Gates retiring doesn't dispel the impression because it doesn't dispel the conflict. They still use his name in the name of the firm because they're still using his network of connections. And if you think they don't still talk to their founder, you don't know how lawfirms work.
I haven't found documentation of how many shares in the corporation Gates still owns/controls, but I expect he's still in the game.
Thinking otherwise is a wild-eyed coincidence theory.
Yeah, now that your "clarification" reverses your claim refuting my original questions about whether OpenLaszlo can replace Flash for apps in mobile phones, it's a lot more clear.
I'd even go so far as to say "OpenLaszlo is more than Flash".
We clearly have a fundamental problem in our government with investigation interest conflicts. The Attorney General running the Justice Department must not be simply hireable and fireable (or forced to resign) just at the president's whim. One of the central failures of the system in Watergate revolved around the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired both the Special Prosecutor and Attorney General who were investigating him. The system obviously did fail when that broken governing system wasn't fixed after Watergate was demonstrated to be a criminally corrupt Republican conspiracy throughout the Executive Branch.
But even Watergate was dealt with by a "bipartisan government": Republican Executive, Democratic Congress. But what about Bush, controlling Congress too? There's none of the oversight Congress is required to exercise on the Executive. Congress has even sent two new Justices to the Supreme Court who subscribe to the Unitary Executive theory, which makes Congress optional, to join the two (Scalia and Thomas) who already work that way. Including giving the president privileges of unlimited wiretapping and torture.
The US system is still pretty strong. Next month, on TUE November 7, 2006, we get a chance to throw out these corrupt Republicans who've gamed the system yet again to produce and protect their global rackets. But Watergate, then Iran/Contra, now the massive Republican criminal conspiracies, all show we need basic reforms to our justice system, specifically where it investigates the government. Since we're not going to outlaw the criminal conspiracies we call "political parties", we need to put the Attorney General and Special Prosecutor out of reach of a corrupt president, a colluding Congress. Probably under Judicial Branch control, which should have oversight committees for confirmation and firing of Justice Department officials. I'd prefer every administration to come with an office collecting all evidence of crimes by them, for development into Special Prosecution, from Inauguration Day.
But we're so far from any of that, that I'll just welcome the basic Election Day chance to throw out these Republican criminals, and at least replace them with tolerable Democratic bums.
Consumers confusing uTube for YouTube and getting a broken/down site (uTube) instead of the gleaming new $BILLION "Internet TV" site is bad for YouTube. It makes those confused people think that YouTube is crap. So it's in YouTube's interest to subsidize uTube's site capacity for a while to handle the extra YouTube traffic. YouTube can get an idea which sites are getting that "brand leakage" by looking at their incoming logs, for referrer sites, if the referring site survived long enough to put a link back to YouTube. Of course broken sites can try to figure out which site the incoming stampede was looking for, and notify the actual site (from another working computer). And the same people who research trademarks to ensure they don't infringe inside industry sectors can also find likely casualties even outside the sector. Google seems like an excellent resource, and could offer a "close domain" tool that would also help regular googlers.
There is probably some residual promotional value to the other sites, like uTube, even if few YouTube customers will ever do business with uTube.
So a little proactive capacity planning by YouTube for its "typo neighbors" would help both of them, without the nasty (and somewhat silly) lawsuits. Should be a lesson to others scaling their brands on the Internet.
OpenLaszlo kinda is Flash: "OpenLaszlo is designed to use open standards, and built with open source tools and technologies. It's a high level architecture designed to target multiple rendering environments, and the first one it currently supports is Flash.
OpenLaszlo's platform independent architecture gives it the ability to target other runtime environments like DHTML, Java, XUL, Avalon, SVG, open source Flash players"
If OpenLaszlo apps run in Flash VMs, and do what Flash does, then it effectively is Flash, by competing directly with actual Flash code.
The #1 "FAQ" would of course be "can this J2ME OpenLazlo run existing Flash movies on lots of mobile phones?", but that isn't answered in that Sun page.
