MS porting Office to Linux isn't terribly surprising, though, when you consider that MS office has been the dominant office product on the macintosh for a long time.
Since the organization is easily big enough for different divisions to go off on their own and have seperate short- and medium- term goals than other divisions, or even the company as a whole, there's no clear contradiction here.
I am curious, though, about this: MS will probably use some flavor of WINE when porting office to Linux (it's faster and easier for them). No doubt they'll uncover WINE bugs in the process (after all, they know their own OS better than anyone else) --- will they contribute their bug fixes back to WINE? Or will they simply modify the code? Would the latter be legal under the license that WINE uses?
ObDisclaimer: I work for a company about to be acquired by Corel, so apply salt when digesting my posts.
Obscenity is defined by local community standards. No, obscenity is defined by statute - state law.
Actually --- the US Supreme Court has consistently held since the early 1970s two things: (1) that it is constitutional to have laws which ban obscene material, and (2) the enforcement of such laws must be based upon local community standards --- ie., "obscene material" is banned, but what constitutes obscene material may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There's a reasonable discussion of the cases which led to this in Bob Woodward's book The Brethren, but you can also find references in just about any Constitutional Law book.
The internet has no local standards. (sarcasm)It doesn't?
Of course it does --- but those standards have not been recognized by the courts, and for several good reasons: (a) it's unclear from a legal perspective what, precisely, the "local community" of the internet is. (b) it's unclear how the "internet local community" and the "geographical local community" interact --- if a particular site would violate my local community standards, but does not violate the internet community standards, is it legitimate to view it in my local library?
The earliest cases of this sort of thing attempted to rigorously enforce local standards on the internet (site owners who lived in the bay area were prosecuted for violating obscenity standards in certain rural regions of the south) --- which led, briefly, to a fear of the most stringent local standards being enforced across the net. Happily, future developments saw that tendency nipped in the bud --- the focus has shifted towards filtering software, and requirements that public access sites use it, and away from attempts to ban sites outright.
Even fairly small companies are, by virtue of short-term focus, less interested in making good products than they should be (this is a particularly bad problem in the software industry, but I don't think it's limited to that industry)... but I digress.
I think that our system is gradually evolving away from being purely market-driven into one with a number of large actors whose presence is self-reinforcing, who are able to trample other actors, and who can cause massive distortions of the market without even intending to. The same thing is happening in the political arena: while most of the developed world is still technically democratic, developments in media technology combined with the growth of large market actors has resulted in a situation which is functionally more like an oligarchy.
Statements like this are usually used as the platform for a diatribe about why the system is bad, and how we have to change it --- i'm not convinced that it's _possible_ to change it, and i doubt that it is intrinsically bad: evolution of this sort is happening as a result of something, and until it can be determined what's driving the process, it's premature to issue a judgement about it.
However... I am concerned about one thing: the most peculiar part of this transformation is the vehemence with which people deny that it is happening; the atmosphere is not a good one for analyzing what's happening to our economic and governmental structures. We're all too caught up in our individual ideologies to look at the world dispassionately.
You will see that the idea of capitalism is for different companies to provide products and services to _consumers_
Isn't this a naive and idealistic view of capitalism? Sure, it's what capitalism is _supposed to be_. But, in practice, many companies behave more as though their goal was to extract money from people by leading them to believe they are providing one thing while in fact providing something quite different.
The goal of a company isn't to provide a good product, or make its consumers happy --- it's to make its _stockholders_ happy. And if the easiest way to do that is by being a pirate, a successful company will gladly comply.
I didn't get that at all. The core theme is still there, it's just made less ambiguous and more stark... suiting the american movie-going audience's tastes, i'm afraid.
For a hollywood adaptation of a novel, while it wasn't great, neither was it awful; they oversimplified it, but they didn't, AFAICT, massacre it.
The movie/book weren't about escape from technology per se, but they were about escape, in a sense --- about the search for something new and different, something exciting, that isn't a part of the day-to-day world.
