"Would regulators let the two biggest webmail providers combine?"
YES, they would.
WHY? because neither MS nor Yahoo! make any real money off of webmail (sans ads, a tiny fraction of their expenditures on the services)
All free email from either company amounts to commercially is a HUGE CASH DRAIN and either/both would probably be GLAD to dump it, if the Regulators got some bad Acid and objected.
AND, there are a GOOGLE-PLEX (get it?) of other companies more than willing to step in and provide free email.
NO FINANCIAL IMPACT TO CONSUMERS, NO REGULATORS INTERFERENCE...
"Let two major IM networks combine?"
SEE ABOVE, but MORE SO....there are SO MANY COMPETING IM services around available immediately.
and IM has NO DIRECT FINANCIAL IMPACT ON THE CONSUMER MARKETPLACE (as "IM GIANT" AOL's DYING Balance Sheet will be glad to testify)
"Allow MS to buy out a promising competitor to Exchange?"
By promising competitor, you mean what 2,3 or 4% of the marketplace?
other than off-platform PC-based competitors like *NIX, the only competitor on the Windows platform to Exchange Server is.....the Next Generation of Exchange Server
Take a look at Blue's acquisition of Lotus Development, and its impact both on Domino and Notes, that should resolve that question nicely.
"Allow two major portal sites to combine?"
When did, by marketshare standards, NOT financial nor advertising outlay or marketing expenses, MS' search efforts become "major"? And was there some "Internet Antitrust Act", that make FREE services subject to government antitrust jurisdiction, i missed?
BTW, if not for default OS installations and PUSH upgrading, the current marketshare of MS' Search efforts would be next-to-invisible, instead of hardly visible and largely irrelevant. Which is WHY they want Y!
ALSO, in many peoples' opinions, it would be huge mistake for MS to acquire Y! and then submerge the partially damaged Yahoo! search INTO MS' DOA search system.
IF MS is half as smart as they tell everyone they are, they would operate Yahoo! at a distance and keep pouring $$$$$ and talent into Yahoo! brand. And try to bring Y! back from the brink where it is right now.
If they just think that they can combine the two companies search efforts, rebrand it as MS-Yahoo! or Yahoo!-MS, and then VOILA', they will have a Google-Killer...
WELLLL, you can combine a duck and a turkey, but you won't get a pony, let alone a racehorse...
In the RW, i'd suggset that we should consider the following;
You are Programmer Sian (notice the trendily androgynous name), you work for a gigantic software company, or conglomerate or industrial that does all its own major development inside, you are potentially confronted with;
1. Antiquated Developer Tools -- in general, the larger the development environment, unless you're Disgesting Your Own Pet's Nutrition, you are very likely to be using multi-year and/or multi-generation old development platforms and tools.
The question here is then, how can you effectively hold poor Sean accountable for vulnerablities, that are intrinsic to many older tools?
Who's more accounatable here? Sian or the managers who make the procurement decisions?
2. "Science Fiction" Application Programming Interfaces - depending on whether you are programming on a well-established product or not, if you are, Poor Sian is probably stuck with API's that were developed many years before and have been the victim of Design Creep, and its, Lunatic Cousin, Design Implosion.
In many instances the APIs, while they may once have had a large degree of Paradigmatic and Philosophic Design Integrity, as their initial Designers and Implementers have moved on to other; products, companies or, Worst Case, Inpatient Mental Health Facilities. Many New Designers have come in to add "Their Own Programming Uniqueness" to the APIs, frequently rendering the API's a jumble of radically different approaches to similar algorithms.
Should Sian be subjected to having their pay docked because 9/10 Functions implement a Library Call one way, and some "Johnny-Come-Lately" API function implements a similar looking, but substantially different in output function?
Shouldn't the API Designers/Architects be held more responsible for this one?
3. PHB Stupidity - As QC forwards endless application/OS defect notices to the Development/Maintenance Team, these defects are reviewed by the Team Managers and Supervisors. It's understandable, given the 11 hours per day of Absolutely Vital Meetings that most PHBs love to, i mean are forced to attend, that Defect Prioritization will suffer.
Sian can't choose what defects to repair, and in what order to repair them.
This is a management function, and one, in my experience, that Mgt usually jealously and zealously guards.
SOOOO, it's been the case in every Development project that i've worked on and know about, that PHB's have a well-understood tendency to prioritize Defect repair, according to external pressures, especially from Sales and Marketing.
Sales and Marketing organizations are usually likely to priortize according to their immediate impact on quarterly projections.
Vulnerablities are only likely to affect quarterly results when they are CATASTROPHIC defects, i.e. App or OS Killers. Otherwise, the majority of vulnerablities, which are usually well submerged in the Defect numbers, tend to get shoved aside for the higher priority defects that S&M believe impact immediate sales.
There are numerous other considerations here; including Contract Programmers, Legacy Compatability (ask the Vista Team about that one), Vendor Driver Teams that don't even know what to do with a new code base, etc, etc..
But it seems to me, that, while financial incentives CAN BE, useful as a Mgt tool for improving product quality, they should, to be even-handed, applied across the entire product team, with specific ***POSITIVE*** incentives used to take care limited, high priority problems across the product line.
There's already a tendency to "blame the programmer", and my Best Guess is, that any attempt to lay the responsiblity for vulnerabillites, THAT AREN'T CLEARLY THE RESULT OF SLOPPY/POOR/INCOMPETENT CODE PRODUCTION, at the feet of the programmer, will merely increase the employee turnover in the Development Team. Something that already is a problem most places.
from my experience: "The Fault, Horatio, Usually Lies Not In Our Code, But In Our Process"
This thread is peculiar timing for me, as i just spent the last few days resurrecting my Visor Prism for a Head-to-Head with my Dell Axim x51v and my AT&T Tilt...
The long and short of the comparsion? Palm never confronted Wince and its Descendants...
My early Palm's, the III's and the V's, were SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE EARLY WINCE PDA'S...
Good screens, GREAT battery life, and once you got the hang of Graffiti...you could fly on entry. The Wince recognizer STILL isn't quite as good as the early Palm.
The Palms were soooo much better that Palm had the market essentially all to itself. For the FIRST FEW YEARS.
But then, Palm failed to grow, Palm failed to innovate (How old is Garnet?).......and each generation of Windows PDA got slowly and slightly better.
So, i remember attending the MS PDC in Denver ('97) and spending over 8 (F******) hours, working on my Compaq Companion (rebranded Casio Cassiopeia), getting the modem and Pocket Outlook and Pocket Explorer working over a 9600 baud connection. If the "windows" in my 16th story hotel room had opened, the Companion would have taken a Unscheduled Flight.
OTOH, my x51v (with a Stowaway BT Folding KB) has around 90% the ESSENTIAL functionality of my current laptops, and the x51v is a 3-year old PDA.
YES, the battery life on the Axim sucks, Yes, the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket apps are still a little underpowered and slightly flaky.
However, in raw functionality, my TX has less power than my x51v, Garnet is flakier than WM5, and i have to go to a bunch of 3rd party apps to get equivalent functionality with the Axim.
The TX's battery life is not all that much better, and the display screen isn't half as good.
ON THE BLACKBERRY SIDE; email on the Treo 700, though way better then my Treo 180, is still a relative PIA, compared to the Idiot Simple usage of a Blackberry.
And though i vastly prefer my Curve2 to my old Pearl, both of them had equivalent basic functionality to the Treo 700 in line-of-business apps, such as contacts and appointments.
Internet access on the BB is just a little behind the best of the 3G/4G phones. Display is also slightly-to-moderately behind, but has been catching up.
So, Palm got beat by cellphones on voice and Internet connectivity. Palm got beat by Wince on applications deployment and display. Palm got slaughtered by RIM on email functionality. Palm (along with everyone else) GOT MASS MURDERED BY Apple on multimedia delivery, which will only get worse with the 3G iPhone.
And both LG and Samsung, gigantic industrial conglomerates with HUGE MONEY, are lining up to play whack-a-mole with the iPhone. They may not succeed, but they WILL deliver many more powerful cellular devices to further eclipse the Palm line.
I STILL LOVE MY PRISM, but it's SOOO Olde Skul...
Palm SHOULD HAVE become the "iPhone", but they got fat and lazy with a dedicated user base.
Then once they fell behing they didn't have the: talent, vision or resources to catch up.
Among the many aspects of the Open/Free Source cultures is the essential characteristics of Choice and Free Will.
As we all on/. seem to love, beer, either Metaphorically or Analogously, Did the EXPLOSION of Micro-Breweries in the last decade kill off Beer?
Or did it offer many people the chance to experiment and introduce new types and varieties of beer to an entirely new audience?
Sure, as the the Giant Commercial Software Shops have participated in the process, they have occasionally Big Footed their way through some issues.
Sure, as they have ponied up large numbers of developers and other resources to promote their vision of Open/Free Source, they have inflected the growth and adoption rates of Linux, et al.
But would anyone seriously suggest, for all the real difficulties this has caused, and will cause in the future, without the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that the Giants have poured into the world of Free/Open Source, that its adoption, growth and technological improvment would be anywhere near where it is now?????
They Pays Their Monies and They Takes Their Chances.....
I'd say we're all much better off with them, than without them. And those of us who want to work on porting LINUX or Java to our favorite Zilog 80 platform, can spend as much time as we chose to do so. Our own pet projects are, as always, up to to us.
As individual developers and contributors, we are as, "Free to Choose", as we have ever been.
but the greater point is when reporting the analysis/opinion of a direct competitor (the CEO of direct competitor, no less), you need to be ESPECIALLY SCEPTICAL about their analysis....
Netflix does indeed have the "well-embedded" position in their space, but i can quickly think of ways that i could attack that position, were i the Amazon CEO...(all just off the top of my head NO deep thoughts provided)
1. offer a free DVD of the customer's choice for every X months of rentals
2. cut prices by 30-50% (or more)
3. go to the Broadcasters, Movie Studios and Cable Networks and buy exclusive and/or early access to their top rated and most popular products
4. since the US' has reasonably strict laws about "loss leaders", go to the big dollar advertisers and get an income stream from them by including a 5-10 ads (that can't be forwarded around) at the begining of the DVDs, then further cut prices "dollar for dollar"
5. Look at the Netflix demographic and start including coupons for; 3 months free at Bally's Gym, 1 cup Starbucks drip coffee per day free for 30 days...ad nauseam...
I guarantee you that if I had access to Amazon's revenue stream and, more importantly, corporate tie-ins, i could put a real hitch in Netflix's getalong..and i'm just some dumm Nganear.
There once was a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Visicalc and Wordperfect were King, and CPM ruled the Universe...
Market-dominating companies only look impregnable because of the perceptual rate differences between "market time" and "biological time", coupled with the fact that venture capital nearly always prefers going into "open" or "poorly defended" markets.
But, if you're familar with the corporate histories of General Electric, General Motors, Ford and IBM...over the last century, thousands and thousands of "well-embedded" companies were shredded by these corporations when they felt they needed to be in a given business space.
