A monopoly is not defined legally as being exclusive. It's a vast preponderance of the market share. More than 80% or 90% or something like that. In this respect, Microsoft is still a monopoly in several different markets.
Being a monopoly is not wrong. Abusing your monopoly position to shut competitors out of a market (even one in which you don't have a monopoly) is. Microsoft was convicted on several counts of this, and then for some strange reason was let off with a light slap on the wrist, despite having previously agreed to a consent decree regarding some of those behaviors.
IMHO, the biggest turning point in our history was the civil war. We should've let the south split. Then we could've justifiably shot any of their slave hunters that came up looking. Eventually they would've collapsed economically, or their slaves would've revolted, or possibly both.
Yeah, until someone from your religion does something awful linked to your religion. Suddenly, every single word you say will be looked at with the most negative possible interpretation and you too could face a secret warrant for your arrest where nobody can talk about the fact you're even gone. Or, maybe you're a gun nut, or a homosexual, or whatever group is out of favor now. Doesn't really matter. Suddenly your rights don't matter, it's who you know and who they know that count. Everybody says things that could be construed to mean something bad if someone else wants to.
Because if everybody's change of companies involved disputes of this nature, we'd quickly end up with a Neuromancer world in a which a change of jobs for a high level researcher or executive required the hiring company to also hire a highly skilled team of mercenaries to pull it off.
People are not property. And non-compete agreements come perilously close to treating them as such, mostly by making their barrier to entry to any other job too high.
The only time I can ever see a clause in an employment agreement that forbids you from switching jobs to a competitor is when you are part of the company's public image (like a radio or TV personality) and your job switch might confuse people as to which organization you represent.
Paid F/OSS is still F/OSS, not OSS. I know exactly the distinction you are making. But, I do not like dropping the word 'Free' as the whole reason it's there has nothing to do with whether you pay for it or not, or whether or not you can easily download it without paying anything.
I would debate you a little on the IP law issue. I'm pushing a little at my current company for them to put their stuff under an Open Source license. I don't think it would affect our business at all to do so. And the company is beginning to plan to get most of its revenue from services anyway.
But, it's not hugely relevant to the point, exactly. I more meant that IP law issues in combination with the monopoly issues, trying to head off arguments that Microsoft came by their monopoly 'fair and square' and none should interfere.
Bill Gates' company is propped up by government support of IP laws and a government granted corporate charter, and a government unwillingness to enforce antitrust law. So, this is kinda close to being taxed, then having some random authority decide what to do with your money. Especially since, in order to communicate with the government in many places, you have to send in Word documents and other things that require you buy things from Microsoft.
Bill Gates' money came from all of us. And now he's choosing to spend some of it on various charities. He seems to be doing a better job, generally, of selecting them than most of our public officials do, but that's what's going on here. Philanthropy with ill-gotten gains is not philanthropy at all.
While I agree that Bush's problems are far, far more egregious than Clinton's, Clinton also violated some of those same agreements. The negotiation that lead to the (thankfully failed) national health care plan all happened illegally in closed door sessions with the major insurance companies. President Clinton lied on the stand (I could care less what he does with his interns as long as its consensual).
I believe both presidents deserved impeachment for these breaches of conduct. That I believe Bush deserves it several order's of magnitude more than Clinton did doesn't mean that I think Clinton shouldn't have been.
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated...
on
The Future of Emacs
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· Score: 1
That means I'll have to switch to XEmacs. Oh, well. It's not that different, but in the past the differences have been jarring enough that it wasn't worth the pain. But if XEmacs gets a feature like anti-aliased fonts before emacs does, the pain might suddenly be worth it.
Thanks.:-)
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated...
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
I definitely agree with you on points 3 and 5. One of my biggest complaints is that I can't get emacs to use anti-aliased fonts because the display engine is too dated. Right now, this is only a minor complaint, but in 2-3 years, it will be a must-have, and I shall be forced to switch to something less competent.:-(
And 5 would be awfully nice. I can get some of that with the extremely simple-minded dynamic abbrevs. M-/ hunts through all your buffers (in a reasonably intelligent order) for text that looks like what you're typing and tries to complete what you're typing based on what it finds. But that's really not enough.
I dread having to move to Eclipse. I do not want a project straightjacket. That's the biggest reason I use emacs instead of some stupid IDE. And I do not want to run some stupid Java app written by monkeys who think that they're all cool for using a language with C-style syntax that has garbage collection, but shares almost nothing with C outside of superficially similar syntax.
