Agreed. The answers seemed realistic as opposed to the interesting but wild and implausible speculation we've been reading about in other forums.
I want as much as anybody to see what kind of things lurk inside the Windows source (seeing as how it comes from the company that brought us "BurgerMaster", "TabbedTextOutForWimps" and "It ain't done till Lotus doesn't run"), but the panel did a good job of keeping things in perspective despite our collective lust.
I think one thing should be kept in mind when one considers what should be done to Microsoft (regardless of how 'bad' they have been). Find analogous situations in other industries and decide whether it still makes sense.
For instance, the old argument that Microsoft should be forced to include Netscape doesn't make much sense if you imagine Coke having a monopoly and it being remedied by forcing them to include a can of Pepsi (or better yet Mountain Dew, my fave!) in each 6-pack.
Or the argument that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to include IE in the OS. Well, what if the DOJ suddenly announced that Ford can't include radios in the vehicles it sells, because it discourages people from going out and buying after-market stereo hardware. I think the comparison is valid, but the second scenario sounds downright silly and constitutionally evil.
No matter how bad Microsoft has treated customers or competitors or how illegally it acted, let's remember that whaever the government does to them, it can do to another company. We don't want to set any (more) ugly precedences. The government should do the absolute mimimum possible to remedy Microsoft's monopoly position (including any apprpriate penalties), but should do everything it can to minimize the negative impact on the company itself above and beyond those remedies. Microsoft may be the evil empire, but it's a company in the United States, and we should treat it how we would want all citizens or corporations to be treated.
Also, on a more practical note, it seems to me that if the gov't p.o.'s billg enough, I'm sure he'd think nothing of dropping a billion or two and simply moving the whole operation to another country.
Not to mention the Jay Ward cartoons, which were all done (very superbly I might add) by a very small group of people. I don't know who did what for sure, but I'm guessing 90% of the voices on that show were played by 3 people.
I've always thought that is a good solution, but for one problem. If a little guy has a case, no matter how rock-solid, I think he would have a disincentive to bring it to court because if he gets a nitwit judge or jury (depending on the type of case) be could be totally screwed on top of losing.
The problem is that when you you put checks in to protect us from the megacorps and their megabucks, you still end up hurting the little guys. If you try to protect the little guys, you end up having every nutcake on the planet suing every big company it can find and we all pay higher prices because of the legal costs or settlement costs.
"DR" originally stood for "Digital Research", the company that developed it. Currently, Caldera owns it and it is the subject of yet another lawsuit involing Microsoft...
I didn't go from Win3.1 to Win95 until there much so much software I wanted to run but couldn't run that I caved in. I think it was about Feb '96...
Also, Microsoft has had buggy software since way before Windows. Anyone remember DOS 3.0...? I personally lost a lot of data (well, for the early 80's it was a lot) because of it. Also, DOS 4.0 was pretty awful, too. DOS 3.3 seemed really rock solid. 5 and 6 seemed good too if you didn't use all the extra stuff (DoubleSpace really sucked!). Win 3.1 was reasonable once you got it configured. NT 3.51 was solid, and 4.0 was too until the Service Packs from hell (2 and 4).
The problem with Microsoft is they can't leave well enough alone. They are always adding unreasonable complexity to their products, sticking with bad designs far too long and then foisting complete redesigns on us that are worse because they are so enormous and poorly tested.
Did anyone remember when MS came out with the commercial about the software testers about a year ago? Who else laughed themselves hoarse?
Convicted monopoly or not, Microsoft is going to lose in the end because they are in quality freefall.
Summing up what a lot of people have said, the real issue here is about closed-source software. Since most people are connected to the Internet at least part of the time, any piece of software could take advantage of this to communicate information to anyone.
Before this near-ubiquitous networking, it mostly didn't matter what software you were running did. The worst that would happen is that it didn't work or screwed up your machine... and even then there were fears, mostly unfounded, that people like Microsoft or AOL were gathering data on computers.
