... paranoia is when you think that people will do things that are detrimental to their own goals just to get you.
Why would changing the file format be detrimental to their own goals? They want everyone to run out and buy the latest version of Office, right?
A colleague who used to work for Microsoft told me that the people working on the office software always extended the file formats each release to force upgrades. They would always provide options for exporting to older formats, so as not to be so blatant. But they make sure that it wouldn't work about 1% of the time. So the user with the older version would eventually get fed up with the occasional failure (and with always having to ask people to send in the right format), give up and upgrade.
A friend of mine had some dealings with a sleazy company in Montreal that tried to screw him by attempting to steal his work and then telling the police that he stole their work, leading to his arrest. They tried to complete the project using their IBM AS/400 computer. He knew that the OS on their computer was pirated, so he snitched to IBM.
These guys were in the business of buying and selling used IBM equipment. So IBM investigated, and discovered that a lot of the computers they sold had copies of the pirated OS. Seems they were buying the hardware without OS licenses. I don't know if that's because the original sellers had restrictions on selling the licenses, or just that they had transferred the licenses to other machines that they owned. But the upshot was that IBM started contacting the customers of this company, then started demanding license fees. Naturally, the companies were pissed at the sleazy sellers, since they assumed they were buying legit systems.
Ultimately, my friend was acquitted, and the sleazeballs went belly-up.
Star Trek was ground breaking, for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the first inter-racial kiss on television.
Actually, that's not quite true. Kirk and Uhura never kiss in that scene (in Plato's Stepchildren). Editing and camera work were used to imply kissing, but they don't touch lips. Roddenberry was forced to shoot it this way by the network suits, who were afraid the scene would cause an outcry in the (U.S.) South.
Details are in Shatner's book Star Trek Memories. This book is full of interesting facts. Another Uhura-related tidbit Shatner mentions is how Nichols wanted to quit because Uhura wasn't doing much besides answering the phone, and Martin Luther King talked her into staying as a role model.
First kiss or not, Roddenberry still pushed the envelope about as far as he could in those days. Even before ST, he wrote scripts for mainstream TV, and worked in social themes (such as racism) way before network TV was ready to hear about them. (Setting a show in the far-off future actually made it easier to introduce controversial topics because the people most likely to be offended were less likely to pick up the meaning.)
When you see a car sitting on the road you don't say. Hmm.. over Billions and Billions of years all the pieces formed in just the right combination to build that car!
This is the "watchmaker" argument, made about 200 years ago (replace "car" with "watch"), one version of the "argument from design." Fairly
persuasive in its day, because people didn't know
(before Darwin) how it was possible for complexity to arise out of simplicity.
Read The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. He eloquently answers the argument from design. It is, IMO, one of the best books on
evolution (since Darwin). Also has lots of neat
computer analogies, and some simulation software.
From the new, less-dishonest Microsoft page referenced by the Register article:
Microsoft:
Better business alignment with straightforward licensing and clarity of intellectual property ownership.
Which is why people in the embedded community are avoiding MS like the plague. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the best word to describe your relationship with MS when you license their products. I think "bentoverforward" is more accurate.
The funniest thing I saw with the MS grammar checker: It told a student to put a hyphen between two words. When he did as he was told, the grammar checker then told him to take it out. Then to put it in, etc.
Four international businessmen are on the golf course, and there is a ringing sound. The Canadian guy goes to his golf bag, pulls out his cellular phone and talks for a minute with his office. "Very important to be in touch these days," he says. "Yes," his golfing partners agree.
A little bit later another different ring is heard, and the American golfer holds his hand up to his head (as if to imitate talking on the phone) and starts talking in what is clearly a real conversation. After the call he explains to his friends, "It's the very latest in cellular technology - a speaker is attached to my thumb, and a microphone to my pinky. You can't even tell I have it on."
A couple of holes later, a different, muted, ringing sound is heard, and the German businessman in the foursome stands erect and begins talking, again an obviously real conversation. When finished he explains, "This really is the latest in cellular technology. A speaker is implanted in my ear, and a microphone in the backside of a front tooth. I stand at attention to talk."
