This is the core of the problem, and the reason why patenting is the wrong mechanism to use. Copyright is the correct mechanism to apply to file formats if you feel compelled to protect them (which is almost always wrong anyway).
The US, and US legislators in particular, with their lame persistence in using patenting instead of copyright, is set to become the principal tool in the collapse of the fight against restrictive trade practises such as patenting an XML Schema (which is what this is all about: not the XML files you create, but the Schema according to which they are created).
Sadly this has been known to be coming for many years but neither politicians nor voters have been aware of it.
I think I remember being taught something like "Yours truly" is correct for a letter addressed impersonally (ie to an office, rank, or status -- here "Dear Licensee"), and "Yours sincerely" is correct for a letter addressed to a named individual. But dear Miss Lanspeary's English class is sooo long ago now.
But yes, the double meaning is interesting. I wonder if they considered "sincerely" and "faithfully" as alternatives and decided this was the least of three evils. Just "Yours" would have done. Or perhaps "Sod off"...
>You do one thing (in their case) and you do it well. Then you use that one thing to make money.
Amen.
>Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?
It doesn't matter, so long as they fulfil the Golden Rule:
You have to have a real product or service to sell (ie not vaporware), which people really want to buy, and you have to deliver on your sale. It doesn't matter whether you have 10 customers or 10M, because there are different scales you can use for different business models, and the Internet can cope with almost all of them.
You can tell the failures instantly: they're the ones whose Web sites or corporate literature spend more time talking about "our investors" and what a wonderful company they are for investing in, than in describing and selling the product or service.
American corporations have simply forgotten how to sell (and European ones never knew anyway). They are going to have to learn [all over again].
I hate to pour cold water on the ideas, but forecasts of VoIP taking over in 2004 are spectacularly off-target.
Why? Local IP access for too many Internet users is still limited by 56Kb/s dialup, which is too slow for reliable, comprehensible voice exchange. Providers emerging from the rat's nest of former state telco monopolies have been unable to introduce anything remotely resembling a widespread DSL service at a sensible cost (remember ISDN?:-)
Perhaps in city areas in the USA we will see VoIP start to make it, but for the real world it's simply a myth (but I would adore to be proved wrong!)
Of course not, but overpriced comms will remain with us until the dipshit beancounters and marketing suits who run the VCs who finance networking get real and stop trying to get RoI over six weeks instead of six years.
In six years we won't be using WiFi, we'll have something else, but we'll still need a network. So instead of putting money exclusively into specific short-term technologies they should be putting it into generic long-term solutions with a current short-term implementation layered on top, which you make available cheaply to attract people to buy into the concept of being online.
This is old hat, not news. I submitted a story 2001-05-21 23:16:51 "Ireland's dialup users get the shoulder" (articles,internet) (rejected, of course, as it wasn't about a big country, and it related to 56Kb/s dialup, not DSL)
Of course these idiots want to redefine "unlimited". Their marketing droids underestimated the whole thing because they know nothing about the Internet. Fortunately I now have a sane and sensible ISP...
It works if the kids know the difference between right and wrong, aren't afraid to admit they made a mistake, and are smart enough to spot a hawk or a fraud.
I was brought up pretty much the same way as you describe (only in the 60s it was ham radio, wiring the house for burglar alarms, and being sent to a liberal boarding school:-) and I've done the same for my kids. I've been lucky to be working in areas where I have had network access as a matter of course since the late 1970s, so they've always had unrestricted access since they were able to type. They know perfectly well that pr0n sites are for adults, that you can recognise a Nigerian spam at 60 paces, that posting dumbfuck questions to Usenet will get you flamed, and that giving out your location or real identity is a no-no until you're old enough to take the consequences.
They are robust enough not to be shocked by body parts suddenly appearing on a Web page, and they know they can discuss anything they want with their parents and they'll get a straight answer. They also know that if anything goes wrong, we're on their side, even if it was their fault.
I don't have any worries about where they go or what they do, and it seems to have worked for us...but I know some of my colleagues and friends are shocked that I allow this. [Oddly these are often people I have known since we were kids, people I have shared assorted adventures with in our youth, and they are now the ones getting uptight about seeing the same behaviour in their kids. Go figure.]
