Actually, there are a couple other of ways you can put pressure on competitors which the government considers illegal. One of the most well known ones is called "predatory pricing," a situation in which a manufacturer with deep pockets sells its goods at a loss for the sake of driving a competitor out of the market. That's essentially what Netscape accused Microsoft of when IE was first released (MS responded that they were simply making the product a part of the OS, which begs the question: why make a version for Mac?). To make matters worse, Microsoft is also accused of the coercive kind of behavior you describe, by forbidding OEMs to include Netscape on their machines.
Bucket58 is right, though. If Intel were just keeping hands-off and letting the two processors fight it out, there'd be nothing to say. The allegation is that they're going to make life hard for MoBo makers who support the K7 by saying that there's a "shortage" of a critical component of the board, and favoring compliant companies with lower prices.
Oh, by the way, Skelly: "Now write that 100 times by morning, or I'll cut your balls off." What a great movie.:)
Absolutely right. And more recently, MS was caught trying to urge it's employees to show "grassroots support" for the company via letter writing campaigns when the DOJ was getting into the main part of the case against them.
Unfortunately, I don't have a link available. Anyone?
Agreed. The "You have mail" thing predates AOL pretty handily (anyone still use Eudora?), and "buddy lists" is pushing it, but Instant Messenger isn't really a phrase that anyone ever used prior to AOL's product. To my knowledge, anyway.
hey maccies? Where's the AGP? What speed is that motherboard humming at? Oh right, I know, it is twice as fast as the Pentium II/III. Right. But, how come the top sped you have is only 333mhz.. Oh yeah.. it is twice as fast as the Pentium II/III. I see..
As previously noted in this topic's discussion: clock speed isn't calculation speed. This is why everyone is making a big deal about AMD's new Athlon chips - they run at the same clock speed as Intel's, but they're good for more calcs per second. (Since you mention Q3: John Carmack recently stated that he felt comfortable saying that Athlons were faster than P3s).
The Mac's processor tends to be faster at integer calculations than equivalent Intel family chips. And that's all.
Anyway - I'm not a Mac fan, but if you're going to criticize the hardware, know what it is you're criticizing.
Thanks for the answer. I pretty much figured that this was the way it [sh|w]ould work out, but wasn't aware that there were already companies out there using open source software.
One of the bugaboos which keeps raising its head whenever we advocate the use of Open Source Software is the question of who to blame when something fails. In a very real sense, most of us can laugh this off because the potential for dire consequences is so low: if some weird confluence of events causes my Apache httpd process to go belly up... so what? There are ten of them running, and if they all go down, I can just restart the server. The odds of something really bad happening - say, losing all of the documents in the docroot - due to a glitch in the software are remote enough to not be worth thinking about.
But how would we react if it actually happened? Personally, I'd stand around looking dumb for a few minutes, then catch a plane for Argentina before my boss caught me. And in that situation, no one winds up dead. (Unless said boss catches me.)
I think, however, that the "what's it gonna take" question is pretty easy to answer, at least in the medical field the article discussed. What it's going to take is a dedicated group of programmers and engineers, willing to incorporate and put out a product which runs on Linux, but for which the company is responsible. In the same way that I would hold Penguin Systems liable if they sold me a server which was defective (not that this has ever happened), the manufacturer of the system would have to shoulder the responsibility for faulty design of its own systems.
So, what do you think? Could this be made to work?
I'm not by any means a security expert, so I hope someone else can help flesh this one out or point out mistakes if I'm screwing up. That said:
Operating systems aren't certified C2, systems are. That means a particular operating system installed in a particular manner with particular software on a particular piece of hardware. When Microsoft says, "Oh boy, NT is now C2 certified", they're yanking your chain: it's C2 when installed in a specific way.
I'm not familiar with the certification process any more than that, though. Anyone else?
Not to disagree with you, Kit, but the text on your website seems to belay your comments. According to the VarStation YMP page, each VALinuxSystems box ships with:
VA Linux OS Version 6.0 Kit All VA Linux Systems machines ship with the best Linux distribution, including the Linux Journal, Using Linux from Que, "Getting Started 6.0" guidelines, 6.0 CD, and much more! We don't stop there. We tune each machine that leaves our manufacturing floor with a kernel that is configured specifically for your hardware.
