If this does pass, it will be interesting to see how this will play in court, with Granny or a 12 year old being dragged in front of a judge because of Justin Timberlake song.
Our courts are clogged already. It would serve the industry right if judges simply laughed the cases our of court.
The City of Chicago is starting to wise up on the drug front at least. They are saying that they've had so many minor marijuana possession cases thrown out by judges that they are going to just forego criminal charges and impose fines instead.
These are all good points and I'm all for them, but what's good for the EU may not necessarily be good for Microsoft, as far as Microsoft is concerned anyway.
Microsoft has vested interest in keeping everyone working on some variant of their.doc format, and has no real interest in any sort of standard format, because in that scenario, they lose control of the "defacto" standard and become just one of a long list of software providers who make document editors.
I'm not saying that is the right answer, but I think we've seen over and over parties with vested interests in the status quo (Microsoft in software, the U.S. Republican Party in U.S. politics, Detroit and automobiles, etc.) will exert enormous amounts of effort to skew public perception such that the "greater good" appears to coincide directly with their own best interests. Witness Microsoft's claims that breaking them up would do severe harm to the U.S. and world economies. They were clearly full of sh*t, but there is a significant portion of the public that will support this sort of stuff reflexively and uncritically.
I bet Microsoft does not take this action lying down but comes up with some way to either overturn it, or twist it to allow some sort of proprietary advantage to accrue to themselves.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks standards compliance is going materially affect anyone's market share should share what they're smoking.
I would go your analysis one step further and say that people use Word, not because it does what people want it to do, but because so many other people use it. It is living proof of MSFT's continued reliance on being the "de facto standard" as opposed to an actual established standard.
Market share is its own reward and its own enforcer. Any competitor to any of MSFT's established application doesn't only need to be better, it needs to be LOTS and LOTS better because any incremental improvement can always be justified away by the difficulties introduced by lower interoperability.
I worked for the municipal engineering department of the city that I live in a number of years ago and we had similar issues with our stock of aerial photographs of the city.
The issue never required adjudication, if I recall correctly, but the city engineer's stand at the time was that we didn't give full sets out simply because we'd paid for them, and giving them away for free to contractors or others was simply bad economics. If others wanted a complete set, then let them bear the cost themselves.
There have to be ways to address this without bringing security into it. Local and other governments may have an obligation to provide information they possess on an as needed basis, but this sounds like the guy is on a fishing expidition.
It seems to me that as long as the town provides the requestor with adequate access to the system in which in the information resides, they should be in the clear with respect to not providing him with a full copy that he can walk away with.
I've been reading Talking Points Memo for a few months now, since I read about it in a Vanity Fair article last May or June, and I love it.
If someone could point out a few conservative blogs that viewed the issues with the level of balance and analysis that Josh Marshall does, I'd be way more willing to explore opposing points of view.
Personally, I find most conservative, and even a lot of liberal blogs, way too belicose. More light, less heat please.
For conservative takes, I'll go with the NYT's David Brooks or Andrew Sullivan. Even mainstream conservatives like William Safire or Charles Krauthammer seem awfully arch and doctrinaire to me.
I know the posting is about blogs and not columnists, but one of my faves is Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune. You can't pin him down as either traditionally liberal or conservative, but he frequently comes across with pieces that seem to wed strands of the two in very provocative ways.
I'm clearly dating myself, but I saw Blade Runner in its first theatrical release, and its my recollection that it was pretty much a disappointment to most people.
It was Ridley Scott's follow up to Alien, and it just doesn't have the narrative drive and shock value of Alien. Of course it grows on you with repeated viewings, but it really didn't go over very well initially. What really cinched Blade Runner's reputation was the advent of home video. People got a chance to look at it again and really appreciate it. I know I do. It is one of my favorite movies.
Not more favorite than 2001: A Space Odessey, however. I'd quibble about the 1 - 2 placement. I vastly prefer 2001. I don't know exactly what it is, but the combination of impressionism and cold realism is completely gripping. Its never quite the same movie twice. Its driven by ambiguity and it is exceptionally beautiful. Nothing else even comes close.
