'Microsoft license does not stop the distribution of source, in fact there's a specific clause allowing it (2.2), you just have to include a paragraph in the source code. Nor does RMS say what his problem is, aside from "Grrr, it's Microsoft". '
The problem *IS* that paragraph, it makes the license extendable, since anyone who wants to use/give away/do anything with, it in future would have to get permission from MS.
"Our provision of this source code does not include any licenses or any other rights to you under any Microsoft intellectual property. If you would like a license from Microsoft you need to contact Microsoft directly"
There is no limit set on that permission, so MS can change the license terms using that paragraph at any time for any future product.
"So, the license RMS is ranting about doesn't apply" Yes it does (Published 23rd June 2004):
"If you are a software developer and are interested in implementing this specification in software, please review the terms of the Caller ID for E-Mail Implementation License before you begin, as the patent license discusses the rights that Microsoft would grant you or your organization."
"If you do redistribute the source code, its fine, but you must add a clause to your licence that says the software may contain IP owned by MS, and that anyone obtaining such derived source must go ask MS for permission to use their bits directly - you can't give that away."
Sounds nasty, an obvious play would be to get this non-standard widely accepted then for MS to refuse permission to new licensee's unless they pay a fee.
That would then lock out free software.
Because you need their permission to get the license, they can tack whetever terms onto the deal they like in order for you to obtain that permission.
Another popular trick of MS's is to claim that a new version of software is a different product. They have done this several times, most famously when they said Windows 98 isn't Windows 95.
So you could find that Sendmail future versions get cut out aswell.
"Okay, how is the loss of a software patent a Good Thing(tm) in a free-market economy? "
Its not a "loss" of software patents, software patents are not permitted by patent law, the Commissioner concern and the EU patent office is trying to change it to *make* software patentable.
All the software you see around today you was written without software patents.
All the software you won't see around you tomorrow will be a result of software patents.
Even if you think there is something between the idea and the implementation, some sort of 'middle' uniqueness that can be patented, a patent is completely useless at protected it!
Consider the Google pagerank patent, how can Google know if anyone other search engine is using pagerank?
Even if search engines released their binaries, it would be next to impossible to reverse engineer all the binaries and locate the equivalent to the 'page rank' system in it.
So any 'middle uniqueness' patents are worthless because infringements can't be detected.
Setting aside all the history of algorithms not being patentable, this is a basic problem with software patents.
That leaves patents on the idea itself, or patents on the implementation in code (which is already protected by copyrights, and trade secrets).
Look, mono have cloned an enviroment & language whose direction is steered by Microsoft.
This is a problem, Microsoft is not nice.
Microsoft can take it into a direction where MS holds patents & IP protection (if it doesn't already which is very unlikely). Mono will either have to follow and lock its user in, or go in a separate direction and abandon any pretensions at cloning MS.NET.
What I think they should do is embrace and extend the the.NET framework *NOW*, add features and support for things that the Windows.NET does not have. But also bring the extended version to Windows itself.
That way the MONO implementation of.NET becomes the real one, not the MS one.
"they'll be better off promoting a creative, alternative solution. "
Energis (?) in the UK already use Fibre optic cable wrapped around the HT cable for broadband signals. They made a wrig that travels down the HT cable and wraps (spirals) the fibre around it. Simple and easy.
So these guys could do the same without all the interference problems.
"An expense represents a transaction where the company spent money on something. Granting options cost the company nothing and no money changes hands. It is only when the options are exercised that there is something to account for. "
If I am a shareholder and I buy shares in your company in February because your earnings per share are $2/share.
In March your earnings are suddenly only $1/share because of dilution due to options.
Management knew the estimated cost in February, but didn't want to tell me because it made the accounts look bad.
So I'm very pissed.
Whats wrong with: Profit before Options Expensing $2B Estimated Options Expensing $3B Profit after Options expensing ($1B)
You are free to ignore the future options costs if you believe it is more accurate to treat it as zero, but I want to see that number!
"By forcing them disclose the impact of both dilution through reporting a diluted number as the 'real earnings' and by detailing the full set of option grants, strike price, and term, you can get all the information required to work this one."
But isn't that just hiding the devil in the detail? There may be thousands of differing options types within a company, so calculating the number from the mass of the detail is simply beyond the bulk of the shareholders. In effect you put up a forest to hide a single tree.
