You can't link Microsoft's business with Gates' philantropy. No matter how much money Gates gives away, it still doesn't Microsoft as a company from playing fairly.
To put another way, suppose Microsoft did play fairly with other companies. They have a lot of smart people there; they would probably still be a thriving company, but not as profitable. So now Gates is worth $20 billion instead of $100 billion. If he is truly engaging in philantropy out of the goodness of his heart, he still will give away a boatload of money. Except in this scenario, the companies that Microsoft ground into oblivion are still thriving as well, and the other $80 billion that Bill doesn't have is in the pockets of shareholders of other companies, to give away as they see fit. There's no net loss there, is there?
In fact, by engaging in predatory business practices, Microsoft may have been artifically holding back the software industry to enforce its monopoly. Without those practices, the entire industry might be a lot bigger, with lots more extraneous profit available for philantropy (and the associates tax write-offs!)
Well, I stand corrected then. Our people in charge of EDA tools on Linux said that the Xilinx software will only run under WINE, but they may be getting WINE and WindU confused.
Applications run through WindU look ugly, but all EDA tools look ugly, so I don't care. Quartus in particular has such a horrid interface that I'm looking forward to my next Xilinx-based project...
I second that remark. Modelsim simply screams on Linux. I use it daily. It seems that for the truly large designs, performance on Linux starts to degrade, but I think that has more to do with bus and memory limitations inherent in the PC architecture (as compared with high-octane Solatis servers that cost > 5x more) . All my recent designs (RTL through post-layout) have gone through Modelsim on Linux, and I'm not going back.
Synplicity doesn't do fitting and layout, just synthesis. I am using Altera FPGA's in my current project, and am currently using Synplicity and Quartus (Altera's design software) under Linux with absolutely no problems. It beats the pants off of our Solaris compute servers, which while they're older, cost 5x as much for half the performance. This is getting IT people turned on about Linux, and I'm hoping my next desktop will be Linux-based instead of NT (but I'm not holding my breath).
As far as I know, Xilinx doesn't have a direct Linux port of their software, but say that their Windows Binaries will run under WINE. I don't know, as I haven't used Xilinx stuff in some time.
I'm not sure if everyone can access that, so here it is:
Question 9: Can I use my existing iPod for Mac on a PC, or my iPod for Windows on a Mac?
Answer: You can reformat your iPod for Windows into an iPod for Mac, but it is not possible to reconfigure your iPod for Mac to an iPod for Windows. This is because Windows does not support the HFS+ file system and therefore will not see the drive.
You can convert your iPod for Windows into an iPod for Mac by using the iPod for Mac Software Updater on the Apple website. Note that once it is reformatted, it will only work with Macs. You need Mac OS 9.2 or Mac OS X version 10.1 or later to reformat an iPod for Windows into an iPod for Mac.
Using the iPod for Mac on a PC, or using the iPod for Windows on a Mac, is not supported by Apple.
Dude, while I agree that the media has been engaging in war sensationalism, just saying that there were "6 Americans and 1 Israeli" is just stating a fact. If there were 6 Americans and one Frenchman on board, we'd be hearing that, too. That das nothing to do with the war.
Now, there will be a media circus speculating on terrorism, just like there was when the plane went down in Far Rockaway. That's unfortunate, but different than your complaint. And it would take place if the seventh astronaut was French, just maybe not with the same intensity.
If there anything that's wrong with that characterization, it's the fact that we still can't get past National Boundaties when describing the people involved. Seven people died today when this mission failed -- does it really matter where they come from?
FYI: searching Google for
"The Empire has taken control of my pants, I advise everyone to leave before more troops arrive."
yields 131 hits. I imagine wherever you found it was not the original place.
I think that it's great that The Economist, which is a magazine that Non-Tech people read, is catching on to this whole copyright mess. It gives me some hope that things might change in the future. Everyone assumes that copyrights will be extended by Congress in a perpetual fashion. But remember that the main reason that the Bono act passed was that there was very little mainstream opposition to it at the time. The next time copyrights are about to expire, there should be very real pressure on Congress not to cave in. The points made in the Eldred case will be just as valid then.
However, I think this article misses the point. It is true that distributing works digitally makes them much easier to copy. But locking them down, when the DMCA makes discussion of how to bypass any locks illegal, doesn't give us a damn thing, no matter how short they make the copyright. It's not a give-or-take issue; if the content cartels get what they want on this issue, we all lose no matter what we get "in exchange".
