I've seen several people ask "What makes an enterprise DB?" Well, size and speed mostly.
For data look at:
http://www.dbpd.com/vault/9808win.html
It's old, but I haven't seen anything newer. Take into consideration that these are business DBs. No monster image blobs (ala TerraServer) to bump up the size.
The largest database in the survey racks in at around 11T (DB2 Hitachi mainframe)
UPS has a DB with 324,000,000,000 rows/records.
Roadway Express has system supporting 1820 Transactions per second (TPS).
JCPenny has a decission support DB that manages 784 concurrent queries.
None of the DBs run on PC hardware, and the UNIX DBs are about 1/2 the size of the mainframes.
Microsoft and other small/mid-range databases are the most threatend by MySQL et.al. The size and scopes of the problems addressed by MS SQLServer are the same that can be solved with the OpenSource varieties.
It will be a while before the big boys will be challanged.
There seems to be a major conflict between CygWin and McAfee VirusScan. If you are using McAfee, turn it off and try CygWin again. I'm not sure who is in the wrong, but I have not seen the problem with Symantec AntiVirus. I assume that McAfee is not playing nice.
Everything he is asking for can be done already (a few lines of perl, python or tcl can produce the progress bar he's looking for) and most window managers allow for assigning keys commands (get sawfish, learn lisp, hack away). There are lots of ways to perform the processing he is looking for. Unix (and linux) is great at this stuff because the gui crap isn't built in. (BTW, which toolkit would you use? Are we going to have tar for gnome, tar for kde, tar for athena, tar for... )
If he really wants all that flashy crap, go to town, write some code, LEARN SOMETHING. Don't make the rest of us re-alias all the commands to turn off USELESS FLUFF! Pick your tools, learn how to use them, and shape your system to your liking. That's one of the benefits of open source.
Don't trade substance for style. Adding flash is easy, removing it nearly impossible.
There are many problems with including the x libraries into these tools.
First is bloat. tar is nice and small, so are the rest of the command line tools I don't want tar to be several megs. leave the bloatware to microsoft.
Second, not everyone installs X. I have a firewall box that I didn't install X on, guess what, the default emacs wont load (can't load the x libs to determine that x isn't there, stupid). I'm not too peeved about having to rebuild emacs, but don't ask me to rebuild all the shell tools as well.
Your example of the alias would work better the other way, write a wrapper for tar (Xtar?) and alias that.
The strength of unix is the "do one thing and one thing only" ideal. Each of these tools works great and can be combined in ways that amazes GUI users.
Please, PLEASE, do not make the mistake that microsoft made and integrate the GUI into everything.
It had more to do with the ambiguity of the language. The porn industry doesn't want to deal with having to constantly face prosecution for situations where everything is legal.
For example, there was one case I read about several years ago where a distributer was shut down over accusations of child porn. It turned out that the actress in question was a 24 year old Japanese girl, but because she 'looked' underage, the prosecutors went after them.
There are two main points that I would like to address. The first is the bad ballots, the second deals with the medias reactions.
The question I have with the bad ballots is this, has there been a historical problem with this ballot system? How often do we see invalid votes?In Connecticut (at least all the towns I have voted in) use a voting machine where you make your selections with little levers. These levers are radio button style, so you can only select one in a group. And you can keep chaning your selections until you pull the red handled lever. This leads to very few mistakes. Why do these other balloting system exists if they cause so many errors?
My second point deals with the media. They screwed everything up by pre-announcing a winner for the state, even before polls had closed. I see this as leading to three main results:
Bush supporters didn't vote because he already lost
Gore supporters voting for Nader because Gore already won
Undecides voting for Gore just to vote for the winner
I'm sure there are more, but my point is that the media distorted the voting process. When they first declared Gore the winner in Florida, most of the US was still voting. The media was talking about a Bush defeat unless he carried everything else, basically saying that Gore was the next president. How might this affect the voting in the rest of the country?
