Actually, I'd say there's at least one really good reason for a second standard, and that is that Microsoft (in theory) would actually be using it. unfortunately, OOXML seems to be completely useless in that respect, since it's not going to be much easier to implement than the word 2000 format (and maybe even harder given how much is already done in that respect).
This of course, is on top of the many other aspects of the format that make it useless as an international standard, like it's inability to do Arabic/Korean/Chinese/Japanese, or the way it conflicts with many already established non computer formats (dates come to mind).
For one, enforce the law. If you know that the test you used is flawed, or even that a more reliable test counteracts what you are presenting, (as another poster mentioned) and you continue to present that as fact, it should be considered purgery and a felony.
I constantly here stories like this about cops/prosecutors/whatever present what amounts to faked evidence in court, and none of them even get a slap on the wrist, even though the law calls for all of them to be in jail.
It's the best way for people on the other side of the office to talk to each other. We also have dedicated chat clients for use with talking to specific people (namely those with some authority) for more official work. And the conversations tend to be a fair sight more professional than in person stuff, thanks to the records that such tools create,
You're projecting too much the attitude people bring to the tools, which have nothing to do with the tools themselves.
I really don't see where the need to overclock comes from anymore. Today's speeds are pretty darn fast and I'd assume that if you actually have a real need for more processing power, that you should be able to come up with the couple hundred bucks for another socket/proc. Quick price point comparison here, I spent 170 on my processor, (2.33 Ghz) and about 60 (fan, thermal grease, and a bit extra on the case) on it's cooling system, while I don't have it overclocked (the cooling system was mostly for fun), the whole thing should easily overclock to match Intel's fastest Core 2 Duo, (3.0 Ghz).
That processor I would be matching is about 280, so my net gain in terms of cash is pretty minimal (though more fun in my opinion).
However, the processor I have, or that more expensive processor, can also overclock significantly more than anything on the table. The conroe is considered stable at 5 Ghz with water cooling by some people, and I'd be more than happy to take mine up to 3.66 if I needed to, so while you may not get much in terms of not needing to fork over a extra hundred or so in cash, getting something that's not actually on the market is a big deal for some people.
I think they're claiming to be inspired by open source, but not actually open source because of the quality control methods they use. (Which implies they really have no idea how open source dev is done). However, the creative commons attribution share alike license is pretty much boilerplate open source for non software copyrights.
Oh, the scam gets better, in my state they got a law passed that only the approved textbooks can be used. Okay, fine, quality control right? Except that the only people that can approve the books is the state legislature. Who is in session a whopping 1 month out of the year, and way way out of the ability of most teachers to contact.
What you describe is more security through difference than security through obfuscation. The problem with the closed source models is that inevitably, all of the targets are the same as what the attacker has, so the attacker can study his copy, find vulnerabilities, and then exploit them elsewhere. Being different than the standard will protect from this, obfuscating the attackers copy will only slow him down slightly.
A) Surfacve is even more vaporware than the gphone is.
b) The point of the gphone is to provide portable apps. So that a consumer with a favorite interface/browser/whatever can buy *any* gPhone and be confident they can get what they're used to. Right now, with other phones, apps frequently are only good for a single phone, even if the OS is the same on a different phone.
Keep in mind that DOS being availble on all the different types of IBM clones is what made MS dominant in the first place. A few killer apps could very rapidly put the gPhone into a similar position.
If I personally, cannot tell that my access to something is being restricted, without the help of extra software, then I fail to see why I should care.
There are a number of Viruses live for smartphones, though they largely target a single OS (not Windows Mobile actually). Scientific American did a peice on them a while back.
Given that you are never in a million years going to get better than 80% of the advertised bandwidth (at the very least, packet loss will ensure that), I'd say going after bandwidth people for gigabits being in base 10 is pointless. (I get about 4 Mbit of Comcast's advertised 6 Mbit, and consider myself lucky to have that much, it was three for a while).
For the most part though, only places were there is a discrepancy in how people measure do you see a real issue, nobodies camera software pops up and tells them they have 5.7 megapixels instead of the 6 they payed for, but I have to deal with explaining to people at work (tech support) why they're new 320 Gigabyte drive is showing as a 292 in Windows (part of that is partitioning).