The FASB has proposed a perfectly sound way of calculating the expense, and I'm happy with that.
But of course that doesn't stop companies describing the extra detail you mention too in their accounts.
"A stock option, even when exercised, does not cost the corporation anything. "
The accounts are for the shareholders. It costs the shareholder. The shareholder holds a share, its not the profit, its the profit per SHARE they care about.
So increasing the shares decreases the shareholders share of the profits, even if the company makes the same profit.
"What happens when an option is issued, from a financial point of view, is absolutely nothing. No expense is incured, no income is acrued, no increase in the share count occurs. It is a big zero from a financial point of view."
If you believe that then you are free to add the number back onto the profits to get what you believe is a real number.
However others may disagree, I for one. I invest in a company for it to grow, so of course the options will reach strike price and will cost money, otherwise I wouldn't be investing!
"Check any public company's 10K. They will show outstanding options"
There's no indication of the cost of those options to the shareholder currently. Management knows the number, the shareholder isn't told it.
"The real question is, why bother to have companies make a pie in the sky estimate as to the value/cost of those options when they are granted, when, at the time of granting, they have no current cost or value, and may never?"
Because by the time the shareholder finds out what those options cost, they've already been screwed, the options have been excised and his shares are diluted.
Why exactly shouldn't the shareholders be told?
Profit before options expensing $X Cost of options $Y Profit after options expensing $(X-Y)
The cost of the options is calculated using FASB rules, just like depreciation, goodwill and so on. Why shouldn't the shareholder see that number?
"If you expense stock options when granted, you have to make an estimate as to their value/cost and use that in the financial statement. "
Look at it from the shareholders viewpoint, would you want an estimate BEFORE you invest, or AFTER the options have been cashed in, your shares are diluted and you are screwed?
At the very least the accounts should have:
Profit before Options Expensing $2B Cost of Options Expensing $3B Profit after expensing options ($1B)
That way *you* are free to believe the company is making $2B profit, and *I* am free to believe that its a fake profit done by paying wages with options.
Options are options, for the CEO or Account Manager they are all the same.
The problem is tech companies have been dishing out options instead of wages.
Those are only worthwhile if the share price rises,
The shareprice rises if the profits rise.
The profits rise if the costs go down.
Wages are costs, so the simple act of issuing options+lowered wages causes the labour costs to reduce, the profits to increase and creates a fake "growth" in profitability.
You can increase the profitability growth next time by issuing more options, and more and more and.... you end up in a situation where 44% of your profits are fake options tricks.
No it makes no difference to their taxes. Its just a number reported on the company statement and accounted for in the profit figure. If you don't agree with it, just add it onto the profit to get the old number.
Not Unfounded, *UNPROVEN*
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The wired story says that the claims that Microsoft invested in SCO via Baystar are unfounded. No, they're *unproven*.
Just to remind you, the details of SCOs claims were outed by CT magazine in AUGUST 20th 2003:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.ht ml
At this point it was clear SCO claims were junk. Not least because SCO story changed repeatedly, eventually claiming it was an example of code *like* the code shown by CT but not the actual code itself.
LATER, in OCTOBER Baystar & RBC made the completely irrational investment. At this time it was clear SCO wouldn't prevail and their investiment simply kept them going.
So a claim that Baystar did it because it believed SCO would make money from the lawsuits doesn't sound plausible.
Since then we had the Opera settlement, where Microsoft paid Opera 12.75 million and a term of the deal seemed to have been that they keep the money secret (only revealed by a leak).
To repeat a comment I made just above. From his original test paper:
"The test sequence contained 49,086 messages. Our gold standard classified 9,038 (18.4%) as ham and 40,048 (81.6%) as spam. The gold standard was derived from X's initial judgements, amended to correct errors that were observed as the result of disagreements between these judgements and the various runs."
From this I got that:
1. He had an initial set of Spam judged by person X. (e.g. 99.84% accurate). 2. That he ran it through each test filter. 3. That discrepencies were analysed by hand to get to the golden 100%.
So its not a spamassasin that generated the gold standard, person X did with corrections from the *runs* (i.e. a composite of all the filters as adjudicated by person X).
"Cormick builds a list of spam and a list of ham using SPAM Assasin. "
I read that bit, but Comicks words:
"The test sequence contained 49,086 messages. Our gold standard classified 9,038 (18.4%) as ham and 40,048 (81.6%) as spam. >>>>>>>The gold standard was derived from X's initial judgements, amended to correct errors that were observed as the result of disagreements between these judgements and the various runs."