Haven't we been through all this with guns over the last 10 or so years? There have been numerous attempts to find gun manufacturers liable for deaths or injuries involving the uses of their products. I don't think they've lost a case on these grounds yet. In every case, I think, it has been found that the responsibility lay, not with the manufacturer, but with the operator of the gun.
I think it should go like that for this case, ultimately. As long as there are legal and proper uses for the products in question, it seems unlikely that manufacturers can be held liable for user's bad acts.
In the worst case, at least this might provide some traction in those suits against gun manufacturers.
I'm no right wing ideologue or luddite, but I can't imagine why anyone thinks genetic engineering is really a good idea.
Two main propositions inform my views on this:
1 - a biological agent is by definition alive and able to reproduce. If someone creates something bad, you can't just wait for its half-life for it to degrade. Its out there making new copies of itself.
2 - it took billions of years and all the fine tuning that follows with that to get where we are today. What makes anyone think, we'll be able to do a better job churning this stuff out of a lab? We've made a hash of the world just by sitting around and consuming. God help us when we start tinkering with it.
Genetic engineering is pinnacle of scientific hubris. I think it has the potential to be far more distructive than nukyalur weapons because it doesn't just take the blunt object approach to destruction, it goes right into the nuts and bolts. Perhaps there really are things we weren't meant to mess with.
I guess that should come as no surprise from Hollywood, but it is apparently getting harder and harder for Dems to work as lobbyist on Capital Hill these days. Mr. Delay has this thing about rigid party loyalty.
Yeah, I get the Trib delivered at home and I saw this the day of publication. I was surprised about Wired. I've been subscribing for about 5 years and I like it, but I didn't think it was as well regarded now as when it first came out. It is really as much a consumers guide now as anything.
My other faves are:
- Atlantic -- it has always been strong on public and international affairs and appears to have only gotten better in the last few years. Has anyone EVER finished an Atlantic crossword puzzle?
- Dr. Dobbs Journal -- still one of the best general programming magazine, but it has developed a disturbing emphasis on.Net lately.
- The New Yorker -- no explanation required.
- Harpers -- very similar to the Atlantic in my book.
- Time -- My Weekly Reader for grown-ups.
- Vanity Fair -- People Magazine for grown-ups. (checkout Despot of the Month for July)
I'm never quite sure just how this is supposed to work. Aren't VOIP carriers actually piggy backing on resources provided by the voice carriers in the first place?
Are we just talking about a segment of the market or what? I don't know all that much about the telco industry, but it has always been my impression that data lines shadow voice lines and are owned and maintained by the same parties. Is that not the case, or is my info wrong? Are there significant data networks in this country that are not in some way owned by or related to major telcos?
To this extent are we talking about big players really going out of business, or there simply being a shift in the market whereby the telcos morph into the owners and maintainers of the backbone and little VoIP carriers pop up at the edges. Then how long will it take for consolidation to cull these little ones to the point where we once again have new telco monopoly, but over a different style of infrastructure.
Coming from the Slashdot crowd, all this excitement over whether Vonage is a phone company or not is particularly amusing.
Granted, not everyone that reads Slashdot is programmer, but clearly a lot either are or have more than a passing acquaintance with programming concepts and theory.
I think what we are seeing here is simply a bureaucratic manifestation of the separation of interface from implementation. The whole point of companies like Vonage is that the do all the stuff a normal telephone company does, but using non-standard methods. If they didn't, they'd have no customer base, and their users would stick with existing providers.
If the users think its a phone company, why shouldn't the regulators? Isn't that the whole basis of OOP over the last several decades? What a thing does is more important than how it does it.
I'd like to know on what basis they state that the airports are unwired.
I travel in and out of O'Hare regularly, and I'm not aware of any wireless service available to the unwashed. Perhaps wireless is available in the airline club lounges, but that hardly counts as "airport" access.
