that's not the only thing mentioned in this thread that doesn't fly...
i'm not a libertarian, i'm a centrist, but let me take a whack at his one anyway,
the original poster of this thread stated his perception of the problem as follows:
"The US government is obviously being terribly corrupted by various organizations with lots of money."
therefore, implying that this corrupt goverment is using its powers to negatively influence people's live with legislation such as the SSSCA..
Then went on a semi-coherent rant against libertarians, implying that they are the cause of the SSSCA problem because of their philosophical opposition to giving the government excessive power to control ***PEOPLE'S*** lives through corrupt legislation such as the DMCA and SSSCA...
and then stated:
"...the gov't is the only organization which has the power to respond appropriately to pressure from the citizens"
so, as my symbolic logic instructors would have said, let's reduce this argument to essentials:
The SSSCA is the result of a government corrupted by corporate influence via lobbying and political contributions.
This corrupt government's influence and power is being reduced by libertarian ideals.
The solution to the corrupt goverment's having too much unchecked power, resulting in its ability to pass corporate special interest legislation which is deleterious to the average citizen is (drum roll, please)....
..to give the corrupt government much broader powers to control the everday lives of citizens...
"I'm scared living in Canada just because of proximity."
...I agree, i'm scared of you living in canada, just because of proximity, too.
i have 2-21" monitors, a 16" FP, 1-19" monitor (plus some small speaker cubes and misc) on that chromed wire rack shelving (called bakers'racks), this stuff is from a company called Metro Shelving, but IKEA has its own brand...
i use the wide shelves, 24" (and 8 or 10 feet long) for the monitors, and use the narrow (around 8-10"wide) to create a keyboard shelf right in front/below the wider "top"....
you can adjust the height on those legs, with those nylon bushings and i've put a ton of weight on these things (well, about 600-800#'s) and not had much deflection...(though the center of percussion was really high..took about 200# off)
the downsides include having to put "trays" for your pens, smoking materials, etc...as they would otherwise just drop through the wires and if you are one of those folk who rest their wrists on the desktop edge...WELL, a couple of hours of that will teach you about numbness and pain...if you use a contoured KB or wrist rest..nada problemo...
it looks kinda HiTek...and you really can find the stuff just about anywhere, its reasonably priced (IKEA's is the cheapest but they don't have a very big selection of sizes) and if you really HATE the chrome...it's available in a semi-dull/shiny BLACL finish...Blood, Bath and Beyond has a really ***nice*** brand of this stuff, but it's kinda pricey
i equipped an office with about 12-15 of these "desks"...got lots of compliments from customer/visitors and only checked it out for the same reason you mention...all of our employees had at least 3 monitors per desktop and we just couldn't find a nice-looking, cost-effective solution...
i thinks it's medium cool looking, but, as always, should you or any of your..., i mean, YMMV...
Thanks! for the GREAT RESPONSE! It's posts like yours that make putting up with the flamers and trolls possible, like the ironically-deprived(entendre*3), humourless, M$ Troll above and below us. Though i agree with most of your analysis, let me respond to a several things you said. it'a little long, but you raised numerous good points.....first the original question i answered was;
"Why should Palm respond to a MS palm with an implementation using an OS unproven on its platform. Extolling the fashionable alternatives just to say it point to a clear lack on thoughtfullness. "
I responded with a personal anecdote centered on a large group of media and analysts. I choose this because the people in that room were; early adopters, important recommenders and media journalists. All of whom have an important function in the success or failure of any product. Your point that;
"Keep in mind that this is an audience of C|Net, ZDNet, tech-reading people, and the Palm devices have always been bashed in the press for not having features that stack up to Pocket PC's."
is true. It's also the reason i chose to bring this anecdote up. These people are important to the success or failure of Palm, not determinative, but important.
"But the Palm devices continue to grab and hold market share. And this was before Palm's acquisition of Be, and before Palm's stated intention to produce a StrongARM device, and before (IIRC) Palm's release of the m500/m505."
Palm's market share is 10X that of the wince devices, BUT, wince sales are doubling every month, IDG Gartner/InfoWorld have confirmed that. PalmCo is losing major share to Handspring. And price cuts have already occurred on the new m5XX series, that's NOT a GOOD sign.
Palm will have to deal with the fact that CE has come a very long way since v1. Look at very recent CE developments.......
1. M$ has lowered the license cost of CE quite substantially. AND is cutting some ***nice*** terms on the side
2, M$ is making very genuine and sincere efforts to reach handheld developers and provide lots of developer tools, help and assistance. M$ also has some of their very best people working on the handheld/embedded space, smart, hardworking, customer saavy folk like Bill Vegthe. People CAN really make the difference in a tech sector
3. M$ has used a subset of Win32 in the development of CE that is known by and appeals to the largest base of app developers in the world.
4. M$ is putting "Big Heat" into their ISV channel to get CE projects off the ground. M$ has the best marketing skills of any tech company in the world. Palm is only starting to develop the kind forward marketing that M$ is capable of.
Now to deal quickly with all three of your bulleted items. Again, they are ALL true, TODAY. What about tomorrow? This sector is very young.
PRICE: pricing is mostly a function (device for device) of volume, and as Palm goes to the high color screens that most CE machines use, the CE machines price will come down towards the Palm prices as their manufacturing volume rises. the Global 2000 companies that mfg CE machines can really take advantage of economies of scale when they are available. PocketPC Prices WILL drop.
FORM FACTOR: This was covered quite a bit in the COMDEX presentation. I struggle with it all the time. What is the "right size" for a sub-notebook device. Palm has in its PalmOS 3 and 4 devices, hit pretty close to a perfect blend of size for function. However, if the MARKETPLACE decides that it wants the ability to do color jpegs, mpegs, pngs, gifs, etc with a handheld the "Palm sized" device screen size will be a liability. The jury is out on that one right now. This gives Palm a decided form factor edge, for now. That will be demand driven and could change at any time.
ZEN OF PALM: There is NO question to this point in handheld development that Palm has gotten it right. However, we're talking about the future. Having owned early Palms and early CE machines, Palm blew away CE for usability, were pocketable and had great battery life. My Color Companion is one of the greatest slayers of batteries i have ever seen, worse than early HP handheld calculators (HP55, great calculator bring lots of batteries). But, as i understand both from COMDEX and from the 2001 M$ Embedded DevCon (GREAT! event,THX!)...
...M$ is betting on the evolving needs of handheld users going towards multimedia and other rich(er) data experiences, with something like MP3 being the "next frontier"...how easy is it to get MP3 playing on a Palm and how cheap? to the degree that its doable, its expensive, now you're Palm in in iPaq/Journada territory
HERE'S WHAT I'M AFRAID IS GOING TO HAPPEN: Palm won't evolve PalmOS fast enough to keep up with falling CE machine prices, and the "value" equation will start to leans towards CE. The industry media, which as you pointed out, is not all that friendly to Palm, will start giving numerous "Editors' Choice", "Top 5" and "Must Buy!" awards to CE machines (they already are to the iPaq (BEST CE MACHINE, have u tried one?) and the momentum will start to swing towards the CE platform, Then, once the Mo' starts to go, M$ will put in a, say a billion dollar broadcast marketing campaign, and that will push the Mo further towards CE.
Meanwhile, Palm (now cash starved from repeated price cutting) will sit on its current laurels and not introduce kernel level improvements that will allow its internal or 3rd party developers to keep up with the rate of change in handhelds' features and all of a sudden there will be a CE machine with; 24-bit color, built in MP3 player, PCMCIA slot, OS level tcp/ip, BROADBAND/80211.b wireless connectivity, the ablity to play either ported or native Gameboy Advanced games and a price level between $300 and $400 (what a Rio 800 costs, IOW)....that machine COULD appear in the next 12-16 months!!!!
If that's where the handheld marketplace is going, M$ absolutely believes it is, i tend to agree, is Palm ready for that upcoming market? From what i've seen Palm is giving out a lot of "It's Perfect the way it is!" and "PocketPC features are largely superflous and not within the scope of OUR vision".
I say Palm has to OUT INNOVATE M$, whether those innovations fall in the scope of the existing "Zen of Palm", or not. As the Bud(ha)said; when you are in zen, the mountain is NOT the mountain..well, Palm's mountain may be NOT the mountain..could be time to move forward fast
Well, betting against the tide of technological evolution and improvment is a risky thing. I'd rather see Palm take action early against a possible paradigm shift then wait till it hits them in the head. Playing catch up to M$ in your own sector historically is; expensive, complex and usually unsuccessful...you can ask ashton-tate,Oz2, borland, lotus and novell...
one of the big questions in C'paqs buying Digital was what to do with DECUnix?
this problem caused major problems for the Paq management team, as did the question of what to do with the Alpha chip...i (and numerous others) predicted at the time that Paq would try to bump off the Alpha chip because of their, uh, close relationship the Redmond Krewe, they did try, the G told them, "No, noo, can't do that"
also Paq had a major (by corporate standards) revolt in the Alpha devel teams....lost mucho development talent because of the merger...
HP will face similar probs...
the high margin folk at HP only know of HPUX, and the "lure" of Linux will probably not be very great for them and their developers, Linux SMP/scalability is at least 2 years behind HPUX....
Paq has been one of M$' dependable Ben Dovers since the day, they know from nothing but WinOS and lousy customer support...any attempt to shove Linux down their throats will result in massive problems with the "True Believers" on the Compaq devel teams...
Linux WILL get a boost from this, SURE, but H'Paq will have to decide to row the boat with Blue or with M$
...for Carly it won't be an easy decision, as picking the wrong partner will prob ensure the acquisition or demise of America's Most Admired Engineering company...
OT: i still have my HP 35/45/55/67/97/41c/x/v calculators and let's not forget my fave, the 16C,they all still work like new, though a few of them be lookin real uglee and they been around the world...Good Luck, HP!
well, i presume that you're supporting M$, because every major poll has shown that around 70% (running average, very rough) of the American public DO NOT support the breakup of M$..
throughout the period of this antitrust trial, this public support in the major media's polls (CNN, Zogby, ABCNews, NYT, et al. when they have polled on this question, which isn't that often) has ranged between 60-80% of the American public supporting M$ in this, and many question the G's role in antitrust as a whole
i presume most of these people have had trouble finding the "Any" key, and while i would dearly love them on the jury of any trial i was subject to...
i sure wouldn't want them making technology policy for my company or my country...ever watch PPV Wrestling????
you want these folk driving major public policy, eh?
Last Fall in COMDEX Hell(?), there was a "Battle of the Handhelds" media event where a cadre of 3COM/Palm geeks did an "debate" style presentation against a M$ cadre...they took turns, laid out strengths/weaknesses, etc...
1. the room (a large sideroom, 300+) was FULL to SRO
2. Phil Holden led the M$ Team, I don't remember who led the Palm Team, both teams were well prepared
the Palm folk abandoned the debate style forum and went into a "we're the OG and we have the market share, and 3rd party apps" Marketing Speel
The M$ folk were clearly taken aback at this, and had to develop an impromptu "market speel" of their own, you wouldn't think that would be that hard for them;), it wasn't theirs was; newer technology, better color, multimedia, and real multi tasking and multi media, all built it
at the end of the hour and a half(?), the moderator asked for a show of hands and asked the audience a number of raised your hands questions (these questions are NOT verbatim, but are pretty damn close, 90%+).
among the ones i clearly remember are:
Who is currently using a handheld? Over 90% of the audience raised their hands affirmatively
Who is using a PalmOS handheld? Around 80+% of the audience raised their hands again.