There's no mention of RH - or Debian, or SuSEI realize that this is, essentially, marketing-speak, and doesn't actually mean that VA is shipping its own dist, but it certainly reads that way to the uninformed. "VA Linux OS" sounds like a dist unto itself.
You're right in that this is a server program more than a client, but the integration with Outlook is an important perk.
Buried in the massive hunk of obstreperous code that is MS Outlook is a pretty full-featured calendaring tool. Basically, it lets you create server-side schedules that others on your team can adjust. If someone is marked as attending a meeting, it appears in both the "meeting notes" view and on their personal schedules. (I don't recall MS's terms for these features, but you get the general idea).
PHBs love this kind of thing. It gives them the ability to ramp up due-dates with an effortless flick of the wrist, whereas before, they had to actually walk to your office (or call you to theirs). This doesn't even require interaction with a real human being.
(Seriously, though: this is pretty cool. I sure hope that new versions of Outlook don't break this functionality.)
As a big Jew philosopher such as yourself is no doubt aware (btw, I am Jewish and despise whiners like you who equate the suffering of the chosen people with their inability to get decent corned beef at their local GoebbelsMart) Girard's "mirror of desire" concept tells us that people will subconsciously emulate attitudes that are only implied in the mass around them
For the record: my comment on conspiracy theories was a joke. Clearly I wasn't clear enough on that, so apologies if I've hurt your feelings.
Further - I'm not a philosopher, nor do I have any pretentions of being a philosopher. To be honest, I couldn't even have told you who Girard is, although I have a passing familiarity with the "mirror of desire" theory. It seems to me, however, that in order for that theory to apply here, the majority opinion on./ would have to be that Katz walks on water. I haven't read all of the posts following this thread, but given the number of "dump Katz" messages I've seen, I'd have to guess that most people don't.
I do have to admit that it's a pretty interesting suggestion: in essence, you can't reward people for posting up-moderated stuff with moderator points, because then only pablum gets moderated. But I'm not sure I buy it.
Finally, as to your implication that I'm a member of a group of "lonely people with low self-esteem who are too frightened to express an opinion or support the expression of same"... ow. So much for reasoned debate. But, if the price of disagreeing with you is to have you label me that way, fine. My stones are big enough to take it.
Look, with respect, this is bullshit. The rules for selecting moderators are posted on the moderator guidelines page. When I've seen posts moderated down, for the most part, it's been people with one-word posts, like "BORING!".
What you seem to be suggesting is that there's some sick cabal of moderators (clearly funded by the Gnomes of Zurich, or possibly the Bavarian Illuminati) who are just out to make Katz look good. That'd be a pretty good trick, considering that moderator access is chosen at mostly-random and none of the moderators know the identity of any of the others.
I've been picked for modertator access about half a dozen times since it was introduced, and believe me when I tell you that it's not really something that excites me all that much: my initial reaction is usually to dump all my points and move on so that I can post stuff. It just drives me nuts when people suggest that folks like me are part of some weird conspiracy. I get enough of that from being a Jew.
I mean, everyone seems to have the impression that an IPO like RedHat just can't lose. That is wrong, wrong, wrong. Look at what happened to MP3.Com (ticker symbol MPPP); they've been in a tailspin since the day their stock started trading.
Not to nitpick, as I agree with the general thrust of your post, but the MP3.com example is a really bad one. On the day of their IPO, their stock valuation jumped to - stand back - seven billion dollars. This is a company whose revenue stream comes almost entirely from advertising dollars, and earned a total of about $.7 million (and took losses of $1.5M) on the previous quarter. Wired News ran a pretty good article on the whole thing.
My point (and yes, I do have one) is that to say MP3.com's stock went into a tailspin might not be the best way to put it. I'd prefer to say that it normalized after a ridiculously lucrative IPO.
I went to see Strange Days in the theater. Took my now-wife. She had to leave partway through, and I wound up following her out.