From this I am left with the impression that X was the judge, not Spam Assasin, and X only fixed up a few errors.
So I dismissed his counter as a misread. Or did I miss something in Cormick paper you can point to.
Oh boy he goes on and on, if ever you wanted to cut out the spam in an article...
His main points (at least the ones I agreed with):
1. No training period, many features only turn on after lots of real emails have been processed. Fair enough.
2. No purge window, stale emails get purged over time (e.g. 4 months), but in a test everthing is shoved through at once (in minutes) and so nothing gets purged. Again fair.
The rest of it complains about the tester, or complains that it was less than ideal conditions & settings for the particular filter. We call that 'the real world' here.
Sys admins are not experts in configuring filters.
Also he should realise that any new filter gets a better rating than the dominant filter. Spammers try to defeat the most popular filter of the day. So sure a new filter might perform better than an existing one *initially* simply because the spammers are targetting it. Until it becomes dominant and then the spammers adjust the spam to defeat the new dominant filter.
So in the real world the data set will always be unusual because the spammers make it that way.
"Intel's also a member of the "Trusted" Computing Platform Alliance (or TCPA). "
Yeh, but in their mind TCPA was to allow corporations to lock down a PCs on their corporate network.
Only in Microsoft's twisted world view did the corporate network become the internet and the corporation doing the locking became the record companies.
Intel started with a reasonable idea and TCPA got hijacked by Microshaft for its DRM crap. I know this comment doesn't change the reality of the hijack, but at least Intel is trying to redress some of it.
"I also agree that MS is actually in a pretty good position to scoop up more business by giving customers what they want."
Or by getting BETWEEN what customers want and the customers themselves. You don't want a toll bridge, but if there's something you want or need on the other side you pay the toll.
Microsoft wants a single encryption key as the secret.
It wants that key protected inside the CPU.
It wants OEM's to pre-register the computer with Microsoft and the key exchange will be done at that time to avoid man in the middle attacks.
Your PC will have an encrypted channel, done via private key encryption between your CPU and Microsoft.
So now all DRM keys for all encryption flow down this channel, direct into the CPU's store.
You DON'T give the attacker the key in this instance, you give the COMPUTER the key. The COMPUTER works against the customer to protect the copyright holders wishes.
It's still a breakable scheme , but the EFF guy didn't give them full credit for the scope of the scheme. Palladium & DRM are ONE AND THE SAME strategy.
Without MS you can't send your DRM key securely, so any DRM seller has to be pay MS even if it doesn't use MS's DRM.
I wonder though if governments will stand idly by and let Microsoft create a private encryption channel between everyone's computer and Microsoft. I strongly doubt it.
"But more than just copy-protection: as The-Bus (138060) demonstrates by copying the entire CD EULA, BMG will also slip in DRM keys "personalized".... "
Surely, the whole claim behind these EULAs is that you can change the terms AFTER the sale, if the contract gives you the option of returning the product for a full refund. The refund is suposed to make it comparable to a sale.
This BMG contract says "if you don't agree, don't play it" not "if you don't agree return it for a full refund". So they're not even putting a pretence of making this legal.
"you're basically talking about the distillation process, which actually generate very little power"
Are you sure? Surely what I'm suggesting would simply capture the heat into potential energy.
A number of traps up the column would capture the water as it condenses up the column. Sure you are left with water half way up the column that is very hot, but further lenses and further evaporation would drive the water in those traps further up the column. So that heat isn't wasted.
I wonder if you couldn't improve it further by insulating the topmost water trap to keep it as hot as possible (when the water falls you want to re-evaporate it, so the hotter it is the better).
When you drop the water again to generate the electricity, the water would warm up a little too, ready for driving up the column again.
So where is the energy being lost in this system? Even the stray heat from the generator you could use to warm up the water waiting to be evaporated.
Slashdot Mirror
'Microsoft license does not stop the distribution of source, in fact there's a specific clause allowing it (2.2), you just have to include a paragraph in the source code. Nor does RMS say what his problem is, aside from "Grrr, it's Microsoft". '
m _s enderid.mspx
The problem *IS* that paragraph, it makes the license extendable, since anyone who wants to use/give away/do anything with, it in future would have to get permission from MS.