Who thinks PalmOS is currently superior to wince? Around 90% of the audience agreed that PalmOS is currently superior.
Who thinks that their next handheld will be a PalmOS machine? HERE it gets interesting, only around 50% of the audience raised their hands.
The moderator, taken aback, thought about it and then asked; Who would consider buying a wince machine when they buy their next handheld? Around 50% of the audience raised their hands.
The moderator then asked who thinks that PalmOS has gone as far can with its current architecture?
AROUND 70%+ OF THE AUDIENCE RAISED THEIR HANDS AFFIRMATIVELY
pretty much everybody in the room was surprised at how many people thought PalmOS needed an overhaul..that was last November!
Palm had better very quickly take the BeOS technology and do something about getting multi-threading, larger memory model, multi-media (read MP3,WMA) 16-24 bit color implemented, TCP/IP support and ALL AT THE KERNEL LEVEL, not as OS shimware or else you can chalk up another dead platform
at the M$ Embedded Developers Conference in Feb this year, M$ laid out some of their platform tools and improvements to CE...they were pretty damned impressive (esp considering their early efforts..i own a very low # Compaq Companion CE v1....i still flinch when i think about using Pocket Outlook or Pocket Explorer at 14.4, my IIIXE blows it away)
wince sales are ***DOUBLING*** every month....you figure it out...the ipaq was backordered for months
gee, shucks, since the original poster framed it this way;
"The question is, does this (the procedural remedies suggested by the DOJ and imposed by Jackson) go to allowing PC vendors to bundle additional operating systems like Linux with new PCs without the penalties that are now part of the Microsoft Bootloader License [byte.com]?"
the byte.com article, linked by the original poster, states clearly, that the DOJ decided to ignore the "bootloader" issue in the current case (a BIG mistake IMHO), so the bootloader issue was NEVER introduced at trial. It will be very hard (nearly impossible) to introduce it now without reopening much or all of the existing findings to further litigation (that's the way our legal system works)
FURTHER, in case you've been living in Elbonia and/or don't understand M$ OS architecture, the ENTIRE thrust of their FS, LOADER AND EXEC is to NOT SUPPORT interoperability with anything but M$ architecture...why do you think they own 90% of the desktop market...their good looks and charm?
so, presuming that the original poster that i responded to meant what he/she said about multi-booting....
...THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE MULTI-BOOTING WITH ***data interoperability*** on M$ ARCHITECTURES IS THROUGH ****substantial redesign****
TRUE, you could force a "Chinese Menu" screen solution (not really completely within the current trial scope, BTW), but how does that help the "monopoly" problem?
...if the average desktop user can't seemlessly and invisible interchange DATA between her multi-booted OS...guess which one they're gonna pick, the one with 3-6% market share amongst geeks like us, or the one with 93% market share amongst home users and businesses?????
Now, just WHO do you think would have to control the necessary architectural changes to M$ OS????
Bubsy F*****G Berkley?
BTW, you might have the stones to not post AC, if you want to be taken seriously, unless taking cheap shots is ALL you're about
"Particularly troubling is the suggestion that the DOJ will model their proposed remedy on the restrictions proposed by Judge jackson in so far as those restrictions to business practices were relevant when they were originally proposed but the landscape has changed drastically si(n)ce then."
i'm really, really hesitant to reply on this one. I had a reply drafted to the thread this AM, b4 the last/. crash, but the volume of replies while i was working makes that reply redundant, so i'll take this one on...as it is, yet again, solid proof of how little reading/research many/.'s do b4 replying to a 'hot' post.
The "restrictions" proposed by Jackson weren't "proposed", they were "remedies in law", that's important because M$ has been ***FOUND GUILTY***, and Judge Jackson issued his punishments, then had his judgements as to M$' behviours ***UNANIMOUSLY (EXCEPT FOR IE TYING)UPHELD*** and ONLY his "remedies" were overturned....
2ndly, "...suggestion that the DOJ will model their proposed remedy on...(those restrictions mentioned)....
where the F**K do you think Jackson got those remedies from? His Ass?
The ***DOJ*** submitted those remedies to Jackson, as the DOJ's ***BEST*** belief in what would counter M$ behaviours.
As far as M$' forward behaviors,.NET and the like, what you seem to be saying is that we should no longer have a presumption of innocence in our legal system and should change to the European system of "guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt"
...skipping the fact that you seem to want to overturn 200 years of American jurisprudence and the presumption of innocence (which, God Forbid, you or I might need someday)...
DO YOU REALLY WANT SOME FEDERAL JUDGE AND BUREAUCRATS DESIGING SOFTWARE????????????
because, let's make it clear, that what you seem to be suggesting...if the new Judge does what you suggest, she will have to turn over responsiblity for the control of M$ software design to the Federal Government
you ***THINK*** that's a Good Idea?
you want yahoos like Tom Daschle and Trent Lott supervising our industry, HUH?
I suggest you review the MTBF data on some of the G's previous design successes; the Navy's Orion, the Sikorsky Sea Stallion, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and let's not forget, the Osprey...
"which is why so many engines get licensed for games"
RIGHT, and and video card performance keeps scaling up, it's easier to take a mature game engine, like id's, and tweak it to take advantage of improved frame rates, pixel shading, etc and to take advantage of whatever improvements might be made in OS shim software like DirectX.....
having to "ground up" create a game engine when the underlying tech paradigm (ChipSetX over pci/agp, yadayada) is a be-atch, and you'll be hard pressed to beat the work of the current OG's, like Abrash, Carmack, Romero, et al
now when a ***BRAND NEW*** chipset approach comes out...all bets are off and then it's who can get their "fastest with the bestest"...
but its really hard to really innovate on mature technology to the point where your newer tech has the kind of advantage it would need to displace its "big market share" competition...
which neatly explains the demise of one vid adapter mfgr after another, insufficent value differentiation in products, that's when two leaders ***ALWAYS*** emerge....the Best Marketed Product and the Best Value Product...everyone in the middle tends to get stomped...(UMM, HP and Compaq???)
unlike *X, which has had peer review, troll review, flameage review, and intense discussional review between Buddha, Allah and God and the largest pool of software talent on the planet (literally)
MS source has been locked away in vaults in Rancho Redmond...doled out sparingly under a NDA that would allow MS to summairily repo your grandchillins
it has been reviewed by a relatively very small pool of some very talented, but frequently inexperienced programmers/developers/architects who are under massive pressure to deliver the next upgrade in MS on schedule or find themselves getting transferred to the code maintainance on MSN if they insist on any QC effort that would slow down delivery....
the "debate" between open source and closed, may well be the race between the tortoise and the hare
security has NEVER been a high priority at MS, more like extra chrome trim on a car....
and the more MS gets deployed in "financially attractive" or "critical" situations, the more exploited its gonna get
Hailstorm should probably be renamed "Hail Mary", for all the praying they'll be doing over its security
"Why would you respect any news outlet that has reporters, not editorialists, who are anti- or pro- anything? I thought their job was to report"
HUH?
there is no sentient being alive without some form of bias....
in the anti-MS crowd (since you included MaryJoFoley), there are journalists who seemed to tell it straight, that is with an obvious anti-MS bias, but who seemed to basically report facts, and journalists (Nicholas Petreley, for just one example) who seem to turn every bit of reporting into "Get M$!"
i respect Nicholas and his Linux work enormously, think he a great contributor to the community, but when he starts in on M$, i turn off, because he is so rabidly (read "irrationally") anti-M$, a flamer par excellence......
Jesse Berst, when at "Anchor Desk", never had a problem with "Here's what I think Company X did that was wrong and why"
Straight reportage is virtually impossible in the tech community, because readers want to know more than just the straight facts, they want some analysis included with the feature.
There is no way anyone can avoid bias in reportage, intelligent human beings will naturally use their intelligence to come to conclusions and those conclusions will color their future judgements about that subject. This bias just needs to up front and understood.
That was my point about CNET. Their reportage is straightforward enough. It's what they don't cover and what they don't provide analysis on. Or who they choose to do a particular analysis that can in a very subtle fashion "steer" the story
That's how the major media filters everything, by subtle steering in a given direction and maintaining the pretense that their is such a thing as "objective journalism".
when ***EVERYTHING*** in reportage is just a question of SPIN, how much and what direction
"Objective Journalism" has all the reality of; The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, "My First Mortgage is Assumable", "It's only a cold sore." and "My reproductive facilitator will not conclude in your nutritive access subsystem."
The number one reason technology is so badly covered starts with the technologists.
1. We have a tendency to assume that all tech media people are stupid or biased, so we give them "shorthand" and "for dummies" explanations that we wouldn't give to anyone we respected.
2. We allows the marketing droids and PR flacks to develop relationships with journalists, when we should be the ones extending ourselves to the industry media.
3. We don't like to contradict our managment when our management say "XYZ" and we know its pure bullshit. So we end supporting OUR corporation's position when we know its not true.
YES, there are plenty of hacks in tech media. But, as i have had a chance to meet and speak with some of the best regarded tech journalists. In my experiences with them, having been sourced a number of times and having contributed to a couple of biggish "scoops", there are also plenty who want to get the story right. But, if the only interface they have is the marketing dept or some project manager with his stock options on the line, they ain't ever gonna hear a discouraging word.
You can't accuse journalists like Dan Gillmor, Mary Jo Foley, Scott Petersen, Walter Mossberg, Peter Coffee, Dan Coursey, Michael Vizard, Jesse Berst, et al of excessive slanting. All of these journalists and the "analysts" like Dvorak have spent many years poking holes in tech corporations "walls of silence"...
Organizations are another thing.
It seems very clear to me, IMHO, that before the purchase of ZDNet by CNET, ZDNet was pretty tough on MS, and this was despite the fact that MS was a HUGE ADVERTISER on ZDNet!
CNET, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be "softer" on its MS coverage than just about any other tech news hub.
Interestingly, since CNET's acquisition of ZDNet, it seems as though some major ZDNet anti-MS reporters such as Mary Jo Foley have gone away, and the overall tone of ZDNet on the subject of MS has softened considerably.
CNET also does not, and never has, seemed as Linux friendly as ZDNet, and I don't get the feeling that CNET wants to do anything to piss MS off.
I'd say it's "Caveat Emptor", i look at the byline. If i know/respect the journalist, i'll read it.
If it's some bozo who can't a monitor from "The Monitor", i'll skip it.
But, if we want more accurate coverage...We are going to have to start by avoiding trolling and flaming journalists who get it wrong, and start developing relationships with the ones who we know cover us fairly and accurately.
And we are going to have to go around our employers sometimes to do that, takes guts and involvement.
without those efforts on our part, you can expect that tech media coverage will remain driven by "Advertiser is King" coverage, until we change it.
but, as my post was already running up against the lameness filter for length....