Don't get me wrong - in a lot of respects, this movie did everything exactly right. It was terrifying, and human - what particularly sticks in my mind was the annoying yuppie "wire-tripping" for the first time to a recording of a 13-year-old girl taking a shower. However, the film contains the most graphic and disturbing sexual assault ever portrayed in a sci-fi movie (to my knowledge), and my wife just couldn't take watching after that. She was so freaked out I wound up following her out to comfort her.
One: if you haven't seen the director's cut of Blade Runner, you owe it to yourself to go rent it now. It far outshines the commercial release, with a good deal of important (and completely surreal) footage left in, and the annoying Mickey Spillane-esque monologues cut out.
Second: Henry Rollins played down in Baltimore at the annual WHFS concert (called the H-Eff-Esstival). One of the DJ's tried to talk to him backstage in his dressing room, and Rollins chased him out, yelling "bitch-boy" at him and apparently threatening to kick his ass. The DJ wrote a song about it, appropriately entitled, "Henry Rollins is going to beat me up."
We sang that song every time he came onscreen in JM. Fun stuff.
I don't know if I'm speaking for the majority of other Slashdot readers, or in fact, anyone except me. But I felt the need to respond to your posting.
I am amazed that the author of this story can turn himself into a hero by lying and cheating. Now, I am sure that you can come up with all kinds of reasons to tell me all that doesn't matter... The truth of the matter is this: IT WAS WRONG. It was a lie and an embarrassment to the concept of freedom...
I don't think anyone here is willing to go out on a limb and say that Jon is a hero. Given the (brief) correspondences I've had with him in the past, I'd go so far as to say that he'd deny the charge vehemently.
As for the lying, I firmly believe that telling an unbelievable, bald-faced lie can be justified for the purpose of making a larger point. Here, the point was that it would somehow be acceptable to view the movie if one was in the company of a pastor, and was doing it purely for the purpose of "religious teaching".
That a woman when even consider to take her children to such a show is an embarrassment to the word mother. "Mom" is a word which represents a caring, nuturing class of women who have the BEST interest of the children in mind. Come on, figure it out here, people.
What I find obscene is the notion that the MPAA (or worse, right-wing fundamentalists) can seek to impose on parents a ready-made, cookie-cutter template for what it's okay to show their kids. Whether you think kids should have been allowed to see the movie is irrelevant: it's the responsibility of the parents
And about the "Ten Commandments" comment in the first part of your story - give me a break. Our country is closer now to "religious discrimination" then in ever has been - but only in the context of restricting prayer in school and the like
Speaking as a kid who grew up Jewish in an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, shame on you for saying that. You have no idea what institutionalized prayer does to children who are in the minority. I have very clear recollections of children asserting, perfectly straight-faced, that I was going to hell because "your people killed Jesus." When I need some advice on how oppressed Christians are in the USA - "one nation, under God" - I'll let you know.
Other Christian Slashdot readers: SPEAK UP! Don't fight with me over ANY of the little details in my post here and just band together to raise the voice that we DO HAVE.
With respect, this doesn't seem like the best way to encourage thoughtful debate. I may not be a Christian, but I like to think of myself as having a pretty well thought out code of ethics. It bothers me that not only do you seem to think that your own version is applicable to everyone, but that voices disagreeing with yours should be silenced.
Thank you, Jon. In a country as screwed up as ours, the only defense we have against the constant encroachment of narrow-mindedness is wit. Thanks for tweaking those badly in need of a tweak.
I had almost exactly the same reaction that you did, and I'm 25. He seemed like a nice enough guy, he ran a so-so magazine, and what was the big deal?
When I mentioned this to my wife, she asked me to put it in perspective this way: let's say you're a child of the 60s. You grew up with JFK, a president who, at least posthumously, is one of the most lionized leaders of our nations history. At the age of twelve, you might have watched the funeral: Jackie-O and her poor, 3 year old son standing at the grave site. Now, so long after, the child who you may have seen for the first time at his father's grave is dead.
Of course it means little to you or I. But we don't feel the same way about our nation's leaders that our parents did about JFK, and in a sense, I think that sense of nostalgia and loss just got passed on to his son.
