Yes, because in the Corporate Republic (thanks Jon) we know that consumers never benefit from increased competition or lower prices. Since when did actually caring for a working capitalist free-market system (note: a monopoly does not count as a "working" market) become so out-there and practically left-wing?
I thought the same thing when viewing the screenshots, having not read too much about the game ahead of time. The problem that I'd have with the game would be that I'd want to zoom off and explore the ringworld itself, go see the Map of Mars, etc. It would be really depressing to play the game and realize that most of that ring will be forever out of reach...
Not to mention the gran-daddy of all the knifings, DR-DOS and Windows 3.1, which is a fully-documented conspiracy complete with encrypted code. Face it - Microsoft is just as dirty as they're made out to be, and only rarely do they allow the same sort of thing to happen to them.
People say "well, Money hasn't won" or "Real still exists" or "AOL is going strong" but what you don't see is that these are monopolizations in progress. Microsoft owns the PC platform - short of government action there is no way that Real, Quicken/Intuit, or even AOL are going to survive once Microsoft really starts hooking things into Windows XP++. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, because Microsoft owns the platform and after the DOJ capitulation, the whole industry knows it.
How much was Microsoft responsible for the hardware being standard, though? That was all Intel, along with the other hardware manufacturers who reverse-engineered IBM's PC specs.
Or do you mean that Microsoft's software was a killer app that drove hardware sales, thus allowing the x86 platform to dominate other hardware platforms? That I'll believe, although I think it could easily have been many other companies besides Microsoft that drove that trend. They were in the right place at the right time, and have never quite recovered yet:)
Also, we tend to compare our internal projects on the basis of assembly-equivalent LOC, or AELOC. Otherwise you can't compare across platforms and languages. For reference, we use the ratio 2.5 AELOC (on a Motorola microcontroller, so fairly RISC-like) equals one C LOC. It would be interesting to see if this is a common ratio for development on x86 hardware, and what ratios others are using for other languages.
Wait, you mean all statistics seen on/. aren't rigorously fact-checked? Next you'll be trying to tell me that rumor about CmdrTaco's spelling problems, you big joker you:)
So, the great majority should be able to remove the rights of the minority? How great of a majority - 99%, 95%, 80%? Hmmm, I can think back to a time where the large majority in Germany didn't like Jews very much, did that make their actions correct?
I am not a Nazi apologist by any means, but I don't see any reason to prevent someone else from espousing those views if they want, because I am confident enough in my viewpoint that I know I could win out in an argument with that person. To me, banning Nazi information implies an unwillingness to take up the debate and prove why Nazism was evil. You can't destroy evil thoughts by sweeping them under the rug; you must confront them, reason them out, and change them.
I don't think you've summarized the law correctly somehow. How does owning or selling Nazi paraphernalia constitute "apologism"? Perhaps I would like to own certain items because my ancestor was in the war, or maybe I preserve a souvenir of fascism in order to remind myself and my family why that must never be allowed to happen again. Then, later on, I need to sell such things, again to other people with the same good intentions.
If the French law were to merely set limits on apologizing for Nazism, or only acted against those who were promoting Nazism, then I think it would be more reasonable (still odious to the true definition of free speech, but at least it would be more narrowly targeted). But just banning everything Nazi results in tossing out the bad with the good, and furthermore makes those same teenagers even more interested in it, since we all know or remember how cool it was to annoy your parents at that age:)
Not that our U.S. laws banning drugs are working very well with the young people either, you understand.
The point is moot, since Yahoo and eBay have already yanked all of their Nazi auctions anyway. This court case won't fix anything for big business, since they were probably happy to get out of the unpopular Nazi stuff market. I'll believe it's a victory for free speech when the little guy is defended from another nation's laws by this ruling.
On the plus side, this certainly gives a leg up to the overseas distribution of DeCSS and other stuff that our !@#$ U.S. laws prevent, doesn't it?
IT managers often seem to live in some stratospheric haze of PowerPoint presentations, corporate sales
representatives, buzzwords, and grandiose strategies.
Don't forget empire-building, constructed from the networks and machines that engineering uses to get Real Work done. Empire-building is practically the national pastime of my corporate behemoth:)
I see it as an even simpler solution than that: the people interviewed are simply Out Of The Loop (tm). It's just like in the early days of Linux: interview executives and they all say "Lin-what?" Meanwhile it was being put to use in their server rooms to improve their businesses. Now they're up to recognizing that Linux is a buzzword they should probably bone up on at some point (imagine the BOFH's boss here if it helps) but still have no idea what's really running things. Trust me: Linux is in every one of the Fortune 1000, simply because those businesses are too big for the management folks surveyed to even know if they're using it or not. It may not be a quote-unquote-priority until some heads roll when IT costs can't be controlled, but Linux is there in fact, if not in theory.