One last point. Whatever the results, I don't think there should re-run the election in Florida. The JFK/Nixon election was also very close, but Nixon decided that for the good of the country to not contest the results. And there were voting irregularities in that election as well.
Lets all be good sports about this. There was questionable and bad calls, but the final gun has sounded and one team is the winner. We certainly can monday morning referee, but we should not replay the game. If there are systemic problems, let's fix them so the same problems don't occur again.
You can publish an article stating "XYZ corp is poluting and knows it...." and discuss the contents of the documents, even extract quotes. Using this technique you are well within your rights under copyright law and cannot be accused of infringement.
If you are publishing data that is considered a trade secret, then they can sue you and you will receive a court order to remove the offending material.
Corporations cannot use trade secret law to cover up criminal acts. Simple. Whistleblower protections will also help prevent corporate retaliation. If there are criminal acts, forward the information to government procecutors and the press.
Copyright law is pretty straight forward. You cannot reproduce, copy, disseminate copyrighted material without some form of permission from the copyright holder.
ESR handled the halloween documents in exactly the proper way to prevent copyright infringement. If you want to publish internal corporate information, look at how he did it.
In @home's case, they were not breaking the law. Also, the documents seem to be parts of a contract. Contracts are normally protected by trade secret law.
If Wesley's intent was to show that @home purposefully evades responsibilty for product defects, then he should have said that and quoted the relevant section of the documents to prove his case. @home would have had a much more difficult case to prove.
Since always... There is nothing in copyright law that requires you to publish. All the law states that the author or copyright holder has control over the publication.
IANAL, but everything is copyrighted with all rights reserved to the author by default. The author has to explicitly give up ownership of the copyright. (I believe this is what the FSF asks you to do with GPL'd code.)
Your Tylenol example is wrongheaded. Tylenol does own the copyright to the text, but since there was no monitary damage or trade secret violation, they probably would not bother suing you. If on the other hand you distributed their marketing strategy for 2001, then they probably would sue.
Look at how ESR handled the halloween documents. He was very carefull about how he posted them. That is the proper way to handle leaked corporate information and CYA.
Just being a jounalist does not give you the right to re-publish anything that comes into your hands. A jounalist can include portions of the document in a larger commentary, but must remain within the rules of copyright law.
Only the authors or copyright holders have the right to publish the material. Everyone else can only comment, cite, or critique.
He has no right to republish the documents. I don't particularly like @home's draconian behavior, they are within their rights.
Wesley didn't author those documents, therefore he has no right to publish them as he did. The documents contained @home's speech, not Wesley's. Thus @home has the right to control their publication.
Just posting stolen documentation is not protected speech. He could have put up a commentary citing the leaked documents. He could even quote any relevant sections. The point is Wesley's speech is protected. If he was speaking or was the author of a document which he had posted, then @home would not have been able to do what they did.
Sorry, but because @home was controlling infrormation that belonged to them. This is not censorship.
It doesn't suprise me that a lot of people don't know that this is an election year. If you don't live in a contested state, your vote doesn't interest the canidates.
The problems is that with all the polling that is done today, canidates don't feel the need to advertise in states where thier opponent is leading... or in states that are too small to have any real affect.
I live in Connecticut. You see very few... ok almost no signs for Gore or Bush. Hell I see more signs for Liberman for Senate than Gore/Liberman. There aren't even any commercials on the TV or radio. Not that I'm complaining mind you. This has been one of the most pleasent election seasons that I can remember.
Anyway, with so little advertising going on, how would you expect to get the attention of someone who already feels left out of the system?
In the latest IEEE Computer (Oct 2000) there is a comprehensive article comparing C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx and TCL. The results are different than in the link that you provide.
The abstract for the article can be found
here.
You need to be a member to get the whole article.
Anyway, the findings that could be of interest here are "...the C and C++ programs run only about twice as fast as Java. The script programs tend to be faster than the Java programs." and "The typical script program consumes about twice as much memory as does a C or C++ program. Java programs consume three to four times as much memory as C or C++ programs."