*sigh* Ideally, I'd like emacs to be redone in Python with a model that strictly separates the UI code from the editing engine so you can slap all kinds of different UIs (including curses) on it.
I've tried using Eclipse. First, it's slow. When you have to start an alternative OS (i.e. Java) in order to run your app, that's to be expected. It's also very big, for much the same reason. These things lead it to feel very clunky.
But, once I get past all that, it feels more like Eclipse gets in my way than helps me. It suffers the "Here, let me manage everything for you! You're going to do it all this way I expect, right?" problem that all IDEs suffer.
Lastly, I don't (and won't, it's a dreadfully stupid language) develop in Java. I develop in Python and/or C++. Eclipse doesn't support those nearly as well. It would be particularly nice if it could be scripted in Python, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I see no details on that case easily visible on that site. I just see some of his rants. Given the content of the rants, there is nothing on his site I can take seriously. He seems incapable of any kind of rational thought process that will lead to a conclusion he hasn't already decided on by other means. So the entire site is largely a disingenuous fraud dressed up as serious thought. Much like his piece in Town Hall.
But, if you can point me to details of the case, I would be very interested, as it sounds like a nasty injustice has been done.
I know, he had his friends beat him up! Or, err... He managed to convince a hospital to fake a report or something.. err... and the police department too! Yeah, that's it! Obviously anybody who's beaten up is going to remember the exact road it's on and everything. And you're going to remember exact details about your attackers too, even when it's at night. Nobody's confused, frightened or panicky after being physically assaulted, especially atheists!
Perhaps we ought to test out these theories on the stupid idiot who's trying to cast some sort of cloud over the guy's credibility without having any hard evidence to back it up.
Depends on who the email is to. Among friends or like-minded people, I think that's perfectly acceptable. All of my friends refer to religious conservatives as fundies, and they are the most detested of any political group we complain about.
It looked like the email was to a club of atheists. So, it was at the edge of acceptability IMHO, but not definitely over it.
No company I've worked for has ever done that. Except for once when I was outright fired. Even the one time I was laid off they let me hang around for the entire rest of the day cleaning things up and making sure the remaining people would have an easier time of it.
In fact, one company gave me a project to do on my last two weeks that was both interesting, and didn't take very long. And that was one of those "Well, things seem to not be working out, and so we'd like you to resign." sort of deals where they gave me a month to find a new job after I asked to be transferred to a different role.
While I tend to agree with the person who started their post "Nice, another word-wanker.", I also agree with the general point of yours. Personally, I wouldn't have started in your camp in that meeting, but I would've ended up there because I think you're right.
This isn't a fight where a comprimise will leave anybody in a good position. This is one where we have to win in the long run. I think your strategy is the only viable one I've heard that has a chance of accomplishing that.
This article appears to be quite confused. In some way, it appears to point at google and claim somehow that the vulnerability was google's fault. Phrases like "Google Fixes Desktop Search Loophole" and "Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to" strongly imply this. In other parts the article is very explicit that the problem is an IE vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't patched.
So, which is it? Is google doing Microsoft a favor by avoiding the use of a feature that Microsoft flubbed? Or did google do something wrong in the first place? And precisely what standards are other makers of desktop software held to? The industry seems to almost gleefully accept an endless parade of the most egregious bugs from these vendors (Microsoft in particular). So, it seems that it would be meaningless to hold google to the same standard unless the complaint is that they have too few bugs.
Note that I have never worked for google or Microsoft.
Another annoyance is this sentence: "Does the researcher think he has really contributed to the security of Internet users worldwide by going public with details of the problem when no fix is available?" In the absence of any other data, that question can't be answered. If a vulnerability goes for longer than a month without the vendor fixing it, then I think a responsible security researcher has a duty to disclose the vulnerability so that people can protect themselves from it.
There is a fine balance to be struck. And as a rule, it is always a courtesy for a security research to disclose a vulnerability first to a vendor, and secondly to the net at large. It is never a requirement. If a vendor abuses the courtesy by not bothering to fix the bug, the researcher has every right (and indeed, a duty) to present the information to the public. You can be sure that people who are much more shadowy than the security researcher looking for a bit of acclaim have a good chance of already knowing about the bug, and are quietly exploiting it for themselves.