But I've seen problems with the Net in families where there is a perpetual culture of guilt imposed by the parents, or a constant harping on about responsibility and sacrifice, and most importantly, where there is a hopelessly low level of understanding about the Net. Parental ignorance is by far the worst problem.
[BTW anyone noticed this URL hangs MSIE 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633?]
Not an icicle's hope in hell with Debian, anyway. Red Hat was getting Real Close[tm] until they dropped the ball last week.
Requirements:
Recognises all hardware, even flaky WinModems, clone NC2000 and weirdo 3C589 NICs, clone Soundblaster cards, dumbf@ck graphics cards, cheapass Taiwanese USB cards, and fruitcake mice and monitor displays -- instantly and without question during auto-install config;
Leaves the user with a fully-working network-connected graphical desktop, with links to a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, POP/IMAP/Exchange-capable MUA, browser, media player, website-maker, and a bunch of cute utilities, all fully-configured and ready to use;
Doesn't suck every cycle from the processor just to keep the window manager running and leave the mouseclicks unserviced;
Recognises hung processes (Konqueror! Evolution!) and kills and restarts them safely;
Accepts n arbitrary additional fonts in TTF format without any configuration;
Stops the pointless religious bickering about whose distro is holier-than-thou's because they accept "non-free" software and we don't;
A working, sensible, meaningful bug-reporting system (ie not BugZilla).
Not predicated on the user having the latest 35GHz processor and 48Tb RAID and gigabit connection: it must work on common office hardware (aka 90MHz PII) as well as the whizz-kid stuff.
Read it and weep: Microsoft Windows does*: Linux does not**
* Except the bug reports. When Hell freezes over:-) ** As noted, RH was soooooo close.
I love Linux -- I use it all day and every day, and I'm happy to pay any sensible amount as a donation/license (in lieu of regular fees) but I do wish the OS programmer crew would get off their high moral ground and fix the bugs, especially in the interoperability of the interface. Not being able to cut and paste from one X app to another because of some stupid religious war over protocols is just embarrasingly stupid.
Yes, but their Web site refers to a Feb 24 episode of CSI:Miami! So these people have been around since at least the beginning of 2003? And/. has only just reported on them?
What the fsck are these idiots doing for marketing?
I was in the USA with my family for 2 weeks in the summer -- phoneless except for my own tri-band. Why weren't there great piles of these phones heaped up for sale at Logan, JFK, BWI, and Dulles? And in every dime store, corner convenience, and drug store from Mt Cadillac to Baja California? Price them right and make them available, and you'll have every passenger off a transatlantic flight buying one (bar the mugs like me who forked out for the tri-band). Presumably you can dial international from these gizzmos...
America has forgotten how to sell. This does not bode well for the future.
> Clearly Mr Strauss isn't doing his job as manager of technology strategy and outreach.
I think we need to ask who is this person Strauss and what are his credentials? I'm not familiar with the name. How much software has he written, and how much of it has survived to the present day? What languages does he know, what institutions has he worked for, where did he get his degree, and what was it in? What books has he written and what are his greatest achievements? It might also be interesting to know what systems he has running on his desktop and his laptop.
In short, is he in any way qualified to speak on the subject?
Perhaps he is unaware that on the Internet you are judged by what you have contributed, not what you have consumed.
Recall the two questions that all properly educated schoolchildren should constantly ask, as they listen to their teachers: "How does s/he know?" and "How can I be sure?" (paraphrasing Nicholas Freeling).
The middle ground has been lost here. At one end you have the experimental systems like Fedora and Debian for people to hack on, and at the other the expensive corporate systems for rich companies. The ordinary user, particularly the solo professional with neither the cash for luxury systems nor much time to experiment, has been left behind.
> In two years you will be using Fedora at home, and when your boss askes you what to use, you will say "Red Hat Enterprise" because you want support.
I don't mind that (like we do now) provided Fedora is usable, defined as
installs graphically and textually without hanging, crashing, or making thoughtless defaults
supports a sensible range of hardware (ie not dependent on having the latest 6THz quad processor and a gigabit connection)
has some reasonable kind of auto-update
has some way to report bugs that isn't predicated on the ghastly mess called bugzilla
doesn't poodlefake around with standard packages like RH has messed up Perl, TeX, etc
> All that's happening here is that [...] a loose committee of volunteers will pick package versions and make other decisions, kind of like Debian
Kiss of death. They spend all their time arguing the political toss over whether package Y is free or not, and can't even make a distro that leaves the user with a working system.