Most people who have travelled extensively have felt this yearning --- a deep-seated, burning desire for something that just isn't there in normal everyday life back home. I know I did, and most of the people I met on the road seemed to as well; and that's just as much an indictment of the world we left as it is a comment about our personalities.
What does this have to do with technology? The answer to that has to do with, to what degree do you believe that technology is responsible for the things that are bad in modern society? I tend to think technology is not the cause of the problem --- but if I didn't think that, if I had any doubts about the beneficience of technology, then I would blame wanderlust on it too, and thus the movie would appear to be about it.
For me, at least, how many hours a week i'm working depends on where in the product cycle I am. For example: in January, I averaged 75-80 hours a week, and managed to work every day except two. But that was late in the cycle; the last two weeks i've averaged 30-35.
The can't-fix-because-it-would-break-things problem is real. As an example:
Windows API routine LoadRegTypeLib allows you to load a type library by specifying its GUID, major version, and minor version. The major versions are documented as requiring an exact match (ie., the major version you are asking for and the version registered must match exactly).
In practice, however, win9x and winNT both allow greater-than-or-equal matches --- thus, if you ask for version 1 and version 3 is registered, you will get it.
This "bug" was fixed late in the beta cycle for win2k --- and severely broke something I was working on which had depended on it.
The problem with VA buying/. is not that editorial independance is going to be compromised today, or next week, or even next month.
The problem is that some day in the future Larry Augustin might _change his mind_ --- or, if he's honorable enough to do that, the internet stock crash that people have been predicting will come, he'll be gone, and whoever comes after him will no longer feel bound by his agreement.
To believe that there is no risk of/. becoming the propoganda arm of VA is to believe that promises, once made, will never be broken, and that the vision of VA will always remain what it is today --- and any student of history, or of business, can tell you that both are unlikely.
I wish I had andover stock so I could vote against this merger.
Delphi will not suffer stagnation. The delay in the Delphi patch was related to a delay in the release of C++Builder. More details than that i'm not willing/able to give you at this time --- ask me at the conference.:)
It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
It's normal during buyouts for the buying company's stock to drop and the stock of the company being bought to rise --- CORL dropping right now is nothing to worry about.
Ironically enough, a good part of Corel's office suite came from Borland originally --- Paradox and Quattro Pro were both Borland products that got sold to Corel when we couldn't turn a profit on them.
Privacy protection laws essentially involve a trade-off: in order to protect our privacy from corporations, we have to reduce the privacy that corporations have from government.
The US is, to put it mildly, ambivalent about this. Which is more dangerous, corporations who invade your privacy or a government which does?
A modicum of privacy is possible, yes, if you know how to achieve it. But it's inconvenient --- and, lets be honest, what percentage of people have the technical ability to ensure their privacy on the net? And even if you are technically astute enough to prevent your activities on the web from being tracked, any time you use plastic to buy anything, it will get recorded --- you'll have to pay cash for everything to stay truly anonymous.
At best, we're evolving towards a world in which some people are able to maintain someprivacy by building up large electronic shields to protect themselves, while the vast majority have effectively no privacy at all. What the real social implications of this are remains unclear; privacy is a relatively new concept in human history, and it's entirely possible it won't be missed much.
The _vast_ majority of bugs reported to me only take one or two days, at most, to fix; a lot can be done in a couple of hours. (Once in a while, there are major architectural bugs that take days to fix, but even those i've never had take longer than a week...).
There tend to be two problems, tho. (1) In the case of major architectural bugs, I am not willing to release my 'fixes' until it's been determined that they didn't actually make the problem worse; this can often take upwards of a month. (2) It isn't uncommon for a bug to take several weeks before I even look at it, because I'm looking at something else right now and only have so much time. This is where open source projects have an advantage: there are more eyes, so things get looked at sooner.