I hope Seagate appeals this though, I'd like to see them not have to pay (they're hardly the only ones doing it, and shouldn't be persecuted, at least not unless everyone else gets hit too (not just drive manufacturers, but OEMs as well). I would, however, like to se a higher court judge set a more major precedent (and ruling, for the area in question) that might force all manufacturers and OEMs to be honest about these things.
Comcast is trying to deal with it in a method (forged packets) that's a felony in 9 states, so they get very little sympathy there.
Futhermore, there is a simple solution to all of this, a couple of them actually.
Traffic shaping, BT can be de-prioritized if necessary, without violating contractual obligations. Torrents might have a lower speed sometimes, but when other usage is low there's no loss from letting it run wild.
512 is enough for KDE as well, I'm sitting at ~350 meg consumption right now, and that's with 8 open, including iceweasel and a pdf (by far the largest of the bunch, kpdf will gladly load the entire 100 meg pdf into memory, uncompressed, if it can find the space for it.
Now, I do hit more than 512 occasionally, so I'm glad I bought more. But the bigger thing with only 512 for me would be no dual channel.
I also want to comment on Everex's plan to track 'Windows' installs on the machine by seeing how many people don't use their linux update tool. Seriously, how many people in here wouldn't just wipe it with [insert favorite distro]. Though admittedly, I think I'm gonna pitch this to my mom alongside an OEM copy of XP.
I am very sure there are any number of little guys who were helped by the patent system. And for that matter, big corporations, and even patent troll style IP firms who have benefited from it legitimately.
I am equally sure, that were we to go tit for tat, with one side naming good results of patents, and the other naming bad ones, that, at least for recent years, the bad ones would easily be the majority. The problem is not the lawyers or corporations per se, but the lack of (affordable) controls for dumb, obvious, and compatability patents.
This 'ODF' group is a couple of nobodies with a name that would make trademark lawyers salivate in the proprietary world.
Their decision to to support or not support ODF means about as much to whether or not ODF will be used in five years time as my vote matters on whether or not Mike Smith will be the next president.
Though if people are really dumb enough to fall for a ruse like that perhaps it's time we take a page from the corporate world and force these people to change their name.
I know at least one statewide prodiver (dial up and DSL, the phone company only sells bandwidth here) who does this same kind of shaping (right down to prioritizing VOIP and games). If it can be scaled to that degree it can probably be scaled to the size of Comcast.
It has an interesting side effect of putting a dampener on p2p the way Comcast wants if bittorrent is lower priority (note, not throttled, because there would be no point), simply allocate only the extra bandwidth to p2p and suddenly all those network problems Comcast claims it causes go away. And while it may not be much consolation to filesharers, at least it will keep Congress from forcing every ISP to act like Comcast and just let connections drop.
Of course, they might have to spend money on that, so somehow I doubt they'd ever do it.
Whether or not Tivoization matters depends on the principals you start with.
One set says that you may do whatever you wish with the code, bu you must also share the code in return.
The other set, and the set that has *always* been Stallman's goal, says that you may do whatever you wish, as long as you do not interfere with another's ability to do whatever they wish.
For developer's who want to do the first, the GPL is pretty airtight (slight patent issues, though nobody has instituted a destructive exploit along the lines of the MS/Novell patent deal yet, and deserving of a GPL 2.1 more than a GPL 3)
For the second goal, the GPL3 *is* a big deal, because it means protecting the end user from being locked down when they buy a cell phone/Tivo/Server.
Yes, the GPLv3 has poor adoption, but that's because the GPLv2 had high adoption by people who fell in the first camp, when the GPLv2 had always been meant for the purposes of the second philosophy.
I get mine either from newegg or the boxes of parts that magically acumalate in my closet. (If you don't have a amgic closet, you really should get one).
The one that gets me is that I've never actually seen a report involving two planes hitting each other. I've heard of planes going down from hitting mountains, buildings, because of hardware issues, because of bombs, or because the pilot was too drunk to see the ground. But I've never once turned on the news and heard about two planes hitting each other. So while I'm sure it must happen occasionally, focusing on things like that would not make nearly as much sense as focusing on other points of failure. (Like snakes in the cargo hold).
