1. You should be reading email in plain text. Most of the HTML I get is advertisements. I figure if they are not smart enough to make it readable in plain text, they are not smart enough to get my bussiness. Do not enable auto confirmation.
2. I use an alias to post on the internet. I do not reply to emails I do not know as legitimate.
3. I believe he means do not have an open email relay. Must spam is sent through open third party mail servers. The spammers use these to hid.
4. I do not know what the other traps are either.
We should not live in fear of spammers. However, we routinely do things to minimize risks. For instance, many of us have unlisted phone numbers.
To me, the decline of the public phone is not that they cost too much, or were inconvenient or dirty, but that the business plan disrespected the customers. There is now enough competition that the telephone companies cannot maintain that disrespect.
There was a time when not just anyone could get a telephone. The bell monopolies would often charge very large deposits which were beyond the reach of lower income people. The phone company created a class of people who had to use pay phones. They used this captive audience to keep profits up. First, they set up the phones so they would not accept incoming calls. Then they the set the phone up so it was no longer a flat quarter, but was a quarter for a few minutes. It now cost a few dollars an hour to talk on a pay phone.
When the telephone monopoly faltered, so did the pay phone. Not only were people able to buy cell phones that were now competitive with pay phones, but lower income people only had come up with around $50 or so to get a phone. No longer did you need to give your life saving to get a land line. No longer did you have to pay a days salary to get the phone turned back on. There are now phone companies that will give you land line services when you can pay, with no penalties if you can't. Most cell phone companies will sell phone service by the minute at competitive rates, with extremely cheap starter phones. And since pay phones now charge about a dollar fee if you use a calling card, an immigrant might justify a land line solely on one call home a day.
I think your first mistake is confusing patent-free and royalty free. A company can have a patent on the technology, but they must give it to the community royalty free. Why would they want to do this? Perhaps the patent is bogus, they know it is bogus, but if they give it away they get to keep the prestige of the patent. Perhaps they are just nice.
Second, no one is forcing anyone to use anything. A standard is a base from which to work. Take a look at how everyone now has the opportunity to expand and adapt the standards to their own needs. MS, AOL, IBM, etc, all have been able to use and expand the standards to express their own business models, and usually make a profit. Is it too much to ask that in exchange, they give us those advances that they wish to become standard. Is it too much to ask that they give to future generations the same freedoms they enjoy. If a company wishes to use a standard that cost money, they are free to do so. For instance, many people to use the MPEG system, but I do not believe that it should be included in standard unless it meets the 'royalty-free' requirement. If a company is so narcissistic that it cannot see the benefit, I say let them walk.
Third, there is a difference between MS owning the internet and OSS owning the internet. As we have seen MS uses it power to manipulate the standards process in an effort to cripple and destroy competitors. As I have mentioned before, MS is the default standard of the internet, and if your web page doesn't work in IE, or browsers doesn't work with code generated in IE, they you are SOL. Much of the fragmentation is a result of this. OTOH, OSS has promoted interoperability and business innovation.
Finally let me suggest that perhaps this type of split license in bad for business. In the same way that companies use MS or IBM for technology because of predictability, I think it would be stupid to use technology of which the copyright is vague. Imagine a company that develops an web product based on the standards, They do not have to pay royalty because it is a web standard. Now imagine a new application that makes certain parts of the web obsolete in the same way that the internet made the old dial up services obsolete. You wish to adapt your service to the new technology, but it turns out that a single critical standard is owned by a competitor. Need I go any further.
I am really trying to think of why someone would want to do this. If I understand the current system, when a user clicks a link in a window, the old address is put on a fifo stack. If the user want to go back, the address is popped off the stack and the browser returned to the page. Good browsers remember the position on the page even if not marked. I have no idea what an 'index page' has to do with it. The back button works independent of page layout.
The first thing I though of is that they are re-implementing the history tabsl; it already exists, and, as the article pointed out, getting home would get very hard very quickly. This would be senseless. My second thought is that they trying fix the damage caused by badly designed pages. These pages break the back button through scripting or Flash, thus confusing the user. These pages are also of IE specific. The fix for this needs to occur on the web page, not browser.
In the end, though, it makes no sense. I don't want a complicated back button. We can open new windows, new tabs, or go to the history if there is someplace special I want to go. Going to the previous page should be trivially simple.
Now, if someone wants to implement a tree structure so that when I hold down the back button a set of submenus appear so I can choose places I went from certain pages, that makes some sort of design sense. Still, the simplicity of the fifo stack is compelling.
I partly agree with the article. It is completely true that if you manufacture an adequate product and don't try to cheat your customers, you will be perceived as a good company. Beyond that, the article is nonsense.
Beyond that, it is nonsense. My experience with XP is that is more stable than any other consumer MS OS, but not as good as 2000. For one thing, the adaptive GUI just gets in the way. The market has spoken on XBox. It is a good machine, but not good enough. Without the benefit of monopoly, MS was not able to set the price on the product, and had to do several price reduction in order to get the results it wanted. This would also be the case with it's OS and apps if competition exists. In countries that aren't MS hostages, the XBox is not doing well. As for the tablet PC, it is not yet a product. We do not how exactly it will act. It is probably as good as XBox, which may not be good enough.