UCITA looks like a precedent to several large companies. Chrysler (a car company) strongly backs UCITA, for example.
This idea is very, very, scary. It implies that we're going to see a wave of similar laws that build into the economic system a structural bias in favor of vendors, and which stack the decks against consumers.
Admittedly, this is partially a response to overzealous pro-consumer legal strictures; companies feel a need, and reasonably so, to be protected from liability lawsuits.
But there needs to be a balance between protecting the consumer from deliberate negligence, and protecting the producer from frivolous liability. Unfortunately, our politics are not at the moment good at finding balances, so (having gone too far in one direction) we'll now go too far in the other.
'Generation X' refers to people born between 1960 and 1980.
'The Baby Boomers' refers to people born between ~1942 and 1960. (The salient thing is they have to have been too young to remember the war).
'The Silent Generation' refers to people born between ~1925 and ~1942 (They have to have been old enough to remember the depression, but not old enough to have been adults during the depression.)
For more information, see 'Generations' by Neil Howe and William Strauss.
freely admit that the free high-speed connects caused me to miss my share of classes playing Quake and also kept me up late at nights running an mp3 server
Ah.... And 5 years ago my friends were getting thrown out for failing classes because of time spent on MUDS. Same thing, just less good graphics.:)
Slashdot Mirror
MS porting Office to Linux isn't terribly surprising, though, when you consider that MS office has been the dominant office product on the macintosh for a long time.
Since the organization is easily big enough for different divisions to go off on their own and have seperate short- and medium- term goals than other divisions, or even the company as a whole, there's no clear contradiction here.
I am curious, though, about this: MS will probably use some flavor of WINE when porting office to Linux (it's faster and easier for them). No doubt they'll uncover WINE bugs in the process (after all, they know their own OS better than anyone else) --- will they contribute their bug fixes back to WINE? Or will they simply modify the code? Would the latter be legal under the license that WINE uses?
ObDisclaimer: I work for a company about to be acquired by Corel, so apply salt when digesting my posts.
Obscenity is defined by local community standards.
No, obscenity is defined by statute - state law.
Actually --- the US Supreme Court has consistently held since the early 1970s two things: (1) that it is constitutional to have laws which ban obscene material, and (2) the enforcement of such laws must be based upon local community standards --- ie., "obscene material" is banned, but what constitutes obscene material may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There's a reasonable discussion of the cases which led to this in Bob Woodward's book The Brethren, but you can also find references in just about any Constitutional Law book.
The internet has no local standards.
(sarcasm)It doesn't?
Of course it does --- but those standards have not been recognized by the courts, and for several good reasons:
(a) it's unclear from a legal perspective what, precisely, the "local community" of the internet is.
(b) it's unclear how the "internet local community" and the "geographical local community" interact --- if a particular site would violate my local community standards, but does not violate the internet community standards, is it legitimate to view it in my local library?
The earliest cases of this sort of thing attempted to rigorously enforce local standards on the internet (site owners who lived in the bay area were prosecuted for violating obscenity standards in certain rural regions of the south) --- which led, briefly, to a fear of the most stringent local standards being enforced across the net. Happily, future developments saw that tendency nipped in the bud --- the focus has shifted towards filtering software, and requirements that public access sites use it, and away from attempts to ban sites outright.
Even fairly small companies are, by virtue of short-term focus, less interested in making good products than they should be (this is a particularly bad problem in the software industry, but I don't think it's limited to that industry) ... but I digress.
... I am concerned about one thing: the most peculiar part of this transformation is the vehemence with which people deny that it is happening; the atmosphere is not a good one for analyzing what's happening to our economic and governmental structures. We're all too caught up in our individual ideologies to look at the world dispassionately.
I think that our system is gradually evolving away from being purely market-driven into one with a number of large actors whose presence is self-reinforcing, who are able to trample other actors, and who can cause massive distortions of the market without even intending to. The same thing is happening in the political arena: while most of the developed world is still technically democratic, developments in media technology combined with the growth of large market actors has resulted in a situation which is functionally more like an oligarchy.