Debian is great if you have the time to spend on a system that has to be installed and configured entirely by hand. It's a non-starter for people who just want to get the job done and don't want to spend a tenth of their annual disposable income on an OS.
Phrases schmases. I wanted to find references to the
Usenet fence, so I searched for "-- "
and it gave me a blank page (Google header, empty
results, not even a "can't find anything".
The problem with LOC is that it's useless for those areas that were never defined (eg anything to do with computing).
DDC has its faults but users find it vastly easier to understand.
The big problem with OCLC is lack of responsiveness. I wanted to use DDC in the Acronym Server but despite me mailing them three times, they never responded, which is either ignorance, stupidity, or just plain rudeness.
I don't see any pointers anywhere to *when* they're going to launch it. A 72hr countdown, sure, but from *when*. I'm in Ireland and I have a telescope...
Unfortunately the US Government and the court system are too much under the influence of business interests to step in. If they ever do intervene, it will be to uphold SCO's right to charge anyone they like anything they want for something they claim to own.
Just as with the Patent Office debacle, the Administration rolls over and plays dead the moment someone says "businesses need this 'protection'" and threatens to withhold their annual checks to party funds. Until they start to uphold the rights of the people instead of the rights of stockholders, this fiasco will continue.
Better, contact your school's datacenter or IT people and explain the problem to them. Make sure you pick a senior techie, rather than an administrator. If the bug is reported by the institution rather than an individual, it stands a better chance of getting fixed.
But no-one is going to go for this at that price.
What have these guys been smoking and where can I get some?
30 pounds ($50) to sign up for one phone to locate one other phone for a year? 10 pounds/year ($15) extra for each phone more you want to locate? And 30p (50c) a shot to do a locate?
Anyone who goes for this needs their head examining.
I had a similar problem with stats and the author of my stats package recommended MJ Moroney's "Facts from Figures" (details) [Pelican/Penguin, London, ISBN 0-14-020236-6, originally 1951 but reprinted a gazillion times]. Huff's book is excellent but Moroney's is the classical book on stats for the non-statistician.
> If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your > "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting,"
...you might just be a redneck.
Sorry, I'm out of sympathy with these people. If they can't tell what's what on their screen, they shouldn't be using a computer, let alone accessing the Internet.
So take other forms of payment. Or just tighten up on the verification. If the company is interested in selling, it'll find a way to get your money. What US company will turn down hard cash?
The real reason you can't buy from US sites if you're outside the US is they make so much money from the US internal market they actually couldn't be bothered selling abroad. (Plus of course most of them don't even know where other countries are located.)
All the whingeing about economic downturn and the difficulties of selling is just so much BS. The market is out there, outside the US, hungry for product, and with the cash to pay for it. If US companies won't satisfy it, others eventually will. The big problem is that US companies have been feather-bedded by their lucrative internal market for so long, they've lost the knack of selling.
Slashdot Mirror
The US, and US legislators in particular, with their lame persistence in using patenting instead of copyright, is set to become the principal tool in the collapse of the fight against restrictive trade practises such as patenting an XML Schema (which is what this is all about: not the XML files you create, but the Schema according to which they are created).
Sadly this has been known to be coming for many years but neither politicians nor voters have been aware of it.
It has often been said that we have the best politicians money can buy -- and they've all been bought.
I look forward to seeing what these sites do with Konqueror under RH9 :-) Or Lynx...
Blessed are the DMSs (Dickhead Marketing Suits) for they shall always be with us.
But yes, the double meaning is interesting. I wonder if they considered "sincerely" and "faithfully" as alternatives and decided this was the least of three evils. Just "Yours" would have done. Or perhaps "Sod off"...
Amen.
>Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?
It doesn't matter, so long as they fulfil the Golden Rule:
You can tell the failures instantly: they're the ones whose Web sites or corporate literature spend more time talking about "our investors" and what a wonderful company they are for investing in, than in describing and selling the product or service.
American corporations have simply forgotten how to sell (and European ones never knew anyway). They are going to have to learn [all over again].
What's a "straight year", Mommy? Can't I be queer any more?
