No problem, say, you wouldn't happen to have millions of pounds and a whole bunch of lobbyists/lawyers we could use would you?
That's what it will take.
We have votes that could go to the local Pirate party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party. Personally, I'm still leaning towards the green party which also tends to be on the side of freedom (for instance, they took a position against software patents the last time the issue came up in the EU). But I could imagine changing my vote to the "pirates". Once such a party gets at least the minimum votes to qualify for seats in the parliament, I'm sure the other parties will notice and adjust their attitude.
And they try to suppress "hard" drugs completely, which is by definition not compatible with having a taxed and regulated commercial network. The cartels that run those drugs anyway have to stay hidden from the law, thus you won't see them filing tax declarations for their business.
For goodness sakes, I have a friend who's job it is to mark a dot on the ground every few metres (where to put the explosives) and he gets $120,000 a year.
Interesting. Does he determine location and amount of the explosives himself? Then he is probably an expert in something like rock blasting, and gets the $120,000 for his expertise. More than most engineers are earning, but probably justified.
Or is he just a guy with a spray can? Then he is ridiculously overpaid;-)
It is still stupid. Polycarbonate has been around long enough that I'm sure lots of other countries have the capability to produce it, optical grade or not. All that will really accomplish (if Congress goes along with it) is hurting the US chemical industry.
Technically, "Windows 2000 Professional" was something you could call a merge, as it brought up-to-date DirectX and USB support to the NT line. It did, however, NOT support all existing DOS programs, unlike Win98.
But for whatever reason Microsoft was not ready to sell a "home" version of Windows 2000. So they released Windows Millennium instead. Yes, that was another DOS based system "after the merge".
Millennium was a major disaster and Microsoft soon followed up with XP Home. XP Home was the first NT-based Windows marketed to the home user, so it looks like the successor to Windows Millennium. But technology-wise, it is Windows 2000 with more eyecandy and crippled user accounts (the non-crippled version is called XP Professional and the direct successor to Windows 2000 Professional).
As others have written, OSS is more likely to work through standards than through "centralized control". Even if there are some exceptions, like Linux kernel development.
I think that more complexity needs better modularity, which can in a sense be reached through standards: the standard describes the interface between programs, and programs conforming to the standard are the "modules" of the system. It will probably be a slower but more reliable process, because more people are involved. That means more eyeballs on the problems (good) but also longer discussions until a consensus is reached.
Personally I suspect that Microsoft suffers from the attempt to integrate too much without well-defined interfaces between the parts. I have been on a few (smaller) software projects that were delayed, partly because of too much historically grown spaghetti code. The same thing on a much larger scale could explain the four years delay of Vista.
From what I heard (admittedly anecdotal evidence) the Microsoft support that is included with the purchase of the license is rather crappy. As in, some guy in a call center who looks for the solution in a database (MSDN??). For that alone, I doubt many customers would pay them.
Alternatively, there is a more professional support which will bill you per incident. Those guys have a better reputation, and I guess it would make sense for hardware vendors to work with them. But that won't give Microsoft much money: If a hardware vendor spends a few thousand dollars on support to fine-tune an installation image, and then sells a few thousand units of that type, Microsoft ends up earning something like one dollar per machine;-)
Since we're on the topic of games: I'd like a bit more performance (but I agree that the ability to run them correctly comes first). Right now, Day Of Defeat:Source runs under WINE on my PC but the FPS are a bit disappointing: roughly 1/4 of the Windows performance.
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
That's one possible explanation. Another is that he intentionally "played" a non-techie customer to show the recipents of the memo what problems they caused for an average user. And finally, maybe he was actually that detached from the technical side of Windows by 2003. I've seen it in certain managers at the company I work for: while they have a scientific degree, they don't seem to understand the technology better than some MBA type.
Overall, I'm not sure either if the article is a hoax.
Like Arial is rather similar to Helvetica. Some people claim that Microsoft did this to avoid paying royalties, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial#Criticism.2FSimilar_fonts. Now this may be true or not, but after they almost copied Helvetica with Arial, turnabout's fair play.
All of it a bit more tricky than clicking on a setup program. So you get a taste of what Linux was like 10 years ago. Back then editing config files to get your drivers running was normal. Today, it is an exception with distributions like Ubuntu, and only needed in problem cases.
