FYI: The assertion that plenty of corporate figures have access to the documents is true. On skimming the documents, you will see lots of President($Corp), Counsel representing($Corp), Director($Think Thank).
Again, nothing surprising. There are multiple possibilities:
1) The appointee is still following marching orders from Bush (doubtful) 2) The appointee is a corporate shill that is trying to hide corporate influence (less doubtful) 3) The appointee feels that there is something in the documentation that exposes information that could lead to a threat against US interests (compromising financial secrecy, negotiation arguments, etc...) (possible) 4) All parties involved are contractually obligated to NOT release any information under penalty of international sanctions (highly likely)
In all these cases, I'd expect the Obama administration to do something about it. Maybe not immediately, but eventually they should get around to it. Even 4) can be fixed by re-negotiating that point, with the not so subtle hint that insisting on further secrecy might bring the negotiations to a halt;-)
That said, I'm just as disappointed by my own (German) government for trying to negotiate this contract in secrecy. ANY of the involved governments could insist on more public negotiations and threaten to refuse participation. If not even one or two of them put their foot down on that, it tells me that western Democracy is not in very good health:-(
But your broad generalization tells me that you don't really know what managers do. I've never been one, and AFAIC, I hope I never am one, but a good manager (even with that dreaded MBA) is often the difference between having a great job and having a living hell at work. The great ones promise a lot but know what those promises require. The bad ones promise a lot and expect the underlings to figure it out. The worthless promise nothing.
The truly worthless promise a lot, deliver nothing and leave for another job before it becomes obvious how badly they failed. SCNR on that one...
True enough, but there is yet another possible outcome: TFA suggests that people whose information is cited frequently by others are considered more valuable. Similar to citations in science or Google's page ranking algorithm. Once employees know about this, we might see similar phenomena as in those other fields: -Creating the maximum number of articles by splitting up the information into the "smallest publishable" unit -Buddies citing each other excessively to push up their scores ("the analogy to "linkfarms")
All of these will distract from getting the actual job done;-)
Linux distributions that support vFAT are on the market for several years now, and they certainly contain binaries too. Compiling your own kernel is optional and done after installation of the pre-compiled version. Except maybe Gentoo...
So while I don't know the legal details of laches (what is a typical timeframe for it to apply?), in principle this looks like a case where it fits.
To extend this analogy, a PC is like a safe to which you have to hide the key in the same room. Because in order to allow legitimate users access, the decryption mechanism including key must be in a piece of software on the PC. AFAIK all purely software based DRM schemes have been cracked within a few months so far (systems which hide the key in special hardware do better, see game consoles). And some people do it for the challenge, so the argument with opportunity costs does not work.
If I were creating a DRM scheme, for my content, I'd release the scheme with an exploit. An exploit that anybody could use, but which was a certifiable pain in the ass. It's going to be broken sooner or later, so why not remove the incentive to make a convenient exploit?
Now you have created an incentive to create a user-friendly wrapper for the pain in the ass exploit. Which probably requires less hacking skill.
And court rulings that affirm the new regulations requiring opt-in consent.
With regard to that, the opt-out concept described in TFA fails to help them. It seems Verizon management wants to be slapped around in court some more;-)
In March of 2002 a poll was conducted among both the free and commercial developers of Wine to see if there was interest in moving to a different license. Most developers did not want their code to be appropriated by a commercial entity and there were concerns that might happen. After much debate they chose the Lesser General Public License and on March 9th, 2002 the Wine source code became bound to those terms.
At this point, obviously Transgaming was no longer allowed to use new versions of Wine in a closed source product. But there is not necessarily personal hostility between the developers. I guess if Transgaming reconsider and make their product Open Source (preferably LGPL) too, Wine and Gedega could be merged again.
I've tried the official Linux package and it did not work that well. So I'm not surprised in the least that it got little use. If plain Wine (which I didn't try) worked better, I'm even less surprised.
PS3 is a similar scenario-- the extra $20 is the potential for better graphics quality. Microsoft chose to go with the 3x2 foot shelves. All their developers can make great looking games. But the potential for game and engine optimization is minimal. Sony, on the other hand, went with the customized shelves. This enables their developers, with greater time investment, to make a game with more visual effects, that the Xbox360 would not be able to run, no matter the level of optimization.
Only that time and Moore's Law will prove Sony wrong. Before the planned lifetime of the PS3 is over, some new console (or the PC) will probably offer more performance per money. To extend your analogy, Microsoft will probably have a 3x3 foot shelf before all the 3/2/1 foot shelve are sold...