Why? Local IP access for too many Internet users is still limited by 56Kb/s dialup, which is too slow for reliable, comprehensible voice exchange. Providers emerging from the rat's nest of former state telco monopolies have been unable to introduce anything remotely resembling a widespread DSL service at a sensible cost (remember ISDN? :-)
Perhaps in city areas in the USA we will see VoIP start to make it, but for the real world it's simply a myth (but I would adore to be proved wrong!)
Of course not, but overpriced comms will remain with us until the dipshit beancounters and marketing suits who run the VCs who finance networking get real and stop trying to get RoI over six weeks instead of six years.
In six years we won't be using WiFi, we'll have something else, but we'll still need a network. So instead of putting money exclusively into specific short-term technologies they should be putting it into generic long-term solutions with a current short-term implementation layered on top, which you make available cheaply to attract people to buy into the concept of being online.
<sigh/>
Of course these idiots want to redefine "unlimited". Their marketing droids underestimated the whole thing because they know nothing about the Internet. Fortunately I now have a sane and sensible ISP...
I was brought up pretty much the same way as you describe (only in the 60s it was ham radio, wiring the house for burglar alarms, and being sent to a liberal boarding school :-) and I've done the same for my kids. I've been lucky to be working in areas where I have had network access as a matter of course since the late 1970s, so they've always had unrestricted access since they were able to type. They know perfectly well that pr0n sites are for adults, that you can recognise a Nigerian spam at 60 paces, that posting dumbfuck questions to Usenet will get you flamed, and that giving out your location or real identity is a no-no until you're old enough to take the consequences.
They are robust enough not to be shocked by body parts suddenly appearing on a Web page, and they know they can discuss anything they want with their parents and they'll get a straight answer. They also know that if anything goes wrong, we're on their side, even if it was their fault.
I don't have any worries about where they go or what they do, and it seems to have worked for us...but I know some of my colleagues and friends are shocked that I allow this. [Oddly these are often people I have known since we were kids, people I have shared assorted adventures with in our youth, and they are now the ones getting uptight about seeing the same behaviour in their kids. Go figure.]
But I've seen problems with the Net in families where there is a perpetual culture of guilt imposed by the parents, or a constant harping on about responsibility and sacrifice, and most importantly, where there is a hopelessly low level of understanding about the Net. Parental ignorance is by far the worst problem.
Not an icicle's hope in hell with Debian, anyway. Red Hat was getting Real Close[tm] until they dropped the ball last week.
Requirements:
- Recognises all hardware, even flaky WinModems, clone NC2000 and weirdo 3C589 NICs, clone Soundblaster cards, dumbf@ck graphics cards, cheapass Taiwanese USB cards, and fruitcake mice and monitor displays -- instantly and without question during auto-install config;
- Leaves the user with a fully-working network-connected graphical desktop, with links to a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, POP/IMAP/Exchange-capable MUA, browser, media player, website-maker, and a bunch of cute utilities, all fully-configured and ready to use;
- Doesn't suck every cycle from the processor just to keep the window manager running and leave the mouseclicks unserviced;
- Recognises hung processes (Konqueror! Evolution!) and kills and restarts them safely;
- Accepts n arbitrary additional fonts in TTF format without any configuration;
- Stops the pointless religious bickering about whose distro is holier-than-thou's because they accept "non-free" software and we don't;
- A working, sensible, meaningful bug-reporting system (ie not BugZilla).
- Not predicated on the user having the latest 35GHz processor and 48Tb RAID and gigabit connection: it must work on common office hardware (aka 90MHz PII) as well as the whizz-kid stuff.
Read it and weep: Microsoft Windows does*: Linux does not*** Except the bug reports. When Hell freezes over :-)
** As noted, RH was soooooo close.
I love Linux -- I use it all day and every day, and I'm happy to pay any sensible amount as a donation/license (in lieu of regular fees) but I do wish the OS programmer crew would get off their high moral ground and fix the bugs, especially in the interoperability of the interface. Not being able to cut and paste from one X app to another because of some stupid religious war over protocols is just embarrasingly stupid.
What the fsck are these idiots doing for marketing?
