!
``That is the problem with libel law, it seems to me (!= lawyer). It is effectively 'guilty until proven innocent'. If you have something which might be libellous, you have to remove it immediately, and err on the side of caution.''
I hope that I'm not the only one bothered by this. I would prefer to think of the internet/www as a public park where you can get up on your soapbox and state your opinion. If your ideas are full of it, listeners will tell you. It looks like that to keep out of trouble, you'll now have to have a lawyer at your side while you're up on your soapbox and have to clear all your statements with him before actually speaking to the public. I guess I still prefer the Usenet-style public forums. Free expression has an inherently lower S/N but at least you're free to express your ideas without having them edited out.
If everyone takes Yahoo's position and deletes anything that might be deemed offensive to someone then the result is a sort of Disneyfication of all of the internet. Remember when Disneyland would bar anyone from entering if their hair was longer than some Disney-prescribed standard? Is that effectively any different from the censorship of posts? Is that the sort of internet we want? I suspect that some case is going to come up in the not-too-distant future, it's going to get ugly, and that a bunch of lawyers are going to be very happy about it.
``I think that if a message is possibly libellous or otherwise illegal, Rob and the gang are justified in removing it.''
As the Boston Globe stated, Yahoo says it remove what it thinks will ``break securities laws or contain libelous statements''. Good gawd, does every Web site now have to become the arbiter of what's libelous and what's not? Damn near anything could be considered libelous if the individual being talked about is in a bad mood that day.
Deleting posts that could be in violation of SEC regulations seems simple enough. There are clear guidelines that regulate the kind of information that can be openly discussed during acquisition/merger talks, IPSs, etc. But who decides what's libelous?
How many people would Slashdot, Yahoo, etc. have to hire to pore over every post to make sure it didn't contain any libelous content? How could you possibly make sure that all these reviewers are thinking exactly the same was to ensure evenhandedness in the judgement of content?
I supposed this would be workable once the security aspects (spoofing, etc.) have been addressed. It'd be a problem for our household since our net access only allows a single IP address assigned via DHCP. If we all got IP addresses assigned at birth then we'd all have a unique ID that could be used for things like voting, email, IP telephony, etc.
But, on the other hand, that pretty much does away with Anonymous Cowards, doesn't it? The personal privacy freaks would excrete masonry if this happened.
``most systems involved in actual trade flow are unix based.''
That's my experience as well. In fact, we had a storeroom with one wall full of spare HP/UX workstations in case there was a hardware problem with one of the systems on the bond trading floor.
One of my co-workers came from a trading firm that lived and died by its Sun workstations. Another former co-worker went to another trading outfit that was running UNIX on all of its trading systems.
``Since it isn't a Microsoft-only practice, and since it seems to be a rather widespread practice, maybe you better buy a bigger mattress to stuff those retirement dollars into instead.''
I agree that it's a widespread practice. That's probably why the FASB's proposed change to accounting for stock options was so heavily opposed by corporations. Just because it's ``widespread'' doesn't make it the correct way of doing business. I doubt that many CEOs and other high-ranking corporate officers would have been happy to see these stock options count against corporate earnings, possibly driving down the company's stock price, and directly impacting the value of their (paper) worth.
Did I sound like I was over-reacting? I'm just someone who realizes that the way things are going in this country, I may never be able to take retirement the way my parents did (not that I'm looking forward to many years of sitting on my duff -- I'd go stir crazy!), and I do plan on keeping close track of how my retirement money is invested. Many people do the same thing to make sure that it's not invested in some company or country's currency that doesn't pass their particular brand of political correctness. Are they over-reacting? (OK, maybe -- some of these folks get a little extreme.) I think that watching out for investments that could fall flat on their face is a prudent activity. Is that over-reacting? The fear of this accounting practice may be the financial scare du jour and will probably blow over soon. Let's hope so, eh?