For the BSD guys, that would indeed be better. But Linux is probably the bigger market. So if I was making that decision on behalf of the vendor, I'd release the driver under a dual license: GPL and BSD (not sure ATM if you can stick BSD code into a GPL project without incurring additional obligations).
All probably true, but I think the obstacles are smaller than you think.
1) If getting permission from third party vendors to open source the code does not work, a vendor can still release hardware specifications and let third parties develop an Open Source driver. Getting a complete driver is nice, but not absolutely necessary. People have tried get the information through reverse engineering before, so there are some developers willing to program drivers from scratch.
2) It might be possible to release a new, "simple" Open Source driver that shows how to access the hardware and provides basic functionality, but lacks the special tricks.
AMD/ATI seems to do a combination of 1) and 2), and we'll see how it works out. If their Open Source driver reaches halfway decent performance and stability, my next graphics card is sure to be an ATI.
For the juvenile hacker, maybe community service plus a few months prison on probation.
In case of the telecoms, it is important that lawbreaking is not legalized by the mere say-so of the government. Because this would seriously undermine all laws that are designed to protect the citizens from government harassment. The "helping in good faith" should count as mitigating circumstance, but not get them completely off the hook. Let's say fines for those reponsible, plus also a few months prison on probation.
Because he gives a good example (his friend's computer privileges) of how a paranoid system deters white hat hackers, so the field is left to the real criminals. Did you notice how reports about benevolent hackers have become rare over the last years, while computer criminality flourishes?
Yes, I think a version control system that can actually render the differences would be better. Because I find Word's change tracking next to unreadable when there are multiple changes in one place. YMMD of course.
Now I didn't expect this to be feasible with the poorly documented.doc format, but there are some limited diffs available. A colleague has showed me a SVN plugin for word - it worked with ordinary text but failed inside tables.
Usually I agree (although.doc is better if I'm mining it for data the user didn't know they sent).
I guess you mean change tracking... it's fun when some government types fall for it, but for the sender it's a disadvantage or even a security risk. Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
Since this seems not to be based on a law but on a nebulous "cross-industry agreement", wouldn't the ISP violate the contract by unilaterally cutting off your connection? Unless there is more to it, I could imagine people who need the internet for their work suing for damages due to loss of business.
Where did GP say the Indians and Chinese are evil?
He states (correctly) that jobs were exported to those countries, but to a large extent this is the fault of US managers who wanted to save a few bucks on wages. Now the inevitable downside becomes obvious: Those who do the manufacturing also have the experience, and in many areas where the US were technologically more advanced China and India are catching up. No conspiracy necessary, just a logical consequence of prior events.
Depends on the alternatives you have. To make it a vendor problem and not a Linux problem you need at least one vendor who makes decent hardware and provides documentation. An example:
For years, the only way to get halfway decent 3D performance under Linux was using the cards and closed source drivers from ATI and Nvidia (Intel's integrated graphics are nicely supported but much slower). That made it a Linux problem.
Now AMD/ATI is releasing specs and I expect open source 3D drivers to show up after a while. This will give them a huge advantage in the Linux market because even "purist" distributions like Debian will have no problems with bundling these. Linux users will prefer AMD/ATI for their better support. At that point, it becomes a vendor problem for Nvidia.
Just remember, the code you're given to support is not junk because your predecessors were idiots, its because they weren't given the time to do it properly. Or they survived ~1,000 change requests. Etc.
There are all sorts of reasons. I remember one project where my predecessors's code was really bad. As in exception "handling" that merely suppressed the exceptions instead of doing appropriate error handling. Later on, I heard he was a business economist by training and had told management that programming was not his forte. He was used in software development anyway...
I've seen all genders write obfuscated code--but it worked. And every single time it was because we were under the gun for a deadline or there was simply no other way to do it.
Yeah, been there, wrote my share of spaghetti code to tack on another feature the quickest and least elegant way. Now add a management that is not willing to invest in refactoring during slower times, and the code will degrade over the years as one quickhack is added to the next.
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We have votes that could go to the local Pirate party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party.
Personally, I'm still leaning towards the green party which also tends to be on the side of freedom (for instance, they took a position against software patents the last time the issue came up in the EU). But I could imagine changing my vote to the "pirates".
