Sure... the larger the corporation, the more it resembles a government.
The people who make the decisions are several hierarchy levels removed from those who actually get things done. This results in a disconnect from reality, with all the negative aspects of appearance being more important than competence, turf wars, plus maybe some corruption thrown in.
Usually the biggest problems are from poor planning at the start or 'mid course correction' by people who didn't make careful consideration of their options up front regarding the physical infrastructure required. A good example of this is 'pole placement.'...
A good example indeed, and the "then 6 months later they change the camera heights" is the sort of stupid non-planning that kills projects in all areas of engineering. You simply cannot change parts of a system on a whim and expect that the system as a whole still works. Whoever let this happen on part of Boeing made a big mistake.
Another point is that this looks like a project that was pushed with an unrealistic timeline from the beginning, probably for political reasons. We had a similar case in Germany a few years ago, with the "Toll Collect" system for automated charging of highway tolls for heavy trucks. The system was supposed to be up and running within a year from signing the contracts, but it actually took more than two years to make it work. Like in the case of "Virtual Fence", politicians wanted to demonstrate drive and competency by getting something up fast. Of course, such attempts rarely succeed.;-)
More to the point, the EU Commission assumes that MS knows the details of their own file format. Now if Microsoft does not give out the documentation, they are assumed to intentionally disobey the order to do so.
I wonder if they could get out of that by claiming the documentation is lost. And how much business they would lose from appearing incompetent;-)
...they know confiscation of their property would hurt more.
Sure Microsoft could refuse to pay up, but then the confiscations of property GP mentioned would start. Until the fine is paid by auctioning off the confiscated stuff. Considering that such auctions tend to get less than regular prices, M$ would probably lose the money from more Windows sales than if they just pay the fine.
And that is assuming that there are no confiscations of "intellectual property". I don't know if the law would allow those. But if yes, it could become really painful for M$.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher for how they work. I think switching off the regular towers would make an IMSI-catcher even more efficient at locating the talibans' phones...;-)
Drugs are one of the few places where patents make sense. Due to the lengthy approval process, competitors could have the copy ready before the inventing company gets to market their drug at all at all. Removing patents would probably kill commercial drug research.
So if you remove patents for drugs, you also need to step up public funding for research (which then goes into the public domain). This may actually be worthwhile, considering the huge amount of money going into drugs today. But you need to be aware of it and think it through.
The dishonesty is reason enough to be annoyed with them. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and it could be much worse for them than a few people hating them: They could get sued (happened to Comcast recently, sorry I can't find the link anymore) and maybe end up having to pay large damages.
There is also another way of offering 20mbps and not have it overused: Sell 20mbps for the first 50 Gbyte/month and make the limitation clear in your advertisments. Throttle those who exceed it to dial-up speed... and announce that in advance as well. That would make it a fair deal, and anyone who still runs into the limit won't get much sympathy from me;-)
-make sure your software IS updated (I'm sure many people will be surprised when they find out their software is only IPv4 capable) -get an ISP that supports IPv6 -actually use it once it is available to you, and report bugs to your ISP or software vendor.
That's it for a non-network programmer, nobody can expect more from you. Unless you have lots of free time and WANT to do more, then you could learn network programming and support the migration of some open source project;-)
Sure, but did it really improve things to ship Vista as it was after four years of delay? That got them bad press for the lemon on top of the bad press for the DNF.
I guess delaying for another year and releasing it in better shape would have been a smarter move.
Imagine if the makers of the other products out there followed suit. You would not be able to purchase second hand goods.
And it would kill a significant part of Ebay's revenue.
If the program is ever abused to the extent you suggest, Ebay would probably stop the VeRo program. Or at least introduce a process to complain about unjustified removals, and then kick those companies from VeRo who abuse the system too much.
I'm not sure if that would help against Scientology, as e-meters probably make up not much of Ebay's revenues. But if Dell, for example, would try to stop all sales of used Dell computers, I'm sure they would not last long in the VeRo program.
Reportedly most of it comes from botnets: Insecure machines that were taken over by hackers and whose clueless owners did not notice anything. Or even don't care.