So I'll also ask "is this Sun's attempt to take over Flash the way Sun has controlled Java, especially now that Flash has clearly beaten Java for mutimedia applets?"
Maybe we'll have to wait until "later this year" to see. By which time those questions will be asked even more frequently.
That article at the Daily Kos to which I linked itself links, in it's third sentence, to the ABC News transcript of 5/24/99 documenting Brian Ross investigating Abramoff's slavery biz in Saipan. But the Daily Kos article was written by someone who's been covering the abuses in the islands for a long time. It includes copies of Preston, Gates lobbyist conspiracies to protect the Marianas abuses. And compiles lots of other cited evidence into a good picture of the racket Abramoff's Republicans, including Delay and Hastert, were running in their "Conservative Paradise", making a travesty of American borders, Chinese trade, and other "Conservative" values. Read it and judge for yourself. That's the power of the Web. Google the facts presented in DKos, and make your own decision.
So instead of seeing a Daily Kos link and caving in to Republican "shoot the messenger" copouts, just click it and see all the facts and logic painting this picture. Not that you are copping out, but others reading this thread have to fight off several layers of Republican media brainwashing. We're just here to help.
'"What is most important, however, is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff wrote to a colleague at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement."'
Preston Gates & Ellis: 'The "Gates" in the firm's name is William H. Gates, Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.'
Abramoff's gang of Republicans took control of the entire elected government in 2001.
"The DOJ, now under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty."
Abramoff's other business with Dennis Hastert (R-IL) included a child slavery industry in Saipan, the Northern Marianas Islands US territory (near the Phillipines). Sex slavery and manufacturing slavery (child and adult). Hastert was simultaneously covering up for Mark Foley (R-FL) while Foley was molesting House pages. Interestingly, ABC News' Brian Ross broke both stories, but hasn't yet connected them.
Abramoff raised money to elect Republicans, Hastert controlled those House Republicans (and through their majority, the House). Together they made laws for the past 6+ years.
Now they're revealed to be in league to suppress open source. Are these Republicans really evil, or does it just require corrupt politicians to give evildoers the advantage they need to win? Is there a difference?
That might be the point of the project, but not the point of the incorrect statement that OLPC will be the biggest monoculture. Distorting that size, and its implications, not only distorts the problem, it also ignores many lessons that can be learned from what is, in fact, the biggest monoculture.
And the ability of billions of people to eat is often centered on using their mobile phones for work and family organization. That might seem a luxury to starving children, but it is reality for many who aren't starving - but who would, if the mobile phone network disappeared in a minute. And, as I pointed out, there's a lot of damage that can be done to people with more to lose even short of a total outage that threatens their lives. Just because a person isn't on the edge of survival doesn't make them worth any less than a person who is.
The results of the OLPC project are hoped to be an even greater number of people dependent on mobile phones, so it will grow that largest monoculture even with its own success.
I'm not questioning the necessity or utility of the OLPC project. I am just correcting one serious error in a claim made about it today. A correction that can hopefully help this important project. BTW, invoking the dire condition of people at whom OLPC is targeted doesn't make the wrong facts about it any more right. It does tend to turn off rational thinking.
I don't think HW differences matter much in the vulnerability of the Windows monoculture, excluding the tiny percentage of Windows running on non-Intel chips. Viruses aren't specific to the HW, they depend on the SW. The same is probably true of the Symbian phones.
The disconnectedness from a "high speed network" also protects these OLPCs from infection as much as from patches, so that's probably a breakeven.
But I didn't argue whether the OLPC monoculture is less vulnerable than the Symbian monoculture. Just the false claim that the OLPC monoculture is the largest. And the false implications of whatever vulnerability of those relative scales.
The many millions of SymbianOS mobile "phones" is the largest computing monoculture in the world. Much more essential for the world's daily operation than these cool kids' PCs, and tied directly to the wallets, by the minute, of most people with any money.
Hubble has taught us much because it's a big eye in the sky. Maybe if we put a big ear in the sky, we'd prove the wisdom of the old Music of the Spheres. We've already got the studio album... when will NASA release the live concert?
