The first was, since when did it become illegal for a judge to explain his opinion in public?
The second was that, of course Microsoft would play the crybaby to the public, and those parties who were/are addicted to MS software would use it as an excuse to get a new judge who would not have had to sit through all the shenanigans, lots of "powerful" people would breathe a sigh of relief, and Microsoft would get the punishments reduced to keep MS intact.
And I wasn't sure whether or not I was glad Microsoft and their products would then get to die the heat death. Technologically, splitting the company up would be the only way to save the company and its products.
Anyway, considering that MSWindows is the host for most of the spambots that clot the internet, I'd say that proportional punishment should be that they should be taken down hard, one way or another.
If I were responsible for determining their punishment, I'd have ordered the company to shutter all projects except security and maintenance for ten years. And I'd have required the primary share-holders to finance the company entirely for those ten years.
Or I'd have split the company into OS, office tools, dev tools, web browser tools, and miscellaneous applications companies, and ordered the several new companies to interact only through public APIs unencumbered by either patent or copyright, so that the playing field would be leveled somewhat. And I'd have set a limit of six months to arrange the splits, and a total year for the APIs to be made available and the splits completed.
Either way would actually still be on the side of leniency. Proportional punishment, shuttering the company and banning the further sale or use of their software, would have induced too many withdrawal pains on the general economy.
But heat death also will ultimately do the job, although it has left us with all those botnets.
(You can complain that the problem is inherent in being the virtual monopoly, okay market leader, but look at that for what it is. If they want the privilege of owning all the tubes, they should make their tubes strong enough to hold. Failing to do so is another of their social crimes.)
Just read about it in the newspaper. (Daily Yomiuri, for me.)
Unfortunately, the on-line version leaves off a few things.
For instance, Kaneko's lawyer's pointed out that auto manufacturers would not "be punished if speeding became rampant." (Reported in the print news.)
Also, the on-line version doesn't mention that, "A revised Copyright Law that prohibits users from downloading such peer-to-peer file sharing software will come into force in January." (The last line of the print article.)
IBM at least (currently) acknowledges the usefulness of opening things up on the low end. And they seem to be able to see more than a few years down the road, particularly relative to what happens when a company screws its own customers.
Also, Microsoft's involvement in the complaints seems at best out of place.
yeah, they may be charging a bit more than is necessary for the hardware and software, but maybe not as much as it seems.
Go back and look at the the recent topic on RAM errors.
Things brought out that are relevant here. Commodity RAM appears not to be significantly more error prone than name brand RAM, but there are still lemons.
A mainframe maker worth its salt is going to have to cull those lemons out, and that kind of hardware testing is expensive.
A huge part of the reason we can buy cheap hardware is that, 30 years ago, the semiconductor fabs realized they could tighten the manufacturing process so much that they could skip testing most parts headed for consumer products.
Statistically, a bad batch would show up in spot checks, and the consumer warranty process could deal with the remaining returns for consumer devices.
For consumer devices.
Google can handle that kind of error rate because the users of their services are expecting an "about" answer. If something weird shows up, they'll search again, mostly.
Most mainframe applications can't handle that kind of error rate.
I suspect T3's complaint stems as much from their ignorance of the amount of real work that goes into building mainframe hardware and software as much as from the problem of not being able to license IBM's software.
If I were in charge at IBM, I would tend to take the open view on the mainframe software as much as on the commodity stuff. I think opening it up would provide significant improvements there, just as it has in the commodity stuff.
(Cast your bread upon the waters.)
But I'd also make sure I didn't try to offer warrantee on other company's work, and that would take a bit of work in the legal department.
Anyway, I think I'd rather see the market pressures play out a bit further, instead of having the government step in and push IBM to open that stuff up too fast.
One thing that should be obvious. Microsoft should be required to separate themselves from any involvement whatsoever.
One thing stands between commodity hard/software and mainframes.
Go back to the recent topic on RAM errors to get a taste of the difference.
The most expensive element of manufacturing is the amount of time a part or a product is receiving human attention. Trained human attention is more expensive than untrained. At present, it takes trained human attention to make sure that otherwise commodity parts can produce the high reliability required in the mainframe world.
