Your next stop at this point should be the regulators for the state where the cable company is operating. File a complaint with them. You may also want to file a complaint with your own state's regulators.
Most public utilities, cable, electric, telephone are hypersensitive to complaints filed with the regulators, even if it doesn't show publicly, because it affects the rates they can charge.
I've been to the Rational Innovate conference (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/) a few years back, been trying to go again. The conference is chock full of software development / software engineering related topics from the companies that have the heritage, between Rational, IBM, and all of their partners. The location doesn't hurt, either, as flights are inexpensive and you can spend as little or as much as you'd like for the hotel.
To MS's defense , perhaps this is their attempt to legally cover their tails? Picture this: Someone types a word that has an offensive synonym, and sues Microsoft for the presentation of that word. It could happen.... If there weren't people out there who are so overly sensitized to the least little bit of slightly perceived hint of offensiveness, and take everything excessively personal, then this probably would not have happened...
"Garrin is hoping to 'reterritorialize the Net, bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies.'"
This statement irks me - Consider that the Internet is over 30? years old, originally a creation of the United States Department of Defense... Yes... That's right, the US DOD. Therefore, the entire premise of this guy's statement is blatantly false. How can this system, a creation of the US Military, which was originally built to support the US military's computing needs in a nuclear war, have as its original ideal of "virtual space without borders or hierarchies"??? It didn't. Yes - the current domain naming system needs to be reevaluated, and possibly scrapped. But do you really think that will happen? At the very least what we need is a Fair naming arbitration system, and a limit on domain holdings.
Actually, the Internet is an indirect creation of the US DOD. The Intenet's ancestors include the ARPANET, which was designed to provide a means for various sites, universities, gov't research houses, etc., to communicate, with the original requirement that it be severely fault tolerant in the event of a nuclear event.
What applications are critical for the Municipal environment? Perhaps someone could package a distro for that class of users. The major requirements that I see for such a distro are:
1. COST
2. Ease of ADMINISTRATION
3. Ease of Use
4. Office Tools
I don't think this is likely to happen. The first problem is that the lawyers don't want technocrats sitting on the bench because then their ignorance (in many cases) will show through. Also - the corporations would rather have the normal court systems available to them instead of ones that are dedicated to technical/technilogical cases. The prime example is the DeCSS/2600.com case. A technically astute judge would not have permitted the MPAA lawyers pulling the wool over the court's eyes...
How's this for a configuration? If you look at the specs on these boards, they allow daughter boards too. The daughter boards include SCSI, 10/100BaseT Ethernet, and IEEE1394. Mainframe Architectures off load I/O from the CPU to a large extent. Suppose we use these in a system like that... Use the PPC board with Ethernet, one on either end, you have the beginnings of a highly secure network card (can you say 1024+ bit keys?). Offload the SCSI, letting the PPC board pick up the I/O control, manipulating the data. Using the Ethernet daughtercard, you can monitor the network traffic, basically building the firewall directly into the NIC at that point. The possibilities for these critters go on.
Then there's the Beowulf - Talk about HUGE... 4 way processor host machine, with 8 of these PPC cards fully loaded, then put these into the Beowulf cluster. Multi-level parallel systems - now you're talking super-computing at a level never seen before!
Then there's the ultimate use... Take a system like this, 4 way processor with these cards, using the cards as multimedia, network, and other I/O sub-processors, and you're talking an incredible gaming box...
IBM chose that chip for its PC line specifically to hobble it; that way the PC could never compete with IBM's then-profitable minicomputer line.
Umm, If memory serves, IBM considered Motorola 68k chips heavily, but part of their requirements included a seat on the board of directors, and Motorola, who at the time, was already large enough to say No Way to Big Blue. So, IBM turned their sights towards a little Silicon Valley chip maker called Intel. Intel, because they were so small, and knew that IBM's search for a CPU could be the jackpot for them consented, gave IBM the seat on the board that they wanted, and, as they say, the rest is History.
I also use VSS for development here (Single person projects) for Visual FoxPro (Ack) projects. VSS, quite frankly STINKS. It uses a shared file system for its source database, like FoxPro. The problems include its handling of binary style files (tables, forms, projects, etc.) and release cycles. We use a three level environment, Development / Test / Production, and VSS has a severe problem handling the migration. I cannot update the Test project with the latest source. I have to delete and recreate the project to do this. Same thing with the Production space. Part of the problem, I know, is the integration with the VFP environment, but still, working with VSS has been painful. If you are going to use it, stick to text only files, and be Extremely careful with the Project files / environments.
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idit-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
-- Rick Cook, Mission Manager, NASA Mars Pathfinder Project
I guess they forgot to tell me all that good stuff while I was there. Because all our team ever used was the source code to our own product, and the documentation available on MSDN.
