> 1. He had his own office, and sometimes he'd put up his feet and stare off into space. He told me that people passing by his office assumed that he was "doing nothing." But, he told me, he wasn't doing "nothing", he was very much doing something: thinking.
I'll go even further. I have the privilege of working from home / running my own outfit.
I frequently simply go to sleep if I feel like it. For a while I felt guilty about this, but the reality is that I usually only doze for 10 minutes or so and when I wake up I have 5 solutions sitting in my head for what I need to do next. I'm not sure how or why it works, but I can struggle through a whole afternoon feeling sleepy and doing mediocre work or I can take a 10 minute nap and be a rock star for an hour... so I do. I wish this was accepted practice in workplaces because I'm sure productivity would rise overall.
> Do you not think there is competition for search already? Bing, Yahoo, or countless others fail to come to mind?
Actually this was the part I thought was most disingenuous. Google has 4 times the market share of its nearest competitor! The barrier to entry in starting a new search engine is enormous - nearly impossible. It's not like 1999 when anybody with a server rack could have a good shot at indexing most of the internet. You physically can't do it without a data center so large that even just supplying power to it is a huge problem. To hold it up as an example where competition is easy and working is laughable.
> Yet, they are ran by humans who are smart enough to realize the potential and being human.
Corporations are bound by laws that transcend the humans that operate them. Some day, who knows when, push will come to shove and unless Google acts in the interests of its *stockholders* rather than its *users*, they will be liable for being sued by their stock holders or the SEC. It may be a long way off or it may be next year, but they can't escape the fundamental change that becoming a public company has wrought upon them.
> since the first page on every search would be nothing but links to viagra and malware
That's just an assertion. It relies on an assumption that Google's algorithms have no real integrity and can be easily fooled. If you believe that "open wins", you should believe that we would see rapid improvement as people innovated around those algorithms.
But more to the point, it's not so much that they keep the algorithms closed that is offensive but that the whole post is about how there is some fundamental magical property about 'openness' that makes everything it touches turn to gold. And after paragraph upon paragraph of this he suddenly drops in "oh, except here and here because we say so". You can't really have it both ways. Microsoft can just as easily assert that keeping SMB closed or making IE proprietary instead of standards based is "good for the internet" as Google can assert keeping their stuff closed.
The fact is this: open does not always win. There are valid scenarios where it just doesn't work, where it's a losing proposition for everyone. The whole blog post is just a load of BS designed to smear Apple and Microsoft with a tag of not being Open while somehow keeping a halo on Google's head.
True, but we are dealing with a very young OS which was missing many major features in it's first few versions (virtual keyboard, bluetooth, etc.). The modern phone OS battle is really only just beginning. The real question is what will happen now that both OSes (iphone, android) are reasonably feature complete and usable. Yes, if android continues the way it has, there will be a problem. However I'm betting things will be a lot smoother from here on out.
Who knows, maybe MS is deliberately losing this case so as to set a precedent for IP rights:-)
Once they take it far enough to firmly establish the legal principle they can do a mea culpa and turn around and start sending invoices to all the companies using pirated windows installs. They could start with the ones in the court room where they lose the case...
I'm not sure you can read so much into it. After what was this? answer: a "UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum".
What was the poster about? promoting a book. A book that protested Chinese internet filtering.
Now - I'm hardly pro-censorship. However I also don't like to think of every forum designed to talk about how to manage the internet turning into a giant protest rally. In short order you'll have the whole thing becoming politicised and China refusing to accept packets from Taiwan or Israel firewalling packets from Palestine... it's a can of worms we just don't want to open... let's protest censorship... but let's not do it in forums where we're trying to sort out nuts and bolts of how to join pipes together.
Apple is on a downhill slope as far as this stuff is concerned. The malware writers are starting to notice that it's getting to a useful percentage of users AND many of those users are smug / stupid / whatever and think their computers are invincible.
The same result is probably achievable for much less money and effort by getting them all Windows 7 and setting them up as low privileged users.