"Our provision of this source code does not include any licenses or any other rights to you under any Microsoft intellectual property. If you would like a license from Microsoft you need to contact Microsoft directly"
There is no limit set on that permission, so MS can change the license terms using that paragraph at any time for any future product.
"So, the license RMS is ranting about doesn't apply"
Yes it does (Published 23rd June 2004):
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/twc/privacy/spa
"If you are a software developer and are interested in implementing this specification in software, please review the terms of the Caller ID for E-Mail Implementation License before you begin, as the patent license discusses the rights that Microsoft would grant you or your organization."
"If you do redistribute the source code, its fine, but you must add a clause to your licence that says the software may contain IP owned by MS, and that anyone obtaining such derived source must go ask MS for permission to use their bits directly - you can't give that away."
Sounds nasty, an obvious play would be to get this non-standard widely accepted then for MS to refuse permission to new licensee's unless they pay a fee.
That would then lock out free software.
Because you need their permission to get the license, they can tack whetever terms onto the deal they like in order for you to obtain that permission.
Another popular trick of MS's is to claim that a new version of software is a different product. They have done this several times, most famously when they said Windows 98 isn't Windows 95.
So you could find that Sendmail future versions get cut out aswell.
Best to avoid this one.
"Okay, how is the loss of a software patent a Good Thing(tm) in a free-market economy? "
Its not a "loss" of software patents, software patents are not permitted by patent law, the Commissioner concern and the EU patent office is trying to change it to *make* software patentable.
All the software you see around today you was written without software patents.
All the software you won't see around you tomorrow will be a result of software patents.
Even if you think there is something between the idea and the implementation, some sort of 'middle' uniqueness that can be patented, a patent is completely useless at protected it!
Consider the Google pagerank patent, how can Google know if anyone other search engine is using pagerank?
Even if search engines released their binaries, it would be next to impossible to reverse engineer all the binaries and locate the equivalent to the 'page rank' system in it.
So any 'middle uniqueness' patents are worthless because infringements can't be detected.
Setting aside all the history of algorithms not being patentable, this is a basic problem with software patents.
That leaves patents on the idea itself, or patents on the implementation in code (which is already protected by copyrights, and trade secrets).
Look, mono have cloned an enviroment & language whose direction is steered by Microsoft.
.NET.
.NET framework *NOW*, add features and support for things that the Windows .NET does not have. But also bring the extended version to Windows itself.
.NET becomes the real one, not the MS one.
This is a problem, Microsoft is not nice.
Microsoft can take it into a direction where MS holds patents & IP protection (if it doesn't already which is very unlikely). Mono will either have to follow and lock its user in, or go in a separate direction and abandon any pretensions at cloning MS
What I think they should do is embrace and extend the the
That way the MONO implementation of
"they'll be better off promoting a creative, alternative solution. "
Energis (?) in the UK already use Fibre optic cable wrapped around the HT cable for broadband signals. They made a wrig that travels down the HT cable and wraps (spirals) the fibre around it. Simple and easy.
So these guys could do the same without all the interference problems.
"An expense represents a transaction where the company spent money on something. Granting options cost the company nothing and no money changes hands. It is only when the options are exercised that there is something to account for. "
If I am a shareholder and I buy shares in your company in February because your earnings per share are $2/share.
In March your earnings are suddenly only $1/share because of dilution due to options.
Management knew the estimated cost in February, but didn't want to tell me because it made the accounts look bad.
So I'm very pissed.
Whats wrong with:
Profit before Options Expensing $2B
Estimated Options Expensing $3B
Profit after Options expensing ($1B)
You are free to ignore the future options costs if you believe it is more accurate to treat it as zero, but I want to see that number!
Its not a private expense, its a reduction in the profit per share of the company.
Generations of stockholders have complained about this trick, FASB has tried many times to close it.
"By forcing them disclose the impact of both dilution through reporting a diluted number as the 'real earnings' and by detailing the full set of option grants, strike price, and term, you can get all the information required to work this one."
But isn't that just hiding the devil in the detail? There may be thousands of differing options types within a company, so calculating the number from the mass of the detail is simply beyond the bulk of the shareholders.
In effect you put up a forest to hide a single tree.
The FASB has proposed a perfectly sound way of calculating the expense, and I'm happy with that.
But of course that doesn't stop companies describing the extra detail you mention too in their accounts.