Now if ISPs start selling traffic by the gigabyte (again - it was not uncommon a few years ago), the owner of those spam-slaves would notice it on their internet bills. At that point, I think securing one's machine would become a lot more popular and the botnets would shrink. Overall result: less spam and DDOS attacks.
Considering the inbound hacking attempts, my father still has a 2 GByte/month plan and so far I've heard no complaints about suddenly increasing bills. So it seems to be not that much.
Compare this with European comics (specifically Belgian and French), and you'll find everything from High Art to Low Art, super heros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, surreal, spy, WW2, funny, serious, story-driven, art-driven, and anything else you can think of.
Of course, you can find these in American and Japanese comics, too. The difference is that they only bother to import the good stuff from Belgium, so when we see Belgian comics, we think they're all great.
You can extend this argument to classical music BTW: The bad musicians and composers from Bach's and Beethoven's time are long forgotten, and what remains is the work of the geniuses. Likewise, every kind of art should be judged by its finest contributions. There will always be incompetents but they do not define the value of the genre.
I think the conflict about interrogating government aides or not makes a story that is worthwhile to report by itself. No need to suppress it in favor of something else;-)
IIRC my classes on the subject, you also need to use a low pass that cuts off anything at or over half the sample rate before sampling. That leaves you with two possible outcomes: 1) You use a low pass filter that does the job well. The 22.4kHz tone is filtered out and does not reach the A/D converter in the first place. You get digital silence;-) 2) You use a lousy low pass filter or none at all. Now you get a digital signal, but it is NOT a representation of a 22.4kHz tone. Instead, on playback you get some frequencies that are sums or differences of half the sample rate and the original signal. Sorry, don't remember all the details...
The lawsuit is not over yet. The ruling that they do not own the Unix copyright will certainly diminish their chances, but there is no verdict yet about who has to pay whom and how much. So far, we had a lot of pre-trial maneuvers but then the lawsuit against IBM was put on hold due to SCO going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.
The Novell lawsuit, however, is still underway. Groklaw's overview (URL:http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760#ref453>) says there will be a 4 day trial starting on April 29th.
If you believe the analysis at Groklaw, SCO is likely to be whacked hard in that trial. Of course they can try to appeal. I expect them to do so, in order to draw out the final defeat and keep the FUD alive a bit longer.
There may be some small party in your country you (mostly) agree with. If I was a US citizen, it would be the libertarians for me.
By all means vote for that party, even if they have no serious chance of winning the election.
First, it tells the other parties that there is support for the positions of $SmallParty, and they may adopt some of those positions in order to win voters over. +++ Recent history lesson +++ I'm currently observing such an effect with the "Linkspartei" in Germany, which consists of communists and socialists. Lots of their members and voters are former supporters of the SPD ("social democratic party of Germany"), which is traditionally a moderately left party that supports the "worker class" but is willing to work in a capitalist environment. Several years ago, the SPD under Chancellor Schröder took a much more industry-friendly stance, alienating the left party wing in the process. Said left wing broke off under Oscar Lafontaine and subsequently united with the remnants of the old east Germany communists, forming the "Linkspartei". By now the "Linkspartei" has gained enough popularity to get maybe 10% of the votes in an election, mostly at the expense of the SPD. The result is that the SPD is now moving left again, trying to regain some of those votes. +++ end of history lesson +++
Second, if $SmallParty manages to gain a respectable third rank in the election, voting for them will no longer look like a total waste of one's vote. After all, they might win the next election with some more support. That may gain a few more votes from people who did already agree with them, but preferred to vote for a "lesser evil" that had actually a chance of winning.
...and otherwise refrain from censoring the internet activities of their users. Acceptable ways to achieve this:
2) Change the terms of service so they clearly state a guaranteed minimum throughput. Do not sell more connections than you can provide with the minimum throughput.
2) Change the terms of service to some model with limited volume, charge those who exceed it per gigabyte. This does not absolutely prevent network congestion, but cost considerations will make most high volume users back off. In areas where people are not deterred (rich filesharers?) use the extra income to upgrade the network.
Governments have a need to keep documents for pretty long times, and they are increasingly aware of the problems they will get from a vendor that changes the default formats of its applications every few years. If you watch the IT news, you will see a tendency to mandate open document standards for government use.
