Removing any segment of society from the State's protection is short sighted and wrong.
That's a nice principle, but the State has finite resources. (Thank God for that!) It can never do everything you'd like it to do.
Anway, I don't really think that the whole polity is going to fall apart if IP laws aren't as enforced as rigorously as IP owners would like. Especially when those laws give the IP owners have more "rights" than most people consider fair.
In point of fact, it is very clear that this bridge will, in fact, be a public road, open to anyone who wishes to use it.
Anybody who wants to travel within the Microsoft campus. Roads of this nature are usually private. I know the ring road around the campus where I work is. It may make sense to fund this private road with public funds, but it's still damned unusual.
Nobody watched much TV before 1950 or so. The NTSC format used by U.S. broadcasters wasn't standardized until 1941, and then the war ended production of TV sets, so there were about 5,000 sets in the whole country. Add a few years for the price of the technology to drop (and for Great Depression era nervousness about buying stuff to wear off) and you really don't have any TV viewers to speak of until the mid 50s.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I recall TV addiction being an issue for me and my friends even then. But I don't think it got to be really bad until the 80s, when cable became widely available, latchkey kids became the norm, and TV was the easiest way for most kids to distract themselves.
Another factor: more and more people living in "edge cities" as mass transit withered and car ownership became common. That really limits the social life of children too young to drive, especially once parents started getting nervous about letting their kids do stuff without supervision.
Well, if you're going to get into how they compromise reality to simplify production (as opposed to deliberately distorting it for feelgood purposes) you have to note that everybody on these sitcoms seems to have a collective, unspoken agreement only to use 3 of the 4 walls in every room they live, work, or play in.
Remember the apartments they lived in in Friends? Remember what they did for a living? Exactly.
I seem to recall that the apartment in Friends was rent-controlled at a level that had been set some time in the 60s, and they were illegally subletting it from a elderly relative who had long since moved away. Also, the show had some good stories about the financial issues of people living in Manhattan.
Nitpicks aside, though, you're right about Friends (most of the time) and TV in general. But then, TV has always lied about a lot of things: everybody is good looking and has no weight or fitness issues (unless they're evil or they're somebody's funny sidekick). Bad people always suffer for their badness, and good people are always rewarded. Nobody is ever at a loss for clever thing to say. All complicated issues get resolved one way or another after 48 minutes of interaction. Etc., etc.
Were this any lesser company, 100% of the cost would be paid for by tax dollars.
Really? The little fact that the bridge goes between two parts of a private facility wouldn't be an issue?
It was a similar situation when Disneyland wanted their own exit on the I-5 in Anaheim.
There may have been a similar level of screaming about private entities benefiting from public money, but it's hardly a comparable project. A freeway offramp is part of the public infrastructure. A bridge connecting two pieces of private property is not.
Mind you, I'm not saying this bridge is a bad idea. It makes sense if building it eases traffic congestion more than spending the same amount of money improving the public freeway. But I doubt that the controversy would be at this level if they'd decided to do that instead, cost effective or not.
This is mainly the usual Slashdot editor laziness. But there's a certain mindset here that's pretty common online. It says that the world is divided between those who know WTF you're talking about and those that that you don't give a Foxtrot about. How many times have you gone to a web site that claims to be the authoritative source for information about the Regularized Blivitron Server, but doesn't have one word about what BVS is?
Ironically enough, there is one editor with a degree in journalism, so he presumably knows how to lead into a story properly. But that editor is pudge, who has a terrible track record for flaming and trashing other users, which is probably why he no longer helps with submissions.
As a matter of fact, I almost always get same day turnaround from Netflix. (Watched "Generation Kill" disc 3 on Tuesday, forgot to put it in the mail Wednesday, remembered Thursday, Netflix got it Friday, sent out replacement same day, "Rome" Season III disc 1 arrived today.) I think the difference with me is that the discs in my queue are among the less popular, so the replacement goes out as soon as the return is scanned in. If a disc just came in, there's probably a delay while it's cleaned and re-enveloped.
For some reason my movies are only mailed to me promptly if I am a new customer. Otherwise it could be that they get a movie back from me on Friday, but don't mail new one till Monday.
Netflix has been caught "throttling", that is delaying new movies for heavy users. But they lost a big lawsuit about that some time back, and I can't imagine them risking the loss of another. More likely you're just ordering a lot of popular movies. Your perception that things speed up again after you open a new account is probably one of those things that doesn't stand up when you track it carefully.
