No, it makes them less vulnerable. I have enough trouble with lions attacking my data as it is; if I didn't present it with zebra stripes, my data loss would be ten times worse! As it is, the lions merely improve the data, by eating the outliers and smoothing the curves. What's good for the whole database is not necessarily what's good for the individual datum.
Indeed, "X Considered Harmful" is such a common title that the Jargon File has a whole entry for it. And the entry, of course, cites Djikstra as the inspiration for the meme. (Others have disputed this, and claim it was common in mainstream journalism even earlier, but Djikstra's famous essay clearly put the phrase on the map in the CS/IT world.) Merely using the phrase hardly indicates that a comparison to Djikstra's classic work is necessary or justified.
There has been, at least according to the aforementioned Jargon File, an essay in CACM called "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful. I have to wonder if we don't need an essay simply titled "Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful".:)
Furthermore, the Slashdot summary is (as usual) badly flawed: Knuth didn't say that threads were harmful, he simply said that he didn't find them useful. Not that I want to defend threads--I've pulled out enough of my own hair because of them--but, as long as we're on the topic of inappropriate comparisons.... I don't know who this James Nobody is, but I'm pretty sure that he's not in the same league as Djikstra or Knuth, and the inappropriate and misleading attempts to convince me that he his makes me less, not more, interested in reading TFA.
You're close, but you're overlooking one detail. The minute the judge in Utah uttered the word "conversion", SCO went rushing off to the bankruptcy court as fast as they could scuttle in the hopes of more delay. Novell isn't going to get in line as a debtor. They are, basically, the victims of theft; the money in question was never SCO's to begin with. The resulting scenario will probably play out fairly close to the way you described, except that repaying Novell is going to be a much higher priority that any mere debtor, and there's a good chance that liquidation will follow almost immediately. Criminal charges are not out of the question either.
If you go to Vegas and blow your life savings, then file bankruptcy, your mortgage company and credit card company will appear as debtors, and will try to get whatever they can. If you also took the contents of your employer's safe before heading out to the desert, though, your employer is not going to appear as a creditor--not even as the "lead creditor"--and things are going to be a whole lot more serious.
In the old days, the fast-track was merely a less-fussy way of ratifying already-widely-used standards. Now it's also a way of ratifying anything that someone is willing to throw enough money at.
Do I not understand the idea behind the fast-track process? You understand part of the idea behind the process. The part you don't understand is the part where the fast track process can be manipulated by corruption and bribery to ensure that a large corporation continues to maximize its profits without concern about what the impact might be on the rest of the world. I have to admit that I wasn't aware of that aspect of ISO before this debacle either, but it's pretty clear now.:)
Does anyone know if Open Office is compliant with the Open Document Format? Just curious. I don't know, but if none of the multiple (big difference already) vendors behind ODF haven't implemented it properly yet, then that just means that it shouldn't have been on the fast-track.
Oh wait! It wasn't!
The fast-track is for de-facto standards which are already so widespread (i.e. supported by multiple vendors) and consistent that there's little point in trying to push a divergent standard out, even though a divergent standard might be better. Something like TCP/IP would be a good example of the sort of thing where the fast track might be appropriate. ODF wasn't fast-tracked, so the standards committee came up with the best standard, irrespective of what might actually be out there in the wild. Now it's up to the vendors to catch up. That's the usual way this is done (i.e. the C++ standard, where most vendors took a few years to catch up, or the C standard where most vendors took a few months to catch up, and MS took a few years).
Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait. So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.