Now Microsoft has three options: 1) Give the standards board the middle finger and lose the government business. Financial ouch, and more importantly companies who work with the government a lot might switch to the same application as the government (like Open Office) for convenience. Great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
2) Use ODF. Might not support all quirks of their old documents (which is a valid concern but not reason enough to support those quirks for eternity). But more importantly, it kills the vendor lock-in. Another great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
3) Try to push a lousy pseudo-standard like OOXML through the standards boards. I will skip the discussion of the details here and just say I think the opponents are right when they say only Microsoft would be able to support OOXML (halfway) well. Result if MS gets away with it: Microsoft can claim to save documents in a standardized format, any legal requirements in that regard are satisfied. A great step towards keeping the government business without being really interoperable with others.
Because once you have a generally accepted standard and applications that support it, you should be able to use those applications for a very long time.
If an individual vendor ceases to support the standard, you have a good chance of finding another who will do so. In that case, you may have some expenses for switching applications but you can still can use your document format.
With Microsoft, your chances of getting either are slim: -they often change their document formats, which leads to users of later Office versions sending you documents you cannot use without upgrading. -third party support for MS formats usually depends on reverse engineering because the formats are poorly specified. Note that you can usually download some specifications, but those tend to be out of date and incomplete. This leads to third party support that sucks, and I think the Open Office developers did a quite good job by getting it almost right under those circumstances.
Many National Bodies identified specific functionality within the specification that reflected existing product defects or legacy application behaviors. These behaviors are important because they reflect the content in existing documents, but should not be perpetuated when creating new documents from scratch.
I call bullshit.
Keeping the old defects in a new standard for reasons of "compatibility" is not a good idea, because it means missing a good opportunity for improvement. Keeping them in new versions of the old products is something I can (barely) understand, but declaring bugs to be features for the whole industry is just plain wrong. I think if Microsoft/ECMA keep insisting on that, ISO should reject OOXML outright.
I found it depends a lot on the quality on the screen.
Back in the CRT days, I did read the occasional e-book but it was a strain on the eyes. With a TFT in decent quality, I find it much more enjoyable. And for catastrophic computer failure there are backups;-)
Right now, I'm sitting in front of a 1600 x 1200 pixel, 20'' screen and the only big advantage left for paper books is that they are much more portable. That is, for reading, not merely transporting. In the subway on the way to work, paper books are still a much better choice than carrying a laptop for reading...
But then you make the government maintain the last-mile infrastructure which they will do with as much diligence and efficiency as they have shown in their maintenance of the roadways. That is to say, not much of either.
In my experience, large companies are often almost as inefficient as governments. At least in situations where they have not much competition (where real competition exists, the incumbent will adapt or die).
This said, most newcomer telecoms in Germany are not eager to lay their own cable. How much of that is due to lack of money, and how much of it is due to legal problems (right of way and such?) I don't know. Might have to research that a bit more...
Germany has tried this in a half-assed way too, but in this case the small telecoms without infrastructure seem to suffer more. The telecommunications part of the former Bundespost was split off and sold to the public as "Deutsche Telekom". It is now a publicly traded company. The Deutsche Telekom also got ownership of the infrastructure, but has to rent the "last mile" of cable to the customer's house to the competition, if said customer wants to get his connection from the competition. A new regulation authority was introduced to set a "fair" price for this.
As usual both sides are complaining, the Deutsche Telekom says they deserve more rent and the "Joe Blow's Fly By Night telecoms" say they are being ripped off. To me, the price of currently 10,68 Euros per month for maintaining the cable seems too high rather than too low, so the incumbent has no reason to complain.
So a lot depends on the rent that is set by your regulation authority, and you get the usual political wrangling about it. I think a better idea would have been to keep the cable as public infrastructure and rent it to any interested telecom at the same price.
If you want to do anything but surf the internet and email, Comcast will suck for you. and it's gonna get worse. They want to oversell the connectivity even further. they already are at a 13 to 1 ratio and want to push it to a 15 to 1. Stable is 10 to 1.
You know they have every right to do this but it is surely already biting them in the ass. In most markets they do have DSL as competition so if they oversell too much they ought to expect to lose customers.