Of course, they are automating as much of the quality control for the parts they purchase as they can. But even there you have a cost differential.
And that's another part of the equation relative to competitors exiting.
I'm not sure whether IBM needs to have external course correction for this behavior or not, but I am sure of one thing. Microsoft is not in a position to be involved in the complaints.
(Yeah, I know that some of Sun's offerings can conceptually compete with pSeries stuff, particularly for new applications, but there's a bit of a difference between direct and indirect competition.)
If you are going to go so far as to force Apple and IBM to split their hardware divisions and software divisions into separate companies, why not go all the way --
Force a certain largish OS house that also sells rather well-selling Apps that mostly run only under their OS to split their OS department and apps department into separate companies?
Actually, I'm all for it. I like small.
But I'd rather see said certain largish OS house split up before Apple and IBM. (And split into more than two pieces.)
Except for one thing. Splitting said largish company could result in the company's products improving enough to avoid early warm death.
I really should do some research first, but let me see.
The public key signatures are in bundled (as in bundled but separate from) files.
Okay.
Unbundle. Patch the binary. sign it with a key stolen from a lax developer somewhere who happened to load a porn reader that happened to contain a little eavesdropper on an older machine and then used that machine to sign his own work. (If you're only a little bit lucky, it was a Microsoft internal developer that did that.)
Bundle.
Most users are not going to know the difference. They'll see your "Click me if you believe in fairies!" dialog and click, and you're in.
And that's doing things the hard way, to cover your tracks a little more carefully.
Dependencies?
You can't manage versions that way. It doesn't work unless almost all your apps are from a very small number of sources. I mean, small, as in Microsoft plus two, maybe three others.
There's a graph parsing problem in here that just gets way out of control when you have signatures from very many sources.
So, no. Microsoft fails yet again, and this time Moore is no longer going to be able to bring the cavalry over the horizon. Maybe, I suppose, if you have an eight processor box and devote 7 of the processors to untangling the dependencies and checking the signatures, but then there are the race conditions.
The complexities take power away from judges, I suppose, but then they put the power in the hands of the lawyers, who have to interpret the laws for the judges.
I prefer keeping the law simple and being able to recall judges who get out of control.
Injustices are going to happen anyway, the only way to deal with that is to learn rudimentary social skills, so you can get others to help you correct them. (Or am I being unreasonably idealistic in asking that?)
As PJ (over at Groklaw) likes to say, law is squishy.
Source code and law look a lot alike, but we have to remember that law is squishy.
We also should remember that lawyers are often seeking for an advantage for their clients (or constituents). This seeking for advantage runs counter to the work patterns of many of us who deal with free/open source stuff, but it is quite common in the legal world.
It would be a great tool for legislators who want the law to make sense, but such are too rare. The others would quickly find ways to pervert the tools.
I'm serious. I'm not talking about forcing all high school students to write even a tic-tac-toe in machine language, but having prototyping boards with nothing but monitor ROMs on them available for the truly interested high school student is bound to be a plus. Likewise the rest, Amiga and BeOS, to show people how modern OSses are not all that modern after all, FORTH machines for the exposure to a different way of thinking, etc.
Why call somebody a troll just for admitting to thinking there is something worthwhile outside the mainstream?
Slashdot Mirror
I see.
When I heard the news, I had two reactions.
The first was, since when did it become illegal for a judge to explain his opinion in public?
The second was that, of course Microsoft would play the crybaby to the public, and those parties who were/are addicted to MS software would use it as an excuse to get a new judge who would not have had to sit through all the shenanigans, lots of "powerful" people would breathe a sigh of relief, and Microsoft would get the punishments reduced to keep MS intact.
And I wasn't sure whether or not I was glad Microsoft and their products would then get to die the heat death. Technologically, splitting the company up would be the only way to save the company and its products.
Anyway, considering that MSWindows is the host for most of the spambots that clot the internet, I'd say that proportional punishment should be that they should be taken down hard, one way or another.
If I were responsible for determining their punishment, I'd have ordered the company to shutter all projects except security and maintenance for ten years. And I'd have required the primary share-holders to finance the company entirely for those ten years.