Here's a thought experiment: let's say that in an alternate reality, Clinton had turned out to be one of the most beloved presidents in American history, but died tragically young, probably while in office. Twenty or thirty years later, would we mourn the loss of Chelsey the way our parents mourn Jon Jon?
Wow. I have to ask: where is your store, and what is the clientele like? It'd be fantastic to hear that you cater to the mainstream, and still manage to sell a lot of Linux dists.
Sorry - I was making a dumb joke. The not being able to pronounce own name thing was a reference to Star Trek I, where "Veeger" turns out to be Voyager. And stuff.
The thing about setting up a scam like this is that the investment you put into it winds up making the reward for cashing in on the damn thing almost negligible.
Take Number Two, from the Austin Powers movies (but especially the first movie). His chief gripe is that he's invested years and years of his life to build up a corporate empire, and Dr. Evil wants to step in and ruin the whole thing by trying to take over the world. It's ludicrous: these are people already rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Why attempt something so risky?
If a guy creates a company which "builds up its reputation" to the point where it is making fair amount of money, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he'll try to bilk his customers. He has too much going for him, and there's too much risk.
(By the way - I seem to recall a post on Bugtraq several months ago which said that Cisco had been caught putting a back door into their router's OS. Amidst a hail of criticism, they issued a patch. It just ain't worth it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there are a couple other of ways you can put pressure on competitors which the government considers illegal. One of the most well known ones is called "predatory pricing," a situation in which a manufacturer with deep pockets sells its goods at a loss for the sake of driving a competitor out of the market. That's essentially what Netscape accused Microsoft of when IE was first released (MS responded that they were simply making the product a part of the OS, which begs the question: why make a version for Mac?). To make matters worse, Microsoft is also accused of the coercive kind of behavior you describe, by forbidding OEMs to include Netscape on their machines.
:)
Bucket58 is right, though. If Intel were just keeping hands-off and letting the two processors fight it out, there'd be nothing to say. The allegation is that they're going to make life hard for MoBo makers who support the K7 by saying that there's a "shortage" of a critical component of the board, and favoring compliant companies with lower prices.
Oh, by the way, Skelly: "Now write that 100 times by morning, or I'll cut your balls off." What a great movie.
Absolutely right. And more recently, MS was caught trying to urge it's employees to show "grassroots support" for the company via letter writing campaigns when the DOJ was getting into the main part of the case against them.
Unfortunately, I don't have a link available. Anyone?
Agreed. The "You have mail" thing predates AOL pretty handily (anyone still use Eudora?), and "buddy lists" is pushing it, but Instant Messenger isn't really a phrase that anyone ever used prior to AOL's product. To my knowledge, anyway.
The Mac's processor tends to be faster at integer calculations than equivalent Intel family chips. And that's all.
Anyway - I'm not a Mac fan, but if you're going to criticize the hardware, know what it is you're criticizing.
Thanks for the answer. I pretty much figured that this was the way it [sh|w]ould work out, but wasn't aware that there were already companies out there using open source software.
Check out The Case of the Killer Robot.
(Note. I'm biased. The author is my advisor.)
One of the bugaboos which keeps raising its head whenever we advocate the use of Open Source Software is the question of who to blame when something fails. In a very real sense, most of us can laugh this off because the potential for dire consequences is so low: if some weird confluence of events causes my Apache httpd process to go belly up... so what? There are ten of them running, and if they all go down, I can just restart the server. The odds of something really bad happening - say, losing all of the documents in the docroot - due to a glitch in the software are remote enough to not be worth thinking about.
But how would we react if it actually happened? Personally, I'd stand around looking dumb for a few minutes, then catch a plane for Argentina before my boss caught me. And in that situation, no one winds up dead. (Unless said boss catches me.)
I think, however, that the "what's it gonna take" question is pretty easy to answer, at least in the medical field the article discussed. What it's going to take is a dedicated group of programmers and engineers, willing to incorporate and put out a product which runs on Linux, but for which the company is responsible. In the same way that I would hold Penguin Systems liable if they sold me a server which was defective (not that this has ever happened), the manufacturer of the system would have to shoulder the responsibility for faulty design of its own systems.