There's a further reason for MS to want to update pirated machines: like it or not, they contribute to the general "impression" of Windows. If there are millions of PCs slowing to a crawl and unusable due to adware or other problems then like it or not, people who encounter those computers attribute it to Windows, not the fact that the Windows installation is illegal.
If I was MS I'd actually go further: I'd say, if your installation isn't legit, you are FORCED to take updates immediately and have NO say in them getting installed - they will just get silently downloaded and run on the computer, whether you like it or not. (there can be an opt out which disables the computer or does format c: or something...).
With respect, you and just about everyone else here is missing the point and deliberately over simplifying the issue. Despite what the article implies, I do not believe Murdoch has ever argued that Google should not index his sites. Never. Let's say it again - NEVER. And that is what robots.txt would do.
So can we stop with lame wise cracks about robots.txt and have a real discussion about the more interesting substance of the issue? Like eg: how much of an article it is fair use to reproduce as context in a search result? What about *not* as a search result but as default content on an aggregation page like Google News? As far as I can tell Murdoch thinks it would be appropriate if Google returns nothing more than a few words from the headline.
Now this is not to say I agree with Murdoch in the slightest. I think he's an idiot and is basically flushing his business down the toilet. He's hoping that if he's brazen enough with this, other newspapers will join him and change the existing precedent that agregators can quote whole paragraphs from articles and the headline. It won't work - even if they all newspapers get on board, people will just flock to free news services instead like the BBC because they have clearer context in search results.
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
on
The Big Questions
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· Score: 1
I prefer to think of it in this way: although the likelihood of any given improbable coincidence occurring is incredibly low, there are an even greater quantity of opportunities for such improbable coincidences to occur. In fact, since just about anything can be qualified as improbable the number is infinite. Why, just now the dishwasher in my kitchen clicked at the same time as a bird out side my window chirped! That is an amazing coincidence, no?
Given that there are so many possible improbable coincidences it would be astonishing if they weren't occurring every single day.
While it's sad whenever someone is falsely accused and I have sympathy for him and his wife, I can't help but feel - it's wonderful that this has happened to a politician. Because this could happen to absolutely anybody and politicians will not relent in their fear mongering and ridiculous laws in this area until they become victims themselves.
While I strongly suspect if they weren't a) wealthy and b) in positions of power the governor would now be rotting in a cell, the fact of the case being overturned will help sanity prevail everywhere.
Maybe in some places they do what you say, but I can tell you for a fact that in Australia any baby born after 21 weeks is considered a live birth regardless of circumstance - eg: even if as a result of a termination procedure. Thus the Australian statistics are considerably inflated by abortions and even then, they still fare much much better than the US (something like a 50% lower rate).
> not giving them your business, or whine, is about all you can do.
There's one other thing that those of us in technology can do: refuse to develop software for, or to manage or deploy Macs in your business.
However nice OSX is as an OS, in my view all that nicesess is trumped by the fact in business that you can't legally do simple things like virtualize it on commodity hardware for things like development or testing, or for aggregating applications together to save hardware resources. If I can't trivially run an OS in a virtual machine on *any* hardware I have available in my company then it's a toy and should be tossed out in the trash. Apple needs to hear this message loud and clear if we want things to ever change.
Indeed. And on top of what you have said - if anyone does achieve "true" artificial intelligence then nobody would want it, because it will include all the traits that we so desperately want to eliminate. Eg: machines will have to start becoming inaccurate, emotional, imaginative, needy etc. as these are all fundamental to our "intelligence" as humans. Should anyone every actually achieve this we will quickly classify it as a useless curiosity and go back to pursuing more reliable "mechanical" goals that we will naturally refuse to classify as AI.
I'm currently working with a company that uses Google Docs for everything, and I've come to the conclusion that Google Docs itself is one of the major reasons that they've completely failed to ship a product despite 4 years of continuous effort (I know this sounds a bizarre thing to say, but it's true). Google docs is wonderful and seductive for collaboration, but it is worse than useless for writing any kind of serious documentation. It lacks so many serious features it destroys the integrity of every document put into it and turns them into one-off memos with a hundred "spam" comments from stakeholders riddled through them and / or surreptitiously changed. Nobody draws diagrams because docs won't support them, no tables of contents, bibiliographies, footnotes, proper cross references, heading numbers, no proper "track changes"... There are features to mitigate some of these things, but in the end, it's not enough - Google Docs is a disaster for serious documents that need to be part of controlled processes.
