Then why doesn't AOL charge for the use of the AIM servers and keep the protocol open? That'd give them a return on investment for the development of the servers, and with clients available everywhere AIM would be even more popular. Of course, with an open protocol, they might start getting competition from other AIM-compatible servers, but since most people are using their servers, few people will want to change.
Okay, so AOL runs the AIM servers. But you still have to have an AOL account to use the AIM servers, even if you use the MS client, right? So if I'm paying AOL the same for the use of their AIM servers, what difference does it make whether I use the AOL client or the MS client?
The only difference is in market control. Since AIM is so popular, AOL wants to use AIM's success to force people to use the rest of their services. To do this, they have to make sure that no other company can integrate AIM into their services that compete with AOL. That's the same integration and control strategy that MS is using with IE: forcing people to use a competitive product (IE/AOL) because it's integrated exclusively with a monopolistic product (Windows/AIM).
...is not an integral part of a proprietary product. A well-designed build process does not increase their product's marketability, so it's not that important.
OTOH, a good build process is essential to an Open Source product. If it's difficult to build, you won't have many users.
Yes, it sounds like this patent will not hold up in court. But look at the waste of time and resources it will take to prove that. Waiting for a court challenge is not sufficient. We need some way to punish companies like this for filing frivolous patents.
How about this? For each patent that later overturned, they should be made to pay a penalty into a fund that provides for more detailed examination of patent filings. The size of this penalty should be proportional to the profits that the company expected to get from the frivolous patent.
If a company files more than x patents within y years that are overturned in court, it will be considered a habitual abuser of the patent process. For the first habitual abuse offense, the company should be prevented from ever filing a patent for things developed within the next six months. Repeated habitual abuse should result in increasing the length of the patent moratorium.
Let's put the cost of these frivolous abuses back onto the shoulders of the abusers!
This article got me to thinking. It's great to have the Open Source, but that's not sufficient to keep the open software explosion going. There are at least a couple other areas that must be opened for the free software community to continue its phenomenal expansion.
One is that we need to have access to hardware documentation in order to write drivers. Fortunately, we have seen much progress on this front. In the past few years, many companies have realized the value of releasing their programming docs so that drivers can be written. (I would like to know if the NDAs that RedHat has negotiated include release of the HW docs when the GPL'ed code is released, though...)
The other is that we need to have Open Employment -- the freedom to hack no matter who is our current or previous employer. Until recently, this hasn't been much of an issue, since few people were paid to hack free software. Now that we have many companies that pay employees to work on free/open software, we need to ensure that the employers don't restrict the freedom to develop.
This restriction could be done in a number of ways, either explicitly or implicitly. An explicit restriction could be a clause preventing employees from working on similar or competing products when they leave the company. An implicit restriction could be something like an NDA on hardware docs that only releases them to that company's employees. Both implicit and explicit restrictions tie the developer's productivity to remaining with the company. If restrictions like this are in place, then a developer who left the company, for whatever reason, might not be free to continue their work.
Now, I'm not accusing Red Hat of having these restrictions. In fact, I think Rasterman's recent departure from Red Hat to continue work on Enlightenment at VA shows that Red Hat does not have these restrictions.
But now that commercial Free/Open development is becoming the fad, I think it might be time to think about some Open Employment guidelines. Here's a quick brain dump for you to chew on (or chew up and spit out):
These Open Employment guidelines are designed to safeguard the freedom of an Open Source developer to continue contributing to the community.
The employer may not place restrictions on the developer that would prevent them from continuing to work on an Open Source project when their employment with the employer is ended.
The employer may not tie incentives to the direction of the developer's Open Source development.
The employer may not restrict the open discussion of Open Source projects, except as required by NDAs in pre-release situations.
The neat think about commercial Open Source development is that companies are realizing that what's good for the community is ultimately good for the company as well.
Yes, address and data can be multiplexed on the same pins. The author did mention this possibility, but then noted that it would take an extra clock cycle per access. Since the emphasis of this chipset is performance, he assumed (rightly or wrongly) that HotRail would not use multiplexed address/data pins. I'm not so sure about that assumption, though. Seems to me that the decrease in bandwidth contention might more than make up for the extra clock cycle needed for multiplexing. As long as the product is manufacturable, and there's a net gain in performance, it doesn't matter whether the design is the absolute fastest...