All in all, I find your article to be both too simplistic in its treatment of various issues, and confused and muddled about exactly where responsibility lies for various problems. You should be able to do better. You call yourselves 'CIO Today', and the average IT worker's biggest complaint about their bosses is how ill-informed their bosses are about technology while being absolutely certain that they know better than their employees. Perhaps this article points to the reason why.
Note that I have never worked for either Microsoft or google.
I'm guessing there could be a lot done with AI that wouldn't require heavy communication between the different AI components. So, with careful design, most of the AI could fit in L1 cache andd be executed by one core without any bandwidth constraints.
Automota based models for physics engines might also be able to make good use of large numbers of parallel processors. I bet there are some interesting techniques for this in the scientific supercomuting sector that I don't know about yet.
That sounds more like game programmers are wasting their time making games that don't make use of multiple CPUs. It's very clear that there are starting to be some limits reached in terms of what one CPU can do in a machine. There's a reason all these manufacturers are making dual core processors instead of making their processor faster. It's time for the programmers to change how they program.
So, I think your comment isn't very useful, since you try to tell hardware manufacturer's that they're doing useless things instead of making the single CPU faster. And that's not true at all. It's the game programmers that are doing stupid things. Going from 1 to 2 is would've been hard to deal with before it happened. But once you have, going from 2 to x is much easier. So, testing out three and more core systems is pretty useful.
There are plenty of reasons for them to be upset, but to express it that way is completely wrong.
I have mixed feelings about city-wide wifi projects. But, I definitely think wifi should be available everywhere for free. Mostly because I can't see any other way it's workable.
Right now, in order to get wifi in the various places I go, I'd have to have about 4 or 5 $30/mo accounts with various providers. That's completely ridiciulous and wrong. I can't use two providers at once. I shouldn't have to pay both of them.
But I can't see of a better way to work things unless you just hand it out for free.
Slashdot Mirror
A monopoly is not defined legally as being exclusive. It's a vast preponderance of the market share. More than 80% or 90% or something like that. In this respect, Microsoft is still a monopoly in several different markets.
Being a monopoly is not wrong. Abusing your monopoly position to shut competitors out of a market (even one in which you don't have a monopoly) is. Microsoft was convicted on several counts of this, and then for some strange reason was let off with a light slap on the wrist, despite having previously agreed to a consent decree regarding some of those behaviors.
IMHO, the biggest turning point in our history was the civil war. We should've let the south split. Then we could've justifiably shot any of their slave hunters that came up looking. Eventually they would've collapsed economically, or their slaves would've revolted, or possibly both.
Yeah, until someone from your religion does something awful linked to your religion. Suddenly, every single word you say will be looked at with the most negative possible interpretation and you too could face a secret warrant for your arrest where nobody can talk about the fact you're even gone. Or, maybe you're a gun nut, or a homosexual, or whatever group is out of favor now. Doesn't really matter. Suddenly your rights don't matter, it's who you know and who they know that count. Everybody says things that could be construed to mean something bad if someone else wants to.
I agree. They, in fact, have very poor support for anything but Windows in any of their desktop products. It's one of my pet peeves about google.
Because if everybody's change of companies involved disputes of this nature, we'd quickly end up with a Neuromancer world in a which a change of jobs for a high level researcher or executive required the hiring company to also hire a highly skilled team of mercenaries to pull it off.
People are not property. And non-compete agreements come perilously close to treating them as such, mostly by making their barrier to entry to any other job too high.
The only time I can ever see a clause in an employment agreement that forbids you from switching jobs to a competitor is when you are part of the company's public image (like a radio or TV personality) and your job switch might confuse people as to which organization you represent.
And exactly how does restricting munitions exports prevent that sort of attack?
Paid F/OSS is still F/OSS, not OSS. I know exactly the distinction you are making. But, I do not like dropping the word 'Free' as the whole reason it's there has nothing to do with whether you pay for it or not, or whether or not you can easily download it without paying anything.
I would debate you a little on the IP law issue. I'm pushing a little at my current company for them to put their stuff under an Open Source license. I don't think it would affect our business at all to do so. And the company is beginning to plan to get most of its revenue from services anyway.
But, it's not hugely relevant to the point, exactly. I more meant that IP law issues in combination with the monopoly issues, trying to head off arguments that Microsoft came by their monopoly 'fair and square' and none should interfere.