Now any piece of code run on your computer can send (or receive) data from anywhere in the world and it is natural to begin distrust anything you run, whether it be the latest installation software from Microsoft, some k3w1 internet utility like Real, or a hidden trojan in that dancing baby program your best friend sent you.
To me, it is becoming more and more important to be able to know everything the software you run might possibly do. It is also becoming easier and easier for someone to release software that could wreak any amount of havoc privacy-wise in your life. And let's face it, law enforcement, if it becomes relevant, can only happen after the damage is done.
Repeating a common slashdot theme, OSS is the only sure way to resolve this distrust.
They can be fed with nano-produced foodstuffs, nano-processed water, living in nano-constructed houses (on Earth or elsewhere) built with nan-processed materials (shipped from the Moon via mass-driver).
I think these kinds of things would happen long before nanotech is repairing our bodies. In any event, I think any nanotech will present many solutions for any population "problem" it would create.
Since most pop music is so rigidly formulaic, that could be done now. Turn on your favorite pop or (especially) country music station. Now imagine if someone gave you the lyrics, but you never heard the song before. For a large number of the songs, you could probably sing it right (taking talent into account, of course) the first time around.
Replacing that schlock with computer-generated compositions is only a small matter of programming.
Creating something on the level of Dream Theater, Steve Vai or Spock's Beard, not to mention Bach, Beethoven or Mozart won't happen in our lifetimes.
Of course composition isn't everything. One thing that fascinates me so much is that so much of the blues uses a very simple twelve bar I-IV-V progression that is butt-head-simple. In this case the genius is in the performance and improvisation. Again, something computers won't be doing well for a long while, Sibelius notwithstanding.
To be fair, I think it is perfectly valid for someone to be moderated up for saying something "wrong" if it is done in a meaningful or thought-provoking way.
Every one of the positive modertations is really an opinion of the moderator. "Off-topic" or even "FlameBait" or "Troll" or whatever it's called is more objective. What's funny or thoughtful to one person might be stupid or pointless to another, but we can usually all agree when someone is trying to be a jerk or is completely in left-field. (I personally have never moderated a post down.)
In any event, I frequently moderate posts up that state things I not sure are factual just because the post makes me think about the topic in a new way or raises some point I hadn't considered. Moderation of factual article must be much more formal, based not on the opinion of the moderator, but data that can be backed up with citations.
...and this is different from most every one else how?
k3W1 spelling aside, I don't find computer people to be much worse than, say, Time magazine. Standards of grammar are going into the toilet with great alacrity. You can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading something that should send any high school English teacher into hysterics (at least those teachers who actually teach English, as opposed to false self-esteem, Ebonics, or whatever moronic fad is plaguing the educators these days).
Look at Apple Computer's "Think Different". How about "Think DifferentLY"? But let's face it, the marketroids aren't worrying about offending the sensibilities of a few people in their attempt to maintain the image that Apple is some kind of groovy, unconventional outfit.
I had a friend in college who had a headset and could do very basic speech recognition on a C-64.
Speech recognition technology would not be dependant on any platform unless there was support for it built into the OS. I don't imagine that it is any more trouble for IBM to develop speech recognition for Windows than for the Mac.
Now if a recent Mac OS has support built in that's another matter... anyone?
I don't doubt that Microsoft knows what to do, and even that they _can_ do it. But since everything they do smacks of pathological committee design and implementation, I expect serious problems will surface.
Yeah, but as was pointed out above, they are keeping one piece of private information and passing around another as "proxy" for your CC#, etc. Your Passport ID number or whatever just takes the place of your CC#.
I'm sure this is an oversimplified view, but the net effect to me it's just another number that someone could exploit. I don't think that the small amount of added convenience is worth it given Microsoft's security track record.
For you those of you deprived of growing up watching American TV:
Gilligan's Island was a sit-com on American TV in the late 60's. It is considered both unredeemably stupid and a classic (often by the same people).