1. i didn't think it was a good place to give a lecture on the rather complex and confusing subject of civil rights in england and if our readers would like a quick and painless introduction to British governance, they can check out this link; http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/2295/c rowninf.html
2. and if you'll reread the key passage in my reply;
"...both the EU and the UK do NOT have SUPERSEDING and BINDING civil rights ***guarantees*** built into their legal systems, equivalent to those contained in the Bill of Rights addendum to the US Constitution..."
the key point wasn't that the English don't have civil rights, merely that they are neither as broad as US civil rights, nor enacted in as rigorous ***Constitutional*** framework (and how about that British Constitution???)
How many people in Britain have been detained w/o due process due to the Official Secrets Act?
How many reporters have had to sit on major news stories and scandals due to British libel laws?
How many purported Provo's have been detained in Britain w/o warrant or other due process, for how many years?
From a rhetorical point of view the European Convention contains some great rhetoric about rights and freedoms, its just they only have the force of recommendations or goals, as they are not totally binding on the member states
another example, How is traditional English due process adhered to in Northern Ireland??
caught between Catholic and Protestant Baby Killers, the British Army regularly (Jan 30, 1972 comes to mind) trashes due process ***WITHOUT PENALTY*** in favor of catching criminals, that's fine as far as it goes, but in the US..
...from the Branch Davidians to Wen Ho Lee to Richard Jewell, when our police punt due process (which, like all law enforcement agencies, they do), there are very often consequences
for one example, when the US government decided to prosecute the few Branch Davidians they weren't able to slaughter initially, the trials lasted a few hours before most of them were let go, one jury foreman commented to the press, "Looks like we had the wrong people on trial here."
it ***has*** been the strength of the civil rights guarantees which have occasionally set the US in a different category....(unless you were; black, female, Native American, etc)
but, don't worry, mes ami, we're diluting our civil rights on a daily basis, from "posse comitatus" to "Fair Use" we seem to be headed towards the Anglo-European civil rights environment, where you have civil rights until someone in the G with juice decides to take them away from you...
Step 1. you're shopping at "WeBGeekz", their face/rec s/w says that you're the notorious, world-class shoplifter, LightFingers Larue.
Step 2. Their $6/hr, 1-day-of-theft-prevention training, security person follows you and finds "reasonable suspicion" in your actions (putting your hands in your pockets at the wrong time will legally suffice), he notifies 5-0
Step 3. 5-0 comes out and also concludes that your description matches that of the aforementioned desperado...based on that and the security guards statement about your activities in the store, 5-0 now restrains you for questioning
Step 4. 5-0 decides that the ID presented does not positively disqualify you from also being Mr. Larue, and decide to take you to the station for further questioning and indentification.
Step 5. You are now booked on "Suspicion of....", you pick, there are a million choices, esp in misdemeanors (can u figure out why misdemeanor????)
Step 6. The booking process gives 5-0 mandatory access to your fingerprints, they take them, run them on NCIC (or whatever it is called this decade) and discover!!!!!!!!! You really are Bob C. Podflicker!!!!!!!!!!, Outstanding Community Member, Friend to All, Enemy to None, Scoutmaster, and Respected Deacon of the First Church of Digital Grepping
Step 7. The police kinda/sorta apologize and release you, if they really feel bad they might actually give you a ride back to your car, usu not.
you are now the Lucky Winner of;
a. state and local police file
b. your fingerprints are now a part of the FBI's national fingerprint database
c. your neighbor, Bill, who has always hated you since the time you accidentally backed over his favorite gerbil, Krusty, in your driveway, has now TOLD EVERYBODY IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD that you were arrested for shoplifting
d. the manager of WeBGeekz has now placed you in the chain's "known offenders" file
e. the Regional Scout Council asks you step down, because you're a "poor example to the youths"
f. the guy you interviewed with last week for the job with the company car and the 20% pay raise, hears you were in some kind of trouble and doesn't want to take a chance...GOODBYE, new job!
for anyone tempted to say, "But you can sue!"
theoretically, SURE you can, but as long as the security guard and the police and the s/w mfg can show "due diligence" in a court of law (which is about one step harder than proving respiration), and particularly if you were booked on a misdemeanor and released prior to arraignment, your chance of collecting in a court of law are roughly equal to the chances of a finding an honest, hardworking politician or ethical journalist...sure they exist, but don't bet the farm that you're going to run into one
REMEMBER ONE THING: if you do go to court, ask for the "OJ Jury", they're your best bet
i don't normally respond to vague AC postings, BUT, as your was so egregiously wrong, here we go (in brief and note, privacy rights in the EU are not separate but largely contained in the Human Rights Convention), hopefully, you'll respond with your own specific quotes and links...
link to Human Rights Act of 1998
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998 /8 0042--a.htm#1
you particularly want to check out Sections 1, 2 and 3 language such as (asterisks are mine);
"1(4) The Secretary of State may by order make such amendments to this Act ******as he considers appropriate***** to reflect the effect, in relation to the United Kingdom, of a protocol."
"as he considers appropriate, eh???"
". 2. - (1) A court or tribunal determining a question which has arisen in connection with a Convention right must take into account any-
..........whenever made or given, so far as, in the *****opinion***** of the court or tribunal, it is relevant to the proceedings in which that question has arisen."
ah, yes, "..in the opinion of the court or tribunal..."
and my own personal favorite;
". 3. - (1) So far as it is possible to do so, primary legislation and subordinate legislation must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the Convention rights."
***love that phrase*** "So far as it is possible to do...*****
and let's not forget the Court of Human Rights own language;
" In accordance with Article 53 of the Convention, the Contracting States ******undertake to abide by the decisions of the Court******. To date States which have been ordered to make payments under Article 50 have consistently done so. The Court now (since October 1991) prescribes, in the operative provisions of the judgment, a period of three months from the date of the decision within which the applicant must be paid and (since January 1996) provides for interest in the event of failure to comply with this time-limit. "
for the non-legally inclined amongst us, all the language in the Convention is non-binding on the EU states, more properly it's as binding as the member states allow/want/let it be...some countries, the Benelux for example, take civil/privacy very, very seriously, some countries, like the UK, who we are speaking of here, are trashing individual rights for collective security
if you've ever carried a bag into a British train station or london hotel lobby, esp when the Provo's are on a tear, you know what i'm talking about.....
let's try this again, both the EU and the UK do NOT have SUPERSEDING and BINDING civil rights ***guarantees*** built into their legal systems, equivalent to those contained in the Bill of Rights addendum to the US Constitution, the Europeans do have many noble statements of intent and/or purpose, none of which have the force of a constitutional guarantee
check it out on the Council of Europe's own main portal;
one of the interesting clashes brewing between the EU and the USA is the ongoing "ratcheting up" of intrusive and obtrusive "ubquitious surveillance" in the UK...
the British people, after decades of things going "BOOM!" in the middle of London and other cities, have choosen to turn over many of their privacy rights (which are far fewer to start with in the UK than the USA, NO Bill of Rights in Limey Land)
here's a link (from last august, was also covered on/. as i recall) to a Salon dot com article on email surveillance of Americans in the UK....
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/23/bri ti sh_carnivore/
the recent tussle in Florida (WHY is it ***ALWAYS*** Florida????) over the use of face/rec is just the start of the argument over what s/f maven Bruce Sterling calls "perpetual surveillance", where any time we are in public, we are "on camera"..
those who support it argue that "personal crimes" mugging, robbery, rape, etc will be drastically reduced and more criminals will be caught and imprisoned and that living in a "fish bowl" is a small price to pay for the additional safety...the Brits seems to have bought this argument hook, line and sinker
if some organization(s) don't emerge to make sure that our "analog" privacy protections are transferred by law and statute to the digital world, which, so far, by and large they have not....our digital lives will become simple currency for the governments and corporations to trade in (Terry Gilliam, Prophet)
the corporations and their proxies, RIAA, MPAA, BSA, et al have their plans for our data, and so far, the US and European governments have either gone along with the corporations or just stood on the sidelines
The Bill of Rights needs to be attached to our digital identities, realms, behaviours ASAP, now's the time to support the EFF, or don't be surprised iff keyboard sniffers are built into OSs in the next decade...
WASHINGTON POSTTIMESHEARLD
WASHINGTON, DC: Aug 30, 2001
As Congress furiously discussed what to do with the newly discovered "First Church Of Digital Grepping" and its alleged dogma that requires its members to constantly search through copyrighted materials for sacred meaning and salvation, the lobbying organizations for the entertainment and publishing sprang into action.
The entertainments' lawyer and lobbyists have already brought about a marked increase in donations of cash, luxury cars, booze, dope and the deployment of hookers.
One crack addict in a poor neighborhood of DC told us today, "Man, you can't score any good shit with it all going to them Congressmen. We down here smoking Draino and hoping those lobbyists from the entertainment industment get whatever the hell it is they want so we can get our freak back on!"
Another professional worker in the recreational sex business tells relates a similar story, "Geez, it's normally bad enough here with all these Congressmen around. Can't keep in they pants, anyway. You know how it is, if they ain't doing one of us out here, they doing the American people in there. But with all them lawyers and lobbyists working Congress about that Geek Religion thing, its nearly as bad for a sex worker as it is when they ain't no interns around. That's the worst, it's just every ho for themselves then and pray for new load of interns."
Sources within the entertainment industry say their goal is the simple protection of the artists.
One anonymous source said, "Look we all know that the actual artist, the creator who is the principal beneficiary of our actions here. We're going to ensure that the people who create the movies, music and books that we all love and cherish continue to receive their.0000001% of all our net net revenues. We're very serious about this."
Another source said that perhaps a solution similar to the one used with Native American peoples would be effective in dealing with "The First Church Of Digital Grepping".
That is, round all them up, march two thousand miles in the middle of winter. Take their computers and ATM cards away from them. Give them habitats in faroff remote Northern rural areas, and allow them to practice their supposed religion two or three times a year, under close Bureau of Geek Affairs supervision.
"Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier...."
even assuming the reports of the rate of rise of bug reports is increasing, and further assuming the rate of rise is as steep as indicated, ol' Billy of Ock wouldn't necessarily agree with you, try some other possible explanations....
1. the code portions showing the increase are relatively new and have not had the equivalent amount of debug time that the more mature sections of the code have been given
2. the coders producing the buggier code are new to the project and are still learning how to implement and design their particular sections, even highly experienced coders/designers have a rise their error rate when changing to an unfamilar design, this is usu short-term and correctable w/o a ton of effort
3. the bugs located could be on the "other" side of the code, say the JVM or the security sandbox or OS threading model or ??????
...and let's not forget that even M$ has acknowledged that W2K has shipped with nearly 70,000 ***KNOWN*** bugs....
the Mozilla Quest article does not classify the bugs by type or location, how many "app killers" are there? how many "OS killers"? versus how many are UI related where a drop down box doesn't autoscroll or automatically alphabetize?????
the entire MozillaQuest article reeked of hostility towards the current Mozilla development structure...