The problem with MS is that it does not have to innovate. It does not have to create great products. Without competition, there is no need to excel. It can steal , cajole, and threaten. The creativity is limited to calling the OS 'Windows'. The charity is limited to giving kids junk and then taking a writeoff for the inflated value. The programming wonders are limited to creating a paperclip that you can't get rid of, or wizards that won't let you get back to the menu. I find the culture to be pretty unified.
The relevant quote from the article, and decision, is
' "Although Lindows.com certainly made a conscious decision to play with fire by choosing a product and company name that differs by only one letter from the world's leading computer software program," the judge wrote, "one could just as easily conclude that in 1983 Microsoft made an equally risky decision to name its product after a term commonly used in the trade to indicate the windowing capability of a G.U.I." '
This implies that the issue is not the use of a general word like Apple, Expedition, or Armada, but the use of a generally applied term, like processor, monitor, API, menu, etc. We would not in fact expect a car to be named "Truck" (real word by the way, means stuff, as in a truck carries truck), and have that be a trademark.
If MS were a creative edgy company, they would have done something more creative and edgy than Windows. Off the top of my head I can think of UltraDOS, Workspace, Integrated Environment (IE is a very promotable trademark), Personal Assistant, Work-Panes, etc. Of course, DOS was never a trademark. The fact is that some marketing yahoo with more salary than brains chose windows. Mistakes happen, but we cannot rewrite laws to compensate for them.
Furthermore, even if the trademark is reasonable, it can still be argued that it so generally used that it should go the way of Asprin. The articles says that like 90% of the people think MS Windowd, but since that is the market share, it might be that 90% of the poeple think windows as a generic term. Who knows?
As the article states, it is clear that Lindows is not on firm legal ground here, and it is clear that the intention is to dilute the trademark. However, if the trademark is not valid, then the intentions of Lindows become as irrelevant as the desire to see MS fail.
It depends on how the CS is taught. If it is basically a office automation class, then one cannot expect anymore than in a typing class. However, such skills are necessary, so I would hesitate to say that such work is useless,.
OTOH, if the classes are taught emphasizing logic, design, and structure, the CS classes can be an integral part of the science and math education. The key is a dedication to theory and a phobia or OS and language specific constructs. For instance, teaching the GUI editor of Visual Studio may be a simple way to allow a student to succeed at programming, but it does nothing to teach the important and general concepts of program structure, data organization, and logic flow. I think in some cases when teach math, science, or computers, we forfeit education for flash.
One wonders if computers is causing the problems, or if perhaps other current factors are contributing. For instance, student to teacher ratio in many schools is outlandish, and is getting worse. The task of a teacher is increasing classroom management at the expense of developing student minds. In the US everything is being done to replace the public school system with Taliban style private schools. Is it any wonder that after the test drills, sa teacher just lets the kids play on the computer
Also, in the U.S., we are in the midst of a standardized testing frenzy that de-emphasizes the ability and talents of the individual student and cares only about the ability to complete a few standard problems. It is no longer necessary for a student to learn, but merely regurgitate facts and forms. For instance, an important part of the standardized testing education is the calculator. The fact is that when doing business, or industrial, or any other type of work a calculator is nearly worthless without the ability to do simple math in your head and approximating complex results. However, calculators facilitate the use of standardized tests, so we have money spent on these electronic calculators instead of books and food.
So it is no wonder that computers are not working. There is no time for students to have fun and just do free form learning. Everything is targeted to these damned test. As a recent episode of 'King of the Hill' stated, all parent care about is zero tolerance and tests. When I was in public high school ('god I feel old'), we have a PDP 11 and several Apple//s. Our IT education started with programming theory, then moved into programming structure and actual coding. The emphasis was on logic and design. These lesson helped up in all parts of our education. In the Junior year we had the opportunity to do system administration on the PDP, assembly on the Apple, or whatever,
That experience was luxurious compared to what I see today. Windows machines tightly locked down so the student has no hope of learning administration. Classes that emphasis the application of very high level library functions rather than proper programming techniques. The ability to use Microsoft Office is more important than the ability to think.
Re:I am sooooooo tired of plastic!!!
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Waterproof Books
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Why is it that I feel I am the only person that cringes whenever a new plastic product is released? Bear with me here: I'm not a vegetarian, I don't belong to any save-the-whatever clubs (tho maybe I should)
I am sooo tired of people pushing their own pet agendas and then trying to gain credibility by disrespecting others' causes. That is sooo uncool. It like being of a lame high school student that needs to beat up smaller kids to compensate for a pathetic life and simple mind.
I am glad that you feel that perhaps, one of these days, you might time out of your busy schedule to save something other than your own ass. I mean really, you don't even want to inconvenience yourself by not eating meat or trying to improve the world, but you want to dictate what corporation can and cannot do with their technologies.
I don't mean to be mean, but when you are trying to be radical, and start insulting other radicals, you pretty much leave yourself open to this sort of thing. I was really be sarcastic and nice. You should be more careful in the future. If you cause is just, you don't need to disrespect other people. That is the lesson we need to learn in the US.