While I agree with most of your post, I wonder about the point where extreme overselling turns into fraud. As in, the advertisements promise great network performance but what you actually get is a dial-up-like crawl.
...because of the "cheap" in LiFePo. Any Lithium-Ion battery needs some cathode, and I guess that LiFePo will eventually be cheaper than the cobalt oxide that is common in today's laptop batteries.
At that point, making fake "LiFePo" batteries from old technology will actually be more expensive than real LiFePo. Scammers might still sell you second-rate batteries that don't last long, but the risk of them exploding under your butt will be greatly reduced.
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Sure... the larger the corporation, the more it resembles a government.
The people who make the decisions are several hierarchy levels removed from those who actually get things done. This results in a disconnect from reality, with all the negative aspects of appearance being more important than competence, turf wars, plus maybe some corruption thrown in.
A good example indeed, and the "then 6 months later they change the camera heights" is the sort of stupid non-planning that kills projects in all areas of engineering. You simply cannot change parts of a system on a whim and expect that the system as a whole still works. Whoever let this happen on part of Boeing made a big mistake.
Another point is that this looks like a project that was pushed with an unrealistic timeline from the beginning, probably for political reasons. We had a similar case in Germany a few years ago, with the "Toll Collect" system for automated charging of highway tolls for heavy trucks.
The system was supposed to be up and running within a year from signing the contracts, but it actually took more than two years to make it work. Like in the case of "Virtual Fence", politicians wanted to demonstrate drive and competency by getting something up fast. Of course, such attempts rarely succeed.
More to the point, the EU Commission assumes that MS knows the details of their own file format. Now if Microsoft does not give out the documentation, they are assumed to intentionally disobey the order to do so.
;-)
I wonder if they could get out of that by claiming the documentation is lost. And how much business they would lose from appearing incompetent
...they know confiscation of their property would hurt more.
Sure Microsoft could refuse to pay up, but then the confiscations of property GP mentioned would start. Until the fine is paid by auctioning off the confiscated stuff. Considering that such auctions tend to get less than regular prices, M$ would probably lose the money from more Windows sales than if they just pay the fine.
And that is assuming that there are no confiscations of "intellectual property". I don't know if the law would allow those. But if yes, it could become really painful for M$.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher for how they work. ;-)
I think switching off the regular towers would make an IMSI-catcher even more efficient at locating the talibans' phones...
Drugs are one of the few places where patents make sense. Due to the lengthy approval process, competitors could have the copy ready before the inventing company gets to market their drug at all at all. Removing patents would probably kill commercial drug research.
So if you remove patents for drugs, you also need to step up public funding for research (which then goes into the public domain). This may actually be worthwhile, considering the huge amount of money going into drugs today. But you need to be aware of it and think it through.
The dishonesty is reason enough to be annoyed with them. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and it could be much worse for them than a few people hating them:
;-)
They could get sued (happened to Comcast recently, sorry I can't find the link anymore) and maybe end up having to pay large damages.
There is also another way of offering 20mbps and not have it overused:
Sell 20mbps for the first 50 Gbyte/month and make the limitation clear in your advertisments. Throttle those who exceed it to dial-up speed... and announce that in advance as well. That would make it a fair deal, and anyone who still runs into the limit won't get much sympathy from me
-make sure your software IS updated (I'm sure many people will be surprised when they find out their software is only IPv4 capable)
;-)
-get an ISP that supports IPv6
-actually use it once it is available to you, and report bugs to your ISP or software vendor.
That's it for a non-network programmer, nobody can expect more from you. Unless you have lots of free time and WANT to do more, then you could learn network programming and support the migration of some open source project
Sure, but did it really improve things to ship Vista as it was after four years of delay? That got them bad press for the lemon on top of the bad press for the DNF.
I guess delaying for another year and releasing it in better shape would have been a smarter move.
And it would kill a significant part of Ebay's revenue.
If the program is ever abused to the extent you suggest, Ebay would probably stop the VeRo program. Or at least introduce a process to complain about unjustified removals, and then kick those companies from VeRo who abuse the system too much.
