More likely, they're looking at what they would have had to budget as a cost of software upgrades, strictly in terms of new licenses. Most companies or government offices (up here in Canada, anyway) plan for this sort of thing, including a periodic migration to the latest software releases. Possibly, they took a look at the Windows2000 licenses that they'd have needed to implement to keep up to MS's evolving standards, and decided enough was enough.
Would this be the sort of thing that can be used to say that Microsoft's monopoly has had a detrimental, harmful effect on the consumer? The only reason why I'm wondering is because even though Microsoft might have all our base in the home desktop market, it's not quite that cut and dry in the information server market. There are more options available, and consumers aren't locked down to a specific set up (popular *nix variants to an IIS, MSSQL and NT are available).
You know, seriously, part of me wonders just how much innovation over the internet has come as a direct result of the demands of the porn industry. I mean, where else is personal security being violated more of an embarassment? Where else are video demands as high? I remember when our government office was looking at having some of their meetings broadcast live over the internet, and were wondering if it was possible, and I wanted to say, "Sure! Heh heh, just check out this site over here..."
It sucks, but it's going to take more case studies like NASA with MySQL in order for free software solutions to not be laughed out of the corporate world. Accountability is just as big an issue as performance and scalability and the other standard RDBMS things.
When you've got millions of dollars worth of information and something goes wrong, somebody's going to want to be able to sue somebody. It's unavoidable. Also, you've got to wonder how readily an insurance company is going to support your free software adventures when, in the end, there's nobody that can be held accountable in case something goes wrong. In the end, this factor alone makes MS (let alone Oracle) seem a more attractive option than PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
Actually, there was a 6.5 version available up here in Canada for a while, so the jump wasn't directly from 6.1 to 7.0.
I'm also wondering, since Mandrake are usually the first ones to push things up to the latest whole digit, if this is some sort of lame marketing ploy?
Something tells me that if I put out a movie called "Microsoft Windows" which basically didn't have anything to do with our favourite monopoly but instead, in a non-parodying light, was about a small software company in Idaho, that I'd get sued by the big boys. If there was no legal precedent for it, I'm sure they'd find one to keep me from putting out the movie.
Now given the likelihood that neither "Microsoft" nor "Microsoft Windows" was trademarked as a possible movie title, what legal grounds would they come up with to sue me? I'm just wondering what sort of extra remarks Blizzard would use (not that I'm rooting for or against them) in this case. Or is it merely a question of trademarking it as a movie first?
Buy the company, tank it, sell the shares off at a loss, make Corel a laughingstock... And sabotage Corel's chances at providing an Office Suite for Windows AND Linux, thereby tying everybody that much closer to MS for office-software-related solutions.
If a program makes you laugh, makes you cry, brings you to emotional extremes, or makes you think that the world is either the most hilariously absurd of places, or the dreariest of all possible experiences, then what you DON'T have is a work of art.
It might not be a "real" loss, but handling these problems can be a "real" expense, and as such can affect the balance sheet. It's sort of IRS-irrelevent -- if a specific cost is taking a huge chunk out of your profits, it doesn't really matter much whether or not the cost can be written off. That'll just minimize the tax burden, but you'll still want to do what you can to address the cost and minimize it so that your profit margin would be greater...
The German speaking world has SuSE. The English speaking world Red Hat. The French speaking world goes with Mandrake, and the Japanese with turbo Linux.
Well, I have to think that English being the language of international business is probably going to unite most of the major distributions despite any regionalization that goes on. Even though Mandrake's manuals routinely exhibit bad translations from French, fact is is that Mandrake is really popular in North America, as is Debian, with Suse and Caldera recognizable names as well.
the german speaking world moves with KDE, and the Enflish with Gnome
Surely you mean the "English" with "Fnome"?
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
I doubt it. If it follows the open-source model, then any cheat that comes up can probably get treated as a bug fix, and we know how quick the turnarounds on open-source bugs can be...
Besides, even if someone can tinker with her client, it doesn't mean she can tinker with the server too. That differentiation might allow more control to the server admin, although they might have to take a coder's interest in the game...
Was it a forgettable stunt? A much-needed wake-up call for insecure e-commerce sites?