I don't think he's supporting the point that he thinks he's making. Usually, consumers don't initiate featuritis, it comes from the marketroids. In order to survive financially, the company has to keep creating new reasons for people to buy their product (remember the yearly model changes from Detroit?). Fortunately (for the companies, at least), the average consumer will swallow the marketing drivel once the features are there. Then the consumers buy the product, and the company is happy.
Fortunately, I am not a typical consumer, and I'm guessing many others here at Slashdot aren't either. I prefer functionality, simplicity, and elegance. That's why I drive an Acura Integra rather than a Lincoln LandMass, a Buick SnootyStreet, a Cadillac UrbanSprawl, or a Ford BunkHouse. I don't have, nor will I pay for, auto-dimming rearview mirrors, automatic headlights, auto-on windshield wipers, auto-adjusting seats, massaging seats, or even auto-shift transmissions.
Every time I turn around, there's another marketing term that fabricates a difference in the consumer's mind -- "Intel Inside" -- "Where do you want to go today?" -- "Duratec V6" -- "Vortech V8" -- "StabiliTrak" -- "You may already be a winner"...
I'm inclined to think that the US consumer is inordinately susceptible to this marketing propaganda. I'm not really sure why, though. We're all supposed to be individuals here, and think for ourselves, right? Then why do so many people believe such transparent marketing scams?
Or maybe I should ask the opposite question: why don't I always believe every claim or slogan from a salesman or commercial? Is there something wrong with me???
The other day, I saw some young kids huddled over a legal notepad. They seemed very intent on what they were doing. It's summer vacation -- were they studying outside of school? Were they sharing profound insights on the nature of the universe?
After further investigation, I found that they were playing an obsolete children's game, "Hangman."
This incident solidifies the support for a theory I've long held: "Legal" notepads are nothing more than a way to carry your graffiti around with you.
Let's face it, you see these things everywhere. Companies buy bazillions of them for their employees. Any lawyer found without at least three legal pads in their briefcase could be summarily disbarred. And yet, what benefit do they really provide? Do they really increase productivity? Answer honestly, now: how many of your most productive moments have even been near a legal pad, much less actually using one?
Let's take a typical employee carrying a legal pad and follow him for one day to see if the pad makes him more productive. The first thing he does when he gets to work is check his email -- amazingly, leaving the pad sitting on the side of his desk all the while. After deleting the 37 spam emails, responding to the two critical ones from his boss, and filing the rest into neat electronic stacks, he moves on to ancient technology. He picks up his legal pad, and checks his voice mail. He scribbles a couple names and numbers down on the pad, and then calls those people right back to leave messages on their voice mail.
Whoops! It's time for the morning meeting already! Grabbing the pad, he rushes to the conference room. He takes detailed notes as the supervisor presents the current project status for all projects ("avoid Bill this week"), the Quality Improvement Committees being set up ("GET MILK!"), and the company's business prospects ("update resume").
Having committed these detailed notes to indelible storage, our hero returns and deposits the legal pad in its place of honor on his desk. Surrepetitiously, he checks out Slashdot, reads a couple topics, and posts a couple replies, all the while not touching his legal pad. After creating and printing a couple memos, he gets down to the real work at hand. Staring intently at his computer screen and moving his hands incessantly between the keyboard and the mouse, he occasionally stops, picks up his pencil, and jots little things down on his conveniently placed notepad. "12450385 - 32" "335 -> better" "BUT HOW?"
Finally, it's time to go home. He picks up the pad and stares at the disconnected little phrases. He can't even remember what most of them mean, so he tears off the top sheet of his legal pad, wads it up, and tosses it into his wastebasket. (Of course, more slovenly employees often just wrap the sheet around to the back of the pad, but our hero is nothing if not conscientious.) Then he drives straight home, forgetting the milk that his wife told him to pick up.
You may crave legal pads. You may even come to depend on them. But in the end, you're better off without them. They do nothing more productive than attracting graffiti. And I'll bet that your company is spending a lot of time and effort getting just the right legal pads -- think of the complexities! Should the company standardize on yellow (traditional) or white (progressive)? Is it acceptable to use an 11" legal pad for storage purposes, or must we remain with the 14"? What about the binding -- plastic-bound pages tend to fall of with extensive wear, but tear-off pages don't nicely fold to the back of the pad.
As you can see, legal pads do not add to productivity in the workplace, and provide many opportunities to waste time and energy.
