Exactly. The first thing I thought about when this story first started wending its way around was that they were only checking access times. I guess they needed to get some good news out there quick so as not to piss off the veterans.
Don't worry, the article is almost as bad as the summary. You didn't miss much by not RTFAing.
All of the components are there: the Rob Enderle-tainted eWeek runs a shill "review" of a product that they were paid to look at, then the company's PR flack sends it to Slashdot as an "anonymous reader". Who knows if money is involved on the Slashdot side, but the mechanism is the same.
They are given public trust and police powers and are held to a higher standard.
I'll go one better with ya and say that all crimes by public servants should be felonies. It would sure make things interesting if there were special enhancements for crimes committed under the public trust the way there are for crimes committed in proximity to other social spaces.
Why would you raise the price of a hit when the very definition of a "hit" is that it is already everywhere? Hits are the least difficult songs to find so raising the price on them seems a bit self-defeating since there will naturally be 8 bazillion sources for hits on P2P. I don't see how this benefits rights-holders.
"What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?"
One led by a person believing there is more to their enterprise than money.
And not only that, history tells us a few things here: that a company can make lots and lots of money by lowering their standards ("You never go broke by underestimating your audience"), and the corollary that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
With capitalism taking its seat as the state's religion of the West, it comes as no surprise that the devout capitalists question others' committment to an ideal that those others may not subscribe to. The question could also be turned around to say "What kind of company refuses to sell itself out?"
You must be new to this Interweb thing if you still think 17 pages is impressive
Indeed. It was within the last month that I visited Tom's Hardware as well and was shocked at how bad they were with the paging thing. It seems apparent that they put a lot more thought into spreading their content over more and more pages, than they did in designing navigation. Not that I'm going to read 60 pages on a screen, mind you, but they don't have to be so user-hostile about it.
That's a bit long-winded. Walter Benjamin boiled fascism down to the aestheticization of politics (some commentary). What we see here is a government instituting more and more radical policies in the name of maintaining the image of society that they say they are trying to protect. Some might say that Bush's declining poll numbers give us hope that a majority of Americans are aware that the image the Government wants and the one the Average Joe wants are different.
The government tells us that since this is what a free society looks like, the behavior the administration exhibits is a natural aspect of that society in the name of self-preservation. This is all bunkum, and what they are doing is using peoples' ideals about how they live against them in order to increase their own power over those people (the US in this case, and attempting the world in general). For some reason, some people respond to these developments by supporting or ignoring the increasing evidence of political deterioration.
Cynics suggest that the research grants and opportunities to build empires will vanish if the problems get solved.
Well hey, if we're going to play devil's advocate then let's see how far down the line we can go. Is it possible that investment into the fusion project will increase once someone figures out how to create an empire in a world with fusion? Look at how the DMCA was passed way in advance of a lot of the problems it addressed; we should be thinking of what problems fusion would create and legislate (or treaty, or something) against them before they become possible.
Wow, amazingly condescending even for Slashdot. I'll just touch on a few points since you're so hot.
Your arguments would be just as stupid as saying that ODF should not support Pictures or Font Styles, and 15 years ago, there were people that said these exact same stupid things.
These things are certainly not necessary to the functioning of state government. Tell me, since you are so well-versed in ADA issues and documents: does an ASCII text file broach any ADA standards? That is, does the file format have an accessibility problem since it does not include its own speech synthesizer and video-rendering functionality?
How many times have you encountered trying to read a PageMaker 1.0 file, or a WordStar file, or some other file format that is so outdated, even the current version of the product WILL NOT READ THEM.
Thank you for making my point for me. ODF is not subject to this problem, and you'll notice that popular and simple file formats also do not have this problem and have lived years and years. Note that Microsoft only moved to submit its formats to ISO/ECMA after the ODF movement started gaining steam. Half-stepping, since as noted elsewhere that they aren't being exactly nondiscriminatory with their IP.
We CANNOT just hold ODF to be a 'published' format, because then it become worthless if there is no round tripping.
But that's exactly what Massachussetts chose ODF for: a publishing format. You may want the selection of ODF to mean more than that, but it's not.
The issue with ODF as it's come up (and Massachussetts in particular) is that they wanted to be able to publish information for the public in a format that they could use regardless of several factors, the big two of which are choice of representation and futureproofing. As has been related many many times before, there are aspects of Microsoft's own Office formats that do not get imported - or get imported in a broken state - when opening documents in more current versions of Office than they were saved in. This is where future-proofing come in.
