Here's a strange one... we found an Advertisement at BestBuy.com yesterday that proclaimed "VisionTek GeForce4 Ti4600 for Special Pre-Order Price of $129.00..the savings is a $200.00 Value". Normally a "typo" or mistake would be something to the effect of a misplaced decimal point or an accidental wrong price. It usually doesn't consist of adding terms like Special Pre-Order Price and savings is a $200.00 Value, ( since it sounds reasonable $129.00 + $200.00 savings for a card announced that day with no real set price yet ) all over the advertisement. So we did the right thing and CALLED. BestBuy.com confirmed the price of $129.00 twice, at which time they gave us the $200.00 value / saving quotes. After a whole day of ordering, they reneged on the deal and cancelled all orders. The money has yet to be refunded. I have made a sign-up page for all of you that placed orders with Best Buy so that we may get as many people taken care of as possible. I have been in contact with them all day....
The evidence these folks have collected (scanned receipts, etc.) appears to be pretty damning for Best Buy. It will be interesting to see how badly Best Buy gets thrashed in court or if they just settle up and offer the cards at the price they advertised.
I find it hilarious that he keeps talking about interoperability as the enabling feature that Microsoft brought to the computing world.
I'm still not sure if he's just so far removed from the reality of what is going on that he really believes what he's saying, or if he's just impressively two-faced. I suspect the former, just because I don't look for a conspiracy when simple ignorance will do.
26. Given these benefits, we expected that the market would attach great
value to any product that enabled such broad interoperability. As I explain more fully
below in Section II.B, Microsoft committed itself to providing compatibility among a wide
range of products, as we believed the market would demand. There were three key and
closely-interrelated elements to our strategy, a strategy that is unchanged to this day.
and:
Literally tens of thousands of hardware and software products
interoperate very well with Windows today.
and:
Interoperability across disparate computing products does not happen
by accident. Interoperability is a two-way street, requiring a lot of hard work between
companies that want to build interoperable products. As discussed below, Microsoft
devotes enormous efforts to promoting interoperability between a wide variety of products and Windows. These efforts include our development and broad licensing of the Windows
platform (described above) and our disclosure of vast amounts of technical information
about Windows--information that we provide to our direct competitors, such as Sun.
Ok, I would like to see some of this disclosure. Why did the Samba team need to reverse-engineer the Windows file sharing protocol if such information is so widely available?
What information did Microsoft need to provide to Sun? More likely, they got information from Sun about the various UNIX protocols so they could embrace and extend them.
If Microsoft was really that open with their specifications, wouldn't writing a Win32 emulator be easier? Instead, it seems to actually be simpler to write a working complete PC emulator and rely on Windows' ability to cope well with different hardware to let it run well than it it to duplicate the ever-changing and never-documented Win32 APIs.
I have no doubt that interoperability played a huge role in development at Microsoft. They needed to talk with other software packages and operating systems in order to gain market share.
At the same time, they could leverage their position as the operating system provider to prevent others from doing the same thing to them.
From the earliest days of DOS, they kept their cards close. The use of those (intentionally?) undocumented DOS calls in Excel gave Microsoft a big advantage over Lotus-1-2-3, who had to go in and either re-implement an existing (but unknown) API that Microsoft had in the OS, or reverse engineer the process to find the undocumented calls that the Excel folks had advance notice of. By the same token, Microsof could and did (deliberately?) change the "undocumented" APIs that Lotus relied on while simultaneously changing the new version of Excel to stop using them.
In short, they seem to have a firm handle on the fact that the path to dominance is to make sure your product can interface with others, but don't let the others interface with you.
My first thought when I saw this was "heck, just install Linux on enough systems to bring the total number of Microsoft product installations well below what they paid for last year." Here's the problem:
Ah, but wait. Microsoft has an offer it thinks you can't refuse, if only to avoid the audit: the vaunted Microsoft School Agreement. Under the terms of this agreement, a school or district simply counts its computers and pays Microsoft somewhere in the neighborhood of $42 per machine for one systemwide annual license.
As Rowlands noted, IBM rolled out this idea years ago. Schools liked it because they could add hundreds of computers over the course of the school year and not pay for the additional software licenses until the next computer count.
But Microsoft has put a new spin on the agreement, requiring an "institution-wide commitment." That means the district must include in its count not only the PCs, but all the iMacs and Power Macs that might conceivably use Windows software.
Without reading the actual terms of the license, it's hard to say for certain, but it appears that there is a chance that no matter what OS each system runs, they owe Microsoft $42/system since those linux boxes "might conceivably use Windows sofware" (i.e. dual-boot, VMWare) they could be subject to the same $42 fee.