The DVD situation is a perfect example. It amounts to a perpetual copyright, because even when the copyright expires on a DVD, there is no legal way to access the data on it. Until and unless that changes, the actual term is irrelevant.
The way I see it, there should be a cracking "spectrum", from "curious" to "Malicious":
The mildest is the person who breaks into a system, just because he can. He (or she, after all) breaks in, looks around, and leaves before doing any damage, changing anything, or "taking" anything. It doesn't impact any services that the target is providing. True, after any break-in that is discovered, the admins of the site will spend time cleaning it up and making it more secure. And I wouldn't like it if someone broke into my house just to look around. But I don't think that the punishment should be too harsh in this case, perhaps on the same scale as graffiti, maybe a little harsher because of the more expensive "cleanup".
The worst case is the cracker who breaks into a system to destroy or deface it. He changes the way external sites look and destroys information that is vital to those systems and may not be able to be rebuilt. Even a DoS could fall into this category if it leaves the site offline long enough, and is clearly deliberate. These guys should get harsher sentences, both for the public nature of their crime and the potential for data to be lost without hope of recovery.
The middle case is the cracker who breaks into a site and doesn't change anything, but just copies information from the site. In this case, the nature of the information itself and the mindset of the cracker must be taken into account. If the information was something that the cracker would have no way of using, and doesn't pass it on, then that would fall under the "curiosity" end of the spectrum. If the information was something that the hacker could directly use or sell, like credit card numbers or confidential documents sold to competitors, that would fall under the "malicious" end of the spectrum and be punished more harshly. I don't think the cracker should have to actually use the data to qualify for harsher punishment, as long as he had plans to use it. Notice that in this case, it is not necessarily the object that is copied that dictates the severity, it is the cracker's intentions.
The main problem with the way computer crime is punished right now is that whenever an item is copied/stolen, there is the tendency to assign the highest possible value to that item, without taking what the cracker plans on doing with it into account. After all, a confidential document could be worth lots of money to the company it is taken from. But nobody takes the capabilities and intent of the cracker into question; if he doesn't know how to capitalize on the value of the document, how could he be liable for "stealing" that much value?
Yes, I know that someone who steals jewelery in real life and then hocks it for a tenth of its value still stole the jewelery, not 1/10th of it. But when physical objects are stolen, the victim doesn't possess it anymore. When documents are "stolen" but not deleted, the victim still has access to it. Therefore, I think it is proper to assign the "value" of the theft to be how much the value of the document is reduced, not the value of the document itself. And if the cracker doesn't know how to use the document or who to sell it to, how can its value be reduced?
Buried in my in-laws' basement is a primitive custom-built computer (i believe it was 8086-vintage, could have been 286) from the 80's timeframe. Inside the computer chassis were two huge full-height 20MB hard disks.
Attached was a note from the person who built the computer for them, saying something to the effect of "This is more storage space than you will ever need."
I imagine that at the time, 40 MB of storage was friggin' huge.
This type of watch doesn't necessarily seem to be a bad idea. I've been wondering why someone hasn't used the NIST broadcast signals to automatically set watches for some time now. (Does anyone know whether these signals exist somewhere outside the U.S.? It would suck for my watch to start drifting when I leave the country...)
What impresses me more is that Microsoft expects to be able to have a nationwide digital pager network to push information to these small devices. Unless they have some deals in place that aren't public right now, that will be no small task, even for Microsoft. (Push technology failed in the '90's -- Microsoft seems convinced that it was because information was pushed to your computer, which wasn't as conveinent as your watch...)
But even if they lose a ton of money on it, they end up with a nationwide digital broadcast network. MS and AOL/TW won't look so different, then. And AOL's content delivery network is a bunch of cable monopolies which are still kind of regulated. Microsoft will likely not actually buy any broadcasting assets, they'll make arrangements with other carriers to carry their data stream. So they won't have to directly deal with regulatory hassles. It's like the whole IBM thing all over again -- Sure, you can make the hardware (or maintain the broadcasting network), as long as we control all the bits!
You're right, the market for a video iPod isn't there, if all you think about is video. But my video iPod would display hi-res digital camera stills. Being able to carry around your entire photo album in your pocket is something people would be interested in.
IMHO, a video, wireless-networking iPod is definitely on its way. The reason it hasn't been released yet is that Apple doesn't want to release expensive toys in a down economy.
