this means the the standard should be implementable without having to wade through a morass of patents. the standard was documented through references to microsoft propreitary code, and now the api is being implemented in microsoft proprietary dev environments. that is the point.
Uh, everything in DotNet is implemented in a proprietary dev environment. This has nothing to do with the openness of standards being implemented. Setting aside your initial claim that the ISO is supposed to validate a standard as being free of patents (which I don't believe to be true), the GP post seemed to be trying to claim that the fact that Microsoft happens to be providing a DotNet SDK has some kind of relevance to this standard not being open.
The DotNet API is not "the" API. It's an API that Microsoft provides. Furthermore this API, nor any other API for OOXML is the standard -- it's just a method of using the standard. The fact that Microsoft has created an API to help some of their paying customers to manage OOXML documents more easily really has nothing to do with whether OOXML is a good standard. The standard -- good or bad -- is the definition of the format, not the method of accessing it.
Microsoft provides DotNet APIs for working with standards such as SMTP, TCP/IP, HTML, GZip, and a whole host of standards that probably everyone would agree are open. Do you think this somehow compromises their open-ness? It also provides DotNet APIs for a heap of things that aren't open, or are even very Microsoft-specific. But it's not the presence of Microsoft APIs that makes those standards closed -- it's the fact that the standards aren't clearly published in a way that allows them to be implemented.
It's actually valid to argue that nobody else can write a valid API based on the specification, but this doesn't seem to be what either yourself or the GP post, or most of the responses to this article for that matter, are doing. Trying to draw some kind of imaginary causation between the standard being broken and Microsoft happening to provide a method of using it more easily on its own platform is ridiculous.
ISO should read this over and over, 1000 times: "You can use the Open XML API in any language supported by the Microsoft.NET Framework®. The help topics presented in this SDK provide code samples in Microsoft Visual C#® and Microsoft Visual Basic®.NET."
Can you be more specific about why? It's the OOXML specification which the ISO is concerned with. An available SDK has little to do with whether OOXML is a suitable document specification one way or the other, as far as I can tell.
Microsoft provides SDKs for lots of its technologies because it wants to make it simpler for its development community to use them. Most of these SDKs primarily target DotNet because that's the primary development platform that Microsoft wants people to write Windows apps in. The fact that this SDK exists in theory doesn't preclude someone else from writing an equivalent SDK for another platform, certainly if the actual OOXML specification is as adequate as the ISO has already declared it to be (pending the appeals process). Personally I don't think the OOXML specification is adequate for such purposes, but I can't see how a Microsoft-provided SDK has anything to do with that, or why it should be of any interest to the ISO. It's entirely another issue.
An API like this is potentially even a good thing. Granted that it gives Microsoft direct control over whether third party developers will write malformed formats that are incompatible with the standard, and they seem to actually be doing that. But it's also encouraging developers not to duplicate their own code for reading and writing document formats, and tying themselves into specific details of an XML spec. If apps are built around an API like this one, which they certainly will be now that it's available, it would (theoretically) make it much easier to port them to work with alternative document formats in the future. Who knows? Microsoft might one day even update the code behind its API to generically support more formats than just OOXML -- especially if they're acutally serious about supporting OASIS in the future.
Yeah it could be Microsoft trying to subvert the process again, but it could also simply be that Microsoft's a gigantic corporation, and that some parts of it don't necessarily work in sync with other parts of it. This is perhaps even to the extent that they might try to provide useful things from time to time without the malicious intent that could have been preferred from the ruling upper levels in the hierarchy.
Whereas Bush & Co's lies have been about issues that the public does have a right to know, and thousands of Americans have died as a direct result of these lies.
Not to mention anything of the millions of people of other nationalities (perhaps an order of magnitude higher) who have died, been irreversably wounded or displaced as a direct result of Bush's lies and mis-leading of the American public. A few Americans might have a problem with that, too.
Gmail's conversation view shows your messages and the replies of your correspondent in context. It is, if you will, a combined threaded view of your inbox and outbox at the same time.
Can't you just use a search folder that combines your Inbox with Sent mail, and/or whatever other folders you use? That's what I've been using in Thunderbird for the last year or so, after I wanted to mimic gmail's conversation view. I also use a similarly designed Search folder in Outlook when I'm at work, because I like to see conversations it context.
Granted that I don't use it much because I've found that search folders over IMAP/Thunderbird seem to be hideously slow (for me) when the Inbox and Sent folders are reasonably large, even when my IMAP server runs on the same local machine, meaning lots of bandwidth and very low latency. I think it's the threading of emails in such a search folder that slows it down most.
I do wonder if it should generally be more a task for the IMAP server to provide search folders and combined views in many contexts, though, because being closer to where the mail is hosted it's in a much better position to host useful indexes and so on. I haven't spent much time looking at available IMAP servers to find out if there are any that can be easily configured to do this.
Yeah, and I often get annoyed at not being able to clearly see past what's in front of me, but I'm not going to buy a big vehicle that I really don't need and just contribute to the problem. Not being able to see around whatever's in front of me is the primary reason I overtake. The only reason it works for you is because everyone's not doing what you're doing, just like everyone's (fortunately) not buying a big heavy SUV as a safety measure to compensate for their bad driving at everyone else's expense.
I have Google Apps for your domain, which I liked so much I wanted to pay for it. However, now that I have it seems I am "protected" from the bleeding edge settings.
But aren't you getting exactly what you paid for?
If I was running a business that was based on Google Apps, I'd want them to stay as stable and predictible as possible. If things started breaking or becoming less efficient than I'd planned on because Google decided to throw a random test feature into the code base every 3 or 4 weeks, I'd get pretty annoyed.
These 11% (would probably be higher if more people actually knew what their governments could do) are proof that paranoid schizophrenia doesn't exist. It's not paranoia when people really are watching your every move, reading your email, and listening to your phone conversations.
I actually trust my government for the most part. (It's not the US government, incidentally.) Having said this there's no way in hell that I support legislation that gives the government and its agencies power to snoop more on its citizens, at least without some very carefully designed procedures in place such as requiring warrants from independent judges, etc.
The whole nothing-to-hide argument seems thin. Personally I don't have anything serious to hide that I'm aware of, and I doubt I ever will. That said, I also have no reason to believe that I'll trust the government and its agencies in the future.
Simply trusting agencies not to abuse their power isn't good enough, because sooner or later someone will always come along who's happy to abuse their position and take advantage of it. (Communism's great until the corrupt people get to the top and then use that influence to change the rules and keep themselves there and push their own agenda.) By the same token, I have no reason to believe that if extra power is given to police and similar agencies to snoop on me and others, that they won't be full of people ready to abuse that ability in 10 or 15 years time.
Having a good and reliable government is as much about good design of its rules and keeping them firmly in place as it is about trusting the people who are in it. Sooner or later bad people will come along, but a good structure will keep the influence of those people to a minimum.
I understand both the importance of open source and standards, but I get kind of lost on what the ISO is, Microsoft's involvement, and what exactly OOXML is. What will the impact of OOXML being standardized be?
Well you probably know most of this, but I'll re-iterate it just in case. Basically there are a lot of organisations, particularly governments, who have recently either declared, or have indicated that they're likely to declare, a policy to only use open formats in various situations (such as document storage). This effectively rules out native MS Office formats because they haven't been open.