If you are in the business of looking important, then by all means carry and use a legal pad. But if you are in the business of staying in business, then you might want to keep an eye on the glorified etch-a-sketches.
Now, it is true that a vanishingly small group of people use legal pads to actually do work rather than just scribbling isolated snatches of useless information. But that usually occurs only when proper legal pad procudure is taught and strictly enforced by the company. Rarely will you see productive use of legal pads without this level of control.
So I already know that you love your legal pad, and think that you could not do without it. But what I want to know is, do you really need it? Can you prove that it increases your productivity?
No, the 3 sec delay does not suitably model slow connections or low bandwidth. It represents time spent within the CGI program to do some calculation, most probably hitting an external data source or database. Connection and bandwidth issues might cause problems with the number of threads/processes blocked in the server, the performance of the TCP/IP stack in sub-optimal situations, and possibly a couple other areas. It would truly be interesting to see how resilient the systems are to typical connection problems, but that would take another test.
You've got a good point. It's always tempting to accept things that agree with our beliefs and question or reject things that don't. But I can see a lot of differences between the benchmarks that make me trust the C't results and mistrust the Mi5ft results.
Microsoft initiated the Mindcraft study. Neither Microsoft nor the Linux community initiated the C't study.
Microsoft specified the server hardware in the Mindcraft study. Neither Microsoft nor the Linux community specified the C't server hardware.
Mi5ft only tested static page serving. C't tested a number of different types of load.
Mi5ft only tested one server configuration. C't tested multiple server configurations, and quantified the performance differences
Mi5ft used internal Microsoft support, but only included Linux community support when their results were challenged. C't used consumer-level support for both systems.
All Mi5ft results showed NT/IIS to be hugely faster. C't results showed that NT/IIS is faster on some things, and Linux/Apache is faster on others.
Mi5ft characterized their results as "NT/IIS is faster". C't showed how their results indicated strong and weak points in both systems.
It should be pretty obvious that the Mi5ft "testing" was pre-determined to result in good marketing slogans, while the C't testing was done to find out which truly works better.
Ultimately, we do have to make sure we evaluate the testing on its merits, not on its results. If we think the C't tests prove that "Linux Rulez!" we're just as guilty of fanaticism as anyone else who claims "Foo Rulez!" But if we take the test results (Mi5ft, C't, or whatever) and say "Hmmm...Linux does pretty good in most areas, but let's see if we can fix the remaining issues," then we're using the testing profitably.
In addition to the nuisance issues that have been raised so far, I think there are some serious security and reliability issues. This sounds like it's going the same way that the web has -- first banner ads, then animated banner ads, then popup ads, then Java/Javascript ads -- more complexity and overhead at each step. Will we see the same progression in BIOS ads? Will the advertisers progress from images to active code? How will this affect the security and reliability of the BIOS?
The reason the BIOS has worked well so far is that it does one thing and does it well. When you add complexity like this, you will create security holes or reliability problems. I, for one, will do everything I can to avoid BIOS ads, even if I have to pay a little extra for it.
I agree with your point, and I often use that argument against email spamming. But I think the situation here is a little different. First, the bulletin board analogy (what I was originally responding to) is very weak in this instance. A much better analogy is the use of mass snail mail, simply it also uses company resources for delivery. Email uses the mail servers; snail mail uses the mail room. Mass mailing of either type is a misuse of company resources. Second, I don't think that it makes sense to accuse him of trespassing. Neither mass snail mail nor mass email involves his presence on Intel's property, either physically or electronically. He wouldn't be accused of trespassing if he had mass snail mailed, so why should he be accused of it when he mass emails?
I do think it's well within Intel's rights to stop accepting either email or snail mail from him, and even to get a restraining order if the harassment persists and they cannot easily block the incoming mail. But comparing his offense to a physical bulletin board, which requires physical trespassing to post something, does not make sense.
No, you're wrong. You can't compare a bulletin board with mail. The proper analogy would be if he sent snamil mail to all of Intel's employees, and Intel sued him for trespassing because their mail room had to deliver all of his mail.
I doubt that any court would uphold a suit for trespassing based on the use of internal mail room resources to deliver snail mail, so why should they consider it trespassing when it's done by email?
...the balance of benefits to society. IP laws are based on the premise that a financial incentive, in the form of a temporary monopoly, is crucial to encourage creativity. In order to provide this monopoly, these laws allow the owner to limit the usefulness of the IP to the general public, assuming that the increased creativity makes up for the decreased utility.