The sad thing is, e-business will probably decide that the better way to deal with events like these is NOT to secure their sites better, but instead prosecute the hell out of the offenders. That'll work well the moment someone else tries it and isn't too much of a stupid HaX0r to brag about it on a chat site. Also interesting is how these opportunities for learning generally end up involving the lawyers.
Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
1. Cost of getting run-time installed. A Java implementation comes free (eg) on most Linux distros (also available free), whereas MS's long-term strategy with regards to Linux (or any non-MAC OS) has been extremely nebulous. I think this is the button that he was trying to push in the part you quoted.
2. Whether or not it will run right now. Something tells me we'll see more of.NET before 2003, but still, it ain't available just yet. (although Wrox already has a book on C# development, and a job I looked into was keying up for.NET development)
3. Reliability of implementation of runtime. Java does have a bit of a head start and a solid base of coders.
4. (point in MS's favour) ability to implement the.NET technology to be better integrated with an existing OS. If nothing else, it could lead to better speed and maybe better exploitation of available OS resources. Did JavaOS ever get off the ground? I stopped caring when I found out how much fun CGI programming was with C in Linux (but I digress...).
Are we forbidden from using the phrase "X Box" as a description, as opposed to a product name?
Well, with RMS telling everyone and her uncle Bob to call it GNU-Linux, I guess it'd be our own bloody fault if this forced distinction bit us on the ass.
Does a trademark name infringe on ones use of the english language?
In any form of print media with the wrong capitalizations, or with a clearly implied context in spoken media, yep. But you already knew that, or were you still waiting for those negative criticisms of Microsoft's monopoly tactics on MSNBC?
Specifically, though, you could probably get away with it if you used the term "X box", as the X is descriptive and the box isn't really a proper noun.
Please, it's not a patent
Ah, whatever. It's a patent on the ordered usage of specific letters from the alphabet, with a different best-before date. Any more hair-splitting and we'll all end up with crew cuts. The poor guy was just trying to make an on-topic first post -- or would you rather that fellow bending over?
Now excuse me while I change accounts and mod myself up a smidgen...
Subscription-based services for digital information will go nowhere. It'll just be like the web was when corporations first got involved. For instance, starwave was a media site that used to give out free basketball stats to whoever wanted them. Then ESPN bought them out and came up with Sportszone, and started a subscription-based service to get the exact same things that you could get for free through other means. Its popularity, as you might expect, went down the tube, and they went back to giving that stuff away free, and using advertising instead as an indirect source of revenue generation. Napster asking people to fork over makes about as much sense as your local radio company asking you to fork over for every 15 minutes you listen to their music.
The only way subscription-based would work for Napster would be if they set up some form of mp3 cartel that could keep people from getting this stuff for free, but with the product already available scattered amongst its users, it's too late for this. As it is, the coded thinking behind Napster wasn't too difficult to keep from inspiring knock-offs -- you have a central database server that gets updated with each logon of all the songs of a user, and you search that for all the users who might have your song, and then leave the clients to connect on their own. The only thing special about Napster here is their brand-naming, not the concept. They could leverage that into making the Napster product super-easy to install and with a built-in advertisement display, and then get that onto as many computers as possible. If Napster users do in fact buy more music, Napster's best chance would be to link their audience to on-line means of purchasing that music.
Another possibility, MAYBE, would be to make sure that Napster itself was responsible for serving off high-end mp3s, and not something that was poorly ripped by some kids in their basements. But to make that work, they'd have to have better music turnover than the industry is currently capable of (in order to keep the fans coming back) to keep people coming back to Napster for the latest thing.
...compared to tons of little sites that no one knows about that has only a little information because volunteers are split apart between them all...
Which is, of course, why there's only one encyclopedia out there in the print-media world.
Oh, wait a second...
Besides, an encyclopedia is going to try to be a huge massive penultimate source of knowledge, right? Except that they're calling for volunteers from within a very specialized audience. No offence, but programmers and technogeeks aren't necessarily going to be the greatest authorities in non-geek-related subject matter. They may be good authorities, but I'd sooner commission a nuclear scientist than some guy with a WW2 itch he likes to scratch to talk about the atomic bomb. At least, if there are more than one such projects, you can reduce the risk that things will get missed, undercovered, or overcovered.