Bill Gates' company is propped up by government support of IP laws and a government granted corporate charter, and a government unwillingness to enforce antitrust law. So, this is kinda close to being taxed, then having some random authority decide what to do with your money. Especially since, in order to communicate with the government in many places, you have to send in Word documents and other things that require you buy things from Microsoft.
Bill Gates' money came from all of us. And now he's choosing to spend some of it on various charities. He seems to be doing a better job, generally, of selecting them than most of our public officials do, but that's what's going on here. Philanthropy with ill-gotten gains is not philanthropy at all.
I sort of agree, but I do think that Bush has done many more and many worse things in that regard than Clinton.
While I agree that Bush's problems are far, far more egregious than Clinton's, Clinton also violated some of those same agreements. The negotiation that lead to the (thankfully failed) national health care plan all happened illegally in closed door sessions with the major insurance companies. President Clinton lied on the stand (I could care less what he does with his interns as long as its consensual).
I believe both presidents deserved impeachment for these breaches of conduct. That I believe Bush deserves it several order's of magnitude more than Clinton did doesn't mean that I think Clinton shouldn't have been.
That means I'll have to switch to XEmacs. Oh, well. It's not that different, but in the past the differences have been jarring enough that it wasn't worth the pain. But if XEmacs gets a feature like anti-aliased fonts before emacs does, the pain might suddenly be worth it.
Thanks. :-)
I definitely agree with you on points 3 and 5. One of my biggest complaints is that I can't get emacs to use anti-aliased fonts because the display engine is too dated. Right now, this is only a minor complaint, but in 2-3 years, it will be a must-have, and I shall be forced to switch to something less competent. :-(
And 5 would be awfully nice. I can get some of that with the extremely simple-minded dynamic abbrevs. M-/ hunts through all your buffers (in a reasonably intelligent order) for text that looks like what you're typing and tries to complete what you're typing based on what it finds. But that's really not enough.
I dread having to move to Eclipse. I do not want a project straightjacket. That's the biggest reason I use emacs instead of some stupid IDE. And I do not want to run some stupid Java app written by monkeys who think that they're all cool for using a language with C-style syntax that has garbage collection, but shares almost nothing with C outside of superficially similar syntax.
*sigh* Ideally, I'd like emacs to be redone in Python with a model that strictly separates the UI code from the editing engine so you can slap all kinds of different UIs (including curses) on it.
I've tried using Eclipse. First, it's slow. When you have to start an alternative OS (i.e. Java) in order to run your app, that's to be expected. It's also very big, for much the same reason. These things lead it to feel very clunky.
But, once I get past all that, it feels more like Eclipse gets in my way than helps me. It suffers the "Here, let me manage everything for you! You're going to do it all this way I expect, right?" problem that all IDEs suffer.
Lastly, I don't (and won't, it's a dreadfully stupid language) develop in Java. I develop in Python and/or C++. Eclipse doesn't support those nearly as well. It would be particularly nice if it could be scripted in Python, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I see no details on that case easily visible on that site. I just see some of his rants. Given the content of the rants, there is nothing on his site I can take seriously. He seems incapable of any kind of rational thought process that will lead to a conclusion he hasn't already decided on by other means. So the entire site is largely a disingenuous fraud dressed up as serious thought. Much like his piece in Town Hall.
But, if you can point me to details of the case, I would be very interested, as it sounds like a nasty injustice has been done.
I know, he had his friends beat him up! Or, err... He managed to convince a hospital to fake a report or something.. err... and the police department too! Yeah, that's it! Obviously anybody who's beaten up is going to remember the exact road it's on and everything. And you're going to remember exact details about your attackers too, even when it's at night. Nobody's confused, frightened or panicky after being physically assaulted, especially atheists!
Perhaps we ought to test out these theories on the stupid idiot who's trying to cast some sort of cloud over the guy's credibility without having any hard evidence to back it up.
Depends on who the email is to. Among friends or like-minded people, I think that's perfectly acceptable. All of my friends refer to religious conservatives as fundies, and they are the most detested of any political group we complain about.
It looked like the email was to a club of atheists. So, it was at the edge of acceptability IMHO, but not definitely over it.
No company I've worked for has ever done that. Except for once when I was outright fired. Even the one time I was laid off they let me hang around for the entire rest of the day cleaning things up and making sure the remaining people would have an easier time of it.