Or I'd have split the company into OS, office tools, dev tools, web browser tools, and miscellaneous applications companies, and ordered the several new companies to interact only through public APIs unencumbered by either patent or copyright, so that the playing field would be leveled somewhat. And I'd have set a limit of six months to arrange the splits, and a total year for the APIs to be made available and the splits completed.
Either way would actually still be on the side of leniency. Proportional punishment, shuttering the company and banning the further sale or use of their software, would have induced too many withdrawal pains on the general economy.
But heat death also will ultimately do the job, although it has left us with all those botnets.
(You can complain that the problem is inherent in being the virtual monopoly, okay market leader, but look at that for what it is. If they want the privilege of owning all the tubes, they should make their tubes strong enough to hold. Failing to do so is another of their social crimes.)
Just read about it in the newspaper. (Daily Yomiuri, for me.)
Unfortunately, the on-line version leaves off a few things.
For instance, Kaneko's lawyer's pointed out that auto manufacturers would not "be punished if speeding became rampant." (Reported in the print news.)
Also, the on-line version doesn't mention that, "A revised Copyright Law that prohibits users from downloading such peer-to-peer file sharing software will come into force in January." (The last line of the print article.)
You mean they won their case after Microsoft somehow managed to get them to remove all the teeth from the punishment?
You and I see recent history from a very different perspective. That is clear.
It really doesn't make sense to trade the FM for digital. Carrier frequency isn't high enough to be of much use.
I'm rather depressed at the whole TV debacle, too. There should be room for analog TV within our culture/society. Maybe HAM?
security is not unimportant.
Go take a look at bandwidth versus carrier frequency.
Or, it should have been UWB, but Intel had to get their egos all tangled up in things and screw that one up.
If your credit card information is embedded in your account info, I'd say that's (yet) a(nother) Microsoft Engineering failure.
It is precisely this kind of selling the customer dangerous convenience that earns Microsoft the scorn it gets.
Is that typical Microsoft engineering, or what?
Much more hackable when you do that.
Microsoft has the biggest online [elided] hackable[elided] console market share by miles.
Fixed that for you.
More to the point, Nintendo understands on-line security in ways that Microsoft has been deliberately misunderstanding for a decade and a half.
And the fact that they failed worse at trying to tame the snot-nosed new gorilla on the block ten years ago is less relevant how?
(Noting especially that said snot-nosed new gorilla on the block is very much involved in the complaints.)
Not sure which I'd call more evil.
No, I think I do know.
IBM at least (currently) acknowledges the usefulness of opening things up on the low end. And they seem to be able to see more than a few years down the road, particularly relative to what happens when a company screws its own customers.
Also, Microsoft's involvement in the complaints seems at best out of place.
yeah, they may be charging a bit more than is necessary for the hardware and software, but maybe not as much as it seems.
Go back and look at the the recent topic on RAM errors.
Things brought out that are relevant here. Commodity RAM appears not to be significantly more error prone than name brand RAM, but there are still lemons.
A mainframe maker worth its salt is going to have to cull those lemons out, and that kind of hardware testing is expensive.
A huge part of the reason we can buy cheap hardware is that, 30 years ago, the semiconductor fabs realized they could tighten the manufacturing process so much that they could skip testing most parts headed for consumer products.
Statistically, a bad batch would show up in spot checks, and the consumer warranty process could deal with the remaining returns for consumer devices.
For consumer devices.
Google can handle that kind of error rate because the users of their services are expecting an "about" answer. If something weird shows up, they'll search again, mostly.
Most mainframe applications can't handle that kind of error rate.
I suspect T3's complaint stems as much from their ignorance of the amount of real work that goes into building mainframe hardware and software as much as from the problem of not being able to license IBM's software.
If I were in charge at IBM, I would tend to take the open view on the mainframe software as much as on the commodity stuff. I think opening it up would provide significant improvements there, just as it has in the commodity stuff.
(Cast your bread upon the waters.)
But I'd also make sure I didn't try to offer warrantee on other company's work, and that would take a bit of work in the legal department.
Anyway, I think I'd rather see the market pressures play out a bit further, instead of having the government step in and push IBM to open that stuff up too fast.