"A stock option, even when exercised, does not cost the corporation anything. "
The accounts are for the shareholders. It costs the shareholder. The shareholder holds a share, its not the profit, its the profit per SHARE they care about.
So increasing the shares decreases the shareholders share of the profits, even if the company makes the same profit.
"What happens when an option is issued, from a financial point of view, is absolutely nothing. No expense is incured, no income is acrued, no increase in the share count occurs. It is a big zero from a financial point of view."
If you believe that then you are free to add the number back onto the profits to get what you believe is a real number.
However others may disagree, I for one.
I invest in a company for it to grow, so of course the options will reach strike price and will cost money, otherwise I wouldn't be investing!
But how much will they cost?
Management knows but doesn't want me to know.
"Check any public company's 10K. They will show outstanding options"
There's no indication of the cost of those options to the shareholder currently. Management knows the number, the shareholder isn't told it.
"The real question is, why bother to have companies make a pie in the sky estimate as to the value/cost of those options when they are granted, when, at the time of granting, they have no current cost or value, and may never?"
Because by the time the shareholder finds out what those options cost, they've already been screwed, the options have been excised and his shares are diluted.
Why exactly shouldn't the shareholders be told?
Profit before options expensing $X
Cost of options $Y
Profit after options expensing $(X-Y)
The cost of the options is calculated using FASB rules, just like depreciation, goodwill and so on. Why shouldn't the shareholder see that number?
"If you expense stock options when granted, you have to make an estimate as to their value/cost and use that in the financial statement. "
Look at it from the shareholders viewpoint, would you want an estimate BEFORE you invest, or AFTER the options have been cashed in, your shares are diluted and you are screwed?
At the very least the accounts should have:
Profit before Options Expensing $2B
Cost of Options Expensing $3B
Profit after expensing options ($1B)
That way *you* are free to believe the company is making $2B profit, and *I* am free to believe that its a fake profit done by paying wages with options.
Options are options, for the CEO or Account Manager they are all the same.
.... you end up in a situation where 44% of your profits are fake options tricks.
The problem is tech companies have been dishing out options instead of wages.
Those are only worthwhile if the share price rises,
The shareprice rises if the profits rise.
The profits rise if the costs go down.
Wages are costs, so the simple act of issuing options+lowered wages causes the labour costs to reduce, the profits to increase and creates a fake "growth" in profitability.
You can increase the profitability growth next time by issuing more options, and more and more and
No it makes no difference to their taxes.
Its just a number reported on the company statement and accounted for in the profit figure. If you don't agree with it, just add it onto the profit to get the old number.
The wired story says that the claims that Microsoft invested in SCO via Baystar are unfounded. No, they're *unproven*.
t ml
s tm ent/2100-7344_3-5092702.html?tag=nl
n +p ayment+to+Opera/2100-1032_3-5218163.html?tag=nefd. lede
Just to remind you, the details of SCOs claims were outed by CT magazine in AUGUST 20th 2003:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.h
At this point it was clear SCO claims were junk. Not least because SCO story changed repeatedly, eventually claiming it was an example of code *like* the code shown by CT but not the actual code itself.
LATER, in OCTOBER Baystar & RBC made the completely irrational investment. At this time it was clear SCO wouldn't prevail and their investiment simply kept them going.
http://news.com.com/SCO+gets+%2450+million+inve
So a claim that Baystar did it because it believed SCO would make money from the lawsuits doesn't sound plausible.
Since then we had the Opera settlement, where Microsoft paid Opera 12.75 million and a term of the deal seemed to have been that they keep the money secret (only revealed by a leak).
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+$12+millio
So this seems to show that indeed Microsoft can and does hide money payments.
To repeat a comment I made just above. From his original test paper:
"The test sequence contained 49,086 messages. Our gold standard classified 9,038
(18.4%) as ham and 40,048 (81.6%) as spam.
The gold standard was derived from
X's initial judgements, amended to correct errors that were observed as the result
of disagreements between these judgements and the various runs."
From this I got that:
1. He had an initial set of Spam judged by person X. (e.g. 99.84% accurate).
2. That he ran it through each test filter.
3. That discrepencies were analysed by hand to get to the golden 100%.
So its not a spamassasin that generated the gold standard, person X did with corrections from the *runs* (i.e. a composite of all the filters as adjudicated by person X).