Such declarations have been treated as great for open formats (such as OASIS), and Open Source, and users generally, because it's much easier to write/maintain applications, open source or otherwise, which implement and use open formats. In other words, if you use an open format, you're much less likely to get locked into a particular software vendor, such as Microsoft, whose closed formats require you to use their software to open them reliably and accurately (at least in theory and according to popular belief in management circles). For the same reasons, open formats tend to be much more useful when exchanging documents. For example, it means that I don't have to buy Windows, install Windows, buy Office, and install Office, just so I can open some kind of law change proposition that a government department might have forwarded to me in an Office 2003 format.
Microsoft has been in danger of losing control over the market, because Office's dominance relies at least partially on format lock-in, and a cascading effect between organisations of document exchange. Organisations often standardise on Office and its formats specifically because they deal with many other businesses and organisations that also use Office. If some key organisations (such as governments) suddenly decide to standardise on open formats, it'll likely have a similar cascading effect whereby other organisations that deal with them will also adapt their systems to be able to interoperate with those open formats. Standardising on open formats means that even if people somehow use MS Office to produce them, organisations that set such a policy won't necessarily be locked into Office any more, and neither will all the organisations that deal with them.
Microsoft's answer was to declare that they'd be standardising and opening the Office 2007 formats, so that the key organisations would still be able to buy and use Office. (They probably could have claimed that Office 2007 would just support an existing open format such as OASIS, but they didn't.) Microsoft wanted to get the ISO to rubber-stamp their new OOXML format to prove to governments and other organisations that it really is open. The ISO (aka the International Standards Organisation) is a highly respected organisation on approving standards, so to get an ISO stamp is basically to declare to everyone that yes it is an open standard and it's been carefully peer reviewed to make sure of this.
The problem is that a lot of people think that OOXML really isn't open, for a variety of reasons which you've probably heard of, and that it's just a tool for Microsoft to keep control of the market using what's really a closed format whilst using double-speak and claiming that it's open, so it'll get accepted. There's also a lot of belief that Microsoft manipulated the ISO and its voting member organisations in some very despicable ways to get their Office 2007 formats rubber-stamped as an "open standard" when it really doesn't deserve to be.
Ultimately this means that employees of governments and organisations which declared they'll be using "open" formats might still standardise their work on Microsoft's OOXML formats, using the ISO's rubber-stamp to justify what they're doing, even though OOXML doesn't actually offer the interoperability benefits that a real open standard should offer, and arguably nobody would win except Microsoft.
I'm not sure how practical this configuration would be. Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
I agree. I was a TA in an HCI course a couple of years ago, and one thing that I found interesting was that in several of the hypothetical UI-design projects we gave them, most students jumped on the opportunity to claim that they were implementing a touchscreen interface so it'd be easier to use, without offering much reasoning or research to back up what they were trying to claim. There are certainly some useful applications for touch screens, but I get the feeling that more than a few people just jump on the band-wagon of assuming they're somehow better simply because they're there. They're probably slightly easier to teach and demonstrate more than they're easier to use.
Touch screens certainly have their place in some applications, but there are definitely things they won't help with. eg. If you have a vertical touch screen (which is reasonably common), someone will have to stand in front of it and hold their arms in the air, which gets more and more tiresome if you want them to perform a task that'll take longer than about 60 seconds or so. I'm sure they'll improve, but so far I've yet to see a useful desktop scale touch screen interface that's more than an info kiosk. ("Desktop scale" meaning something like for a desktop or laptop sized computing device, I guess.)
If they have a horizontal screen in front of them, you're still asking them to use big fat pointing devices (fingers) that aren't always accurate to the scale which today's typical applications like to give a pointing device. Add to this that a typical touch screen of any sort is still a hard, flat surface which still requires a user to look through directly through where they've just put their fingers or hand, or (occasionally) listen carefully. It doesn't give any tactile feedback whereas hands and fingers are well evolved with the ability to pick things up and manipulate them in complex ways.
Mouses are similar in some ways, in that you're reducing the complete flexibility of a user's hands and fingers to the manipulation of a single pointing device that can only be in one place at a time and has a couple of buttons. They seem to have become popular because they simplify things compared with a keyboard input, but it's often deceptive. People often tell themselves that a mouse is simple to use, but you can then watch them take an incredibly long time to do something because they're constantly moving the mouse and clicking (often missing things) to get even simple things done.
I also think that Windows in particular has historically been built around a very irritating philosophy of encouraging application developers to make everything possible with the mouse more directly than the keyboard, if the keyboard's even available. The ability to make things possible with a keyboard is usually there, but anything involving keyboards in nearly all the Windows application development frameworks seems to be an afterthought. If anything I think a multi-touch display might replace a mouse, but I also think it'll be almost as annoying as and not vastly more efficient than a mouse in most applications, unless there's a radical re-design of applications which seems unlikely.
Keyboards are ancient in technology terms, but they let someone with a little training interact very quickly, and they have the reliability of everything always being in the same predictable place without having to visually search for it, even if some software maps keys inconsistently. I wouldn't want to detract people from researching touch screens and multitouch interfaces, but personally I think it'd be great to see more research put into some more intuitive keyboard-
What choice do I have? Who has the right to tell me I must live in some country, or choose where they're going to send me when I don't live in it? I pretty much have to live in Antarctica.
I think you're close to right, although this Iranian guy now sells kebabs after settling on the island of Spitsbergen when his immigration attempts into Norway failed. Not quite lawless but it doesn't require residency permits, which I guess makes it easier for people to move there if they want to.
I don't want to call you a liar, but Windows activation (for both XP and Vista) requires a large change to hardware for the version of Windows to become de-activated.
I don't know about you, but when I was playing with our new Vista image that we're building for users at work, I managed to de-activate my Vista Enterprise machine three times (re-creating the image in between because we didn't have enough licenses at the time to run an activation server, and trying to get new keys from Microsoft was much more of a pain). Each time it was by installing the driver software for a particular USB key device. I presume it had something to do with Vista suddenly being able to detect the new hardware, and assuming that it was internal or something. In the end I learned to install the driver after imaging it the first time, but before the first activation.
Take the analogy with the house again: if the door is open, you can explain away your presence in the house - you went in to see if everything was OK, or whatever; but if there is a lock, even the flimsiest kind, you will have to break in, and it will be clear that you didn't come in just by accident, "because you thought they were home".
Surely what it really comes down to, however, is whether they actually had a right to put the lock there in the first place, or a right to order you not to break it. If you put a lock on someone else's house, should you expect the owner not to break it off? If you put a padlock on your house and sell the house to someone, can you sell it while withholding the right for them to enter it?
To put it in context, if I legally buy a DVD with a movie and legally license the content, why should the media cartels be able to tell me that I'm not allowed to play it on my Linux box using software designed to decrypt their CSS algorithm? Copyright is irrelevant (or should be) in this case because I've already licensed the content. Whether I play it using an "approved" player or kaffeine with libdvdcss on debian makes no difference to them, but there's a major convenience difference for me. Currently I live in Region 4 and have a nice collection of Region 4 DVDs. If I move to Regions 1 or 2 and lose my existing player along the way, I'll effectively have to re-license the media and pay for it all over again, just because the stupid publishers have been pushing through totalitarian laws that give them so much more control, all in the name of some kind of War Against Copyright Infringement which arguably doesn't even work.