The idea is that the constituents of the Commonwealth should be able to read the digital documents produced by their government. It is FUD in the most classic sense that the idea was to mandate some ODF-only office suite that allowed people to work only in ODF. This is not the case. The point is accessibility for the final product.
Think of a magazine. Magazines are commonly laid out in Quark XPress (as a common example). Quark has features like revision control, graphics control, text kerning and leading and flow-control. Myriad tweakable parameters that allow the people who work on the magazine to make it look and read the way they feel is best. We as magazine readers do not need this functionality at all in order to read the magazine. We just want to be able to pick up the publication and flip through the pages and read stories, look at pictures, and so on. These are two completely different modes of interacting with the document that are not mutually exclusive, but that intersect in the act of publication. ODF is this simplified translation for uses that do not require things like XAML.
This is where Microsoft sought to sow seeds of doubt that the sky of document creation and workflow was falling. This is not the case, and what we read here is that what ODF proponents predicted has come true: Microsoft would not stand in the way of their users choosing to "Save As..." in the ODF format. It's just bad business for them to do so and I for one see this story as Microsoft acknowledging a big, fat "I told you so."
I don't even want to touch the accessibility/ADA aspects of embedded media, which is entirely uneccessary for the purposes that Massachussetts wants to use ODF for, but that Microsoft purported to be 110% necessary for anybody to create documents in the future. They were trying to embrace and extend their reach into the very act of creating a document. Is any government document dependent on the creator being able to publish their Inkitudes in a native format? I don't think so! The fact remains, however, that government employees can use whatever techniques they like to create a document, but if it's going to wind up being a public document then people need to be able to access it forevermore. I certainly didn't see them promising THAT in the runup to MA's decision to use ODF.
ODF is just another output format and there's no reason that the laws and other byproducts of governmental communication can't be published in a format that people can be confident can be incorporated into future products - it being an open and documented format - and won't be aged out in favor of Microsoft's decision that maybe Ink should be the lingua franca of Office formats (downsampled into Palatino if desired). Microsoft did not want to cede control of one iota of their Office franchise and they preferred to be able to hold the reins on just what software would be able to read a Microsoft Office document.
I'm sure Google would pay a ton of money to be listed as the default search engine on IE, but Microsoft decided that it's worth more to them to set their own search engine as the default, thus forgoing cash profit.
So what is the profit that Microsoft receives? Market share. Isn't market share the criteria by which monopolies are measured? If so, then what sense does it make for them to maintain their monopoly marketshare via anti-competitive means when they could satisfy a fiduciary responsibility by taking in a ton of money? Isn't this illegal?
The only realistic argument here is that IE has a monopoly for somewhat unfair reasons..
Kudos for attempting to limit any response, but you actually glance off of the problem here. Monopolies are not necessarily achieved for unfair reasons, but Microsoft's problem is that they've been found, yes convicted, of maintaining a monopoly via unfair techniques. Windows is the monopoly, IE is the default webbrowser on that product, and here they are planning on making their search engine as the default. These are things that other companies have to pay for, and it's what makes their actions unfair: leveraging their monopoly to retain that monopoly is illegal, and they've been convicted of this before.
Maybe it's Google's fault for not making an operating system that is used by the vast majority of computer users, to which they can add their own browser and search engines as the default. What a bunch of dummies.
It's also a common practice to use a delayed SMTP response to thwart spammers. Maybe this person's ping script doesn't account for any delay and thus returns an error.
I'm a Mac user, and although I love OS X with all of my bits, I do think that if the same % population used it as currently uses windows, then there would be more serious problems with it.
If not an out-and-out myth, this certainly qualifies as speculation without evidence. Did the PDP-10 have as many problems as Windows proportional to its complexity? System 360? How about DOS? People seem to want to apologize for Microsoft with this logic because maybe it allows them to think of themselves as Clarke-ian future-predicting supernerds who have a complete grasp on every technological possibility, but to me it reeks because I just don't see the silly mistakes being recreated in other operating systems (ActiveX I'm looking at you). I do think that if other OSes were more popular that there would be a similar level of attempts to compromise (check your sshd log sometime if you have one), but they would tend to be application based (Apache, SSH, etc) or they would be successful only in technologies that affect *all* OSes, like TCP/IP.