Another interpretation: this article is heavily phrased in terms of money, because money is the funhouse mirror through which upper management views everything.
"Areas like supply-chain management software
and Linux servers rank near the bottom of spending priorities," wrote Goldman
Sachs analysts Rick Sherlund and Laura Conigliaro. The results brought "some
surprises from our IT managers, with Linux...virtually not registering on our
survey."
Well, of course Linux is at the bottom of your spending priorities when there are no costs for you to try it out and much lower costs to implement and customize it (not to mention zero recurring licensing costs - free software is the gift that keeps on giving). Linux is dead last on my personal spending priorities as well, even though I use a lot of it and plan to use more.
So, as always, ignore the top brass behind the curtain, use Linux where it works (and if you want to, improve where it doesn't), and don't suffer Microsoft to control too much of how your business does business. Same old, same old.
I'm not hitting the stories when they are first posted, usually. Unless I have a comment to make myself, I don't read a story until it has ~30 comments because moderation hasn't really kicked in until then.
I don't see the point of a first post when the commend id number is not 1, but then again I never saw the point in the first place:)
That's what moderation points are for, and also why the comments in an article don't number from 1 anymore. Between the two of those, I can't think the last time I've read a first post (that said it was a first post, at least).
It looks like a greater-than-infinite amount of people already have:)
Re:Spelling/Grammer Nazis...
on
Looking At Gobe
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, if the poster above was implying that the poor speller was a native speaker of another language, then I think some latitude is allowed - English is a tough language to learn, by all accounts.
I have nothing but disdain for the myriad abusers of spelling and grammar that the U.S. school systems have turned out, though. CmdrTaco, this means you, because I'm pretty sure your native tongue is English:)
Here's a thought for future story submitters: since any posting of this magnitude will guarantee a rapid/.ing of any posted site, why not make the links point to the bad guys, like CRC in this case? If I'm going to/. some web server and still not read the story (which is mirrored in a post below, BTW, just before I was about to post it), then I'd rather/. a server of some guys who quite clearly Have It Coming, And How.
Congrats to Eric and Wolfram, so sorry to see that you had to give in and settle, but on the other hand maybe you made the right choice in order to get this invaluable resource up on the web again. And now we know that CRC is just as low as Gracenote and other money-grubbing "fencing in the commons" corporate scum.
People talk about "piracy" of intellectual property. Well, guess what: downloading a song from Napster isn't piracy. But using a limited right of publication in print form to destroy an entire online encyclopedia is the very definition of piracy. CRC essentially boarded and scuttled mathworld, and now they're selling it back to the rightful owners a piece at a time. So from now on, when Hilary Rosen blathers about piracy, remember: we know the real pirates by their actions. They are CRC, and Gracenote, and any other company that takes a publicly-generated free resource and tries to coopt that resource for their sole gain. It's a valuable lesson: it takes real money and a corporate seal to be a true pirate these days.
I must be sadly deficient in the imagination department, because I have no idea what that last one was. I can guess a couple words, but that's it. Can I buy a few more letters?
An interesting alternative project to this for you cable-modem users would be to sniff your local network for other people's web searches, and scroll past what their search terms are. I wonder - do people who work at search engine companies do this for fun sometimes?
That would probably be good for the Internet: a large number of small business people who have been there from the start of the 'net (or at least since the beginning of the commercial variety), have experience with the technical issues as well as business concerns, and are definitely anti-censorship. I think my interests as a netizen would be much better served by a representative sample of 50000 pr0n vendors than by one Microsoft, AOL, or Esther Dyson. At least the pr0n vendors just want to make their money; they aren't interested in taking over the whole thing, they just want their little piece to be secure.
ICANN is moving more and more towards governing the 'net top-down, in stark contrast to the way it was originally created. Now, more than ever, we truly need a grassroots organization springing from the small domain owners and technical architects of the network, not from some fading 20th-century relic of the U.S. Commerce Department. Hopefully someday ICANN will realize that popular input into the process isn't the problem, it's the solution. As currently constituted, though, ICANN doesn't seem able to grasp this principle (which you would think would be self-evident to a group who mostly hail from western, open societies).
Well, if their concern from the article was to make sure that ICANN is composed of people that know the Internet's technical problems, then I'd say they've failed:)
If I had a DVD-quality TV, maybe I'd care more:) I don't mind the ads in the guide one way or the other, but I like to be able to flip channels as fast as the eye can go, which digital cable doesn't seem to support very well.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because in the Corporate Republic (thanks Jon) we know that consumers never benefit from increased competition or lower prices. Since when did actually caring for a working capitalist free-market system (note: a monopoly does not count as a "working" market) become so out-there and practically left-wing?