I don't think those companies contribute to Linux as charity in the first place. More likely, they wanted to have some input in a system with growing market share. Red Hat is actually making a profit according to its latest quarterly report, so I don't expect them to close shop soon;-)
Ubuntu might be an exception, as its founder Mark Shuttleworth has said he is doing it partly to return something to the community.
The.45 ACP round is a pistol round. Pistols typically have a lot less power than rifles (which are the successor to smooth bore muskets). For a comparison of more similar weapons, take a large bore hunting rifle.
Most were small corporations indeed (below 200 employees). The last one is an exception: German subsidiary of a large US corporation. By itself also below 200 people, but the US corp was a lot larger. The funny part is that the German subsidiary actually did specific images where required by regulation (PCs used in medical equipment) and tested those too. With test documentation and everything. But for the typical workplace PC? Nope. We had a wild mix of PCs from the first Pentium IV generation to Core 2 Duo. The management of the subsidiary did not bother to do strict configuration management, and the US corp had a rather inept IT management. I remember an attempt to introduce the IBM Rational tool suite that took some years and a few hundred thousand $, only to end up with a single pilot site in the US (the original plan was to cover the whole corp, including the German subsidiary).
That's the consequence of hardware costs often being lower than the cost of wages (and licenses) to upgrade the old systems. I suspect the $300 GP cited are not unrealistic, especially for a company that buys dozens of computers at once. Now calculate the cost of having your support guys reinstall the old machines, possibly do a few hardware upgrades along he way, and buying your licenses separately from hardware (hint: there is plenty of evidence OEM licenses are MUCH cheaper).
Of course the license part is Microsoft's fault, but the rest just follows out of an unemotional cost calculation. The best the company can do with the old computers is donate them to nonprofit organizations who can use them and have volunteers who reinstall them as needed for free.
With earlier versions of Windows, a clean install was clearly preferred. So why not do that again?
Besides, I suspect that most corporate users will just update the whole PC and buy new ones with Windows 77 pre-installed. In the 10 years of my IT career I have seen one large company (Novartis) that actually did its own OS installations on a regular basis. The rest just used the computers with whatever OS was delivered at purchase, most of the time the unchanged vendor installation.
I don't think that degree of uninstallation is possible (anymore). But you don't really need it:
For the purpose of web browsing using another browser as default works pretty well, and that is where the security risks are. If some already installed program uses the IE rendering engine, I don't see a problem there. Because if that program happens to be malware, you have a greater problem than its use of IE anyway. What remains is some waste of memory because two browsers are installed/running in parallel. But memory is cheap enough to make this a minor problem.
I think you're right about the fun factor of operating some machinery for eight hours a day. So the game would have to put players in more of a manager role, making it more of a MMORTS game. For bonus fun but less realism, add military campaigns;-)
3. Go the full monte and make it a full MMO with lots of combat (space _and_ ground combat), hunting alien spiders for epic world drops, PvP (maybe one faction gets to play the aliens), and tiered endgame grind.
Well, I for one would welcome _that_ overlord, because there's a severe lack of good traditional (character-based as opposed to ship-based) SF-themed MMOs.
There are actually not many of those. Maybe Earthrise when it is done (but it will probably un-traditional in the combat model, more FPS that traditional controls). It is actually one whose development I'm following because the rather traditional controls in EvE Online are not so exciting.
If so, I wonder how many fans a cooperative building strategy game will have. MMORPGs tend to need significant subscriber numbers to pay the costs, and AFAIK similar games like "A Tale In The Desert" have pretty low subscriber numbers.
So while I like the idea, it seems quite possible that the game won't get far without NASA funding.
>>The vision at Microsoft has always been to try and reduce complexity.
If this was true, then what's more onerous is that they failed, and did so in repeated, dramatically awful ways.
I think they did (mostly) succeed for beginners' tasks. Take installation for instance: You could do that with some limited knowledge about partitioning years before Linux got there. Plug & Play would do the rest for you. Only recently, distributions like Ubuntu caught up to that. Similarly, you can do elementary tasks in other MS programs without much knowledge. Writing a document in Word, setting up a database with default properties in MSSQL Server - all of these are doable with minimum learning.
A GP wrote, the problems arise when you want to do more complex tasks that are not covered in the newbie-friendly GUI. Then you have to work with registry keys and APIs that are often poorly documented. Also, complex tasks are where the often poor software quality of MS application shows - weird behavior and crashes are not rare.