Time was, countries like the USA and Australia prided themselves on standing up for white male landholder freedom and protecting the rights of the white male landholder against the State There, corrected that for ya!:)
It's easy to pick out some bad trends and conclude that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's equally easy to pick out some good ones and conclude that we're entering a golden age. Both conclusions are grotesque oversimplifications. Where the exact balance is, I've been unable to determine in the mere four decades or so of my life, but I have come to the conclusion that things are getting better and worse at ever-increasing rates. I'm not sure I believe in the singularity, but the last couple of centuries have been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's slowing down any time soon.:)
In the instant case, I might suggest that the governments in question have removed the "white" and "male" requirements over time, but have decided that "landowner" was too inclusive, so now they just work to protect the rights and freedoms of corporate officers and directors. Of any race or sex. It's the old principle of "one lobbyist, one vote". If you don't like it, go buy yourself a lobbyist and get your own vote.:)
Hey, if they stop somewhere per IP, then if you want to look for a domain name, sending in some random requests for a while might be a good first step.:)
Hmm, I have a fragment of perl code that generates a random domain name. sub randdomain {
my $len = 4 + int(28*rand); # 4-30 chars
my @chars = ("a".."z", "-", "0".."9");
my $name = @chars[int(26*rand)]; # first char is alpha
while (--$len > 0) {
$name.= @chars[int(37*rand)];
}
$name . ".com"; }
Of course, doing anything with this code that might be considered a Denial of Service attack would not only violate your TOS, but might result in criminal prosecution (for all I know). But hey, there can't be anything wrong with generating a few random whois queries, can there?:)
Yes, but there is a special exception made for those of us who have four-digit IDs starting with "13". We're the special elite black-magic krewe! All must bow before us!
(Ok, I didn't really have anything to add to this thread, but how often do you--any of you--see someone with a slashdot id within 30 of your own? I had to say something! At least I remembered to turn off my automatic karma bonus.):)
Doesn't tangible personal property imply it's a good I could re-sell? Legally, I believe you can. The fact that there are technological barriers in place does not mean that there are legal barriers in place. That's between you and your vendor, and more fool you if you bought something under such conditions.
I can't think of a good car analogy, so lets consider a tattoo. That's pretty tangible. Yet, you're going to have a pretty hard time reselling a tattoo physically attached to your own skin. There is no legal impediment to your reselling of the tattoo; it's simply a technological limitation. When you buy DRM'd media, it's like having it physically tattooed onto your computer. Which, of course, suggests an obvious option: you can sell the music by selling the computer it's attached to.
Were any of you drawn to firefox and mozilla because it was open source and non profit? Yes.
Now that it is getting kickbacks from google do you question it's integrity? No.
Any more questions?
(I could elaborate on my reasons, but first I'd want to be convinced that parent wasn't trolling. I will point out that "open source" and "non profit" are orthogonal concepts, though, for those who want a hint.)
Numerous people have responded to point out that you're not right--almost nobody is defending this move for FF. Nevertheless, your argument would be invalid even if it were justified: MS didn't get in trouble for integrating the browser with the OS! They got in trouble for trying to shut down competition by leveraging their monopoly! Integrating the browser with the OS is how they were leveraging their monopoly, but it wouldn't have been a (legal) issue if they weren't trying to abuse their monopoly position to shut down competition. MS has a monopoly, so they can engage in anti-competitive behavior--Mozilla doesn't, so it can't. Which means that if this were a good move on Mozilla's part, it would not be hypocritical to say so while still condemning MS's actions. Which is what you were suggesting.
Bottom line: even if Mozilla integrates FF with the OS, you'll still easily be able to remove it and use some other product instead. When MS decided to integrate IE with the OS, it became unremovable, and still gets used for some processes (like updating) even by the most fanatic IE haters.
MS Word has had regex for years, as well... though like everything Microsoft, they've wandered a bit from standards. Well, I'm no fan of MS--don't own their software, can't even verify the claim that they support regex--nevertheless, honesty compels me to suggest that regex "standards", such as they are, are something that few adhere to very strictly. Especially if the standards you're referring to are POSIX. I think GNU grep, sed and awk will do standard regex, but only if you pass a special flag or environment variable. Perl has so many useful extensions (embrace? extend?) that hardly anyone uses the standards with Perl (extinguish?). And newer systems are more likely to be based on something close to Perl than any sort of existing standard--unless you want to consider Perl regex to be a de-facto standard. Even so, you generally need documentation for your specific app or language if you want to do anything more than slightly complex with regex.
When it comes to regex, I sometimes feel that wandering from the standard is the standard!:)
You can develop for whatever target you want. That doesn't change the fact that many people on slashdot will want to install/use an ACID3 browser, which is why this is news for nerds. Plus it can potentially give geeks bragging rights about their favorite browser. It doesn't have to be popular to be your favorite.
Not everyone on slashdot is a web developer. Some of us actually consider browsers to be tools for browsing teh Intarweb.
(Beyond that, some of us develop sites for use by Linux users, and could give a rat's ass what IE's overall market share is when our users are 75-99% non-IE.)