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More likely, the guy with 10k songs would get the 30,000 dollar maximum. There is a reason they have a large gap between the two numbers.
Actually, I'd say there's at least one really good reason for a second standard, and that is that Microsoft (in theory) would actually be using it. unfortunately, OOXML seems to be completely useless in that respect, since it's not going to be much easier to implement than the word 2000 format (and maybe even harder given how much is already done in that respect).
This of course, is on top of the many other aspects of the format that make it useless as an international standard, like it's inability to do Arabic/Korean/Chinese/Japanese, or the way it conflicts with many already established non computer formats (dates come to mind).
If I remember right, Manhattan was only worth 20.
For one, enforce the law. If you know that the test you used is flawed, or even that a more reliable test counteracts what you are presenting, (as another poster mentioned) and you continue to present that as fact, it should be considered purgery and a felony.
I constantly here stories like this about cops/prosecutors/whatever present what amounts to faked evidence in court, and none of them even get a slap on the wrist, even though the law calls for all of them to be in jail.
It's the best way for people on the other side of the office to talk to each other. We also have dedicated chat clients for use with talking to specific people (namely those with some authority) for more official work. And the conversations tend to be a fair sight more professional than in person stuff, thanks to the records that such tools create,
You're projecting too much the attitude people bring to the tools, which have nothing to do with the tools themselves.
That processor I would be matching is about 280, so my net gain in terms of cash is pretty minimal (though more fun in my opinion).
However, the processor I have, or that more expensive processor, can also overclock significantly more than anything on the table. The conroe is considered stable at 5 Ghz with water cooling by some people, and I'd be more than happy to take mine up to 3.66 if I needed to, so while you may not get much in terms of not needing to fork over a extra hundred or so in cash, getting something that's not actually on the market is a big deal for some people.
I think they're claiming to be inspired by open source, but not actually open source because of the quality control methods they use. (Which implies they really have no idea how open source dev is done). However, the creative commons attribution share alike license is pretty much boilerplate open source for non software copyrights.
Oh, the scam gets better, in my state they got a law passed that only the approved textbooks can be used. Okay, fine, quality control right? Except that the only people that can approve the books is the state legislature. Who is in session a whopping 1 month out of the year, and way way out of the ability of most teachers to contact.
What you describe is more security through difference than security through obfuscation. The problem with the closed source models is that inevitably, all of the targets are the same as what the attacker has, so the attacker can study his copy, find vulnerabilities, and then exploit them elsewhere. Being different than the standard will protect from this, obfuscating the attackers copy will only slow him down slightly.
A) Surfacve is even more vaporware than the gphone is.
b) The point of the gphone is to provide portable apps. So that a consumer with a favorite interface/browser/whatever can buy *any* gPhone and be confident they can get what they're used to. Right now, with other phones, apps frequently are only good for a single phone, even if the OS is the same on a different phone.
Keep in mind that DOS being availble on all the different types of IBM clones is what made MS dominant in the first place. A few killer apps could very rapidly put the gPhone into a similar position.
If I personally, cannot tell that my access to something is being restricted, without the help of extra software, then I fail to see why I should care.
There are a number of Viruses live for smartphones, though they largely target a single OS (not Windows Mobile actually). Scientific American did a peice on them a while back.
Given that you are never in a million years going to get better than 80% of the advertised bandwidth (at the very least, packet loss will ensure that), I'd say going after bandwidth people for gigabits being in base 10 is pointless. (I get about 4 Mbit of Comcast's advertised 6 Mbit, and consider myself lucky to have that much, it was three for a while).
For the most part though, only places were there is a discrepancy in how people measure do you see a real issue, nobodies camera software pops up and tells them they have 5.7 megapixels instead of the 6 they payed for, but I have to deal with explaining to people at work (tech support) why they're new 320 Gigabyte drive is showing as a 292 in Windows (part of that is partitioning).
I hope Seagate appeals this though, I'd like to see them not have to pay (they're hardly the only ones doing it, and shouldn't be persecuted, at least not unless everyone else gets hit too (not just drive manufacturers, but OEMs as well). I would, however, like to se a higher court judge set a more major precedent (and ruling, for the area in question) that might force all manufacturers and OEMs to be honest about these things.