I liked Ann Bartow's bit better. Here's a very insightful quote from her:
New, rigidly enforced restrictions on use and access to copyrighted content, especially if accompanied by increased costs, may motivate otherwise law abiding copyright users to circumvent copyright controls (or at least to feel
increasing sympathy for those who do so).
While they may facilitate higher profits and more control over users, these restrictions do not appear to foster enhanced or principled respect for copyrights. Instead, they may actually be undermining the perceived legitimacy of the copyright laws among the copyrighted work consuming populace.
Glad to know someone is in touch with the big picture. She seems very concerned that the attempts to "lock down" content might lead to the public abandoning the whole copyright concept.
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
We regret that Sprint is experiencing the same sort of despicable gang war behavior from
MIT that was visited on Mr. Boyle. We also know that, in addition, MIT students or
personnel are engaged in massive, behind the scenes influence brokering, contacting
everyone from access providers to our own employees in an effort to silence us.
Basically the "MIT thugs" were complaining to his ISP about inappropriate use of USENET. When that failed because the spammer found a crooked ISP, they complained to the ISP's ISP about them sanctioning the inappropriate use of USENET.
Since the spammers were under the impression that this was acceptable use of USENET, they objected to the MIT students' attempts at getting them shut down.
The best way to ensure that they only have the same information that is printed on your license is as simple as 10 seconds with a bulk eraser.
Magnetic strips get erased or damaged so commonly that most people won't think twice about it.
Now those 2-D barcodes some states use are another matter. Those take a little working over with a magic marker. Or if you want to be more subtle, the precision application of some sandpaper.
You'd be surprised what you can change. Go ahead and do it! The worst thing that can happen is the poor document preparer will have a fit, make some calls, and they'll reject your changes.
On the other hand, often the changes are never even seen by human eyes.
I need to go look at those old papers again, especially since the following is also part of California law:
[2870].... the part included in the original post....
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports
to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from
being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision
is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.
2871. No employer shall require a provision made void and
unenforceable by Section 2870 as a condition of employment or
continued employment. Nothing in this article shall be construed to
forbid or restrict the right of an employer to provide in contracts
of employment for disclosure, provided that any such disclosures be
received in confidence, of all of the employee's inventions made
solely or jointly with others during the term of his or her
employment, a review process by the employer to determine such issues
as may arise, and for full title to certain patents and inventions
to be in the United States, as required by contracts between the
employer and the United States or any of its agencies.
2872. If an employment agreement entered into after January 1,
1980, contains a provision requiring the employee to assign or offer
to assign any of his or her rights in any invention to his or her
employer, the employer must also, at the time the agreement is made,
provide a written notification to the employee that the agreement
does not apply to an invention which qualifies fully under the
provisions of Section 2870. In any suit or action arising
thereunder, the burden of proof shall be on the employee claiming the
benefits of its provisions.
It's quite possible that the "waiver" is really "an offer to assign" under section 2872 there. Talk about an offer you can't refuse...
But then again, I'm no lawyer so I have no idea how this should be interpreted "correctly".
The solution to people wasting company time on this BS is not to ratchet down the firewall and install the latest version of MS-Censor on the proxy. The solution is to open up the proxy and make the logs readable by anyone in the company. Preferably sorted by person.
This has the following useful side effects:
* People will know EXACTLY to what degree their web activities are logged
* Abusers can be persuaded by public consensus to clean up their habits
* Everyone is equally accountable
The solution to the virus problem is harder. Our good buddies in Redmond have left so many possible ways for a virus to propagate that plugging all the holes is practically impossible.
In order to help prevent viruses, the "standard desktop" environment used inside the company would be darn near unworkable (i.e. no file associations, executables/docs stripped from E-mail, macros/scripting disabled, "high" javascript security on browsers, etc. etc.)
The best compromise is to keep one's resident antivirus software up to date and accept that the standard Microsoft office environment is going to be vulnerable to fast spreading viruses. Budget for IT staff appropriately.
Like you, my first thought was "heck, I can provide a constant velocity space engine right now!" It's over there!
If you assume that he meant to write "constant acceleration" (or maybe some bozo editor thought that "velocity" read better and heck, it's the same thing, right?), the rest of the article reads much better.
What's wrong with it? If your files are associated with metadata, you need to maintain it and programs need to deal with it. How should the metadata get copied? What do you do with it if the file is accessed through HTTP? Proponents always think this is merely an issue of standardization, but it isn't: it's an intrinsic problem with metadata.
You are right that this is an intrinsic problem with metadata. In the GNOME link I had above they say:
The biggest problem is database consistency. The problem here is that if a metadata-ignorant tool is used to manipulate the filesystem, then metadata information will be lost. For instance, in an implementation that associates a file name with the data in some separate database, a naive file rename will cause the metadata to be lost.