What's specifically preventing me is a stupid law, being increasingly duplicated around the world (thanks partly to USA diplomacy and "Free Trade Agreement" conditions) that says I'm not allowed to use certain software to do it, even though I don't have much of an alternative, because it might also be able to be used to copy the content illegally.... and more specifically because I didn't reverse engineer their encryption and write that software myself. The specific software isn't illegal, the playback isn't illegal, but for some ludicrous reason the distribution of that software is illegal in some places.
This is why the DMCA and its copycat laws around the world are ridiculous, because they take a broadsword and inaccurate approach towards preventing illegal reproduction, putting far too much power in the hands of media publishers who have only their own interests in mind (including the ability to effectively define their own copyright laws and terms), and removing a whole swathe of things that people could otherwise do which had nothing to do with copyright infringement. Of course CSS is an "indication" that they don't want you to copy it. What's at stake is whether they should be allowed to indicate something like that and have it worth anything whatsoever in the eyes of the law.
A media publisher shouldn't be allowed to decide whether their content can be legally copied or not, because they'll typically abuse that privilege, deny fair use / fair dealing, and prevent whatever other traditional exceptions to copyright have always been inconvenient for them. Some content is in the public domain and there are other reasons and circumstances why it's legal to copy certain things, which publishers would love to deny people but legally can't, yet now they can flag their media so that it's effectively illegal to play or copy the media anyway. 50 or 100 years from now, depending on the location, all that content may be out of copyright. Will the technology to copy it still be illegal?
When I think of a red cross, I immediately think of emergency relief, supplies, etc. I don't think of household products. What did Johnson & Johnson see in trying to seize (what I feel is) a pretty well established brand with a certain set of qualities (such as disaster aid)?
I'm presuming the court made the appropriate decision here, but it sounds as if the story's more complicated than a bunch of crazy lawyers filing a ridiculous lawsuit. The problem that Johnson & Johnson had was that the Red Cross had (apparently) started to commercially license its symbol to businesses that were probably in direct competition with J&J, and this would have been unforseen in the past when J&J probably saw and treated the Red Cross as a completely non-commercial organisation, with largely uncommercial products, and where any place it used the logo were at best for fundraising.
If it suddenly starts licensing its logo, though, then other companies can start using it to promote their own commercial products in the same domain as Johnson & Johnson in a way that could potentially confuse customers. In other words, any business that wants to start leeching from Johnson & Johnson's pre-existing brand recognition and loyalty might be able to throw a comparably cheap donation towards the Red Cross as a licensing fee, without having to negotiate at all with J&J, and make their commercial packaging potentially confusing with Johnson & Johnson's. This could be a real problem for J&J in the case of competitors who want to get their products shelved right next to it in supermarkets, for instance. Apart from the licensing fee, the Red Cross isn't even benefiting anywhere near as much as J&J might be losing.
I think the lawyers probably wanted to prevent the Red Cross from being able to give other businesses what could be a huge commercial advantage and steal its own good will, when under normal circumstances this would all be prevented by trademark law. Sure, J&J has probably benefited a lot from having a logo that looks like the Red Cross, but it sounds as if they've at least had it for as long as the Red Cross has.
Saying Vista sells with new PCs is like saying people want junk mail because they choose to have a letter box.
I doubt that matters to the people he's trying to address, who are likely to care mostly about how much it's selling irrespective of the quality or what the customers actually want. I know of plenty of junk-mail delivery companies who would happily boast about how many letter boxes they'd stuffed their crap into. It's what their customers care about, after all, and the people who have to dispose of it aren't relevant.
Yeah they probably could and it'd be just as profitable. Personally I stopped watching the show years ago when all the good writers and production staff. ("Good" in this case meaning "people who produce stuff I like") moved over to Futurama.
I agree about this GTA guy though, the deal is done and nobody should have to pay him more now. But I think he makes a valid point in general. He probably had to take the deal offered because that is how the industry is right now. You try to negotiate and say goodbye to your job. I think that needs to change, not just for voice actors (though if the pay was better maybe the voice actors in games wouldn't suck so much; then again, we'd also need to see better writers), but also for the programmers, writers and designers.
I can appreciate the point, but really I think that if you want a secure income then you probably shouldn't be working in voice acting -- or any acting -- and expecting it to pay the bills. I know a lot of people who enjoy acting, but very few who make a career of it, because there's simply not a reliable salary for it. Perhaps with the exception of a few at the very top, there are just so many people who can do that job and have almost the same effectiveness, and a lot who want to but can't. It's understandable enough to say that people should be able to negotiate, but there are a lot of other people who'd love to have the opportunity. Why should an employer ignore them just because one person might have gotten their foot in the door earlier?
Rockstar could have let people pay them to have their voice feature in a game this popular, and they still could have pulled off a fairly good game if they were reasonably selective about the offers. The fact that they didn't do this, and instead decided to pay someone ~$100k for their voice, suggests to me that they're at least trying to be reasonable about it.
I think a union can be helpful when the workforce is limited, can't easily leave their employer, and if the employer is out-right abusing that. (eg. Speaking on behalf of workers at a steel mill that employs everyone in a small town, or whatever.) But if there's a flood of people who aren't union members and all want to do the same job, then perhaps it's just not a very good job to be trying to get work in. Any bargain that a worker's union conjures up will be effectively penalising all the people who can't get the work because they're not already part of the exclusive club.
I have to admit that there are things I don't understand. eg. I don't understand why people work for EA if they get treated so crappily, unless it's still worth something to them to actually have a job that pays them money. It's not a secret that EA's a bad place to work, though, and if you're good enough you should probably know not to bother applying there. The truth is that devs are replaceable in this industry these days, at least until people start to realise that and those people who don't really care as much about what they're doing go off to do something else instead.
I also don't really understand some of the movie-related guild unions in the States at all. I'm definitely not an expert but the whole relationship between movie studios and guilds in the USA seems completely whacked compared with everything else and probably the rest of the world. To me they seem more like exclusionary clubs that have agreements with the major studios. Their power comes much more from the fact that most in-demand writers/actors/directors are already members, particularly because most of those people became powerful as a consequence of working with the studios. This of course means that anyone else who even wants to deal with the studios, to try and get their career going, has to pay a guild joining tax, and thus the wheel keeps turning.
Good for them, I guess, but I do think that the effectiveness which organisations such as the Screen Actors Guild have still comes at the expense of people who'd like to be actors with certain studios but don't want to (or can't) work by the rules put forward by the union.
If the video game industry wants to be taken more seriously, they should start taking their product more seriously. That means respecting the talent that actually creates the games. Programmers shoulld get paid like writers. They need to have a guild. The head of the team should probably be considered the director or producer. As actors become more and more integral to the success of a game,they should be paid like any other actor.