The premise of the show is that 7 people on a three hour boat tour were caught in a storm and standed on an island. The episodes recounted their futile attempts to get back to Hawaii. One of the more amusing aspects of the show is that the castaways managed to create for themselves most of the comforts of modern life (including a car and a washing machine) out of bamboo and coconuts. Another was that several of the characters must have carried dozens of changes of clothes for a "three-hour tour".
Gilligan was the hapless ship's mate (played by Bob Denver) who while good-intentioned, was usually the cause of any particular scheme to get rescued failing.
It's a classic of American pop culture. The show lasted for a few seasons and has been rerun incessantly since then.
In other words, it's "Star Trek: Voyager" without the spaceship.
Itanium reminds me Volkswagen's "Turbonium", which despite Intel's best effort, is still much stupider.
I don't know what's worse... Volkswagen advertising its new car by showing it spinning like a top or Intel advertising a computer chip as making the Internet better, as if moire processing speed means better bandwidth (or disk I/O, which we all know is the real performance bottleneck!)
Marketing seems to be getting stupider and stupider.
It's nice to see a real game return! Along with Cosmic Encounter (which was re-released a few years ago), Car wars, AD&D, V&V, Traveller, Champions, Star Fleet Battles, Paranoia, GURPS, etc, this was a game I used to really enjoy playing years ago when I was single and had a lot free time to spend with friends.
I just bought the latest version of Car Wars in a fit of nostalgia and would like to get Illuminati too.
It's also nice to see someone publish a card game where the ability to win isn't simply a measure of how much money you throw into it. My one foray into playing Magic left me very unimpressed.
Don't feel bad for me not being able to play. I currently play Monopoly with my 3- and 5-year-olds (and eventually the 1-year-old and baby...) and will work them up to more interesting games once they learn to read and count money for themselves, etc. I know they will love these old classics.
You know I worked for a company (TEIR) that Jim Rutt pounded into the ground by hiring incompetent managers, making incredibly stupid business decisions and thinking the only thing a programmer or engineer wants to be happy is free beer.
Three years ago TEIR developed a Client/Server architecture that required 5 _megabyes_ of DLL's to run on a client machine. This took a year and a half to and about 80 people to develop.
After being given tens of millions of dollars and running the company into the toilet, it's amusing to see he was given another company that continually does incredibly stupid things. I wish I was an executive because there is obviously no accountability.
The worst about this thing was that as soon as I saw the e-mail, I immediately windered how many people would try to abuse this blatant security hole. It's obvious no one with two neurons to rub together was involved in this promotion at any level.
I can't wait until I can change to another company for my domain registration.
I'm sure there are many hard-working (and overworked) people in the Patent Office that do their very best at their jobs. That doesn't change the fact that the system is highly broken and prone to exploitation from companies who can squeak through patents for ideas anyone could come up with.
It just means that it's not necessarily the fault of the poor souls in the Patent Office, but perhaps their bosses in Congress and the White House.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The answers seemed realistic as opposed to the interesting but wild and implausible speculation we've been reading about in other forums.
I want as much as anybody to see what kind of things lurk inside the Windows source (seeing as how it comes from the company that brought us "BurgerMaster", "TabbedTextOutForWimps" and "It ain't done till Lotus doesn't run"), but the panel did a good job of keeping things in perspective despite our collective lust.
I think one thing should be kept in mind when one considers what should be done to Microsoft (regardless of how 'bad' they have been). Find analogous situations in other industries and decide whether it still makes sense.
For instance, the old argument that Microsoft should be forced to include Netscape doesn't make much sense if you imagine Coke having a monopoly and it being remedied by forcing them to include a can of Pepsi (or better yet Mountain Dew, my fave!) in each 6-pack.
Or the argument that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to include IE in the OS. Well, what if the DOJ suddenly announced that Ford can't include radios in the vehicles it sells, because it discourages people from going out and buying after-market stereo hardware. I think the comparison is valid, but the second scenario sounds downright silly and constitutionally evil.