This sounds more like a marketing brochure than news. While the technology of such a device might be interesting, there is no mention of the technology in the article or other links. Furthermore, such remote diagnosis is nothing new. The technology that has been in the field for many years. The fact that the device just happens to cost the same as the estimate minimum loss of a diversion is just, i am sure, a coincidence.
Also, the numbers quoted of 'one diversion per day' and the '50-100 thousand dollars' just doesn't sound significant. I am not sure how many flights are made a day, but I believe the airline revenue is in excess of 300 million dollars a day, which makes a diverted flight at most 0.03% of revenue. And what is the liability to the airline for misdiagnosis. I can't imagine that airlines are going to risk a lawsuit to keep a plane in the air. Anyone remember the guy who recently died because the train would not stop to let him go to a hospital?
It might be nice to keep these devices on planes just in case. But is not like a defibrillator that might actually save a persons life.
rant on
I don't think this is flambait at all. I think the excessive number of connectors one need on a computer is part of the inefficiency of the industry.
For instance, at at time when a Macs needed a single ADB port for all slow input devices, an Intel machine had two identical ports, for keyboard and mouse. These ports had to be color coded because they were not interchangeable. People hasted the few ports, but the standard made the machine easier to deal with and design for, even if a bit more expensive.
Likewise why have serial and parallel ports on a computer. Just make everyone use serial. It is not difficult, it is no longer expensive. I mean nearly everyone has switched to USB. What was the problem? I know that we need to support legacy hardware, but the poster has a point. Why bloat clearly niche device with things people no longer need or use.
But my real issue is with these printers and scanners that are shipped with two or three different ports. Is it really so expensive to replace the ports with and ethernet connector, at least on some of the machines. Most people have ethernet connector, and combined with a router with a DHCP server, these are easier to setup than a parallel or serial connection. I know not everyone has a router, but many people and most business have broadband, and selling broadband with a router, is, in my mind, irresponsible, but that is another rant.
Anyway, I agree with the poster. Don't put stuff in a product just because you can and it is cheap.
rant off
And whether it is DRM, CD Extra, or some other crap from the music industry, the fact remains that discs that are marketed as CDs do not play on a consumer stand alone CD player. This is unacceptable. The notion that it would be acceptable to market a CD that is designed to not function on certain consumer CD players, even though the players themselves follow the standard is, in my mind, close to fraudulent. Combine that with the fact that many stores will no longer take accept opened CDs, and we have a situation that shows great disrespect to the customer. Such behavior will just decrease the likelyhood that people will buy CDs for present. Who wants to give a broken present?
In addition, you analogy is flawed. You would find very few people who believe that one needs a special CD player to listen to a store bought CD. You would find very few people, at least who knows what Groupwise is, to expect an XP machine to receive Groupwise. However, that may be because no one expects XP to work in any reasonable fashion.
In theory it not a good idea. Proper security requires some redundancy. An ATM requires a token and code. To cash a check you have to have a special document, and usually two forms of identification. I know from recent experience that if it has been a while since you cashed a check at Krogers, they call corporate for verifications. Credit cards are less secure, but the CC companies and vendors take those losses as a business cost. This system has no redundancy, and no verification that the token(fingerprint) belongs to the correct person.
In this case, Krogers appears to linking the customer fingerprint to a credit card or bank account. SVC, which would make a lot of sense, is not an option. There are so many ways to hack this system, some without the victim even noticing. The weakness is that once you have the token, the fingerprint, a publicly available piece of information, you have cracked the main security. After that, you are at the mercy of the investigators. The bank may in fact say the problem is yours and not give the money back.
This is something I have thought about and it seems to be the compromise between privacy, security and liability.
I have no credit card linked to my bank account, so I use electronic tablets. I use a bad signiture, and all my cards say check ID. Any money stolen is the problem of the credit card company.
I don't use the special store cards, but that is just mostly a protest against bloat. If you use a credit card the store can track you just as well.
I only have an ATM card, and I don't keep an excessive amount of cash it the account. I use this only for ATM machines because if the money is gone, then it is my problem. I am out the cash and have to fight to get it back.
I am sorry you metro uses smart cards, That really sucks. We have stored value cards, which are not linked to the rider.
I agree with you though. I stopped using Krogers when they jacked up thier prices and required the card to get a discount.
This is pretty much a troll, as this has nothing to do with free software, MS is not likely to open source this code, or give it away for no cost.
Do even though the parent is clueless, lets take a look at the "hypocracy". I think the basic concept is that all information has a tendency to become free, just like all matter has a tendency to become disordered, and we as humans, if we want to protect our information, must do intentional things to keep information not free.
It is a long way to go from this to justifying MS appropriation of others IP and selling products based upon it. For instance, most of us think we have the right to make copies of music and videos for ourselves and friends. How many friends is a contentious issue, but that tends to be quibble. However, most would say making copies of music we do not own or have the right to, and then selling it is on the illegal side. With the free software issue, only MS and other radicals would argue that all software should be one way or the other. In either case, MS has no problem taking, but want to control what everyone else has.