Once such a party gets at least the minimum votes to qualify for seats in the parliament, I'm sure the other parties will notice and adjust their attitude.
And they try to suppress "hard" drugs completely, which is by definition not compatible with having a taxed and regulated commercial network.
The cartels that run those drugs anyway have to stay hidden from the law, thus you won't see them filing tax declarations for their business.
Interesting. Does he determine location and amount of the explosives himself? Then he is probably an expert in something like rock blasting, and gets the $120,000 for his expertise. More than most engineers are earning, but probably justified.
Or is he just a guy with a spray can? Then he is ridiculously overpaid ;-)
It is still stupid. Polycarbonate has been around long enough that I'm sure lots of other countries have the capability to produce it, optical grade or not. All that will really accomplish (if Congress goes along with it) is hurting the US chemical industry.
Technically, "Windows 2000 Professional" was something you could call a merge, as it brought up-to-date DirectX and USB support to the NT line. It did, however, NOT support all existing DOS programs, unlike Win98.
But for whatever reason Microsoft was not ready to sell a "home" version of Windows 2000. So they released Windows Millennium instead. Yes, that was another DOS based system "after the merge".
Millennium was a major disaster and Microsoft soon followed up with XP Home. XP Home was the first NT-based Windows marketed to the home user, so it looks like the successor to Windows Millennium. But technology-wise, it is Windows 2000 with more eyecandy and crippled user accounts (the non-crippled version is called XP Professional and the direct successor to Windows 2000 Professional).
As others have written, OSS is more likely to work through standards than through "centralized control". Even if there are some exceptions, like Linux kernel development.
I think that more complexity needs better modularity, which can in a sense be reached through standards:
the standard describes the interface between programs, and programs conforming to the standard are the "modules" of the system. It will probably be a slower but more reliable process, because more people are involved. That means more eyeballs on the problems (good) but also longer discussions until a consensus is reached.
Personally I suspect that Microsoft suffers from the attempt to integrate too much without well-defined interfaces between the parts. I have been on a few (smaller) software projects that were delayed, partly because of too much historically grown spaghetti code. The same thing on a much larger scale could explain the four years delay of Vista.
From what I heard (admittedly anecdotal evidence) the Microsoft support that is included with the purchase of the license is rather crappy. As in, some guy in a call center who looks for the solution in a database (MSDN??). For that alone, I doubt many customers would pay them.
Alternatively, there is a more professional support which will bill you per incident. Those guys have a better reputation, and I guess it would make sense for hardware vendors to work with them. But that won't give Microsoft much money: ;-)
If a hardware vendor spends a few thousand dollars on support to fine-tune an installation image, and then sells a few thousand units of that type, Microsoft ends up earning something like one dollar per machine
For me (German ISP/IP address) the link leads to random commercials. Each time I try it another one.
Fuck Fox News, and thanks to the posters who provided alternative links about the project...
Since we're on the topic of games:
I'd like a bit more performance (but I agree that the ability to run them correctly comes first). Right now, Day Of Defeat:Source runs under WINE on my PC but the FPS are a bit disappointing: roughly 1/4 of the Windows performance.
That's one possible explanation.
Another is that he intentionally "played" a non-techie customer to show the recipents of the memo what problems they caused for an average user.
And finally, maybe he was actually that detached from the technical side of Windows by 2003. I've seen it in certain managers at the company I work for: while they have a scientific degree, they don't seem to understand the technology better than some MBA type.
Overall, I'm not sure either if the article is a hoax.
Like Arial is rather similar to Helvetica. Some people claim that Microsoft did this to avoid paying royalties, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial#Criticism.2FSimilar_fonts.
Now this may be true or not, but after they almost copied Helvetica with Arial, turnabout's fair play.
Look here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=265962
It seems that a bios update in Q1 2007 fixed the problem for some people. Unfortunately not for everyone, but that is something you could try.
Or maybe this one helps: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/ubuntu-on-dell-inspiron-2600-laptop-595259/
Or this one: http://www.apfrod.com/works/2008/03/15/ubuntu_8_04_hardy_heron_on_dell_inspiron_2600
All of it a bit more tricky than clicking on a setup program. So you get a taste of what Linux was like 10 years ago. Back then editing config files to get your drivers running was normal. Today, it is an exception with distributions like Ubuntu, and only needed in problem cases.