If a "Giant" can find ways to turn marketshare compeitition into a "dollar for dollar race", the vast majority of the time, they with the deeper pocketbooks wins. And remember, people have predicting diaster for Amazon for years now....
...but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."
HMMMM, as a lifelong SciFi Geek, with a real preference (after the GrandMasters) for the "hard" stuff ala' Charles Sheffield (RIP)..it's an interesting question.
which seems to me to beg another question...How of much what we are talking about in inextricalby interwoven with contemporary American politics?
ST:TOS came along during one of the most politically and socially dynamic periods of American history. TOS had a distinctly "Utopian" viewpoint, which many have extracted/inferred something of a "Fabian Socialist" viewpoint on the part of the show. Giving Gene Roddenberry's well-known political leanings, that's pretty unlikely.
It is MORE likely that Roddenberry intended a "technological utopia" where a politically-neutral science has advanced to the point where it has solved all the supply and demand and resource conflicts that have fueled international relations since the Hellenic Period.
Going all the way back to the Golden Age, and looking at early Vogt and the Lensmen series, where you have LOTS and LOTS of rayguns, and pretty routinely violate EVERY understanding we had (even then) of the "Laws,AHEM, of Physics"
Is the principle attraction of TOS its utopian politics, which gives us "future warm/fuzzies" about scientific solutions to all the global conflicts and crises that currently beset Gaia?
Or is it actually the "science" of TOS that attracts Geeks?
I would argue that there is so VERY LITTLE "science" in ST (as a whole)...that those who respond strongly to it are responding to the "sociology" of the future ST envrionment...
Customers Complain About a New Security Hole. The number of complaints reaches Management's "Action Threshold". The Patch Process is started.
1. First, blame the customers' other software packages for the insecurity.
2. Then, blame the customers' for failing to apply services and hot fixes in a timely fashion.
3. Security Focus (or another of the Sec/Priv sites) calls up and threatens to "out" the hole if it isn't fixed.
4. Accuse the complaining entity of having a "partisan" agenda against your company, initiate "Four Corners" Stall -- while you try to figure out if you actually CAN patch the damn thing
5. As the news of the new exploit makes it into IRC and the UGs' Forums you issue an indignant press release stating that it has never been proven that the new exploit has even been used and is principly "theoretical".
6. As your Patch Team frantically works to get the patch out, explain that even though the chances of this exploit being used WERE previously slender or non-existent, now that some details of the exploit have been malicously leaked, HEAVY SIGH, you'll now go ahead and fix it.
7. Issue the patch, take credit for being "Right on Top" of security issues, explain how much money and time you are spending to counter the effects of the "Few Bad People" on the Internet.
8. News start to come in that your patch has broken a number of somewhat older apps -- explain that Users have a responsiblity to use "current" software products and refer them to Sales.
9. News of another exploit comes in --GOTO 1
BTW, this is pretty much AN INDUSTRY STANDARD APPROACH
In Commerical Software, it's the FEW companies that DON'T do some version of this that are the (delightful) and unfortunately RARE exception.
First the linguistic point..."you provide a long list of international organisations, and say that if a nation is a member of them all (you said "and" not "or")......
since we've taken a grammatical turn here, NO i certainly didn't "say" that...
I MIGHT have ERRONEOUSLY "implied" that by my use of the phrase -- "...and DOZENS AND DOZENS OF OTHERS.." HOWEVER, that phrase was intended to modify the LIST of international treaties, conventions, accords and other agreements, it wasn't meant to modify or QUALIFY the scope of the subject.
It seemed clear to me (guess i was wrong), that most reasonably well-informed/.'s would be aware that the scope and sway of NAFTA is different from the scope and sway as the proposed European Constitution....NAFTA is (i also thought rather obviously) a rather traditional "trade and tariffs" agreement, of a type that has been in use for all of recorded history. I thought that anyone who couldn't sort out NAFTA from the EU wasn't going to get much out of my comment (or probably care to).
OTOH, The proposed (and probably now moribund) European Constitution is/was intended as a social contract between independent nations.
SO rather transparently, i thought, "apples and oranges" as to the TYPE or CATEGORY of the individual entity, and focused on the parent's question of the use and application of legal structures across national identities.
From that perspective, what do NAFTA and the others have in common?
If you've read them all (i have), you will find that EVERY one of the previously mentioned entities deal with the application of either general or specific legal structures across national boundaries and in specific instances.
Some provide specific reconciliation and grievance mechanisms, some "agree to disagree" (for just one example, Bretton Woods is a model of "unspoken agreements" -- those rascally Central Bankers)
Since the Rooseveltian agreements created after WWII, birthing the foundational international orgs such as the World Bank, IMF and United Nations (and its incredibly profligate list of sub-orgs), the quantity and quality of international accords (for good or ill) has been skyrocketing and is continuing to do so.
For the example the parent focused on, the DMCA is definitely and/or potentially transportable via a number of these agreements, so in the case of North America, the DMCA can be transported via the NAFTA agreement.
Internationally (other than NA), the DMCA can be transported via; WTO, GATT, numerous individual bilateral or multilateral copyright protection agreements and protocols and the World Court.
So is there "International Law"?, of course not. It seems to me that only a child or naif would think so.
I don't think that I or the parent stated or implied that, if i did i apologize.
However, is there a means for extra-national enforcement, ON A CASE-BY-CASE basis, of a given law such as the DMCA?
Read those agreements and you find lots and lots of ways to try it.
EXTRA CREDIT: Want to see some real "interesting" agreements on international law enforcement, that directly undercut the laws and civil rights of many signatory nations?
Read the various UN Maritime Agreements and if those don't freak you out, then proceed to the UN Anti-Money Laundering Agreements and Protocols.
" Except that if it ISN'T a crime where I did the action is it still a crime?
YES, it is still a crime -- IF your country is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Criminal Court (ICC), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Court, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and DOZENS AND DOZENS OF OTHERS, including the European Currency Agreement (EURO) and the proposed European Constitution and a member state of the United Nations.......your country and its citizens get to pretty much unilaterally accept the laws of your fellow member nations when it comes to this type of "crime" (quotes NOT because i doubt its a crime, but because its not really clear "where" and EXACTLY "what" the PRECISE criminal elements of this activity are atomically composed of)
The legal institutions (civil, criminal, enforcement and academic) of ALL the various G8 nations have barely caught up with the 100+ year old industrial revolution and the telecommunications revolution of the 1960's and 1970's.
These legal institutions are WAAAY behind in the "cyber" realm and the PC Revolution, let alone the newly emerging areas of 21st century intellectual property.
So, the guiding laws and legal practices are those designed to protect and prosecute 18th and 19th crimes. Therefore, you may not be breaking into a computer or system covered by the laws of your national entity, but if they are signatory to the above AND if the target national entity wants to pursue prosecution....
BINGO! you have just won a complete abdication of the laws of your nation, and "Welcome to XXXXX Correctional Facility! Where you will be opened to BIG NEW fascinating experiments and experiences in hair braiding, toilet cleaning and, AHEM, the broadening of your sexual experiences and horizons! Think of Club Med and just add the horrors of personal degredation and hair-trigger lethal violence."
Global 2000/National 500 Corporations, G8 bureaucrats and others with either large money AND/OR large clout have been loading up every international agreement of the last twenty years (to be charitable) with the export of laws and statutes favorable to their own secular partisan interests.
So, you can be sure that developing nations will be seeing a HUGE LOAD of things like the DMCA, EU Green Laws, et al stuffed down their throats (cause we all really care how many Kazaa DLs of Eminem there are in Upper Volta?).
I'm only being SLIGHTLY facetious in saying that if you were to read ALL these global agreements since the Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) you'd get the feeling that the principle purpose of international treaties was to guarantee that Mickey Mouse, French wine, British beef and German cars be protected from any international competition.
OH, it gets worse before it gets better. Atlanta Arcology anyone?
"the prosecuter - a guy with a vested interest in slamming people and playing it up so he looks better
A "prosecuter(sic)", is actually a guy who represents;
1. The Victims -- the MILLIONS of hardworking, honest people who have been victimized by the more successful attempts of morons like these guys, and as the skyrocketing dollar costs of identity theft/fraudulent CC transactions are just simply passed along to the other CC holders, he also represents
2. The Indirect Victims -- ALL that mass of people who need consumer credit to buy toys at seasonal holidays, pay for medicine for their sick dependents, and the great bulk of the other uses of consumer credit, that make peoples lives more pleasant and comfortable and their CC charges just keep going up and up, largely because of successful versions of Brian Salcedo.
3. The Constitution of the United States, the Guiding Documents of the individual states and municipalities -- ALSO KNOWN QUAINTLY AS "THE RULE OF LAW", I wonder how long ANYONE but the wealthiest would have credit cards, if CC fraud wasn't prosecuted vigorously????
Prosecutors are, similarly to most productive civil servants (and there are PLENTY of NON-productive civil servants, esp here in SoCal) generally overworked, underpaid and completely dedicated to "slamming" people such as; killers, rapists, burglars, robbers (essentially what people who specialize identity theft are), child molesters, and their ilk...
While we can all argue the logic and sensibility of keeping some person who sold/used some small quantities of banned substances in prison at 40K+/year, seemingly to provide "sex toys" for lifers.
The simple fact is, OTHER THAN DRUG CRIMES, which are after all still "crimes", and could rather easily be decriminialized (in MOST states) by ballot propposition (as we did here in Cali)...THE MAJORITY OF NON-DRUG RELATED CRIMINALS IN AMERICAN PRISONS ARE GENUINE BAD GUYS....
In Cali you have crack dealers, caught with serious "trafficking weight" on 3 or 4 SEPARATE arrests out on bail for 6 months to 2 years before they finally go inside.
Kevin (who i've met, i worked with his mother years ago) was a POLITICAL PRISONER, esp at the end of his "formal sentence", when the system just kinda "kept" him for a "while" longer...Kevin was a "cracker" who "missed the message", when they stopped the "hand slap" policy that had been in place 10 years ago...wrong crime, wrong time.
China, Myanmar, Cuba and numerous other countries have thousands and thousands of political prisoners...tortured, raped, beaten...they deserve our support and indignation.
Castro murdered some "dissidents" some months back, not even "capitialist provocateurs", but Socialist fellow-travelers who had the nerve to question his social policies....
Brian Salcedo is just a crook, using a computer instead of a gun...be interesting to see how that goes over with the Triple Lifers in the GenPop...hope he's good with his hands.
BTW, Since Mr. Salcedo "Pled Out", you can bet, the 9 years he plea bargained for, was prob about 1/3 to 1/2 of what he would have received at trial. If he didn't like the arrangement, he could have taken his chances at trial.
Re:This is a marriage made in ***HELL***
on
Skype + Kazaa = ?
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· Score: 1
"No. It is a lose-lose."
I"ll another "Lose" to that for an even 3 (Chill -- that's a/. MATH JOKE)
"Kazaa does not become any more legitimate because Skype is not using anything in it."
In fact, as implied in the parent, many companies and technologists already regard Kazaa as anathema (or worse), this will now put Skype on that same list, with many of these decision makers/deployers.