The problem with Microsoft's security problems is that they are continually ongoing. There is no refinement in the OS when the fix comes out, it is only a patch in the strictest sense of the word. So unless you can identify similarly prevalent *and* lame technologies in other OSes then your argument that everything would be the same if Microsoft didn't exist falls flatter than flat. Other OSes are much more standards-based and it exactly Microsoft's non-standardized features that cause problems.
Does that mean that they're going to trip off whatever mechanism prevents you from using such software after Claria's uninstalled without uninstalling the client software?
I'm waiting for the date just so we can see how many infected machines break down once the network becomes unavailable. I hope a reporter is on this angle, because I don't think it's beyond the pale that poorly-written spyware has well-written error handling, especially for core functionality.
It doesn't matter! Cause I only use 10% of the fundamental features of every office suite.
This is what I thought at first, too. Since many many people still only use the features of Office 97, OOo only has to buckle down for another year before they've caught up to what most people want in an office suite.
I'm on a mailing list where this was discussed by people who work in the business side of the entertainment industry. Plagiarized to preserve anonymity, this explains things better than I ever could and puts the story in terms that non-lawyers can understand.
People are not "assets" and employment contracts are not property. Employment contracts are agreements about work and not documents of indenture which give the "owner" the right to release or not release a worker on the basis of extrinsic value acquired for a trade of "rights" and "property." Executives and artists are often left unprotected by basic rules of common decency because the compensation packages are so huge or the work seems not to be "real" in the classic sense of a blue collar worker. But executives and artists are no different than other people who are protected under laws governing employment and the reasonable protections we all need for those relationships. An employment contract at its most severe implication provides that the worker will not work elsewhere. (You can no longer get a court anywhere in the United States to enforce an employment contract by requiring the worker or artist to actually work for the party holding the contract.) But what Disney said here is: "No, we will let you work elsewhere, we don't need you to work here, BUT we won't let you go unless Disney gets concessions in the form of "things" completely out of the employee's control to provide. In that moment, the person became a property. As a moral and social matter, that's disgusting and a behavior that should no longer be tolerated. Sure, lots of people are treated like property all over the world. That doesn't make it just or even appropriate.
So, you are partially right in that there isn't a whole lot of "online" in this story about "your rights," but it does speak to a host of issues (temp-to-perm anyone?) that people here can relate to. But I'm not trying to argue for the appropriateness of this story, just to illustrate that in fact there is some funky business going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. The first thing I thought about when this story first started wending its way around was that they were only checking access times. I guess they needed to get some good news out there quick so as not to piss off the veterans.
Don't worry, the article is almost as bad as the summary. You didn't miss much by not RTFAing.
All of the components are there: the Rob Enderle-tainted eWeek runs a shill "review" of a product that they were paid to look at, then the company's PR flack sends it to Slashdot as an "anonymous reader". Who knows if money is involved on the Slashdot side, but the mechanism is the same.
They are given public trust and police powers and are held to a higher standard.
I'll go one better with ya and say that all crimes by public servants should be felonies. It would sure make things interesting if there were special enhancements for crimes committed under the public trust the way there are for crimes committed in proximity to other social spaces.
Why would you raise the price of a hit when the very definition of a "hit" is that it is already everywhere? Hits are the least difficult songs to find so raising the price on them seems a bit self-defeating since there will naturally be 8 bazillion sources for hits on P2P. I don't see how this benefits rights-holders.
"What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?"
One led by a person believing there is more to their enterprise than money.
And not only that, history tells us a few things here: that a company can make lots and lots of money by lowering their standards ("You never go broke by underestimating your audience"), and the corollary that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
With capitalism taking its seat as the state's religion of the West, it comes as no surprise that the devout capitalists question others' committment to an ideal that those others may not subscribe to. The question could also be turned around to say "What kind of company refuses to sell itself out?"
You must be new to this Interweb thing if you still think 17 pages is impressive
Indeed. It was within the last month that I visited Tom's Hardware as well and was shocked at how bad they were with the paging thing. It seems apparent that they put a lot more thought into spreading their content over more and more pages, than they did in designing navigation. Not that I'm going to read 60 pages on a screen, mind you, but they don't have to be so user-hostile about it.
Truly off-putting.
I can give you 2 guesses to whether or not she even got the interview, but you'll only need one.
So the lesson here is that the company is willing to forego the best candidate for politics.