Once the economy comes back and people have money for toys again, watch out!
Has it occured to anyone else that the new 12" Powerbook is, for all practical purposes, a G4 iBook?
What does this say about the future of the iBook? Will Apple continue having two different laptop form factors in the future? While it certainly helps Apple to have a entry-level $999 iBook, especially for the education market, I wouldn't be suprised if by next year there's only one Apple laptop "style", with all price ranges contained within it.
So Microsoft had this system that encouraged and rewarded people who acted a certain way. And some of that behavior trickled out into meetings with customers and partners, where they were correctly seen as negatives and helped foster the anti-Microsoft attitude. But since Microsoft kept hiring and promoting obnoxious people, they kept being obnoxious.
You know, I have been wondering whether my dislike of Microsoft goes deeper than just not liking their products, and goes straight to the attitude and culture they encourage in the business world.
Consider some Microsoft ads that have been shown recently, pitched as "software for the agile business"...
- A wine seller noticed half of his stock was just destroyed in a tragic accident, then instantly updates his inventory and doubles his price so the guy currently buying cases gets screwed. Are we supposed to think this is how businesses should be run? Any reasonable store owner I know of carries insurance for these circumstances, because they understand that screwing the customer will lead to less customers.
- A bunch of Record Industry execs come up with a great marketing plan: somehow find out the E-mail addresses of everyone who bought a certain band's CD in a certain city, and send them e-mail direct marketing messages about concerts and other exciting offers. They even show that the fans are happy that they are getting this unsolicited spam! What gives?
I understand that the real point of the commercials was to show how well all the systems talk to each other, but I find their examples extremely outrageous.Maybe I'm just a disgruntled corporate drone, but is this how most "agile businesses" want to operate? Because if it is, we have more to worry about than just Microsoft!
This is great news! But we need Tech companies on our side, not the Boy Scouts!
Seriously, though, I'm suprised to see Microsoft take this position, since they had the most to gain if this scheme takes off. After all, if you can only watch future movies on "approved" OS's, guess which ones will be approved and which ones won't!
I agree with you that Apple's choice of the BSD license has plenty of merit, and that the GPL has specific political and social goals that not all may agree with. But I keep hearing "Viral nature" and "severe restrictions" in relation to the GPL, and I just don't get it.
Apple uses plenty of GPL'd software -- gcc ships with OS X after all. And my understanding of the GPL you can use as much GPL software as you like with no restrictions whatsoever. There's nothing viral about that! The only restriction is that if you modify and distribute binaries based on those modifications , you have to make the changes you made to the source available. Which seems reasonable; you're modifying someone else's work after all, you should reciprocate. While this is a restriction, please show me how this is any more restrictive than any other license short of the Public Domain.
The GPL could pose problems for a company such as Apple, who probably have other people's licensed proprietary code in their code base, and who really can't open up the whole thing in a GPL-like way. But that doesn't mean that the GPL is "is inimical to the standard economical model and way of doing business.". Plenty of companies are contributing to GPL'd projects (where appropriate for their business models) and making money off of it, and RMS hasn't forcefully added them to the GNU collective yet.
We do a variation on this theme. On both my side and my wife's side of the family, we get together sometime in December for a big Christmas party. That in itself is a present for me, especially since my family is in NYC and that party is the one time of year I get to see some of my cousins.
But while we'll buy presents for the kids in both families, once you hit 18, you go into a kind of "secret santa" thing where you're assigned one person to buy for. This is good because when you only have to buy a few present, you can put some real thought into them. Sometimes, it gives an excuse to call extended family members and talk about what you might buy where otherwise you wouldn't make the call. It's especially interesting when I need to buy for an older or younger member of my family and have to think outside my generation when finding something to buy.
It gets Christmas back to basics with an emphasis on giving and not on getting.
Slashdot Mirror
To put another way, suppose Microsoft did play fairly with other companies. They have a lot of smart people there; they would probably still be a thriving company, but not as profitable. So now Gates is worth $20 billion instead of $100 billion. If he is truly engaging in philantropy out of the goodness of his heart, he still will give away a boatload of money. Except in this scenario, the companies that Microsoft ground into oblivion are still thriving as well, and the other $80 billion that Bill doesn't have is in the pockets of shareholders of other companies, to give away as they see fit. There's no net loss there, is there?
In fact, by engaging in predatory business practices, Microsoft may have been artifically holding back the software industry to enforce its monopoly. Without those practices, the entire industry might be a lot bigger, with lots more extraneous profit available for philantropy (and the associates tax write-offs!)