This is one reason I think all these countries that are busily setting up mandatory internet filtering are completely defeating themselves.
Right now, 95% of people accessing child porn and the like just post on open unencrypted connections. Stupid - but there you go. Once the connection is filtered and only encrypted connections even work any more they will all become educated about encryption and anonymization sufficient to bypass the filters and 99% of the intelligence sources that are now helping to track down these criminals will go dark.
I don't think you do quite understand what I'm saying. It doesn't matter whether the hardware works or not. It matters whether it *says* it works on the box. Even the vast majority of the hardware that does work on Linux doesn't say it on the box. Hence Grandma and Joe Sixpack will bypass it at the store and so will the vast majority of people for whom the only way to navigate technical complexity of compatibility is to read what's on the box. And it's an interesting question, why doesn't it say it on the box when in actual fact it works in reality? And the answer is that hardware manufacturers can't commit to supporting an OS that has a driver interface that is constantly changing under their feet.
> I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.
Well, nobody can account for how cheap you might be or how much you value something.
However - if you're talking about a comparison with XP then I think there is an enormous list of stuff that is worth having. UAC is a genuine security improvement. Real support for transparency and big performance improvements in how windows are drawn and composited (it is all done natively on the graphics card, if your card supports it). Individual control of volume levels for each application. Ability to prioritize network traffic on a per-connection basis. Live thumbnail previews of windows when using alt-tab / hover over taskbar items. Built in color management and subpixel font anti-aliasing in system dialogs. Better utilization / performance on multi-core architectures...
Nothing I can say can affect how you value these things, but the fact is there are a huge number of substantial improvements in Vista alone over XP, and Win7 is a marked improvement over that.
> If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar
Agree. One of the reasons I really didn't want to upgrade to Vista was I hated the idea of a black taskbar. It's just gloomy and depressing. For some reason it makes me think of Darth Vader and the Death Star. The fact that there is *no* way to customize it really turned me off.
After I started using Vista I got used to it and now I'm fine with it, but it really turned me off in the beginning. I think psychological factors like this might have a lot more to do with the poor perception of Vista than people acknowledge.
> Now if nearly all of the programs being sold for the Microsoft platform worked equally well on a Linux platform then I believe that MS really could be shut out of the market
Only if you count drivers among those programs, and frankly that is never going to happen. Linux will never be popular as long as when you walk into your average tech store and pick a random device off the shelf and look at compatibility and 99% of them say Windows, (maybe) Mac and NOT Linux. This problem is built into Linux at a deep level because of the refusal to keep the kernel ABI stable, so I don't expect it to go away.
There's a certain irony that a company is being driven into bankruptcy (yeah they are a way from that, but that is where the trajectory points) by a process accusing them of being so dominant the market cannot operate fairly. It really can't be both ways.
You're right! Why does OOo need to compete with anything? They should remove all features over and above Notepad. No matter if nobody finds it useful any more, it's not a competition, remember? We're all just in it for love and hugs.
Well, actually, what is clear is that the document editing market is evolving rapidly towards having real time collaboration as a major feature and it's very interesting that Open Office doesn't seem to be even making a start in this area. They seem to be focussed on building the features everyone wanted in about 2001. Right now I'm writing some documents in OO and every time I send it out one of the recipients helpfully turns it into a Google doc so that we can edit it live while discussing it. I *hate* this because Google docs are abhorent for writing complex structured documents, but which version do you think ends up being the definitive one?
People with no cell phone can go screw themselves. I'm not kidding, my (Australian) bank *requires* an SMS code and won't authorize a transaction to a new account without it. Not only that, they won't allow duplicate cell numbers so my wife is unable to use my cell phone since we use the same bank and I already set it up. Sucks:-)
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> 1. He had his own office, and sometimes he'd put up his feet and stare off into space. He told me that people passing by his office assumed that he was "doing nothing." But, he told me, he wasn't doing "nothing", he was very much doing something: thinking.