Companies that are open to VOIP will now take another look before they deploy a Skype solution, just because of the stink of Kazaa, especially as this comes on the heels of CA's declaration of Kazaa as the #1 Piece of Spyware in the World (as carred on/. a few days ago)...so not only does Kazaa not become "more legitimate", Skype's street cred just took a huge self-inflicted hit.
"At the same time a bunch of freeloaders will come along who are least likely to pay anything as long as they can. So this move will also hit Skype financially in the long run.
Exactly. If you go over to CNET and grep Skype you will see that the Skype Krewe was, over the course of the last year, desparately seeking to distance itself from their roles in the creation and establishment of Kazaa/FastTrack (good business idea), and now Zinnstrom and Company have jumped back in the mud pit with the Kazaa "monster" they created and were trying to get away from...STRANGE...especially now that the Australian court trial of Sharman is about to get under way, and the preliminary indications are that the judge in this trial has just ordered the world's largest tube of KY and had it sent to Ms. Hemmings....
Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster/FastTrack/Sharman has done a GR8 job of ducking the bullet in the courts of the USA and the Netherlands, but a betting man would say their roll is about to end in a courthouse in Sydney...weird time to slime a solid new MONEY MAKING product like Skype????
With this boner move, in addition to having made any IPO much harder (from a due diligence POV), Skype are now going to have work that much harder to attract paying customers, directly because of the association with the "Always Free, Always Will Be" model of FastTrack/Kazaa, they will now have to work crazy hard to sell the paid service...AGAINST the fact that Packet8 and Vonnage are really starting to pick up momentum...
Makes me wonder if they're getting business advice from either RIAA or MPIA?
"The amount of disturbance to the industry caused or even potentially caused by Div-X converting and downloading is so tiny compared to the amount of resources and ill-will generated by their heavy-handed response to this so-called threat that one must come to the conclusion that the MPAA leadership is mentally unbalanced."
I agree and working here in the belly of the beast and having collaborated with some of the people and corporations involved, they are indeed "mentally unbalanced", but not by concerns of customers dissatisfaction, or even by concerns of several percentage points of lost sales, though with a movie that might earn $100 Million in DVD sales, over the course of ten years, several percentage points of loss are nothing to spit on.
THE ESSENTIAL REASON THAT THE MAJOR ENTERTAINMENT CONGLOMERATES CARE ABOUT FILE SHARING, WHETHER BY IP, SPINNING 'GLASS OR ANY OTHER DIGITAL FORMAT BASED MEDIUM, IS THEY SEE THEIR ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL SLIPPING AWAY DOWN A PIECE OF OPTICAL FIBRE.
despite the legal fiction of a separation (Chinese Wall) between production, distribution and exhibition, the VERY SMALL NUMBERS of actual players who control all the previous listed key aspects of entertainment "manufacture" share something nearly as valuable as the ability to actully actively collude (which is VERY MUCH forbidden by law, and they wouldn't even think about active collusion, as they could lose EVERY NICKEL they've ever earned)
they have something nearly as good as cartel behavior, and completely legal......they work in system where everybody knows the rules, and follows them. and the MOST IMPORTANT part of their business model is control of distribution, and once that is gone, their current business model goes with it, and they are ACUTELY AWARE that broadband and digital distribution MUST , over time, render the distribution model that has evolved over the last 50 years ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS...
any day you can go to lunch at The Grille or dinner at Koi or Ivy, and there will be seen many/most of the people who control production and distribution of film, TV and music...
HOW MANY other multibillion dollars industries can say that nearly ALL the key decision makers live in the same town, eat at the same restaurants, go to the same health clubs, vacation at the same resorts and SEE each other socially several times a month?
NOT telecom, not software, not healthcare, not wireless...
how much collusion can you imagine between Linus and Bill and Scott and John and Carly and Steve?
So, H'Wood will fight every inch of the way, i'm asked several times a month "When will DRM be unbeatable?", the look on their faces when i say "Never" is priceless...they simply don't believe me
they are waiting for that "Silver Bullet" combination of OS, Network and Desktop software that enables that "Unbeatable DRM"...and by the way, there are legions of technologists out here telling them that "Silver Bullet" is going to get here RealSoonNow...
SO, When will the E! Industry wise up and stop these bizarre anti-customer pogroms against a small number of file sharers?
My guess, is that until the current management teams of these companies are either replaced by a new generation, willing to see the promise and potential of digital distribution, or (MUCH MORE LIKELY, IMHO) the acceptance of easily available digital distribution will have to wait until the market capitalization values of these companies are lowered to the point where they have to make peace with the digital world in order to just survive.
"Its a question for those of us who were around at the time."
Ok, i'll bite.
Not only did i wait on deploying MS Word, i was a "decider" for several large entities that were waiting for the consultant community to pick a winner.
WordPerfect for Windows 6 (WPW6) was a train wreck, but as i remember (reasonably well, i believe), it was primarily a question of DESIGN (i.e. usuability), NOT reliability that pushed me and my customers to MS Word.
The outstanding clarity of design focus that was evident in WordPerfect 5/5.5 was (OBVIOUSLY, IMHO), completely lacking in WPW6.
The WPW6 menus, past the obligatory XWin/Win components were illogical, occasionally misleading and often confusing. As were many of the dialogs.
I would hold that most of this confusion came from the complete departure from the long established Wang meta tag block text markup interface that SSI WordPerfect, UMMM, "adopted" for their own, with two pane screen windows, one for text and one for the markup meta tags.
Though this was available in WPW6, it was awkwardly implemented, and in design terms the "context binding" to the Win32 design approach was very poor.
Interestingly, MS Word for Windows 1.0 ALSO had a pretty horrible implementation of the Win32 GUI, however it was somewhat cleaner, and somewhat faster.
Leading to another observation;
WordPerfect for Windows 6 WAS SLOOOOOW, real, real slow. large document saves were "go get a cup of coffee slow".
WinWord 1 was also somewhat porky (i personally stayed with MS WORD DOS for a LONG TIME, much faster, much more stable, from a BSofD perspective - i also had written nearly 300 macros that really couldn't be translated easily/well to WinWord).
so, if WPW6 was all/mostly written in assembler, -- WPW6 was SO SLOW, i'd guess that it was either badly written, or rather badly optimized -- making me wonder if all/parts were written to the Win32S API (what a train wreck THAT was), and also wondering what assembler WP used????
-- in those days the first round of Win32, the first version or two of MASM wasn't all that much more powerful than "Debug", i still occasionally use MASM 5/6 to knock out quick small drivers and some CODEC work, and as i recall from the time (VERY FOGGILY), IFF TASM was around (and many of MS' competitors wouldn't TOUCH MASM), early TASM never really performed for me (or my friends) on LARGE scale projects (it was VERY nicely fixed after the first/second version).
I also seem to recall that it has already been legally established that MS has in/around this time period did indeed have "non-published" API features, particuarly used by the Excel teams in their "life and death" battle with the then spreadsheet market monopoly holder, "Lotus 1-2-3", and Andrew Schulman has written numerous books and articles on this aspect of early Win development.
Lotus, i believe, having bet BIG on OS2/G (BTW, 1-2-3G ROCKED -- way ahead (2 years) of its time), came late to the Win32 party, and had to rush 1-2-3 Win out the door, using lots of source from OS2/G (not quite a port, but close) and the Oz2 -Win32 APIs were VERY different (Oz2 was in many ways much "cleaner" than the earliest W32 APIs).
Ashcan Fate (down the street from my company) was imploding at the time, between the "religious" problems that were besetting the company's highest management, and the Big Bet (Failed) on Framework and that DTP program they were tussling with Ken Ski over, I would say Ashton-Tate died of self-inflicted wounds.
While i certainly don't know the internals of WPW6, most of the senior corporate developer types i spoke to were not ready to put any large amount of developer resources into Win32 until it was market tested, most people at that time thought Oz2 would wipe Win32 out of the market, and many ISVs put their money down accordingly....
And i completely agree, this suit serves NO ONE but, the attorneys, and Novell should leave it alone.
What next? Should AT&T sue MITS and IMSAI for ripping off the OS approach and command verbs of UNIX????
Re:Someone has to...PRELIMINARY AUTOPSY RESULTS
on
Is The Lone Coder Dead?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"The Lone Coder was found dead in front of his home computer this evening"
In a later news release of the Preliminary Autopsy Results:
1. He had Type II diabetes from the consumption of Mountain Dew/Code Red.
2. He has extremity palsy from the intake of Jolt Cola.
3. He was having Grand Mal epileptic seizures from the MSG in his local Chinese takeout.
4. He had become reclusive with the shock of finding out that real, live women DIDN'T have staples in their navels.
5. He hands had become claws due to the carpal tunnel and tendonitis from his non-ergonomic keyboard.
HOWEVER, the proximate cause of death was...
6. He attempted to read the entire set of Don Knuth's TAOCP (The Art of Computer Programming) AND "Regular Expressions in PERL" in the same evening and HIS HEAD EXPLODED!!!
LATE BREAKING NEWS: In a joint press announcment, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and SCO announced that they were SURE that the Lone Coder's work infringed on their IP, and they would be seeking redress beyond the grave, from the appropriate authorities, saying "If ANYONE thinks that merely by DYING they can escape the reach of our lawyers enforcing our intellectual property rights, they will find out just how far we will go to make sure that every line of ever written has the protection it deserves!"
He is survived by his parents, who will be paying off his student loans from MIT for the rest of their natural lives, and his high school sweetheart, who, unknown to the Lone Coder, due to lack of consortium, became a lesbian several years ago and moved to North Beach.
Richard Stallman has annouced that he's quite sure the Lone Coder's work was pretty much something that he had written in LISP on a napkin, one lunch 30 years ago at the Lampoon, but he was kinda buzzed and "...wasn't sure what i did with the *&)&*(&)( napkin...!"
"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS: A. Photoshop B. Dreamweaver C. Flash D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;
These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....
STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"
3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..
some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!
4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...
without taking a position on the DOD case(one way or the other, i don't know the specifics of the case well enough)
It's a ***FELONY*** because it's a combination of a variety of PROPERTY crimes, including THEFT, FRAUD and DISTRIBUTION of stolen property.
Would we argue the nature of this if someone had broken in an electronics warehouse or a bookstore or a Costco and taken an equivalent dollar amount of goods and given them out to their friends?
I doubt it.
However, because software is "intangible" in nature compared to a frozen cheese pizza or bottle of Jack or Sony Walkman, some of us look at it differently.
However, the manufacturers of the software have to pay ALL those same expenses that Sony does.
They have to pay executives, engineers, marketing staff, assembly workers, packaging, warehousing, shipping, et al.
When you distribute a stolen copy of a piece of software and by so doing, reduce the numbers of copies that will be sold, you make it harder for a company to survive.
While it's easy to imagine that every s/w company is a MS, Oracle, IBM or Sun, it's not true.
Most s/w companies are much smaller and are fighting for their survival on a daily basis.
And we all have to wonder what would have happened to our entire marketplace, if their had been less piracy.
What would have been the fate of WordPerfect Corp, Lotus, Novell, and many other dead products if there had been less piracy?