So, what do you think? Could this be made to work?
I'm not by any means a security expert, so I hope someone else can help flesh this one out or point out mistakes if I'm screwing up. That said:
Operating systems aren't certified C2, systems are. That means a particular operating system installed in a particular manner with particular software on a particular piece of hardware. When Microsoft says, "Oh boy, NT is now C2 certified", they're yanking your chain: it's C2 when installed in a specific way.
I'm not familiar with the certification process any more than that, though. Anyone else?
I used to use Outlook 98, and I don't recall it having any support for IMAP (although, ironically, Outlook Express does). You sure about this one?
Buried in the massive hunk of obstreperous code that is MS Outlook is a pretty full-featured calendaring tool. Basically, it lets you create server-side schedules that others on your team can adjust. If someone is marked as attending a meeting, it appears in both the "meeting notes" view and on their personal schedules. (I don't recall MS's terms for these features, but you get the general idea).
PHBs love this kind of thing. It gives them the ability to ramp up due-dates with an effortless flick of the wrist, whereas before, they had to actually walk to your office (or call you to theirs). This doesn't even require interaction with a real human being.
(Seriously, though: this is pretty cool. I sure hope that new versions of Outlook don't break this functionality.)
For the record: my comment on conspiracy theories was a joke. Clearly I wasn't clear enough on that, so apologies if I've hurt your feelings.
Further - I'm not a philosopher, nor do I have any pretentions of being a philosopher. To be honest, I couldn't even have told you who Girard is, although I have a passing familiarity with the "mirror of desire" theory. It seems to me, however, that in order for that theory to apply here, the majority opinion on
I do have to admit that it's a pretty interesting suggestion: in essence, you can't reward people for posting up-moderated stuff with moderator points, because then only pablum gets moderated. But I'm not sure I buy it.
Finally, as to your implication that I'm a member of a group of "lonely people with low self-esteem who are too frightened to express an opinion or support the expression of same"... ow. So much for reasoned debate. But, if the price of disagreeing with you is to have you label me that way, fine. My stones are big enough to take it.
Look, with respect, this is bullshit. The rules for selecting moderators are posted on the moderator guidelines page. When I've seen posts moderated down, for the most part, it's been people with one-word posts, like "BORING!".
What you seem to be suggesting is that there's some sick cabal of moderators (clearly funded by the Gnomes of Zurich, or possibly the Bavarian Illuminati) who are just out to make Katz look good. That'd be a pretty good trick, considering that moderator access is chosen at mostly-random and none of the moderators know the identity of any of the others.
I've been picked for modertator access about half a dozen times since it was introduced, and believe me when I tell you that it's not really something that excites me all that much: my initial reaction is usually to dump all my points and move on so that I can post stuff. It just drives me nuts when people suggest that folks like me are part of some weird conspiracy. I get enough of that from being a Jew.
Fnord.
Not to nitpick, as I agree with the general thrust of your post, but the MP3.com example is a really bad one. On the day of their IPO, their stock valuation jumped to - stand back - seven billion dollars . This is a company whose revenue stream comes almost entirely from advertising dollars, and earned a total of about $.7 million (and took losses of $1.5M) on the previous quarter. Wired News ran a pretty good article on the whole thing.
My point (and yes, I do have one) is that to say MP3.com's stock went into a tailspin might not be the best way to put it. I'd prefer to say that it normalized after a ridiculously lucrative IPO.
I went to see Strange Days in the theater. Took my now-wife. She had to leave partway through, and I wound up following her out.
Don't get me wrong - in a lot of respects, this movie did everything exactly right. It was terrifying, and human - what particularly sticks in my mind was the annoying yuppie "wire-tripping" for the first time to a recording of a 13-year-old girl taking a shower. However, the film contains the most graphic and disturbing sexual assault ever portrayed in a sci-fi movie (to my knowledge), and my wife just couldn't take watching after that. She was so freaked out I wound up following her out to comfort her.
Two side notes:
One: if you haven't seen the director's cut of Blade Runner, you owe it to yourself to go rent it now. It far outshines the commercial release, with a good deal of important (and completely surreal) footage left in, and the annoying Mickey Spillane-esque monologues cut out.