As for the Parrish study being anti-Microsoft: I never read that into it (though others might). I think the study was opposed to the specific accounting practice that Parrish believes is not much more than smoke and mirrors. Microsoft's having such a huge capitalization (and with so many people dependent on its stock value) is, perhaps, the best or, at least one of the most visible, examples of a company that uses this accounting practice.
``The stock market is, IMO, just a machine for pumping money out of amateurs' pockets and into the pros' pockets.''
Now I may just have to go re-read ``Where Are the Customers' Yachts? Or, a Good Hard Look at Wall Street'' by Fred Schwed and Peter Arno. A sometimes humorous look into the way Wall Street investment firms work.
``The bottom line is usually 'what goes around comes around'. -IF- MS is really crossing the line with regards to how they cook the books, it will catch up with them''
Anyway, I believe that the Parrish analyst's point was that if and when it does catch up with Microsoft, a lot of little people are going to get hurt when the value of their retirement plans goes down the toilet. If this doesn't register somewhat on the concern-o-meter then methinks that, perhaps, too many Slashdot readers aren't concerning themselves with their retirement plans. Panic certainly isn't warranted (yet) but keep your eyes peeled. The FASB (sp?) may get its way in the future and those stock options may eat into corporate earnings; if so, the stock market could become much more volatile.
I saw this analysis last week and didn't really know what to make of it. I'm sure that many see its author as some sort of crackpot. Since I'm not a professional financial analyst, I can't really judge the quality of this guy's claims. On the other hand, it certainly seems shady that MS canned its internal (for reasons that we'll probably never really know since, I believe, the terms of the out of court settlement will neatly cover up the facts). Sigh.
My 401K and other investments are only currently only minimally invested in MS stock. I will be keeping an eye out on how heavily my retirement is dependent on certain stocks.
``>In the case of non-compete clauses, courts have >generally enforced them.
No, they haven't. The courts have always been hostile to these, and only enforced them when absolutely necessary.''
I've run into some people who say that they've been forced to sign agreements such as this. Then they leave the company and their former employer tries to prevent them from working in the same field. Judges presiding over the cases that the acquantances have been in threw the cases out saying, essentially, that no company has the right to deny you a livelihood. One guy said that it might have helped that he had his wife and three kids sitting behind him in the courtroom. (Good tactic, IMHO.)
These clauses have always struck me as a ``sour grapes'' clause:
``If you won't do this work for us then, Dammit, you ain't gonna do it for amybody!''
``What are they talking about? I read the article, and it says that not only are users exposed to porn, but "horrific pictures of teenage sex". They don't give any examples, or sites that do that, they simply assert this, and then have the article wander on to a history of mp3s.''
Funny stuff. For me, it helped to bring up a mental picture of a group of Monty Python ``Twits of the Year'' and imagine that all the tripe in the article was coming from them.
Trying to follow their tortured logic was too much on a Friday afternoon. Was it ``MP3 downloaders are forced (á la Clockwork Orange, I guess) `horrific pictures of teenage sex' videos therefore MP3s must be abolished''? Was that it?
(I imagine now that everyone will be sprinkling their webpage META tags with the phrase ``horrific pictures of teenage sex''.)
Re:Hard science fiction is soft
on
Darwin's Radio
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· Score: 2
``I think we should discontinue all further use of the term "hard science fiction" - there are NO hard sci-fi writers, even among those (like Bear) with strong science groundings.''
Have to disagree. John Cramer, author of ``Einstein's Bridge'' and ``Twistor'', is a working physicist when he's not writing. Those two novels are full of references to current scientific theories. At least one of the novels I mentioned has an appendix that describes the relationships between those theories and the concepts used in the story.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't underestimate the ability of the government to turn a molehill into a mountain.
It's more frequently than that. I used to work for a place whose contracts administrator was a CPA that did tax work on the side. The IRS sent him a BOX (not some measly little envelope) of changes to the tax code at least every quarter. This amounted to, usually, hundreds of pages that he had to replace in his tax manuals. (And I used to complain about the 1-2 dozen pages of corrections to the DEC manuals that I'd get from time to time.)