I have to say that I don't really see anything wrong with throttling, as long as they're honest about it. (They pretended they weren't doing it, hence the lawsuit.) It must cost over a dollar to put a disc through the mail/return/restock cycle. (Postage alone would be about 65 cents, counting the extra charge for prepaid return.) Suppose you have a $14 2-at-a-time membership, like me. When I'm in my worst video droid mode I can run through 10 discs a month, and they barely break even on me. (Lucky for them, I sometimes read a book, watch broadcast TV, or even get out of the house.) If I really watched a lot of videos (or ripped them to disc for later viewing), they'd be losing money off me.
So throttling isn't evil, it's just economics. Dishonestly pretending you don't throttle when you really do is another matter.
People do it in real life? I've only ever seen it on TV shows. I mean, it's really hard to cough and say something at the same time. I guess what I should ask is what TV show first thought it was funny. Happy Days, at a guess, the show that invented the very Shark Jumping meme.
Layers have nothing to do with it. A good API provides a simple way to do common things. You should have to construct a complicated GUI framework every time you start writing an application. Neither Windows nor X Window System has an API that acknowledges that.
Laser, schmaser. Any nation with a half-decent air force could shoot this thing down. But so what? This wouldn't be deployed against such an enemy. It would be deployed against a guerilla force, which typically has no air force at all. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, includes the opposing forces in both the wars the U.S. is currently fighting.
And no, Osama bin Laden doesn't have any giant lasers, not the last time I checked.
you end up supporting horrific APIs for years (*cough* Windows *cough*)
Where does this stupid *cough* gag come from? It's really lame.
I agree that the Windows API sucks. But let's be fair: the X Window System API sucks even more and has been around almost as long. The big difference is that there are some decent APIs running on top of X that impose some sanity, whereas Microsoft keeps bungling every new GUI platform it creates.
Why is this not the editor's fault? Part of an editor's job is to filter out crap. If an editor approved a story claiming that John Lennon had returned from the dead and was now named Barack Obama Jones, would you say it was the original writer's fault only?
That spec really struck me, because I spend a lot of time documenting a multi-CPU systems, and its maximum RAM for a 4-CPU setup is 256GB. But of course, it's a server.
I'm just trying to figure out what sort of moron expects 16 cores and 8 hdds to be quiet?
Well, speaking of your morons, that question makes no sense. Quiet systems with 4 cores and 2 HDDs are actually pretty common amongst those who value quiet. There's no absolute reason that can't scale up. It's just that there aren't enough customers for mass-produced machines to go there.
You may consider $16,000 to be too much to spend so you can use a high-end machine without wearing headphones. But that's a matter of priorities, not intelligence. Don't confuse your bigotry with smarts.
TFA seems to muddle together a bunch of different issues.
One is the purely Novell issue of not being good at selling stuff. Which might be true (though I spend a lot of time dealing with SLES issues at the hardware vendor I work for) but really doesn't have anything to do with the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Another issue is the core of the Novell-MS partnership: interoperability. AFAIK, that part is working well.
Finally, there's the fact that MS is committed to supported mixed Windows-SLES installation, but hasn't bothered to actually sell any SLES licenses. Really, what else do you expect? People actually making deals based on technology they've worked with for years are not going to change their strategies just because management says so. IBM never could get its people to sell OS/2 instead of Windows, and Sun salespeople often continue to push SPARC products to all their customers, even though Sun is now in the x86 business. And in the case of MS, they have particularly limited motivation to sell Linux, since doing so would not actually generate any extra profits for MS.
Well, they could switch to the Intel Atom chip. But the ARM makes more sense. The only reason I can see for using an x86 chip is binary compatibility, and it's not like that's a big issue for a project that's so thoroughly open source. I never quite understood why they went with the Geode in the first place. Because Quanta gave them a good price on the motherboards?
What, a slashdotter who admits he's not a legal expert? That's rarer than a convict who admits that he got a fair trial!
I don't pretend to know any more than you (hey, that's two of us! anybody else?) but I do know that many hackers have been convicted despite claiming lack of criminal intent. The poster boy for this crowd has to be Randal Schwartz, who got probation and $200K in fines and legal bills after penetrating security at Intel in an attempt to show that people were using weak passwords. I think he maybe sealed his own case by trying to justify his actions to an investigator, thus supplying the prosecution with what amounted to a full confession.
Yeah, I know, stupid of Intel and law enforcement to come down so hard on somebody for a non-malicious penetration. But just as stupid is the common geek habit of equating good intentions with legality.
The law in the UK might be different, but I'd be surprised if it were weaker than U.S. law. The BBC is probably safe though, since none of the owners of the PCs they "trespassed" on have the clout of Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, the movies never do explain why Skynet hates humanity so much. Any clue?
I'm sorry, thinking up new variations on the "insect overlord" gag does not count as "clever".
You're reading way too much into my post. I was just picking a nit.
Removing any segment of society from the State's protection is short sighted and wrong.