The only issue I have with the research is that only one OS platform was used, a Sun Ultra II. I would like to see the executions performed on a few more systems, at least a Linux/BSD system and a Windows Box. While this might not affect the non-Java languages much, Java is heavily influenced by the JVM in use. It is wide known that (other than the IBM JVM on linux) the windows JVMs tend to be the fastest available.
OTOH, the testing approach looks good and more work should be done to validate and extend the research. The Internet C++ guys should use the same tools to get a good performance comparison.
The people who pay the most taxes are going to expect the most benefits. I know the propaganda is that voting gives you power, but it is really the taxes that are the power. When the middle class pays most of the taxes, they own the government. When the rich pays most of the taxes, guess who has control now? Do we really what a government owned by the top 10% of socitey?
I seem to recall reading something like this a while ago. Almost exactly the same argment and aparantly the same mistakes (adding aggregate linux numbers to the seperate redhat). I'm thinking 6-9mo ago?
Is this a Deja Vu moment or does anybody else remember this?
because it is really the next version of the AOL client.
AOL needs mozilla and needs all these extra features included. AOL needs the flexibility to rapidly deploy a client on whatever platform comes in the future (set top boxes, web pads, kiosks). They also want to stop supporting MS with the IE integration (limiting the clients to whatever MS supports). When AOL upgrades all their users (how many bajillions now?) no one will be saying that mozilla is dead.
UML in Color is about the four archetypes of classes. These archetypes are Moment-Itervals (Something happening in time), Person/Place/Thing (Something in space), Role (an iteraction between a M-I and a PPT, and Description (meta data on a group of PPT objects).
The color helps to distinguish between each of the various archetypes (Pink for MI, Green for PPT, Yellow for Roles, and Blue for Descriptions). With the colors, UML diagrams become much more readable. Normally you end up with a backbone of pink MIs, representing the transactions that the system has to perform. The handfull of PPT objects interact along the way via the yellow Roles they can fulfill. Blues pop up when there are several PPTs that share the same characteristics. It works remarkably well.
While I found that the subject of the book (the archetypes and using color to represent them) very enlightening, the presentation was poor. The whole book comes accross as two or three magazine articles mashed together with a catalog of class diagrams. The most important information in the book is in the first chapter or two. Coad had posted most of it on the web at one point, I don't know if they are still there. Try at http://www.togethersoft.com
There does seem to be a paradigm switch involved. I found the technique immediately helpful. Others have a much harder time seeing how the archetypes are applicable to their problems (sometimes it is not). If you are an Object-Oriented designer, read the first chapter and file it away into your set of techniques. You can never have too many tools.
There are no advantages to developing on either platform. I develop on both Linux and NT. I definately prefer working in Linux, the environment is better (multiple desktops, better stability etc). But when it comes to tools, they are both about equal. I use the same tools (emacs, vim, bash, perl) on both platforms so I don't see a real difference. It simply comes down to using what you are most productive with.
A few really good movies/shows...
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
There are so many good anime titles.
Akira, Ghost in the Shell (I like everything that Shirow does, so...) Iria (the animated version, I haven't gotten around to seeing the live action version) BubbleGum Crisis, Lodoss War (first series), Riding Bean, Dominion Tank Police, Slayers, Vampire Hunter D, Project AKo
I always go for the subtitled versions if I can. Most of the dub jobs I have heard are terrible. (if you have never heard Akira in Japanese, do yourself a favor and get it. It is a much better version than the dubbed. Same thing for Ghost in the Shell).
It's not the autorun part. The fact that you can launch an attachment that runs within the client that is dangerous, you don't even need to save it to the local system first. It may even not run if you detach it. I don't think that vbs files are executable (correct me if I am wrong, I don't use VB).
The virus/worm/whatever cannot spread itself from clients that do not have an outlook address book and contain a VB exec engine. I don't think that any mail clients but outlook and outlook express support VB. Other mail clients are immune as far as I can tell. Even if you can execute a VBS file, without an outlook addressbook, the virus would not be able to replicate itself.