Uh, perhaps some kind of guild or union might be useful in some circumstances in which case let it happen, but ultimately programmers should be paid whatever their worth within the law, which is about however much it takes for an employer to keep them employed so they won't leave and work somewhere else. Actors are exactly the same. The reason that a very small minority of actors get paid mega-bucks in big budget movies is because they draw crowds, even if many of them can't act very well. Movies that make money don't have to be good, and they're not at all representative examples of paying people according to their skill. They're examples of market forces in action, where money goes most into whatever pulls in the highest returns. In most cases that tends to be pouring money into getting well known actors, and cutting corners in places where money doesn't have as much effect, such as having mediocre scripts.
Games will never be "art" until the people who make them start considering them to be art.
Since when did anyone make money from art, though? (Money is necessary if you're intending to pay a lot to actors.) Money-hungry Hollywood movies are almost never art, unless you have a generous definition of the word -- they're money-making corporate ventures. The artsiest movies (which I personally prefer but taste varies) tend to be the ones that are full of relatively low budget actors who might get paid reasonably but not through the roof, and are actually good actors combined with good writers, good producers and good support crew.
I think this GTA4 voice actor guy is just disappointed to see a company that employed him making mega-dollars from a game in which his voice prominently features, but then you could say something similar about everyone else involved in the game who was paid an pre-agreed amount for doing their job. Investors in the game shouldn't be penalised and have to suddenly fork out more just because they invested in something that happened to be successful -- that's part of the risk they took by coming up with the money. Surely he knew that was likely to happen when he got involved, and now he has something to add to his resume which nearly everyone who matters would have heard of.
I honestly hate the fact that actors feel like they deserve more for doing less.
Personally I don't think this guy should get more than what he initially agreed to, and I also think he's sounding a bit more arrogant for wanting more. The fact is that his employer could hire someone else and get virtually the same result, because (as many people have already said) people don't buy games for the actors.
But I certainly don't have a problem with actors getting paid a lot if it's just a case of market forces. A really good example of this is the Simpsons' voice cast, who are now earning on the order of millions of dollars per season. That's a huge amount of money for the amount of time it takes and compared with other people on the staff (such as writers and producers and animators, presumably), especially considering it doesn't even prevent them from doing other work. The difference is that they're nowhere near as replacable. Fox can (and did) replace most of the original writers of the show to the extent that the plots and quality have changed hugely (imho), but it still makes money because the show's primary pulling point these days is the voice acting.
The reason they get this much isn't because they're arrogant, it's because that's what the studio thinks they're worth. The actors have been doing voices on this show for something on the order of 20 years! Nearly anyone would rather be spending their time doing something else by that time, and it's not as if the actors owe it to the show's fans to keep working at low rates for the rest of their lives. They've named a price that'll convince them to stay, and Fox thinks they're worth it. At some point it won't be worth it for Fox to keep paying the amount that the actors want, the show will end or they'll find someone else, and the actors will still be happy because they'll finally have time to spend on other projects they've wanted to to for ages. Meanwhile it's market-decided compensation for whatever else they're giving up which they'd much rather be doing.
If this GTA4 guy (whom I never heard of) reckons he's worth more than $100k then more power to him, but he needs to convince someone to pay him what he thinks he's worth. If a studio pays him more they'll probably be subsidising it by dropping alternative actors or talent somewhere else, which he'd be expected to replace. If he can't convince them to do that, he's worth less.
I assume that there's an IT professional somewhere that looks over these released files prior to their release?
I can't speak for everyone, but we just train our staff properly.
I work in a (non-US) government department where we often release information under New Zealand's Official Information Act, which basically says that anyone can request any information and the government's required to provide it as long as the request meets certain specifications. (ie. The request was specific enough, someone's privacy won't be unreasonably compromised, etc.) There's an independent office to resolve any disputes between government organisations and requesters (mostly journalists), but we actually go to efforts to avoid with-holding information unless there's a really good reason, because it just makes it easier. The fact that the law's the way it is in the first place means that people are fully aware that information about decisions they're making might one day be made public.
Occasionally we need to keep something back, though. In those cases I don't think IT people get involved unless they're specifically requested to. We do have specialist librarian staff though, whose primary work is to keep track of all the Official Information Act requests and make sure they're assigned to appropriate people and being answered properly. They're definitely not computer geeks, but they know all about the issues with releasing digital information and how things that look deleted aren't always gone, and they have procedures to cover that kind of thing.
But, I would have to say, when you actions lead to someone being beaten, jailed, and forced to use the same dish to eat and shit, then you can be sure your action was evil.
Not to completely take Google's side here since I don't know much about the what happened beyond what I've read, but surely the action would be "evil" only if you had reason to believe that your actions would lead to that kind of thing happening, and only if you were actually within control of your actions and there was no reasonable alternative. Google might have had no reason whatsoever to believe that this person would be treated badly, or they might have had the law-books thrown at them to the extent that they couldn't refuse the authority.
I'm not sure if this actually happened, but if you judge someone as "evil" simply because something they do leads to someone else being "evil", then you're setting a very disturbing precedent. Google probably could have handled this a lot better, but keep in mind that this guy wouldn't have been treated as he had if India had a working system for properly enforcing human rights.
I think this is just a philosophical difference between Windows and Unix (and similar systems). Unix was built from the ground up for the command line to be the main input device, with GUIs as an added extra. Unix programs and admin tools frequently have good command line interfaces which interface using plain text, and GUIs are often built over the top of the command line. Most Unix admins I know spend a lot of time in the command line, sometimes by choice and often because it's necessary. Windows was built the other way around. GUIs are the primary interface for administration and everything else, they often exchange information using tersely specified protocols and binary formats. A command line interface is an added extra on many occasions, if it even exists. Most Windows admins I know spend a lot of time in the GUI either by choice, or because it's necessary.
I run Debian Linux at home and use Windows all day at work, and I have to admit that my personal preference is the command line way of doing things. It just feels a bit more powerful, I guess. YMMV but I usually find I can type much more quickly, delicately and specifically than I can move a mouse pointer around and click things, or even use GUI shortcut keys. (This makes sense too given that a mouse effectively reduces 10 fingers to a single line-it-up-and-thump-it device.) Having said this though, I rarely use the command line at work. This is probably because the Windows GUI tools and apps tend to be more powerful, but it's also very much because the Windows command line just feels klunky in comparison to something like bash or tcsh running inside an xterm.
It's as if Microsoft's primary command prompt has hardly changed at all from DOS days. It's not very customisable, and it also runs inside one of the most horrible windows for a command line. ie. Not easily resize-able or reconfigurable for things like window size and column width without drilling into a hierarchy of menus. The ability to string commands or tools together in Windows is very limited, unless two commands were specifically designed to interact, so there's much more reliance on monolithic tools or third party applications to do things. The PowerShell is a good step, but it's directed more at scripting than command line interaction. (It's also stuck inside that hideous fixed-size window.)
If there is no abuse, and, indeed, no actual children involved, then what the hell is the justification?
I haven't been following this at all but the one justification I can think of is to do with fairness to the children involved, in having pictures of them altered to appear sexually explicit. If faked pictures were being made available it could end up being very embarrassing, and I doubt there's any possibility of a child giving a suitably informed consent about this kind of thing. On the other hand, should it be okay for parents to offer images of their children for manipulation into faked child porn?
most software was written in straight machine code, and physical limitations on memory and storage space meant that programs were smaller. So analysing a binary wasn't anything like as intractable as it is today.