...as someone who is NOT a daily Linux user, and who doesn't use any Mozilla on ANY platform i found the tone of the article very opinionated and hostile...it sounded more political than analytical and seemed to have an agenda greater than informing the Mozilla faithful....
maybe justified, maybe not, i don't know...but there's way insufficient info in that article to conclude "...Mozilla is getting buggier"...
"...web is still a pretty eclectic and loony place to be."
you can add webrings on everything such as "goth lifestyle" to "AMC Gremlin autos" to "anime'" to "power ranger collectibles", to "AIDS treatment and prevention", "womens' health", "dogs' health", "gerbils health"
then throw in; every kind of pr0n known to man or redneck, millions and millions of MP3s, thousands of movies, hundreds of thousand of complete books, millions of magazine articles....
the guys (the author and the interviewees) in this artlcle seem to be playing the "too cool" hand, just like we routinely see the "The Death of _______; Linux, UNIX, MS, C, C++, Java, COBOL,/., the Internet, yadayada....
the Internet is the most ***AMAZING*** invention/construction/collection/device/thingie in the blood and misery soaked history of mankind
and even more remarkably, unlike most grand scale human accomplishments (the pyramids, the cathedrals, the a-bomb), thousands didn't have to die building it, thousands more aren't being killed to maintain and grow it....
gee, maybe amy harmon and her friends need to reboot and do a little more random surfing????
WHOA! Cringely Got It Right! BUT........
on
Make Your Own DSL
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Cringely got it right, in my last business, the area was out of dedicated "Data Lines", so PB had to send out an install tech who really knew what he was doing, i was looking over his shoulder and noticed that he was using our alarm lines...the tech told me almost exactly the same story as Cringely, including that if you called PB and asked for a pair of "guard lines" you'd be told they didn't exist or that they were all assigned in your area.
SOME THINGS TO NOTE:
since this is a point-to-point connection, your throughput will vary with the quality of your wire pairs
you might also need to perform line balancing, as some of these wire have been in the ground/air for a LONG time
if you have big power transformers or other "leaky" devices near your wires, your S/N ratio could be terrible
AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST, anyone can just simply t-splice your line to get 100% access to your communications, with maybe just having to perform a simple impedence adjustment...
BUT, still cool for all of that BTW, when "Boardwatch Magazine" still had Jack Richards they ran a very similar (but more detailed) piece on this about 3 years ago
"Don't blame the ISP, it's the DMCA that's broken."
while the DMCA is seriously one-sided (precisely as it was intended to be), you can surely share some of the blame with the ISP...
it's amusing to note that the AOL portion of TimeWarnerAOL HIDES behind one of the strictest privacy agreements in the industry, in case (no pun intended) anyone thinks thats done solely to favor the user, think again.
The AOL privacy agreement is at least as much intended to keep AOL's ass out of hot water.
By making a really strict Privacy Agreement (if you haven't read AOL's Service Agreement, you should, it's remarkable in every legal way you can think of) with its customers when of the "watchdog" groups like the MPAA, RIAA, BSA comes calling AOL can throw up its hands and say...
"Gee, we'd really like to check and see AOL User; "IRIPDVDS" has any copyrighted materials on our service. But, Shucks, our privacy agreement with them doesn't really allow us to do so without you guys having a warrant. You DO have a warrant don't you?"
The average ISP remaining after the fallout is only a fraction of AOL's size and clout, and can't afford to play "Lawyers At Dawn" with the entertainment industry, so they will do the "Bend and Spread" in about 10 seconds.
And since the remaining broadband providers are essentially all telcos, who would (like all public utilities) generally perform copulative acts with their maternal unit's left eye socket, they would just as soon hose a customer as look at them.
As the telcos remind us constantly they ***HATE*** deregulation and the fact the RBOCs are "re-merging" should tell you how well they understand (and care to understand) the retail communications marketplace.
The DMCA, as related in the article, is having precisely the intended effect on ISPs.
We in the community failed to stop the DMCA, and now we're seeing only the beginning of our failure.
Essentially, those who enforce copyright laws in the "non-digital world" are used to having "no knock, no due process" rights to puruse purported violators
We in the digital world have largely, up to this point, only been purused by statutes and agencies that have to more/less give us due process and Bill of Rights protections (the glaring exception to that is Kevin Mitnick, who literally became "The Man Without a Country", one of the most egregrous violations of due process in American history")
well, our friends in the entertainment industry don't observe (thanks to the American Congress) either due process or bill of rights restrictions when pursuing "copyright violators"
it should interesting to note that the Freakazoid who slaughtered his whole family up in Sacramento has more civil rights than he would have if he downloaded "Phantom Menace"....
you decide who our laws are really intended to protect, people or property????
"A screwdriver's interface has remained unchanged for centuries and it doesn't need a new concept. Same with the firearm, a Beretta flintlock from 1300 had the same interfact characteristics as a Beretta Gold Sable rifle made in 2001."
let's see if we can fix your analogy;
a screwdriver and a flintlock (which is also a "rifle" BTW) are NOT the "interface"...they're the APPLICATIONS
the "interface" in your analogy is "The Hand"
since it hasn't changed since the advent of homo sapiens (a black day for Australopithicus Ananemsis, indeed), there would be no need for the "applications" to change.
on the subj of the GUI/Mac interface, Dvorak wrote an excellent column for PC Mag about 10 years, putting that to rest
as JD pointed out there is nothing in the least bit "natural" about clicking once to move the focus and clicking twice to launch the program. additionally, anyone who thinks that it's "intuitive" to eject a f/d by dropping it on the trashcan is smoking some dynamite stuff
the "Windows Explorer" is the most painful navigation schema i've ever seen, it would be against the Geneva Convention to make POWs use it, i suspect, i usu go to a DOS box
neither your 3 or 80 year old will find any help from any GUI in constructing a multiple database, complex SQL query or enable multidimensional formula construction in a spreadsheet, let's not even discuss problem solvers like Maple or Mathematica
THE OLD TIRED POINT: for those that have mastered vi or emacs, or systems' admin via CLI, the GUI is so much dead weight
THE NEW, MORE INTERESING POINT; though it is true that the visual areas of the brain are some of the densest in the brain, that is primarily because they are massively parallel
if you're looking for multiordinal, multilayered complex constructions in the brain look for the speech integration centers, which suggest that the next evolution of the man/machine interface will be Natural Language Processing (till we all get our brain jack)
there's more to life than Von Neumann construction, check out Raymond Kurzweil, George Gilder, and Signal Processors (both Analog and Digital) on google...."Oh, Brave New World that has such components in it..!"
****TROLL ALERT****au contraire, mes ami...*****THOUGHT POLICE ALERT*****
"Attention, viewers. The seemingly innocuous post you have just read contains elements (overblown phraseology, potentially offensive generalizations) strongly suggestive of the "craft" of trolling." ---- What are you smoking?
I see that the oldest and unfortunately truest tradition of Decnet, political correctness, still has a tenacious foothold in the community when it comes to RMS.
My prior post was polite, considerate and fully acknowledged Richard's contributions, which is more than some of the criticism that he receives from the LINUX community. NO, my friend, the agenda here is yours.
While i don't know if it's a simple, unrefined need for attention or more deviously, a reactive "ad hominem" attack against anything that questions RMS' relevance.
It was also peformed in the classic Goebbelian fashion, without neither examples nor proof of your claims.
But, assuming that it was an attack against the notion of RMS' decreasing relevance. Let me state it more clearly...
Everytime Richard launches into one of his canned diatribes, whether against the entire concept of "Open Soure" and/or any license scheme other than GNU/GPL and starts getting pissy about how "impure" other people are (and how "pure" he is), he loses relevance and influence and credibility.
Richard's spent 3 decades (unsuccessfully) trying to get something like LINUX going, he should be F*****G tickled pink and blue at how well the Open Source movement has brought the entire question of the value of proprietary software into the public for discussion. Since that's supposedly what he's all about.
Instead, he demonstrates this remarkable infintilism by running around acting like he's everybody's dick-deprived, spinster aunt, Zelda. Lecturing people who don't; want it, need it or appreciate it on the values of ***HIS DEFINTIONS*** of "virtuousness" and "purity"
There is NO BETTER example of this than the non-issue of appending GNU to LINUX, if this was all that big of an issue to him, he WOULD HAVE PUT IT IN THE LICENSE, as that's his complete raison d'etre.
Nope, Richard bet the farm on Hurd, dissed LINUX/Linus for years and now wants a piece of the action. But, in classic autocratic fashion he just doesn't want to "get on the LINUX bus" with the rest of the community, he wants to tell the bus where to go and how to get there. That's called hijacking.
Well, as someone who ***genuinely*** values much of what RMS has done (even if not how's he done it). One thing is clear.
The biggest impediment to RMS's "Message" is RMS, and he's dooming himself to increasing irrelevance in the Open Source movement by his behaviours.
"...people are behind these corperations and they are screwing themseleves as well as us.."
SORRY! (really) but they aren't...
one trivial example, i have numerous friends in the record industry with CD collections numbering in the thousands, how many have they paid for?
from as few as 1 in 25 CD's to as many as 1 in 15 CD's so, obviously they benefit from their positions (at 15$/pop that's thousands of dollars)
another less trivial example, i know a person who just was promoted to a very senior executive position at an entertainment company, they're making 7 figures,
now, this person's large income is derived from the fact that a very large "information asymmetry" exists, this asymmetry in the case of books, television, films and music derives from the fact that a very small group of companies can act as a "market lockout" mechanism (we all remember that term, right?)....
so, maybe you are a better singer than Robert Plant or Beck or Mariah Carey or a better screenplay writer than Robert Towne or Bill Goldman or Jerry Zucker or a better actor than Jack Nicholson or Helen Hunt or Alicia Silverstone or Freddie Prinze Jr -G-
but without someone making the conscious decision to allow your talent to be exhibited, you'll be slinging pastrami at your local restaurant for the rest or your life.
the number of available channels for exhibiting/promoting/distributing such materials are being increasingly owned/controlled by fewer and fewer companies (who themselves are positively Gibsonian in global reach, influence and control)
the DMCA is just the latest of a spectrum of a wide variety of Intellectual Property laws that have been carved out by American Corporations (and European and Asian, with the E! Industry leading the pack in special interest IP legistlation w/o a close second, which would prob be Tech Companies)
it is now a race between the "content controllers" and their proxies (the US Congress, the EU legislature, et al) and the technologists
RIAA, DMCA, Napster and all the other battles going on now are just barely the opening skirmishes in what promises to be a long, long fight to allow the efficient use of digital technologies and to rationalize IP laws to reflect the new and oncoming distribution technologies...
Slashdot Mirror
"That is because boats don't fly."
that's not the only thing mentioned in this thread that doesn't fly...
i'm not a libertarian, i'm a centrist, but let me take a whack at his one anyway,
the original poster of this thread stated his perception of the problem as follows:
"The US government is obviously being terribly corrupted by various organizations with lots of money."
therefore, implying that this corrupt goverment is using its powers to negatively influence people's live with legislation such as the SSSCA..