Statements like this are usually used as the platform for a diatribe about why the system is bad, and how we have to change it --- i'm not convinced that it's _possible_ to change it, and i doubt that it is intrinsically bad: evolution of this sort is happening as a result of something, and until it can be determined what's driving the process, it's premature to issue a judgement about it.
However
You will see that the idea of capitalism is for different companies to provide products and services to _consumers_
Isn't this a naive and idealistic view of capitalism? Sure, it's what capitalism is _supposed to be_. But, in practice, many companies behave more as though their goal was to extract money from people by leading them to believe they are providing one thing while in fact providing something quite different.
The goal of a company isn't to provide a good product, or make its consumers happy --- it's to make its _stockholders_ happy. And if the easiest way to do that is by being a pirate, a successful company will gladly comply.
What did you think about the part where it has Leonardo DiCaprio in a video game, and he's marching around
I thought it was vaguely amusing, but silly and completely out of context; the movie would have been better without it.
I didn't get that at all. The core theme is still there, it's just made less ambiguous and more stark ... suiting the american movie-going audience's tastes, i'm afraid.
For a hollywood adaptation of a novel, while it wasn't great, neither was it awful; they oversimplified it, but they didn't, AFAICT, massacre it.
The movie/book weren't about escape from technology per se, but they were about escape, in a sense --- about the search for something new and different, something exciting, that isn't a part of the day-to-day world.
Most people who have travelled extensively have felt this yearning --- a deep-seated, burning desire for something that just isn't there in normal everyday life back home. I know I did, and most of the people I met on the road seemed to as well; and that's just as much an indictment of the world we left as it is a comment about our personalities.
What does this have to do with technology? The answer to that has to do with, to what degree do you believe that technology is responsible for the things that are bad in modern society? I tend to think technology is not the cause of the problem --- but if I didn't think that, if I had any doubts about the beneficience of technology, then I would blame wanderlust on it too, and thus the movie would appear to be about it.
For me, at least, how many hours a week i'm working depends on where in the product cycle I am. For example: in January, I averaged 75-80 hours a week, and managed to work every day except two. But that was late in the cycle; the last two weeks i've averaged 30-35.
The can't-fix-because-it-would-break-things problem is real. As an example:
Windows API routine LoadRegTypeLib allows you to
load a type library by specifying its GUID, major version, and minor version. The major versions are documented as requiring an exact match (ie., the major version you are asking for and the version registered must match exactly).
In practice, however, win9x and winNT both allow
greater-than-or-equal matches --- thus, if you ask for version 1 and version 3 is registered, you will get it.
This "bug" was fixed late in the beta cycle for win2k --- and severely broke something I was working on which had depended on it.
A number of coworkers of mine have purchased VAIOs and put Linux on them --- it seems to be less than a problem than putting NT on, in fact.
We Slashdot readers aren't stupid and it's not as if anybody would have to rebuild something like cnn.com from scratch.
Ah, but biases don't have to be blatant and obvious, and you don't have to be stupid to be lulled into a false sense of security.
The problem with VA buying /. is not that editorial independance is going to be compromised today, or next week, or even next month.
/. becoming the propoganda arm of VA is to believe that promises, once made, will never be broken, and that the vision of VA will always remain what it is today --- and any student of history, or of business, can tell you that both are unlikely.
The problem is that some day in the future Larry Augustin might _change his mind_ --- or, if he's honorable enough to do that, the internet stock crash that people have been predicting will come, he'll be gone, and whoever comes after him will no longer feel bound by his agreement.
To believe that there is no risk of
I wish I had andover stock so I could vote against this merger.
Delphi will not suffer stagnation. :)
The delay in the Delphi patch was related to a delay in the release of C++Builder.
More details than that i'm not willing/able
to give you at this time --- ask me at the
conference.