I'd truly hate to be writing tax software. Talk about trying to hit a moving target.
Better grab that patent on 64-bit second counters quick. That give us time stamps for (approx.) 585 billion years. By the time 128-bit counters would be useful I suspect that the universe will have died out, let alone any humans who give a second thought to petty ownership of ideas.
Maybe it's a good idea, though, to issue the call to arms on getting the Y2038 ``bug'' fixed. (Yah, I know it's not a bug but that's what the press will call it.) We'll all be running on 64-bit processors in a couple of years anyway. Hopefully, 38 years will be enough time to migrate all those older UNIX systems to 64-bit versions of the libraries. It might seem a bit early to be working on it now, but think how much fun it'll be when you can say you got the problem solved with 35 years (or whatever) to spare.
Ah.
Yah... I had a couple of those too (actually not related to running) and, as a result, I don't do that kind of running anymore. BTW, for me that was only about 11 mi/day over the summer. A nice hour and a half or so to be alone in your thoughts (when you're not watching out for crazy drivers, that is.)
Reminds me of the old Bonze Dog Band song that includes the line ``It's the odd boy that doesn't like Sport''. I find that attitude a bit odd. Not that I minded being encouraged to participate in sports, mind you. Probably kept from becoming some sort of juvenile delinquent. :-) I would have preferred that something like basebase be played all year 'round instead of football (George Carlin's old comparison of those two sports was always a favorite of mine).
Interesting... So being interested in or participating in any sports makes you some sort of conformist? When I was in high school, the people who were on the track team and especially those of us who were also on the cross country team were the geeks. Of course, this was long enough ago that if you wanted to work on a computer you had to know how to use a keypunch machine (I suspect that a majority of Slashdot readers were even born then). Being a geek meant that you had good grades, had more than a passing interest in science, and didn't fall into the ``jock'' (mostly football players), ``freak'' (hippy wannabees), or ``gearhead'' (the auto shop crowd). Oddly, we were jocks but not considered part of the jock crowd. We were just the brainy guys (most of us were in the top percentiles in GPA and in NHS) that ran 1000 miles over the summmer; something that marked you as extremely wierd.
I find your sort of profiling (stereotyping, really) nearly as bad as that being employed by the FBI.
IMHO, the Caltech hack of the card section at the Rose Bowl was the greatest and better than the MIT football game hack. (This one's also listed in the Jargon File.)
What utter BS! Call me an idealist but, IMHO, there's no such thing as a necessary evil. You either accept the evil or you turn away.
BTW, I have more applications installed on my Linux box at home than most people's PCs have here at work. The only time I've had problems is when I decide to delve into parts of the kernel or device drivers (neither of which is a specialty of mine) and do something experimental. I don't blame Linux for that; it was my mistake.
And I strongly disagree that it's ``not the operating system that crashes''. If I'm going into the NT tool to add a user and it locks the machine, then it's the OS that crashed, pal. I've yet to have any flavor of UNIX seize when editing /etc/passwd. I guess adding users to NT is something you should schedule downtime for since NT might lock up on you while you're performing such a simple task.
There is no such thing (at least I've not encountered one) as an unconditionally stable operating system. You can always do something to make even the most rock-solid of them tip over. My major beef with NT is that it claims that it's stable but, heck, just getting the damned thing installed can make it blue screen. It shouldn't take an MSCE to install the operating system. I never had to take a vendor course or be certified to install any of the DEC operating systems I used to use. All it took was reading the manual (you really haven't installed a real operating system until you've done a SYSGEN of RSX on a fully loaded PDP-11/70 :-). Hell, my first VMS install was done after reading a few magazine columns about the process. Just what the heck are they teaching in these certification classes, anyway?
I read Cities in Flight when I was in my early teens. The book had just come out in paperback. It still ranks up there near the top of my list of the greatest Sci-Fi novels.
Never read any of the Star Trek novels (none of 'em -- never looked interesting) so I can't hold them against Blish.