Which is why near the top of their page they say:
Implementing metadata is a tricky problem. I believe there is no way to do it perfectly without designing it into the entire operating system from the ground up.
In other words, the only way to have metadata be reliable is if the operating system controls it to a degree where you cannot (under normal operation) manipulate the file data without manipulating the metadata. Clearly, abnormal operations like filesystem debuggers can get around these restrictions, but one could argue that people who do things like that create their own problems. (I.e. Macintosh file association editors can seriously break file associations. Go figure.)
Microsoft is proposing just such a scheme-- they will control the filesystem. If applications access the filesystem through the proper API/system calls the OS can ensure that the file metadata will be kept in sync. (I.e. they will have required arguments to the API to provide input for the metadata.)
To take one of your questions as an example:
What do you do with it if the file is accessed through HTTP?
Suppose there is a metadata field for "last accessed time". The HTTP server opens the file for reading using a fictional Windows system call called "open(*FILE)". Windows then internally updates the "last accessed time" metadata field and opens the file for reading. In this simple case the OS does all the work.
Suppose there is a new metadata field for "last accessed from ". In this case the "open(*FILE)" call would need a new parameter (or some other way to pass in metadata like "open_new(*FILE, *metadata_struct)") so that the HTTP server can feed in the server that accessed the file. For backward compatibility the default might be the local server if the old system call/API is used.
Of course, this is all still vaporware. We'll just have to see what really happens.
On a truly secure client there is no screen. Instead, you need to run a USB connection into your modified artificial retina to generate text for you to read.
Sure, you can "copy" it by hand, but then it's just your word against theirs.
:-)
Note for the humor impaired: Yes, I'm kidding. At least I hope I am.
It looks like Microsoft is trying to implement a standard (for Windows) metadata storage method. The've been trying to do this for years, but backward compatibility issues keep forcing them to abandon it.
The Macintosh method seems to work OK, but is extremely limited in scope. It looks like Microsoft is planning something much wider scale. (The analogies to SQL are scary-- I hope they're just analogies and they don't mean to really implement a SQL-compliant database as a filesystem.)
Of course, this will mean a whole new found of application incompatibilities on Windows and a whole new round of reverse engineering to determine the filesystem and metadata layout.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second this. On something this easy to win, even a good lawyer is likely to want to work on it without any cash up front.
Best Buy has deep pockets, you have a LOT of support and corroborating evidence, and they get to play the race card.
Shop around for a good lawyer-- they'll be drooling all over themselves to get a piece of this.
I'm still not sure if he's just so far removed from the reality of what is going on that he really believes what he's saying, or if he's just impressively two-faced. I suspect the former, just because I don't look for a conspiracy when simple ignorance will do.
and: and: Ok, I would like to see some of this disclosure. Why did the Samba team need to reverse-engineer the Windows file sharing protocol if such information is so widely available?What information did Microsoft need to provide to Sun? More likely, they got information from Sun about the various UNIX protocols so they could embrace and extend them.
If Microsoft was really that open with their specifications, wouldn't writing a Win32 emulator be easier? Instead, it seems to actually be simpler to write a working complete PC emulator and rely on Windows' ability to cope well with different hardware to let it run well than it it to duplicate the ever-changing and never-documented Win32 APIs.
I have no doubt that interoperability played a huge role in development at Microsoft. They needed to talk with other software packages and operating systems in order to gain market share.
At the same time, they could leverage their position as the operating system provider to prevent others from doing the same thing to them.
From the earliest days of DOS, they kept their cards close. The use of those (intentionally?) undocumented DOS calls in Excel gave Microsoft a big advantage over Lotus-1-2-3, who had to go in and either re-implement an existing (but unknown) API that Microsoft had in the OS, or reverse engineer the process to find the undocumented calls that the Excel folks had advance notice of. By the same token, Microsof could and did (deliberately?) change the "undocumented" APIs that Lotus relied on while simultaneously changing the new version of Excel to stop using them.
In short, they seem to have a firm handle on the fact that the path to dominance is to make sure your product can interface with others, but don't let the others interface with you.
Nasty suituation, eh?
If he's his own sysadmin, you should walk over there now to hear him cursing while his server gets slashdotted into oblivion.
:-)
Post MP3's if you get 'em.
There is an embedded space in the above causing problems. Try this link to the archive of Chemcomics instead.
Neither method is as easy as "cp bigdoc.pdf /mnt/floppy".
It's on citeseer as "Paper as an Analytic Resource for the Design of New Technologies".