Suitably impressed, the foursome continues their game. Suddenly, the Japanese golfer excuses himself and ducks behind a bush. After he doesn't re-appear for several minutes, the American golfer goes to make sure he is okay. He finds him behind the bushes squatting down with his pants around his ankles. "Is everything okay?" asks the American. "Yes," replies the Japanese golfer, "If you could just give me a minute here, I'm expecting a fax... "
(I think it was from rec.humor.funny about 5 years ago.)
His male member is dwarfed in comparison to his cockroach-sized brain. The stench of his breath makes granite crumble. His moral integrity is challenged only by that of a Microsoft lawyer. He rapes newborns with curling irons.
Alan Dershowitz, in his book The Best Defense, describes a case where the male star of Deep Throat (a porn flick) was charged in Tennessee of participating in a conspiracy to violate Tennessee obscenity laws through his role as actor, even though the film was shot elsewhere and he had no control over the distribution of the film to Tennessee. (Seems the Attorney General there was an anti-porn zealot who figured it was easier to charge powerless actors than studios with money.)
(On a side note, tells of another case where a porn distributor in Manhattan was charged with violating federal obscenity laws because they shipped a movie to Albany (also in New York). The "interstate commerce" clause was invoked on the grounds that the shipping company normally took the Holland Tunnel out of Manhattan, and thus were temporarily in New Jersey. Dershowitz defended the client by showing that the company sometimes used an alternate route if traffic was bad, a route confined to New York. The government couldn't prove the shipper had taken the normal route on the day in question.
But the purist in me still hates gov't intervention!
Unfortunately, most computer (l)users don't think about it that way. In fact, I know quite a few who clearly recognize the dangers of Microsoft's power but continue to support them by buying their software. Their rationale is that it doesn't matter because the government will ultimately restrain Microsoft.
One of Microsoft's flagship government customers, the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Austria, is the first government body in Europe to become a member of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.
Wasn't Austria the first government in Europe to become a member of another initiative by someone interested in total control?
OTOH, it's interesting to see Germany high on the open-source list. From my personal experience, Germans are the most anti-Microsoft of all computer users. And their biggest computer magazine (c't magazine) is one of the few that isn't afraid to risk their ad revenue by giving MS products negative reviews. Perhaps the Germans understand the dangers of putting too much power in one person's hands.
{A] very good case could probably be made that
if the person really wanted to, they could just read the source to verify that it works properly.
If the person really wanted to, they could just read the machine code in the executable to figure out what it does. (Provided that doesn't violate the DMCA...)
How about instead, returning pages with the email address abuse@domain-that-spambot-is-coming-from
How about the email addresses of everyone in Congress, plus all the politicians in Russia, Korea, and the other countries with lots of open relays? (Perhaps excluding those who have tried to do something about spam.)
You can get many opinions on this subject. Last year I saw a workshop where there were some benchmarks. One found it was pretty much a tossup comparing NT4 with 2.2 on identical machines (each won about half of the races on NAS parallel benchmarks, with margins typically around 5%). He repeatedly stressed that "the OS doesn't get in the way" because users were not allowed access to any node other than the head node, and would just launch their MPI codes from there in most cases.
So the most important determinant of performance is the compiler and whatever libraries you need (such as an MPI library). It's hard to get identical versions of these under both systems, so a true OS-to-OS comparison is hard. The OS can play a performance role in things like the TCP/IP connection. I recently reviewed a paper which included some comparisons of TCP/IP latencies, and Linux was about half the latency of NT, so communication-intensive apps that use standard sockets would run faster under Linux.
A few prominent institutions have become shills for MS clusters for Beowulf-style computation, but it turns out that MS funded their clusters. If your university has a good name than tell your MS rep you'll switch if MS buys you a big cluster of 2GHz processors and pays your sysadmins' salaries. (They make such offers to big-name universities.) And if you see any papers promoting NT Beowulfs, check carefully to see who funds them.
Here's a JPEG of the sticker itself. Use xv or whatever to crop it at the outer line boundary (the copyright is not part of the sticker), and print it at about 164pt x 60pt. You'll get a pretty good approximation you can tape to your Palm and it will work until your sticker comes in the mail.
There wouldn't be any benefit. This keyboard is designed for use of a single stylus. The goal is to minimize average distance between successive keystrokes. There are no "home keys" (where your fingers rest on a regular keyboard). On a regular keyboard, you have many fingers (if you know how to type:-). The goal is to minimize average distance to the home keys, and to try to put successive keystrokes on opposite hands for faster typing.