I loved the part in CIF where the main character asks ``What city has two names twice?''.
Getting a bit off-topic but...
I was reminded of the part where the cities took off when I saw the movie Silent Running. Does anyone remember the little robots (Huey, Dewey, and Louie if memory serves) in that movie? They made reappearance in the original Star Wars movie when R2D2 and C3PO are in the trader's sand crawler before they got sold to Luke's uncle. One of these robots was walking around in the sand crawler. Must have still been sitting around in the props department.
But it doesn't have to be that way and, at one time, it wasn't that way.
Anyone around when microcomputers were new stuff can remember Creative Computing, the original Byte, and once the IBM PC came out, magazines like IBM PC Technical Journal (or was it just Tech Journal. It was always great looking forward to a new Don Lancaster or Steve Ciarcia article for new hardware ideas or some nifty assembly code tricks in ``Some Assembly Required'' (I can't remember now; was that column in IBMPCTJ?).
Once I moved into larger systems, the newspaper sized magazines like Digital Review were staples of your tech reading. It had great multipart articles on tuning VMS I/O performance, and stuff like that. Product reviews were geared toward those with a technical bent with real benchmarks (not puff pieces sponsored by vendors).
Then the technical magazines started insisting that there was a good reason for abandoning their newsprint publications in favor of the glossy paper versions. Instead of continuing their original mission of providing a place for the dissemination of technical information for the people involved in IT, they seemed to turn into vehicles for graphics artists and magazine layout designers to try and win design awards. Enter the age of content-free but visually exciting magazines. Here's a clue for the publishers: It's the content stupid! We're not interested in eye candy. Technical magazines aren't supposed to look like Vogue.
Also, for those of us who were attempting to be somewhat ``green'', this was disturbing because, for a long time, glossy paper magazines wouldn't be accepted for recycling. Even more troubling was that the format of the magazine always changed to more of an advertising rag than a magazine targeted for the technical person (that was, after all, the real reason for the shift to glossy paper -- increased advertising revenues are possible if the ads look fancier).
Now the ones that are left are, by and large, nothing more than product reviews targetted for non-technical management. Heck, the advertisements are so outdated that they're less than worthless. (The vast majority of the ads are all selling the same products but can't even publish actual prices, instead urging you to ``Call!!!'')
I can't even bring myself to read PC Magazine at the public library anymore let alone buy an issue.
Imagine you own a company called Infocom and you are known for selling a popular computer game called ``Zork''. Imagine that because of the popularity of your flagship product you decide to name your customer newsletter ``The New Zork Times''. Would you ever imagine that the New York Times' legal department would threaten you with legal action? Because it thought that people might mistake your newsletter for their newspaper? It happened. There is little in the way of logic passing through the minds of some lawyers.
I guess that the following publications would also run into trouble:
If this is the gist of the article then I suspect that explains why someone in our corporate IT department decided to block Salon labeling it ``inappropriate for business use''.
Methinks Tim O'Rielly is getting a little too full of himself. Equating Gates and Hitler? Nah, Gates and Henry Ford maybe (a big maybe).
...I'd settle for DSL availability. I'm within range of the local CO but no one seems to be able to tell me definitively whether or not I can get DSL. The phone company (Ameritech) only seems to want to sell me more cellular minutes, or caller ID, or telemarketer blocking, or a bunch of other crap that I don't want or need.
Oh, but they'll cheerfully sell me ISDN access for about the same cost as a T1!
I heard about this a couple of days ago on NPR. There was mention that professors were being told that they should copyright their lectures so that publishing them would constitute a copyright violation.
IMHO, IANAL, etc. etc., but unless you tape the lecture, type up an accurate transcript, and post it on this Web site, I cannot see how your lecture's being copyrighted helps the professor. Unless your students are the fastest damn note takers on the planet, they're not going to get the lecture down verbatim. Paraphrasing isn't a copyright violation as far as I remember.