Things I enjoy about paper:
+ It doesn't crash
+ It rarely loses data
+ 100% availability with proper care
+ Annotations are simple
+ Easy to take with you
+ Content doesn't change
+ Extremely quick access and intuitive interface
+ High resolution/easy on the eyes
Things I don't enjoy about paper:
+ Indexing/searching is tedious
+ Backups can be difficult
Right now, the list of pros/cons favors paper for me. PDAs are starting to reduce some of the cons (i.e. easy to take with you) but still suffer from most of the rest. About the only time a paper document becomes "unavailable" is when it gets lost. Can the same be said for your PC or PDA?
The crisp black-on-white is easy to read. Some LCD panels have text that is pretty easy to read at low resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 at around 100 pixels per inch) but can't touch the level of detail of even a cheap laser printed page of 300 dots (pixels) per inch. Professional typesetting often gets up to 2400 dots per inch. Not even close. This often doesn't matter for text, but what about that detailed network diagram that gets turned to mud at 100dpi. (Don't even get me started on people who use lossy compression on such images...)
Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes! (I realize that some PDF authoring software allows this kind of thing. The ones I have seen were masterpieces of overengineering and were correspondingly priced. What's wrong with a basic "notes in the margin" feature included at no cost?)
Until the massive inconveniences of using digital media are resolved, paper will continue to play a dominant role in exchanging and storing information.
Since the spammers were under the impression that this was acceptable use of USENET, they objected to the MIT students' attempts at getting them shut down.
Funny, I always seem to find the "one point" that they missed.
Magnetic strips get erased or damaged so commonly that most people won't think twice about it.
Now those 2-D barcodes some states use are another matter. Those take a little working over with a magic marker. Or if you want to be more subtle, the precision application of some sandpaper.
The writer that wrote the first Mudd episode attended Harvey Mudd College, and yes, it provided the inspiration for the name "Harcourt Fenton Mudd".
On the other hand, often the changes are never even seen by human eyes.
But then again, I'm no lawyer so I have no idea how this should be interpreted "correctly".
The lawyers are already onto this. Every small company I've seen requires employees to "waive" this right as a condition of employment.
Somewhat puzzlingly, the larger, more bureaucratic companies do not always require this waiver. I expected it to be the other way around.
Providing some small hope for humanity, I also know of a lot of very qualified people who have left over this very requirement.
The solution to people wasting company time on this BS is not to ratchet down the firewall and install the latest version of MS-Censor on the proxy. The solution is to open up the proxy and make the logs readable by anyone in the company. Preferably sorted by person.
This has the following useful side effects:
* People will know EXACTLY to what degree their web activities are logged
* Abusers can be persuaded by public consensus to clean up their habits
* Everyone is equally accountable
The solution to the virus problem is harder. Our good buddies in Redmond have left so many possible ways for a virus to propagate that plugging all the holes is practically impossible.
In order to help prevent viruses, the "standard desktop" environment used inside the company would be darn near unworkable (i.e. no file associations, executables/docs stripped from E-mail, macros/scripting disabled, "high" javascript security on browsers, etc. etc.)
The best compromise is to keep one's resident antivirus software up to date and accept that the standard Microsoft office environment is going to be vulnerable to fast spreading viruses. Budget for IT staff appropriately.
If you assume that he meant to write "constant acceleration" (or maybe some bozo editor thought that "velocity" read better and heck, it's the same thing, right?), the rest of the article reads much better.
Microsoft is proposing just such a scheme-- they will control the filesystem. If applications access the filesystem through the proper API/system calls the OS can ensure that the file metadata will be kept in sync. (I.e. they will have required arguments to the API to provide input for the metadata.)
To take one of your questions as an example:
Suppose there is a metadata field for "last accessed time". The HTTP server opens the file for reading using a fictional Windows system call called "open(*FILE)". Windows then internally updates the "last accessed time" metadata field and opens the file for reading. In this simple case the OS does all the work.Suppose there is a new metadata field for "last accessed from ". In this case the "open(*FILE)" call would need a new parameter (or some other way to pass in metadata like "open_new(*FILE, *metadata_struct)") so that the HTTP server can feed in the server that accessed the file. For backward compatibility the default might be the local server if the old system call/API is used.
Of course, this is all still vaporware. We'll just have to see what really happens.
Sure, you can "copy" it by hand, but then it's just your word against theirs.
Note for the humor impaired: Yes, I'm kidding. At least I hope I am.
The GNOME project has an excellent overview of some of the issues with metatata in general.
Of course, this will mean a whole new found of application incompatibilities on Windows and a whole new round of reverse engineering to determine the filesystem and metadata layout.