I'll go even further. I have the privilege of working from home / running my own outfit.
I frequently simply go to sleep if I feel like it. For a while I felt guilty about this, but the reality is that I usually only doze for 10 minutes or so and when I wake up I have 5 solutions sitting in my head for what I need to do next. I'm not sure how or why it works, but I can struggle through a whole afternoon feeling sleepy and doing mediocre work or I can take a 10 minute nap and be a rock star for an hour ... so I do. I wish this was accepted practice in workplaces because I'm sure productivity would rise overall.
> Do you not think there is competition for search already? Bing, Yahoo, or countless others fail to come to mind?
Actually this was the part I thought was most disingenuous. Google has 4 times the market share of its nearest competitor! The barrier to entry in starting a new search engine is enormous - nearly impossible. It's not like 1999 when anybody with a server rack could have a good shot at indexing most of the internet. You physically can't do it without a data center so large that even just supplying power to it is a huge problem. To hold it up as an example where competition is easy and working is laughable.
> Yet, they are ran by humans who are smart enough to realize the potential and being human.
Corporations are bound by laws that transcend the humans that operate them. Some day, who knows when, push will come to shove and unless Google acts in the interests of its *stockholders* rather than its *users*, they will be liable for being sued by their stock holders or the SEC. It may be a long way off or it may be next year, but they can't escape the fundamental change that becoming a public company has wrought upon them.
> since the first page on every search would be nothing but links to viagra and malware
That's just an assertion. It relies on an assumption that Google's algorithms have no real integrity and can be easily fooled. If you believe that "open wins", you should believe that we would see rapid improvement as people innovated around those algorithms.
But more to the point, it's not so much that they keep the algorithms closed that is offensive but that the whole post is about how there is some fundamental magical property about 'openness' that makes everything it touches turn to gold. And after paragraph upon paragraph of this he suddenly drops in "oh, except here and here because we say so". You can't really have it both ways. Microsoft can just as easily assert that keeping SMB closed or making IE proprietary instead of standards based is "good for the internet" as Google can assert keeping their stuff closed.
The fact is this: open does not always win. There are valid scenarios where it just doesn't work, where it's a losing proposition for everyone. The whole blog post is just a load of BS designed to smear Apple and Microsoft with a tag of not being Open while somehow keeping a halo on Google's head.
True, but we are dealing with a very young OS which was missing many major features in it's first few versions (virtual keyboard, bluetooth, etc.). The modern phone OS battle is really only just beginning. The real question is what will happen now that both OSes (iphone, android) are reasonably feature complete and usable. Yes, if android continues the way it has, there will be a problem. However I'm betting things will be a lot smoother from here on out.
Who knows, maybe MS is deliberately losing this case so as to set a precedent for IP rights :-)
Once they take it far enough to firmly establish the legal principle they can do a mea culpa and turn around and start sending invoices to all the companies using pirated windows installs. They could start with the ones in the court room where they lose the case ...
I'm not sure you can read so much into it. After what was this? answer: a "UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum".
What was the poster about? promoting a book. A book that protested Chinese internet filtering.
Now - I'm hardly pro-censorship. However I also don't like to think of every forum designed to talk about how to manage the internet turning into a giant protest rally. In short order you'll have the whole thing becoming politicised and China refusing to accept packets from Taiwan or Israel firewalling packets from Palestine ... it's a can of worms we just don't want to open ... let's protest censorship ... but let's not do it in forums where we're trying to sort out nuts and bolts of how to join pipes together.
Apple is on a downhill slope as far as this stuff is concerned. The malware writers are starting to notice that it's getting to a useful percentage of users AND many of those users are smug / stupid / whatever and think their computers are invincible.
The same result is probably achievable for much less money and effort by getting them all Windows 7 and setting them up as low privileged users.
Not to mention, D has a Windows compiler.
I can't quite see the point of a language in this day and age that has no compiler or runtime engine on the most popular platform on the planet.