Any OS or Mail client is suseptable(sp?) to trojans. No one will argue with that. Linux, BSD and others may be a bit more resiliant, but not immune.
ILOVEYOU is simply not possible without Outlook. Finally an inovation MS can point to. They created a whole new class of virus/worms.
Patents are all about implementation details. As long as you are achieving the same results a different way you are fine.
Also, by naming the registry specifically as a required technology should clear the Linux varieties. If they had stated that the information is store in a file in the local filesystem without specifying the technology then there would be problems.
Anyway, I think that IBM had this sort of information kept on the mainframes (a db of app/lib/version/dependencies) and that would definitely be prior art there. Anyone know for sure?
If different look and feels were that bad, the average user would have run screeming for the hills years ago. Look at the web. cnn.com is different from abcnews.com which is diffent from msnbc.com. People use all of them without difficulty.
Every site is different and customized. When a site is well layed out and easy to use, people come back; if not, they don't. Skins or themes are key to the web browsing experience. How interesting would the web be if could only use a couple of fonts, a handfull of colors, and a few structure tags?
The saying "Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone" is true for applications. No amount of chrome will make a bad app usable, but it can make a good app more fun and appealing.
As for Suck. Their web site doesn't look like anyone else's... Isn't that going to cause readers problems?
You can presure companies to open their drivers: Don't buy the products! Support those companies that do have open drivers. Work on making those drivers the best they can be. Help them make their Winblows drivers better if we can (the windows market is still the bread and butter for these guys). If we can show the market that there is a strong competitive advantage to having their drivers open source, then more companies will do it. We have to show them. Telling these companies that open source is the way to go is not enough. To prove it we need to support those companies that do open their drivers.
Vote with your dollars. Unlike the election, you can vote twice.
Gwonk
You know what they call Windows 95, don'tcha? A 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on top of an eight-bit operating system written for a four-bit processor by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. - Michael Swain "Swain's Flames"
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another link. These are the guys who run the survey. The latest report is not available online that I can find.
Winter Corp
I've seen several people ask "What makes an enterprise DB?" Well, size and speed mostly.
For data look at:
http://www.dbpd.com/vault/9808win.html
It's old, but I haven't seen anything newer. Take into consideration that these are business DBs. No monster image blobs (ala TerraServer) to bump up the size.
The largest database in the survey racks in at around 11T (DB2 Hitachi mainframe)
UPS has a DB with 324,000,000,000 rows/records.
Roadway Express has system supporting 1820 Transactions per second (TPS).
JCPenny has a decission support DB that manages 784 concurrent queries.
None of the DBs run on PC hardware, and the UNIX DBs are about 1/2 the size of the mainframes.
Microsoft and other small/mid-range databases are the most threatend by MySQL et.al. The size and scopes of the problems addressed by MS SQLServer are the same that can be solved with the OpenSource varieties.
It will be a while before the big boys will be challanged.
gwonk
There seems to be a major conflict between CygWin and McAfee VirusScan. If you are using McAfee, turn it off and try CygWin again. I'm not sure who is in the wrong, but I have not seen the problem with Symantec AntiVirus. I assume that McAfee is not playing nice.
g
Everything he is asking for can be done already (a few lines of perl, python or tcl can produce the progress bar he's looking for) and most window managers allow for assigning keys commands (get sawfish, learn lisp, hack away). There are lots of ways to perform the processing he is looking for. Unix (and linux) is great at this stuff because the gui crap isn't built in. (BTW, which toolkit would you use? Are we going to have tar for gnome, tar for kde, tar for athena, tar for ... )
If he really wants all that flashy crap, go to town, write some code, LEARN SOMETHING. Don't make the rest of us re-alias all the commands to turn off USELESS FLUFF! Pick your tools, learn how to use them, and shape your system to your liking. That's one of the benefits of open source.
Don't trade substance for style. Adding flash is easy, removing it nearly impossible.
g
There are many problems with including the x libraries into these tools.