You call my showing Bush as a warmonger "overreaction", and do nothing but call me paranoid. Only a Bush worshipper can spit up such gibberish at this late date. The kind of Bush worshipper who can't even admit your worship to yourself.
I bet you con yourself into thinking you're some kind of "Libertarian". Riiiight. You toe the Bush line, you're sucking his idol.
If you were funny, you'd be a joke. You're pathetic.
Touchscreens would make us even more productive, now that the screens are big enough tell the difference between different areas with even big fingers. But instead of just making them cheaper, so using a stylus doesn't make an LCD PDA much more expensive, they should make them much more accurate. Find the actual pixel at the center of the touched area, and set the cursor above it, just visible at the fingernail point. And accept multiple simultaneous touches, so we can move from the mouse/touchpad's single point of interaction to a real model of how people work with objects even on a screen.
A real innovation would be an interactive textured surface. An electromagnetic or maybe MEMs clear film that changes texture from flat through a range of maybe 8-16 or so "roughscale" positions aligned with the pixels. Our fingertips could pick up edges of GUI widgets, or tell whether widgets are active or triggered, while we're touching them. Multiple fingers can slide across areas to define them. The multiple sensory feedback confirmation with the visual graphics will make us more accurate, more natural, faster and less exerted while keeping our attention on the work instead of the tools.
Once we cut out the middlemouse we'll finally have moved away from the basic teaching tools, like mouse and "file/folder volumes", that helped us from the physical office to the personal computer. These big screens give us the place to finally do all our work, instead of being mainly the scoreboard for the games we play with various crude input devices.
That's not the Earth's orbit causing rodent extinction.
That was the micerebooting the Earth while debugging it.
Since the users of our iPlanet are bailing out now without the system shutting down, I expect we're obsolete. Get ready to do your part for the firewall they turn us into.
"Flamebait"? Just because TrollMods are such reactionary sissies that pointing out Microsoft's well known failures interferes with their MS worship, doesn't mean they have to flame back. They're too scared to do something so overt, so they just TrollMod anonymously instead.
Google makes its money advertising to people looking at its pages. The draw of people looking at video pages makes even more traffic. And making all kinds of media available to googlers really starts to turn "the Internet" into a "Google space" the way "the desktop" has been a Microsoft space.
Are you claiming that MS knew what was going on in the Internet bubble? Or just the obvious fact that those companies' execs knew to take the money and run? Their dotcommies didn't really understand the Internet, either, or they would have stayed. Like the better examples of Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, or Google.
Except that YouTube was sucking all the audience from GoogleVideo. Now it won't, if Google doesn't want it to.
Napster's business model was a payoff to its previous owners for throwing the lawsuit that purchaser Bertelsmann brought. That precedent bought the music biz several years legal power over their customers, while switching many of the downloaders to a legal model that put some money into Bertelsmann's pockets. A bad business model, but brought to you by the record labels with more political than business canny.
And a different model than Google's, which is to free content the world exchanges, finding our way with Google's help, looking at their targeted ads along with their guidance.
It's a different model than Microsoft's, too. And probably the best one. As long as Google can avoid getting held over a barrel by copyright. Which the original Napster should have been able to do, as a "pointer service" that doesn't host content itself. But which didn't because it threw that Bertelsmann lawsuit to get its money. Google is in the financial and legal position to reboot that business, just like Apple rebooted the MP3 player from the (now forgotten) Rio generation.
Branding. Like Napster, Google will probably clean it up. Or, better than Napster, will monetize the sharing of copyright videos, and like Apple, make a deal with the rights holders to let it circulate freely (unmetered) as long as they're making real money.
That might cost another $billion, but if Google can free video content among the huge YouTube audience, they will have "invented" Internet TV, without hardly trying.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates retiring doesn't dispel the impression because it doesn't dispel the conflict. They still use his name in the name of the firm because they're still using his network of connections. And if you think they don't still talk to their founder, you don't know how lawfirms work.
I haven't found documentation of how many shares in the corporation Gates still owns/controls, but I expect he's still in the game.