I'm not sure if that would help against Scientology, as e-meters probably make up not much of Ebay's revenues. But if Dell, for example, would try to stop all sales of used Dell computers, I'm sure they would not last long in the VeRo program.
Reportedly most of it comes from botnets:
Insecure machines that were taken over by hackers and whose clueless owners did not notice anything. Or even don't care.
Now if ISPs start selling traffic by the gigabyte (again - it was not uncommon a few years ago), the owner of those spam-slaves would notice it on their internet bills. At that point, I think securing one's machine would become a lot more popular and the botnets would shrink. Overall result:
less spam and DDOS attacks.
Considering the inbound hacking attempts, my father still has a 2 GByte/month plan and so far I've heard no complaints about suddenly increasing bills. So it seems to be not that much.
You can extend this argument to classical music BTW:
The bad musicians and composers from Bach's and Beethoven's time are long forgotten, and what remains is the work of the geniuses.
Likewise, every kind of art should be judged by its finest contributions. There will always be incompetents but they do not define the value of the genre.
I think the conflict about interrogating government aides or not makes a story that is worthwhile to report by itself. No need to suppress it in favor of something else ;-)
IIRC my classes on the subject, you also need to use a low pass that cuts off anything at or over half the sample rate before sampling. That leaves you with two possible outcomes: ;-)
1) You use a low pass filter that does the job well. The 22.4kHz tone is filtered out and does not reach the A/D converter in the first place. You get digital silence
2) You use a lousy low pass filter or none at all. Now you get a digital signal, but it is NOT a representation of a 22.4kHz tone. Instead, on playback you get some frequencies that are sums or differences of half the sample rate and the original signal. Sorry, don't remember all the details...
The lawsuit is not over yet. The ruling that they do not own the Unix copyright will certainly diminish their chances, but there is no verdict yet about who has to pay whom and how much. So far, we had a lot of pre-trial maneuvers but then the lawsuit against IBM was put on hold due to SCO going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.
The Novell lawsuit, however, is still underway.
Groklaw's overview (URL:http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760#ref453>) says there will be a 4 day trial starting on April 29th.
If you believe the analysis at Groklaw, SCO is likely to be whacked hard in that trial. Of course they can try to appeal. I expect them to do so, in order to draw out the final defeat and keep the FUD alive a bit longer.
There may be some small party in your country you (mostly) agree with. If I was a US citizen, it would be the libertarians for me.
By all means vote for that party, even if they have no serious chance of winning the election.
First, it tells the other parties that there is support for the positions of $SmallParty, and they may adopt some of those positions in order to win voters over.
+++ Recent history lesson +++
I'm currently observing such an effect with the "Linkspartei" in Germany, which consists of communists and socialists. Lots of their members and voters are former supporters of the SPD ("social democratic party of Germany"), which is traditionally a moderately left party that supports the "worker class" but is willing to work in a capitalist environment.
Several years ago, the SPD under Chancellor Schröder took a much more industry-friendly stance, alienating the left party wing in the process. Said left wing broke off under Oscar Lafontaine and subsequently united with the remnants of the old east Germany communists, forming the "Linkspartei".
By now the "Linkspartei" has gained enough popularity to get maybe 10% of the votes in an election, mostly at the expense of the SPD. The result is that the SPD is now moving left again, trying to regain some of those votes.
+++ end of history lesson +++
Second, if $SmallParty manages to gain a respectable third rank in the election, voting for them will no longer look like a total waste of one's vote. After all, they might win the next election with some more support. That may gain a few more votes from people who did already agree with them, but preferred to vote for a "lesser evil" that had actually a chance of winning.
...and otherwise refrain from censoring the internet activities of their users. Acceptable ways to achieve this:
2) Change the terms of service so they clearly state a guaranteed minimum throughput. Do not sell more connections than you can provide with the minimum throughput.
2) Change the terms of service to some model with limited volume, charge those who exceed it per gigabyte. This does not absolutely prevent network congestion, but cost considerations will make most high volume users back off. In areas where people are not deterred (rich filesharers?) use the extra income to upgrade the network.
Governments have a need to keep documents for pretty long times, and they are increasingly aware of the problems they will get from a vendor that changes the default formats of its applications every few years. If you watch the IT news, you will see a tendency to mandate open document standards for government use.