First is bloat. tar is nice and small, so are the rest of the command line tools I don't want tar to be several megs. leave the bloatware to microsoft.
Second, not everyone installs X. I have a firewall box that I didn't install X on, guess what, the default emacs wont load (can't load the x libs to determine that x isn't there, stupid). I'm not too peeved about having to rebuild emacs, but don't ask me to rebuild all the shell tools as well.
Your example of the alias would work better the other way, write a wrapper for tar (Xtar?) and alias that.
The strength of unix is the "do one thing and one thing only" ideal. Each of these tools works great and can be combined in ways that amazes GUI users.
Please, PLEASE, do not make the mistake that microsoft made and integrate the GUI into everything.
g
It had more to do with the ambiguity of the language. The porn industry doesn't want to deal with having to constantly face prosecution for situations where everything is legal.
For example, there was one case I read about several years ago where a distributer was shut down over accusations of child porn. It turned out that the actress in question was a 24 year old Japanese girl, but because she 'looked' underage, the prosecutors went after them.
g
There are two main points that I would like to address. The first is the bad ballots, the second deals with the medias reactions.
The question I have with the bad ballots is this, has there been a historical problem with this ballot system? How often do we see invalid votes?In Connecticut (at least all the towns I have voted in) use a voting machine where you make your selections with little levers. These levers are radio button style, so you can only select one in a group. And you can keep chaning your selections until you pull the red handled lever. This leads to very few mistakes. Why do these other balloting system exists if they cause so many errors?
My second point deals with the media. They screwed everything up by pre-announcing a winner for the state, even before polls had closed. I see this as leading to three main results:
- Bush supporters didn't vote because he already lost
- Gore supporters voting for Nader because Gore already won
- Undecides voting for Gore just to vote for the winner
I'm sure there are more, but my point is that the media distorted the voting process. When they first declared Gore the winner in Florida, most of the US was still voting. The media was talking about a Bush defeat unless he carried everything else, basically saying that Gore was the next president. How might this affect the voting in the rest of the country?One last point. Whatever the results, I don't think there should re-run the election in Florida. The JFK/Nixon election was also very close, but Nixon decided that for the good of the country to not contest the results. And there were voting irregularities in that election as well.
Lets all be good sports about this. There was questionable and bad calls, but the final gun has sounded and one team is the winner. We certainly can monday morning referee, but we should not replay the game. If there are systemic problems, let's fix them so the same problems don't occur again.
gYou can publish an article stating "XYZ corp is poluting and knows it...." and discuss the contents of the documents, even extract quotes. Using this technique you are well within your rights under copyright law and cannot be accused of infringement.
If you are publishing data that is considered a trade secret, then they can sue you and you will receive a court order to remove the offending material.
Corporations cannot use trade secret law to cover up criminal acts. Simple. Whistleblower protections will also help prevent corporate retaliation. If there are criminal acts, forward the information to government procecutors and the press.
Copyright law is pretty straight forward. You cannot reproduce, copy, disseminate copyrighted material without some form of permission from the copyright holder.
ESR handled the halloween documents in exactly the proper way to prevent copyright infringement. If you want to publish internal corporate information, look at how he did it.
In @home's case, they were not breaking the law. Also, the documents seem to be parts of a contract. Contracts are normally protected by trade secret law.
If Wesley's intent was to show that @home purposefully evades responsibilty for product defects, then he should have said that and quoted the relevant section of the documents to prove his case. @home would have had a much more difficult case to prove.
g
Since always... There is nothing in copyright law that requires you to publish. All the law states that the author or copyright holder has control over the publication.
IANAL, but everything is copyrighted with all rights reserved to the author by default. The author has to explicitly give up ownership of the copyright. (I believe this is what the FSF asks you to do with GPL'd code.)
Your Tylenol example is wrongheaded. Tylenol does own the copyright to the text, but since there was no monitary damage or trade secret violation, they probably would not bother suing you. If on the other hand you distributed their marketing strategy for 2001, then they probably would sue.
gwonk.