By contrast, I was in KC Mo last month, a much smaller airport than O'Hare, though with a very cool design in my opinion, and their wireless access was both publicly available, and clearly announced on their PA screens.
The story digest may have this completely wrong. It says "What do you do when you let an employee go? You kill their password and ID, right?"
The activity in question appears to have been facilitated by access granted as part of his severance package. As the article notes: "As part of his separation package when Lafond left Canadian Airlines in October 2000, he received two space-available airline tickets per year for five years. These tickets are booked through the private website."
The article is actually a little hazy on the details here. Though it doesn't specifically say so, it seems to imply that the separation agreement gave the terminated employee direct access to this private web site through a user name and password. One can imagine other ways this could be done that didn't involve direct access to the employee, like through a dedicated fulfillment provider, for example.
Either way, it sounds like it all amounts to some pretty dumb corporate behavior on the part of Air Canada. Either bad security practices if they didn't cut off the guy's access, or bad auditting if all that use went unnoticed for so long.
I think that people who see the U.S. government as some behemoth that can devour SCO are missing something. Four years ago, that might have been a reasonable analysis, but now you have people in charge of the govenrment who are actually much more hostile to the institutions that they nominally govern than they are to the industries they nominally regulate or serve.
This is actually a perfect oppotunity for SCO to walk in, whine about lost IP value, and have a truly sympathetic ear on the other side of the table. The government shut down several nominally free services provided by the government because private industry concerns complained that they were too successful and taking away business from the private sector.
The Bush administration loves anything that makes a buck, and probably hates things like Open Source software because it sounds too much like Communism.
A ped phase, because of the much slower speed of a human being relative to a car, can actually be longer than if there were no pedestrians.
A lot of intersections have traffic sensitive cycles, such that once the control hardware is "aware" that there is no more vehicle traffic in the direction of the green, it will automatically terminate that phase (by bringing up yellow and then red) and bring up green for the traffic on the intersecting street.
Most pedestrian phases are timed presuming that humans travel at about 2.5 feet per second, and the "don't walk" phase is usually determined by dividing the width of the street by that number to permit a person just stepping into the cross-walk to make it all the way across in time. So presuming 10-15 seconds of ped-green to get things started and 20 to 30 seconds of "don't walk" time at a 50 foot crossing, the full ped phase time can be up to 45 seconds.
Without pedestrians, the cycle could be much shorter if there were little or no vehicular traffic present. Usually, a pedestrian phase will run for the longest duration permitted at a given intersection.
I had for years misunderstood just what cross walk buttons do until I actually worked in traffic engineering. Pedestrian buttons essentially do the same thing for pedestrian cross-walks that the in-road detectors do for automobiles: they tell the local traffic light controller that there is a pedestrian waiting to use the cross walk and that the pedestrian phase in the traffic signals timing plan should be used during the next cycle.
If no pedestrian is present at the cross walk and the button is not hit, that plan will not be used and as a result the timing of the lights during the next cycle will be somewhat different than if a pedestrian were present.
There does seem to be an informal sense among pedestrians that pressing the button should cause the ped signal to activate sooner, since they are there and requesting service, but that is not the case. The only thing pressing the button changes is whether that special ped phase cycle is used or not.
The real need for the buttons in the first place is that, while most contemporary vehicle detection schemes are based on the electromagnetic properties of automobiles, most normal pedestrians are not constructed of massive chunks of ferrous metals and so have little effect on these devices. A car announces its presence simply by being there, a human being must make a little extra effort to push a button.
What I get from the headline (I'll read the article after I've submitted my uninformed opinion) is that there may really be no need for those buttons in the first place. A place like New York is likely to have such massive pedestrian activity in the first place, that the buttons themselves are redundant, since nearly every signal cycle is likely to require an active pedestrian phase to serve that volume. Ped crossing buttons may be as useful in NYC as they would be on an interstate highway in the middle of Nevada, but for opposite reasons.
This may not help you, but it was great for me. Find an employer that provides tuition reimbursment, get a job there, and exploit that benefit all you can. I'm on my second go round going this route. It isn't quick, but you can't beat the price.