What impact on Apple's conversion from a $10BN a year company to $1+BN company?
There have been many jobs lost, products destroyed and careers sidetracked in our industry by sales declines.
Sone of these SURELY have been as a result of warez.
If you lost your job and maybe your family, and knew warez had been at least partially responsible, how would you feel about warez?
Plan 9 (from Wash D.C.) as 802 proliferates around urban America and clusters in rural America...
1. The Telcos start whining to their regulators that they are being deprived of revenue, as point-to-point trunk calls lessen for 802-based communications.
2. The wireless carriers (who still haven't found a stable, profitable business model -- i thought PacBell Wireless was bad -- until Cingular bought 'em) will join in with the trunk owners and scream that their FCC franchise is being devalued by Wireless IP Data and IP Telephony and they need government help (read: R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N) right now.
3. The Consumer Giants will whine and bitch and snivel about interference issues with 2.5 and 5 GHZ devices they make.
4. The law enforcement/intelligence community will endlessly bitch about their lack of ability to "monitor" this dangerous new technology, and how this creates a national security vulnerablity and therefore, offers a "window of opportunity" to evil-dewars. They will insist on lousy/key crypto and 1.5 bit key algorithms, and their ability to "oversee" the security of this spectrum.
4. The G, sensing the increased value of this spectrum and their ability to make even more money in licence fees and regulatory overhead will further regulate the spectrum and cause more and more expense to be made to justify their jobs and administration and regulation of it.
"I don't really see magic realism as being a 'sub-genre' of science fiction or fantasy. I'd rather see it as a development of the 60s and 70s (through the works of, for example, Calvino, Angela Carter, Marquez, and later, Rushdie) experiments in novel writing."
exactly, if you want to go back to James Joyce's "Ulysses" and "The Dubliners", 20th century author's have been struggling with ways to mix metaphorical "alternate realities" to so-called "mainstream" writing.
i think there is a fairly direct link from Joyce to Gaiman, and it passes the writers you mention, with Rushdie and Marquez (if you haven't read "100 Years of Solitude", you missing out on a great (if really twisted) book) being the best commercially known.
But, there is also much of this literary approach present, in the Sci-Fi genre, in both the "Dr. Who" series and Doug Adams' "Hitchhiker" series.
You could also make a pretty good case for ELEMENTS of this approach in Heinlein's last few (post-stroke) books; "Friday", "Number of the Beast" and "Cat Who Walked through Walls", as alternative realities abound.
And some of Harlan's short stories like "Repent Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man" (the story ROCKS, BTW), mix reality and fantasy, though are more psychological in approach.
I liked "Neverwhere" and found "American Gods" oddly affecting, but Mr. Gaiman's "Neverwhere" seemed to another of the mixture of the "LOTR, D&D, Snakes & Ladders RPG" type of writing that's been leaking out of Britain/Europe for the last 20 years.
LeGuin does it as well as anybody, "Dispossessed" is a fabulous book, and the gender-bending shows a pretty "alternate" approach to S/F in and of itself. And it was published in 1975.
"Microsoft, because of their desktop OS monopoly, was/is in a position to make or break anybody's desktop software. No matter how excellent Java (on the desktop) could have been, Microsoft could (and arguably did) keep it from becoming a success."
I'm not arguing that MS'opposition to Java hasn't had a negative effect on Java. I'm NOT arguing that MS didn't want to kill Java off (wouldn't you, if you were a competitor? that's what you're paid to do as an executive?)
I AM arguing that the "blame MS for EVERYTHING negative that happens in technology to any product that competes with MS, is overblown and generally destructive to the overall technology environment.
Let's generalize your argument and put it as follows
Company X, because of their desktop monopoly was/is in a position ot make/break anybody's software.
1975 - MITS Altair 8800 had a "monopoly" on the PC marketplace.
Late 1970's to mid 1980's -- Apple I and then the II dominated the "pre-built" PC market (effectively a "monopoly", with some competition from the 8 bit kits -- i built one of the others).
1981 -- IBM introduces the 5150 and then later the XT, within a few years IBM has a, you guessed it, monopoly on desktop PC
1984 -- Apple introduces the Macintosh (still have my 128K Mac, somewhere), Apple has an effective sales monopoly on the GUI amongst PCs.
August 24, 1995 -- Windows 95 released, as good a point as any to mark the birth MS' modern desktop (and very real) monopoly.
Substituting the name of any of the above for "Company X", you will arrive at the following conclusions;
1. tech monopolies are short lived
2. new products CAN suceed in the face of strong opposition from a entrenched, market-dominating competitor. I think the sucess of both Apache and LINUX as whole show that very clearly.
In OS/FS, very often people use MS as a scapegoat for EVERYTHING that goes against their wishes.
In an earlier, and very clear example, did MS radically harm Borland's ability to compete on languages by cherry picking many of the best and brightest employees that Borland have?
OH YEAH! But the 34 Borland employees at the core of the legal argument were all adults capable of making their own decisions. They went with the bucks -- the vast majority of us would have done the same thing when offered 3-10X (and in a couple of cases, X*10 to the 9) our current compensation packages.
We have to do our best to create the best software we can. And worrying about what the competitive marketplace is going to do is foolish.
Capitalism is not for the feint of heart. The body count is (and always will be) high. Let the lawyers bury the lawyers. Let the rest of us get on with building the future.
"The US District Court clearly found Microsoft guilty of illegal anticompetitive behavior with respect to Java..."
HMM, Really? Which District Court? Maybe you provide/. with some documentation on that. I'd thought that i read every major court decision on the MS V World Battle, I sure don't remember that one. I've read Jackson's 300+ page decision about a dozen times (great reading if you never read it, very insightful), don't remember that part.
Give us the citation, please?
"... and that court's findings were upheld and clarified by the US Court of Appeals.
Ditto, missed that one, too. How about that citation as well?
"... Nonetheless, Microsoft has continued to benefit from having used its monopoly power illegally to suppress the emerging success of Java."
Maybe you could also tell us all WHY you think M$ is responsible for helping Java succeed?
So using your implied standards, Sun, HP, IBM et al have a responsibilty to help an emerging technology, say.NET, and can't do anything to compete against it????
HMMM, that's a novel definition of business competition "You MUST support your competions' emerging products". No wonder you posted AC. Silly Troll.
As unfashionable as it is on/. to point out ANY contradictions in a good MS bashing, as a long-time believer in both personal and software "freedom" (and as someone who has received really nasty emails from NT Core members and was suddenly banished from the OS Betas), the facts are simple and have been reported by all the tech pubs and many of the mass media.
Did M$ ship IE with a "corrupt" JVM, i'd sure bet they did.
SO WHAT?
Did they intend to kill the Java adoptions and standards momentum?
I'd bet they sure wanted to (and still do).
SO WHAT?
Just as we in the Open Source and FSF communities are free to get up in the evening and work on any project we want, deploy any OS we want, use any app we want and deploy any available technology we can...
so is M$, they are no more obligated to support java than pepsi is to support coca-cola, than lexus is to support mercedes, than toyota is to support nissan
M$ is responsible for its own karma. If the world wants Java and M$ doesn't support it they way the world wants, they will lose market share.......because the customer will have the final say.
Microsoft (and any other company) is only resposible to their stockholders and customers, if that means killing off a competitive technology, that's the way the game is (and has always been) played. That's the system.
It was Sun's responsiblity to make Java an important, dominating technology, NOT Microsoft.
If you've REALLY followed the Java Saga, Sun has done as much (some would say more) to halt Java adoption/deployment as Microsoft.
If you're a customer, you vote with your wallet.
If you're a developer/technologist you vote with the systems you deploy/develop and recommend.
1. This is an HUGE OPPORTUNITY for some LINUX distro and Company with hair to get some media exposure (FREE marketing -- hard to comeby in this world).
2. If NOLA + MS is going to short-circuit the bid process, why shouldn't EVERYBODY get to play? (BTW, this is almost certainly a ***LEGAL*** circumvention of the bid process -- very few governmental entities have a rule against accepting ***FREE*** anything, as long as it is NOT an attempt to gain POLTICAL FAVOR). This is VERY, VERY slick on MS' part.
3. VERY FEW Federal, State, Regional, Municipal entities have a F*****G CLUE when it comes to IT procurement. They are freq well behind industry in IT acquisition/deployment (not all that many corporations are great at it either).
So, NOLA is gonna do whatever NOLA is gonna do. Courts might reverse it later, much later. Probably not (separation of powers and all that).
I suggest you consider what my main man, StevieB, has probably already figured out...once a few 2nd/3rd tier munincipalities have adopted a 'City Wide' apps and services vendor (WHOEVER that is) it will MUCH, MUCH easier to sell the rest of them.
Procurement specialists (need to be careful about discussing 'procurement' in NOLA -- my favorite American city) in government jobs are VERY, VERY conservative and follow a "herd rule". Once a few of these entities adopts a given solution, many/most of the others will follow.
We can sit on the sidlines and cry "Foul" and ask for the "Ref" to intercede (and we've all seen how effective that strategy is, haven't we?), or we return the punch.
"It shuts out network OS competition, and it shuts out hundreds of companies that develop applications for cities and governments."
Nope, reread the article, it doesn't say anything about NOLA being restricted to using ONLY MS products.
Further, IFF you know anything about MS server products, the consulting and aftermarket business they generate is astonishing.If you're running an MS shop, you will quickly learn the meaning of TCO. And network security. And data redundancy.
"It *is* a bribe."
One man's bribe is another man inducement. Whether we're talking about Triple Coupon Day, Zero Dollars Down on a Lexus, Zero Percent Financing on a Chevy or a Free Hot Wax with every Car Wash on Tuesday.
MS don't have any real position in goverment software systems, so they can't be accused of market domination. That means they're safe from any legal blowback.
HEY, I HAVE AN IDEA!!!!
Why doesn't RedHat or Mandrake or Debian make a counter-offer to NOLA to provide them with LINUX systems, tit for tat, for all the services that MS is offering?
Think what a great headline that would be for LINUX.
"Entire City of New Orleans goes OpenSource."
That's how you play and that's how you beat them. Competition. The Amurrican Way.
BTW, you do realize, don't you, that this is a rather BIG validation of "free software" (small 'f"), and MS has done little in the last few years but tell everyone that "free software is worth what you pay for it.
"When are these manufacturers going to define something really useful.(?)"
being generous to your observation, you can probably do useful voice recognition with something around a 1GHZ P3/256MB RAM/50-100MB of SROM for the voice rec firmware
some developer friends who have extensive voice rec XPerience (i don't) would say 1.5GHZ P4/512MB RAM/100-200MB of SROM....
even given super low power versions of all these parts (which DON'T exist at this time)
your battery life (assuming 2-4 AA spec cells (more for form factor than any other reason, you'd actually use LiPoly, but you still wouldn't have room for than the eqivalent of 4 AAs) your battery life would be measured in minutes
"Obviously, Danger Inc. got stuck with the lame-os who were unwilling to persue handwriting recognition. (or voice recognition, or a b.a.t. keypad, or even DVORAK keyboard.)"
obviously you're NOT an engineer, OR don't understand either "economies of scale" OR just how hard it is to get a new technological standard adopted...(check with BeOS developers).
if all this tech existed (it doesn't) the device would retail between $1500 - $3000, hardly good territory for a consumer communications device
THAT MIGHT BE WHY THEY DIDN'T DO SOMETHING "USEFUL"???????