Yes, it looks like a game from a few years ago. With nice enough detail level but effects like reflections on the surfaces are missing. Freelancer comes to mind as a comparison. As a reason, the developers have said they want the game to run on a wide range of hardware, not just the latest high end PCs.
Also, the gameplay is supposed to be faster with manual piloting. More like Freelancer than a classic MMORPG with "click&wait". So JGE cannot afford much lag, and slow graphics would be a show stopper. Actually that is what I'm more worried about, the video showed some of the movement stutter that is usually associated with lag in FPS games.
From what I've seen in the trial, it has a functional if small trading based economy (shipping stuff around, with supply and demand having some impact on prices). No crafting involved.
Shooting NPCs and selling the loot, however, appears to be way more lucrative. So trading is not that attractive and EVE remains the only game in this genre with a serious economy. Back to topic: JGE is supposed to have an economy that is at least partly player driven. But I don't expect it to be on EVE's level, at least not right away.
I tried Vendetta Online and liked the concept. But it has a very small world for a MMORPG, and I had some problems with lag in PvP (hardly surprising, since I live in Europe and the server is in the US. It's the same with FPS games).So if JGE is a bigger and better Vendetta Online with a server near me, it is what I'm looking for.
I'm curious too about how many people want a real skill based MMORPG. I think the market success of JGE will give the answer, because the fans of more traditional MMORPG controls already have a great game with EvE.
but this argument is ineffective: the list can be fixed. there can even be punitive damage costs delivered to anyone shown to be put on the list in error, which i would suggest, to make sure governments don't block carelessly. let a law be established where the government can me made to suffer dearly financially for blocking content that is deemed permissible in an open court of law.
Important correction: The government as a whole would not care about the punitive damage, because they would just take it out of taxes. Compared to the billions that are currently dumped into dubious rescue plans for the economy, a few million would not even register.
So instead of making "the government" pay, the person who made a false entry to the list would have to pays personally. That way it could work.
Going slightly off topic, I think a similar rule would be good against false DCMA takedown notices. With statutory damages awarded to the owner of the falsely blocked website, and those should be just as high as the statutory damages for illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
Depends on your driving profile. With lots of stop and go (city), the hybrid shines because of its braking energy recovery.
Now add a scenario where you drive a lot in the city, and I think the hybrid will save enough to be a good buy. Think taxis in urban areas.
The other extreme is if you drive a lot over land and little in the city, like me. In this case, I agree about Diesel being better. Or maybe an Otto engine that sacrifices some power for efficiency, like with the Atkinson cycle. Both the Toyota Prius and the Mercedes Bluetec use that on top of being hybrids. Actually, the Otto-Atkinson engine in the new Prius might be interesting as a "standalone" car engine, at 98hp I think it has sufficient power.
The Ovonics patent is a temporary nuisance rather than a long term problem. Because new Li-Ion batteries that are made from cheaper raw materials are about to make NiMH obsolete. These are also safer than the "classic" laptop Li-Ion batteries.
For instance LiFePO4, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery. This type of battery is already made by several vendors, so I think it is too late to get a patent on it and shut its use down. And while it is a new technology, the performance already exceeds that of NiMH. Except maybe lifetime, but A123 already claims more than 1000 charge cycles for their LiFePO4 cells.
So I think any electric car manufacturer who cannot get NiMH will eventually move to LiFePO4 or a similar new technology. Which will leave Ovonics with a worthless patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Works for me (from Germany).
I also get access to the list on http://www.ustr.gov/Who_We_Are/List_of_USTR_Advisory_Committees.html, and the PDFs for the individual ITACs. So maybe the site was just temporarily slashdotted.
FYI: The assertion that plenty of corporate figures have access to the documents is true. On skimming the documents, you will see lots of President($Corp), Counsel representing($Corp), Director($Think Thank).
In all these cases, I'd expect the Obama administration to do something about it. Maybe not immediately, but eventually they should get around to it. Even 4) can be fixed by re-negotiating that point, with the not so subtle hint that insisting on further secrecy might bring the negotiations to a halt ;-)
That said, I'm just as disappointed by my own (German) government for trying to negotiate this contract in secrecy. ANY of the involved governments could insist on more public negotiations and threaten to refuse participation. If not even one or two of them put their foot down on that, it tells me that western Democracy is not in very good health :-(
The truly worthless promise a lot, deliver nothing and leave for another job before it becomes obvious how badly they failed. SCNR on that one...