Look at how ESR handled the halloween documents. He was very carefull about how he posted them. That is the proper way to handle leaked corporate information and CYA.
gwonkJust being a jounalist does not give you the right to re-publish anything that comes into your hands. A jounalist can include portions of the document in a larger commentary, but must remain within the rules of copyright law.
Only the authors or copyright holders have the right to publish the material. Everyone else can only comment, cite, or critique.
gwonkHe has no right to republish the documents. I don't particularly like @home's draconian behavior, they are within their rights.
Wesley didn't author those documents, therefore he has no right to publish them as he did. The documents contained @home's speech, not Wesley's. Thus @home has the right to control their publication.
Just posting stolen documentation is not protected speech. He could have put up a commentary citing the leaked documents. He could even quote any relevant sections. The point is Wesley's speech is protected. If he was speaking or was the author of a document which he had posted, then @home would not have been able to do what they did.
Sorry, but because @home was controlling infrormation that belonged to them. This is not censorship.
gwonkIt doesn't suprise me that a lot of people don't know that this is an election year. If you don't live in a contested state, your vote doesn't interest the canidates.
The problems is that with all the polling that is done today, canidates don't feel the need to advertise in states where thier opponent is leading... or in states that are too small to have any real affect.
I live in Connecticut. You see very few... ok almost no signs for Gore or Bush. Hell I see more signs for Liberman for Senate than Gore/Liberman. There aren't even any commercials on the TV or radio. Not that I'm complaining mind you. This has been one of the most pleasent election seasons that I can remember.
Anyway, with so little advertising going on, how would you expect to get the attention of someone who already feels left out of the system?
gwonkIn the latest IEEE Computer (Oct 2000) there is a comprehensive article comparing C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx and TCL. The results are different than in the link that you provide.
The abstract for the article can be found here. You need to be a member to get the whole article.
Anyway, the findings that could be of interest here are "...the C and C++ programs run only about twice as fast as Java. The script programs tend to be faster than the Java programs." and "The typical script program consumes about twice as much memory as does a C or C++ program. Java programs consume three to four times as much memory as C or C++ programs."The only issue I have with the research is that only one OS platform was used, a Sun Ultra II. I would like to see the executions performed on a few more systems, at least a Linux/BSD system and a Windows Box. While this might not affect the non-Java languages much, Java is heavily influenced by the JVM in use. It is wide known that (other than the IBM JVM on linux) the windows JVMs tend to be the fastest available.
OTOH, the testing approach looks good and more work should be done to validate and extend the research. The Internet C++ guys should use the same tools to get a good performance comparison.
gwonkWell, yes.
The people who pay the most taxes are going to expect the most benefits. I know the propaganda is that voting gives you power, but it is really the taxes that are the power. When the middle class pays most of the taxes, they own the government. When the rich pays most of the taxes, guess who has control now? Do we really what a government owned by the top 10% of socitey?
I seem to recall reading something like this a while ago. Almost exactly the same argment and aparantly the same mistakes (adding aggregate linux numbers to the seperate redhat). I'm thinking 6-9mo ago?
Is this a Deja Vu moment or does anybody else remember this?
g
because it is really the next version of the AOL client.
AOL needs mozilla and needs all these extra features included. AOL needs the flexibility to rapidly deploy a client on whatever platform comes in the future (set top boxes, web pads, kiosks). They also want to stop supporting MS with the IE integration (limiting the clients to whatever MS supports). When AOL upgrades all their users (how many bajillions now?) no one will be saying that mozilla is dead.
G
UML in Color is about the four archetypes of classes. These archetypes are Moment-Itervals (Something happening in time), Person/Place/Thing (Something in space), Role (an iteraction between a M-I and a PPT, and Description (meta data on a group of PPT objects).