All in all, I think this is pretty overblown. Unless the professor is the worst in the University, his students are going to get more out of the lectures than they will reading the transcripts. Of course, the prof's gotta lose the attitude that ``my time is too important to spend it talking with students, and my office hours aren't for discussions about class'', etc. Clowns like that should lose their tenure (tenure's supposed to protect academic freedom, not protect some anti-social boor dressed in tweed -- but that's another question altogether, eh?). My wife's currently struggling through a C class taught by a guy who, apparently, has too much else to do than prepare a decent lecture. She gets a lot more from the textbook. I doubt that transcripts of his lectures would be too helpful if found on the Web. (heh, heh)
[All of this, of course, reminds me of the old joke about the professor who was teaching a senior-level/first-year-grad course for the first time and asked another professor how to tell the seniors from the grad students. The answer was ``When you go in the first day, say 'Good morning!'. The seniors will reply back; the grad students will have already written it down.'']
Let Microsoft innovate Windows all they want. There's a lot more to computing than Microsoft software.
Jerry Pournelle seems lately to think that all computing is done with Microsoft products and that those are the only innovations that count anymore. I know Jerry's used other software; his Chaos Manor columns in Byte used to describe his experiences with all sorts of other software. I used to read them regularly. Lately, though, if it doesn't come from Redmond, he barely mentions it. His attempts to use Linux are sometimes humorous. Otherwise, I barely bother to read him anymore.
I haven't read the entire series of replies to this story so I hope that I'm not repeating someone...
Does anyone else see this as a potential performance bottleneck?
Vendors are telling us that we will be able to plug everything from mice to hard drives into the USB. Do you really want to see your mouse freeze because you're in the middle of a large data transfer from a hard disk? Watch your mouse jump around jerkily because your scanner is transferring data?
I don't mind seeing ISA bus cards disappear so long as they increase the number of PCI slots!!!
I hope that I'm not the only one bothered by this. I would prefer to think of the internet/www as a public park where you can get up on your soapbox and state your opinion. If your ideas are full of it, listeners will tell you. It looks like that to keep out of trouble, you'll now have to have a lawyer at your side while you're up on your soapbox and have to clear all your statements with him before actually speaking to the public. I guess I still prefer the Usenet-style public forums. Free expression has an inherently lower S/N but at least you're free to express your ideas without having them edited out.
If everyone takes Yahoo's position and deletes anything that might be deemed offensive to someone then the result is a sort of Disneyfication of all of the internet. Remember when Disneyland would bar anyone from entering if their hair was longer than some Disney-prescribed standard? Is that effectively any different from the censorship of posts? Is that the sort of internet we want? I suspect that some case is going to come up in the not-too-distant future, it's going to get ugly, and that a bunch of lawyers are going to be very happy about it.
As the Boston Globe stated, Yahoo says it remove what it thinks will ``break securities laws or contain libelous statements''. Good gawd, does every Web site now have to become the arbiter of what's libelous and what's not? Damn near anything could be considered libelous if the individual being talked about is in a bad mood that day.
Deleting posts that could be in violation of SEC regulations seems simple enough. There are clear guidelines that regulate the kind of information that can be openly discussed during acquisition/merger talks, IPSs, etc. But who decides what's libelous?
How many people would Slashdot, Yahoo, etc. have to hire to pore over every post to make sure it didn't contain any libelous content? How could you possibly make sure that all these reviewers are thinking exactly the same was to ensure evenhandedness in the judgement of content?
I supposed this would be workable once the security aspects (spoofing, etc.) have been addressed. It'd be a problem for our household since our net access only allows a single IP address assigned via DHCP. If we all got IP addresses assigned at birth then we'd all have a unique ID that could be used for things like voting, email, IP telephony, etc.
But, on the other hand, that pretty much does away with Anonymous Cowards, doesn't it? The personal privacy freaks would excrete masonry if this happened.
That's my experience as well. In fact, we had a storeroom with one wall full of spare HP/UX workstations in case there was a hardware problem with one of the systems on the bond trading floor.