True enough, but there is yet another possible outcome:
TFA suggests that people whose information is cited frequently by others are considered more valuable. Similar to citations in science or Google's page ranking algorithm. Once employees know about this, we might see similar phenomena as in those other fields:
-Creating the maximum number of articles by splitting up the information into the "smallest publishable" unit
-Buddies citing each other excessively to push up their scores ("the analogy to "linkfarms")
All of these will distract from getting the actual job done ;-)
Linux distributions that support vFAT are on the market for several years now, and they certainly contain binaries too. Compiling your own kernel is optional and done after installation of the pre-compiled version. Except maybe Gentoo...
So while I don't know the legal details of laches (what is a typical timeframe for it to apply?), in principle this looks like a case where it fits.
To extend this analogy, a PC is like a safe to which you have to hide the key in the same room. Because in order to allow legitimate users access, the decryption mechanism including key must be in a piece of software on the PC.
AFAIK all purely software based DRM schemes have been cracked within a few months so far (systems which hide the key in special hardware do better, see game consoles). And some people do it for the challenge, so the argument with opportunity costs does not work.
Now you have created an incentive to create a user-friendly wrapper for the pain in the ass exploit. Which probably requires less hacking skill.
With regard to that, the opt-out concept described in TFA fails to help them. It seems Verizon management wants to be slapped around in court some more ;-)
From the Wine homepage (http://www.winehq.org/history):
At this point, obviously Transgaming was no longer allowed to use new versions of Wine in a closed source product. But there is not necessarily personal hostility between the developers. I guess if Transgaming reconsider and make their product Open Source (preferably LGPL) too, Wine and Gedega could be merged again.
I've tried the official Linux package and it did not work that well. So I'm not surprised in the least that it got little use. If plain Wine (which I didn't try) worked better, I'm even less surprised.
Only that time and Moore's Law will prove Sony wrong. Before the planned lifetime of the PS3 is over, some new console (or the PC) will probably offer more performance per money. To extend your analogy, Microsoft will probably have a 3x3 foot shelf before all the 3/2/1 foot shelve are sold...
I don't think those companies contribute to Linux as charity in the first place. More likely, they wanted to have some input in a system with growing market share. Red Hat is actually making a profit according to its latest quarterly report, so I don't expect them to close shop soon ;-)
Ubuntu might be an exception, as its founder Mark Shuttleworth has said he is doing it partly to return something to the community.
The .45 ACP round is a pistol round. Pistols typically have a lot less power than rifles (which are the successor to smooth bore muskets). For a comparison of more similar weapons, take a large bore hunting rifle.
Most were small corporations indeed (below 200 employees). The last one is an exception:
German subsidiary of a large US corporation. By itself also below 200 people, but the US corp was a lot larger.
The funny part is that the German subsidiary actually did specific images where required by regulation (PCs used in medical equipment) and tested those too. With test documentation and everything.
But for the typical workplace PC? Nope. We had a wild mix of PCs from the first Pentium IV generation to Core 2 Duo. The management of the subsidiary did not bother to do strict configuration management, and the US corp had a rather inept IT management. I remember an attempt to introduce the IBM Rational tool suite that took some years and a few hundred thousand $, only to end up with a single pilot site in the US (the original plan was to cover the whole corp, including the German subsidiary).
That's the consequence of hardware costs often being lower than the cost of wages (and licenses) to upgrade the old systems. I suspect the $300 GP cited are not unrealistic, especially for a company that buys dozens of computers at once. Now calculate the cost of having your support guys reinstall the old machines, possibly do a few hardware upgrades along he way, and buying your licenses separately from hardware (hint: there is plenty of evidence OEM licenses are MUCH cheaper).
Of course the license part is Microsoft's fault, but the rest just follows out of an unemotional cost calculation. The best the company can do with the old computers is donate them to nonprofit organizations who can use them and have volunteers who reinstall them as needed for free.
With earlier versions of Windows, a clean install was clearly preferred. So why not do that again?
Besides, I suspect that most corporate users will just update the whole PC and buy new ones with Windows 77 pre-installed. In the 10 years of my IT career I have seen one large company (Novartis) that actually did its own OS installations on a regular basis. The rest just used the computers with whatever OS was delivered at purchase, most of the time the unchanged vendor installation.
I don't think that degree of uninstallation is possible (anymore). But you don't really need it:
For the purpose of web browsing using another browser as default works pretty well, and that is where the security risks are.
If some already installed program uses the IE rendering engine, I don't see a problem there. Because if that program happens to be malware, you have a greater problem than its use of IE anyway. What remains is some waste of memory because two browsers are installed/running in parallel. But memory is cheap enough to make this a minor problem.