Our IP system sure seemed to work well in its early days. Society as a whole profited from numerous inventions, because the inventions passed into public use rather rapidly. The monopoly granted by the IP laws often encouraged others to develop new inventions with functionality similar to or better than those already registered, which gave even more public benefit from the competition.
Now, though, it seems like our IP system has more drawbacks to society than it has benefits. Companies often use IP suits to stifle competition. It's rare to have a competitor successfully come up with an alternative innovation that duplicates the functionality of the original IP. And companies often exploit the temporary monopolies by making deals with competitors that allow them to control technology to an unprecedented degree. I would contend that the drawbacks in the current use of the system overwhelm the benefit of increased incentive to the IP developers.
What has changed? Why does it seem like there are more drawbacks and less benefits now? I would suggest that there are a number of things that have changed significantly since our current IP system was established.
The areas that are subject to IP are much less tangible than they used to be. It's very straightforward to determine if a physical machine uses the same structure as that listed in a patent, or to find out if a work duplicates the words or notes of a copyrighted work. But when you get into other arenas, it's much more difficult to tell if something truly duplicates the original IP, or if it's just something that provides equivalent functionality.
The IP-granting agencies regularly accept vaguely-written IP applications. The applications can be written this way in an attempt to control not only one specific way of doing things, but also any other functionally-equivalent way. When it's done carefully, this allows companies to supress potential competition.
Companies can register IP for the sole reason of supressing competition, without any intent to develop the technology. Obviously, this can result in less innovation overall.
The increasing system complexity makes it more difficult to determine whether something violates the IP protection, or just provides equivalent functionality. Instead of physical mechanisms or processes with tens to hundreds of components, we are dealing with things like software than can easily have thousands or millions of components. This makes it much more difficult for the IP-granting agencies to determine direct correspondence, especially since they are rarely experts in the field of the IP, which results in a tendency toward determining functional equivalency rather than direct correspondence.
The increasing complexity also makes it more difficult to develop a competing process. Instead of trying to compete, it's often easier to just license the IP from the originator, which gives them even more control over the technology and the competition.
The increasing complexity of our environment makes interoperability critical. When IP protection covers the interfaces, whether we're talking network protocols or SMP standards or document formats, then that provides another barrier to competition. A potential competitor must either try and duplicate the functionality of the interface, using considerable resources, or they must license the interface from the IP-holder, giving their competitor significant control over a critical part of their product. Neither option is attractive.
The increasing complexity also provides a natural market barrier to competing products. Things are so complex now, that it takes a bit of work to learn them to the point where the user is comfortable using them. The public often don't want to spend the extra time to learn a competiting product, even if it promises more effectiveness in the long term.
The increasing complexity [boy, there's a theme here...] also means that new systems must be built on a foundation of previous systems. Since each building block could be under IP protection, it's often easier to re-invent the whole thing. Unfortunately, the additional work involved is a disincentive to innovation. Also, this can result in a slightly incompatible product, which raises another barrier to competition. Even if there are no incompatibilities, the IP-holder can raise the spectre of potential incompatibilities as another barrier to competition.
I think it's obvious that the overall drawbacks of the current system outweigh the benefits it provides. It's time to re-engineer an IP system that still provides incentives for creativity, and protects inventors from exploitative competition, but that prevents the type of abuse that is rampant today. I think it'd be a Bad Thing to do away with IP protection completely, but we've got to fix the current system so that it prevents abuses and actually does provide benefits to the public.
When groups like RIAA complain solely about the loss of revenues, then it's pretty obvious that the original intent of encouraging creativity has, sadly, been lost.
The sentence construction is vague. It could be either "the linux OS...that has attained" or "a tech reference...that has attained". Typically, the closer reference is the one intended, so it's easy to think that the author meant that Linux was touted by RMS. To make their intent clear, they should have put commas around "such as the Linux OS" to make it explicit that the "that" refers to something earlier in the sentence. Like this:
As expected, Slashdot's readers gave Gore 2000 a shellacking for appropriating "open source" -- a tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems, such as the Linux OS, that has attained mythical status since it was touted by the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman in 1984.
Of course, the sentence is horribly unwieldy even with that change. It needs simplification.
Okay, enough nitpicking...we now return you to your regularly scheduled flame-fest...