That's a nice principle, but the State has finite resources. (Thank God for that!) It can never do everything you'd like it to do.
Anway, I don't really think that the whole polity is going to fall apart if IP laws aren't as enforced as rigorously as IP owners would like. Especially when those laws give the IP owners have more "rights" than most people consider fair.
I had always moved SSH to another port anyways, just to make it that much harder on the script kiddies, but still, what were they thinking?
They were thinking, "We're being proactive".
As always, security is more theater than actually securing stuff.
In point of fact, it is very clear that this bridge will, in fact, be a public road, open to anyone who wishes to use it.
Anybody who wants to travel within the Microsoft campus. Roads of this nature are usually private. I know the ring road around the campus where I work is. It may make sense to fund this private road with public funds, but it's still damned unusual.
Nobody watched much TV before 1950 or so. The NTSC format used by U.S. broadcasters wasn't standardized until 1941, and then the war ended production of TV sets, so there were about 5,000 sets in the whole country. Add a few years for the price of the technology to drop (and for Great Depression era nervousness about buying stuff to wear off) and you really don't have any TV viewers to speak of until the mid 50s.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I recall TV addiction being an issue for me and my friends even then. But I don't think it got to be really bad until the 80s, when cable became widely available, latchkey kids became the norm, and TV was the easiest way for most kids to distract themselves.
Another factor: more and more people living in "edge cities" as mass transit withered and car ownership became common. That really limits the social life of children too young to drive, especially once parents started getting nervous about letting their kids do stuff without supervision.
Well, if you're going to get into how they compromise reality to simplify production (as opposed to deliberately distorting it for feelgood purposes) you have to note that everybody on these sitcoms seems to have a collective, unspoken agreement only to use 3 of the 4 walls in every room they live, work, or play in.
Remember the apartments they lived in in Friends? Remember what they did for a living? Exactly.
I seem to recall that the apartment in Friends was rent-controlled at a level that had been set some time in the 60s, and they were illegally subletting it from a elderly relative who had long since moved away. Also, the show had some good stories about the financial issues of people living in Manhattan.
Nitpicks aside, though, you're right about Friends (most of the time) and TV in general. But then, TV has always lied about a lot of things: everybody is good looking and has no weight or fitness issues (unless they're evil or they're somebody's funny sidekick). Bad people always suffer for their badness, and good people are always rewarded. Nobody is ever at a loss for clever thing to say. All complicated issues get resolved one way or another after 48 minutes of interaction. Etc., etc.
Were this any lesser company, 100% of the cost would be paid for by tax dollars.
Really? The little fact that the bridge goes between two parts of a private facility wouldn't be an issue?
It was a similar situation when Disneyland wanted their own exit on the I-5 in Anaheim.
There may have been a similar level of screaming about private entities benefiting from public money, but it's hardly a comparable project. A freeway offramp is part of the public infrastructure. A bridge connecting two pieces of private property is not.
Mind you, I'm not saying this bridge is a bad idea. It makes sense if building it eases traffic congestion more than spending the same amount of money improving the public freeway. But I doubt that the controversy would be at this level if they'd decided to do that instead, cost effective or not.
This is mainly the usual Slashdot editor laziness. But there's a certain mindset here that's pretty common online. It says that the world is divided between those who know WTF you're talking about and those that that you don't give a Foxtrot about. How many times have you gone to a web site that claims to be the authoritative source for information about the Regularized Blivitron Server, but doesn't have one word about what BVS is?
Ironically enough, there is one editor with a degree in journalism, so he presumably knows how to lead into a story properly. But that editor is pudge, who has a terrible track record for flaming and trashing other users, which is probably why he no longer helps with submissions.
As a matter of fact, I almost always get same day turnaround from Netflix. (Watched "Generation Kill" disc 3 on Tuesday, forgot to put it in the mail Wednesday, remembered Thursday, Netflix got it Friday, sent out replacement same day, "Rome" Season III disc 1 arrived today.) I think the difference with me is that the discs in my queue are among the less popular, so the replacement goes out as soon as the return is scanned in. If a disc just came in, there's probably a delay while it's cleaned and re-enveloped.
For some reason my movies are only mailed to me promptly if I am a new customer. Otherwise it could be that they get a movie back from me on Friday, but don't mail new one till Monday.
Netflix has been caught "throttling", that is delaying new movies for heavy users. But they lost a big lawsuit about that some time back, and I can't imagine them risking the loss of another. More likely you're just ordering a lot of popular movies. Your perception that things speed up again after you open a new account is probably one of those things that doesn't stand up when you track it carefully.