Then went on a semi-coherent rant against libertarians, implying that they are the cause of the SSSCA problem because of their philosophical opposition to giving the government excessive power to control ***PEOPLE'S*** lives through corrupt legislation such as the DMCA and SSSCA...
and then stated:
"...the gov't is the only organization which has the power to respond appropriately to pressure from the citizens"
so, as my symbolic logic instructors would have said, let's reduce this argument to essentials:
The SSSCA is the result of a government corrupted by corporate influence via lobbying and political contributions.
This corrupt government's influence and power is being reduced by libertarian ideals.
The solution to the corrupt goverment's having too much unchecked power, resulting in its ability to pass corporate special interest legislation which is deleterious to the average citizen is (drum roll, please)....
..to give the corrupt government much broader powers to control the everday lives of citizens...
"I'm scared living in Canada just because of proximity."
...I agree, i'm scared of you living in canada, just because of proximity, too.
i have 2-21" monitors, a 16" FP, 1-19" monitor (plus some small speaker cubes and misc) on that chromed wire rack shelving (called bakers'racks), this stuff is from a company called Metro Shelving, but IKEA has its own brand...
i use the wide shelves, 24" (and 8 or 10 feet long) for the monitors, and use the narrow (around 8-10"wide) to create a keyboard shelf right in front/below the wider "top"....
you can adjust the height on those legs, with those nylon bushings and i've put a ton of weight on these things (well, about 600-800#'s) and not had much deflection...(though the center of percussion was really high..took about 200# off)
the downsides include having to put "trays" for your pens, smoking materials, etc...as they would otherwise just drop through the wires and if you are one of those folk who rest their wrists on the desktop edge...WELL, a couple of hours of that will teach you about numbness and pain...if you use a contoured KB or wrist rest..nada problemo...
it looks kinda HiTek...and you really can find the stuff just about anywhere, its reasonably priced (IKEA's is the cheapest but they don't have a very big selection of sizes) and if you really HATE the chrome...it's available in a semi-dull/shiny BLACL finish...Blood, Bath and Beyond has a really ***nice*** brand of this stuff, but it's kinda pricey
i equipped an office with about 12-15 of these "desks"...got lots of compliments from customer/visitors and only checked it out for the same reason you mention...all of our employees had at least 3 monitors per desktop and we just couldn't find a nice-looking, cost-effective solution...
i thinks it's medium cool looking, but, as always, should you or any of your..., i mean, YMMV...
Thanks! for the GREAT RESPONSE! It's posts like yours that make putting up with the flamers and trolls possible, like the ironically-deprived(entendre*3), humourless, M$ Troll above and below us. Though i agree with most of your analysis, let me respond to a several things you said. it'a little long, but you raised numerous good points.....first the original question i answered was;
/.'s for talking so long...
"Why should Palm respond to a MS palm with an implementation using an OS unproven on its platform. Extolling the fashionable alternatives just to say it point to a clear lack on thoughtfullness. "
I responded with a personal anecdote centered on a large group of media and analysts. I choose this because the people in that room were; early adopters, important recommenders and media journalists. All of whom have an important function in the success or failure of any product. Your point that;
"Keep in mind that this is an audience of C|Net, ZDNet, tech-reading people, and the Palm devices have always been bashed in the press for not having features that stack up to Pocket PC's."
is true. It's also the reason i chose to bring this anecdote up. These people are important to the success or failure of Palm, not determinative, but important.
"But the Palm devices continue to grab and hold market share. And this was before Palm's acquisition of Be, and before Palm's stated intention to produce a StrongARM device, and before (IIRC) Palm's release of the m500/m505."
Palm's market share is 10X that of the wince devices, BUT, wince sales are doubling every month, IDG Gartner/InfoWorld have confirmed that. PalmCo is losing major share to Handspring. And price cuts have already occurred on the new m5XX series, that's NOT a GOOD sign.
Palm will have to deal with the fact that CE has come a very long way since v1. Look at very recent CE developments.......
1. M$ has lowered the license cost of CE quite substantially. AND is cutting some ***nice*** terms on the side
2, M$ is making very genuine and sincere efforts to reach handheld developers and provide lots of developer tools, help and assistance. M$ also has some of their very best people working on the handheld/embedded space, smart, hardworking, customer saavy folk like Bill Vegthe. People CAN really make the difference in a tech sector
3. M$ has used a subset of Win32 in the development of CE that is known by and appeals to the largest base of app developers in the world.
4. M$ is putting "Big Heat" into their ISV channel to get CE projects off the ground. M$ has the best marketing skills of any tech company in the world. Palm is only starting to develop the kind forward marketing that M$ is capable of.
Now to deal quickly with all three of your bulleted items. Again, they are ALL true, TODAY. What about tomorrow? This sector is very young.
PRICE: pricing is mostly a function (device for device) of volume, and as Palm goes to the high color screens that most CE machines use, the CE machines price will come down towards the Palm prices as their manufacturing volume rises. the Global 2000 companies that mfg CE machines can really take advantage of economies of scale when they are available. PocketPC Prices WILL drop.
FORM FACTOR: This was covered quite a bit in the COMDEX presentation. I struggle with it all the time. What is the "right size" for a sub-notebook device. Palm has in its PalmOS 3 and 4 devices, hit pretty close to a perfect blend of size for function. However, if the MARKETPLACE decides that it wants the ability to do color jpegs, mpegs, pngs, gifs, etc with a handheld the "Palm sized" device screen size will be a liability. The jury is out on that one right now. This gives Palm a decided form factor edge, for now. That will be demand driven and could change at any time.
ZEN OF PALM: There is NO question to this point in handheld development that Palm has gotten it right. However, we're talking about the future. Having owned early Palms and early CE machines, Palm blew away CE for usability, were pocketable and had great battery life. My Color Companion is one of the greatest slayers of batteries i have ever seen, worse than early HP handheld calculators (HP55, great calculator bring lots of batteries). But, as i understand both from COMDEX and from the 2001 M$ Embedded DevCon (GREAT! event,THX!)...
...M$ is betting on the evolving needs of handheld users going towards multimedia and other rich(er) data experiences, with something like MP3 being the "next frontier"...how easy is it to get MP3 playing on a Palm and how cheap? to the degree that its doable, its expensive, now you're Palm in in iPaq/Journada territory
HERE'S WHAT I'M AFRAID IS GOING TO HAPPEN: Palm won't evolve PalmOS fast enough to keep up with falling CE machine prices, and the "value" equation will start to leans towards CE. The industry media, which as you pointed out, is not all that friendly to Palm, will start giving numerous "Editors' Choice", "Top 5" and "Must Buy!" awards to CE machines (they already are to the iPaq (BEST CE MACHINE, have u tried one?) and the momentum will start to swing towards the CE platform, Then, once the Mo' starts to go, M$ will put in a, say a billion dollar broadcast marketing campaign, and that will push the Mo further towards CE.
Meanwhile, Palm (now cash starved from repeated price cutting) will sit on its current laurels and not introduce kernel level improvements that will allow its internal or 3rd party developers to keep up with the rate of change in handhelds' features and all of a sudden there will be a CE machine with; 24-bit color, built in MP3 player, PCMCIA slot, OS level tcp/ip, BROADBAND/80211.b wireless connectivity, the ablity to play either ported or native Gameboy Advanced games and a price level between $300 and $400 (what a Rio 800 costs, IOW)....that machine COULD appear in the next 12-16 months!!!!
If that's where the handheld marketplace is going, M$ absolutely believes it is, i tend to agree, is Palm ready for that upcoming market? From what i've seen Palm is giving out a lot of "It's Perfect the way it is!" and "PocketPC features are largely superflous and not within the scope of OUR vision".
I say Palm has to OUT INNOVATE M$, whether those innovations fall in the scope of the existing "Zen of Palm", or not. As the Bud(ha)said; when you are in zen, the mountain is NOT the mountain..well, Palm's mountain may be NOT the mountain..could be time to move forward fast
Well, betting against the tide of technological evolution and improvment is a risky thing. I'd rather see Palm take action early against a possible paradigm shift then wait till it hits them in the head. Playing catch up to M$ in your own sector historically is; expensive, complex and usually unsuccessful...you can ask ashton-tate,Oz2, borland, lotus and novell...
SORRY Fellow
one of the big questions in C'paqs buying Digital was what to do with DECUnix?
this problem caused major problems for the Paq management team, as did the question of what to do with the Alpha chip...i (and numerous others) predicted at the time that Paq would try to bump off the Alpha chip because of their, uh, close relationship the Redmond Krewe, they did try, the G told them, "No, noo, can't do that"
also Paq had a major (by corporate standards) revolt in the Alpha devel teams....lost mucho development talent because of the merger...
HP will face similar probs...
the high margin folk at HP only know of HPUX, and the "lure" of Linux will probably not be very great for them and their developers, Linux SMP/scalability is at least 2 years behind HPUX....
Paq has been one of M$' dependable Ben Dovers since the day, they know from nothing but WinOS and lousy customer support...any attempt to shove Linux down their throats will result in massive problems with the "True Believers" on the Compaq devel teams...
Linux WILL get a boost from this, SURE, but H'Paq will have to decide to row the boat with Blue or with M$
...for Carly it won't be an easy decision, as picking the wrong partner will prob ensure the acquisition or demise of America's Most Admired Engineering company...
OT: i still have my HP 35/45/55/67/97/41c/x/v calculators and let's not forget my fave, the 16C,they all still work like new, though a few of them be lookin real uglee and they been around the world...Good Luck, HP!
well, i presume that you're supporting M$, because every major poll has shown that around 70% (running average, very rough) of the American public DO NOT support the breakup of M$..
throughout the period of this antitrust trial, this public support in the major media's polls (CNN, Zogby, ABCNews, NYT, et al. when they have polled on this question, which isn't that often) has ranged between 60-80% of the American public supporting M$ in this, and many question the G's role in antitrust as a whole
i presume most of these people have had trouble finding the "Any" key, and while i would dearly love them on the jury of any trial i was subject to...
i sure wouldn't want them making technology policy for my company or my country...ever watch PPV Wrestling????
you want these folk driving major public policy, eh?
Last Fall in COMDEX Hell(?), there was a "Battle of the Handhelds" media event where a cadre of 3COM/Palm geeks did an "debate" style presentation against a M$ cadre...they took turns, laid out strengths/weaknesses, etc...
;), it wasn't theirs was; newer technology, better color, multimedia, and real multi tasking and multi media, all built it
1. the room (a large sideroom, 300+) was FULL to SRO
2. Phil Holden led the M$ Team, I don't remember who led the Palm Team, both teams were well prepared
the Palm folk abandoned the debate style forum and went into a "we're the OG and we have the market share, and 3rd party apps" Marketing Speel
The M$ folk were clearly taken aback at this, and had to develop an impromptu "market speel" of their own, you wouldn't think that would be that hard for them
at the end of the hour and a half(?), the moderator asked for a show of hands and asked the audience a number of raised your hands questions (these questions are NOT verbatim, but are pretty damn close, 90%+).
among the ones i clearly remember are:
Who is currently using a handheld? Over 90% of the audience raised their hands affirmatively
Who is using a PalmOS handheld? Around 80+% of the audience raised their hands again.