The color helps to distinguish between each of the various archetypes (Pink for MI, Green for PPT, Yellow for Roles, and Blue for Descriptions). With the colors, UML diagrams become much more readable. Normally you end up with a backbone of pink MIs, representing the transactions that the system has to perform. The handfull of PPT objects interact along the way via the yellow Roles they can fulfill. Blues pop up when there are several PPTs that share the same characteristics. It works remarkably well.
While I found that the subject of the book (the archetypes and using color to represent them) very enlightening, the presentation was poor. The whole book comes accross as two or three magazine articles mashed together with a catalog of class diagrams. The most important information in the book is in the first chapter or two. Coad had posted most of it on the web at one point, I don't know if they are still there. Try at http://www.togethersoft.com
There does seem to be a paradigm switch involved. I found the technique immediately helpful. Others have a much harder time seeing how the archetypes are applicable to their problems (sometimes it is not). If you are an Object-Oriented designer, read the first chapter and file it away into your set of techniques. You can never have too many tools.
gwonkThere are no advantages to developing on either platform. I develop on both Linux and NT. I definately prefer working in Linux, the environment is better (multiple desktops, better stability etc). But when it comes to tools, they are both about equal. I use the same tools (emacs, vim, bash, perl) on both platforms so I don't see a real difference. It simply comes down to using what you are most productive with.
There are so many good anime titles.
Akira, Ghost in the Shell (I like everything that Shirow does, so...) Iria (the animated version, I haven't gotten around to seeing the live action version) BubbleGum Crisis, Lodoss War (first series), Riding Bean, Dominion Tank Police, Slayers, Vampire Hunter D, Project AKo
I always go for the subtitled versions if I can. Most of the dub jobs I have heard are terrible. (if you have never heard Akira in Japanese, do yourself a favor and get it. It is a much better version than the dubbed. Same thing for Ghost in the Shell).
gwonk
what a pain.
gwonk
It's not the autorun part. The fact that you can launch an attachment that runs within the client that is dangerous, you don't even need to save it to the local system first. It may even not run if you detach it. I don't think that vbs files are executable (correct me if I am wrong, I don't use VB).
The virus/worm/whatever cannot spread itself from clients that do not have an outlook address book and contain a VB exec engine. I don't think that any mail clients but outlook and outlook express support VB. Other mail clients are immune as far as I can tell. Even if you can execute a VBS file, without an outlook addressbook, the virus would not be able to replicate itself.
Any OS or Mail client is suseptable(sp?) to trojans. No one will argue with that. Linux, BSD and others may be a bit more resiliant, but not immune.
ILOVEYOU is simply not possible without Outlook. Finally an inovation MS can point to. They created a whole new class of virus/worms.
Patents are all about implementation details. As long as you are achieving the same results a different way you are fine.
Also, by naming the registry specifically as a required technology should clear the Linux varieties. If they had stated that the information is store in a file in the local filesystem without specifying the technology then there would be problems.
Anyway, I think that IBM had this sort of information kept on the mainframes (a db of app/lib/version/dependencies) and that would definitely be prior art there. Anyone know for sure?
Every site is different and customized. When a site is well layed out and easy to use, people come back; if not, they don't. Skins or themes are key to the web browsing experience. How interesting would the web be if could only use a couple of fonts, a handfull of colors, and a few structure tags?
The saying "Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone" is true for applications. No amount of chrome will make a bad app usable, but it can make a good app more fun and appealing.
As for Suck. Their web site doesn't look like anyone else's... Isn't that going to cause readers problems?
BS.
You can presure companies to open their drivers: Don't buy the products! Support those companies that do have open drivers. Work on making those drivers the best they can be. Help them make their Winblows drivers better if we can (the windows market is still the bread and butter for these guys). If we can show the market that there is a strong competitive advantage to having their drivers open source, then more companies will do it. We have to show them. Telling these companies that open source is the way to go is not enough. To prove it we need to support those companies that do open their drivers.
Vote with your dollars. Unlike the election, you can vote twice.
Gwonk
You know what they call Windows 95, don'tcha? A 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on top of an eight-bit operating system written for a four-bit processor by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. - Michael Swain "Swain's Flames"