I have to say that I don't really see anything wrong with throttling, as long as they're honest about it. (They pretended they weren't doing it, hence the lawsuit.) It must cost over a dollar to put a disc through the mail/return/restock cycle. (Postage alone would be about 65 cents, counting the extra charge for prepaid return.) Suppose you have a $14 2-at-a-time membership, like me. When I'm in my worst video droid mode I can run through 10 discs a month, and they barely break even on me. (Lucky for them, I sometimes read a book, watch broadcast TV, or even get out of the house.) If I really watched a lot of videos (or ripped them to disc for later viewing), they'd be losing money off me.
So throttling isn't evil, it's just economics. Dishonestly pretending you don't throttle when you really do is another matter.
People do it in real life? I've only ever seen it on TV shows. I mean, it's really hard to cough and say something at the same time. I guess what I should ask is what TV show first thought it was funny. Happy Days, at a guess, the show that invented the very Shark Jumping meme.
Layers have nothing to do with it. A good API provides a simple way to do common things. You should have to construct a complicated GUI framework every time you start writing an application. Neither Windows nor X Window System has an API that acknowledges that.
Laser, schmaser. Any nation with a half-decent air force could shoot this thing down. But so what? This wouldn't be deployed against such an enemy. It would be deployed against a guerilla force, which typically has no air force at all. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, includes the opposing forces in both the wars the U.S. is currently fighting.
And no, Osama bin Laden doesn't have any giant lasers, not the last time I checked.
Herr Goldfinger! I thought you died shortly after that Fort Knox fiasco!
you end up supporting horrific APIs for years (*cough* Windows *cough*)
Where does this stupid *cough* gag come from? It's really lame.
I agree that the Windows API sucks. But let's be fair: the X Window System API sucks even more and has been around almost as long. The big difference is that there are some decent APIs running on top of X that impose some sanity, whereas Microsoft keeps bungling every new GUI platform it creates.
Why is this not the editor's fault? Part of an editor's job is to filter out crap. If an editor approved a story claiming that John Lennon had returned from the dead and was now named Barack Obama Jones, would you say it was the original writer's fault only?
That spec really struck me, because I spend a lot of time documenting a multi-CPU systems, and its maximum RAM for a 4-CPU setup is 256GB. But of course, it's a server.
I'm just trying to figure out what sort of moron expects 16 cores and 8 hdds to be quiet?
Well, speaking of your morons, that question makes no sense. Quiet systems with 4 cores and 2 HDDs are actually pretty common amongst those who value quiet. There's no absolute reason that can't scale up. It's just that there aren't enough customers for mass-produced machines to go there.
You may consider $16,000 to be too much to spend so you can use a high-end machine without wearing headphones. But that's a matter of priorities, not intelligence. Don't confuse your bigotry with smarts.
I'm a tech writer. So when I say "issues" I mean "documenting use of SLES".
TFA seems to muddle together a bunch of different issues.
One is the purely Novell issue of not being good at selling stuff. Which might be true (though I spend a lot of time dealing with SLES issues at the hardware vendor I work for) but really doesn't have anything to do with the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Another issue is the core of the Novell-MS partnership: interoperability. AFAIK, that part is working well.
Finally, there's the fact that MS is committed to supported mixed Windows-SLES installation, but hasn't bothered to actually sell any SLES licenses. Really, what else do you expect? People actually making deals based on technology they've worked with for years are not going to change their strategies just because management says so. IBM never could get its people to sell OS/2 instead of Windows, and Sun salespeople often continue to push SPARC products to all their customers, even though Sun is now in the x86 business. And in the case of MS, they have particularly limited motivation to sell Linux, since doing so would not actually generate any extra profits for MS.
The title of the article, and the title of the slashdot posting is inaccurate...
What's your point?
Well, they could switch to the Intel Atom chip. But the ARM makes more sense. The only reason I can see for using an x86 chip is binary compatibility, and it's not like that's a big issue for a project that's so thoroughly open source. I never quite understood why they went with the Geode in the first place. Because Quanta gave them a good price on the motherboards?
What, a slashdotter who admits he's not a legal expert? That's rarer than a convict who admits that he got a fair trial!
I don't pretend to know any more than you (hey, that's two of us! anybody else?) but I do know that many hackers have been convicted despite claiming lack of criminal intent. The poster boy for this crowd has to be Randal Schwartz, who got probation and $200K in fines and legal bills after penetrating security at Intel in an attempt to show that people were using weak passwords. I think he maybe sealed his own case by trying to justify his actions to an investigator, thus supplying the prosecution with what amounted to a full confession.
Yeah, I know, stupid of Intel and law enforcement to come down so hard on somebody for a non-malicious penetration. But just as stupid is the common geek habit of equating good intentions with legality.
The law in the UK might be different, but I'd be surprised if it were weaker than U.S. law. The BBC is probably safe though, since none of the owners of the PCs they "trespassed" on have the clout of Intel.