Your point is well taken for that fraction of slashdot users that develop commercial mainstream websites, though. But then any commercial mainstream web developers who have to be told that IE is their primary target are probably too stupid to survive much longer anyway.:)
$2.91 Label overhead - What exactly is supposed to be here other than production costs and everything else on this list? I suspect this is really one of two big issues. Overhead--that's the money they spend they don't really need to be spending, e.g. hookers and blow. That stuff's expensive, y'know. ; )
Not so sure about the retail overhead--isn't that an expense to the retailer, not the label? And yet it's the biggest item on the list. How can they charge Walmart for Walmart's own expenses?
Novell and MS have been both making deals together and suing each other for over two decades. They've been at each other's throats one minute, and posing together for photo ops while singing about peace and harmony the next since the eighties. Novell's a savvy company--they're one of the very few that's been targeted by MS for total extermination (see "Windows for Workgroups") and managed to survive. (Somehow--I'm still not sure how they pulled it off.) The latest MS/Novell deal that has so many paranoids sure that Novell is trying to sell out the entire Linux community (and others, optimists, sure that Novell has finally managed to pull a fast one on MS) is just the latest in a long, long, long line of cooperation agreements between the companies. Usually followed by some vicious fighting and lawsuits.
The ironic thing is the people who blather about how wonderful Apple is for standing up the evil MS, and what a traitor Novell is for working with them. MS is a major part-owner of Apple, and every iPod, iPhone and Airbook you buy puts money in MS's pockets. But Apple is shiny and sexy and promises to make you a rebel in all their ads, so they can do no wrong, while Novell is a dry, business-oriented company whose ads target managers and IT Directors, rather than pimply-faced teens, so they're no fun at all.
The fact is that the world is rarely as simple and black-and-white as most people would like. Frankly, I don't trust any of these companies very much, but I think I still trust Novell a little more than I trust Apple, and both of them about a thousand times more than I trust MS.
From Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856) [bouvier]:
MONOPOLY, commercial law. This word has various significations. 1. It is the
abuse of free commerce by which one or more individuals have procured the
advantage of selling alone all of a particular kind of merchandise, to the
detriment of the public.
2.-2. All combinations among merchants to raise the price of
merchandise to the injury of the public, is also said to be a monopoly.
(Emphasis mine.) Slightly out of date, but I don't think the meanings of the words have changed that much.
The underlying idea here, I think, is that you can have more than one member of a monopoly and still properly call it a monopoly, as long as the members work together, effectively forming a single group. A group that collaborates to form and exploit a collective monopoly is referred to as a "trust", hence the Sherman Anti-Trust laws,
Whether this particular group of three companies collaborated sufficiently to qualify as a trust, I don't know, but if they did, then the term "monopoly" would be completely appropriate. And even if not, I suspect it was close enough that an informal description of them as a (collective) monopoly would not be entirely inappropriate. Oligopoly and monopoly are not necessarily exclusive categories.
Actually, I suspect that a Scandinavian (or Icelandic, actually) would know for sure that the word is not Scandinavian (or Icelandic); it seems more like an error that would be made by someone who is fuzzy on the difference between Russia and Iceland, and who can't spell.
And which great country has a nearly-illiterate geographically- and culturally-ignorant population armed with lots of high-tech devices that give them easy access to Slashdot? That's right. The good-ol' US of A. If the spelling "Bolsjevik" doesn't tag that guy as an 'Amurikin", I don't know what does!:)
Indeed, while most of the general public may use P2P almost exclusively for copyright violating, the slashdot crowd, being almost entirely geeks and nerds who like cool technology, probably has an amazingly high percentage of legal P2P/Torrent users. 50 of the last 50 swarms I joined were all perfectly legal (either Free/Libre software or taper-friendly-band concert recordings). Which probably makes me atypical even for slashdot, but even so, that leaves room for there to be thousands like me here.