Thinking otherwise is a wild-eyed coincidence theory.
Yeah, now that your "clarification" reverses your claim refuting my original questions about whether OpenLaszlo can replace Flash for apps in mobile phones, it's a lot more clear.
I'd even go so far as to say "OpenLaszlo is more than Flash".
We clearly have a fundamental problem in our government with investigation interest conflicts. The Attorney General running the Justice Department must not be simply hireable and fireable (or forced to resign) just at the president's whim. One of the central failures of the system in Watergate revolved around the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired both the Special Prosecutor and Attorney General who were investigating him. The system obviously did fail when that broken governing system wasn't fixed after Watergate was demonstrated to be a criminally corrupt Republican conspiracy throughout the Executive Branch.
But even Watergate was dealt with by a "bipartisan government": Republican Executive, Democratic Congress. But what about Bush, controlling Congress too? There's none of the oversight Congress is required to exercise on the Executive. Congress has even sent two new Justices to the Supreme Court who subscribe to the Unitary Executive theory, which makes Congress optional, to join the two (Scalia and Thomas) who already work that way. Including giving the president privileges of unlimited wiretapping and torture.
The US system is still pretty strong. Next month, on TUE November 7, 2006, we get a chance to throw out these corrupt Republicans who've gamed the system yet again to produce and protect their global rackets. But Watergate, then Iran/Contra, now the massive Republican criminal conspiracies, all show we need basic reforms to our justice system, specifically where it investigates the government. Since we're not going to outlaw the criminal conspiracies we call "political parties", we need to put the Attorney General and Special Prosecutor out of reach of a corrupt president, a colluding Congress. Probably under Judicial Branch control, which should have oversight committees for confirmation and firing of Justice Department officials. I'd prefer every administration to come with an office collecting all evidence of crimes by them, for development into Special Prosecution, from Inauguration Day.
But we're so far from any of that, that I'll just welcome the basic Election Day chance to throw out these Republican criminals, and at least replace them with tolerable Democratic bums.
Consumers confusing uTube for YouTube and getting a broken/down site (uTube) instead of the gleaming new $BILLION "Internet TV" site is bad for YouTube. It makes those confused people think that YouTube is crap. So it's in YouTube's interest to subsidize uTube's site capacity for a while to handle the extra YouTube traffic. YouTube can get an idea which sites are getting that "brand leakage" by looking at their incoming logs, for referrer sites, if the referring site survived long enough to put a link back to YouTube. Of course broken sites can try to figure out which site the incoming stampede was looking for, and notify the actual site (from another working computer). And the same people who research trademarks to ensure they don't infringe inside industry sectors can also find likely casualties even outside the sector. Google seems like an excellent resource, and could offer a "close domain" tool that would also help regular googlers.
There is probably some residual promotional value to the other sites, like uTube, even if few YouTube customers will ever do business with uTube.
So a little proactive capacity planning by YouTube for its "typo neighbors" would help both of them, without the nasty (and somewhat silly) lawsuits. Should be a lesson to others scaling their brands on the Internet.
OpenLaszlo kinda is Flash:
"OpenLaszlo is designed to use open standards, and built with open source tools and technologies. It's a high level architecture designed to target multiple rendering environments, and the first one it currently supports is Flash.
OpenLaszlo's platform independent architecture gives it the ability to target other runtime environments like DHTML, Java, XUL, Avalon, SVG, open source Flash players "
If OpenLaszlo apps run in Flash VMs, and do what Flash does, then it effectively is Flash, by competing directly with actual Flash code.
The #1 "FAQ" would of course be "can this J2ME OpenLazlo run existing Flash movies on lots of mobile phones?", but that isn't answered in that Sun page.
So I'll also ask "is this Sun's attempt to take over Flash the way Sun has controlled Java, especially now that Flash has clearly beaten Java for mutimedia applets?"
Maybe we'll have to wait until "later this year" to see. By which time those questions will be asked even more frequently.