Who thinks PalmOS is currently superior to wince? Around 90% of the audience agreed that PalmOS is currently superior.
Who thinks that their next handheld will be a PalmOS machine? HERE it gets interesting, only around 50% of the audience raised their hands.
The moderator, taken aback, thought about it and then asked; Who would consider buying a wince machine when they buy their next handheld? Around 50% of the audience raised their hands.
The moderator then asked who thinks that PalmOS has gone as far can with its current architecture?
AROUND 70%+ OF THE AUDIENCE RAISED THEIR HANDS AFFIRMATIVELY
pretty much everybody in the room was surprised at how many people thought PalmOS needed an overhaul..that was last November!
Palm had better very quickly take the BeOS technology and do something about getting multi-threading, larger memory model, multi-media (read MP3,WMA) 16-24 bit color implemented, TCP/IP support and ALL AT THE KERNEL LEVEL, not as OS shimware or else you can chalk up another dead platform
at the M$ Embedded Developers Conference in Feb this year, M$ laid out some of their platform tools and improvements to CE...they were pretty damned impressive (esp considering their early efforts..i own a very low # Compaq Companion CE v1....i still flinch when i think about using Pocket Outlook or Pocket Explorer at 14.4, my IIIXE blows it away)
wince sales are ***DOUBLING*** every month....you figure it out...the ipaq was backordered for months
gee, shucks, since the original poster framed it this way;
"The question is, does this (the procedural remedies suggested by the DOJ and imposed by Jackson) go to allowing PC vendors to bundle additional operating systems like Linux with new PCs without the penalties that are now part of the Microsoft Bootloader License [byte.com]?"
the byte.com article, linked by the original poster, states clearly, that the DOJ decided to ignore the "bootloader" issue in the current case (a BIG mistake IMHO), so the bootloader issue was NEVER introduced at trial. It will be very hard (nearly impossible) to introduce it now without reopening much or all of the existing findings to further litigation (that's the way our legal system works)
FURTHER, in case you've been living in Elbonia and/or don't understand M$ OS architecture, the ENTIRE thrust of their FS, LOADER AND EXEC is to NOT SUPPORT interoperability with anything but M$ architecture...why do you think they own 90% of the desktop market...their good looks and charm?
so, presuming that the original poster that i responded to meant what he/she said about multi-booting....
...THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE MULTI-BOOTING WITH ***data interoperability*** on M$ ARCHITECTURES IS THROUGH ****substantial redesign****
TRUE, you could force a "Chinese Menu" screen solution (not really completely within the current trial scope, BTW), but how does that help the "monopoly" problem?
...if the average desktop user can't seemlessly and invisible interchange DATA between her multi-booted OS...guess which one they're gonna pick, the one with 3-6% market share amongst geeks like us, or the one with 93% market share amongst home users and businesses?????
Now, just WHO do you think would have to control the necessary architectural changes to M$ OS????
Bubsy F*****G Berkley?
BTW, you might have the stones to not post AC, if you want to be taken seriously, unless taking cheap shots is ALL you're about
"Particularly troubling is the suggestion that the DOJ will model their proposed remedy on the restrictions proposed by Judge jackson in so far as those restrictions to business practices were relevant when they were originally proposed but the landscape has changed drastically si(n)ce then."
/. crash, but the volume of replies while i was working makes that reply redundant, so i'll take this one on...as it is, yet again, solid proof of how little reading/research many /.'s do b4 replying to a 'hot' post.
.NET and the like, what you seem to be saying is that we should no longer have a presumption of innocence in our legal system and should change to the European system of "guilty until proven innocent beyond a reasonable doubt"
i'm really, really hesitant to reply on this one. I had a reply drafted to the thread this AM, b4 the last
The "restrictions" proposed by Jackson weren't "proposed", they were "remedies in law", that's important because M$ has been ***FOUND GUILTY***, and Judge Jackson issued his punishments, then had his judgements as to M$' behviours ***UNANIMOUSLY (EXCEPT FOR IE TYING)UPHELD*** and ONLY his "remedies" were overturned....
2ndly, "...suggestion that the DOJ will model their proposed remedy on...(those restrictions mentioned)....
where the F**K do you think Jackson got those remedies from? His Ass?
The ***DOJ*** submitted those remedies to Jackson, as the DOJ's ***BEST*** belief in what would counter M$ behaviours.
As far as M$' forward behaviors,
...skipping the fact that you seem to want to overturn 200 years of American jurisprudence and the presumption of innocence (which, God Forbid, you or I might need someday)...
DO YOU REALLY WANT SOME FEDERAL JUDGE AND BUREAUCRATS DESIGING SOFTWARE????????????
because, let's make it clear, that what you seem to be suggesting...if the new Judge does what you suggest, she will have to turn over responsiblity for the control of M$ software design to the Federal Government
you ***THINK*** that's a Good Idea?
you want yahoos like Tom Daschle and Trent Lott supervising our industry, HUH?
I suggest you review the MTBF data on some of the G's previous design successes; the Navy's Orion, the Sikorsky Sea Stallion, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and let's not forget, the Osprey...
"which is why so many engines get licensed for games"
RIGHT, and and video card performance keeps scaling up, it's easier to take a mature game engine, like id's, and tweak it to take advantage of improved frame rates, pixel shading, etc and to take advantage of whatever improvements might be made in OS shim software like DirectX.....
having to "ground up" create a game engine when the underlying tech paradigm (ChipSetX over pci/agp, yadayada) is a be-atch, and you'll be hard pressed to beat the work of the current OG's, like Abrash, Carmack, Romero, et al
now when a ***BRAND NEW*** chipset approach comes out...all bets are off and then it's who can get their "fastest with the bestest"...
but its really hard to really innovate on mature technology to the point where your newer tech has the kind of advantage it would need to displace its "big market share" competition...
which neatly explains the demise of one vid adapter mfgr after another, insufficent value differentiation in products, that's when two leaders ***ALWAYS*** emerge....the Best Marketed Product and the Best Value Product...everyone in the middle tends to get stomped...(UMM, HP and Compaq???)
when the economy is good all men and women are brothers and sisters...
when times are BAD.....
the Japanese economy just hit a two-decade (17 year to be more precise) low...
Japanese banks are being given lending capital from the Central Bank at ***ZERO*** percent interest, and there are few-to-NO takers....
at some point, the Intellectual Property War between the West and the East is really going to heat up
historically, MIT has been very much a "Good Citizen" on the issues of cross/conflicting patents...Sony, historically, has been so-so
could this be an early skirmish in the upcoming IP Wars????
Now, if we're going to do "Lawyers At Dawn", I officially suggest that we carpet bomb Tokyo with attorneys from B-52's and B-1B's in HUGE WAVES
unlike *X, which has had peer review, troll review, flameage review, and intense discussional review between Buddha, Allah and God and the largest pool of software talent on the planet (literally)
MS source has been locked away in vaults in Rancho Redmond...doled out sparingly under a NDA that would allow MS to summairily repo your grandchillins
it has been reviewed by a relatively very small pool of some very talented, but frequently inexperienced programmers/developers/architects who are under massive pressure to deliver the next upgrade in MS on schedule or find themselves getting transferred to the code maintainance on MSN if they insist on any QC effort that would slow down delivery....
the "debate" between open source and closed, may well be the race between the tortoise and the hare
security has NEVER been a high priority at MS, more like extra chrome trim on a car....
and the more MS gets deployed in "financially attractive" or "critical" situations, the more exploited its gonna get
Hailstorm should probably be renamed "Hail Mary", for all the praying they'll be doing over its security
"Why would you respect any news outlet that has reporters, not editorialists, who are anti- or pro- anything? I thought their job was to report"
HUH?
there is no sentient being alive without some form of bias....
in the anti-MS crowd (since you included MaryJoFoley), there are journalists who seemed to tell it straight, that is with an obvious anti-MS bias, but who seemed to basically report facts, and journalists (Nicholas Petreley, for just one example) who seem to turn every bit of reporting into "Get M$!"
i respect Nicholas and his Linux work enormously, think he a great contributor to the community, but when he starts in on M$, i turn off, because he is so rabidly (read "irrationally") anti-M$, a flamer par excellence......
Jesse Berst, when at "Anchor Desk", never had a problem with "Here's what I think Company X did that was wrong and why"
Straight reportage is virtually impossible in the tech community, because readers want to know more than just the straight facts, they want some analysis included with the feature.
There is no way anyone can avoid bias in reportage, intelligent human beings will naturally use their intelligence to come to conclusions and those conclusions will color their future judgements about that subject. This bias just needs to up front and understood.
That was my point about CNET. Their reportage is straightforward enough. It's what they don't cover and what they don't provide analysis on. Or who they choose to do a particular analysis that can in a very subtle fashion "steer" the story
That's how the major media filters everything, by subtle steering in a given direction and maintaining the pretense that their is such a thing as "objective journalism".
when ***EVERYTHING*** in reportage is just a question of SPIN, how much and what direction
"Objective Journalism" has all the reality of; The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, "My First Mortgage is Assumable", "It's only a cold sore." and "My reproductive facilitator will not conclude in your nutritive access subsystem."
The number one reason technology is so badly covered starts with the technologists.
1. We have a tendency to assume that all tech media people are stupid or biased, so we give them "shorthand" and "for dummies" explanations that we wouldn't give to anyone we respected.
2. We allows the marketing droids and PR flacks to develop relationships with journalists, when we should be the ones extending ourselves to the industry media.
3. We don't like to contradict our managment when our management say "XYZ" and we know its pure bullshit. So we end supporting OUR corporation's position when we know its not true.
YES, there are plenty of hacks in tech media. But, as i have had a chance to meet and speak with some of the best regarded tech journalists. In my experiences with them, having been sourced a number of times and having contributed to a couple of biggish "scoops", there are also plenty who want to get the story right. But, if the only interface they have is the marketing dept or some project manager with his stock options on the line, they ain't ever gonna hear a discouraging word.
You can't accuse journalists like Dan Gillmor, Mary Jo Foley, Scott Petersen, Walter Mossberg, Peter Coffee, Dan Coursey, Michael Vizard, Jesse Berst, et al of excessive slanting. All of these journalists and the "analysts" like Dvorak have spent many years poking holes in tech corporations "walls of silence"...
Organizations are another thing.
It seems very clear to me, IMHO, that before the purchase of ZDNet by CNET, ZDNet was pretty tough on MS, and this was despite the fact that MS was a HUGE ADVERTISER on ZDNet!
CNET, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be "softer" on its MS coverage than just about any other tech news hub.
Interestingly, since CNET's acquisition of ZDNet, it seems as though some major ZDNet anti-MS reporters such as Mary Jo Foley have gone away, and the overall tone of ZDNet on the subject of MS has softened considerably.
CNET also does not, and never has, seemed as Linux friendly as ZDNet, and I don't get the feeling that CNET wants to do anything to piss MS off.
I'd say it's "Caveat Emptor", i look at the byline. If i know/respect the journalist, i'll read it.
If it's some bozo who can't a monitor from "The Monitor", i'll skip it.