In fact, one company gave me a project to do on my last two weeks that was both interesting, and didn't take very long. And that was one of those "Well, things seem to not be working out, and so we'd like you to resign." sort of deals where they gave me a month to find a new job after I asked to be transferred to a different role.
While I tend to agree with the person who started their post "Nice, another word-wanker.", I also agree with the general point of yours. Personally, I wouldn't have started in your camp in that meeting, but I would've ended up there because I think you're right.
This isn't a fight where a comprimise will leave anybody in a good position. This is one where we have to win in the long run. I think your strategy is the only viable one I've heard that has a chance of accomplishing that.
This article appears to be quite confused. In some way, it appears to point at google and claim somehow that the vulnerability was google's fault. Phrases like "Google Fixes Desktop Search Loophole" and "Since Google is providing end-user software, it must be held to the same standards that you would hold other desktop software vendors to" strongly imply this. In other parts the article is very explicit that the problem is an IE vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't patched.
So, which is it? Is google doing Microsoft a favor by avoiding the use of a feature that Microsoft flubbed? Or did google do something wrong in the first place? And precisely what standards are other makers of desktop software held to? The industry seems to almost gleefully accept an endless parade of the most egregious bugs from these vendors (Microsoft in particular). So, it seems that it would be meaningless to hold google to the same standard unless the complaint is that they have too few bugs.
Note that I have never worked for google or Microsoft.
Another annoyance is this sentence: "Does the researcher think he has really contributed to the security of Internet users worldwide by going public with details of the problem when no fix is available?" In the absence of any other data, that question can't be answered. If a vulnerability goes for longer than a month without the vendor fixing it, then I think a responsible security researcher has a duty to disclose the vulnerability so that people can protect themselves from it.
There is a fine balance to be struck. And as a rule, it is always a courtesy for a security research to disclose a vulnerability first to a vendor, and secondly to the net at large. It is never a requirement. If a vendor abuses the courtesy by not bothering to fix the bug, the researcher has every right (and indeed, a duty) to present the information to the public. You can be sure that people who are much more shadowy than the security researcher looking for a bit of acclaim have a good chance of already knowing about the bug, and are quietly exploiting it for themselves.
All in all, I find your article to be both too simplistic in its treatment of various issues, and confused and muddled about exactly where responsibility lies for various problems. You should be able to do better. You call yourselves 'CIO Today', and the average IT worker's biggest complaint about their bosses is how ill-informed their bosses are about technology while being absolutely certain that they know better than their employees. Perhaps this article points to the reason why.
Note that I have never worked for either Microsoft or google.
Or, start writing code using actual cross-platform 3D libraries and stuff instead of the stupid garbageX libraries that Microsoft shoves at them.
I'm guessing there could be a lot done with AI that wouldn't require heavy communication between the different AI components. So, with careful design, most of the AI could fit in L1 cache andd be executed by one core without any bandwidth constraints.
Automota based models for physics engines might also be able to make good use of large numbers of parallel processors. I bet there are some interesting techniques for this in the scientific supercomuting sector that I don't know about yet.
That sounds more like game programmers are wasting their time making games that don't make use of multiple CPUs. It's very clear that there are starting to be some limits reached in terms of what one CPU can do in a machine. There's a reason all these manufacturers are making dual core processors instead of making their processor faster. It's time for the programmers to change how they program.
So, I think your comment isn't very useful, since you try to tell hardware manufacturer's that they're doing useless things instead of making the single CPU faster. And that's not true at all. It's the game programmers that are doing stupid things. Going from 1 to 2 is would've been hard to deal with before it happened. But once you have, going from 2 to x is much easier. So, testing out three and more core systems is pretty useful.
*laugh* That's what I do whenever I can. :-) I actually have a full suite of network analysis tools loaded onto my laptop for just that reason.
There are plenty of reasons for them to be upset, but to express it that way is completely wrong.
I have mixed feelings about city-wide wifi projects. But, I definitely think wifi should be available everywhere for free. Mostly because I can't see any other way it's workable.
Right now, in order to get wifi in the various places I go, I'd have to have about 4 or 5 $30/mo accounts with various providers. That's completely ridiciulous and wrong. I can't use two providers at once. I shouldn't have to pay both of them.
But I can't see of a better way to work things unless you just hand it out for free.