In the end, tweaking the corporate tail paid off.
Yeah, those towels are awesome. Now, about the pay grades and leveling...
That's a bit long-winded. Walter Benjamin boiled fascism down to the aestheticization of politics (some commentary). What we see here is a government instituting more and more radical policies in the name of maintaining the image of society that they say they are trying to protect. Some might say that Bush's declining poll numbers give us hope that a majority of Americans are aware that the image the Government wants and the one the Average Joe wants are different.
The government tells us that since this is what a free society looks like, the behavior the administration exhibits is a natural aspect of that society in the name of self-preservation. This is all bunkum, and what they are doing is using peoples' ideals about how they live against them in order to increase their own power over those people (the US in this case, and attempting the world in general). For some reason, some people respond to these developments by supporting or ignoring the increasing evidence of political deterioration.
Imagine what it saved the telecoms
That's like saying that paying the parking meter is what keeps your car from being randomly towed.
Then fine, they should pick a freaking image format that is fully rendered. PERIOD.
OCR software is, shall we say, less than perfect.
Cynics suggest that the research grants and opportunities to build empires will vanish if the problems get solved.
Well hey, if we're going to play devil's advocate then let's see how far down the line we can go. Is it possible that investment into the fusion project will increase once someone figures out how to create an empire in a world with fusion? Look at how the DMCA was passed way in advance of a lot of the problems it addressed; we should be thinking of what problems fusion would create and legislate (or treaty, or something) against them before they become possible.
Wow, amazingly condescending even for Slashdot. I'll just touch on a few points since you're so hot.
Your arguments would be just as stupid as saying that ODF should not support Pictures or Font Styles, and 15 years ago, there were people that said these exact same stupid things.
These things are certainly not necessary to the functioning of state government. Tell me, since you are so well-versed in ADA issues and documents: does an ASCII text file broach any ADA standards? That is, does the file format have an accessibility problem since it does not include its own speech synthesizer and video-rendering functionality?
How many times have you encountered trying to read a PageMaker 1.0 file, or a WordStar file, or some other file format that is so outdated, even the current version of the product WILL NOT READ THEM.
Thank you for making my point for me. ODF is not subject to this problem, and you'll notice that popular and simple file formats also do not have this problem and have lived years and years. Note that Microsoft only moved to submit its formats to ISO/ECMA after the ODF movement started gaining steam. Half-stepping, since as noted elsewhere that they aren't being exactly nondiscriminatory with their IP.
We CANNOT just hold ODF to be a 'published' format, because then it become worthless if there is no round tripping.
But that's exactly what Massachussetts chose ODF for: a publishing format. You may want the selection of ODF to mean more than that, but it's not.
The issue with ODF as it's come up (and Massachussetts in particular) is that they wanted to be able to publish information for the public in a format that they could use regardless of several factors, the big two of which are choice of representation and futureproofing. As has been related many many times before, there are aspects of Microsoft's own Office formats that do not get imported - or get imported in a broken state - when opening documents in more current versions of Office than they were saved in. This is where future-proofing come in.
The idea is that the constituents of the Commonwealth should be able to read the digital documents produced by their government. It is FUD in the most classic sense that the idea was to mandate some ODF-only office suite that allowed people to work only in ODF. This is not the case. The point is accessibility for the final product.
Think of a magazine. Magazines are commonly laid out in Quark XPress (as a common example). Quark has features like revision control, graphics control, text kerning and leading and flow-control. Myriad tweakable parameters that allow the people who work on the magazine to make it look and read the way they feel is best. We as magazine readers do not need this functionality at all in order to read the magazine. We just want to be able to pick up the publication and flip through the pages and read stories, look at pictures, and so on. These are two completely different modes of interacting with the document that are not mutually exclusive, but that intersect in the act of publication. ODF is this simplified translation for uses that do not require things like XAML.
This is where Microsoft sought to sow seeds of doubt that the sky of document creation and workflow was falling. This is not the case, and what we read here is that what ODF proponents predicted has come true: Microsoft would not stand in the way of their users choosing to "Save As..." in the ODF format. It's just bad business for them to do so and I for one see this story as Microsoft acknowledging a big, fat "I told you so."