Re: The ISO BRM on OOXML, TropicalCoder wrote:
I am really amazed that Slashdot hasn't picked up this story yet. Actually, that's a good thing. Even Andy Updegrove has been struggling to present an accurate description of what happened and what it implies. PJ doesn't seem to have all the details straight yet (as far as I can tell--but then I don't either). Given that some fairly reliable sources are having trouble sorting through the mess, I can only thank all the Gods that Slashdot hasn't done their usual complete-misses-the-point and misrepresents-all-parties coverage. I mean, look how completely inaccurate the description of the current story is. Tens of thousands of people are probably going to go away convinced that SCO has just gotten a massive influx of money. If Slashdot covered the BRM, they'd probably convince people that it was about voting on OOXML, rather than deciding which modifications should be accepted before any more voting happens.
Replying probably too late for anyone to see, but what the heck...:)
If you define substantial in terms of business generated or something equivalent to that, then it has to be compared to something. How is an arbitrary percentage of business, or whatever you're proposing, any less arbitrary than an arbitrary definition of "substantial"? ("Predefined" does not equate to "nonarbitrary".) In any case, the MPAA raised that exact argument in the Betamax case, and successfully showed that the overwhelming majority of use of the VCR at that time was for copyright infringment. The court accepted the argument, but ruled it irrelevant, as the potential for legal, non-infringing use was so great! And, indeed, the court turned out to be fairly prophetic, as the the video rental market exploded soon thereafter, which in turn lead to a massive reduction in the price of individual preprinted tapes, which lead to an explosion in the (legal) video sales market. So you have to consider not just what torrent is used for today, but what it might be used for in the future. And it's clearly a technology with great potential for legal uses.
The Grokster folks got nailed not because their technology didn't have the potential for substantial non-infringing uses but because they were actively promoting their software as a tool for copyright infringement. It's sometimes hard for techies to grok, but intent matters under the law. Programmers tend to think that the legal system should be deterministic, with a fixed set of inputs leading to a fixed set of outputs, but, in fact, the law is based on human judgement and semi-mythical concepts like "a reasonable person", and has no problem whatsoever with arbitrary terms such as "substantial", as long as a reasonable person is likely to have a reasonable idea of what that means.
After I had a couple of old Win95-era games that refused to install on my brother's Win2k system (I haven't had Windows for nearly a decade, so I was thinking of giving them to him), I've been wondering if it might not be possible to get Wine to run on Windows. Sounds like this might be an idea that will only become more and more reasonable as time goes on. So...how about it, Wine team? Can we possibly get Wine for Windows? It could run on top of Cygwin/X.:)
As for other protocols you have mentioned, I have the same question: what is the percentage of traffic in question consittues in HTTP, IRC, SMTP and FTP. The MPAA v Sony ("the Betamax case") already established that as irrelevant. The question is not "what percentage of the use is infringing", but merely, "are their substantial non-infringing uses?" For torrent, the answer is clearly yes. Not just Linux ISOs and game updates--there are thousands of bands that allow redistribution of their concert recordings, including some pretty big names. (The Internet Archive has over 2500 bands who have opted into their free hosting/redistribution service. And they're missing many well-known taper-friendly bands, including Phish and Dave Matthews, who do allow torrents.) Hundreds of these bands play over a hundred concerts a year, and many if not most of these concerts get redistributed--legally--by fans via bittorrent.
Jon Hart, the California man mentioned in the summary, is the main West Coast taper for the New Orleans rock band, The Radiators. I know Jon slightly through the band's mailing list, and he signed up with Comcast specifically so that he could distribute his own legal recordings through bittorrent. But of course, Comcast's so-called "unlimited" service isn't unlimited when it comes to torrents. Jon's not doing anything illegal with torrent--has never (to the best of my knowledge) attempted to do anything illegal with torrent--he's simply a man who believed an advertisement, and then discovered, to his surprise, that it was a lie. Don't you think it's at least possible that he has a valid case? I sure do.
Re:I don't understand...
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From an academic viewpoint, it probably matters. From a point of view of trying to get the job done...not so much. I studied the performance and efficiency of a wide variety of sort algorithms when I was in school, but nowadays, I generally just call some library to do my sorting for me. It may not be quite as efficient for the machine to use some random, generic sort, but for me, it's the difference between a few seconds to type "sort" vs. a few hours to code and debug a sort routine that is probably, at best, only a few percent faster.