Second: Henry Rollins played down in Baltimore at the annual WHFS concert (called the H-Eff-Esstival). One of the DJ's tried to talk to him backstage in his dressing room, and Rollins chased him out, yelling "bitch-boy" at him and apparently threatening to kick his ass. The DJ wrote a song about it, appropriately entitled, "Henry Rollins is going to beat me up."
We sang that song every time he came onscreen in JM. Fun stuff.
Little violence? In The Matrix?
Are you sure we're talking about the same movie?
I don't think anyone here is willing to go out on a limb and say that Jon is a hero. Given the (brief) correspondences I've had with him in the past, I'd go so far as to say that he'd deny the charge vehemently.
As for the lying, I firmly believe that telling an unbelievable, bald-faced lie can be justified for the purpose of making a larger point. Here, the point was that it would somehow be acceptable to view the movie if one was in the company of a pastor, and was doing it purely for the purpose of "religious teaching".
What I find obscene is the notion that the MPAA (or worse, right-wing fundamentalists) can seek to impose on parents a ready-made, cookie-cutter template for what it's okay to show their kids. Whether you think kids should have been allowed to see the movie is irrelevant: it's the responsibility of the parents
Speaking as a kid who grew up Jewish in an overwhelmingly Christian neighborhood, shame on you for saying that. You have no idea what institutionalized prayer does to children who are in the minority. I have very clear recollections of children asserting, perfectly straight-faced, that I was going to hell because "your people killed Jesus." When I need some advice on how oppressed Christians are in the USA - "one nation, under God" - I'll let you know. With respect, this doesn't seem like the best way to encourage thoughtful debate. I may not be a Christian, but I like to think of myself as having a pretty well thought out code of ethics. It bothers me that not only do you seem to think that your own version is applicable to everyone, but that voices disagreeing with yours should be silenced.Thank you, Jon. In a country as screwed up as ours, the only defense we have against the constant encroachment of narrow-mindedness is wit. Thanks for tweaking those badly in need of a tweak.
I had almost exactly the same reaction that you did, and I'm 25. He seemed like a nice enough guy, he ran a so-so magazine, and what was the big deal?
When I mentioned this to my wife, she asked me to put it in perspective this way: let's say you're a child of the 60s. You grew up with JFK, a president who, at least posthumously, is one of the most lionized leaders of our nations history. At the age of twelve, you might have watched the funeral: Jackie-O and her poor, 3 year old son standing at the grave site. Now, so long after, the child who you may have seen for the first time at his father's grave is dead.
Of course it means little to you or I. But we don't feel the same way about our nation's leaders that our parents did about JFK, and in a sense, I think that sense of nostalgia and loss just got passed on to his son.
Here's a thought experiment: let's say that in an alternate reality, Clinton had turned out to be one of the most beloved presidents in American history, but died tragically young, probably while in office. Twenty or thirty years later, would we mourn the loss of Chelsey the way our parents mourn Jon Jon?
Wow. I have to ask: where is your store, and what is the clientele like? It'd be fantastic to hear that you cater to the mainstream, and still manage to sell a lot of Linux dists.
Sorry - I was making a dumb joke. The not being able to pronounce own name thing was a reference to Star Trek I, where "Veeger" turns out to be Voyager. And stuff.
:)
Ahh. Dumb reference. Nevermind.
The thing about setting up a scam like this is that the investment you put into it winds up making the reward for cashing in on the damn thing almost negligible.
Take Number Two, from the Austin Powers movies (but especially the first movie). His chief gripe is that he's invested years and years of his life to build up a corporate empire, and Dr. Evil wants to step in and ruin the whole thing by trying to take over the world. It's ludicrous: these are people already rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Why attempt something so risky?
If a guy creates a company which "builds up its reputation" to the point where it is making fair amount of money, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he'll try to bilk his customers. He has too much going for him, and there's too much risk.
(By the way - I seem to recall a post on Bugtraq several months ago which said that Cisco had been caught putting a back door into their router's OS. Amidst a hail of criticism, they issued a patch. It just ain't worth it.)