Applications run through WindU look ugly, but all EDA tools look ugly, so I don't care. Quartus in particular has such a horrid interface that I'm looking forward to my next Xilinx-based project...
I second that remark. Modelsim simply screams on Linux. I use it daily. It seems that for the truly large designs, performance on Linux starts to degrade, but I think that has more to do with bus and memory limitations inherent in the PC architecture (as compared with high-octane Solatis servers that cost > 5x more) . All my recent designs (RTL through post-layout) have gone through Modelsim on Linux, and I'm not going back.
As far as I know, Xilinx doesn't have a direct Linux port of their software, but say that their Windows Binaries will run under WINE. I don't know, as I haven't used Xilinx stuff in some time.
I'm not sure if everyone can access that, so here it is:
Now, there will be a media circus speculating on terrorism, just like there was when the plane went down in Far Rockaway. That's unfortunate, but different than your complaint. And it would take place if the seventh astronaut was French, just maybe not with the same intensity.
If there anything that's wrong with that characterization, it's the fact that we still can't get past National Boundaties when describing the people involved. Seven people died today when this mission failed -- does it really matter where they come from?
Let them watch cartoons. Do they really need to know about everything bad in the world right when it happens, live?
"The Empire has taken control of my pants, I advise everyone to leave before more troops arrive."
yields 131 hits. I imagine wherever you found it was not the original place.
Another useless fact, courtesy of Google.
250 Verilog licenses? Where the heck do you work?
However, I think this article misses the point. It is true that distributing works digitally makes them much easier to copy. But locking them down, when the DMCA makes discussion of how to bypass any locks illegal, doesn't give us a damn thing, no matter how short they make the copyright. It's not a give-or-take issue; if the content cartels get what they want on this issue, we all lose no matter what we get "in exchange".
The DVD situation is a perfect example. It amounts to a perpetual copyright, because even when the copyright expires on a DVD, there is no legal way to access the data on it. Until and unless that changes, the actual term is irrelevant.
*ducks*
I'll wait until the Beta comes out. *ducks*
The mildest is the person who breaks into a system, just because he can. He (or she, after all) breaks in, looks around, and leaves before doing any damage, changing anything, or "taking" anything. It doesn't impact any services that the target is providing. True, after any break-in that is discovered, the admins of the site will spend time cleaning it up and making it more secure. And I wouldn't like it if someone broke into my house just to look around. But I don't think that the punishment should be too harsh in this case, perhaps on the same scale as graffiti, maybe a little harsher because of the more expensive "cleanup".
The worst case is the cracker who breaks into a system to destroy or deface it. He changes the way external sites look and destroys information that is vital to those systems and may not be able to be rebuilt. Even a DoS could fall into this category if it leaves the site offline long enough, and is clearly deliberate. These guys should get harsher sentences, both for the public nature of their crime and the potential for data to be lost without hope of recovery.
The middle case is the cracker who breaks into a site and doesn't change anything, but just copies information from the site. In this case, the nature of the information itself and the mindset of the cracker must be taken into account. If the information was something that the cracker would have no way of using, and doesn't pass it on, then that would fall under the "curiosity" end of the spectrum. If the information was something that the hacker could directly use or sell, like credit card numbers or confidential documents sold to competitors, that would fall under the "malicious" end of the spectrum and be punished more harshly. I don't think the cracker should have to actually use the data to qualify for harsher punishment, as long as he had plans to use it. Notice that in this case, it is not necessarily the object that is copied that dictates the severity, it is the cracker's intentions.
The main problem with the way computer crime is punished right now is that whenever an item is copied/stolen, there is the tendency to assign the highest possible value to that item, without taking what the cracker plans on doing with it into account. After all, a confidential document could be worth lots of money to the company it is taken from. But nobody takes the capabilities and intent of the cracker into question; if he doesn't know how to capitalize on the value of the document, how could he be liable for "stealing" that much value?
Yes, I know that someone who steals jewelery in real life and then hocks it for a tenth of its value still stole the jewelery, not 1/10th of it. But when physical objects are stolen, the victim doesn't possess it anymore. When documents are "stolen" but not deleted, the victim still has access to it. Therefore, I think it is proper to assign the "value" of the theft to be how much the value of the document is reduced, not the value of the document itself. And if the cracker doesn't know how to use the document or who to sell it to, how can its value be reduced?