I took a job a number of years ago that provided full tuition reimbursment and used it to finish a BS in CS. I had about three years of undergrad credit from past lives, so it wasn't like starting from scratch, but I needed 15 courses at about $1,200 a pop, so it saved me over $15,000. I'm currently pursuing an MS at a school where the classes are $2000 a pop. My current employer will reimburse $10K per year, but after about $5,500 it becomes taxable. Still cheaper than paying it all yourself. Unfortunately, not all employers are so generous, and I've even read of some who are withdrawing this benefit in these lean times.
One other thing to pursue would be CLEP credit. This is credit you can receive for simply taking and passing a test. During my full post-secondary career (>20 years) I've tested out of well over a year's worth of class credit. With the tests running about $100 per attempt, you'd be foolish not take at least a few.
Another angle might be to get a job at the school itself. Many colleges allow employees and their family to enroll in courses at little or no cost. My sister works at an exclusive college on the east coast and she says some of the staff employees continue to work there for that reason alone. A $30,000 a year job provides not only that wage, but gives their children an education that would cost nearly as much for free.
Doesn't this company have a history of this? If memory serves, Caldera (which is just SCO by another name, no?), made a pile a number of years ago by buying DR DOS from Digital Research and then turning around an suing Microsoft for alledgedly sabotaging versions of Windows 3.1x such that it would not run properly on DR DOS.
Funny though, I'll bet most of the/. crowd was on the Caldera side of that one. How times change.
Would someone mind clarifying the acronym "SEO"? It is used repeatedly in the article, but in the context of an audience that already knows it. I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
...mean criminal trials.
If this does pass, it will be interesting to see how this will play in court, with Granny or a 12 year old being dragged in front of a judge because of Justin Timberlake song.
Our courts are clogged already. It would serve the industry right if judges simply laughed the cases our of court.
The City of Chicago is starting to wise up on the drug front at least. They are saying that they've had so many minor marijuana possession cases thrown out by judges that they are going to just forego criminal charges and impose fines instead.
These are all good points and I'm all for them, but what's good for the EU may not necessarily be good for Microsoft, as far as Microsoft is concerned anyway.
.doc format, and has no real interest in any sort of standard format, because in that scenario, they lose control of the "defacto" standard and become just one of a long list of software providers who make document editors.
Microsoft has vested interest in keeping everyone working on some variant of their
I'm not saying that is the right answer, but I think we've seen over and over parties with vested interests in the status quo (Microsoft in software, the U.S. Republican Party in U.S. politics, Detroit and automobiles, etc.) will exert enormous amounts of effort to skew public perception such that the "greater good" appears to coincide directly with their own best interests. Witness Microsoft's claims that breaking them up would do severe harm to the U.S. and world economies. They were clearly full of sh*t, but there is a significant portion of the public that will support this sort of stuff reflexively and uncritically.
I bet Microsoft does not take this action lying down but comes up with some way to either overturn it, or twist it to allow some sort of proprietary advantage to accrue to themselves.
That's a good point, but it relates to legislative compliance, not standards compliance. At least not directly.
An EU mandate would represent a much larger stick than an ISO standard represents a carrot.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks standards compliance is going materially affect anyone's market share should share what they're smoking.
I would go your analysis one step further and say that people use Word, not because it does what people want it to do, but because so many other people use it. It is living proof of MSFT's continued reliance on being the "de facto standard" as opposed to an actual established standard.
Market share is its own reward and its own enforcer. Any competitor to any of MSFT's established application doesn't only need to be better, it needs to be LOTS and LOTS better because any incremental improvement can always be justified away by the difficulties introduced by lower interoperability.
I worked for the municipal engineering department of the city that I live in a number of years ago and we had similar issues with our stock of aerial photographs of the city.
The issue never required adjudication, if I recall correctly, but the city engineer's stand at the time was that we didn't give full sets out simply because we'd paid for them, and giving them away for free to contractors or others was simply bad economics. If others wanted a complete set, then let them bear the cost themselves.