For the BSD guys, that would indeed be better. But Linux is probably the bigger market. So if I was making that decision on behalf of the vendor, I'd release the driver under a dual license:
GPL and BSD (not sure ATM if you can stick BSD code into a GPL project without incurring additional obligations).
All probably true, but I think the obstacles are smaller than you think.
1) If getting permission from third party vendors to open source the code does not work, a vendor can still release hardware specifications and let third parties develop an Open Source driver. Getting a complete driver is nice, but not absolutely necessary. People have tried get the information through reverse engineering before, so there are some developers willing to program drivers from scratch.
2) It might be possible to release a new, "simple" Open Source driver that shows how to access the hardware and provides basic functionality, but lacks the special tricks.
AMD/ATI seems to do a combination of 1) and 2), and we'll see how it works out. If their Open Source driver reaches halfway decent performance and stability, my next graphics card is sure to be an ATI.
For the juvenile hacker, maybe community service plus a few months prison on probation.
In case of the telecoms, it is important that lawbreaking is not legalized by the mere say-so of the government. Because this would seriously undermine all laws that are designed to protect the citizens from government harassment.
The "helping in good faith" should count as mitigating circumstance, but not get them completely off the hook. Let's say fines for those reponsible, plus also a few months prison on probation.
Because he gives a good example (his friend's computer privileges) of how a paranoid system deters white hat hackers, so the field is left to the real criminals.
Did you notice how reports about benevolent hackers have become rare over the last years, while computer criminality flourishes?
Yes, I think a version control system that can actually render the differences would be better. Because I find Word's change tracking next to unreadable when there are multiple changes in one place. YMMD of course.
Now I didn't expect this to be feasible with the poorly documented .doc format, but there are some limited diffs available. A colleague has showed me a SVN plugin for word - it worked with ordinary text but failed inside tables.
For ODF, I have higher expectations and there is already a project going on: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooosvn
I guess you mean change tracking... it's fun when some government types fall for it, but for the sender it's a disadvantage or even a security risk.
Also, I think it is not very user-friendly if you want to track multiple revisions. The display gets really cluttered tying to display three or four different versions. Overall, I think it is a poor substitute for a version control system.
Since this seems not to be based on a law but on a nebulous "cross-industry agreement", wouldn't the ISP violate the contract by unilaterally cutting off your connection?
Unless there is more to it, I could imagine people who need the internet for their work suing for damages due to loss of business.
Where did GP say the Indians and Chinese are evil?
He states (correctly) that jobs were exported to those countries, but to a large extent this is the fault of US managers who wanted to save a few bucks on wages. Now the inevitable downside becomes obvious:
Those who do the manufacturing also have the experience, and in many areas where the US were technologically more advanced China and India are catching up. No conspiracy necessary, just a logical consequence of prior events.
Depends on the alternatives you have. To make it a vendor problem and not a Linux problem you need at least one vendor who makes decent hardware and provides documentation. An example:
For years, the only way to get halfway decent 3D performance under Linux was using the cards and closed source drivers from ATI and Nvidia (Intel's integrated graphics are nicely supported but much slower). That made it a Linux problem.
Now AMD/ATI is releasing specs and I expect open source 3D drivers to show up after a while. This will give them a huge advantage in the Linux market because even "purist" distributions like Debian will have no problems with bundling these. Linux users will prefer AMD/ATI for their better support.
At that point, it becomes a vendor problem for Nvidia.
Well, some of them. A few of the stories sound a little constructed. But I guess that maybe 80% are real. Which is bad enough ;-)
http://thedailywtf.com/. Even if some of the stories are probably made up.
There are all sorts of reasons. I remember one project where my predecessors's code was really bad. As in exception "handling" that merely suppressed the exceptions instead of doing appropriate error handling. Later on, I heard he was a business economist by training and had told management that programming was not his forte. He was used in software development anyway...
Yeah, been there, wrote my share of spaghetti code to tack on another feature the quickest and least elegant way.
Now add a management that is not willing to invest in refactoring during slower times, and the code will degrade over the years as one quickhack is added to the next.