"There was a bit of confusion recently regarding the announcement of a 'gnupedia' project. There already exists a free encyclopedia project, with all code GPL'd and all content FDL'd..."
You know, I really hope this isn't the sort of things people are going to make a big deal out of. I mean, for all the outrage that people show here at the silly patenting of ideas, you'd think they'd actually embrace this sort of duplication. I mean, the last thing we need to see is peer pressure affecting the way these projects are looked at (who came up with the idea first, who's got RMS backing them up, who gets to be the official GNU version, etc.).
Why the hell COULDN'T there be two projects? Bleah bleah bleah redundancy of effort will lead to poor quality on both ends bleah. Right. Tell that to GNOME and KDE, why doncha?
The university of victoria (a real university) has been using java as its teaching language for comp sci students for a few years now.
It may have bad performance etc., but it's still a good language to teach the fundamentals of programming.
Whenever I see a so-called prodigy, I feel really badly for her. (Since this is all hypothetical, I'm gonna use a gender switch just for fun.)
No doubt this kid has probably been coddled and exposed to a whole lot of attention from approving adults about how she can do this thing or that thing better/quicker/more intuitively than most other people. All that specific exposure to people is probably going to lead her to an unbalanced world view on methods of seeking/gaining approval, and she might have a bunch of messed up priorities which involve her having a very narrow view of what constitutes self-worth.
Give this kid alone time. Let her constantly feel reintroduced to the world each time she meets someone new. Give her different pillars of literature and philosophy to bounce off. Expose her to mentors, a bunch of them. Have her pick up a sport or hobby that doesn't cater to left-brained ability. Let her hone her extrapolation skills on things that she hasn't been exposed to yet. Make her sit in on argumentative discussions and don't let her say a word, so that she can observe things objectively. Let her construct her own ego. No doubt she's had too much help in that department already.
Make sure she has a chance and the choice to live outside the traditional prodigy mold, so that in all this thinking she's probably doing she gets a chance to learn to think for herself.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely, they're looking at what they would have had to budget as a cost of software upgrades, strictly in terms of new licenses. Most companies or government offices (up here in Canada, anyway) plan for this sort of thing, including a periodic migration to the latest software releases. Possibly, they took a look at the Windows2000 licenses that they'd have needed to implement to keep up to MS's evolving standards, and decided enough was enough.
Would this be the sort of thing that can be used to say that Microsoft's monopoly has had a detrimental, harmful effect on the consumer? The only reason why I'm wondering is because even though Microsoft might have all our base in the home desktop market, it's not quite that cut and dry in the information server market. There are more options available, and consumers aren't locked down to a specific set up (popular *nix variants to an IIS, MSSQL and NT are available).
Just wondering.
This sig is for sale
You know, seriously, part of me wonders just how much innovation over the internet has come as a direct result of the demands of the porn industry. I mean, where else is personal security being violated more of an embarassment? Where else are video demands as high? I remember when our government office was looking at having some of their meetings broadcast live over the internet, and were wondering if it was possible, and I wanted to say, "Sure! Heh heh, just check out this site over here..."
It sucks, but it's going to take more case studies like NASA with MySQL in order for free software solutions to not be laughed out of the corporate world. Accountability is just as big an issue as performance and scalability and the other standard RDBMS things.
When you've got millions of dollars worth of information and something goes wrong, somebody's going to want to be able to sue somebody. It's unavoidable. Also, you've got to wonder how readily an insurance company is going to support your free software adventures when, in the end, there's nobody that can be held accountable in case something goes wrong. In the end, this factor alone makes MS (let alone Oracle) seem a more attractive option than PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
Yeah, no kidding. I just got modded down. Man, I worked HARD on that joke.
Now that Mandrake's getting slashdotted, I'll finally be able to get www.redhat.com again.
Actually, there was a 6.5 version available up here in Canada for a while, so the jump wasn't directly from 6.1 to 7.0.
I'm also wondering, since Mandrake are usually the first ones to push things up to the latest whole digit, if this is some sort of lame marketing ploy?
Okay, hypothetical alternate universe stuff here...
Something tells me that if I put out a movie called "Microsoft Windows" which basically didn't have anything to do with our favourite monopoly but instead, in a non-parodying light, was about a small software company in Idaho, that I'd get sued by the big boys. If there was no legal precedent for it, I'm sure they'd find one to keep me from putting out the movie.