No matter how bad Microsoft has treated customers or competitors or how illegally it acted, let's remember that whaever the government does to them, it can do to another company. We don't want to set any (more) ugly precedences. The government should do the absolute mimimum possible to remedy Microsoft's monopoly position (including any apprpriate penalties), but should do everything it can to minimize the negative impact on the company itself above and beyond those remedies. Microsoft may be the evil empire, but it's a company in the United States, and we should treat it how we would want all citizens or corporations to be treated.
Also, on a more practical note, it seems to me that if the gov't p.o.'s billg enough, I'm sure he'd think nothing of dropping a billion or two and simply moving the whole operation to another country.
Not to mention the Jay Ward cartoons, which were all done (very superbly I might add) by a very small group of people. I don't know who did what for sure, but I'm guessing 90% of the voices on that show were played by 3 people.
I've always thought that is a good solution, but for one problem. If a little guy has a case, no matter how rock-solid, I think he would have a disincentive to bring it to court because if he gets a nitwit judge or jury (depending on the type of case) be could be totally screwed on top of losing.
The problem is that when you you put checks in to protect us from the megacorps and their megabucks, you still end up hurting the little guys. If you try to protect the little guys, you end up having every nutcake on the planet suing every big company it can find and we all pay higher prices because of the legal costs or settlement costs.
How do you legislate common sense?
"DR" originally stood for "Digital Research", the company that developed it. Currently, Caldera owns it and it is the subject of yet another lawsuit involing Microsoft...
I didn't go from Win3.1 to Win95 until there much so much software I wanted to run but couldn't run that I caved in. I think it was about Feb '96...
Also, Microsoft has had buggy software since way before Windows. Anyone remember DOS 3.0...? I personally lost a lot of data (well, for the early 80's it was a lot) because of it. Also, DOS 4.0 was pretty awful, too. DOS 3.3 seemed really rock solid. 5 and 6 seemed good too if you didn't use all the extra stuff (DoubleSpace really sucked!). Win 3.1 was reasonable once you got it configured. NT 3.51 was solid, and 4.0 was too until the Service Packs from hell (2 and 4).
The problem with Microsoft is they can't leave well enough alone. They are always adding unreasonable complexity to their products, sticking with bad designs far too long and then foisting complete redesigns on us that are worse because they are so enormous and poorly tested.
Did anyone remember when MS came out with the commercial about the software testers about a year ago? Who else laughed themselves hoarse?
Convicted monopoly or not, Microsoft is going to lose in the end because they are in quality freefall.
Summing up what a lot of people have said, the real issue here is about closed-source software. Since most people are connected to the Internet at least part of the time, any piece of software could take advantage of this to communicate information to anyone.
Before this near-ubiquitous networking, it mostly didn't matter what software you were running did. The worst that would happen is that it didn't work or screwed up your machine... and even then there were fears, mostly unfounded, that people like Microsoft or AOL were gathering data on computers.
Now any piece of code run on your computer can send (or receive) data from anywhere in the world and it is natural to begin distrust anything you run, whether it be the latest installation software from Microsoft, some k3w1 internet utility like Real, or a hidden trojan in that dancing baby program your best friend sent you.
To me, it is becoming more and more important to be able to know everything the software you run might possibly do. It is also becoming easier and easier for someone to release software that could wreak any amount of havoc privacy-wise in your life. And let's face it, law enforcement, if it becomes relevant, can only happen after the damage is done.
Repeating a common slashdot theme, OSS is the only sure way to resolve this distrust.
According to Lego, and they should know, it's their name, it's "Lego".
:)
"I play with Lego."
"I have lots of Lego."
or you could say,
"I have lots of Lego bricks."
I always thought "Legos" sounds wrong. It's like that car named "millenia", which is a plural word. It just sounds wrong.
Of course my 3-year-old says "Legos". I'll have to start correcting him.