"Cormick builds a list of spam and a list of ham using SPAM Assasin. "
I read that bit, but Comicks words:
"The test sequence contained 49,086 messages. Our gold standard classified 9,038
(18.4%) as ham and 40,048 (81.6%) as spam.
>>>>>>>The gold standard was derived from
X's initial judgements, amended to correct errors that were observed as the result
of disagreements between these judgements and the various runs."
From this I am left with the impression that X was the judge, not Spam Assasin, and X only fixed up a few errors.
So I dismissed his counter as a misread. Or did I miss something in Cormick paper you can point to.
Oh boy he goes on and on, if ever you wanted to cut out the spam in an article...
His main points (at least the ones I agreed with):
1. No training period, many features only turn on after lots of real emails have been processed. Fair enough.
2. No purge window, stale emails get purged over time (e.g. 4 months), but in a test everthing is shoved through at once (in minutes) and so nothing gets purged. Again fair.
The rest of it complains about the tester, or complains that it was less than ideal conditions & settings for the particular filter.
We call that 'the real world' here.
Sys admins are not experts in configuring filters.
Also he should realise that any new filter gets a better rating than the dominant filter. Spammers try to defeat the most popular filter of the day. So sure a new filter might perform better than an existing one *initially* simply because the spammers are targetting it. Until it becomes dominant and then the spammers adjust the spam to defeat the new dominant filter.
So in the real world the data set will always be unusual because the spammers make it that way.
Linus should sue Alexis de Tocqueville , and name Microsoft too.
That way we could make plenty of headlines worldwide about Microsoft's systematic funding of fake studies and Astroturf.
Maybe he could go for a Tortuous Interference in Business lawsuit too, but IANAL.
"Intel's also a member of the "Trusted" Computing Platform Alliance (or TCPA). "
Yeh, but in their mind TCPA was to allow corporations to lock down a PCs on their corporate network.
Only in Microsoft's twisted world view did the corporate network become the internet and the corporation doing the locking became the record companies.
Intel started with a reasonable idea and TCPA got hijacked by Microshaft for its DRM crap. I know this comment doesn't change the reality of the hijack, but at least Intel is trying to redress some of it.
"I also agree that MS is actually in a pretty good position to scoop up more business by giving customers what they want."
Or by getting BETWEEN what customers want and the customers themselves. You don't want a toll bridge, but if there's something you want or need on the other side you pay the toll.
Microsoft wants a single encryption key as the secret.
It wants that key protected inside the CPU.
It wants OEM's to pre-register the computer with Microsoft and the key exchange will be done at that time to avoid man in the middle attacks.
Your PC will have an encrypted channel, done via private key encryption between your CPU and Microsoft.
So now all DRM keys for all encryption flow down this channel, direct into the CPU's store.
You DON'T give the attacker the key in this instance, you give the COMPUTER the key. The COMPUTER works against the customer to protect the copyright holders wishes.
It's still a breakable scheme , but the EFF guy didn't give them full credit for the scope of the scheme. Palladium & DRM are ONE AND THE SAME strategy.
Without MS you can't send your DRM key securely, so any DRM seller has to be pay MS even if it doesn't use MS's DRM.
I wonder though if governments will stand idly by and let Microsoft create a private encryption channel between everyone's computer and Microsoft.
I strongly doubt it.
"But more than just copy-protection: as The-Bus (138060) demonstrates by copying the entire CD EULA, BMG will also slip in DRM keys "personalized" .... "
Surely, the whole claim behind these EULAs is that you can change the terms AFTER the sale, if the contract gives you the option of returning the product for a full refund.
The refund is suposed to make it comparable to a sale.
This BMG contract says "if you don't agree, don't play it" not "if you don't agree return it for a full refund".
So they're not even putting a pretence of making this legal.
"you're basically talking about the distillation process, which actually generate very little power"
Are you sure? Surely what I'm suggesting would simply capture the heat into potential energy.
A number of traps up the column would capture the water as it condenses up the column. Sure you are left with water half way up the column that is very hot, but further lenses and further evaporation would drive the water in those traps further up the column. So that heat isn't wasted.
I wonder if you couldn't improve it further by insulating the topmost water trap to keep it as hot as possible (when the water falls you want to re-evaporate it, so the hotter it is the better).
When you drop the water again to generate the electricity, the water would warm up a little too, ready for driving up the column again.
So where is the energy being lost in this system? Even the stray heat from the generator you could use to warm up the water waiting to be evaporated.