It might also interest you to know that the Delphi (and C++ Builder) on Linux team is a completely different team than the Delphi on Windows team (they hired all-linux developers to write the Delphi-Linux "Kylix" project).
Really? I hadn't noticed that.
--Robert West
--Delphi R&D
It's normal during buyouts for the buying company's stock to drop and the stock of the company being bought to rise --- CORL dropping right now is nothing to worry about.
Ironically enough, a good part of Corel's office suite came from Borland originally --- Paradox and Quattro Pro were both Borland products that got sold to Corel when we couldn't turn a profit on them.
Privacy protection laws essentially involve a trade-off: in order to protect our privacy from corporations, we have to reduce the privacy that corporations have from government.
The US is, to put it mildly, ambivalent about this. Which is more dangerous, corporations who invade your privacy or a government which does?
A modicum of privacy is possible, yes, if you know how to achieve it. But it's inconvenient --- and, lets be honest, what percentage of people have the technical ability to ensure their privacy on the net? And even if you are technically astute enough to prevent your activities on the web from being tracked, any time you use plastic to buy anything, it will get recorded --- you'll have to pay cash for everything to stay truly anonymous.
At best, we're evolving towards a world in which some people are able to maintain someprivacy by building up large electronic shields to protect themselves, while the vast majority have effectively no privacy at all. What the real social implications of this are remains unclear; privacy is a relatively new concept in human history, and it's entirely possible it won't be missed much.
I believe that's one of the most frightening concepts i've ever seen in software design.
Yikes!
Or these:
John Barnes
Greg Egan
Ken MacLeod
James Morrow
I think the problem is that the market has become too diffuse: there are no BIG NAMES like there were before, so it looks like there are no 'masters'.
It's interesting, isn't it, how slow these are.
...).
The _vast_ majority of bugs reported to me only take one or two days, at most, to fix; a lot can be done in a couple of hours. (Once in a while, there are major architectural bugs that take days to fix, but even those i've never had take longer than a week
There tend to be two problems, tho. (1) In the case of major architectural bugs, I am not willing to release my 'fixes' until it's been determined that they didn't actually make the problem worse; this can often take upwards of a month. (2) It isn't uncommon for a bug to take several weeks before I even look at it, because I'm looking at something else right now and only have so much time. This is where open source projects have an advantage: there are more eyes, so things get looked at sooner.
Are you seriously telling me that you consider someone who is within months of being 40 in 1999 a Generation Xer? Get real.
Not that this proves anything, but the author of _ Generation X_ was born in 1960.
*shrug*
UCITA looks like a precedent to several large companies. Chrysler (a car company) strongly backs UCITA, for example.
This idea is very, very, scary. It implies that we're going to see a wave of similar laws that build into the economic system a structural bias in favor of vendors, and which stack the decks against consumers.
Admittedly, this is partially a response to overzealous pro-consumer legal strictures; companies feel a need, and reasonably so, to be protected from liability lawsuits.
But there needs to be a balance between protecting the consumer from deliberate negligence, and protecting the producer from frivolous liability. Unfortunately, our politics are not at the moment good at finding balances, so (having gone too far in one direction) we'll now go too far in the other.
*pedantic mode on*
'Generation X' refers to people born between 1960 and 1980.
'The Baby Boomers' refers to people born between ~1942 and 1960. (The salient thing is they have to have been too young to remember the war).
'The Silent Generation' refers to people born between ~1925 and ~1942 (They have to have been old enough to remember the depression, but not old enough to have been adults during the depression.)
For more information, see 'Generations' by Neil Howe and William Strauss.
*pedantic mode off*
freely admit that the free high-speed connects caused me to miss my share of classes playing Quake and also kept me up late at nights running an mp3 server
.... And 5 years ago my friends were getting thrown out for failing classes because of time spent on MUDS. Same thing, just less good graphics. :)
Ah