I'm rather skeptical myself, but since those guys are not exactly hiding behind some anonymous company, they may be sincere in believing they have invented the perpetuum mobile.
And if we are VERY lucky, it may be real.
So give it a few more weeks. Since Steorn have just announced they are ready for demonstrating their invention, its time for them to put up or shut up. Lets say until the end of August. If they can show proof by then, good. If not, I'll follow the others in this discussion who recommend to disregard them as frauds;-)
$50 bucks cheaper? Who thinks that this is going to make a single person buying a Dell change their mind? There are those who are inclined to use something other than Vista anyway, but might give Vista a try if it does not cost extra. Now, there is another choice at $50 less...
Actually, $50 may be realistic for Dell. While we don't know the details of Dell's contract with Microsoft, it is quite possible that they pay only $30 - $40 per copy they bundle with their PCs. If so, they can afford to sell it for $50. If you pay hundreds when buying Vista separately, it is a matter of Microsoft's pricing policy. No slap in the face from Dell.
As I wrote in my other post (two levels above) some of that is unavoidable. To elaborate, each time we communicate with some service on the internet, we give away some information. Even if it is only the fact that we are interested in a particular thing.
But this discussion is about a case of rather brazen data-grabbing, far more than what I consider reasonable for the purpose of installing and running an operating system. To this, we can and should resist. For instance, by boycotting the product in question.
If you want to be part of the whole, you have to accept the inherit lose of privacy that is associated with it. Doesn't matter how much you dislike it, but as a whole EVERYTHING is becoming more connected, you can't truly expect your privacy to somehow remain immune from all this "openness". To some extent this is true, but that does not mean we should give up more privacy than what is unavoidable. In the context of this article, I think it is bad to have a bunch of services on my computer that send more data to the software vendor than immediately necessary. It might be useful for Microsoft to run statistics about the habits of Windows users, but that does not mean I have to accept being monitored.
BTW, my private computers are still on Windows 2000, because I found the product activation in XP too annoying. Vista is completely disqualified. The new machine I've just bought will probably be my last Windows PC, because it already approaches the limits of what Windows 2000 Professional can handle (Dual Core, 2 GByte RAM). Any significant upgrades from that will make a switch to a proper 64 bit OS necessary;-)
My rule number one in dealing with Microsoft: Unless forced by circumstances, never upgrade to a new version of Windows until the second service pack is released. Let other people have the grief. The huge number of bugs in Windows XP before SP2 was very expensive for us. If I remember correctly, SP2 fixed more than 630 bugs, and some of the fixes were not documented. It is not only the vulnerabilities that are expensive. Better yet: Wait until the service pack is out and independent reviewers are happy with it. Because if people stick to the rule "after SP X things are fine", it is merely an incentive for Microsoft to rush the service packs until the number X in question is reached. In the case of Vista, it seems Microsoft was already organizing the beta testing for SP1 before the OS was released to end users: http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6152704.html That article was from January 23rd. Looks like the beginning of a trend to increase the SP count as fast as possible.
Single-user systems would not be affected. Except in the case that you don't trust some software and run it with a non-administrator account to be safe against hijacking of your system.
These CPU bugs may allow malware to get around limitations of the user account it is running on. Thus making an otherwise very sensible precaution useless. The same goes for things like Vista's UAC, if the malware can hack into the OS itself thanks to a CPU bug.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs. I think you are correct in analyzing their behaviour. At the same time, however, this means their own developers are stuck with an increasingly difficult to maintain system. NOT breaking up a complex system into modules is a recipe for trouble, and it shows. Vista reviews are mostly negative, and the (few) people I know who actually tried it were not so happy either.
Thus I believe that keeping Windows obfuscated will protect their business model in the short run, but make it harder for Microsoft to compete in terms of quality. Vista seems to be a sign that such problems are already growing at Microsoft.
If China still was a communist country in the traditional sense, they would not be much of an economic threat. IMHO, the inefficiency of the central planning bureaucracy was the downfall of the USSR in the cold war. The Chinese have recognized that and allow their companies a lot more freedom. In effect, they still have a one-party dictatorship but with a semi-capitalist economy.