This is news that matters to this nerd. I have to work with Micros~1 products and licensing on a regular basis, and I'm often frustrated both by their shady practices and their shoddy goods. Of course, I can't speak for Rob, but I support Linux over Microsoft because:
It is more productive for my tasks on my hardware
It is more easily customizable, and doesn't change my customizations on a whim
It crashes much less than Windows (which contributes to #1)
It's diverse, yet better organized, and let's face it, fun!
I see myself more as a convenience zealot rather than a Linux zealot. Of course, you're free to think what you want...
No, I mean that the government provides patents and copyrights, which effectively enforce a temporary monopoly for those holding the patents and copyrights.
I can't speak for Alan Greenspan, or the context of the quote, of course...
...a statement made by Hydrophobe ages ago (slashdottily speaking, anyway): "We need corporations to protect us from governments. And vice versa." So what do you do when the corporation and the government are in cahoots?
Slashdot Mirror
Then why doesn't AOL charge for the use of the AIM servers and keep the protocol open? That'd give them a return on investment for the development of the servers, and with clients available everywhere AIM would be even more popular. Of course, with an open protocol, they might start getting competition from other AIM-compatible servers, but since most people are using their servers, few people will want to change.
The only difference is in market control. Since AIM is so popular, AOL wants to use AIM's success to force people to use the rest of their services. To do this, they have to make sure that no other company can integrate AIM into their services that compete with AOL. That's the same integration and control strategy that MS is using with IE: forcing people to use a competitive product (IE/AOL) because it's integrated exclusively with a monopolistic product (Windows/AIM).
Nope, the Gemini's always been a steel track on a wooden structure -- at least it was in '78/79, when I first rode it...
OTOH, a good build process is essential to an Open Source product. If it's difficult to build, you won't have many users.
Interesting assertion. Can you give references to other literature of the same genre, or discussions of this genre?
How about this? For each patent that later overturned, they should be made to pay a penalty into a fund that provides for more detailed examination of patent filings. The size of this penalty should be proportional to the profits that the company expected to get from the frivolous patent.
If a company files more than x patents within y years that are overturned in court, it will be considered a habitual abuser of the patent process. For the first habitual abuse offense, the company should be prevented from ever filing a patent for things developed within the next six months. Repeated habitual abuse should result in increasing the length of the patent moratorium.
Let's put the cost of these frivolous abuses back onto the shoulders of the abusers!
One is that we need to have access to hardware documentation in order to write drivers. Fortunately, we have seen much progress on this front. In the past few years, many companies have realized the value of releasing their programming docs so that drivers can be written. (I would like to know if the NDAs that RedHat has negotiated include release of the HW docs when the GPL'ed code is released, though...)
The other is that we need to have Open Employment -- the freedom to hack no matter who is our current or previous employer. Until recently, this hasn't been much of an issue, since few people were paid to hack free software. Now that we have many companies that pay employees to work on free/open software, we need to ensure that the employers don't restrict the freedom to develop.
This restriction could be done in a number of ways, either explicitly or implicitly. An explicit restriction could be a clause preventing employees from working on similar or competing products when they leave the company. An implicit restriction could be something like an NDA on hardware docs that only releases them to that company's employees. Both implicit and explicit restrictions tie the developer's productivity to remaining with the company. If restrictions like this are in place, then a developer who left the company, for whatever reason, might not be free to continue their work.
Now, I'm not accusing Red Hat of having these restrictions. In fact, I think Rasterman's recent departure from Red Hat to continue work on Enlightenment at VA shows that Red Hat does not have these restrictions.
But now that commercial Free/Open development is becoming the fad, I think it might be time to think about some Open Employment guidelines. Here's a quick brain dump for you to chew on (or chew up and spit out):
These Open Employment guidelines are designed to safeguard the freedom of an Open Source developer to continue contributing to the community.
The neat think about commercial Open Source development is that companies are realizing that what's good for the community is ultimately good for the company as well.
Comments?
Yes, address and data can be multiplexed on the same pins. The author did mention this possibility, but then noted that it would take an extra clock cycle per access. Since the emphasis of this chipset is performance, he assumed (rightly or wrongly) that HotRail would not use multiplexed address/data pins. I'm not so sure about that assumption, though. Seems to me that the decrease in bandwidth contention might more than make up for the extra clock cycle needed for multiplexing. As long as the product is manufacturable, and there's a net gain in performance, it doesn't matter whether the design is the absolute fastest...