On one hand this is nothing interesting. Companies enter into these type of agreements all the time, often with the intention of gaining expertise that will allow them, in the fullness of time, to compete. However, normally both parties are required to fulfill some obligation complete the contract. Several issues ago, Foreign Affairs has a very good article on this type of business practice and it's benefits to free enterprise.
The interesting thing is that MS seems to be an expert at entering into these sorts of strategic alliances without incurring any burden of responsibility. In this case MS took the technology, took the manufacturing rights, and left Sendo with nothing. One would think the contract would have prevented this, or specified financial consequences if MS did such a thing. They certainly have a history of destroying partners, and it seems like prudent partner would take this history into account. The MS lawyers and sales people must be excellent con men if they can routinely negotiate deals like this.
Kids, Santa Clause is real, and will always be able to deliver presents. He is just that good. This story was posted by a bad person who hates Santa Clause and wants to end Christmas. Do not believe it. Open your presents and enjoy your day. Remember, Santa loves you.
Since I heard a talk about this recently, and apparently i have karma to burn, I will take the flame-bait, as I way too often do.
There are christians that do take the Santa/Jesus feud seriously. If it is a feud, then, as depicted in the first South Park holiday episode, Jesus has lost. However, it need not be a feud. Jesus and Santa appeal to different parts of our personalities. They are not in competition. Of course if you are referencing the graven image clause of the biblical commandments, they that also precludes ownership of most artwork and buying clothes, cars, etc based on branding. It is not useful to pick and choose commandments.
The current image is large based on the Coke ads but Santa, much like Christmas is a composite. It Santa's case, there have always been legends of good people leaving gifts for kids. In the case of Christmas, there was an intentional decision by the church powers to set christmas a few days after the winter solstice, in line with then contemporary pagan traditions, rather than Spring, which would have been consistent with biblical accounts.
You are correct that Christmas is not about gifts, but peace and love. However, Santa in itself is not about materialism. It is about being rewarded for being a good person. This is a developmentally appropriate feeling for children. I was good today so I get a sticker in my book. Santa leaves one gift. Mall santa make parents buy too many gifts.
And just as a counter argument, no one should worship anything. The 9/11 people worshiped and it caused them to kill thousands of people. McNicol and McVeigh worshiped and they killed innocent children in a day care center. Hitler worshiped and he oversaw the deaths millions of innocent civilians.
I wonder if this will benefit anyone in a spread out country like the U.S. Right now the only people who have broadband live close to the telco switching station for DSL or get cable. For the people who can get DSL, cable or power broadband is probably also an option, and the decision will be made on price and reliability.
For the cable people, power-line broadband is also a possibility and the issue will again be pricing and reliability. I can image people staying away from power broadband because of reliability. If I lived in one these suburbs that has frequent power fluctuation (and I have worked in them), I would stay away from power broadband and install a UPS.
So the question is will the power companies install repeaters to reach the unserved population, and will that population pay at a rate that supports the service. Previous experience tells us the answer is no. We could implement another tax to help subsidize those who live far away from power lines, but I am not sure broadband is a necessity. It will be interesting to see how the (generally) conservative power companies and rural dwellers lobby congress on this issue. Certainly low population density suburbs and rural areas are more expensive to serve.
I would say M$ does not use lawsuits as a weapon for three reasons.
What MS does is to take existing technology and make it accessible and cheap to the common technology consumer. There is only profit in their approach because the have a monopoly(U.S. government rule of law, not my words) and so can set the price on individual sales and gain a large profit from volume sales. This keeps smaller vendors from making a profit, and also allows attacks competitators though unfair business practices, not lawsuits. We have few competing OSes because there is no money in it. Apple exists because it was the first consumer GUI(lisa) and Linux exisits becuase it was not written for profit.
Second, Microsoft uses unfair licensing restrictions and directly attack to maintain it's monopoly. Therefore many lawsuits have not been necessary. They have other avenues. They can intimidate system vendors to only include Windows on a machine, which is one the things that killed BeOS. They can create code that renders the competing product ineffective, which is one of the things that essentially has killed Netscape. They choose not to ship or support a product that is in generally use, which they did with Java and now has to ship. They make it difficult to set competing application as default, which they do with virtually every internet utility. Remember when it was all the craze to commodities the desktop and sell the real estate?
Third, MS can simple steal the technology and attempt to destroy the company, which is what claims happened to them.
Apple does not have option one or two, and can only occasionally exercise option three. Therefore to protect it's market share and protect it's trademarks and copyrights, it must sue. I do not agree with MS business practices, and I wish Apple could find another way to protect it's products. Also, I am glad Apple did not win the case against MS and the theft of the Apple desktop, although I wish that the court would have used the occasion to tame MS criminal practices.
One last point. To treat the Lindows as a purely trademark dispute is quite naive. Now it is true that Windows itself may, in time, become a nearly free product, MS will gain most of it's money through subscription applications, and Lindows users may prove a lucrative revenue in the same way that Apple users now are. However, that time is not now and may never come, Lindows may provide a means for users to migrate off a MS platform, and ultimately threaten the monopoly. This lawsuit is simply as the first foray into battle. An XP clone for Linux is the same principle.
I would say the issue is even more broad. When we talk about investment in non-western countries, one of the prime criteria is how transparently the business and government is run. Over the past year we have seen families destroyed by deceptive and opaque business practices.