Actually, 2000 was quite a good system for the home user with a bit of NT knowledge (aka geek who wanted an OS for his private computer). It introduced up-to-date Direct X and USB support to the NT line, and in 2007 it still supports most games in the market. It was, however, not 100% compatible to existing DOS games, and that may have kept Microsoft from marketing it to home users at the time.
Another reason might have been price differentiation: Windows 2000 was only available as "professional" or server version at a hefty price tag. Not exactly suitable for computer discount shops. That changed with XP, which has a separate "home edition" that is IMHO pretty crippled when it comes to administration. This way, Microsoft can sell it cheaply to home users without cannibalizing the "professional" version too much.
Michael Moore "forgot" to mention that the bank did a background check (had to by law?) to find out if he had a criminal history. The gun was handed over after that check.
The film made it appear as if everybody could walk into the bank, open an account and immediately take a rifle away. Technically Michael Moore did not lie, but the way he reported the proceedings was definitely misleading.
I guess it would be used to calibrate a (limited by wear and tear, yes) number of "second generation" reference weights. Which would obviously not be quite as accurate, but still good enough to serve as reference to calibrate commercially weights and weighing machines.
The great advantage of this approach is that you can reproduce the original reference weight if necessary, while the loss of the current prototype would mean a much bigger problem.
Solution: Transfer based billing. I think the sender should pay for the bandwidth as it is with the web sites as well. Your incoming traffic requires also outgoing traffic and you attach the interest of the company (build as little infrastructure as economically feasible) with the interest of the client (use that infrastructure as little as economically feasible).
Transfer based as in "20 GBytes per month included, after that we charge extra"?
That would make sense, but where I live (Germany), such offers have become rare. The few you can still find outside the mobile market tend to have a pretty low data volume (2-5 GByte/month), and the price for extra volume is very steep.
Instead, most vendors sell "flatrates" (supposedly unlimited traffic) and then try to get rid of the "Petes" by throttling their traffic and sometimes cutting off their service. Which obviously causes all kinds of legal and PR risks. Stupid gits...
Things like that are one reason why I -only have one account at a time in any online game -and pay for 3 months in advance at most.
So if anything along these lines happens to my account, my financial loss will be rather limited and the company in question will never see me again as a customer.
BTW, I'm talking about MMOGs in general, not Blizzard in particular. Blizzard are already on my personal boycott list for different (political) reasons.
If you look around on the internet, you will find a few reports from people who managed to return their copy of Windows directly to Microsoft and got a few dollars out of it. Usually in the case of preinstalled OEM versions.
But the same reports tend to say that it takes quite a bit of perseverance to get through to the right department. So even if you can technically return the software, it will cost you time and effort.
A problem that is best avoided by using free software where it is available;-)
Microsoft Office doesn't KNOW which subset is 'standardized', so how can it possibly limit the files it writes to that subset.
If someone were to define THAT subset and program MS Office to 'know about it', then we'd essentially have a whole new standard. (And it would look pretty much like ODF.)
The subset is defined in the infamous 6000 page document. Or it will be defined if Microsoft gets its wish to have it accepted as a standard. Programming MS Office to 'know about it' would obviously be Microsofts problem. After all they drafted the proposed MSOOXML standard and should know best how to implement it. If they are unable to do that and are as a result unable to sell their office suite to the government - tough luck. In fact, I think accepting the MSOOXML standard as proposed by Microsoft would be a pretty big favour towards them, because they could keep all the quirks that are part of the current MS Office implementations and have been made part of the MSOOXML draft.
Please explain how to implement "autoSpaceLikeWord95" and "lineWrapLikeWord6". Microsoft's proposed 6000 page standard does not define these, along with many other parts of the specification. Even if you can reverse engineer Microsoft's products and determine how to implement those features, Microsoft's covenant not to sue does not "apply to things that are merely referenced in the specification". As you can see MS Office Open XML fails on all three requirements.
A possible solution would be that government limits its documents to using only the standardized features in MS Office Open XML. Technologically that may be an inferior solution, as a 6000 page standard is probably unnecessarily complex (and in this case, reportedly skewed to accomodate known bugs in Microsoft Office). Which may be reason enough to reject it for lack of quality. But it would fulfill the legal goal of having a format for which everyone may implement a reader. It would also disqualify MS Office for government use if it actually uses these unspecified features;-)
It's a good game NOT to play since it isn't really a game. Seems to me they've spent too much time thinking about what's "realistic" and "hardcore" and not enough time thinking about what is fun. I think that particular problem arises when you have player-controlled territory and the need to defend it (because your stations there CAN be blown up while you are offline). Suddenly it is not a game anymore, but work you have to do unless you want to lose your prior conquests.