Question then is, did you use the publicly published Visual Studio, or an internal version? There may be a difference in the tool suite that could make a major difference in the performance of the final product.
Funnny - I went to the site for the story, interesting. MS patents the file format, then claims IP rights to the format. This effectively performs a Legal end run around reverse engineering rights. And even more fun, there is a link to another story at LinuxToday about this that states:
"
A broken ASF file not accepted by the Microsoft parser would be lost; the patent would prevent anyone from writing a byte-level tool to recover the ASF file. A third-party Linux player wouldn't be legal, since there would be no way to legally extract the file data, even if third-party video and audio decoders were available. Attempting to transcode a compressed ASF to another format would be impossible with any Microsoft-licensed tools, even if you have the permission of the copyright owner, or even if you are the copyright owner, because the Windows Media Format SDK license requires programs to actively block this action. For instance, Microsoft compelled Nullsoft to disable DSP plugin support in WinAmp with Windows Media Audio content because the DSP interface could be used to transcode, even though DSP plugins normally just process the audio."
Out of curiosity, I went into MSDN and tried to pull up the license for the Windows Media Components SDK. If I understand the pages right, you can't get the licenses without applying for the license... I would be most interested in seeing this license to see what it actually permits, and does not permit. Maybe it is time to separate this topic???
Slashdot Mirror
Your next stop at this point should be the regulators for the state where the cable company is operating. File a complaint with them. You may also want to file a complaint with your own state's regulators.
Most public utilities, cable, electric, telephone are hypersensitive to complaints filed with the regulators, even if it doesn't show publicly, because it affects the rates they can charge.
Good luck!
I've been to the Rational Innovate conference (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/innovate/) a few years back, been trying to go again. The conference is chock full of software development / software engineering related topics from the companies that have the heritage, between Rational, IBM, and all of their partners. The location doesn't hurt, either, as flights are inexpensive and you can spend as little or as much as you'd like for the hotel.
To MS's defense , perhaps this is their attempt to legally cover their tails? Picture this: Someone types a word that has an offensive synonym, and sues Microsoft for the presentation of that word. It could happen.... If there weren't people out there who are so overly sensitized to the least little bit of slightly perceived hint of offensiveness, and take everything excessively personal, then this probably would not have happened...
This statement irks me - Consider that the Internet is over 30? years old, originally a creation of the United States Department of Defense... Yes... That's right, the US DOD. Therefore, the entire premise of this guy's statement is blatantly false. How can this system, a creation of the US Military, which was originally built to support the US military's computing needs in a nuclear war, have as its original ideal of "virtual space without borders or hierarchies"??? It didn't. Yes - the current domain naming system needs to be reevaluated, and possibly scrapped. But do you really think that will happen? At the very least what we need is a Fair naming arbitration system, and a limit on domain holdings.
Actually, the Internet is an indirect creation of the US DOD. The Intenet's ancestors include the ARPANET, which was designed to provide a means for various sites, universities, gov't research houses, etc., to communicate, with the original requirement that it be severely fault tolerant in the event of a nuclear event.
What applications are critical for the Municipal environment? Perhaps someone could package a distro for that class of users. The major requirements that I see for such a distro are:
1. COST
2. Ease of ADMINISTRATION
3. Ease of Use
4. Office Tools
Just a though.
Has anyone noticed that comment submissions were due on 11 Sept, 2000??? A load of good that does us!
I don't think this is likely to happen. The first problem is that the lawyers don't want technocrats sitting on the bench because then their ignorance (in many cases) will show through. Also - the corporations would rather have the normal court systems available to them instead of ones that are dedicated to technical/technilogical cases. The prime example is the DeCSS/2600.com case. A technically astute judge would not have permitted the MPAA lawyers pulling the wool over the court's eyes...
How's this for a configuration? If you look at the specs on these boards, they allow daughter boards too. The daughter boards include SCSI, 10/100BaseT Ethernet, and IEEE1394. Mainframe Architectures off load I/O from the CPU to a large extent. Suppose we use these in a system like that... Use the PPC board with Ethernet, one on either end, you have the beginnings of a highly secure network card (can you say 1024+ bit keys?). Offload the SCSI, letting the PPC board pick up the I/O control, manipulating the data. Using the Ethernet daughtercard, you can monitor the network traffic, basically building the firewall directly into the NIC at that point. The possibilities for these critters go on.
Then there's the Beowulf - Talk about HUGE... 4 way processor host machine, with 8 of these PPC cards fully loaded, then put these into the Beowulf cluster. Multi-level parallel systems - now you're talking super-computing at a level never seen before!
Then there's the ultimate use... Take a system like this, 4 way processor with these cards, using the cards as multimedia, network, and other I/O sub-processors, and you're talking an incredible gaming box...