Add to this the curious attitude of paranoia that's developed around the possibility of others disassembling binaries, and which is widely promoted by companies like Microsoft who are very happy to provide developers with tools to make it even harder for anyone to get your precious source code.
...I don't think that Microsoft as a company is concerned about these kids' education. I think they are more concerned about training new users to use MS rather than linux, and with keeping 90%+ of desktop OS market.
I'm not sure if this is a disagreement with what you said or a clarification, but personally I don't think Microsoft cares about training these users at all. Microsoft wouldn't have given it a second thought if OLPC didn't take the initiative. Even if these kids are trained on Windows, it's unlikely they'll ever be a huge source of income for Microsoft or any other proprietary businesses, compared with the money made in developed places.
I think what frightens Microsoft, given that the children will get trained with or without Microsoft, is the possibility of any other platform ending up with some kind of dominance through popularity in third world countries. Microsoft's dominance comes through its monopolistic control and lock-in practices, and if non-Microsoft platforms become too dominant in third world countries, it'll almost certainly propagate to more developed countries in one form or another, reducing the control that Microsoft has. (ie. Customers will be demanding the ability to use open protocols, file formats, etc, so they can properly interact with those in third world countries.) Such a prospect has caused Microsoft's rather ruthless marketing and management machine to jump up and do whatever's necessary to stop that from happening, even though it might mean using subversive tactics to undermine the OLPC programme.
Actually I have no doubt that many people in Microsoft, probably including most at ground level, have nothing but the best intentions and fully believe that Windows is a good thing for OLPC, since that's what you tend to do when you're embedded in such a corporate atmosphere. I also have no doubt that there are subversive tactics and strategic decisions going on around this at a marketing and management level.
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Uh, everything in DotNet is implemented in a proprietary dev environment. This has nothing to do with the openness of standards being implemented. Setting aside your initial claim that the ISO is supposed to validate a standard as being free of patents (which I don't believe to be true), the GP post seemed to be trying to claim that the fact that Microsoft happens to be providing a DotNet SDK has some kind of relevance to this standard not being open.
The DotNet API is not "the" API. It's an API that Microsoft provides. Furthermore this API, nor any other API for OOXML is the standard -- it's just a method of using the standard. The fact that Microsoft has created an API to help some of their paying customers to manage OOXML documents more easily really has nothing to do with whether OOXML is a good standard. The standard -- good or bad -- is the definition of the format, not the method of accessing it.
Microsoft provides DotNet APIs for working with standards such as SMTP, TCP/IP, HTML, GZip, and a whole host of standards that probably everyone would agree are open. Do you think this somehow compromises their open-ness? It also provides DotNet APIs for a heap of things that aren't open, or are even very Microsoft-specific. But it's not the presence of Microsoft APIs that makes those standards closed -- it's the fact that the standards aren't clearly published in a way that allows them to be implemented.
It's actually valid to argue that nobody else can write a valid API based on the specification, but this doesn't seem to be what either yourself or the GP post, or most of the responses to this article for that matter, are doing. Trying to draw some kind of imaginary causation between the standard being broken and Microsoft happening to provide a method of using it more easily on its own platform is ridiculous.
Can you be more specific about why? It's the OOXML specification which the ISO is concerned with. An available SDK has little to do with whether OOXML is a suitable document specification one way or the other, as far as I can tell.
Microsoft provides SDKs for lots of its technologies because it wants to make it simpler for its development community to use them. Most of these SDKs primarily target DotNet because that's the primary development platform that Microsoft wants people to write Windows apps in. The fact that this SDK exists in theory doesn't preclude someone else from writing an equivalent SDK for another platform, certainly if the actual OOXML specification is as adequate as the ISO has already declared it to be (pending the appeals process). Personally I don't think the OOXML specification is adequate for such purposes, but I can't see how a Microsoft-provided SDK has anything to do with that, or why it should be of any interest to the ISO. It's entirely another issue.
An API like this is potentially even a good thing. Granted that it gives Microsoft direct control over whether third party developers will write malformed formats that are incompatible with the standard, and they seem to actually be doing that. But it's also encouraging developers not to duplicate their own code for reading and writing document formats, and tying themselves into specific details of an XML spec. If apps are built around an API like this one, which they certainly will be now that it's available, it would (theoretically) make it much easier to port them to work with alternative document formats in the future. Who knows? Microsoft might one day even update the code behind its API to generically support more formats than just OOXML -- especially if they're acutally serious about supporting OASIS in the future.
Yeah it could be Microsoft trying to subvert the process again, but it could also simply be that Microsoft's a gigantic corporation, and that some parts of it don't necessarily work in sync with other parts of it. This is perhaps even to the extent that they might try to provide useful things from time to time without the malicious intent that could have been preferred from the ruling upper levels in the hierarchy.
Not to mention anything of the millions of people of other nationalities (perhaps an order of magnitude higher) who have died, been irreversably wounded or displaced as a direct result of Bush's lies and mis-leading of the American public. A few Americans might have a problem with that, too.
Can't you just use a search folder that combines your Inbox with Sent mail, and/or whatever other folders you use? That's what I've been using in Thunderbird for the last year or so, after I wanted to mimic gmail's conversation view. I also use a similarly designed Search folder in Outlook when I'm at work, because I like to see conversations it context.
Granted that I don't use it much because I've found that search folders over IMAP/Thunderbird seem to be hideously slow (for me) when the Inbox and Sent folders are reasonably large, even when my IMAP server runs on the same local machine, meaning lots of bandwidth and very low latency. I think it's the threading of emails in such a search folder that slows it down most.
I do wonder if it should generally be more a task for the IMAP server to provide search folders and combined views in many contexts, though, because being closer to where the mail is hosted it's in a much better position to host useful indexes and so on. I haven't spent much time looking at available IMAP servers to find out if there are any that can be easily configured to do this.
Yeah, and I often get annoyed at not being able to clearly see past what's in front of me, but I'm not going to buy a big vehicle that I really don't need and just contribute to the problem. Not being able to see around whatever's in front of me is the primary reason I overtake. The only reason it works for you is because everyone's not doing what you're doing, just like everyone's (fortunately) not buying a big heavy SUV as a safety measure to compensate for their bad driving at everyone else's expense.
But aren't you getting exactly what you paid for?
If I was running a business that was based on Google Apps, I'd want them to stay as stable and predictible as possible. If things started breaking or becoming less efficient than I'd planned on because Google decided to throw a random test feature into the code base every 3 or 4 weeks, I'd get pretty annoyed.
I actually trust my government for the most part. (It's not the US government, incidentally.) Having said this there's no way in hell that I support legislation that gives the government and its agencies power to snoop more on its citizens, at least without some very carefully designed procedures in place such as requiring warrants from independent judges, etc.
The whole nothing-to-hide argument seems thin. Personally I don't have anything serious to hide that I'm aware of, and I doubt I ever will. That said, I also have no reason to believe that I'll trust the government and its agencies in the future.
Simply trusting agencies not to abuse their power isn't good enough, because sooner or later someone will always come along who's happy to abuse their position and take advantage of it. (Communism's great until the corrupt people get to the top and then use that influence to change the rules and keep themselves there and push their own agenda.) By the same token, I have no reason to believe that if extra power is given to police and similar agencies to snoop on me and others, that they won't be full of people ready to abuse that ability in 10 or 15 years time.