Now given the likelihood that neither "Microsoft" nor "Microsoft Windows" was trademarked as a possible movie title, what legal grounds would they come up with to sue me? I'm just wondering what sort of extra remarks Blizzard would use (not that I'm rooting for or against them) in this case. Or is it merely a question of trademarking it as a movie first?
Buy the company, tank it, sell the shares off at a loss, make Corel a laughingstock... And sabotage Corel's chances at providing an Office Suite for Windows AND Linux, thereby tying everybody that much closer to MS for office-software-related solutions.
Very, very smart...
If a program makes you laugh, makes you cry, brings you to emotional extremes, or makes you think that the world is either the most hilariously absurd of places, or the dreariest of all possible experiences, then what you DON'T have is a work of art.
What you DO have is a Microsoft product.
One of BB's favourites: "Well, a space walrus. With photon flippers or something."
That he planned on using his Nikes so much that he could have been a sweat manufacturer, making enough to sell off. Hence, a "sweat shop".
Might have fooled the suits long enough to allow the order.
It might not be a "real" loss, but handling these problems can be a "real" expense, and as such can affect the balance sheet. It's sort of IRS-irrelevent -- if a specific cost is taking a huge chunk out of your profits, it doesn't really matter much whether or not the cost can be written off. That'll just minimize the tax burden, but you'll still want to do what you can to address the cost and minimize it so that your profit margin would be greater...
Well, I have to think that English being the language of international business is probably going to unite most of the major distributions despite any regionalization that goes on. Even though Mandrake's manuals routinely exhibit bad translations from French, fact is is that Mandrake is really popular in North America, as is Debian, with Suse and Caldera recognizable names as well.
the german speaking world moves with KDE, and the Enflish with Gnome
Surely you mean the "English" with "Fnome"?
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
Whoa! Down boy.
I doubt it. If it follows the open-source model, then any cheat that comes up can probably get treated as a bug fix, and we know how quick the turnarounds on open-source bugs can be...
Besides, even if someone can tinker with her client, it doesn't mean she can tinker with the server too. That differentiation might allow more control to the server admin, although they might have to take a coder's interest in the game...
The sad thing is, e-business will probably decide that the better way to deal with events like these is NOT to secure their sites better, but instead prosecute the hell out of the offenders. That'll work well the moment someone else tries it and isn't too much of a stupid HaX0r to brag about it on a chat site. Also interesting is how these opportunities for learning generally end up involving the lawyers.
PS: I was being facetious. But next time I promise I'll try to be clearer for the l33t sP3LL0Rz about it.
Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
1. Cost of getting run-time installed. A Java implementation comes free (eg) on most Linux distros (also available free), whereas MS's long-term strategy with regards to Linux (or any non-MAC OS) has been extremely nebulous. I think this is the button that he was trying to push in the part you quoted.
2. Whether or not it will run right now. Something tells me we'll see more of .NET before 2003, but still, it ain't available just yet. (although Wrox already has a book on C# development, and a job I looked into was keying up for .NET development)
3. Reliability of implementation of runtime. Java does have a bit of a head start and a solid base of coders.
4. (point in MS's favour) ability to implement the .NET technology to be better integrated with an existing OS. If nothing else, it could lead to better speed and maybe better exploitation of available OS resources. Did JavaOS ever get off the ground? I stopped caring when I found out how much fun CGI programming was with C in Linux (but I digress...).
C'mon, gimme a -1, Insightful! Can it be done??
Well, with RMS telling everyone and her uncle Bob to call it GNU-Linux, I guess it'd be our own bloody fault if this forced distinction bit us on the ass.
Does a trademark name infringe on ones use of the english language?
In any form of print media with the wrong capitalizations, or with a clearly implied context in spoken media, yep. But you already knew that, or were you still waiting for those negative criticisms of Microsoft's monopoly tactics on MSNBC?
Specifically, though, you could probably get away with it if you used the term "X box", as the X is descriptive and the box isn't really a proper noun.