Slashdot Mirror
"Would regulators let the two biggest webmail providers combine?"
YES, they would.
WHY? because neither MS nor Yahoo! make any real money off of webmail (sans ads, a tiny fraction of their expenditures on the services)
All free email from either company amounts to commercially is a HUGE CASH DRAIN and either/both would probably be GLAD to dump it, if the Regulators got some bad Acid and objected.
AND, there are a GOOGLE-PLEX (get it?) of other companies more than willing to step in and provide free email.
NO FINANCIAL IMPACT TO CONSUMERS, NO REGULATORS INTERFERENCE...
"Let two major IM networks combine?"
SEE ABOVE, but MORE SO....there are SO MANY COMPETING IM services around available immediately.
and IM has NO DIRECT FINANCIAL IMPACT ON THE CONSUMER MARKETPLACE (as "IM GIANT" AOL's DYING Balance Sheet will be glad to testify)
"Allow MS to buy out a promising competitor to Exchange?"
By promising competitor, you mean what 2,3 or 4% of the marketplace?
other than off-platform PC-based competitors like *NIX, the only competitor on the Windows platform to Exchange Server is.....the Next Generation of Exchange Server
Take a look at Blue's acquisition of Lotus Development, and its impact both on Domino and Notes, that should resolve that question nicely.
"Allow two major portal sites to combine?"
When did, by marketshare standards, NOT financial nor advertising outlay or marketing expenses, MS' search efforts become "major"? And was there some "Internet Antitrust Act", that make FREE services subject to government antitrust jurisdiction, i missed?
BTW, if not for default OS installations and PUSH upgrading, the current marketshare of MS' Search efforts would be next-to-invisible, instead of hardly visible and largely irrelevant. Which is WHY they want Y!
ALSO, in many peoples' opinions, it would be huge mistake for MS to acquire Y! and then submerge the partially damaged Yahoo! search INTO MS' DOA search system.
IF MS is half as smart as they tell everyone they are, they would operate Yahoo! at a distance and keep pouring $$$$$ and talent into Yahoo! brand. And try to bring Y! back from the brink where it is right now.
If they just think that they can combine the two companies search efforts, rebrand it as MS-Yahoo! or Yahoo!-MS, and then VOILA', they will have a Google-Killer...
WELLLL, you can combine a duck and a turkey, but you won't get a pony, let alone a racehorse...
In the RW, i'd suggset that we should consider the following;
You are Programmer Sian (notice the trendily androgynous name), you work for a gigantic software company, or conglomerate or industrial that does all its own major development inside, you are potentially confronted with;
1. Antiquated Developer Tools -- in general, the larger the development environment, unless you're Disgesting Your Own Pet's Nutrition, you are very likely to be using multi-year and/or multi-generation old development platforms and tools.
The question here is then, how can you effectively hold poor Sean accountable for vulnerablities, that are intrinsic to many older tools?
Who's more accounatable here? Sian or the managers who make the procurement decisions?
2. "Science Fiction" Application Programming Interfaces - depending on whether you are programming on a well-established product or not, if you are, Poor Sian is probably stuck with API's that were developed many years before and have been the victim of Design Creep, and its, Lunatic Cousin, Design Implosion.
In many instances the APIs, while they may once have had a large degree of Paradigmatic and Philosophic Design Integrity, as their initial Designers and Implementers have moved on to other; products, companies or, Worst Case, Inpatient Mental Health Facilities. Many New Designers have come in to add "Their Own Programming Uniqueness" to the APIs, frequently rendering the API's a jumble of radically different approaches to similar algorithms.
Should Sian be subjected to having their pay docked because 9/10 Functions implement a Library Call one way, and some "Johnny-Come-Lately" API function implements a similar looking, but substantially different in output function?
Shouldn't the API Designers/Architects be held more responsible for this one?
3. PHB Stupidity - As QC forwards endless application/OS defect notices to the Development/Maintenance Team, these defects are reviewed by the Team Managers and Supervisors. It's understandable, given the 11 hours per day of Absolutely Vital Meetings that most PHBs love to, i mean are forced to attend, that Defect Prioritization will suffer.
Sian can't choose what defects to repair, and in what order to repair them.
This is a management function, and one, in my experience, that Mgt usually jealously and zealously guards.
SOOOO, it's been the case in every Development project that i've worked on and know about, that PHB's have a well-understood tendency to prioritize Defect repair, according to external pressures, especially from Sales and Marketing.
Sales and Marketing organizations are usually likely to priortize according to their immediate impact on quarterly projections.
Vulnerablities are only likely to affect quarterly results when they are CATASTROPHIC defects, i.e. App or OS Killers. Otherwise, the majority of vulnerablities, which are usually well submerged in the Defect numbers, tend to get shoved aside for the higher priority defects that S&M believe impact immediate sales.
There are numerous other considerations here; including Contract Programmers, Legacy Compatability (ask the Vista Team about that one), Vendor Driver Teams that don't even know what to do with a new code base, etc, etc..
But it seems to me, that, while financial incentives CAN BE, useful as a Mgt tool for improving product quality, they should, to be even-handed, applied across the entire product team, with specific ***POSITIVE*** incentives used to take care limited, high priority problems across the product line.
There's already a tendency to "blame the programmer", and my Best Guess is, that any attempt to lay the responsiblity for vulnerabillites, THAT AREN'T CLEARLY THE RESULT OF SLOPPY/POOR/INCOMPETENT CODE PRODUCTION, at the feet of the programmer, will merely increase the employee turnover in the Development Team. Something that already is a problem most places.
from my experience: "The Fault, Horatio, Usually Lies Not In Our Code, But In Our Process"
This thread is peculiar timing for me, as i just spent the last few days resurrecting my Visor Prism for a Head-to-Head with my Dell Axim x51v and my AT&T Tilt...
The long and short of the comparsion? Palm never confronted Wince and its Descendants...
My early Palm's, the III's and the V's, were SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE EARLY WINCE PDA'S...
Good screens, GREAT battery life, and once you got the hang of Graffiti...you could fly on
entry. The Wince recognizer STILL isn't quite as good as the early Palm.
The Palms were soooo much better that Palm had the market essentially all to itself. For the FIRST FEW YEARS.
But then, Palm failed to grow, Palm failed to innovate (How old is Garnet?)... ....and each generation of Windows PDA got slowly and slightly better.
So, i remember attending the MS PDC in Denver ('97) and spending over 8 (F******) hours, working on my Compaq Companion (rebranded Casio Cassiopeia), getting the modem and Pocket Outlook and Pocket Explorer working over a 9600 baud connection. If the "windows" in my 16th story hotel room had opened, the Companion would have taken a Unscheduled Flight.
OTOH, my x51v (with a Stowaway BT Folding KB) has around 90% the ESSENTIAL functionality of my current laptops, and the x51v is a 3-year old PDA.
YES, the battery life on the Axim sucks, Yes, the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket apps are still a little underpowered and slightly flaky.
However, in raw functionality, my TX has less power than my x51v, Garnet is flakier than WM5, and i have to go to a bunch of 3rd party apps to get equivalent functionality with the Axim.
The TX's battery life is not all that much better, and the display screen isn't half as good.
ON THE BLACKBERRY SIDE; email on the Treo 700, though way better then my Treo 180, is still a relative PIA, compared to the Idiot Simple usage of a Blackberry.
And though i vastly prefer my Curve2 to my old Pearl, both of them had equivalent basic functionality to the Treo 700 in line-of-business apps, such as contacts and appointments.
Internet access on the BB is just a little behind the best of the 3G/4G phones. Display is also slightly-to-moderately behind, but has been catching up.
So, Palm got beat by cellphones on voice and Internet connectivity. Palm got beat by Wince on applications deployment and display. Palm got slaughtered by RIM on email functionality. Palm (along with everyone else) GOT MASS MURDERED BY Apple on multimedia delivery, which will only get worse with the 3G iPhone.
And both LG and Samsung, gigantic industrial conglomerates with HUGE MONEY, are lining up to play whack-a-mole with the iPhone. They may not succeed, but they WILL deliver many more powerful cellular devices to further eclipse the Palm line.
I STILL LOVE MY PRISM, but it's SOOO Olde Skul...
Palm SHOULD HAVE become the "iPhone", but they got fat and lazy with a dedicated user base.
Then once they fell behing they didn't have the: talent, vision or resources to catch up.
Palm -- "The PDA That Time Forgot"
Among the many aspects of the Open/Free Source cultures is the essential characteristics of Choice and Free Will.
/. seem to love, beer, either Metaphorically or Analogously, Did the EXPLOSION of Micro-Breweries in the last decade kill off Beer?
As we all on
Or did it offer many people the chance to experiment and introduce new types and varieties of beer to an entirely new audience?
Sure, as the the Giant Commercial Software Shops have participated in the process, they have occasionally Big Footed their way through some issues.
Sure, as they have ponied up large numbers of developers and other resources to promote their vision of Open/Free Source, they have inflected the growth and adoption rates of Linux, et al.
But would anyone seriously suggest, for all the real difficulties this has caused, and will cause in the future, without the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that the Giants have poured into the world of Free/Open Source, that its adoption, growth and technological improvment would be anywhere near where it is now?????
They Pays Their Monies and They Takes Their Chances.....
I'd say we're all much better off with them, than without them. And those of us who want to work on porting LINUX or Java to our favorite Zilog 80 platform, can spend as much time as we chose to do so. Our own pet projects are, as always, up to to us.
As individual developers and contributors, we are as, "Free to Choose", as we have ever been.
TRUE ENOUGH...
but the greater point is when reporting the analysis/opinion of a direct competitor (the CEO of direct competitor, no less), you need to be ESPECIALLY SCEPTICAL about their analysis....
Netflix does indeed have the "well-embedded" position in their space, but i can quickly think of ways that i could attack that position, were i the Amazon CEO...(all just off the top of my head NO deep thoughts provided)
1. offer a free DVD of the customer's choice for every X months of rentals
2. cut prices by 30-50% (or more)
3. go to the Broadcasters, Movie Studios and Cable Networks and buy exclusive and/or early access to their top rated and most popular products
4. since the US' has reasonably strict laws about "loss leaders", go to the big dollar advertisers and get an income stream from them by including a 5-10 ads (that can't be forwarded around) at the begining of the DVDs, then further cut prices "dollar for dollar"
5. Look at the Netflix demographic and start including coupons for; 3 months free at Bally's Gym, 1 cup Starbucks drip coffee per day free for 30 days...ad nauseam...
I guarantee you that if I had access to Amazon's revenue stream and, more importantly, corporate tie-ins, i could put a real hitch in Netflix's getalong..and i'm just some dumm Nganear.
There once was a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Visicalc and Wordperfect were King, and CPM ruled the Universe...