One thing that should be obvious. Microsoft should be required to separate themselves from any involvement whatsoever.
Do we really think so?
I mean, put in the simplest terms, should women's and men's athletics be combined for every sport? Today?
Should pizza lovers and steak lovers and vegetarians all be required to eat at Mickey-D's?
One thing stands between commodity hard/software and mainframes.
Go back to the recent topic on RAM errors to get a taste of the difference.
The most expensive element of manufacturing is the amount of time a part or a product is receiving human attention. Trained human attention is more expensive than untrained. At present, it takes trained human attention to make sure that otherwise commodity parts can produce the high reliability required in the mainframe world.
Of course, they are automating as much of the quality control for the parts they purchase as they can. But even there you have a cost differential.
And that's another part of the equation relative to competitors exiting.
I'm not sure whether IBM needs to have external course correction for this behavior or not, but I am sure of one thing. Microsoft is not in a position to be involved in the complaints.
Have a link.
Cuts both ways.
Is Sun in the mainframe market?
(Yeah, I know that some of Sun's offerings can conceptually compete with pSeries stuff, particularly for new applications, but there's a bit of a difference between direct and indirect competition.)
If you are going to go so far as to force Apple and IBM to split their hardware divisions and software divisions into separate companies, why not go all the way --
Force a certain largish OS house that also sells rather well-selling Apps that mostly run only under their OS to split their OS department and apps department into separate companies?
Actually, I'm all for it. I like small.
But I'd rather see said certain largish OS house split up before Apple and IBM. (And split into more than two pieces.)
Except for one thing. Splitting said largish company could result in the company's products improving enough to avoid early warm death.
I really should do some research first, but let me see.
The public key signatures are in bundled (as in bundled but separate from) files.
Okay.
Unbundle. Patch the binary. sign it with a key stolen from a lax developer somewhere who happened to load a porn reader that happened to contain a little eavesdropper on an older machine and then used that machine to sign his own work. (If you're only a little bit lucky, it was a Microsoft internal developer that did that.)
Bundle.
Most users are not going to know the difference. They'll see your "Click me if you believe in fairies!" dialog and click, and you're in.
And that's doing things the hard way, to cover your tracks a little more carefully.
Dependencies?
You can't manage versions that way. It doesn't work unless almost all your apps are from a very small number of sources. I mean, small, as in Microsoft plus two, maybe three others.
There's a graph parsing problem in here that just gets way out of control when you have signatures from very many sources.
So, no. Microsoft fails yet again, and this time Moore is no longer going to be able to bring the cavalry over the horizon. Maybe, I suppose, if you have an eight processor box and devote 7 of the processors to untangling the dependencies and checking the signatures, but then there are the race conditions.
The spammers are in cahoots with those who want to balkanize the internet.
We have to come up with new e-mail standards that avoid balkanization before they can push their next attempt.
One thing is to refrain from requiring all e-mail traffic to use whatever tech we invent to ID the sender effectively.
The complexities take power away from judges, I suppose, but then they put the power in the hands of the lawyers, who have to interpret the laws for the judges.
I prefer keeping the law simple and being able to recall judges who get out of control.
Injustices are going to happen anyway, the only way to deal with that is to learn rudimentary social skills, so you can get others to help you correct them. (Or am I being unreasonably idealistic in asking that?)
As PJ (over at Groklaw) likes to say, law is squishy.
Source code and law look a lot alike, but we have to remember that law is squishy.
We also should remember that lawyers are often seeking for an advantage for their clients (or constituents). This seeking for advantage runs counter to the work patterns of many of us who deal with free/open source stuff, but it is quite common in the legal world.
It would be a great tool for legislators who want the law to make sense, but such are too rare. The others would quickly find ways to pervert the tools.
I'm serious. I'm not talking about forcing all high school students to write even a tic-tac-toe in machine language, but having prototyping boards with nothing but monitor ROMs on them available for the truly interested high school student is bound to be a plus. Likewise the rest, Amiga and BeOS, to show people how modern OSses are not all that modern after all, FORTH machines for the exposure to a different way of thinking, etc.
Why call somebody a troll just for admitting to thinking there is something worthwhile outside the mainstream?