That article at the Daily Kos to which I linked itself links, in it's third sentence, to the ABC News transcript of 5/24/99 documenting Brian Ross investigating Abramoff's slavery biz in Saipan. But the Daily Kos article was written by someone who's been covering the abuses in the islands for a long time. It includes copies of Preston, Gates lobbyist conspiracies to protect the Marianas abuses. And compiles lots of other cited evidence into a good picture of the racket Abramoff's Republicans, including Delay and Hastert, were running in their "Conservative Paradise", making a travesty of American borders, Chinese trade, and other "Conservative" values. Read it and judge for yourself. That's the power of the Web. Google the facts presented in DKos, and make your own decision.
So instead of seeing a Daily Kos link and caving in to Republican "shoot the messenger" copouts, just click it and see all the facts and logic painting this picture. Not that you are copping out, but others reading this thread have to fight off several layers of Republican media brainwashing. We're just here to help.
'"What is most important, however, is that this matter is kept discreet," Abramoff wrote to a colleague at the Preston, Gates & Ellis law firm. "We do not want the opponents to think that we are trying to buy the taxpayer movement."'
Preston Gates & Ellis: 'The "Gates" in the firm's name is William H. Gates, Sr., father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.'
Abramoff's gang of Republicans took control of the entire elected government in 2001.
"The DOJ, now under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty."
Check out just a few links in the Abramoff Web of corruption. For extra points, google each player to see how deep in jail they are already.
Abramoff's other business with Dennis Hastert (R-IL) included a child slavery industry in Saipan, the Northern Marianas Islands US territory (near the Phillipines). Sex slavery and manufacturing slavery (child and adult). Hastert was simultaneously covering up for Mark Foley (R-FL) while Foley was molesting House pages. Interestingly, ABC News' Brian Ross broke both stories, but hasn't yet connected them.
Abramoff raised money to elect Republicans, Hastert controlled those House Republicans (and through their majority, the House). Together they made laws for the past 6+ years.
Now they're revealed to be in league to suppress open source. Are these Republicans really evil, or does it just require corrupt politicians to give evildoers the advantage they need to win? Is there a difference?
That might be the point of the project, but not the point of the incorrect statement that OLPC will be the biggest monoculture. Distorting that size, and its implications, not only distorts the problem, it also ignores many lessons that can be learned from what is, in fact, the biggest monoculture.
And the ability of billions of people to eat is often centered on using their mobile phones for work and family organization. That might seem a luxury to starving children, but it is reality for many who aren't starving - but who would, if the mobile phone network disappeared in a minute. And, as I pointed out, there's a lot of damage that can be done to people with more to lose even short of a total outage that threatens their lives. Just because a person isn't on the edge of survival doesn't make them worth any less than a person who is.
The results of the OLPC project are hoped to be an even greater number of people dependent on mobile phones, so it will grow that largest monoculture even with its own success.
I'm not questioning the necessity or utility of the OLPC project. I am just correcting one serious error in a claim made about it today. A correction that can hopefully help this important project. BTW, invoking the dire condition of people at whom OLPC is targeted doesn't make the wrong facts about it any more right. It does tend to turn off rational thinking.
I don't think HW differences matter much in the vulnerability of the Windows monoculture, excluding the tiny percentage of Windows running on non-Intel chips. Viruses aren't specific to the HW, they depend on the SW. The same is probably true of the Symbian phones.
The disconnectedness from a "high speed network" also protects these OLPCs from infection as much as from patches, so that's probably a breakeven.
But I didn't argue whether the OLPC monoculture is less vulnerable than the Symbian monoculture. Just the false claim that the OLPC monoculture is the largest. And the false implications of whatever vulnerability of those relative scales.
The many millions of SymbianOS mobile "phones" is the largest computing monoculture in the world. Much more essential for the world's daily operation than these cool kids' PCs, and tied directly to the wallets, by the minute, of most people with any money.
Some would say the entire Earth is a cosmic raspberry.
Hubble has taught us much because it's a big eye in the sky. Maybe if we put a big ear in the sky, we'd prove the wisdom of the old Music of the Spheres. We've already got the studio album... when will NASA release the live concert?