We do not know what Microsoft is doing with it's money. We have had some indication that they use non-transparent financial vehicles to manage earnings and exactly meet investor expectation. Likewise, there was some noise about secret deals with the stock brokers that managed employee owned stock. We don't really know what is going on. Right now the company appears to be doing well, can meet all it's debt, and shows growth, so no one wants to look too hard. Nevertheless opaque company management of a publicly traded company is not acceptable.
First, the RIAA member companies as businesses have the right to charge for and protect product as they wish, within the limitations of the law. The association has been convicted of price fixing, and may be in violation of certain laws by labeling non-CD plastic disc products as CD's. They are also probably moraly wrong in their desire to hack. However, as is the case with most anti-terror legislation, we in the U.S. have been made so afraid by the rhetoric of our politician, reality shows, and newspapers that we are willing to give up any rights if we are allowed to hide behind our bricked in subdivisions and drive our SUVs. As such, giving the right to hack to the RIAA may be a small price to pay if we are allowed to continue to listen to Britney Spears, who likely would not exist without the RIAA.
However, ultimately, the success of a business depends on it's customers. If we buy RIAA CDs, even as used products, we support their methods. If we go out, find other music, and purchase those non-RIAA CDs, we support an alternate model that depends on quality and personal customer service, not mass appeal and copy protection. There is no way to legislate the RIAA from destroying the right of fair use anymore than there was a way to legislate Wal-Mart from destroying main street. In both cases, the presence of customers determines success.
At this point this is mostly as philosophical argument. On one side is the 'original intent' people who states, correctly, that HTML is not a fixed page design tool, but an cross-platform, extendable, entity markup tool. That is, the designer marks entities with tags, gives the tag a default behavior, but ultimately does not know or care how these entities are going to be rendered.
On the other side are those practical people who realize that the above idealization is ludicrous. We do care what things look like. Our clients do need clean well designed pages. Our clients do not understand the utopia we are trying to create, and therefore want to do stupid things like have a smidgen more space between the paragraphs, and we can do little to stop them.
The issue should, at this point, be largely resolved. The font tag is depreciated and shouldn't be used. CSS is defined well enough to allow designers control the look of the page while allowing the rendering engine to override that look when necessary. Also, as much as we might complain, IE defines the look of the web, and most designers are crafted their page to the IE engine. Responsible designers make sure the code works well enough in other engines, but IE is the look and feel.
What that means is that what happens in IE is not broken behavior, it is default behavior. M$ should be more responsible, but often their mistakes become default behavior.
I will jump to defend/. here. The essential URL for the article is 'http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/23/13924 3'. This is long but not complicated. It has no random sequence of characters. It is simple URL for anyone familiar with address conventions, and only slightly more complicated for the average user.
Slashdot Mirror
2. I use an alias to post on the internet. I do not reply to emails I do not know as legitimate.
3. I believe he means do not have an open email relay. Must spam is sent through open third party mail servers. The spammers use these to hid.
4. I do not know what the other traps are either.
We should not live in fear of spammers. However, we routinely do things to minimize risks. For instance, many of us have unlisted phone numbers.
There was a time when not just anyone could get a telephone. The bell monopolies would often charge very large deposits which were beyond the reach of lower income people. The phone company created a class of people who had to use pay phones. They used this captive audience to keep profits up. First, they set up the phones so they would not accept incoming calls. Then they the set the phone up so it was no longer a flat quarter, but was a quarter for a few minutes. It now cost a few dollars an hour to talk on a pay phone.
When the telephone monopoly faltered, so did the pay phone. Not only were people able to buy cell phones that were now competitive with pay phones, but lower income people only had come up with around $50 or so to get a phone. No longer did you need to give your life saving to get a land line. No longer did you have to pay a days salary to get the phone turned back on. There are now phone companies that will give you land line services when you can pay, with no penalties if you can't. Most cell phone companies will sell phone service by the minute at competitive rates, with extremely cheap starter phones. And since pay phones now charge about a dollar fee if you use a calling card, an immigrant might justify a land line solely on one call home a day.
Second, no one is forcing anyone to use anything. A standard is a base from which to work. Take a look at how everyone now has the opportunity to expand and adapt the standards to their own needs. MS, AOL, IBM, etc, all have been able to use and expand the standards to express their own business models, and usually make a profit. Is it too much to ask that in exchange, they give us those advances that they wish to become standard. Is it too much to ask that they give to future generations the same freedoms they enjoy. If a company wishes to use a standard that cost money, they are free to do so. For instance, many people to use the MPEG system, but I do not believe that it should be included in standard unless it meets the 'royalty-free' requirement. If a company is so narcissistic that it cannot see the benefit, I say let them walk.
Third, there is a difference between MS owning the internet and OSS owning the internet. As we have seen MS uses it power to manipulate the standards process in an effort to cripple and destroy competitors. As I have mentioned before, MS is the default standard of the internet, and if your web page doesn't work in IE, or browsers doesn't work with code generated in IE, they you are SOL. Much of the fragmentation is a result of this. OTOH, OSS has promoted interoperability and business innovation.