Having a good and reliable government is as much about good design of its rules and keeping them firmly in place as it is about trusting the people who are in it. Sooner or later bad people will come along, but a good structure will keep the influence of those people to a minimum.
Well you probably know most of this, but I'll re-iterate it just in case. Basically there are a lot of organisations, particularly governments, who have recently either declared, or have indicated that they're likely to declare, a policy to only use open formats in various situations (such as document storage). This effectively rules out native MS Office formats because they haven't been open.
Such declarations have been treated as great for open formats (such as OASIS), and Open Source, and users generally, because it's much easier to write/maintain applications, open source or otherwise, which implement and use open formats. In other words, if you use an open format, you're much less likely to get locked into a particular software vendor, such as Microsoft, whose closed formats require you to use their software to open them reliably and accurately (at least in theory and according to popular belief in management circles). For the same reasons, open formats tend to be much more useful when exchanging documents. For example, it means that I don't have to buy Windows, install Windows, buy Office, and install Office, just so I can open some kind of law change proposition that a government department might have forwarded to me in an Office 2003 format.
Microsoft has been in danger of losing control over the market, because Office's dominance relies at least partially on format lock-in, and a cascading effect between organisations of document exchange. Organisations often standardise on Office and its formats specifically because they deal with many other businesses and organisations that also use Office. If some key organisations (such as governments) suddenly decide to standardise on open formats, it'll likely have a similar cascading effect whereby other organisations that deal with them will also adapt their systems to be able to interoperate with those open formats. Standardising on open formats means that even if people somehow use MS Office to produce them, organisations that set such a policy won't necessarily be locked into Office any more, and neither will all the organisations that deal with them.
Microsoft's answer was to declare that they'd be standardising and opening the Office 2007 formats, so that the key organisations would still be able to buy and use Office. (They probably could have claimed that Office 2007 would just support an existing open format such as OASIS, but they didn't.) Microsoft wanted to get the ISO to rubber-stamp their new OOXML format to prove to governments and other organisations that it really is open. The ISO (aka the International Standards Organisation) is a highly respected organisation on approving standards, so to get an ISO stamp is basically to declare to everyone that yes it is an open standard and it's been carefully peer reviewed to make sure of this.
The problem is that a lot of people think that OOXML really isn't open, for a variety of reasons which you've probably heard of, and that it's just a tool for Microsoft to keep control of the market using what's really a closed format whilst using double-speak and claiming that it's open, so it'll get accepted. There's also a lot of belief that Microsoft manipulated the ISO and its voting member organisations in some very despicable ways to get their Office 2007 formats rubber-stamped as an "open standard" when it really doesn't deserve to be.
Ultimately this means that employees of governments and organisations which declared they'll be using "open" formats might still standardise their work on Microsoft's OOXML formats, using the ISO's rubber-stamp to justify what they're doing, even though OOXML doesn't actually offer the interoperability benefits that a real open standard should offer, and arguably nobody would win except Microsoft.
I agree. I was a TA in an HCI course a couple of years ago, and one thing that I found interesting was that in several of the hypothetical UI-design projects we gave them, most students jumped on the opportunity to claim that they were implementing a touchscreen interface so it'd be easier to use, without offering much reasoning or research to back up what they were trying to claim. There are certainly some useful applications for touch screens, but I get the feeling that more than a few people just jump on the band-wagon of assuming they're somehow better simply because they're there. They're probably slightly easier to teach and demonstrate more than they're easier to use.
Touch screens certainly have their place in some applications, but there are definitely things they won't help with. eg. If you have a vertical touch screen (which is reasonably common), someone will have to stand in front of it and hold their arms in the air, which gets more and more tiresome if you want them to perform a task that'll take longer than about 60 seconds or so. I'm sure they'll improve, but so far I've yet to see a useful desktop scale touch screen interface that's more than an info kiosk. ("Desktop scale" meaning something like for a desktop or laptop sized computing device, I guess.)
If they have a horizontal screen in front of them, you're still asking them to use big fat pointing devices (fingers) that aren't always accurate to the scale which today's typical applications like to give a pointing device. Add to this that a typical touch screen of any sort is still a hard, flat surface which still requires a user to look through directly through where they've just put their fingers or hand, or (occasionally) listen carefully. It doesn't give any tactile feedback whereas hands and fingers are well evolved with the ability to pick things up and manipulate them in complex ways.
Mouses are similar in some ways, in that you're reducing the complete flexibility of a user's hands and fingers to the manipulation of a single pointing device that can only be in one place at a time and has a couple of buttons. They seem to have become popular because they simplify things compared with a keyboard input, but it's often deceptive. People often tell themselves that a mouse is simple to use, but you can then watch them take an incredibly long time to do something because they're constantly moving the mouse and clicking (often missing things) to get even simple things done.
I also think that Windows in particular has historically been built around a very irritating philosophy of encouraging application developers to make everything possible with the mouse more directly than the keyboard, if the keyboard's even available. The ability to make things possible with a keyboard is usually there, but anything involving keyboards in nearly all the Windows application development frameworks seems to be an afterthought. If anything I think a multi-touch display might replace a mouse, but I also think it'll be almost as annoying as and not vastly more efficient than a mouse in most applications, unless there's a radical re-design of applications which seems unlikely.
Keyboards are ancient in technology terms, but they let someone with a little training interact very quickly, and they have the reliability of everything always being in the same predictable place without having to visually search for it, even if some software maps keys inconsistently. I wouldn't want to detract people from researching touch screens and multitouch interfaces, but personally I think it'd be great to see more research put into some more intuitive keyboard-
I think you're close to right, although this Iranian guy now sells kebabs after settling on the island of Spitsbergen when his immigration attempts into Norway failed. Not quite lawless but it doesn't require residency permits, which I guess makes it easier for people to move there if they want to.
I don't know about you, but when I was playing with our new Vista image that we're building for users at work, I managed to de-activate my Vista Enterprise machine three times (re-creating the image in between because we didn't have enough licenses at the time to run an activation server, and trying to get new keys from Microsoft was much more of a pain). Each time it was by installing the driver software for a particular USB key device. I presume it had something to do with Vista suddenly being able to detect the new hardware, and assuming that it was internal or something. In the end I learned to install the driver after imaging it the first time, but before the first activation.
Surely what it really comes down to, however, is whether they actually had a right to put the lock there in the first place, or a right to order you not to break it. If you put a lock on someone else's house, should you expect the owner not to break it off? If you put a padlock on your house and sell the house to someone, can you sell it while withholding the right for them to enter it?
To put it in context, if I legally buy a DVD with a movie and legally license the content, why should the media cartels be able to tell me that I'm not allowed to play it on my Linux box using software designed to decrypt their CSS algorithm? Copyright is irrelevant (or should be) in this case because I've already licensed the content. Whether I play it using an "approved" player or kaffeine with libdvdcss on debian makes no difference to them, but there's a major convenience difference for me. Currently I live in Region 4 and have a nice collection of Region 4 DVDs. If I move to Regions 1 or 2 and lose my existing player along the way, I'll effectively have to re-license the media and pay for it all over again, just because the stupid publishers have been pushing through totalitarian laws that give them so much more control, all in the name of some kind of War Against Copyright Infringement which arguably doesn't even work.