Comcast is trying to deal with it in a method (forged packets) that's a felony in 9 states, so they get very little sympathy there.
Futhermore, there is a simple solution to all of this, a couple of them actually.
Traffic shaping, BT can be de-prioritized if necessary, without violating contractual obligations. Torrents might have a lower speed sometimes, but when other usage is low there's no loss from letting it run wild.
512 is enough for KDE as well, I'm sitting at ~350 meg consumption right now, and that's with 8 open, including iceweasel and a pdf (by far the largest of the bunch, kpdf will gladly load the entire 100 meg pdf into memory, uncompressed, if it can find the space for it.
Now, I do hit more than 512 occasionally, so I'm glad I bought more. But the bigger thing with only 512 for me would be no dual channel.
I also want to comment on Everex's plan to track 'Windows' installs on the machine by seeing how many people don't use their linux update tool. Seriously, how many people in here wouldn't just wipe it with [insert favorite distro]. Though admittedly, I think I'm gonna pitch this to my mom alongside an OEM copy of XP.
I am very sure there are any number of little guys who were helped by the patent system. And for that matter, big corporations, and even patent troll style IP firms who have benefited from it legitimately.
I am equally sure, that were we to go tit for tat, with one side naming good results of patents, and the other naming bad ones, that, at least for recent years, the bad ones would easily be the majority. The problem is not the lawyers or corporations per se, but the lack of (affordable) controls for dumb, obvious, and compatability patents.
Hopefully much less, I mean all the UAT got was a link, not a whole story.
Um, did you not read any of the other comments?
This 'ODF' group is a couple of nobodies with a name that would make trademark lawyers salivate in the proprietary world.
Their decision to to support or not support ODF means about as much to whether or not ODF will be used in five years time as my vote matters on whether or not Mike Smith will be the next president.
Though if people are really dumb enough to fall for a ruse like that perhaps it's time we take a page from the corporate world and force these people to change their name.
I know at least one statewide prodiver (dial up and DSL, the phone company only sells bandwidth here) who does this same kind of shaping (right down to prioritizing VOIP and games). If it can be scaled to that degree it can probably be scaled to the size of Comcast.
It has an interesting side effect of putting a dampener on p2p the way Comcast wants if bittorrent is lower priority (note, not throttled, because there would be no point), simply allocate only the extra bandwidth to p2p and suddenly all those network problems Comcast claims it causes go away. And while it may not be much consolation to filesharers, at least it will keep Congress from forcing every ISP to act like Comcast and just let connections drop.
Of course, they might have to spend money on that, so somehow I doubt they'd ever do it.
I'm betting he knew full well he could be replaced with a script. He did quit after all.
Whether or not Tivoization matters depends on the principals you start with.
One set says that you may do whatever you wish with the code, bu you must also share the code in return.
The other set, and the set that has *always* been Stallman's goal, says that you may do whatever you wish, as long as you do not interfere with another's ability to do whatever they wish.
For developer's who want to do the first, the GPL is pretty airtight (slight patent issues, though nobody has instituted a destructive exploit along the lines of the MS/Novell patent deal yet, and deserving of a GPL 2.1 more than a GPL 3)
For the second goal, the GPL3 *is* a big deal, because it means protecting the end user from being locked down when they buy a cell phone/Tivo/Server.
Yes, the GPLv3 has poor adoption, but that's because the GPLv2 had high adoption by people who fell in the first camp, when the GPLv2 had always been meant for the purposes of the second philosophy.
Funny thing actually, Comcast refused to show me the contract, it was buried deep in a binary that I need something called 'Windows' to see.
A months worth of gas (~120 USD) wouldn't even buy the bike I have, let alone a nice one.
I get mine either from newegg or the boxes of parts that magically acumalate in my closet. (If you don't have a amgic closet, you really should get one).
The one that gets me is that I've never actually seen a report involving two planes hitting each other. I've heard of planes going down from hitting mountains, buildings, because of hardware issues, because of bombs, or because the pilot was too drunk to see the ground. But I've never once turned on the news and heard about two planes hitting each other. So while I'm sure it must happen occasionally, focusing on things like that would not make nearly as much sense as focusing on other points of failure. (Like snakes in the cargo hold).