XML is, in many cases (including mine), the path of least resistance. It's not particularly fast or efficient, but it's simple and quick and I don't have to spend hours documenting my formats for the dozens of other people in the company who have to use my data. Many of whom are probably not programmers by Dewar and Schonberg's definition, but who still do valuable work for the company.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it makes them less vulnerable. I have enough trouble with lions attacking my data as it is; if I didn't present it with zebra stripes, my data loss would be ten times worse! As it is, the lions merely improve the data, by eating the outliers and smoothing the curves. What's good for the whole database is not necessarily what's good for the individual datum.
Indeed, "X Considered Harmful" is such a common title that the Jargon File has a whole entry for it. And the entry, of course, cites Djikstra as the inspiration for the meme. (Others have disputed this, and claim it was common in mainstream journalism even earlier, but Djikstra's famous essay clearly put the phrase on the map in the CS/IT world.) Merely using the phrase hardly indicates that a comparison to Djikstra's classic work is necessary or justified.
:)
There has been, at least according to the aforementioned Jargon File, an essay in CACM called "GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful. I have to wonder if we don't need an essay simply titled "Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful".
Furthermore, the Slashdot summary is (as usual) badly flawed: Knuth didn't say that threads were harmful, he simply said that he didn't find them useful. Not that I want to defend threads--I've pulled out enough of my own hair because of them--but, as long as we're on the topic of inappropriate comparisons.... I don't know who this James Nobody is, but I'm pretty sure that he's not in the same league as Djikstra or Knuth, and the inappropriate and misleading attempts to convince me that he his makes me less, not more, interested in reading TFA.
You're close, but you're overlooking one detail. The minute the judge in Utah uttered the word "conversion", SCO went rushing off to the bankruptcy court as fast as they could scuttle in the hopes of more delay. Novell isn't going to get in line as a debtor. They are, basically, the victims of theft; the money in question was never SCO's to begin with. The resulting scenario will probably play out fairly close to the way you described, except that repaying Novell is going to be a much higher priority that any mere debtor, and there's a good chance that liquidation will follow almost immediately. Criminal charges are not out of the question either.
If you go to Vegas and blow your life savings, then file bankruptcy, your mortgage company and credit card company will appear as debtors, and will try to get whatever they can. If you also took the contents of your employer's safe before heading out to the desert, though, your employer is not going to appear as a creditor--not even as the "lead creditor"--and things are going to be a whole lot more serious.
Oh wait! It wasn't!
The fast-track is for de-facto standards which are already so widespread (i.e. supported by multiple vendors) and consistent that there's little point in trying to push a divergent standard out, even though a divergent standard might be better. Something like TCP/IP would be a good example of the sort of thing where the fast track might be appropriate. ODF wasn't fast-tracked, so the standards committee came up with the best standard, irrespective of what might actually be out there in the wild. Now it's up to the vendors to catch up. That's the usual way this is done (i.e. the C++ standard, where most vendors took a few years to catch up, or the C standard where most vendors took a few months to catch up, and MS took a few years).
Of course, if MSOOXML had gone through the regular track, it probably would have taken years to finish (since it's so large, complex, and poorly defined), and MS couldn't afford to wait. So instead they bought themselves a standards committee or twelve.
It's easy to pick out some bad trends and conclude that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's equally easy to pick out some good ones and conclude that we're entering a golden age. Both conclusions are grotesque oversimplifications. Where the exact balance is, I've been unable to determine in the mere four decades or so of my life, but I have come to the conclusion that things are getting better and worse at ever-increasing rates. I'm not sure I believe in the singularity, but the last couple of centuries have been a wild ride, and it doesn't look like it's slowing down any time soon.
In the instant case, I might suggest that the governments in question have removed the "white" and "male" requirements over time, but have decided that "landowner" was too inclusive, so now they just work to protect the rights and freedoms of corporate officers and directors. Of any race or sex. It's the old principle of "one lobbyist, one vote". If you don't like it, go buy yourself a lobbyist and get your own vote.
Hey, if they stop somewhere per IP, then if you want to look for a domain name, sending in some random requests for a while might be a good first step. :)
Hmm, I have a fragment of perl code that generates a random domain name.
.= @chars[int(37*rand)];
:)
sub randdomain {
my $len = 4 + int(28*rand); # 4-30 chars
my @chars = ("a".."z", "-", "0".."9");
my $name = @chars[int(26*rand)]; # first char is alpha
while (--$len > 0) {
$name
}
$name . ".com";
}
Of course, doing anything with this code that might be considered a Denial of Service attack would not only violate your TOS, but might result in criminal prosecution (for all I know). But hey, there can't be anything wrong with generating a few random whois queries, can there?