I was in the USA with my family for 2 weeks in the summer -- phoneless except for my own tri-band. Why weren't there great piles of these phones heaped up for sale at Logan, JFK, BWI, and Dulles? And in every dime store, corner convenience, and drug store from Mt Cadillac to Baja California? Price them right and make them available, and you'll have every passenger off a transatlantic flight buying one (bar the mugs like me who forked out for the tri-band). Presumably you can dial international from these gizzmos...
America has forgotten how to sell. This does not bode well for the future.
I think we need to ask who is this person Strauss and what are his credentials? I'm not familiar with the name. How much software has he written, and how much of it has survived to the present day? What languages does he know, what institutions has he worked for, where did he get his degree, and what was it in? What books has he written and what are his greatest achievements? It might also be interesting to know what systems he has running on his desktop and his laptop.
In short, is he in any way qualified to speak on the subject?
Perhaps he is unaware that on the Internet you are judged by what you have contributed, not what you have consumed.
Recall the two questions that all properly educated schoolchildren should constantly ask, as they listen to their teachers: "How does s/he know?" and "How can I be sure?" (paraphrasing Nicholas Freeling).
> In two years you will be using Fedora at home, and when your boss askes you what to use, you will say "Red Hat Enterprise" because you want support.
I don't mind that (like we do now) provided Fedora is usable, defined as
- installs graphically and textually without hanging, crashing, or making thoughtless defaults
- supports a sensible range of hardware (ie not dependent on having the latest 6THz quad processor and a gigabit connection)
- has some reasonable kind of auto-update
- has some way to report bugs that isn't predicated on the ghastly mess called bugzilla
- doesn't poodlefake around with standard packages like RH has messed up Perl, TeX, etc
> All that's happening here is that [...] a loose committee of volunteers will pick package versions and make other decisions, kind of like DebianKiss of death. They spend all their time arguing the political toss over whether package Y is free or not, and can't even make a distro that leaves the user with a working system.
Debian is great if you have the time to spend on a system that has to be installed and configured entirely by hand. It's a non-starter for people who just want to get the job done and don't want to spend a tenth of their annual disposable income on an OS.
Phrases schmases. I wanted to find references to the Usenet fence, so I searched for "-- " and it gave me a blank page (Google header, empty results, not even a "can't find anything".
Surely this is what all the current spam is about curing?
The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and si under a tree -- Spike Milligan (RIP)
The big problem with OCLC is lack of responsiveness. I wanted to use DDC in the Acronym Server but despite me mailing them three times, they never responded, which is either ignorance, stupidity, or just plain rudeness.
I don't see any pointers anywhere to *when* they're going to launch it. A 72hr countdown, sure, but from *when*. I'm in Ireland and I have a telescope...
Just as with the Patent Office debacle, the Administration rolls over and plays dead the moment someone says "businesses need this 'protection'" and threatens to withhold their annual checks to party funds. Until they start to uphold the rights of the people instead of the rights of stockholders, this fiasco will continue.
Better, contact your school's datacenter or IT people and explain the problem to them. Make sure you pick a senior techie, rather than an administrator. If the bug is reported by the institution rather than an individual, it stands a better chance of getting fixed.
30 pounds ($50) to sign up for one phone to locate one other phone for a year? 10 pounds/year ($15) extra for each phone more you want to locate? And 30p (50c) a shot to do a locate?
Anyone who goes for this needs their head examining.
But Tengwar fonts for LaTeX have been around for over a decade! What planet has this guy been living on?
I had a similar problem with stats and the author of my stats package recommended MJ Moroney's "Facts from Figures" (details) [Pelican/Penguin, London, ISBN 0-14-020236-6, originally 1951 but reprinted a gazillion times]. Huff's book is excellent but Moroney's is the classical book on stats for the non-statistician.
> "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting,"
Sorry, I'm out of sympathy with these people. If they can't tell what's what on their screen, they shouldn't be using a computer, let alone accessing the Internet.
The real reason you can't buy from US sites if you're outside the US is they make so much money from the US internal market they actually couldn't be bothered selling abroad. (Plus of course most of them don't even know where other countries are located.)
All the whingeing about economic downturn and the difficulties of selling is just so much BS. The market is out there, outside the US, hungry for product, and with the cash to pay for it. If US companies won't satisfy it, others eventually will. The big problem is that US companies have been feather-bedded by their lucrative internal market for so long, they've lost the knack of selling.