Attached was a note from the person who built the computer for them, saying something to the effect of "This is more storage space than you will ever need."
I imagine that at the time, 40 MB of storage was friggin' huge.
What impresses me more is that Microsoft expects to be able to have a nationwide digital pager network to push information to these small devices. Unless they have some deals in place that aren't public right now, that will be no small task, even for Microsoft. (Push technology failed in the '90's -- Microsoft seems convinced that it was because information was pushed to your computer, which wasn't as conveinent as your watch...)
But even if they lose a ton of money on it, they end up with a nationwide digital broadcast network. MS and AOL/TW won't look so different, then. And AOL's content delivery network is a bunch of cable monopolies which are still kind of regulated. Microsoft will likely not actually buy any broadcasting assets, they'll make arrangements with other carriers to carry their data stream. So they won't have to directly deal with regulatory hassles. It's like the whole IBM thing all over again -- Sure, you can make the hardware (or maintain the broadcasting network), as long as we control all the bits!
You're not married, are you?
You're right, the market for a video iPod isn't there, if all you think about is video. But my video iPod would display hi-res digital camera stills. Being able to carry around your entire photo album in your pocket is something people would be interested in.
Once the economy comes back and people have money for toys again, watch out!
I just noticed that both new Powerbooks have DDR RAM and a new NVidia graphics card. Does that make it worth it?
Has it occured to anyone else that the new 12" Powerbook is, for all practical purposes, a G4 iBook? What does this say about the future of the iBook? Will Apple continue having two different laptop form factors in the future? While it certainly helps Apple to have a entry-level $999 iBook, especially for the education market, I wouldn't be suprised if by next year there's only one Apple laptop "style", with all price ranges contained within it.
Did you just say you can't wait to get a life? Heh, the RDF must be stronger than I thought...
You know, I have been wondering whether my dislike of Microsoft goes deeper than just not liking their products, and goes straight to the attitude and culture they encourage in the business world.
Consider some Microsoft ads that have been shown recently, pitched as "software for the agile business"...
- A wine seller noticed half of his stock was just destroyed in a tragic accident, then instantly updates his inventory and doubles his price so the guy currently buying cases gets screwed. Are we supposed to think this is how businesses should be run? Any reasonable store owner I know of carries insurance for these circumstances, because they understand that screwing the customer will lead to less customers.
- A bunch of Record Industry execs come up with a great marketing plan: somehow find out the E-mail addresses of everyone who bought a certain band's CD in a certain city, and send them e-mail direct marketing messages about concerts and other exciting offers. They even show that the fans are happy that they are getting this unsolicited spam! What gives?
I understand that the real point of the commercials was to show how well all the systems talk to each other, but I find their examples extremely outrageous.Maybe I'm just a disgruntled corporate drone, but is this how most "agile businesses" want to operate? Because if it is, we have more to worry about than just Microsoft!
Seriously, though, I'm suprised to see Microsoft take this position, since they had the most to gain if this scheme takes off. After all, if you can only watch future movies on "approved" OS's, guess which ones will be approved and which ones won't!
Apple uses plenty of GPL'd software -- gcc ships with OS X after all. And my understanding of the GPL you can use as much GPL software as you like with no restrictions whatsoever. There's nothing viral about that! The only restriction is that if you modify and distribute binaries based on those modifications , you have to make the changes you made to the source available. Which seems reasonable; you're modifying someone else's work after all, you should reciprocate. While this is a restriction, please show me how this is any more restrictive than any other license short of the Public Domain.
The GPL could pose problems for a company such as Apple, who probably have other people's licensed proprietary code in their code base, and who really can't open up the whole thing in a GPL-like way. But that doesn't mean that the GPL is "is inimical to the standard economical model and way of doing business.". Plenty of companies are contributing to GPL'd projects (where appropriate for their business models) and making money off of it, and RMS hasn't forcefully added them to the GNU collective yet.
But while we'll buy presents for the kids in both families, once you hit 18, you go into a kind of "secret santa" thing where you're assigned one person to buy for. This is good because when you only have to buy a few present, you can put some real thought into them. Sometimes, it gives an excuse to call extended family members and talk about what you might buy where otherwise you wouldn't make the call. It's especially interesting when I need to buy for an older or younger member of my family and have to think outside my generation when finding something to buy.
It gets Christmas back to basics with an emphasis on giving and not on getting.