Market-dominating companies only look impregnable because of the perceptual rate differences between "market time" and "biological time", coupled with the fact that venture capital nearly always prefers going into "open" or "poorly defended" markets.
But, if you're familar with the corporate histories of General Electric, General Motors, Ford and IBM...over the last century, thousands and thousands of "well-embedded" companies were shredded by these corporations when they felt they needed to be in a given business space.
If a "Giant" can find ways to turn marketshare compeitition into a "dollar for dollar race", the vast majority of the time, they with the deeper pocketbooks wins. And remember, people have predicting diaster for Amazon for years now....
"No Fool, Bezos, is he!"
...but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."
HMMMM, as a lifelong SciFi Geek, with a real preference (after the GrandMasters) for the "hard" stuff ala' Charles Sheffield (RIP)..it's an interesting question.
which seems to me to beg another question...How of much what we are talking about in inextricalby interwoven with contemporary American politics?
ST:TOS came along during one of the most politically and socially dynamic periods of American history. TOS had a distinctly "Utopian" viewpoint, which many have extracted/inferred something of a "Fabian Socialist" viewpoint on the part of the show. Giving Gene Roddenberry's well-known political leanings, that's pretty unlikely.
It is MORE likely that Roddenberry intended a "technological utopia" where a politically-neutral science has advanced to the point where it has solved all the supply and demand and resource conflicts that have fueled international relations since the Hellenic Period.
Going all the way back to the Golden Age, and looking at early Vogt and the Lensmen series, where you have LOTS and LOTS of rayguns, and pretty routinely violate EVERY understanding we had (even then) of the "Laws,AHEM, of Physics"
Is the principle attraction of TOS its utopian politics, which gives us "future warm/fuzzies" about scientific solutions to all the global conflicts and crises that currently beset Gaia?
Or is it actually the "science" of TOS that attracts Geeks?
I would argue that there is so VERY LITTLE "science" in ST (as a whole)...that those who respond strongly to it are responding to the "sociology" of the future ST envrionment...
FWIW..YMMV
1. Microsoft CEO sees no future for LINUX
2. RHEL CEO sees no future for UNIX
3. Google CEO sees no future for Yahoo!
4. RIAA CEO sees no future for P2P
5. CBS CEO sees no future for HBO
6. Western Digital CEO sees no future for Lexar
7. Oracle CEO sees no future for MySQL
8. Sun CEO sees no future for Dell
You read it here first!
Customers Complain About a New Security Hole. The number of complaints reaches Management's "Action Threshold". The Patch Process is started.
1. First, blame the customers' other software packages for the insecurity.
2. Then, blame the customers' for failing to apply services and hot fixes in a timely fashion.
3. Security Focus (or another of the Sec/Priv sites) calls up and threatens to "out" the hole if it isn't fixed.
4. Accuse the complaining entity of having a "partisan" agenda against your company, initiate "Four Corners" Stall -- while you try to figure out if you actually CAN patch the damn thing
5. As the news of the new exploit makes it into IRC and the UGs' Forums you issue an indignant press release stating that it has never been proven that the new exploit has even been used and is principly "theoretical".
6. As your Patch Team frantically works to get the patch out, explain that even though the chances of this exploit being used WERE previously slender or non-existent, now that some details of the exploit have been malicously leaked, HEAVY SIGH, you'll now go ahead and fix it.
7. Issue the patch, take credit for being "Right on Top" of security issues, explain how much money and time you are spending to counter the effects of the "Few Bad People" on the Internet.
8. News start to come in that your patch has broken a number of somewhat older apps -- explain that Users have a responsiblity to use "current" software products and refer them to Sales.
9. News of another exploit comes in --GOTO 1
BTW, this is pretty much AN INDUSTRY STANDARD APPROACH
In Commerical Software, it's the FEW companies that DON'T do some version of this that are the (delightful) and unfortunately RARE exception.
First the linguistic point ..."you provide a long list of international organisations, and say that if a nation is a member of them all (you said "and" not "or")......
/.'s would be aware that the scope and sway of NAFTA is different from the scope and sway as the proposed European Constitution....NAFTA is (i also thought rather obviously) a rather traditional "trade and tariffs" agreement, of a type that has been in use for all of recorded history. I thought that anyone who couldn't sort out NAFTA from the EU wasn't going to get much out of my comment (or probably care to).
since we've taken a grammatical turn here, NO i certainly didn't "say" that...
I MIGHT have ERRONEOUSLY "implied" that by my use of the phrase -- "...and DOZENS AND DOZENS OF OTHERS.." HOWEVER, that phrase was intended to modify the LIST of international treaties, conventions, accords and other agreements, it wasn't meant to modify or QUALIFY the scope of the subject.
It seemed clear to me (guess i was wrong), that most reasonably well-informed
OTOH, The proposed (and probably now moribund) European Constitution is/was intended as a social contract between independent nations.
SO rather transparently, i thought, "apples and oranges" as to the TYPE or CATEGORY of the individual entity, and focused on the parent's question of the use and application of legal structures across national identities.
From that perspective, what do NAFTA and the others have in common?
If you've read them all (i have), you will find that EVERY one of the previously mentioned entities deal with the application of either general or specific legal structures across national boundaries and in specific instances.
Some provide specific reconciliation and grievance mechanisms, some "agree to disagree" (for just one example, Bretton Woods is a model of "unspoken agreements" -- those rascally Central Bankers)
Since the Rooseveltian agreements created after WWII, birthing the foundational international orgs such as the World Bank, IMF and United Nations (and its incredibly profligate list of sub-orgs), the quantity and quality of international accords (for good or ill) has been skyrocketing and is continuing to do so.
For the example the parent focused on, the DMCA is definitely and/or potentially transportable via a number of these agreements, so in the case of North America, the DMCA can be transported via the NAFTA agreement.
Internationally (other than NA), the DMCA can be transported via; WTO, GATT, numerous individual bilateral or multilateral copyright protection agreements and protocols and the World Court.
So is there "International Law"?, of course not. It seems to me that only a child or naif would think so.
I don't think that I or the parent stated or implied that, if i did i apologize.
However, is there a means for extra-national enforcement, ON A CASE-BY-CASE basis, of a given law such as the DMCA?
Read those agreements and you find lots and lots of ways to try it.
EXTRA CREDIT: Want to see some real "interesting" agreements on international law enforcement, that directly undercut the laws and civil rights of many signatory nations?
Read the various UN Maritime Agreements and if those don't freak you out, then proceed to the UN Anti-Money Laundering Agreements and Protocols.
" Except that if it ISN'T a crime where I did the action is it still a crime?
...your country and its citizens get to pretty much unilaterally accept the laws of your fellow member nations when it comes to this type of "crime" (quotes NOT because i doubt its a crime, but because its not really clear "where" and EXACTLY "what" the PRECISE criminal elements of this activity are atomically composed of)
YES, it is still a crime -- IF your country is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Criminal Court (ICC), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Court, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and DOZENS AND DOZENS OF OTHERS, including the European Currency Agreement (EURO) and the proposed European Constitution and a member state of the United Nations....
The legal institutions (civil, criminal, enforcement and academic) of ALL the various G8 nations have barely caught up with the 100+ year old industrial revolution and the telecommunications revolution of the 1960's and 1970's.
These legal institutions are WAAAY behind in the "cyber" realm and the PC Revolution, let alone the newly emerging areas of 21st century intellectual property.
So, the guiding laws and legal practices are those designed to protect and prosecute 18th and 19th crimes. Therefore, you may not be breaking into a computer or system covered by the laws of your national entity, but if they are signatory to the above AND if the target national entity wants to pursue prosecution....
BINGO! you have just won a complete abdication of the laws of your nation, and "Welcome to XXXXX Correctional Facility! Where you will be opened to BIG NEW fascinating experiments and experiences in hair braiding, toilet cleaning and, AHEM, the broadening of your sexual experiences and horizons! Think of Club Med and just add the horrors of personal degredation and hair-trigger lethal violence."
Global 2000/National 500 Corporations, G8 bureaucrats and others with either large money AND/OR large clout have been loading up every international agreement of the last twenty years (to be charitable) with the export of laws and statutes favorable to their own secular partisan interests.
So, you can be sure that developing nations will be seeing a HUGE LOAD of things like the DMCA, EU Green Laws, et al stuffed down their throats (cause we all really care how many Kazaa DLs of Eminem there are in Upper Volta?).
I'm only being SLIGHTLY facetious in saying that if you were to read ALL these global agreements since the Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) you'd get the feeling that the principle purpose of international treaties was to guarantee that Mickey Mouse, French wine, British beef and German cars be protected from any international competition.
OH, it gets worse before it gets better. Atlanta Arcology anyone?
Peace, Out
"the prosecuter - a guy with a vested interest in slamming people and playing it up so he looks better
...they deserve our support and indignation.
A "prosecuter(sic)", is actually a guy who represents;
1. The Victims -- the MILLIONS of hardworking, honest people who have been victimized by the more successful attempts of morons like these guys, and as the skyrocketing dollar costs of identity theft/fraudulent CC transactions are just simply passed along to the other CC holders, he also represents
2. The Indirect Victims -- ALL that mass of people who need consumer credit to buy toys at seasonal holidays, pay for medicine for their sick dependents, and the great bulk of the other uses of consumer credit, that make peoples lives more pleasant and comfortable and their CC charges just keep going up and up, largely because of successful versions of Brian Salcedo.
3. The Constitution of the United States, the Guiding Documents of the individual states and municipalities -- ALSO KNOWN QUAINTLY AS "THE RULE OF LAW", I wonder how long ANYONE but the wealthiest would have credit cards, if CC fraud wasn't prosecuted vigorously????
Prosecutors are, similarly to most productive civil servants (and there are PLENTY of NON-productive civil servants, esp here in SoCal) generally overworked, underpaid and completely dedicated to "slamming" people such as; killers, rapists, burglars, robbers (essentially what people who specialize identity theft are), child molesters, and their ilk...
While we can all argue the logic and sensibility of keeping some person who sold/used some small quantities of banned substances in prison at 40K+/year, seemingly to provide "sex toys" for lifers.
The simple fact is, OTHER THAN DRUG CRIMES, which are after all still "crimes", and could rather easily be decriminialized (in MOST states) by ballot propposition (as we did here in Cali)...THE MAJORITY OF NON-DRUG RELATED CRIMINALS IN AMERICAN PRISONS ARE GENUINE BAD GUYS....
In Cali you have crack dealers, caught with serious "trafficking weight" on 3 or 4 SEPARATE arrests out on bail for 6 months to 2 years before they finally go inside.
Kevin (who i've met, i worked with his mother years ago) was a POLITICAL PRISONER, esp at the end of his "formal sentence", when the system just kinda "kept" him for a "while" longer...Kevin was a "cracker" who "missed the message", when they stopped the "hand slap" policy that had been in place 10 years ago...wrong crime, wrong time.
China, Myanmar, Cuba and numerous other countries have thousands and thousands of political prisoners...tortured, raped, beaten
Castro murdered some "dissidents" some months back, not even "capitialist provocateurs", but Socialist fellow-travelers who had the nerve to question his social policies....