Fortunately, I am not a typical consumer, and I'm guessing many others here at Slashdot aren't either. I prefer functionality, simplicity, and elegance. That's why I drive an Acura Integra rather than a Lincoln LandMass, a Buick SnootyStreet, a Cadillac UrbanSprawl, or a Ford BunkHouse. I don't have, nor will I pay for, auto-dimming rearview mirrors, automatic headlights, auto-on windshield wipers, auto-adjusting seats, massaging seats, or even auto-shift transmissions.
Every time I turn around, there's another marketing term that fabricates a difference in the consumer's mind -- "Intel Inside" -- "Where do you want to go today?" -- "Duratec V6" -- "Vortech V8" -- "StabiliTrak" -- "You may already be a winner" ...
I'm inclined to think that the US consumer is inordinately susceptible to this marketing propaganda. I'm not really sure why, though. We're all supposed to be individuals here, and think for ourselves, right? Then why do so many people believe such transparent marketing scams?
Or maybe I should ask the opposite question: why don't I always believe every claim or slogan from a salesman or commercial? Is there something wrong with me???
After further investigation, I found that they were playing an obsolete children's game, "Hangman."
This incident solidifies the support for a theory I've long held: "Legal" notepads are nothing more than a way to carry your graffiti around with you.
Let's face it, you see these things everywhere. Companies buy bazillions of them for their employees. Any lawyer found without at least three legal pads in their briefcase could be summarily disbarred. And yet, what benefit do they really provide? Do they really increase productivity? Answer honestly, now: how many of your most productive moments have even been near a legal pad, much less actually using one?
Let's take a typical employee carrying a legal pad and follow him for one day to see if the pad makes him more productive. The first thing he does when he gets to work is check his email -- amazingly, leaving the pad sitting on the side of his desk all the while. After deleting the 37 spam emails, responding to the two critical ones from his boss, and filing the rest into neat electronic stacks, he moves on to ancient technology. He picks up his legal pad, and checks his voice mail. He scribbles a couple names and numbers down on the pad, and then calls those people right back to leave messages on their voice mail.
Whoops! It's time for the morning meeting already! Grabbing the pad, he rushes to the conference room. He takes detailed notes as the supervisor presents the current project status for all projects ("avoid Bill this week"), the Quality Improvement Committees being set up ("GET MILK!"), and the company's business prospects ("update resume").
Having committed these detailed notes to indelible storage, our hero returns and deposits the legal pad in its place of honor on his desk. Surrepetitiously, he checks out Slashdot, reads a couple topics, and posts a couple replies, all the while not touching his legal pad. After creating and printing a couple memos, he gets down to the real work at hand. Staring intently at his computer screen and moving his hands incessantly between the keyboard and the mouse, he occasionally stops, picks up his pencil, and jots little things down on his conveniently placed notepad. "12450385 - 32" "335 -> better" "BUT HOW?"
Finally, it's time to go home. He picks up the pad and stares at the disconnected little phrases. He can't even remember what most of them mean, so he tears off the top sheet of his legal pad, wads it up, and tosses it into his wastebasket. (Of course, more slovenly employees often just wrap the sheet around to the back of the pad, but our hero is nothing if not conscientious.) Then he drives straight home, forgetting the milk that his wife told him to pick up.
You may crave legal pads. You may even come to depend on them. But in the end, you're better off without them. They do nothing more productive than attracting graffiti. And I'll bet that your company is spending a lot of time and effort getting just the right legal pads -- think of the complexities! Should the company standardize on yellow (traditional) or white (progressive)? Is it acceptable to use an 11" legal pad for storage purposes, or must we remain with the 14"? What about the binding -- plastic-bound pages tend to fall of with extensive wear, but tear-off pages don't nicely fold to the back of the pad.
As you can see, legal pads do not add to productivity in the workplace, and provide many opportunities to waste time and energy.
If you are in the business of looking important, then by all means carry and use a legal pad. But if you are in the business of staying in business, then you might want to keep an eye on the glorified etch-a-sketches.
Now, it is true that a vanishingly small group of people use legal pads to actually do work rather than just scribbling isolated snatches of useless information. But that usually occurs only when proper legal pad procudure is taught and strictly enforced by the company. Rarely will you see productive use of legal pads without this level of control.
So I already know that you love your legal pad, and think that you could not do without it. But what I want to know is, do you really need it? Can you prove that it increases your productivity?