But, if we want more accurate coverage...We are going to have to start by avoiding trolling and flaming journalists who get it wrong, and start developing relationships with the ones who we know cover us fairly and accurately.
And we are going to have to go around our employers sometimes to do that, takes guts and involvement.
without those efforts on our part, you can expect that tech media coverage will remain driven by "Advertiser is King" coverage, until we change it.
you're ***ABSOLUTELY*** correct, as far as you go
c rowninf.html
but, as my post was already running up against the lameness filter for length....
1. i didn't think it was a good place to give a lecture on the rather complex and confusing subject of civil rights in england and if our readers would like a quick and painless introduction to British governance, they can check out this link; http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/2295/
2. and if you'll reread the key passage in my reply;
"...both the EU and the UK do NOT have SUPERSEDING and BINDING civil rights ***guarantees*** built into their legal systems, equivalent to those contained in the Bill of Rights addendum to the US Constitution..."
the key point wasn't that the English don't have civil rights, merely that they are neither as broad as US civil rights, nor enacted in as rigorous ***Constitutional*** framework (and how about that British Constitution???)
How many people in Britain have been detained w/o due process due to the Official Secrets Act?
How many reporters have had to sit on major news stories and scandals due to British libel laws?
How many purported Provo's have been detained in Britain w/o warrant or other due process, for how many years?
From a rhetorical point of view the European Convention contains some great rhetoric about rights and freedoms, its just they only have the force of recommendations or goals, as they are not totally binding on the member states
another example, How is traditional English due process adhered to in Northern Ireland??
caught between Catholic and Protestant Baby Killers, the British Army regularly (Jan 30, 1972 comes to mind) trashes due process ***WITHOUT PENALTY*** in favor of catching criminals, that's fine as far as it goes, but in the US..
...from the Branch Davidians to Wen Ho Lee to Richard Jewell, when our police punt due process (which, like all law enforcement agencies, they do), there are very often consequences
for one example, when the US government decided to prosecute the few Branch Davidians they weren't able to slaughter initially, the trials lasted a few hours before most of them were let go, one jury foreman commented to the press, "Looks like we had the wrong people on trial here."
it ***has*** been the strength of the civil rights guarantees which have occasionally set the US in a different category....(unless you were; black, female, Native American, etc)
but, don't worry, mes ami, we're diluting our civil rights on a daily basis, from "posse comitatus" to "Fair Use" we seem to be headed towards the Anglo-European civil rights environment, where you have civil rights until someone in the G with juice decides to take them away from you...
"how is this a privacy issue?"
Step 1. you're shopping at "WeBGeekz", their face/rec s/w says that you're the notorious, world-class shoplifter, LightFingers Larue.
Step 2. Their $6/hr, 1-day-of-theft-prevention training, security person follows you and finds "reasonable suspicion" in your actions (putting your hands in your pockets at the wrong time will legally suffice), he notifies 5-0
Step 3. 5-0 comes out and also concludes that your description matches that of the aforementioned desperado...based on that and the security guards statement about your activities in the store, 5-0 now restrains you for questioning
Step 4. 5-0 decides that the ID presented does not positively disqualify you from also being Mr. Larue, and decide to take you to the station for further questioning and indentification.
Step 5. You are now booked on "Suspicion of....", you pick, there are a million choices, esp in misdemeanors (can u figure out why misdemeanor????)
Step 6. The booking process gives 5-0 mandatory access to your fingerprints, they take them, run them on NCIC (or whatever it is called this decade) and discover!!!!!!!!! You really are Bob C. Podflicker!!!!!!!!!!, Outstanding Community Member, Friend to All, Enemy to None, Scoutmaster, and Respected Deacon of the First Church of Digital Grepping
Step 7. The police kinda/sorta apologize and release you, if they really feel bad they might actually give you a ride back to your car, usu not.
you are now the Lucky Winner of;
a. state and local police file
b. your fingerprints are now a part of the FBI's national fingerprint database
c. your neighbor, Bill, who has always hated you since the time you accidentally backed over his favorite gerbil, Krusty, in your driveway, has now TOLD EVERYBODY IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD that you were arrested for shoplifting
d. the manager of WeBGeekz has now placed you in the chain's "known offenders" file
e. the Regional Scout Council asks you step down, because you're a "poor example to the youths"
f. the guy you interviewed with last week for the job with the company car and the 20% pay raise, hears you were in some kind of trouble and doesn't want to take a chance...GOODBYE, new job!
for anyone tempted to say, "But you can sue!"
theoretically, SURE you can, but as long as the security guard and the police and the s/w mfg can show "due diligence" in a court of law (which is about one step harder than proving respiration), and particularly if you were booked on a misdemeanor and released prior to arraignment, your chance of collecting in a court of law are roughly equal to the chances of a finding an honest, hardworking politician or ethical journalist...sure they exist, but don't bet the farm that you're going to run into one
REMEMBER ONE THING: if you do go to court, ask for the "OJ Jury", they're your best bet
i don't normally respond to vague AC postings, BUT, as your was so egregiously wrong, here we go (in brief and note, privacy rights in the EU are not separate but largely contained in the Human Rights Convention), hopefully, you'll respond with your own specific quotes and links...
8 /8 0042--a.htm#1
..........whenever made or given, so far as, in the *****opinion***** of the court or tribunal, it is relevant to the proceedings in which that question has arisen."
& L= E&M=$t/1-1-1-1/EMB1.asp
link to Human Rights Act of 1998
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts199
you particularly want to check out Sections 1, 2 and 3 language such as (asterisks are mine);
"1(4) The Secretary of State may by order make such amendments to this Act ******as he considers appropriate***** to reflect the effect, in relation to the United Kingdom, of a protocol."
"as he considers appropriate, eh???"
". 2. - (1) A court or tribunal determining a question which has arisen in connection with a Convention right must take into account any-
ah, yes, "..in the opinion of the court or tribunal..."
and my own personal favorite;
". 3. - (1) So far as it is possible to do so, primary legislation and subordinate legislation must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the Convention rights."
***love that phrase*** "So far as it is possible to do...*****
and let's not forget the Court of Human Rights own language;
" In accordance with Article 53 of the Convention, the Contracting States ******undertake to abide by the decisions of the Court******. To date States which have been ordered to make payments under Article 50 have consistently done so. The Court now (since October 1991) prescribes, in the operative provisions of the judgment, a period of three months from the date of the decision within which the applicant must be paid and (since January 1996) provides for interest in the event of failure to comply with this time-limit. "
for the non-legally inclined amongst us, all the language in the Convention is non-binding on the EU states, more properly it's as binding as the member states allow/want/let it be...some countries, the Benelux for example, take civil/privacy very, very seriously, some countries, like the UK, who we are speaking of here, are trashing individual rights for collective security
if you've ever carried a bag into a British train station or london hotel lobby, esp when the Provo's are on a tear, you know what i'm talking about.....
let's try this again, both the EU and the UK do NOT have SUPERSEDING and BINDING civil rights ***guarantees*** built into their legal systems, equivalent to those contained in the Bill of Rights addendum to the US Constitution, the Europeans do have many noble statements of intent and/or purpose, none of which have the force of a constitutional guarantee
check it out on the Council of Europe's own main portal;
http://www.coe.int/portal.asp?strScreenType=100
and last, but certainly not least, google the following; Britain's/British Official Secrets Act
one of the interesting clashes brewing between the EU and the USA is the ongoing "ratcheting up" of intrusive and obtrusive "ubquitious surveillance" in the UK...
/. as i recall) to a Salon dot com article on email surveillance of Americans in the UK ....
i ti sh_carnivore/
the British people, after decades of things going "BOOM!" in the middle of London and other cities, have choosen to turn over many of their privacy rights (which are far fewer to start with in the UK than the USA, NO Bill of Rights in Limey Land)
here's a link (from last august, was also covered on
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/23/br
the recent tussle in Florida (WHY is it ***ALWAYS*** Florida????) over the use of face/rec is just the start of the argument over what s/f maven Bruce Sterling calls "perpetual surveillance", where any time we are in public, we are "on camera"..
those who support it argue that "personal crimes" mugging, robbery, rape, etc will be drastically reduced and more criminals will be caught and imprisoned and that living in a "fish bowl" is a small price to pay for the additional safety...the Brits seems to have bought this argument hook, line and sinker
if some organization(s) don't emerge to make sure that our "analog" privacy protections are transferred by law and statute to the digital world, which, so far, by and large they have not....our digital lives will become simple currency for the governments and corporations to trade in (Terry Gilliam, Prophet)
the corporations and their proxies, RIAA, MPAA, BSA, et al have their plans for our data, and so far, the US and European governments have either gone along with the corporations or just stood on the sidelines
The Bill of Rights needs to be attached to our digital identities, realms, behaviours ASAP, now's the time to support the EFF, or don't be surprised iff keyboard sniffers are built into OSs in the next decade...
We're all in it together...
WASHINGTON POSTTIMESHEARLD
.0000001% of all our net net revenues. We're very serious about this."
WASHINGTON, DC: Aug 30, 2001
As Congress furiously discussed what to do with the newly discovered "First Church Of Digital Grepping" and its alleged dogma that requires its members to constantly search through copyrighted materials for sacred meaning and salvation, the lobbying organizations for the entertainment and publishing sprang into action.
The entertainments' lawyer and lobbyists have already brought about a marked increase in donations of cash, luxury cars, booze, dope and the deployment of hookers.
One crack addict in a poor neighborhood of DC told us today, "Man, you can't score any good shit with it all going to them Congressmen. We down here smoking Draino and hoping those lobbyists from the entertainment industment get whatever the hell it is they want so we can get our freak back on!"
Another professional worker in the recreational sex business tells relates a similar story, "Geez, it's normally bad enough here with all these Congressmen around. Can't keep in they pants, anyway. You know how it is, if they ain't doing one of us out here, they doing the American people in there. But with all them lawyers and lobbyists working Congress about that Geek Religion thing, its nearly as bad for a sex worker as it is when they ain't no interns around. That's the worst, it's just every ho for themselves then and pray for new load of interns."
Sources within the entertainment industry say their goal is the simple protection of the artists.
One anonymous source said, "Look we all know that the actual artist, the creator who is the principal beneficiary of our actions here. We're going to ensure that the people who create the movies, music and books that we all love and cherish continue to receive their
Another source said that perhaps a solution similar to the one used with Native American peoples would be effective in dealing with "The First Church Of Digital Grepping".
That is, round all them up, march two thousand miles in the middle of winter. Take their computers and ATM cards away from them. Give them habitats in faroff remote Northern rural areas, and allow them to practice their supposed religion two or three times a year, under close Bureau of Geek Affairs supervision.
"Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier...."
even assuming the reports of the rate of rise of bug reports is increasing, and further assuming the rate of rise is as steep as indicated, ol' Billy of Ock wouldn't necessarily agree with you, try some other possible explanations....
1. the code portions showing the increase are relatively new and have not had the equivalent amount of debug time that the more mature sections of the code have been given
2. the coders producing the buggier code are new to the project and are still learning how to implement and design their particular sections, even highly experienced coders/designers have a rise their error rate when changing to an unfamilar design, this is usu short-term and correctable w/o a ton of effort
3. the bugs located could be on the "other" side of the code, say the JVM or the security sandbox or OS threading model or ??????