There have to be ways to address this without bringing security into it. Local and other governments may have an obligation to provide information they possess on an as needed basis, but this sounds like the guy is on a fishing expidition.
It seems to me that as long as the town provides the requestor with adequate access to the system in which in the information resides, they should be in the clear with respect to not providing him with a full copy that he can walk away with.
I've been reading Talking Points Memo for a few months now, since I read about it in a Vanity Fair article last May or June, and I love it.
If someone could point out a few conservative blogs that viewed the issues with the level of balance and analysis that Josh Marshall does, I'd be way more willing to explore opposing points of view.
Personally, I find most conservative, and even a lot of liberal blogs, way too belicose. More light, less heat please.
For conservative takes, I'll go with the NYT's David Brooks or Andrew Sullivan. Even mainstream conservatives like William Safire or Charles Krauthammer seem awfully arch and doctrinaire to me.
I know the posting is about blogs and not columnists, but one of my faves is Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune. You can't pin him down as either traditionally liberal or conservative, but he frequently comes across with pieces that seem to wed strands of the two in very provocative ways.
I'm clearly dating myself, but I saw Blade Runner in its first theatrical release, and its my recollection that it was pretty much a disappointment to most people.
It was Ridley Scott's follow up to Alien, and it just doesn't have the narrative drive and shock value of Alien. Of course it grows on you with repeated viewings, but it really didn't go over very well initially. What really cinched Blade Runner's reputation was the advent of home video. People got a chance to look at it again and really appreciate it. I know I do. It is one of my favorite movies.
Not more favorite than 2001: A Space Odessey, however. I'd quibble about the 1 - 2 placement. I vastly prefer 2001. I don't know exactly what it is, but the combination of impressionism and cold realism is completely gripping. Its never quite the same movie twice. Its driven by ambiguity and it is exceptionally beautiful. Nothing else even comes close.
Haven't we been through all this with guns over the last 10 or so years? There have been numerous attempts to find gun manufacturers liable for deaths or injuries involving the uses of their products. I don't think they've lost a case on these grounds yet. In every case, I think, it has been found that the responsibility lay, not with the manufacturer, but with the operator of the gun.
I think it should go like that for this case, ultimately. As long as there are legal and proper uses for the products in question, it seems unlikely that manufacturers can be held liable for user's bad acts.
In the worst case, at least this might provide some traction in those suits against gun manufacturers.
I'm no right wing ideologue or luddite, but I can't imagine why anyone thinks genetic engineering is really a good idea.
Two main propositions inform my views on this:
1 - a biological agent is by definition alive and able to reproduce. If someone creates something bad, you can't just wait for its half-life for it to degrade. Its out there making new copies of itself.
2 - it took billions of years and all the fine tuning that follows with that to get where we are today. What makes anyone think, we'll be able to do a better job churning this stuff out of a lab? We've made a hash of the world just by sitting around and consuming. God help us when we start tinkering with it.
Genetic engineering is pinnacle of scientific hubris. I think it has the potential to be far more distructive than nukyalur weapons because it doesn't just take the blunt object approach to destruction, it goes right into the nuts and bolts. Perhaps there really are things we weren't meant to mess with.
...he's a Democrat.
I guess that should come as no surprise from Hollywood, but it is apparently getting harder and harder for Dems to work as lobbyist on Capital Hill these days. Mr. Delay has this thing about rigid party loyalty.
Yeah, I get the Trib delivered at home and I saw this the day of publication. I was surprised about Wired. I've been subscribing for about 5 years and I like it, but I didn't think it was as well regarded now as when it first came out. It is really as much a consumers guide now as anything.
.Net lately.
My other faves are:
- Atlantic -- it has always been strong on public and international affairs and appears to have only gotten better in the last few years. Has anyone EVER finished an Atlantic crossword puzzle?
- Dr. Dobbs Journal -- still one of the best general programming magazine, but it has developed a disturbing emphasis on
- The New Yorker -- no explanation required.
- Harpers -- very similar to the Atlantic in my book.