Brian Salcedo is just a crook, using a computer instead of a gun...be interesting to see how that goes over with the Triple Lifers in the GenPop...hope he's good with his hands.
BTW, Since Mr. Salcedo "Pled Out", you can bet, the 9 years he plea bargained for, was prob about 1/3 to 1/2 of what he would have received at trial. If he didn't like the arrangement, he could have taken his chances at trial.
"No. It is a lose-lose."
/. MATH JOKE)
/. a few days ago)...so not only does Kazaa not become "more legitimate", Skype's street cred just took a huge self-inflicted hit.
I"ll another "Lose" to that for an even 3 (Chill -- that's a
"Kazaa does not become any more legitimate because Skype is not using anything in it."
In fact, as implied in the parent, many companies and technologists already regard Kazaa as anathema (or worse), this will now put Skype on that same list, with many of these decision makers/deployers.
Companies that are open to VOIP will now take another look before they deploy a Skype solution, just because of the stink of Kazaa, especially as this comes on the heels of CA's declaration of Kazaa as the #1 Piece of Spyware in the World (as carred on
"At the same time a bunch of freeloaders will come along who are least likely to pay anything as long as they can. So this move will also hit Skype financially in the long run.
Exactly. If you go over to CNET and grep Skype you will see that the Skype Krewe was, over the course of the last year, desparately seeking to distance itself from their roles in the creation and establishment of Kazaa/FastTrack (good business idea), and now Zinnstrom and Company have jumped back in the mud pit with the Kazaa "monster" they created and were trying to get away from...STRANGE...especially now that the Australian court trial of Sharman is about to get under way, and the preliminary indications are that the judge in this trial has just ordered the world's largest tube of KY and had it sent to Ms. Hemmings....
Kazaa/Morpheus/Grokster/FastTrack/Sharman has done a GR8 job of ducking the bullet in the courts of the USA and the Netherlands, but a betting man would say their roll is about to end in a courthouse in Sydney...weird time to slime a solid new MONEY MAKING product like Skype????
With this boner move, in addition to having made any IPO much harder (from a due diligence POV), Skype are now going to have work that much harder to attract paying customers, directly because of the association with the "Always Free, Always Will Be" model of FastTrack/Kazaa, they will now have to work crazy hard to sell the paid service...AGAINST the fact that Packet8 and Vonnage are really starting to pick up momentum...
Makes me wonder if they're getting business advice from either RIAA or MPIA?
"The amount of disturbance to the industry caused or even potentially caused by Div-X converting and downloading is so tiny compared to the amount of resources and ill-will generated by their heavy-handed response to this so-called threat that one must come to the conclusion that the MPAA leadership is mentally unbalanced."
...they work in system where everybody knows the rules, and follows them. and the MOST IMPORTANT part of their business model is control of distribution, and once that is gone, their current business model goes with it, and they are ACUTELY AWARE that broadband and digital distribution MUST , over time, render the distribution model that has evolved over the last 50 years ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS...
I agree and working here in the belly of the beast and having collaborated with some of the people and corporations involved, they are indeed "mentally unbalanced", but not by concerns of customers dissatisfaction, or even by concerns of several percentage points of lost sales, though with a movie that might earn $100 Million in DVD sales, over the course of ten years, several percentage points of loss are nothing to spit on.
THE ESSENTIAL REASON THAT THE MAJOR ENTERTAINMENT CONGLOMERATES CARE ABOUT FILE SHARING, WHETHER BY IP, SPINNING 'GLASS OR ANY OTHER DIGITAL FORMAT BASED MEDIUM, IS THEY SEE THEIR ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL SLIPPING AWAY DOWN A PIECE OF OPTICAL FIBRE.
despite the legal fiction of a separation (Chinese Wall) between production, distribution and exhibition, the VERY SMALL NUMBERS of actual players who control all the previous listed key aspects of entertainment "manufacture" share something nearly as valuable as the ability to actully actively collude (which is VERY MUCH forbidden by law, and they wouldn't even think about active collusion, as they could lose EVERY NICKEL they've ever earned)
they have something nearly as good as cartel behavior, and completely legal...
any day you can go to lunch at The Grille or dinner at Koi or Ivy, and there will be seen many/most of the people who control production and distribution of film, TV and music...
HOW MANY other multibillion dollars industries can say that nearly ALL the key decision makers live in the same town, eat at the same restaurants, go to the same health clubs, vacation at the same resorts and SEE each other socially several times a month?
NOT telecom, not software, not healthcare, not wireless...
how much collusion can you imagine between Linus and Bill and Scott and John and Carly and Steve?
So, H'Wood will fight every inch of the way, i'm asked several times a month "When will DRM be unbeatable?", the look on their faces when i say "Never" is priceless...they simply don't believe me
they are waiting for that "Silver Bullet" combination of OS, Network and Desktop software that enables that "Unbeatable DRM"...and by the way, there are legions of technologists out here telling them that "Silver Bullet" is going to get here RealSoonNow...
SO, When will the E! Industry wise up and stop these bizarre anti-customer pogroms against a small number of file sharers?
My guess, is that until the current management teams of these companies are either replaced by a new generation, willing to see the promise and potential of digital distribution, or (MUCH MORE LIKELY, IMHO) the acceptance of easily available digital distribution will have to wait until the market capitalization values of these companies are lowered to the point where they have to make peace with the digital world in order to just survive.
"Its a question for those of us who were around at the time."
Ok, i'll bite.
Not only did i wait on deploying MS Word, i was a "decider" for several large entities that were waiting for the consultant community to pick a winner.
WordPerfect for Windows 6 (WPW6) was a train wreck, but as i remember (reasonably well, i believe), it was primarily a question of DESIGN (i.e. usuability), NOT reliability that pushed me and my customers to MS Word.
The outstanding clarity of design focus that was evident in WordPerfect 5/5.5 was (OBVIOUSLY, IMHO), completely lacking in WPW6.
The WPW6 menus, past the obligatory XWin/Win components were illogical, occasionally misleading and often confusing. As were many of the dialogs.
I would hold that most of this confusion came from the complete departure from the long established Wang meta tag block text markup interface that SSI WordPerfect, UMMM, "adopted" for their own, with two pane screen windows, one for text and one for the markup meta tags.
Though this was available in WPW6, it was awkwardly implemented, and in design terms the "context binding" to the Win32 design approach was very poor.
Interestingly, MS Word for Windows 1.0 ALSO had a pretty horrible implementation of the Win32 GUI, however it was somewhat cleaner, and somewhat faster.
Leading to another observation;
WordPerfect for Windows 6 WAS SLOOOOOW, real, real slow. large document saves were "go get a cup of coffee slow".
WinWord 1 was also somewhat porky (i personally stayed with MS WORD DOS for a LONG TIME, much faster, much more stable, from a BSofD perspective - i also had written nearly 300 macros that really couldn't be translated easily/well to WinWord).
so, if WPW6 was all/mostly written in assembler, -- WPW6 was SO SLOW, i'd guess that it was either badly written, or rather badly optimized -- making me wonder if all/parts were written to the Win32S API (what a train wreck THAT was), and also wondering what assembler WP used????
-- in those days the first round of Win32, the first version or two of MASM wasn't all that much more powerful than "Debug", i still occasionally use MASM 5/6 to knock out quick small drivers and some CODEC work, and as i recall from the time (VERY FOGGILY), IFF TASM was around (and many of MS' competitors wouldn't TOUCH MASM), early TASM never really performed for me (or my friends) on LARGE scale projects (it was VERY nicely fixed after the first/second version).
I also seem to recall that it has already been legally established that MS has in/around this time period did indeed have "non-published" API features, particuarly used by the Excel teams in their "life and death" battle with the then spreadsheet market monopoly holder, "Lotus 1-2-3", and Andrew Schulman has written numerous books and articles on this aspect of early Win development.
Lotus, i believe, having bet BIG on OS2/G (BTW, 1-2-3G ROCKED -- way ahead (2 years) of its time), came late to the Win32 party, and had to rush 1-2-3 Win out the door, using lots of source from OS2/G (not quite a port, but close) and the Oz2 -Win32 APIs were VERY different (Oz2 was in many ways much "cleaner" than the earliest W32 APIs).
Ashcan Fate (down the street from my company) was imploding at the time, between the "religious" problems that were besetting the company's highest management, and the Big Bet (Failed) on Framework and that DTP program they were tussling with Ken Ski over, I would say Ashton-Tate died of self-inflicted wounds.
While i certainly don't know the internals of WPW6, most of the senior corporate developer types i spoke to were not ready to put any large amount of developer resources into Win32 until it was market tested, most people at that time thought Oz2 would wipe Win32 out of the market, and many ISVs put their money down accordingly....
And i completely agree, this suit serves NO ONE but, the attorneys, and Novell should leave it alone.
What next? Should AT&T sue MITS and IMSAI for ripping off the OS approach and command verbs of UNIX????
In a later news release of the Preliminary Autopsy Results:
1. He had Type II diabetes from the consumption of Mountain Dew/Code Red.
2. He has extremity palsy from the intake of Jolt Cola.
3. He was having Grand Mal epileptic seizures from the MSG in his local Chinese takeout.
4. He had become reclusive with the shock of finding out that real, live women DIDN'T have staples in their navels.
5. He hands had become claws due to the carpal tunnel and tendonitis from his non-ergonomic keyboard.
HOWEVER, the proximate cause of death was...
6. He attempted to read the entire set of Don Knuth's TAOCP (The Art of Computer Programming) AND "Regular Expressions in PERL" in the same evening and HIS HEAD EXPLODED!!!
LATE BREAKING NEWS:
In a joint press announcment, Microsoft, Sun, Apple and SCO announced that they were SURE that the Lone Coder's work infringed on their IP, and they would be seeking redress beyond the grave, from the appropriate authorities, saying "If ANYONE thinks that merely by DYING they can escape the reach of our lawyers enforcing our intellectual property rights, they will find out just how far we will go to make sure that every line of ever written has the protection it deserves!"
He is survived by his parents, who will be paying off his student loans from MIT for the rest of their natural lives, and his high school sweetheart, who, unknown to the Lone Coder, due to lack of consortium, became a lesbian several years ago and moved to North Beach.
Richard Stallman has annouced that he's quite sure the Lone Coder's work was pretty much something that he had written in LISP on a napkin, one lunch 30 years ago at the Lampoon, but he was kinda buzzed and "...wasn't sure what i did with the *&)&*(&)( napkin...!"
"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;
A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/?
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....
STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"
3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..
some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!
4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...
Good Luck!
It's a ***FELONY*** because it's a combination of a variety of PROPERTY crimes, including THEFT, FRAUD and DISTRIBUTION of stolen property.
Would we argue the nature of this if someone had broken in an electronics warehouse or a bookstore or a Costco and taken an equivalent dollar amount of goods and given them out to their friends?
I doubt it.
However, because software is "intangible" in nature compared to a frozen cheese pizza or bottle of Jack or Sony Walkman, some of us look at it differently.