Finally let me suggest that perhaps this type of split license in bad for business. In the same way that companies use MS or IBM for technology because of predictability, I think it would be stupid to use technology of which the copyright is vague. Imagine a company that develops an web product based on the standards, They do not have to pay royalty because it is a web standard. Now imagine a new application that makes certain parts of the web obsolete in the same way that the internet made the old dial up services obsolete. You wish to adapt your service to the new technology, but it turns out that a single critical standard is owned by a competitor. Need I go any further.
The first thing I though of is that they are re-implementing the history tabsl; it already exists, and, as the article pointed out, getting home would get very hard very quickly. This would be senseless. My second thought is that they trying fix the damage caused by badly designed pages. These pages break the back button through scripting or Flash, thus confusing the user. These pages are also of IE specific. The fix for this needs to occur on the web page, not browser.
In the end, though, it makes no sense. I don't want a complicated back button. We can open new windows, new tabs, or go to the history if there is someplace special I want to go. Going to the previous page should be trivially simple. Now, if someone wants to implement a tree structure so that when I hold down the back button a set of submenus appear so I can choose places I went from certain pages, that makes some sort of design sense. Still, the simplicity of the fifo stack is compelling.
Beyond that, it is nonsense. My experience with XP is that is more stable than any other consumer MS OS, but not as good as 2000. For one thing, the adaptive GUI just gets in the way. The market has spoken on XBox. It is a good machine, but not good enough. Without the benefit of monopoly, MS was not able to set the price on the product, and had to do several price reduction in order to get the results it wanted. This would also be the case with it's OS and apps if competition exists. In countries that aren't MS hostages, the XBox is not doing well. As for the tablet PC, it is not yet a product. We do not how exactly it will act. It is probably as good as XBox, which may not be good enough.
The problem with MS is that it does not have to innovate. It does not have to create great products. Without competition, there is no need to excel. It can steal , cajole, and threaten. The creativity is limited to calling the OS 'Windows'. The charity is limited to giving kids junk and then taking a writeoff for the inflated value. The programming wonders are limited to creating a paperclip that you can't get rid of, or wizards that won't let you get back to the menu. I find the culture to be pretty unified.
' "Although Lindows.com certainly made a conscious decision to play with fire by choosing a product and company name that differs by only one letter from the world's leading computer software program," the judge wrote, "one could just as easily conclude that in 1983 Microsoft made an equally risky decision to name its product after a term commonly used in the trade to indicate the windowing capability of a G.U.I." '
This implies that the issue is not the use of a general word like Apple, Expedition, or Armada, but the use of a generally applied term, like processor, monitor, API, menu, etc. We would not in fact expect a car to be named "Truck" (real word by the way, means stuff, as in a truck carries truck), and have that be a trademark.
If MS were a creative edgy company, they would have done something more creative and edgy than Windows. Off the top of my head I can think of UltraDOS, Workspace, Integrated Environment (IE is a very promotable trademark), Personal Assistant, Work-Panes, etc. Of course, DOS was never a trademark. The fact is that some marketing yahoo with more salary than brains chose windows. Mistakes happen, but we cannot rewrite laws to compensate for them.
Furthermore, even if the trademark is reasonable, it can still be argued that it so generally used that it should go the way of Asprin. The articles says that like 90% of the people think MS Windowd, but since that is the market share, it might be that 90% of the poeple think windows as a generic term. Who knows?
As the article states, it is clear that Lindows is not on firm legal ground here, and it is clear that the intention is to dilute the trademark. However, if the trademark is not valid, then the intentions of Lindows become as irrelevant as the desire to see MS fail.
OTOH, if the classes are taught emphasizing logic, design, and structure, the CS classes can be an integral part of the science and math education. The key is a dedication to theory and a phobia or OS and language specific constructs. For instance, teaching the GUI editor of Visual Studio may be a simple way to allow a student to succeed at programming, but it does nothing to teach the important and general concepts of program structure, data organization, and logic flow. I think in some cases when teach math, science, or computers, we forfeit education for flash.
Also, in the U.S., we are in the midst of a standardized testing frenzy that de-emphasizes the ability and talents of the individual student and cares only about the ability to complete a few standard problems. It is no longer necessary for a student to learn, but merely regurgitate facts and forms. For instance, an important part of the standardized testing education is the calculator. The fact is that when doing business, or industrial, or any other type of work a calculator is nearly worthless without the ability to do simple math in your head and approximating complex results. However, calculators facilitate the use of standardized tests, so we have money spent on these electronic calculators instead of books and food.
So it is no wonder that computers are not working. There is no time for students to have fun and just do free form learning. Everything is targeted to these damned test. As a recent episode of 'King of the Hill' stated, all parent care about is zero tolerance and tests. When I was in public high school ('god I feel old'), we have a PDP 11 and several Apple //s. Our IT education started with programming theory, then moved into programming structure and actual coding. The emphasis was on logic and design. These lesson helped up in all parts of our education. In the Junior year we had the opportunity to do system administration on the PDP, assembly on the Apple, or whatever,
That experience was luxurious compared to what I see today. Windows machines tightly locked down so the student has no hope of learning administration. Classes that emphasis the application of very high level library functions rather than proper programming techniques. The ability to use Microsoft Office is more important than the ability to think.