Rick (who has lots of Lego... some over 30 years old!)
They can be fed with nano-produced foodstuffs, nano-processed water, living in nano-constructed houses (on Earth or elsewhere) built with nan-processed materials (shipped from the Moon via mass-driver).
I think these kinds of things would happen long before nanotech is repairing our bodies. In any event, I think any nanotech will present many solutions for any population "problem" it would create.
Patch your optic nerves and just install a jack on the back of your head....
Greg Bear was writing Nanotechnology stories almost 20 years before Star Trek's feeble watered down use of "nanites".
Take a look at "Blood Music" or even better the more recent "Queen of Angels" which really gives you a feel for the potential of nanotechnology.
It was cool to see nanotech on Star Trek, but I was greatly disappointed with the story.
Since most pop music is so rigidly formulaic, that could be done now. Turn on your favorite pop or (especially) country music station. Now imagine if someone gave you the lyrics, but you never heard the song before. For a large number of the songs, you could probably sing it right (taking talent into account, of course) the first time around.
Replacing that schlock with computer-generated compositions is only a small matter of programming.
Creating something on the level of Dream Theater, Steve Vai or Spock's Beard, not to mention Bach, Beethoven or Mozart won't happen in our lifetimes.
Of course composition isn't everything. One thing that fascinates me so much is that so much of the blues uses a very simple twelve bar I-IV-V progression that is butt-head-simple. In this case the genius is in the performance and improvisation. Again, something computers won't be doing well for a long while, Sibelius notwithstanding.
To be fair, I think it is perfectly valid for someone to be moderated up for saying something "wrong" if it is done in a meaningful or thought-provoking way.
Every one of the positive modertations is really an opinion of the moderator. "Off-topic" or even "FlameBait" or "Troll" or whatever it's called is more objective. What's funny or thoughtful to one person might be stupid or pointless to another, but we can usually all agree when someone is trying to be a jerk or is completely in left-field. (I personally have never moderated a post down.)
In any event, I frequently moderate posts up that state things I not sure are factual just because the post makes me think about the topic in a new way or raises some point I hadn't considered. Moderation of factual article must be much more formal, based not on the opinion of the moderator, but data that can be backed up with citations.
Here are some of the things I'd do with a 1100MHz CPU:
SETI@Home
calculating digits of PI
searching for Mersenne primes
...any of a number of other neat distributed computing projects.
But most of all, can you imagine how fast a version of POV-Ray (http://www.povray.org) optimized for this chip would run?
It's a dream come true for us glass sphere and checkerboard folks!
Rick
...and this is different from most every one else how?
k3W1 spelling aside, I don't find computer people to be much worse than, say, Time magazine. Standards of grammar are going into the toilet with great alacrity. You can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading something that should send any high school English teacher into hysterics (at least those teachers who actually teach English, as opposed to false self-esteem, Ebonics, or whatever moronic fad is plaguing the educators these days).
Look at Apple Computer's "Think Different". How about "Think DifferentLY"? But let's face it, the marketroids aren't worrying about offending the sensibilities of a few people in their attempt to maintain the image that Apple is some kind of groovy, unconventional outfit.
Get used to it, it's only going to get worse.
When it comes to Apple, I think NOT.
Seriously, I think capt kangarooski has a point,
although it sounds very awkward to me.
However, using adjectives as adverbs is becoming pandemic, and it really bugs me.
I had a friend in college who had a headset and could do very basic speech recognition on a C-64.
Speech recognition technology would not be dependant on any platform unless there was support for it built into the OS. I don't imagine that it is any more trouble for IBM to develop speech recognition for Windows than for the Mac.
Now if a recent Mac OS has support built in that's another matter... anyone?
Rick
It's not "thinking differently", it's "thinking different".
Of course, a grammatically incorrect motto is about the only innovation Apple has had in the last 10 years.