There's a further reason for MS to want to update pirated machines: like it or not, they contribute to the general "impression" of Windows. If there are millions of PCs slowing to a crawl and unusable due to adware or other problems then like it or not, people who encounter those computers attribute it to Windows, not the fact that the Windows installation is illegal.
If I was MS I'd actually go further: I'd say, if your installation isn't legit, you are FORCED to take updates immediately and have NO say in them getting installed - they will just get silently downloaded and run on the computer, whether you like it or not. (there can be an opt out which disables the computer or does format c: or something ...).
With respect, you and just about everyone else here is missing the point and deliberately over simplifying the issue. Despite what the article implies, I do not believe Murdoch has ever argued that Google should not index his sites. Never. Let's say it again - NEVER. And that is what robots.txt would do.
So can we stop with lame wise cracks about robots.txt and have a real discussion about the more interesting substance of the issue? Like eg: how much of an article it is fair use to reproduce as context in a search result? What about *not* as a search result but as default content on an aggregation page like Google News? As far as I can tell Murdoch thinks it would be appropriate if Google returns nothing more than a few words from the headline.
Now this is not to say I agree with Murdoch in the slightest. I think he's an idiot and is basically flushing his business down the toilet. He's hoping that if he's brazen enough with this, other newspapers will join him and change the existing precedent that agregators can quote whole paragraphs from articles and the headline. It won't work - even if they all newspapers get on board, people will just flock to free news services instead like the BBC because they have clearer context in search results.
I prefer to think of it in this way: although the likelihood of any given improbable coincidence occurring is incredibly low, there are an even greater quantity of opportunities for such improbable coincidences to occur. In fact, since just about anything can be qualified as improbable the number is infinite. Why, just now the dishwasher in my kitchen clicked at the same time as a bird out side my window chirped! That is an amazing coincidence, no?
Given that there are so many possible improbable coincidences it would be astonishing if they weren't occurring every single day.
While it's sad whenever someone is falsely accused and I have sympathy for him and his wife, I can't help but feel - it's wonderful that this has happened to a politician. Because this could happen to absolutely anybody and politicians will not relent in their fear mongering and ridiculous laws in this area until they become victims themselves.
While I strongly suspect if they weren't a) wealthy and b) in positions of power the governor would now be rotting in a cell, the fact of the case being overturned will help sanity prevail everywhere.
Maybe in some places they do what you say, but I can tell you for a fact that in Australia any baby born after 21 weeks is considered a live birth regardless of circumstance - eg: even if as a result of a termination procedure. Thus the Australian statistics are considerably inflated by abortions and even then, they still fare much much better than the US (something like a 50% lower rate).
> not giving them your business, or whine, is about all you can do.
There's one other thing that those of us in technology can do: refuse to develop software for, or to manage or deploy Macs in your business.
However nice OSX is as an OS, in my view all that nicesess is trumped by the fact in business that you can't legally do simple things like virtualize it on commodity hardware for things like development or testing, or for aggregating applications together to save hardware resources. If I can't trivially run an OS in a virtual machine on *any* hardware I have available in my company then it's a toy and should be tossed out in the trash. Apple needs to hear this message loud and clear if we want things to ever change.
Indeed. And on top of what you have said - if anyone does achieve "true" artificial intelligence then nobody would want it, because it will include all the traits that we so desperately want to eliminate. Eg: machines will have to start becoming inaccurate, emotional, imaginative, needy etc. as these are all fundamental to our "intelligence" as humans. Should anyone every actually achieve this we will quickly classify it as a useless curiosity and go back to pursuing more reliable "mechanical" goals that we will naturally refuse to classify as AI.
I hear you.
I'm currently working with a company that uses Google Docs for everything, and I've come to the conclusion that Google Docs itself is one of the major reasons that they've completely failed to ship a product despite 4 years of continuous effort (I know this sounds a bizarre thing to say, but it's true). Google docs is wonderful and seductive for collaboration, but it is worse than useless for writing any kind of serious documentation. It lacks so many serious features it destroys the integrity of every document put into it and turns them into one-off memos with a hundred "spam" comments from stakeholders riddled through them and / or surreptitiously changed. Nobody draws diagrams because docs won't support them, no tables of contents, bibiliographies, footnotes, proper cross references, heading numbers, no proper "track changes" ... There are features to mitigate some of these things, but in the end, it's not enough - Google Docs is a disaster for serious documents that need to be part of controlled processes.