;-)
Now Microsoft has three options:
1) Give the standards board the middle finger and lose the government business. Financial ouch, and more importantly companies who work with the government a lot might switch to the same application as the government (like Open Office) for convenience. Great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
2) Use ODF. Might not support all quirks of their old documents (which is a valid concern but not reason enough to support those quirks for eternity). But more importantly, it kills the vendor lock-in. Another great way to erode the dominant position of Microsoft Office.
3) Try to push a lousy pseudo-standard like OOXML through the standards boards. I will skip the discussion of the details here and just say I think the opponents are right when they say only Microsoft would be able to support OOXML (halfway) well. Result if MS gets away with it:
Microsoft can claim to save documents in a standardized format, any legal requirements in that regard are satisfied. A great step towards keeping the government business without being really interoperable with others.
Now guess what Microsoft is trying
Because once you have a generally accepted standard and applications that support it, you should be able to use those applications for a very long time.
If an individual vendor ceases to support the standard, you have a good chance of finding another who will do so. In that case, you may have some expenses for switching applications but you can still can use your document format.
With Microsoft, your chances of getting either are slim:
-they often change their document formats, which leads to users of later Office versions sending you documents you cannot use without upgrading.
-third party support for MS formats usually depends on reverse engineering because the formats are poorly specified. Note that you can usually download some specifications, but those tend to be out of date and incomplete. This leads to third party support that sucks, and I think the Open Office developers did a quite good job by getting it almost right under those circumstances.
I call bullshit.
Keeping the old defects in a new standard for reasons of "compatibility" is not a good idea, because it means missing a good opportunity for improvement.
Keeping them in new versions of the old products is something I can (barely) understand, but declaring bugs to be features for the whole industry is just plain wrong. I think if Microsoft/ECMA keep insisting on that, ISO should reject OOXML outright.
I found it depends a lot on the quality on the screen.
;-)
Back in the CRT days, I did read the occasional e-book but it was a strain on the eyes. With a TFT in decent quality, I find it much more enjoyable. And for catastrophic computer failure there are backups
Right now, I'm sitting in front of a 1600 x 1200 pixel, 20'' screen and the only big advantage left for paper books is that they are much more portable. That is, for reading, not merely transporting. In the subway on the way to work, paper books are still a much better choice than carrying a laptop for reading...
In my experience, large companies are often almost as inefficient as governments. At least in situations where they have not much competition (where real competition exists, the incumbent will adapt or die).
This said, most newcomer telecoms in Germany are not eager to lay their own cable. How much of that is due to lack of money, and how much of it is due to legal problems (right of way and such?) I don't know. Might have to research that a bit more...
Germany has tried this in a half-assed way too, but in this case the small telecoms without infrastructure seem to suffer more.
The telecommunications part of the former Bundespost was split off and sold to the public as "Deutsche Telekom". It is now a publicly traded company. The Deutsche Telekom also got ownership of the infrastructure, but has to rent the "last mile" of cable to the customer's house to the competition, if said customer wants to get his connection from the competition. A new regulation authority was introduced to set a "fair" price for this.
As usual both sides are complaining, the Deutsche Telekom says they deserve more rent and the "Joe Blow's Fly By Night telecoms" say they are being ripped off. To me, the price of currently 10,68 Euros per month for maintaining the cable seems too high rather than too low, so the incumbent has no reason to complain.
So a lot depends on the rent that is set by your regulation authority, and you get the usual political wrangling about it.
I think a better idea would have been to keep the cable as public infrastructure and rent it to any interested telecom at the same price.
While I agree with most of your post, I wonder about the point where extreme overselling turns into fraud. As in, the advertisements promise great network performance but what you actually get is a dial-up-like crawl.
...because of the "cheap" in LiFePo. Any Lithium-Ion battery needs some cathode, and I guess that LiFePo will eventually be cheaper than the cobalt oxide that is common in today's laptop batteries.
At that point, making fake "LiFePo" batteries from old technology will actually be more expensive than real LiFePo. Scammers might still sell you second-rate batteries that don't last long, but the risk of them exploding under your butt will be greatly reduced.