Please, it's not a patent Ah, whatever. It's a patent on the ordered usage of specific letters from the alphabet, with a different best-before date. Any more hair-splitting and we'll all end up with crew cuts. The poor guy was just trying to make an on-topic first post -- or would you rather that fellow bending over? Now excuse me while I change accounts and mod myself up a smidgen...
Subscription-based services for digital information will go nowhere. It'll just be like the web was when corporations first got involved. For instance, starwave was a media site that used to give out free basketball stats to whoever wanted them. Then ESPN bought them out and came up with Sportszone, and started a subscription-based service to get the exact same things that you could get for free through other means. Its popularity, as you might expect, went down the tube, and they went back to giving that stuff away free, and using advertising instead as an indirect source of revenue generation. Napster asking people to fork over makes about as much sense as your local radio company asking you to fork over for every 15 minutes you listen to their music.
The only way subscription-based would work for Napster would be if they set up some form of mp3 cartel that could keep people from getting this stuff for free, but with the product already available scattered amongst its users, it's too late for this. As it is, the coded thinking behind Napster wasn't too difficult to keep from inspiring knock-offs -- you have a central database server that gets updated with each logon of all the songs of a user, and you search that for all the users who might have your song, and then leave the clients to connect on their own. The only thing special about Napster here is their brand-naming, not the concept. They could leverage that into making the Napster product super-easy to install and with a built-in advertisement display, and then get that onto as many computers as possible. If Napster users do in fact buy more music, Napster's best chance would be to link their audience to on-line means of purchasing that music.
Another possibility, MAYBE, would be to make sure that Napster itself was responsible for serving off high-end mp3s, and not something that was poorly ripped by some kids in their basements. But to make that work, they'd have to have better music turnover than the industry is currently capable of (in order to keep the fans coming back) to keep people coming back to Napster for the latest thing.
Which is, of course, why there's only one encyclopedia out there in the print-media world.
Oh, wait a second...
Besides, an encyclopedia is going to try to be a huge massive penultimate source of knowledge, right? Except that they're calling for volunteers from within a very specialized audience. No offence, but programmers and technogeeks aren't necessarily going to be the greatest authorities in non-geek-related subject matter. They may be good authorities, but I'd sooner commission a nuclear scientist than some guy with a WW2 itch he likes to scratch to talk about the atomic bomb. At least, if there are more than one such projects, you can reduce the risk that things will get missed, undercovered, or overcovered.
"There was a bit of confusion recently regarding the announcement of a 'gnupedia' project. There already exists a free encyclopedia project, with all code GPL'd and all content FDL'd..."
You know, I really hope this isn't the sort of things people are going to make a big deal out of. I mean, for all the outrage that people show here at the silly patenting of ideas, you'd think they'd actually embrace this sort of duplication. I mean, the last thing we need to see is peer pressure affecting the way these projects are looked at (who came up with the idea first, who's got RMS backing them up, who gets to be the official GNU version, etc.).
Why the hell COULDN'T there be two projects? Bleah bleah bleah redundancy of effort will lead to poor quality on both ends bleah. Right. Tell that to GNOME and KDE, why doncha?
The university of victoria (a real university) has been using java as its teaching language for comp sci students for a few years now. It may have bad performance etc., but it's still a good language to teach the fundamentals of programming.
Whenever I see a so-called prodigy, I feel really badly for her. (Since this is all hypothetical, I'm gonna use a gender switch just for fun.)
No doubt this kid has probably been coddled and exposed to a whole lot of attention from approving adults about how she can do this thing or that thing better/quicker/more intuitively than most other people. All that specific exposure to people is probably going to lead her to an unbalanced world view on methods of seeking/gaining approval, and she might have a bunch of messed up priorities which involve her having a very narrow view of what constitutes self-worth.
Give this kid alone time. Let her constantly feel reintroduced to the world each time she meets someone new. Give her different pillars of literature and philosophy to bounce off. Expose her to mentors, a bunch of them. Have her pick up a sport or hobby that doesn't cater to left-brained ability. Let her hone her extrapolation skills on things that she hasn't been exposed to yet. Make her sit in on argumentative discussions and don't let her say a word, so that she can observe things objectively. Let her construct her own ego. No doubt she's had too much help in that department already.
Make sure she has a chance and the choice to live outside the traditional prodigy mold, so that in all this thinking she's probably doing she gets a chance to learn to think for herself.