Who's worried about quality standards when you shipped with the bug in the first place? At exploit time, you had your chance at quality, and blew it.
Maybe without all those annoying competitors in their way, they'll have time for security? Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it, baby :)
I thought the same thing when viewing the screenshots, having not read too much about the game ahead of time. The problem that I'd have with the game would be that I'd want to zoom off and explore the ringworld itself, go see the Map of Mars, etc. It would be really depressing to play the game and realize that most of that ring will be forever out of reach...
Thank you so much for causing my monitor to be covered in laughter-spewed liquid. Fortunately I was only drinking water... :)
Not to mention the gran-daddy of all the knifings, DR-DOS and Windows 3.1, which is a fully-documented conspiracy complete with encrypted code. Face it - Microsoft is just as dirty as they're made out to be, and only rarely do they allow the same sort of thing to happen to them.
People say "well, Money hasn't won" or "Real still exists" or "AOL is going strong" but what you don't see is that these are monopolizations in progress. Microsoft owns the PC platform - short of government action there is no way that Real, Quicken/Intuit, or even AOL are going to survive once Microsoft really starts hooking things into Windows XP++. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, because Microsoft owns the platform and after the DOJ capitulation, the whole industry knows it.
How much was Microsoft responsible for the hardware being standard, though? That was all Intel, along with the other hardware manufacturers who reverse-engineered IBM's PC specs.
Or do you mean that Microsoft's software was a killer app that drove hardware sales, thus allowing the x86 platform to dominate other hardware platforms? That I'll believe, although I think it could easily have been many other companies besides Microsoft that drove that trend. They were in the right place at the right time, and have never quite recovered yet :)
Also, we tend to compare our internal projects on the basis of assembly-equivalent LOC, or AELOC. Otherwise you can't compare across platforms and languages. For reference, we use the ratio 2.5 AELOC (on a Motorola microcontroller, so fairly RISC-like) equals one C LOC. It would be interesting to see if this is a common ratio for development on x86 hardware, and what ratios others are using for other languages.
Wait, you mean all statistics seen on /. aren't rigorously fact-checked? Next you'll be trying to tell me that rumor about CmdrTaco's spelling problems, you big joker you :)
So, the great majority should be able to remove the rights of the minority? How great of a majority - 99%, 95%, 80%? Hmmm, I can think back to a time where the large majority in Germany didn't like Jews very much, did that make their actions correct?
I am not a Nazi apologist by any means, but I don't see any reason to prevent someone else from espousing those views if they want, because I am confident enough in my viewpoint that I know I could win out in an argument with that person. To me, banning Nazi information implies an unwillingness to take up the debate and prove why Nazism was evil. You can't destroy evil thoughts by sweeping them under the rug; you must confront them, reason them out, and change them.
I don't think you've summarized the law correctly somehow. How does owning or selling Nazi paraphernalia constitute "apologism"? Perhaps I would like to own certain items because my ancestor was in the war, or maybe I preserve a souvenir of fascism in order to remind myself and my family why that must never be allowed to happen again. Then, later on, I need to sell such things, again to other people with the same good intentions.
If the French law were to merely set limits on apologizing for Nazism, or only acted against those who were promoting Nazism, then I think it would be more reasonable (still odious to the true definition of free speech, but at least it would be more narrowly targeted). But just banning everything Nazi results in tossing out the bad with the good, and furthermore makes those same teenagers even more interested in it, since we all know or remember how cool it was to annoy your parents at that age :)
Not that our U.S. laws banning drugs are working very well with the young people either, you understand.
The point is moot, since Yahoo and eBay have already yanked all of their Nazi auctions anyway. This court case won't fix anything for big business, since they were probably happy to get out of the unpopular Nazi stuff market. I'll believe it's a victory for free speech when the little guy is defended from another nation's laws by this ruling.
On the plus side, this certainly gives a leg up to the overseas distribution of DeCSS and other stuff that our !@#$ U.S. laws prevent, doesn't it?
See if this helps, I haven't read it but it seems spot-on.