One of my co-workers came from a trading firm that lived and died by its Sun workstations. Another former co-worker went to another trading outfit that was running UNIX on all of its trading systems.
I agree that it's a widespread practice. That's probably why the FASB's proposed change to accounting for stock options was so heavily opposed by corporations. Just because it's ``widespread'' doesn't make it the correct way of doing business. I doubt that many CEOs and other high-ranking corporate officers would have been happy to see these stock options count against corporate earnings, possibly driving down the company's stock price, and directly impacting the value of their (paper) worth.
Did I sound like I was over-reacting? I'm just someone who realizes that the way things are going in this country, I may never be able to take retirement the way my parents did (not that I'm looking forward to many years of sitting on my duff -- I'd go stir crazy!), and I do plan on keeping close track of how my retirement money is invested. Many people do the same thing to make sure that it's not invested in some company or country's currency that doesn't pass their particular brand of political correctness. Are they over-reacting? (OK, maybe -- some of these folks get a little extreme.) I think that watching out for investments that could fall flat on their face is a prudent activity. Is that over-reacting? The fear of this accounting practice may be the financial scare du jour and will probably blow over soon. Let's hope so, eh?
As for the Parrish study being anti-Microsoft: I never read that into it (though others might). I think the study was opposed to the specific accounting practice that Parrish believes is not much more than smoke and mirrors. Microsoft's having such a huge capitalization (and with so many people dependent on its stock value) is, perhaps, the best or, at least one of the most visible, examples of a company that uses this accounting practice.
Now I may just have to go re-read ``Where Are the Customers' Yachts? Or, a Good Hard Look at Wall Street'' by Fred Schwed and Peter Arno. A sometimes humorous look into the way Wall Street investment firms work.
Anyway, I believe that the Parrish analyst's point was that if and when it does catch up with Microsoft, a lot of little people are going to get hurt when the value of their retirement plans goes down the toilet. If this doesn't register somewhat on the concern-o-meter then methinks that, perhaps, too many Slashdot readers aren't concerning themselves with their retirement plans. Panic certainly isn't warranted (yet) but keep your eyes peeled. The FASB (sp?) may get its way in the future and those stock options may eat into corporate earnings; if so, the stock market could become much more volatile.
I saw this analysis last week and didn't really know what to make of it. I'm sure that many see its author as some sort of crackpot. Since I'm not a professional financial analyst, I can't really judge the quality of this guy's claims. On the other hand, it certainly seems shady that MS canned its internal (for reasons that we'll probably never really know since, I believe, the terms of the out of court settlement will neatly cover up the facts). Sigh.
My 401K and other investments are only currently only minimally invested in MS stock. I will be keeping an eye out on how heavily my retirement is dependent on certain stocks.
I've run into some people who say that they've been forced to sign agreements such as this. Then they leave the company and their former employer tries to prevent them from working in the same field. Judges presiding over the cases that the acquantances have been in threw the cases out saying, essentially, that no company has the right to deny you a livelihood. One guy said that it might have helped that he had his wife and three kids sitting behind him in the courtroom. (Good tactic, IMHO.)
These clauses have always struck me as a ``sour grapes'' clause:
Funny stuff. For me, it helped to bring up a mental picture of a group of Monty Python ``Twits of the Year'' and imagine that all the tripe in the article was coming from them.
Trying to follow their tortured logic was too much on a Friday afternoon. Was it ``MP3 downloaders are forced (á la Clockwork Orange, I guess) `horrific pictures of teenage sex' videos therefore MP3s must be abolished''? Was that it?
(I imagine now that everyone will be sprinkling their webpage META tags with the phrase ``horrific pictures of teenage sex''.)
Have to disagree. John Cramer, author of ``Einstein's Bridge'' and ``Twistor'', is a working physicist when he's not writing. Those two novels are full of references to current scientific theories. At least one of the novels I mentioned has an appendix that describes the relationships between those theories and the concepts used in the story.