- Time -- My Weekly Reader for grown-ups.
- Vanity Fair -- People Magazine for grown-ups. (checkout Despot of the Month for July)
I'm never quite sure just how this is supposed to work. Aren't VOIP carriers actually piggy backing on resources provided by the voice carriers in the first place?
Are we just talking about a segment of the market or what? I don't know all that much about the telco industry, but it has always been my impression that data lines shadow voice lines and are owned and maintained by the same parties. Is that not the case, or is my info wrong? Are there significant data networks in this country that are not in some way owned by or related to major telcos?
To this extent are we talking about big players really going out of business, or there simply being a shift in the market whereby the telcos morph into the owners and maintainers of the backbone and little VoIP carriers pop up at the edges. Then how long will it take for consolidation to cull these little ones to the point where we once again have new telco monopoly, but over a different style of infrastructure.
Coming from the Slashdot crowd, all this excitement over whether Vonage is a phone company or not is particularly amusing.
Granted, not everyone that reads Slashdot is programmer, but clearly a lot either are or have more than a passing acquaintance with programming concepts and theory.
I think what we are seeing here is simply a bureaucratic manifestation of the separation of interface from implementation. The whole point of companies like Vonage is that the do all the stuff a normal telephone company does, but using non-standard methods. If they didn't, they'd have no customer base, and their users would stick with existing providers.
If the users think its a phone company, why shouldn't the regulators? Isn't that the whole basis of OOP over the last several decades? What a thing does is more important than how it does it.
I'd like to know on what basis they state that the airports are unwired.
I travel in and out of O'Hare regularly, and I'm not aware of any wireless service available to the unwashed. Perhaps wireless is available in the airline club lounges, but that hardly counts as "airport" access.
By contrast, I was in KC Mo last month, a much smaller airport than O'Hare, though with a very cool design in my opinion, and their wireless access was both publicly available, and clearly announced on their PA screens.
The story digest may have this completely wrong. It says "What do you do when you let an employee go? You kill their password and ID, right?"
The activity in question appears to have been facilitated by access granted as part of his severance package. As the article notes: "As part of his separation package when Lafond left Canadian Airlines in October 2000, he received two space-available airline tickets per year for five years. These tickets are booked through the private website."
The article is actually a little hazy on the details here. Though it doesn't specifically say so, it seems to imply that the separation agreement gave the terminated employee direct access to this private web site through a user name and password. One can imagine other ways this could be done that didn't involve direct access to the employee, like through a dedicated fulfillment provider, for example.
Either way, it sounds like it all amounts to some pretty dumb corporate behavior on the part of Air Canada. Either bad security practices if they didn't cut off the guy's access, or bad auditting if all that use went unnoticed for so long.
refer to subject.
I think that people who see the U.S. government as some behemoth that can devour SCO are missing something. Four years ago, that might have been a reasonable analysis, but now you have people in charge of the govenrment who are actually much more hostile to the institutions that they nominally govern than they are to the industries they nominally regulate or serve.
This is actually a perfect oppotunity for SCO to walk in, whine about lost IP value, and have a truly sympathetic ear on the other side of the table. The government shut down several nominally free services provided by the government because private industry concerns complained that they were too successful and taking away business from the private sector.
The Bush administration loves anything that makes a buck, and probably hates things like Open Source software because it sounds too much like Communism.
A ped phase, because of the much slower speed of a human being relative to a car, can actually be longer than if there were no pedestrians.
A lot of intersections have traffic sensitive cycles, such that once the control hardware is "aware" that there is no more vehicle traffic in the direction of the green, it will automatically terminate that phase (by bringing up yellow and then red) and bring up green for the traffic on the intersecting street.
Most pedestrian phases are timed presuming that humans travel at about 2.5 feet per second, and the "don't walk" phase is usually determined by dividing the width of the street by that number to permit a person just stepping into the cross-walk to make it all the way across in time. So presuming 10-15 seconds of ped-green to get things started and 20 to 30 seconds of "don't walk" time at a 50 foot crossing, the full ped phase time can be up to 45 seconds.