This is one reason I think all these countries that are busily setting up mandatory internet filtering are completely defeating themselves.
Right now, 95% of people accessing child porn and the like just post on open unencrypted connections. Stupid - but there you go. Once the connection is filtered and only encrypted connections even work any more they will all become educated about encryption and anonymization sufficient to bypass the filters and 99% of the intelligence sources that are now helping to track down these criminals will go dark.
I don't think you do quite understand what I'm saying. It doesn't matter whether the hardware works or not. It matters whether it *says* it works on the box. Even the vast majority of the hardware that does work on Linux doesn't say it on the box. Hence Grandma and Joe Sixpack will bypass it at the store and so will the vast majority of people for whom the only way to navigate technical complexity of compatibility is to read what's on the box. And it's an interesting question, why doesn't it say it on the box when in actual fact it works in reality? And the answer is that hardware manufacturers can't commit to supporting an OS that has a driver interface that is constantly changing under their feet.
> I yet have to find someone who can show me what it brings me, over XP, that is worth paying 100+ EUR for.
Well, nobody can account for how cheap you might be or how much you value something.
However - if you're talking about a comparison with XP then I think there is an enormous list of stuff that is worth having. UAC is a genuine security improvement. Real support for transparency and big performance improvements in how windows are drawn and composited (it is all done natively on the graphics card, if your card supports it). Individual control of volume levels for each application. Ability to prioritize network traffic on a per-connection basis. Live thumbnail previews of windows when using alt-tab / hover over taskbar items. Built in color management and subpixel font anti-aliasing in system dialogs. Better utilization / performance on multi-core architectures...
Nothing I can say can affect how you value these things, but the fact is there are a huge number of substantial improvements in Vista alone over XP, and Win7 is a marked improvement over that.
> If you recall, Vista had that weird color theme with yellow-green background and dark, almost solid black window frames and taskbar
Agree. One of the reasons I really didn't want to upgrade to Vista was I hated the idea of a black taskbar. It's just gloomy and depressing. For some reason it makes me think of Darth Vader and the Death Star. The fact that there is *no* way to customize it really turned me off.
After I started using Vista I got used to it and now I'm fine with it, but it really turned me off in the beginning. I think psychological factors like this might have a lot more to do with the poor perception of Vista than people acknowledge.
> Now if nearly all of the programs being sold for the Microsoft platform worked equally well on a Linux platform then I believe that MS really could be shut out of the market
Only if you count drivers among those programs, and frankly that is never going to happen. Linux will never be popular as long as when you walk into your average tech store and pick a random device off the shelf and look at compatibility and 99% of them say Windows, (maybe) Mac and NOT Linux. This problem is built into Linux at a deep level because of the refusal to keep the kernel ABI stable, so I don't expect it to go away.
There's a certain irony that a company is being driven into bankruptcy (yeah they are a way from that, but that is where the trajectory points) by a process accusing them of being so dominant the market cannot operate fairly. It really can't be both ways.
You're right! Why does OOo need to compete with anything? They should remove all features over and above Notepad. No matter if nobody finds it useful any more, it's not a competition, remember? We're all just in it for love and hugs.
Well, actually, what is clear is that the document editing market is evolving rapidly towards having real time collaboration as a major feature and it's very interesting that Open Office doesn't seem to be even making a start in this area. They seem to be focussed on building the features everyone wanted in about 2001. Right now I'm writing some documents in OO and every time I send it out one of the recipients helpfully turns it into a Google doc so that we can edit it live while discussing it. I *hate* this because Google docs are abhorent for writing complex structured documents, but which version do you think ends up being the definitive one?
People with no cell phone can go screw themselves. I'm not kidding, my (Australian) bank *requires* an SMS code and won't authorize a transaction to a new account without it. Not only that, they won't allow duplicate cell numbers so my wife is unable to use my cell phone since we use the same bank and I already set it up. Sucks :-)