As I'm sure many have pointed out, raw clock speed isn't the only determinant of performance. Other architectural features play a BIG role. Two advantages for Sparc:
Sparcs (and other RISC processors) have more general-purpose registers, especially in floating point. Hence, big loops generate fewer "spills" (temporarily storing a reg to memory/cache because you need that reg for another intermediate calculation).
The Sparc architecture has a more efficient calling mechanism (register windows)
Slashdot Mirror
Why would changing the file format be detrimental to their own goals? They want everyone to run out and buy the latest version of Office, right?
A colleague who used to work for Microsoft told me that the people working on the office software always extended the file formats each release to force upgrades. They would always provide options for exporting to older formats, so as not to be so blatant. But they make sure that it wouldn't work about 1% of the time. So the user with the older version would eventually get fed up with the occasional failure (and with always having to ask people to send in the right format), give up and upgrade.
A friend of mine had some dealings with a sleazy company in Montreal that tried to screw him by attempting to steal his work and then telling the police that he stole their work, leading to his arrest. They tried to complete the project using their IBM AS/400 computer. He knew that the OS on their computer was pirated, so he snitched to IBM.
These guys were in the business of buying and selling used IBM equipment. So IBM investigated, and discovered that a lot of the computers they sold had copies of the pirated OS. Seems they were buying the hardware without OS licenses. I don't know if that's because the original sellers had restrictions on selling the licenses, or just that they had transferred the licenses to other machines that they owned. But the upshot was that IBM started contacting the customers of this company, then started demanding license fees. Naturally, the companies were pissed at the sleazy sellers, since they assumed they were buying legit systems.
Ultimately, my friend was acquitted, and the sleazeballs went belly-up.
Actually, that's not quite true. Kirk and Uhura never kiss in that scene (in Plato's Stepchildren). Editing and camera work were used to imply kissing, but they don't touch lips. Roddenberry was forced to shoot it this way by the network suits, who were afraid the scene would cause an outcry in the (U.S.) South.
Details are in Shatner's book Star Trek Memories. This book is full of interesting
facts. Another Uhura-related tidbit Shatner mentions is how Nichols wanted to quit because Uhura wasn't doing much besides answering the phone, and Martin Luther King talked her into staying as a role model.
First kiss or not, Roddenberry still pushed the envelope about as far as he could in those days. Even before ST, he wrote scripts for mainstream TV, and worked in social themes (such as racism) way before network TV was ready to hear about them. (Setting a show in the far-off future actually made it easier to introduce controversial topics because the people most likely to be offended were less likely to pick up the meaning.)
This is the "watchmaker" argument, made about 200 years ago (replace "car" with "watch"), one version of the "argument from design." Fairly persuasive in its day, because people didn't know (before Darwin) how it was possible for complexity to arise out of simplicity.
Read The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. He eloquently answers the argument from design. It is, IMO, one of the best books on evolution (since Darwin). Also has lots of neat computer analogies, and some simulation software.
...then we'll only need Argentina and Brazil, and
then we'll have a continent!
Microsoft:
Better business alignment with straightforward licensing and clarity of intellectual property ownership.
Which is why people in the embedded community are avoiding MS like the plague. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the best word to describe your relationship with MS when you license their products. I think "bentoverforward" is more accurate.
From what I've seen, about half the people on
The funniest thing I saw with the MS grammar checker: It told a student to put a hyphen between two words. When he did as he was told, the grammar checker then told him to take it out. Then to put it in, etc.
cellular phone and talks for a minute with his office. "Very important to be in touch these days," he says. "Yes," his golfing partners agree.
A little bit later another different ring is heard, and the American golfer holds his hand up to his head (as if to imitate talking on the
phone) and starts talking in what is clearly a real conversation. After the call he explains to his friends, "It's the very latest in cellular technology - a speaker is attached to my thumb, and a microphone to my pinky. You can't even tell I have it on."
A couple of holes later, a different, muted, ringing sound is heard, and the German businessman in the foursome stands erect and begins talking, again an obviously real conversation. When finished he explains, "This really is the latest in cellular technology. A speaker is implanted in my ear, and a microphone in the backside
of a front tooth. I stand at attention to talk."