...and let's not forget that even M$ has acknowledged that W2K has shipped with nearly 70,000 ***KNOWN*** bugs....
the Mozilla Quest article does not classify the bugs by type or location, how many "app killers" are there? how many "OS killers"? versus how many are UI related where a drop down box doesn't autoscroll or automatically alphabetize?????
the entire MozillaQuest article reeked of hostility towards the current Mozilla development structure...
...as someone who is NOT a daily Linux user, and who doesn't use any Mozilla on ANY platform i found the tone of the article very opinionated and hostile...it sounded more political than analytical and seemed to have an agenda greater than informing the Mozilla faithful....
maybe justified, maybe not, i don't know...but there's way insufficient info in that article to conclude "...Mozilla is getting buggier"...
"...web is still a pretty eclectic and loony place to be."
/., the Internet, yadayada....
you can add webrings on everything such as "goth lifestyle" to "AMC Gremlin autos" to "anime'" to "power ranger collectibles", to "AIDS treatment and prevention", "womens' health", "dogs' health", "gerbils health"
then throw in; every kind of pr0n known to man or redneck, millions and millions of MP3s, thousands of movies, hundreds of thousand of complete books, millions of magazine articles....
the guys (the author and the interviewees) in this artlcle seem to be playing the "too cool" hand, just like we routinely see the "The Death of _______; Linux, UNIX, MS, C, C++, Java, COBOL,
the Internet is the most ***AMAZING*** invention/construction/collection/device/thingie in the blood and misery soaked history of mankind
and even more remarkably, unlike most grand scale human accomplishments (the pyramids, the cathedrals, the a-bomb), thousands didn't have to die building it, thousands more aren't being killed to maintain and grow it....
gee, maybe amy harmon and her friends need to reboot and do a little more random surfing????
Cringely got it right, in my last business, the area was out of dedicated "Data Lines", so PB had to send out an install tech who really knew what he was doing, i was looking over his shoulder and noticed that he was using our alarm lines...the tech told me almost exactly the same story as Cringely, including that if you called PB and asked for a pair of "guard lines" you'd be told they didn't exist or that they were all assigned in your area.
SOME THINGS TO NOTE:
since this is a point-to-point connection, your throughput will vary with the quality of your wire pairs
you might also need to perform line balancing, as some of these wire have been in the ground/air for a LONG time
if you have big power transformers or other "leaky" devices near your wires, your S/N ratio could be terrible
AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST, anyone can just simply t-splice your line to get 100% access to your communications, with maybe just having to perform a simple impedence adjustment...
BUT, still cool for all of that BTW, when "Boardwatch Magazine" still had Jack Richards they ran a very similar (but more detailed) piece on this about 3 years ago
Peace, Love to my Homies
"Don't blame the ISP, it's the DMCA that's broken."
while the DMCA is seriously one-sided (precisely as it was intended to be), you can surely share some of the blame with the ISP...
it's amusing to note that the AOL portion of TimeWarnerAOL HIDES behind one of the strictest privacy agreements in the industry, in case (no pun intended) anyone thinks thats done solely to favor the user, think again.
The AOL privacy agreement is at least as much intended to keep AOL's ass out of hot water.
By making a really strict Privacy Agreement (if you haven't read AOL's Service Agreement, you should, it's remarkable in every legal way you can think of) with its customers when of the "watchdog" groups like the MPAA, RIAA, BSA comes calling AOL can throw up its hands and say...
"Gee, we'd really like to check and see AOL User; "IRIPDVDS" has any copyrighted materials on our service. But, Shucks, our privacy agreement with them doesn't really allow us to do so without you guys having a warrant. You DO have a warrant don't you?"
The average ISP remaining after the fallout is only a fraction of AOL's size and clout, and can't afford to play "Lawyers At Dawn" with the entertainment industry, so they will do the "Bend and Spread" in about 10 seconds.
And since the remaining broadband providers are essentially all telcos, who would (like all public utilities) generally perform copulative acts with their maternal unit's left eye socket, they would just as soon hose a customer as look at them.
As the telcos remind us constantly they ***HATE*** deregulation and the fact the RBOCs are "re-merging" should tell you how well they understand (and care to understand) the retail communications marketplace.
The DMCA, as related in the article, is having precisely the intended effect on ISPs.
We in the community failed to stop the DMCA, and now we're seeing only the beginning of our failure.
Essentially, those who enforce copyright laws in the "non-digital world" are used to having "no knock, no due process" rights to puruse purported violators
We in the digital world have largely, up to this point, only been purused by statutes and agencies that have to more/less give us due process and Bill of Rights protections (the glaring exception to that is Kevin Mitnick, who literally became "The Man Without a Country", one of the most egregrous violations of due process in American history")
well, our friends in the entertainment industry don't observe (thanks to the American Congress) either due process or bill of rights restrictions when pursuing "copyright violators"
it should interesting to note that the Freakazoid who slaughtered his whole family up in Sacramento has more civil rights than he would have if he downloaded "Phantom Menace"....
you decide who our laws are really intended to protect, people or property????
"A screwdriver's interface has remained unchanged for centuries and it doesn't need a new concept. Same with the firearm, a Beretta flintlock from 1300 had the same interfact characteristics as a Beretta Gold Sable rifle made in 2001."
let's see if we can fix your analogy;
a screwdriver and a flintlock (which is also a "rifle" BTW) are NOT the "interface"...they're the APPLICATIONS
the "interface" in your analogy is "The Hand"
since it hasn't changed since the advent of homo sapiens (a black day for Australopithicus Ananemsis, indeed), there would be no need for the "applications" to change.
on the subj of the GUI/Mac interface, Dvorak wrote an excellent column for PC Mag about 10 years, putting that to rest
as JD pointed out there is nothing in the least bit "natural" about clicking once to move the focus and clicking twice to launch the program. additionally, anyone who thinks that it's "intuitive" to eject a f/d by dropping it on the trashcan is smoking some dynamite stuff
the "Windows Explorer" is the most painful navigation schema i've ever seen, it would be against the Geneva Convention to make POWs use it, i suspect, i usu go to a DOS box
neither your 3 or 80 year old will find any help from any GUI in constructing a multiple database, complex SQL query or enable multidimensional formula construction in a spreadsheet, let's not even discuss problem solvers like Maple or Mathematica
THE OLD TIRED POINT: for those that have mastered vi or emacs, or systems' admin via CLI, the GUI is so much dead weight
THE NEW, MORE INTERESING POINT; though it is true that the visual areas of the brain are some of the densest in the brain, that is primarily because they are massively parallel
if you're looking for multiordinal, multilayered complex constructions in the brain look for the speech integration centers, which suggest that the next evolution of the man/machine interface will be Natural Language Processing (till we all get our brain jack)
there's more to life than Von Neumann construction, check out Raymond Kurzweil, George Gilder, and Signal Processors (both Analog and Digital) on google...."Oh, Brave New World that has such components in it..!"
****TROLL ALERT****au contraire, mes ami...*****THOUGHT POLICE ALERT*****
"Attention, viewers. The seemingly innocuous post you have just read contains elements (overblown phraseology, potentially offensive generalizations) strongly suggestive of the "craft" of trolling." ---- What are you smoking?
I see that the oldest and unfortunately truest tradition of Decnet, political correctness, still has a tenacious foothold in the community when it comes to RMS.
My prior post was polite, considerate and fully acknowledged Richard's contributions, which is more than some of the criticism that he receives from the LINUX community. NO, my friend, the agenda here is yours.
While i don't know if it's a simple, unrefined need for attention or more deviously, a reactive "ad hominem" attack against anything that questions RMS' relevance.
It was also peformed in the classic Goebbelian fashion, without neither examples nor proof of your claims.
But, assuming that it was an attack against the notion of RMS' decreasing relevance. Let me state it more clearly...
Everytime Richard launches into one of his canned diatribes, whether against the entire concept of "Open Soure" and/or any license scheme other than GNU/GPL and starts getting pissy about how "impure" other people are (and how "pure" he is), he loses relevance and influence and credibility.
Richard's spent 3 decades (unsuccessfully) trying to get something like LINUX going, he should be F*****G tickled pink and blue at how well the Open Source movement has brought the entire question of the value of proprietary software into the public for discussion. Since that's supposedly what he's all about.
Instead, he demonstrates this remarkable infintilism by running around acting like he's everybody's dick-deprived, spinster aunt, Zelda. Lecturing people who don't; want it, need it or appreciate it on the values of ***HIS DEFINTIONS*** of "virtuousness" and "purity"
There is NO BETTER example of this than the non-issue of appending GNU to LINUX, if this was all that big of an issue to him, he WOULD HAVE PUT IT IN THE LICENSE, as that's his complete raison d'etre.
Nope, Richard bet the farm on Hurd, dissed LINUX/Linus for years and now wants a piece of the action. But, in classic autocratic fashion he just doesn't want to "get on the LINUX bus" with the rest of the community, he wants to tell the bus where to go and how to get there. That's called hijacking.
Well, as someone who ***genuinely*** values much of what RMS has done (even if not how's he done it). One thing is clear.
The biggest impediment to RMS's "Message" is RMS, and he's dooming himself to increasing irrelevance in the Open Source movement by his behaviours.
"...people are behind these corperations and they are screwing themseleves as well as us.."
SORRY! (really) but they aren't...
one trivial example, i have numerous friends in the record industry with CD collections numbering in the thousands, how many have they paid for?
from as few as 1 in 25 CD's to as many as 1 in 15 CD's so, obviously they benefit from their positions (at 15$/pop that's thousands of dollars)
another less trivial example, i know a person who just was promoted to a very senior executive position at an entertainment company, they're making 7 figures,
now, this person's large income is derived from the fact that a very large "information asymmetry" exists, this asymmetry in the case of books, television, films and music derives from the fact that a very small group of companies can act as a "market lockout" mechanism (we all remember that term, right?)....
so, maybe you are a better singer than Robert Plant or Beck or Mariah Carey or a better screenplay writer than Robert Towne or Bill Goldman or Jerry Zucker or a better actor than Jack Nicholson or Helen Hunt or Alicia Silverstone or Freddie Prinze Jr -G-
but without someone making the conscious decision to allow your talent to be exhibited, you'll be slinging pastrami at your local restaurant for the rest or your life.
the number of available channels for exhibiting/promoting/distributing such materials are being increasingly owned/controlled by fewer and fewer companies (who themselves are positively Gibsonian in global reach, influence and control)
the DMCA is just the latest of a spectrum of a wide variety of Intellectual Property laws that have been carved out by American Corporations (and European and Asian, with the E! Industry leading the pack in special interest IP legistlation w/o a close second, which would prob be Tech Companies)
it is now a race between the "content controllers" and their proxies (the US Congress, the EU legislature, et al) and the technologists
RIAA, DMCA, Napster and all the other battles going on now are just barely the opening skirmishes in what promises to be a long, long fight to allow the efficient use of digital technologies and to rationalize IP laws to reflect the new and oncoming distribution technologies...