What's specifically preventing me is a stupid law, being increasingly duplicated around the world (thanks partly to USA diplomacy and "Free Trade Agreement" conditions) that says I'm not allowed to use certain software to do it, even though I don't have much of an alternative, because it might also be able to be used to copy the content illegally.... and more specifically because I didn't reverse engineer their encryption and write that software myself. The specific software isn't illegal, the playback isn't illegal, but for some ludicrous reason the distribution of that software is illegal in some places.
This is why the DMCA and its copycat laws around the world are ridiculous, because they take a broadsword and inaccurate approach towards preventing illegal reproduction, putting far too much power in the hands of media publishers who have only their own interests in mind (including the ability to effectively define their own copyright laws and terms), and removing a whole swathe of things that people could otherwise do which had nothing to do with copyright infringement. Of course CSS is an "indication" that they don't want you to copy it. What's at stake is whether they should be allowed to indicate something like that and have it worth anything whatsoever in the eyes of the law.
A media publisher shouldn't be allowed to decide whether their content can be legally copied or not, because they'll typically abuse that privilege, deny fair use / fair dealing, and prevent whatever other traditional exceptions to copyright have always been inconvenient for them. Some content is in the public domain and there are other reasons and circumstances why it's legal to copy certain things, which publishers would love to deny people but legally can't, yet now they can flag their media so that it's effectively illegal to play or copy the media anyway. 50 or 100 years from now, depending on the location, all that content may be out of copyright. Will the technology to copy it still be illegal?
I'm presuming the court made the appropriate decision here, but it sounds as if the story's more complicated than a bunch of crazy lawyers filing a ridiculous lawsuit. The problem that Johnson & Johnson had was that the Red Cross had (apparently) started to commercially license its symbol to businesses that were probably in direct competition with J&J, and this would have been unforseen in the past when J&J probably saw and treated the Red Cross as a completely non-commercial organisation, with largely uncommercial products, and where any place it used the logo were at best for fundraising.
If it suddenly starts licensing its logo, though, then other companies can start using it to promote their own commercial products in the same domain as Johnson & Johnson in a way that could potentially confuse customers. In other words, any business that wants to start leeching from Johnson & Johnson's pre-existing brand recognition and loyalty might be able to throw a comparably cheap donation towards the Red Cross as a licensing fee, without having to negotiate at all with J&J, and make their commercial packaging potentially confusing with Johnson & Johnson's. This could be a real problem for J&J in the case of competitors who want to get their products shelved right next to it in supermarkets, for instance. Apart from the licensing fee, the Red Cross isn't even benefiting anywhere near as much as J&J might be losing.
I think the lawyers probably wanted to prevent the Red Cross from being able to give other businesses what could be a huge commercial advantage and steal its own good will, when under normal circumstances this would all be prevented by trademark law. Sure, J&J has probably benefited a lot from having a logo that looks like the Red Cross, but it sounds as if they've at least had it for as long as the Red Cross has.
I doubt that matters to the people he's trying to address, who are likely to care mostly about how much it's selling irrespective of the quality or what the customers actually want. I know of plenty of junk-mail delivery companies who would happily boast about how many letter boxes they'd stuffed their crap into. It's what their customers care about, after all, and the people who have to dispose of it aren't relevant.
Obviously they must be pirating illegal copies of Vista and installing it on the hardware themselves!
Yeah they probably could and it'd be just as profitable. Personally I stopped watching the show years ago when all the good writers and production staff. ("Good" in this case meaning "people who produce stuff I like") moved over to Futurama.
No argument that some big movies are good.
I can appreciate the point, but really I think that if you want a secure income then you probably shouldn't be working in voice acting -- or any acting -- and expecting it to pay the bills. I know a lot of people who enjoy acting, but very few who make a career of it, because there's simply not a reliable salary for it. Perhaps with the exception of a few at the very top, there are just so many people who can do that job and have almost the same effectiveness, and a lot who want to but can't. It's understandable enough to say that people should be able to negotiate, but there are a lot of other people who'd love to have the opportunity. Why should an employer ignore them just because one person might have gotten their foot in the door earlier?
Rockstar could have let people pay them to have their voice feature in a game this popular, and they still could have pulled off a fairly good game if they were reasonably selective about the offers. The fact that they didn't do this, and instead decided to pay someone ~$100k for their voice, suggests to me that they're at least trying to be reasonable about it.
I think a union can be helpful when the workforce is limited, can't easily leave their employer, and if the employer is out-right abusing that. (eg. Speaking on behalf of workers at a steel mill that employs everyone in a small town, or whatever.) But if there's a flood of people who aren't union members and all want to do the same job, then perhaps it's just not a very good job to be trying to get work in. Any bargain that a worker's union conjures up will be effectively penalising all the people who can't get the work because they're not already part of the exclusive club.
I have to admit that there are things I don't understand. eg. I don't understand why people work for EA if they get treated so crappily, unless it's still worth something to them to actually have a job that pays them money. It's not a secret that EA's a bad place to work, though, and if you're good enough you should probably know not to bother applying there. The truth is that devs are replaceable in this industry these days, at least until people start to realise that and those people who don't really care as much about what they're doing go off to do something else instead.
I also don't really understand some of the movie-related guild unions in the States at all. I'm definitely not an expert but the whole relationship between movie studios and guilds in the USA seems completely whacked compared with everything else and probably the rest of the world. To me they seem more like exclusionary clubs that have agreements with the major studios. Their power comes much more from the fact that most in-demand writers/actors/directors are already members, particularly because most of those people became powerful as a consequence of working with the studios. This of course means that anyone else who even wants to deal with the studios, to try and get their career going, has to pay a guild joining tax, and thus the wheel keeps turning.
Good for them, I guess, but I do think that the effectiveness which organisations such as the Screen Actors Guild have still comes at the expense of people who'd like to be actors with certain studios but don't want to (or can't) work by the rules put forward by the union.
Uh, perhaps some kind of guild or union might be useful in some circumstances in which case let it happen, but ultimately programmers should be paid whatever their worth within the law, which is about however much it takes for an employer to keep them employed so they won't leave and work somewhere else. Actors are exactly the same. The reason that a very small minority of actors get paid mega-bucks in big budget movies is because they draw crowds, even if many of them can't act very well. Movies that make money don't have to be good, and they're not at all representative examples of paying people according to their skill. They're examples of market forces in action, where money goes most into whatever pulls in the highest returns. In most cases that tends to be pouring money into getting well known actors, and cutting corners in places where money doesn't have as much effect, such as having mediocre scripts.
Since when did anyone make money from art, though? (Money is necessary if you're intending to pay a lot to actors.) Money-hungry Hollywood movies are almost never art, unless you have a generous definition of the word -- they're money-making corporate ventures. The artsiest movies (which I personally prefer but taste varies) tend to be the ones that are full of relatively low budget actors who might get paid reasonably but not through the roof, and are actually good actors combined with good writers, good producers and good support crew.