I think you're right about the fun factor of operating some machinery for eight hours a day. So the game would have to put players in more of a manager role, making it more of a MMORTS game. For bonus fun but less realism, add military campaigns ;-)
There are actually not many of those. Maybe Earthrise when it is done (but it will probably un-traditional in the combat model, more FPS that traditional controls). It is actually one whose development I'm following because the rather traditional controls in EvE Online are not so exciting.
If so, I wonder how many fans a cooperative building strategy game will have. MMORPGs tend to need significant subscriber numbers to pay the costs, and AFAIK similar games like "A Tale In The Desert" have pretty low subscriber numbers.
So while I like the idea, it seems quite possible that the game won't get far without NASA funding.
I think they did (mostly) succeed for beginners' tasks. Take installation for instance:
You could do that with some limited knowledge about partitioning years before Linux got there. Plug & Play would do the rest for you. Only recently, distributions like Ubuntu caught up to that.
Similarly, you can do elementary tasks in other MS programs without much knowledge. Writing a document in Word, setting up a database with default properties in MSSQL Server - all of these are doable with minimum learning.
A GP wrote, the problems arise when you want to do more complex tasks that are not covered in the newbie-friendly GUI. Then you have to work with registry keys and APIs that are often poorly documented. Also, complex tasks are where the often poor software quality of MS application shows - weird behavior and crashes are not rare.
Yes, it looks like a game from a few years ago. With nice enough detail level but effects like reflections on the surfaces are missing. Freelancer comes to mind as a comparison. As a reason, the developers have said they want the game to run on a wide range of hardware, not just the latest high end PCs.
Also, the gameplay is supposed to be faster with manual piloting. More like Freelancer than a classic MMORPG with "click&wait". So JGE cannot afford much lag, and slow graphics would be a show stopper. Actually that is what I'm more worried about, the video showed some of the movement stutter that is usually associated with lag in FPS games.
From what I've seen in the trial, it has a functional if small trading based economy (shipping stuff around, with supply and demand having some impact on prices). No crafting involved.
Shooting NPCs and selling the loot, however, appears to be way more lucrative. So trading is not that attractive and EVE remains the only game in this genre with a serious economy. Back to topic:
JGE is supposed to have an economy that is at least partly player driven. But I don't expect it to be on EVE's level, at least not right away.
That's what I hope for.
I tried Vendetta Online and liked the concept. But it has a very small world for a MMORPG, and I had some problems with lag in PvP (hardly surprising, since I live in Europe and the server is in the US. It's the same with FPS games).So if JGE is a bigger and better Vendetta Online with a server near me, it is what I'm looking for.
I'm curious too about how many people want a real skill based MMORPG. I think the market success of JGE will give the answer, because the fans of more traditional MMORPG controls already have a great game with EvE.
Important correction:
The government as a whole would not care about the punitive damage, because they would just take it out of taxes. Compared to the billions that are currently dumped into dubious rescue plans for the economy, a few million would not even register.
So instead of making "the government" pay, the person who made a false entry to the list would have to pays personally. That way it could work.
Going slightly off topic, I think a similar rule would be good against false DCMA takedown notices. With statutory damages awarded to the owner of the falsely blocked website, and those should be just as high as the statutory damages for illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
Depends on your driving profile. With lots of stop and go (city), the hybrid shines because of its braking energy recovery.
Now add a scenario where you drive a lot in the city, and I think the hybrid will save enough to be a good buy. Think taxis in urban areas.
The other extreme is if you drive a lot over land and little in the city, like me. In this case, I agree about Diesel being better. Or maybe an Otto engine that sacrifices some power for efficiency, like with the Atkinson cycle. Both the Toyota Prius and the Mercedes Bluetec use that on top of being hybrids. Actually, the Otto-Atkinson engine in the new Prius might be interesting as a "standalone" car engine, at 98hp I think it has sufficient power.
The Ovonics patent is a temporary nuisance rather than a long term problem. Because new Li-Ion batteries that are made from cheaper raw materials are about to make NiMH obsolete. These are also safer than the "classic" laptop Li-Ion batteries.
For instance LiFePO4, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery. This type of battery is already made by several vendors, so I think it is too late to get a patent on it and shut its use down. And while it is a new technology, the performance already exceeds that of NiMH. Except maybe lifetime, but A123 already claims more than 1000 charge cycles for their LiFePO4 cells.
So I think any electric car manufacturer who cannot get NiMH will eventually move to LiFePO4 or a similar new technology. Which will leave Ovonics with a worthless patent.