I don't even want to touch the accessibility/ADA aspects of embedded media, which is entirely uneccessary for the purposes that Massachussetts wants to use ODF for, but that Microsoft purported to be 110% necessary for anybody to create documents in the future. They were trying to embrace and extend their reach into the very act of creating a document. Is any government document dependent on the creator being able to publish their Inkitudes in a native format? I don't think so! The fact remains, however, that government employees can use whatever techniques they like to create a document, but if it's going to wind up being a public document then people need to be able to access it forevermore. I certainly didn't see them promising THAT in the runup to MA's decision to use ODF.
ODF is just another output format and there's no reason that the laws and other byproducts of governmental communication can't be published in a format that people can be confident can be incorporated into future products - it being an open and documented format - and won't be aged out in favor of Microsoft's decision that maybe Ink should be the lingua franca of Office formats (downsampled into Palatino if desired). Microsoft did not want to cede control of one iota of their Office franchise and they preferred to be able to hold the reins on just what software would be able to read a Microsoft Office document.
I'm sure Google would pay a ton of money to be listed as the default search engine on IE, but Microsoft decided that it's worth more to them to set their own search engine as the default, thus forgoing cash profit.
So what is the profit that Microsoft receives? Market share. Isn't market share the criteria by which monopolies are measured? If so, then what sense does it make for them to maintain their monopoly marketshare via anti-competitive means when they could satisfy a fiduciary responsibility by taking in a ton of money? Isn't this illegal?
The only realistic argument here is that IE has a monopoly for somewhat unfair reasons..
Kudos for attempting to limit any response, but you actually glance off of the problem here. Monopolies are not necessarily achieved for unfair reasons, but Microsoft's problem is that they've been found, yes convicted, of maintaining a monopoly via unfair techniques. Windows is the monopoly, IE is the default webbrowser on that product, and here they are planning on making their search engine as the default. These are things that other companies have to pay for, and it's what makes their actions unfair: leveraging their monopoly to retain that monopoly is illegal, and they've been convicted of this before.
Maybe it's Google's fault for not making an operating system that is used by the vast majority of computer users, to which they can add their own browser and search engines as the default. What a bunch of dummies.
It's also a common practice to use a delayed SMTP response to thwart spammers. Maybe this person's ping script doesn't account for any delay and thus returns an error.
I'm a Mac user, and although I love OS X with all of my bits, I do think that if the same % population used it as currently uses windows, then there would be more serious problems with it.
If not an out-and-out myth, this certainly qualifies as speculation without evidence. Did the PDP-10 have as many problems as Windows proportional to its complexity? System 360? How about DOS? People seem to want to apologize for Microsoft with this logic because maybe it allows them to think of themselves as Clarke-ian future-predicting supernerds who have a complete grasp on every technological possibility, but to me it reeks because I just don't see the silly mistakes being recreated in other operating systems (ActiveX I'm looking at you). I do think that if other OSes were more popular that there would be a similar level of attempts to compromise (check your sshd log sometime if you have one), but they would tend to be application based (Apache, SSH, etc) or they would be successful only in technologies that affect *all* OSes, like TCP/IP.
The problem with Microsoft's security problems is that they are continually ongoing. There is no refinement in the OS when the fix comes out, it is only a patch in the strictest sense of the word. So unless you can identify similarly prevalent *and* lame technologies in other OSes then your argument that everything would be the same if Microsoft didn't exist falls flatter than flat. Other OSes are much more standards-based and it exactly Microsoft's non-standardized features that cause problems.
that's from the old "haxor shiat" page...
Does that mean that they're going to trip off whatever mechanism prevents you from using such software after Claria's uninstalled without uninstalling the client software?
I'm waiting for the date just so we can see how many infected machines break down once the network becomes unavailable. I hope a reporter is on this angle, because I don't think it's beyond the pale that poorly-written spyware has well-written error handling, especially for core functionality.
>It is so religeous without being about god.
Setting aside the self-canceling aspect of that statement, any time you have a concept of "The One" who can save everybody, it's about God.
It doesn't matter! Cause I only use 10% of the fundamental features of every office suite.
This is what I thought at first, too. Since many many people still only use the features of Office 97, OOo only has to buckle down for another year before they've caught up to what most people want in an office suite.
they bring innovations to consumers in a form they can actually use.
Which is a form of innovation in itself.
So, you are partially right in that there isn't a whole lot of "online" in this story about "your rights," but it does speak to a host of issues (temp-to-perm anyone?) that people here can relate to. But I'm not trying to argue for the appropriateness of this story, just to illustrate that in fact there is some funky business going on here.