No, the 3 sec delay does not suitably model slow connections or low bandwidth. It represents time spent within the CGI program to do some calculation, most probably hitting an external data source or database. Connection and bandwidth issues might cause problems with the number of threads/processes blocked in the server, the performance of the TCP/IP stack in sub-optimal situations, and possibly a couple other areas. It would truly be interesting to see how resilient the systems are to typical connection problems, but that would take another test.
It should be pretty obvious that the Mi5ft "testing" was pre-determined to result in good marketing slogans, while the C't testing was done to find out which truly works better.
Ultimately, we do have to make sure we evaluate the testing on its merits, not on its results. If we think the C't tests prove that "Linux Rulez!" we're just as guilty of fanaticism as anyone else who claims "Foo Rulez!" But if we take the test results (Mi5ft, C't, or whatever) and say "Hmmm...Linux does pretty good in most areas, but let's see if we can fix the remaining issues," then we're using the testing profitably.
Look at the Ford "Duratec" or "Zetec" engines, the Chevy "Vortec V6", etc. It's getting so that you can't tell the contents without an autopsy...
The reason the BIOS has worked well so far is that it does one thing and does it well. When you add complexity like this, you will create security holes or reliability problems. I, for one, will do everything I can to avoid BIOS ads, even if I have to pay a little extra for it.
And that's pronounced "Windows [pause] Oh-Oh!" (just like it is for earlier versions)
Carbon fiber is conductive -- need I say more?
I drive a V-8...
Well, mine's a Hemi...
Yeah, well, I've got a Turbo...
"She's real fine, my 409"... Q.E.D.
I do think it's well within Intel's rights to stop accepting either email or snail mail from him, and even to get a restraining order if the harassment persists and they cannot easily block the incoming mail. But comparing his offense to a physical bulletin board, which requires physical trespassing to post something, does not make sense.
I doubt that any court would uphold a suit for trespassing based on the use of internal mail room resources to deliver snail mail, so why should they consider it trespassing when it's done by email?
Our IP system sure seemed to work well in its early days. Society as a whole profited from numerous inventions, because the inventions passed into public use rather rapidly. The monopoly granted by the IP laws often encouraged others to develop new inventions with functionality similar to or better than those already registered, which gave even more public benefit from the competition.
Now, though, it seems like our IP system has more drawbacks to society than it has benefits. Companies often use IP suits to stifle competition. It's rare to have a competitor successfully come up with an alternative innovation that duplicates the functionality of the original IP. And companies often exploit the temporary monopolies by making deals with competitors that allow them to control technology to an unprecedented degree. I would contend that the drawbacks in the current use of the system overwhelm the benefit of increased incentive to the IP developers.
What has changed? Why does it seem like there are more drawbacks and less benefits now? I would suggest that there are a number of things that have changed significantly since our current IP system was established.
I think it's obvious that the overall drawbacks of the current system outweigh the benefits it provides. It's time to re-engineer an IP system that still provides incentives for creativity, and protects inventors from exploitative competition, but that prevents the type of abuse that is rampant today. I think it'd be a Bad Thing to do away with IP protection completely, but we've got to fix the current system so that it prevents abuses and actually does provide benefits to the public.
When groups like RIAA complain solely about the loss of revenues, then it's pretty obvious that the original intent of encouraging creativity has, sadly, been lost.
As expected, Slashdot's readers gave Gore 2000 a shellacking for appropriating "open source" -- a tech reference for nonproprietary, open-to-all software systems, such as the Linux OS, that has attained mythical status since it was touted by the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman in 1984.
Of course, the sentence is horribly unwieldy even with that change. It needs simplification.
Okay, enough nitpicking...we now return you to your regularly scheduled flame-fest...
This is news that matters to this nerd. I have to work with Micros~1 products and licensing on a regular basis, and I'm often frustrated both by their shady practices and their shoddy goods. Of course, I can't speak for Rob, but I support Linux over Microsoft because:
I see myself more as a convenience zealot rather than a Linux zealot. Of course, you're free to think what you want...
I can't speak for Alan Greenspan, or the context of the quote, of course...
Microsoft is government enforced? News to me..
How else would you describe patents and copyrights?
...a statement made by Hydrophobe ages ago (slashdottily speaking, anyway): "We need corporations to protect us from governments. And vice versa." So what do you do when the corporation and the government are in cahoots?