Yes, but there is a special exception made for those of us who have four-digit IDs starting with "13". We're the special elite black-magic krewe! All must bow before us!
:)
(Ok, I didn't really have anything to add to this thread, but how often do you--any of you--see someone with a slashdot id within 30 of your own? I had to say something! At least I remembered to turn off my automatic karma bonus.)
I can't think of a good car analogy, so lets consider a tattoo. That's pretty tangible. Yet, you're going to have a pretty hard time reselling a tattoo physically attached to your own skin. There is no legal impediment to your reselling of the tattoo; it's simply a technological limitation. When you buy DRM'd media, it's like having it physically tattooed onto your computer. Which, of course, suggests an obvious option: you can sell the music by selling the computer it's attached to.
Don't like it? Don't buy from iTunes (I don't).
Any more questions?
(I could elaborate on my reasons, but first I'd want to be convinced that parent wasn't trolling. I will point out that "open source" and "non profit" are orthogonal concepts, though, for those who want a hint.)
Numerous people have responded to point out that you're not right--almost nobody is defending this move for FF. Nevertheless, your argument would be invalid even if it were justified: MS didn't get in trouble for integrating the browser with the OS! They got in trouble for trying to shut down competition by leveraging their monopoly! Integrating the browser with the OS is how they were leveraging their monopoly, but it wouldn't have been a (legal) issue if they weren't trying to abuse their monopoly position to shut down competition. MS has a monopoly, so they can engage in anti-competitive behavior--Mozilla doesn't, so it can't. Which means that if this were a good move on Mozilla's part, it would not be hypocritical to say so while still condemning MS's actions. Which is what you were suggesting.
Bottom line: even if Mozilla integrates FF with the OS, you'll still easily be able to remove it and use some other product instead. When MS decided to integrate IE with the OS, it became unremovable, and still gets used for some processes (like updating) even by the most fanatic IE haters.
When it comes to regex, I sometimes feel that wandering from the standard is the standard!
You can develop for whatever target you want. That doesn't change the fact that many people on slashdot will want to install/use an ACID3 browser, which is why this is news for nerds. Plus it can potentially give geeks bragging rights about their favorite browser. It doesn't have to be popular to be your favorite.
:)
Not everyone on slashdot is a web developer. Some of us actually consider browsers to be tools for browsing teh Intarweb.
(Beyond that, some of us develop sites for use by Linux users, and could give a rat's ass what IE's overall market share is when our users are 75-99% non-IE.)
Your point is well taken for that fraction of slashdot users that develop commercial mainstream websites, though. But then any commercial mainstream web developers who have to be told that IE is their primary target are probably too stupid to survive much longer anyway.
Not so sure about the retail overhead--isn't that an expense to the retailer, not the label? And yet it's the biggest item on the list. How can they charge Walmart for Walmart's own expenses?
Novell and MS have been both making deals together and suing each other for over two decades. They've been at each other's throats one minute, and posing together for photo ops while singing about peace and harmony the next since the eighties. Novell's a savvy company--they're one of the very few that's been targeted by MS for total extermination (see "Windows for Workgroups") and managed to survive. (Somehow--I'm still not sure how they pulled it off.) The latest MS/Novell deal that has so many paranoids sure that Novell is trying to sell out the entire Linux community (and others, optimists, sure that Novell has finally managed to pull a fast one on MS) is just the latest in a long, long, long line of cooperation agreements between the companies. Usually followed by some vicious fighting and lawsuits.
The ironic thing is the people who blather about how wonderful Apple is for standing up the evil MS, and what a traitor Novell is for working with them. MS is a major part-owner of Apple, and every iPod, iPhone and Airbook you buy puts money in MS's pockets. But Apple is shiny and sexy and promises to make you a rebel in all their ads, so they can do no wrong, while Novell is a dry, business-oriented company whose ads target managers and IT Directors, rather than pimply-faced teens, so they're no fun at all.
The fact is that the world is rarely as simple and black-and-white as most people would like. Frankly, I don't trust any of these companies very much, but I think I still trust Novell a little more than I trust Apple, and both of them about a thousand times more than I trust MS.
From Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856) [bouvier]:
MONOPOLY, commercial law. This word has various significations. 1. It is the
abuse of free commerce by which one or more individuals have procured the
advantage of selling alone all of a particular kind of merchandise, to the
detriment of the public.
2.-2. All combinations among merchants to raise the price of
merchandise to the injury of the public, is also said to be a monopoly.
(Emphasis mine.) Slightly out of date, but I don't think the meanings of the words have changed that much.
The underlying idea here, I think, is that you can have more than one member of a monopoly and still properly call it a monopoly, as long as the members work together, effectively forming a single group. A group that collaborates to form and exploit a collective monopoly is referred to as a "trust", hence the Sherman Anti-Trust laws,
Whether this particular group of three companies collaborated sufficiently to qualify as a trust, I don't know, but if they did, then the term "monopoly" would be completely appropriate. And even if not, I suspect it was close enough that an informal description of them as a (collective) monopoly would not be entirely inappropriate. Oligopoly and monopoly are not necessarily exclusive categories.
Actually, I suspect that a Scandinavian (or Icelandic, actually) would know for sure that the word is not Scandinavian (or Icelandic); it seems more like an error that would be made by someone who is fuzzy on the difference between Russia and Iceland, and who can't spell.
:)
And which great country has a nearly-illiterate geographically- and culturally-ignorant population armed with lots of high-tech devices that give them easy access to Slashdot? That's right. The good-ol' US of A. If the spelling "Bolsjevik" doesn't tag that guy as an 'Amurikin", I don't know what does!
Indeed, while most of the general public may use P2P almost exclusively for copyright violating, the slashdot crowd, being almost entirely geeks and nerds who like cool technology, probably has an amazingly high percentage of legal P2P/Torrent users. 50 of the last 50 swarms I joined were all perfectly legal (either Free/Libre software or taper-friendly-band concert recordings). Which probably makes me atypical even for slashdot, but even so, that leaves room for there to be thousands like me here.
The Grokster folks got nailed not because their technology didn't have the potential for substantial non-infringing uses but because they were actively promoting their software as a tool for copyright infringement. It's sometimes hard for techies to grok, but intent matters under the law. Programmers tend to think that the legal system should be deterministic, with a fixed set of inputs leading to a fixed set of outputs, but, in fact, the law is based on human judgement and semi-mythical concepts like "a reasonable person", and has no problem whatsoever with arbitrary terms such as "substantial", as long as a reasonable person is likely to have a reasonable idea of what that means.
After I had a couple of old Win95-era games that refused to install on my brother's Win2k system (I haven't had Windows for nearly a decade, so I was thinking of giving them to him), I've been wondering if it might not be possible to get Wine to run on Windows. Sounds like this might be an idea that will only become more and more reasonable as time goes on. So...how about it, Wine team? Can we possibly get Wine for Windows? It could run on top of Cygwin/X. :)
Jon Hart, the California man mentioned in the summary, is the main West Coast taper for the New Orleans rock band, The Radiators. I know Jon slightly through the band's mailing list, and he signed up with Comcast specifically so that he could distribute his own legal recordings through bittorrent. But of course, Comcast's so-called "unlimited" service isn't unlimited when it comes to torrents. Jon's not doing anything illegal with torrent--has never (to the best of my knowledge) attempted to do anything illegal with torrent--he's simply a man who believed an advertisement, and then discovered, to his surprise, that it was a lie. Don't you think it's at least possible that he has a valid case? I sure do.
From an academic viewpoint, it probably matters. From a point of view of trying to get the job done...not so much. I studied the performance and efficiency of a wide variety of sort algorithms when I was in school, but nowadays, I generally just call some library to do my sorting for me. It may not be quite as efficient for the machine to use some random, generic sort, but for me, it's the difference between a few seconds to type "sort" vs. a few hours to code and debug a sort routine that is probably, at best, only a few percent faster.
XML is, in many cases (including mine), the path of least resistance. It's not particularly fast or efficient, but it's simple and quick and I don't have to spend hours documenting my formats for the dozens of other people in the company who have to use my data. Many of whom are probably not programmers by Dewar and Schonberg's definition, but who still do valuable work for the company.