Don't forget empire-building, constructed from the networks and machines that engineering uses to get Real Work done. Empire-building is practically the national pastime of my corporate behemoth :)
...and many do! :)
I see it as an even simpler solution than that: the people interviewed are simply Out Of The Loop (tm). It's just like in the early days of Linux: interview executives and they all say "Lin-what?" Meanwhile it was being put to use in their server rooms to improve their businesses. Now they're up to recognizing that Linux is a buzzword they should probably bone up on at some point (imagine the BOFH's boss here if it helps) but still have no idea what's really running things. Trust me: Linux is in every one of the Fortune 1000, simply because those businesses are too big for the management folks surveyed to even know if they're using it or not. It may not be a quote-unquote-priority until some heads roll when IT costs can't be controlled, but Linux is there in fact, if not in theory.
Another interpretation: this article is heavily phrased in terms of money, because money is the funhouse mirror through which upper management views everything.
Well, of course Linux is at the bottom of your spending priorities when there are no costs for you to try it out and much lower costs to implement and customize it (not to mention zero recurring licensing costs - free software is the gift that keeps on giving). Linux is dead last on my personal spending priorities as well, even though I use a lot of it and plan to use more.
So, as always, ignore the top brass behind the curtain, use Linux where it works (and if you want to, improve where it doesn't), and don't suffer Microsoft to control too much of how your business does business. Same old, same old.
I'm not hitting the stories when they are first posted, usually. Unless I have a comment to make myself, I don't read a story until it has ~30 comments because moderation hasn't really kicked in until then.
I don't see the point of a first post when the commend id number is not 1, but then again I never saw the point in the first place :)
That's what moderation points are for, and also why the comments in an article don't number from 1 anymore. Between the two of those, I can't think the last time I've read a first post (that said it was a first post, at least).
It looks like a greater-than-infinite amount of people already have :)
On the other hand, if the poster above was implying that the poor speller was a native speaker of another language, then I think some latitude is allowed - English is a tough language to learn, by all accounts.
I have nothing but disdain for the myriad abusers of spelling and grammar that the U.S. school systems have turned out, though. CmdrTaco, this means you, because I'm pretty sure your native tongue is English :)
Here's a thought for future story submitters: since any posting of this magnitude will guarantee a rapid /.ing of any posted site, why not make the links point to the bad guys, like CRC in this case? If I'm going to /. some web server and still not read the story (which is mirrored in a post below, BTW, just before I was about to post it), then I'd rather /. a server of some guys who quite clearly Have It Coming, And How.
Congrats to Eric and Wolfram, so sorry to see that you had to give in and settle, but on the other hand maybe you made the right choice in order to get this invaluable resource up on the web again. And now we know that CRC is just as low as Gracenote and other money-grubbing "fencing in the commons" corporate scum.
People talk about "piracy" of intellectual property. Well, guess what: downloading a song from Napster isn't piracy. But using a limited right of publication in print form to destroy an entire online encyclopedia is the very definition of piracy. CRC essentially boarded and scuttled mathworld, and now they're selling it back to the rightful owners a piece at a time. So from now on, when Hilary Rosen blathers about piracy, remember: we know the real pirates by their actions. They are CRC, and Gracenote, and any other company that takes a publicly-generated free resource and tries to coopt that resource for their sole gain. It's a valuable lesson: it takes real money and a corporate seal to be a true pirate these days.
I must be sadly deficient in the imagination department, because I have no idea what that last one was. I can guess a couple words, but that's it. Can I buy a few more letters?
An interesting alternative project to this for you cable-modem users would be to sniff your local network for other people's web searches, and scroll past what their search terms are. I wonder - do people who work at search engine companies do this for fun sometimes?
That would probably be good for the Internet: a large number of small business people who have been there from the start of the 'net (or at least since the beginning of the commercial variety), have experience with the technical issues as well as business concerns, and are definitely anti-censorship. I think my interests as a netizen would be much better served by a representative sample of 50000 pr0n vendors than by one Microsoft, AOL, or Esther Dyson. At least the pr0n vendors just want to make their money; they aren't interested in taking over the whole thing, they just want their little piece to be secure.
ICANN is moving more and more towards governing the 'net top-down, in stark contrast to the way it was originally created. Now, more than ever, we truly need a grassroots organization springing from the small domain owners and technical architects of the network, not from some fading 20th-century relic of the U.S. Commerce Department. Hopefully someday ICANN will realize that popular input into the process isn't the problem, it's the solution. As currently constituted, though, ICANN doesn't seem able to grasp this principle (which you would think would be self-evident to a group who mostly hail from western, open societies).
Well, if their concern from the article was to make sure that ICANN is composed of people that know the Internet's technical problems, then I'd say they've failed :)
If I had a DVD-quality TV, maybe I'd care more :) I don't mind the ads in the guide one way or the other, but I like to be able to flip channels as fast as the eye can go, which digital cable doesn't seem to support very well.