I am sooo tired of people pushing their own pet agendas and then trying to gain credibility by disrespecting others' causes. That is sooo uncool. It like being of a lame high school student that needs to beat up smaller kids to compensate for a pathetic life and simple mind.
I am glad that you feel that perhaps, one of these days, you might time out of your busy schedule to save something other than your own ass. I mean really, you don't even want to inconvenience yourself by not eating meat or trying to improve the world, but you want to dictate what corporation can and cannot do with their technologies.
I don't mean to be mean, but when you are trying to be radical, and start insulting other radicals, you pretty much leave yourself open to this sort of thing. I was really be sarcastic and nice. You should be more careful in the future. If you cause is just, you don't need to disrespect other people. That is the lesson we need to learn in the US.
Also, the numbers quoted of 'one diversion per day' and the '50-100 thousand dollars' just doesn't sound significant. I am not sure how many flights are made a day, but I believe the airline revenue is in excess of 300 million dollars a day, which makes a diverted flight at most 0.03% of revenue. And what is the liability to the airline for misdiagnosis. I can't imagine that airlines are going to risk a lawsuit to keep a plane in the air. Anyone remember the guy who recently died because the train would not stop to let him go to a hospital?
It might be nice to keep these devices on planes just in case. But is not like a defibrillator that might actually save a persons life.
I don't think this is flambait at all. I think the excessive number of connectors one need on a computer is part of the inefficiency of the industry.
For instance, at at time when a Macs needed a single ADB port for all slow input devices, an Intel machine had two identical ports, for keyboard and mouse. These ports had to be color coded because they were not interchangeable. People hasted the few ports, but the standard made the machine easier to deal with and design for, even if a bit more expensive.
Likewise why have serial and parallel ports on a computer. Just make everyone use serial. It is not difficult, it is no longer expensive. I mean nearly everyone has switched to USB. What was the problem? I know that we need to support legacy hardware, but the poster has a point. Why bloat clearly niche device with things people no longer need or use.
But my real issue is with these printers and scanners that are shipped with two or three different ports. Is it really so expensive to replace the ports with and ethernet connector, at least on some of the machines. Most people have ethernet connector, and combined with a router with a DHCP server, these are easier to setup than a parallel or serial connection. I know not everyone has a router, but many people and most business have broadband, and selling broadband with a router, is, in my mind, irresponsible, but that is another rant.
Anyway, I agree with the poster. Don't put stuff in a product just because you can and it is cheap.
rant off
amen to that brother.
In addition, you analogy is flawed. You would find very few people who believe that one needs a special CD player to listen to a store bought CD. You would find very few people, at least who knows what Groupwise is, to expect an XP machine to receive Groupwise. However, that may be because no one expects XP to work in any reasonable fashion.
In this case, Krogers appears to linking the customer fingerprint to a credit card or bank account. SVC, which would make a lot of sense, is not an option. There are so many ways to hack this system, some without the victim even noticing. The weakness is that once you have the token, the fingerprint, a publicly available piece of information, you have cracked the main security. After that, you are at the mercy of the investigators. The bank may in fact say the problem is yours and not give the money back.
I have no credit card linked to my bank account, so I use electronic tablets. I use a bad signiture, and all my cards say check ID. Any money stolen is the problem of the credit card company.
I don't use the special store cards, but that is just mostly a protest against bloat. If you use a credit card the store can track you just as well.
I only have an ATM card, and I don't keep an excessive amount of cash it the account. I use this only for ATM machines because if the money is gone, then it is my problem. I am out the cash and have to fight to get it back.
I am sorry you metro uses smart cards, That really sucks. We have stored value cards, which are not linked to the rider.
I agree with you though. I stopped using Krogers when they jacked up thier prices and required the card to get a discount.
Do even though the parent is clueless, lets take a look at the "hypocracy". I think the basic concept is that all information has a tendency to become free, just like all matter has a tendency to become disordered, and we as humans, if we want to protect our information, must do intentional things to keep information not free.
It is a long way to go from this to justifying MS appropriation of others IP and selling products based upon it. For instance, most of us think we have the right to make copies of music and videos for ourselves and friends. How many friends is a contentious issue, but that tends to be quibble. However, most would say making copies of music we do not own or have the right to, and then selling it is on the illegal side. With the free software issue, only MS and other radicals would argue that all software should be one way or the other. In either case, MS has no problem taking, but want to control what everyone else has.
The interesting thing is that MS seems to be an expert at entering into these sorts of strategic alliances without incurring any burden of responsibility. In this case MS took the technology, took the manufacturing rights, and left Sendo with nothing. One would think the contract would have prevented this, or specified financial consequences if MS did such a thing. They certainly have a history of destroying partners, and it seems like prudent partner would take this history into account. The MS lawyers and sales people must be excellent con men if they can routinely negotiate deals like this.
Thank You. S. Clause
There are christians that do take the Santa/Jesus feud seriously. If it is a feud, then, as depicted in the first South Park holiday episode, Jesus has lost. However, it need not be a feud. Jesus and Santa appeal to different parts of our personalities. They are not in competition. Of course if you are referencing the graven image clause of the biblical commandments, they that also precludes ownership of most artwork and buying clothes, cars, etc based on branding. It is not useful to pick and choose commandments.