Without pedestrians, the cycle could be much shorter if there were little or no vehicular traffic present. Usually, a pedestrian phase will run for the longest duration permitted at a given intersection.
I had for years misunderstood just what cross walk buttons do until I actually worked in traffic engineering. Pedestrian buttons essentially do the same thing for pedestrian cross-walks that the in-road detectors do for automobiles: they tell the local traffic light controller that there is a pedestrian waiting to use the cross walk and that the pedestrian phase in the traffic signals timing plan should be used during the next cycle.
If no pedestrian is present at the cross walk and the button is not hit, that plan will not be used and as a result the timing of the lights during the next cycle will be somewhat different than if a pedestrian were present.
There does seem to be an informal sense among pedestrians that pressing the button should cause the ped signal to activate sooner, since they are there and requesting service, but that is not the case. The only thing pressing the button changes is whether that special ped phase cycle is used or not.
The real need for the buttons in the first place is that, while most contemporary vehicle detection schemes are based on the electromagnetic properties of automobiles, most normal pedestrians are not constructed of massive chunks of ferrous metals and so have little effect on these devices. A car announces its presence simply by being there, a human being must make a little extra effort to push a button.
What I get from the headline (I'll read the article after I've submitted my uninformed opinion) is that there may really be no need for those buttons in the first place. A place like New York is likely to have such massive pedestrian activity in the first place, that the buttons themselves are redundant, since nearly every signal cycle is likely to require an active pedestrian phase to serve that volume. Ped crossing buttons may be as useful in NYC as they would be on an interstate highway in the middle of Nevada, but for opposite reasons.
I absolutely love Mozilla and run IE only to access sites which explicitly require it, such as my employers expense processing system.
That one only seems to break on the Java implementation. It apparently requires some of the WFC classes that aren't implemented in a more generic JVM.
Shouldn't there be some way to select the Microsoft JVM in Mozilla? I know its apostacy, but I'd like to try it nonetheless.
Perhaps Canadian wireless prices are under the influence of the same shadowy forces responsible for American pharmaceutical prices.
This may not help you, but it was great for me. Find an employer that provides tuition reimbursment, get a job there, and exploit that benefit all you can. I'm on my second go round going this route. It isn't quick, but you can't beat the price.
I took a job a number of years ago that provided full tuition reimbursment and used it to finish a BS in CS. I had about three years of undergrad credit from past lives, so it wasn't like starting from scratch, but I needed 15 courses at about $1,200 a pop, so it saved me over $15,000. I'm currently pursuing an MS at a school where the classes are $2000 a pop. My current employer will reimburse $10K per year, but after about $5,500 it becomes taxable. Still cheaper than paying it all yourself. Unfortunately, not all employers are so generous, and I've even read of some who are withdrawing this benefit in these lean times.
One other thing to pursue would be CLEP credit. This is credit you can receive for simply taking and passing a test. During my full post-secondary career (>20 years) I've tested out of well over a year's worth of class credit. With the tests running about $100 per attempt, you'd be foolish not take at least a few.
Another angle might be to get a job at the school itself. Many colleges allow employees and their family to enroll in courses at little or no cost. My sister works at an exclusive college on the east coast and she says some of the staff employees continue to work there for that reason alone. A $30,000 a year job provides not only that wage, but gives their children an education that would cost nearly as much for free.
Doesn't this company have a history of this? If memory serves, Caldera (which is just SCO by another name, no?), made a pile a number of years ago by buying DR DOS from Digital Research and then turning around an suing Microsoft for alledgedly sabotaging versions of Windows 3.1x such that it would not run properly on DR DOS.
/. crowd was on the Caldera side of that one. How times change.
Funny though, I'll bet most of the
Would someone mind clarifying the acronym "SEO"? It is used repeatedly in the article, but in the context of an audience that already knows it. I don't.
Boies did not come to prominence during the Microsoft trial, he successfully defended IBM against anti-trust changes 20 years ago.