Suitably impressed, the foursome continues their game. Suddenly, the Japanese golfer excuses himself and ducks behind a bush. After he doesn't re-appear for several minutes, the American golfer goes to make sure he is okay. He finds him behind the bushes squatting down with his pants around his ankles. "Is everything okay?" asks the American. "Yes," replies the Japanese golfer, "If you could just give me a minute here, I'm expecting a fax... "
(I think it was from rec.humor.funny about 5 years ago.)
That is simply uncalled for!
I mean really. A Microsoft lawyer???
(On a side note, tells of another case where a porn distributor in Manhattan was charged with violating federal obscenity laws because they shipped a movie to Albany (also in New York). The "interstate commerce" clause was invoked on the grounds that the shipping company normally took the Holland Tunnel out of Manhattan, and thus were temporarily in New Jersey. Dershowitz defended the client by showing that the company sometimes used an alternate route if traffic was bad, a route confined to New York. The government couldn't prove the shipper had taken the normal route on the day in question.
Unfortunately, most computer (l)users don't think about it that way. In fact, I know quite a few who clearly recognize the dangers of Microsoft's power but continue to support them by buying their software. Their rationale is that it doesn't matter because the government will ultimately restrain Microsoft.
From the article:
One of Microsoft's flagship government customers, the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Austria, is the first government body in Europe to become a member of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.
Wasn't Austria the first government in Europe to become a member of another initiative by someone interested in total control?
OTOH, it's interesting to see Germany high on the open-source list. From my personal experience, Germans are the most anti-Microsoft of all computer users. And their biggest computer magazine (c't magazine) is one of the few that isn't afraid to risk their ad revenue by giving MS products negative reviews. Perhaps the Germans understand the dangers of putting too much power in one person's hands.
And because our Germans were better than their Germans!
If the person really wanted to, they could just read the machine code in the executable to figure out what it does. (Provided that doesn't violate the DMCA...)
How about the email addresses of everyone in
Congress, plus all the politicians in Russia,
Korea, and the other countries with lots of open
relays? (Perhaps excluding those who have tried
to do something about spam.)
Let me tell you, it is by far his best work!
And all the record companies have to pay royalties for putting excerpts of his work in between the regular tracks of music on CDs.
But at least when I rip it to MP3, I can use a low bitrate without losing quality!
Outlook is a very appropriate name for MS' mail client. It's a reversal of Lookout, as in "Look out, you got another virus!"
So the most important determinant of performance is the compiler and whatever libraries you need (such as an MPI library). It's hard to get identical versions of these under both systems, so a true OS-to-OS comparison is hard.
The OS can play a performance role in things like the TCP/IP connection. I recently reviewed a paper which included some comparisons of TCP/IP latencies, and Linux was about half the latency of NT, so communication-intensive apps that use standard sockets would run faster under Linux.
A few prominent institutions have become shills for MS clusters for Beowulf-style computation, but it turns out that MS funded their clusters. If your university has a good name than tell your MS rep you'll switch if MS buys you a big cluster of 2GHz processors and pays your sysadmins' salaries. (They make such offers to big-name universities.) And if you see any papers promoting NT Beowulfs, check carefully to see who funds them.
And don't note that the manual (if it's the Beowulf book everyone cites) is mostly about how to PROGRAM it (e.g., includes an intro to MPI).
Here's a JPEG of the sticker itself. Use xv or whatever to crop it at the outer line boundary (the copyright is not part of the sticker), and print it at about 164pt x 60pt. You'll get a pretty good approximation you can tape to your Palm and it will work until your sticker comes in the mail.
This new
There wouldn't be any benefit. This keyboard is designed for use of a single stylus. The goal is to minimize average distance between successive keystrokes. There are no "home keys" (where your fingers rest on a regular keyboard). On a regular keyboard, you have many fingers (if you know how to type
I tried this new system and it seems to work. Not having the patience to wait for the sticker, I downloaded the , used xv to crop it and print it out in Postscript with the main area at 164pt by 60pt. That seems to work OK.
But an IP address would also be nice, to give to the Code Red Worm...
Be sure to call them Evil Russian Hackers.
Better yet, they're Evil Hackers next door from KaZaAkhstan!