The current image is large based on the Coke ads but Santa, much like Christmas is a composite. It Santa's case, there have always been legends of good people leaving gifts for kids. In the case of Christmas, there was an intentional decision by the church powers to set christmas a few days after the winter solstice, in line with then contemporary pagan traditions, rather than Spring, which would have been consistent with biblical accounts.
You are correct that Christmas is not about gifts, but peace and love. However, Santa in itself is not about materialism. It is about being rewarded for being a good person. This is a developmentally appropriate feeling for children. I was good today so I get a sticker in my book. Santa leaves one gift. Mall santa make parents buy too many gifts.
And just as a counter argument, no one should worship anything. The 9/11 people worshiped and it caused them to kill thousands of people. McNicol and McVeigh worshiped and they killed innocent children in a day care center. Hitler worshiped and he oversaw the deaths millions of innocent civilians.
For the cable people, power-line broadband is also a possibility and the issue will again be pricing and reliability. I can image people staying away from power broadband because of reliability. If I lived in one these suburbs that has frequent power fluctuation (and I have worked in them), I would stay away from power broadband and install a UPS.
So the question is will the power companies install repeaters to reach the unserved population, and will that population pay at a rate that supports the service. Previous experience tells us the answer is no. We could implement another tax to help subsidize those who live far away from power lines, but I am not sure broadband is a necessity. It will be interesting to see how the (generally) conservative power companies and rural dwellers lobby congress on this issue. Certainly low population density suburbs and rural areas are more expensive to serve.
What MS does is to take existing technology and make it accessible and cheap to the common technology consumer. There is only profit in their approach because the have a monopoly(U.S. government rule of law, not my words) and so can set the price on individual sales and gain a large profit from volume sales. This keeps smaller vendors from making a profit, and also allows attacks competitators though unfair business practices, not lawsuits. We have few competing OSes because there is no money in it. Apple exists because it was the first consumer GUI(lisa) and Linux exisits becuase it was not written for profit.
Second, Microsoft uses unfair licensing restrictions and directly attack to maintain it's monopoly. Therefore many lawsuits have not been necessary. They have other avenues. They can intimidate system vendors to only include Windows on a machine, which is one the things that killed BeOS. They can create code that renders the competing product ineffective, which is one of the things that essentially has killed Netscape. They choose not to ship or support a product that is in generally use, which they did with Java and now has to ship. They make it difficult to set competing application as default, which they do with virtually every internet utility. Remember when it was all the craze to commodities the desktop and sell the real estate?
Third, MS can simple steal the technology and attempt to destroy the company, which is what claims happened to them.
Apple does not have option one or two, and can only occasionally exercise option three. Therefore to protect it's market share and protect it's trademarks and copyrights, it must sue. I do not agree with MS business practices, and I wish Apple could find another way to protect it's products. Also, I am glad Apple did not win the case against MS and the theft of the Apple desktop, although I wish that the court would have used the occasion to tame MS criminal practices.
One last point. To treat the Lindows as a purely trademark dispute is quite naive. Now it is true that Windows itself may, in time, become a nearly free product, MS will gain most of it's money through subscription applications, and Lindows users may prove a lucrative revenue in the same way that Apple users now are. However, that time is not now and may never come, Lindows may provide a means for users to migrate off a MS platform, and ultimately threaten the monopoly. This lawsuit is simply as the first foray into battle. An XP clone for Linux is the same principle.
We do not know what Microsoft is doing with it's money. We have had some indication that they use non-transparent financial vehicles to manage earnings and exactly meet investor expectation. Likewise, there was some noise about secret deals with the stock brokers that managed employee owned stock. We don't really know what is going on. Right now the company appears to be doing well, can meet all it's debt, and shows growth, so no one wants to look too hard. Nevertheless opaque company management of a publicly traded company is not acceptable.
However, ultimately, the success of a business depends on it's customers. If we buy RIAA CDs, even as used products, we support their methods. If we go out, find other music, and purchase those non-RIAA CDs, we support an alternate model that depends on quality and personal customer service, not mass appeal and copy protection. There is no way to legislate the RIAA from destroying the right of fair use anymore than there was a way to legislate Wal-Mart from destroying main street. In both cases, the presence of customers determines success.
On the other side are those practical people who realize that the above idealization is ludicrous. We do care what things look like. Our clients do need clean well designed pages. Our clients do not understand the utopia we are trying to create, and therefore want to do stupid things like have a smidgen more space between the paragraphs, and we can do little to stop them.
The issue should, at this point, be largely resolved. The font tag is depreciated and shouldn't be used. CSS is defined well enough to allow designers control the look of the page while allowing the rendering engine to override that look when necessary. Also, as much as we might complain, IE defines the look of the web, and most designers are crafted their page to the IE engine. Responsible designers make sure the code works well enough in other engines, but IE is the look and feel.
What that means is that what happens in IE is not broken behavior, it is default behavior. M$ should be more responsible, but often their mistakes become default behavior.
There is no way that this is an unusable URL.