I think this GTA4 voice actor guy is just disappointed to see a company that employed him making mega-dollars from a game in which his voice prominently features, but then you could say something similar about everyone else involved in the game who was paid an pre-agreed amount for doing their job. Investors in the game shouldn't be penalised and have to suddenly fork out more just because they invested in something that happened to be successful -- that's part of the risk they took by coming up with the money. Surely he knew that was likely to happen when he got involved, and now he has something to add to his resume which nearly everyone who matters would have heard of.
Personally I don't think this guy should get more than what he initially agreed to, and I also think he's sounding a bit more arrogant for wanting more. The fact is that his employer could hire someone else and get virtually the same result, because (as many people have already said) people don't buy games for the actors.
But I certainly don't have a problem with actors getting paid a lot if it's just a case of market forces. A really good example of this is the Simpsons' voice cast, who are now earning on the order of millions of dollars per season. That's a huge amount of money for the amount of time it takes and compared with other people on the staff (such as writers and producers and animators, presumably), especially considering it doesn't even prevent them from doing other work. The difference is that they're nowhere near as replacable. Fox can (and did) replace most of the original writers of the show to the extent that the plots and quality have changed hugely (imho), but it still makes money because the show's primary pulling point these days is the voice acting.
The reason they get this much isn't because they're arrogant, it's because that's what the studio thinks they're worth. The actors have been doing voices on this show for something on the order of 20 years! Nearly anyone would rather be spending their time doing something else by that time, and it's not as if the actors owe it to the show's fans to keep working at low rates for the rest of their lives. They've named a price that'll convince them to stay, and Fox thinks they're worth it. At some point it won't be worth it for Fox to keep paying the amount that the actors want, the show will end or they'll find someone else, and the actors will still be happy because they'll finally have time to spend on other projects they've wanted to to for ages. Meanwhile it's market-decided compensation for whatever else they're giving up which they'd much rather be doing.
If this GTA4 guy (whom I never heard of) reckons he's worth more than $100k then more power to him, but he needs to convince someone to pay him what he thinks he's worth. If a studio pays him more they'll probably be subsidising it by dropping alternative actors or talent somewhere else, which he'd be expected to replace. If he can't convince them to do that, he's worth less.
I can't speak for everyone, but we just train our staff properly.
I work in a (non-US) government department where we often release information under New Zealand's Official Information Act, which basically says that anyone can request any information and the government's required to provide it as long as the request meets certain specifications. (ie. The request was specific enough, someone's privacy won't be unreasonably compromised, etc.) There's an independent office to resolve any disputes between government organisations and requesters (mostly journalists), but we actually go to efforts to avoid with-holding information unless there's a really good reason, because it just makes it easier. The fact that the law's the way it is in the first place means that people are fully aware that information about decisions they're making might one day be made public.
Occasionally we need to keep something back, though. In those cases I don't think IT people get involved unless they're specifically requested to. We do have specialist librarian staff though, whose primary work is to keep track of all the Official Information Act requests and make sure they're assigned to appropriate people and being answered properly. They're definitely not computer geeks, but they know all about the issues with releasing digital information and how things that look deleted aren't always gone, and they have procedures to cover that kind of thing.
Not to completely take Google's side here since I don't know much about the what happened beyond what I've read, but surely the action would be "evil" only if you had reason to believe that your actions would lead to that kind of thing happening, and only if you were actually within control of your actions and there was no reasonable alternative. Google might have had no reason whatsoever to believe that this person would be treated badly, or they might have had the law-books thrown at them to the extent that they couldn't refuse the authority.
I'm not sure if this actually happened, but if you judge someone as "evil" simply because something they do leads to someone else being "evil", then you're setting a very disturbing precedent. Google probably could have handled this a lot better, but keep in mind that this guy wouldn't have been treated as he had if India had a working system for properly enforcing human rights.
I think this is just a philosophical difference between Windows and Unix (and similar systems). Unix was built from the ground up for the command line to be the main input device, with GUIs as an added extra. Unix programs and admin tools frequently have good command line interfaces which interface using plain text, and GUIs are often built over the top of the command line. Most Unix admins I know spend a lot of time in the command line, sometimes by choice and often because it's necessary. Windows was built the other way around. GUIs are the primary interface for administration and everything else, they often exchange information using tersely specified protocols and binary formats. A command line interface is an added extra on many occasions, if it even exists. Most Windows admins I know spend a lot of time in the GUI either by choice, or because it's necessary.
I run Debian Linux at home and use Windows all day at work, and I have to admit that my personal preference is the command line way of doing things. It just feels a bit more powerful, I guess. YMMV but I usually find I can type much more quickly, delicately and specifically than I can move a mouse pointer around and click things, or even use GUI shortcut keys. (This makes sense too given that a mouse effectively reduces 10 fingers to a single line-it-up-and-thump-it device.) Having said this though, I rarely use the command line at work. This is probably because the Windows GUI tools and apps tend to be more powerful, but it's also very much because the Windows command line just feels klunky in comparison to something like bash or tcsh running inside an xterm.
It's as if Microsoft's primary command prompt has hardly changed at all from DOS days. It's not very customisable, and it also runs inside one of the most horrible windows for a command line. ie. Not easily resize-able or reconfigurable for things like window size and column width without drilling into a hierarchy of menus. The ability to string commands or tools together in Windows is very limited, unless two commands were specifically designed to interact, so there's much more reliance on monolithic tools or third party applications to do things. The PowerShell is a good step, but it's directed more at scripting than command line interaction. (It's also stuck inside that hideous fixed-size window.)
I haven't been following this at all but the one justification I can think of is to do with fairness to the children involved, in having pictures of them altered to appear sexually explicit. If faked pictures were being made available it could end up being very embarrassing, and I doubt there's any possibility of a child giving a suitably informed consent about this kind of thing. On the other hand, should it be okay for parents to offer images of their children for manipulation into faked child porn?
Add to this the curious attitude of paranoia that's developed around the possibility of others disassembling binaries, and which is widely promoted by companies like Microsoft who are very happy to provide developers with tools to make it even harder for anyone to get your precious source code.
I'm not sure if this is a disagreement with what you said or a clarification, but personally I don't think Microsoft cares about training these users at all. Microsoft wouldn't have given it a second thought if OLPC didn't take the initiative. Even if these kids are trained on Windows, it's unlikely they'll ever be a huge source of income for Microsoft or any other proprietary businesses, compared with the money made in developed places.
I think what frightens Microsoft, given that the children will get trained with or without Microsoft, is the possibility of any other platform ending up with some kind of dominance through popularity in third world countries. Microsoft's dominance comes through its monopolistic control and lock-in practices, and if non-Microsoft platforms become too dominant in third world countries, it'll almost certainly propagate to more developed countries in one form or another, reducing the control that Microsoft has. (ie. Customers will be demanding the ability to use open protocols, file formats, etc, so they can properly interact with those in third world countries.) Such a prospect has caused Microsoft's rather ruthless marketing and management machine to jump up and do whatever's necessary to stop that from happening, even though it might mean using subversive tactics to undermine the OLPC programme.
Actually I have no doubt that many people in Microsoft, probably including most at ground level, have nothing but the best intentions and fully believe that Windows is a good thing for OLPC, since that's what you tend to do when you're embedded in such a corporate atmosphere. I also have no doubt that there are subversive tactics and strategic decisions going on around this at a marketing and management level.