That's quadrillions of grams, or billions of tons.</PEDANTIC>
I knew you couldn't even say "DENIAL".
You call my showing Bush as a warmonger "overreaction", and do nothing but call me paranoid. Only a Bush worshipper can spit up such gibberish at this late date. The kind of Bush worshipper who can't even admit your worship to yourself.
I bet you con yourself into thinking you're some kind of "Libertarian". Riiiight. You toe the Bush line, you're sucking his idol.
If you were funny, you'd be a joke. You're pathetic.
Touchscreens would make us even more productive, now that the screens are big enough tell the difference between different areas with even big fingers. But instead of just making them cheaper, so using a stylus doesn't make an LCD PDA much more expensive, they should make them much more accurate. Find the actual pixel at the center of the touched area, and set the cursor above it, just visible at the fingernail point. And accept multiple simultaneous touches, so we can move from the mouse/touchpad's single point of interaction to a real model of how people work with objects even on a screen.
A real innovation would be an interactive textured surface. An electromagnetic or maybe MEMs clear film that changes texture from flat through a range of maybe 8-16 or so "roughscale" positions aligned with the pixels. Our fingertips could pick up edges of GUI widgets, or tell whether widgets are active or triggered, while we're touching them. Multiple fingers can slide across areas to define them. The multiple sensory feedback confirmation with the visual graphics will make us more accurate, more natural, faster and less exerted while keeping our attention on the work instead of the tools.
Once we cut out the middlemouse we'll finally have moved away from the basic teaching tools, like mouse and "file/folder volumes", that helped us from the physical office to the personal computer. These big screens give us the place to finally do all our work, instead of being mainly the scoreboard for the games we play with various crude input devices.
That's not the Earth's orbit causing rodent extinction.
That was the mice rebooting the Earth while debugging it.
Since the users of our iPlanet are bailing out now without the system shutting down, I expect we're obsolete. Get ready to do your part for the firewall they turn us into.
Moderation +3
60% Interesting
20% Flamebait
20% Insightful
"Flamebait"? Just because TrollMods are such reactionary sissies that pointing out Microsoft's well known failures interferes with their MS worship, doesn't mean they have to flame back. They're too scared to do something so overt, so they just TrollMod anonymously instead.
Google makes its money advertising to people looking at its pages. The draw of people looking at video pages makes even more traffic. And making all kinds of media available to googlers really starts to turn "the Internet" into a "Google space" the way "the desktop" has been a Microsoft space.
Are you claiming that MS knew what was going on in the Internet bubble? Or just the obvious fact that those companies' execs knew to take the money and run? Their dotcommies didn't really understand the Internet, either, or they would have stayed. Like the better examples of Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, or Google.
Welcome to government contracting. We're here to help. Shoot to kill.
Except that YouTube was sucking all the audience from GoogleVideo. Now it won't, if Google doesn't want it to.
Napster's business model was a payoff to its previous owners for throwing the lawsuit that purchaser Bertelsmann brought. That precedent bought the music biz several years legal power over their customers, while switching many of the downloaders to a legal model that put some money into Bertelsmann's pockets. A bad business model, but brought to you by the record labels with more political than business canny.
And a different model than Google's, which is to free content the world exchanges, finding our way with Google's help, looking at their targeted ads along with their guidance.
It's a different model than Microsoft's, too. And probably the best one. As long as Google can avoid getting held over a barrel by copyright. Which the original Napster should have been able to do, as a "pointer service" that doesn't host content itself. But which didn't because it threw that Bertelsmann lawsuit to get its money. Google is in the financial and legal position to reboot that business, just like Apple rebooted the MP3 player from the (now forgotten) Rio generation.
Branding. Like Napster, Google will probably clean it up. Or, better than Napster, will monetize the sharing of copyright videos, and like Apple, make a deal with the rights holders to let it circulate freely (unmetered) as long as they're making real money.
That might cost another $billion, but if Google can free video content among the huge YouTube audience, they will have "invented" Internet TV, without hardly trying.