However, the manufacturers of the software have to pay ALL those same expenses that Sony does.
They have to pay executives, engineers, marketing staff, assembly workers, packaging, warehousing, shipping, et al.
When you distribute a stolen copy of a piece of software and by so doing, reduce the numbers of copies that will be sold, you make it harder for a company to survive.
While it's easy to imagine that every s/w company is a MS, Oracle, IBM or Sun, it's not true.
Most s/w companies are much smaller and are fighting for their survival on a daily basis.
And we all have to wonder what would have happened to our entire marketplace, if their had been less piracy.
What would have been the fate of WordPerfect Corp, Lotus, Novell, and many other dead products if there had been less piracy?
What impact on Apple's conversion from a $10BN a year company to $1+BN company?
There have been many jobs lost, products destroyed and careers sidetracked in our industry by sales declines.
Sone of these SURELY have been as a result of warez.
If you lost your job and maybe your family, and knew warez had been at least partially responsible, how would you feel about warez?
1. The Telcos start whining to their regulators that they are being deprived of revenue, as point-to-point trunk calls lessen for 802-based communications.
2. The wireless carriers (who still haven't found a stable, profitable business model -- i thought PacBell Wireless was bad -- until Cingular bought 'em) will join in with the trunk owners and scream that their FCC franchise is being devalued by Wireless IP Data and IP Telephony and they need government help (read: R-E-G-U-L-A-T-I-O-N) right now.
3. The Consumer Giants will whine and bitch and snivel about interference issues with 2.5 and 5 GHZ devices they make.
4. The law enforcement/intelligence community will endlessly bitch about their lack of ability to "monitor" this dangerous new technology, and how this creates a national security vulnerablity and therefore, offers a "window of opportunity" to evil-dewars. They will insist on lousy/key crypto and 1.5 bit key algorithms, and their ability to "oversee" the security of this spectrum.
4. The G, sensing the increased value of this spectrum and their ability to make even more money in licence fees and regulatory overhead will further regulate the spectrum and cause more and more expense to be made to justify their jobs and administration and regulation of it.
no wonder i don't sleep much.....
exactly, if you want to go back to James Joyce's "Ulysses" and "The Dubliners", 20th century author's have been struggling with ways to mix metaphorical "alternate realities" to so-called "mainstream" writing.
i think there is a fairly direct link from Joyce to Gaiman, and it passes the writers you mention, with Rushdie and Marquez (if you haven't read "100 Years of Solitude", you missing out on a great (if really twisted) book) being the best commercially known.
But, there is also much of this literary approach present, in the Sci-Fi genre, in both the "Dr. Who" series and Doug Adams' "Hitchhiker" series.
You could also make a pretty good case for ELEMENTS of this approach in Heinlein's last few (post-stroke) books; "Friday", "Number of the Beast" and "Cat Who Walked through Walls", as alternative realities abound.
And some of Harlan's short stories like "Repent Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man" (the story ROCKS, BTW), mix reality and fantasy, though are more psychological in approach.
I liked "Neverwhere" and found "American Gods" oddly affecting, but Mr. Gaiman's "Neverwhere" seemed to another of the mixture of the "LOTR, D&D, Snakes & Ladders RPG" type of writing that's been leaking out of Britain/Europe for the last 20 years.
LeGuin does it as well as anybody, "Dispossessed" is a fabulous book, and the gender-bending shows a pretty "alternate" approach to S/F in and of itself. And it was published in 1975.
I'm not arguing that MS'opposition to Java hasn't had a negative effect on Java. I'm NOT arguing that MS didn't want to kill Java off (wouldn't you, if you were a competitor? that's what you're paid to do as an executive?)
I AM arguing that the "blame MS for EVERYTHING negative that happens in technology to any product that competes with MS, is overblown and generally destructive to the overall technology environment.
Let's generalize your argument and put it as follows
Company X, because of their desktop monopoly was/is in a position ot make/break anybody's software.
1975 - MITS Altair 8800 had a "monopoly" on the PC marketplace.
Late 1970's to mid 1980's -- Apple I and then the II dominated the "pre-built" PC market (effectively a "monopoly", with some competition from the 8 bit kits -- i built one of the others).
1981 -- IBM introduces the 5150 and then later the XT, within a few years IBM has a, you guessed it, monopoly on desktop PC
1984 -- Apple introduces the Macintosh (still have my 128K Mac, somewhere), Apple has an effective sales monopoly on the GUI amongst PCs.
August 24, 1995 -- Windows 95 released, as good a point as any to mark the birth MS' modern desktop (and very real) monopoly.
Substituting the name of any of the above for "Company X", you will arrive at the following conclusions;
1. tech monopolies are short lived
2. new products CAN suceed in the face of strong opposition from a entrenched, market-dominating competitor. I think the sucess of both Apache and LINUX as whole show that very clearly.
In OS/FS, very often people use MS as a scapegoat for EVERYTHING that goes against their wishes.
In an earlier, and very clear example, did MS radically harm Borland's ability to compete on languages by cherry picking many of the best and brightest employees that Borland have?
OH YEAH! But the 34 Borland employees at the core of the legal argument were all adults capable of making their own decisions. They went with the bucks -- the vast majority of us would have done the same thing when offered 3-10X (and in a couple of cases, X*10 to the 9) our current compensation packages.
We have to do our best to create the best software we can. And worrying about what the competitive marketplace is going to do is foolish.
Capitalism is not for the feint of heart. The body count is (and always will be) high. Let the lawyers bury the lawyers. Let the rest of us get on with building the future.
"W.O.W." -- Way of the World -- Assholes Are.
HMM, Really? Which District Court? Maybe you provide
Give us the citation, please?
"... and that court's findings were upheld and clarified by the US Court of Appeals.
Ditto, missed that one, too. How about that citation as well?
"... Nonetheless, Microsoft has continued to benefit from having used its monopoly power illegally to suppress the emerging success of Java."
Maybe you could also tell us all WHY you think M$ is responsible for helping Java succeed?
So using your implied standards, Sun, HP, IBM et al have a responsibilty to help an emerging technology, say
HMMM, that's a novel definition of business competition "You MUST support your competions' emerging products". No wonder you posted AC. Silly Troll.
As unfashionable as it is on
Did M$ ship IE with a "corrupt" JVM, i'd sure bet they did.
SO WHAT?
Did they intend to kill the Java adoptions and standards momentum?
I'd bet they sure wanted to (and still do).
SO WHAT?
Just as we in the Open Source and FSF communities are free to get up in the evening and work on any project we want, deploy any OS we want, use any app we want and deploy any available technology we can...
so is M$, they are no more obligated to support java than pepsi is to support coca-cola, than lexus is to support mercedes, than toyota is to support nissan
M$ is responsible for its own karma. If the world wants Java and M$ doesn't support it they way the world wants, they will lose market share....
Microsoft (and any other company) is only resposible to their stockholders and customers, if that means killing off a competitive technology, that's the way the game is (and has always been) played. That's the system.
It was Sun's responsiblity to make Java an important, dominating technology, NOT Microsoft.
If you've REALLY followed the Java Saga, Sun has done as much (some would say more) to halt Java adoption/deployment as Microsoft.
If you're a customer, you vote with your wallet.
If you're a developer/technologist you vote with the systems you deploy/develop and recommend.
You want to "beat" Microsoft?
Do it with better software.
1. This is an HUGE OPPORTUNITY for some LINUX distro and Company with hair to get some media exposure (FREE marketing -- hard to comeby in this world).
2. If NOLA + MS is going to short-circuit the bid process, why shouldn't EVERYBODY get to play? (BTW, this is almost certainly a ***LEGAL*** circumvention of the bid process -- very few governmental entities have a rule against accepting ***FREE*** anything, as long as it is NOT an attempt to gain POLTICAL FAVOR). This is VERY, VERY slick on MS' part.
3. VERY FEW Federal, State, Regional, Municipal entities have a F*****G CLUE when it comes to IT procurement. They are freq well behind industry in IT acquisition/deployment (not all that many corporations are great at it either).
So, NOLA is gonna do whatever NOLA is gonna do. Courts might reverse it later, much later. Probably not (separation of powers and all that).
I suggest you consider what my main man, StevieB, has probably already figured out...once a few 2nd/3rd tier munincipalities have adopted a 'City Wide' apps and services vendor (WHOEVER that is) it will MUCH, MUCH easier to sell the rest of them.
Procurement specialists (need to be careful about discussing 'procurement' in NOLA -- my favorite American city) in government jobs are VERY, VERY conservative and follow a "herd rule". Once a few of these entities adopts a given solution, many/most of the others will follow.
We can sit on the sidlines and cry "Foul" and ask for the "Ref" to intercede (and we've all seen how effective that strategy is, haven't we?), or we return the punch.
Quod erat demonstrandum...
Nope, reread the article, it doesn't say anything about NOLA being restricted to using ONLY MS products.
Further, IFF you know anything about MS server products, the consulting and aftermarket business they generate is astonishing.If you're running an MS shop, you will quickly learn the meaning of TCO. And network security. And data redundancy.
"It *is* a bribe."
One man's bribe is another man inducement. Whether we're talking about Triple Coupon Day, Zero Dollars Down on a Lexus, Zero Percent Financing on a Chevy or a Free Hot Wax with every Car Wash on Tuesday.
MS don't have any real position in goverment software systems, so they can't be accused of market domination. That means they're safe from any legal blowback.
HEY, I HAVE AN IDEA!!!!
Why doesn't RedHat or Mandrake or Debian make a counter-offer to NOLA to provide them with LINUX systems, tit for tat, for all the services that MS is offering?
Think what a great headline that would be for LINUX.
"Entire City of New Orleans goes OpenSource."
That's how you play and that's how you beat them. Competition. The Amurrican Way.
BTW, you do realize, don't you, that this is a rather BIG validation of "free software" (small 'f"), and MS has done little in the last few years but tell everyone that "free software is worth what you pay for it.
Interesting, that they're "giving it away".
What could that mean? HMMMMMMMM
being generous to your observation, you can probably do useful voice recognition with something around a 1GHZ P3/256MB RAM/50-100MB of SROM for the voice rec firmware
some developer friends who have extensive voice rec XPerience (i don't) would say 1.5GHZ P4/512MB RAM/100-200MB of SROM....
even given super low power versions of all these parts (which DON'T exist at this time)
your battery life (assuming 2-4 AA spec cells (more for form factor than any other reason, you'd actually use LiPoly, but you still wouldn't have room for than the eqivalent of 4 AAs) your battery life would be measured in minutes
"Obviously, Danger Inc. got stuck with the lame-os who were unwilling to persue handwriting recognition. (or voice recognition, or a b.a.t. keypad, or even DVORAK keyboard.)"
obviously you're NOT an engineer, OR don't understand either "economies of scale" OR just how hard it is to get a new technological standard adopted...(check with BeOS developers).
if all this tech existed (it doesn't) the device would retail between $1500 - $3000, hardly good territory for a consumer communications device
THAT MIGHT BE WHY THEY DIDN'T DO SOMETHING "USEFUL"???????