I don't doubt that Microsoft knows what to do, and even that they _can_ do it. But since everything they do smacks of pathological committee design and implementation, I expect serious problems will surface.
Yeah, but as was pointed out above, they are keeping one piece of private information and passing around another as "proxy" for your CC#, etc. Your Passport ID number or whatever just takes the place of your CC#.
I'm sure this is an oversimplified view, but the net effect to me it's just another number that someone could exploit. I don't think that the small amount of added convenience is worth it given Microsoft's security track record.
For you those of you deprived of growing up watching American TV:
Gilligan's Island was a sit-com on American TV in the late 60's. It is considered both unredeemably stupid and a classic (often by the same people).
The premise of the show is that 7 people on a three hour boat tour were caught in a storm and standed on an island. The episodes recounted their futile attempts to get back to Hawaii. One of the more amusing aspects of the show is that the castaways managed to create for themselves most of the comforts of modern life (including a car and a washing machine) out of bamboo and coconuts. Another was that several of the characters must have carried dozens of changes of clothes for a "three-hour tour".
Gilligan was the hapless ship's mate (played by Bob Denver) who while good-intentioned, was usually the cause of any particular scheme to get rescued failing.
It's a classic of American pop culture. The show lasted for a few seasons and has been rerun incessantly since then.
In other words, it's "Star Trek: Voyager" without the spaceship.
Itanium reminds me Volkswagen's "Turbonium", which despite Intel's best effort, is still much stupider.
I don't know what's worse... Volkswagen advertising its new car by showing it spinning like a top or Intel advertising a computer chip as making the Internet better, as if moire processing speed means better bandwidth (or disk I/O, which we all know is the real performance bottleneck!)
Marketing seems to be getting stupider and stupider.
Rick (happy with a 200MHz PPro)
Uh-oh... looks like we've got a meta-flame war going on. Or should I say "We have a meta-flame war going on."
I'm so confused....
It's nice to see a real game return! Along with Cosmic Encounter (which was re-released a few years ago), Car wars, AD&D, V&V, Traveller, Champions, Star Fleet Battles, Paranoia, GURPS, etc, this was a game I used to really enjoy playing years ago when I was single and had a lot free time to spend with friends.
I just bought the latest version of Car Wars in a fit of nostalgia and would like to get Illuminati too.
It's also nice to see someone publish a card game where the ability to win isn't simply a measure of how much money you throw into it. My one foray into playing Magic left me very unimpressed.
Don't feel bad for me not being able to play. I currently play Monopoly with my 3- and 5-year-olds (and eventually the 1-year-old and baby...) and will work them up to more interesting games once they learn to read and count money for themselves, etc. I know they will love these old classics.
Rick
!= is synonomous with "not equal to"
( x != y ) is most certainly an assertion. I can clearly assert that 1 != 2.
The question comes in when you say "if".
Only a non C-programmer would get that confused.
You know I worked for a company (TEIR) that Jim Rutt pounded into the ground by hiring incompetent managers, making incredibly stupid business decisions and thinking the only thing a programmer or engineer wants to be happy is free beer.
Three years ago TEIR developed a Client/Server architecture that required 5 _megabyes_ of DLL's to run on a client machine. This took a year and a half to and about 80 people to develop.
After being given tens of millions of dollars and running the company into the toilet, it's amusing to see he was given another company that continually does incredibly stupid things. I wish I was an executive because there is obviously no accountability.
The worst about this thing was that as soon as I saw the e-mail, I immediately windered how many people would try to abuse this blatant security hole. It's obvious no one with two neurons to rub together was involved in this promotion at any level.
I can't wait until I can change to another company for my domain registration.
Rick
I'm sure there are many hard-working (and overworked) people in the Patent Office that do their very best at their jobs. That doesn't change the fact that the system is highly broken and prone to exploitation from companies who can squeak through patents for ideas anyone could come up with.
It just means that it's not necessarily the fault of the poor souls in the Patent Office, but perhaps their bosses in Congress and the White House.