My own EVE Char will avoid that particular style of gameplay and tour the lawless regions now and then in "hit and run" style once she is fit enough. We will see how well this works out, and at this point it will be decided if I stick to EVE for a longer time. Because EVE is a great game in many ways, but I won't let it turn into a second job.
Player-level espionage and corruption is expected in EVE and part of the game. But cheating by GMs is just lame, for the reasons Skycraft-fu has explained.
That some key events are rigged is a given. Sorry, but it can't be any other way. Storylines are developed months in advance, the developers need time to implement them. You can't develop two or more stories and possible outcomes just in case it turns out this or that way. That's even quite understandable. Solid reasoning so far, but I draw another conclusion from it:
When you cannot make your storyline play out as desired without cheating, you should not have long, preplanned storylines. At best, you can have one where irresistible forces that are credibly outside player control drive the plot.
In EVE's case such forces could be stargates going defective or some star going nova, as controlling such events is outside the skills available to player characters. But if CCP only spawns something like a medium-sized pirate fleet, they should be prepared for players wiping it out before it achieves its storyline purpose.
one could view it that way, but unlike free TV, Microsoft gains much of its income from the licenses the "user base" buys. So they are as much customers as the big business partners of Microsoft. Your analogy works a lot better for Google, which charges its users nothing and lives entirely off advertising revenue.
But either way, Microsoft cannot afford to lose its user base by annoying it too much;-)
Wrong, people are still buying their stuff despite its increasingly user-unfriendly restrictions. So Microsoft gets away with pleasing big business by including DRM stuff. I wonder when they will go too far and trigger an avalanche of dissatisfied users moving off Windows. Personally, I'm somewhere in between at the moment (playing with Linux now and then, but mostly holding out on Win 2000). But I guess the way Microsoft is going will eventually drive me to make the transition.
This strategy could be part of the "if you can't beat them, join them" plan: If Vista and the corresponding to-be-released server OS prove to be disappointments over the long term the Windows platform as it exists today may be allowed to wither and die on the vine, to be replaced with something more Linux-like (or perhaps BSD-like).
If it does indeed "pull an Apple" and underpin its OS with such Free content it'll need a differentiator--and they intend that to be backwards compatibility with what will be "legacy Windows", which will also allow them to maintain their vendor lock-in. That key piece of the puzzle cannot be Free under the MSFT business model so the goal of more aggressively enforcing patents is likely to explore the feasibility of taking the "MSFT/Linux" or "BSD Windows" route whilst maintaining the leverage they enjoy as a monopoly.
Interesting long term view, but as several people (including yourself) have said, Microsoft might fail to wriggle out of the obligations imposed by the GPL. If they want to "pull an Apple" and still maintain their vendor lock-in, I believe they will have to do it in the same way as Apple, by building on something with a license that allows closing the source. BSD, for instance, like Apple did. If they do that, it will be interesting to see how well they can reproduce their own APIs on the new underpinnings. Sometimes it looks like they have trouble with that on the old Windows platform;-)
IANAL too, but AFAIK part of #1 already exists: after being hit with a frivolous lawsuit, you can sue the plaintiff to recover your legal fees and have a good chance of winning.
In this case, I think plaintiff is asking for it (by suing some big corporations who can afford fighting this bullshit in court;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm rather skeptical myself, but since those guys are not exactly hiding behind some anonymous company, they may be sincere in believing they have invented the perpetuum mobile.
;-)
And if we are VERY lucky, it may be real.
So give it a few more weeks. Since Steorn have just announced they are ready for demonstrating their invention, its time for them to put up or shut up. Lets say until the end of August. If they can show proof by then, good. If not, I'll follow the others in this discussion who recommend to disregard them as frauds
$50 bucks cheaper? Who thinks that this is going to make a single person buying a Dell change their mind?
There are those who are inclined to use something other than Vista anyway, but might give Vista a try if it does not cost extra. Now, there is another choice at $50 less...
Actually, $50 may be realistic for Dell. While we don't know the details of Dell's contract with Microsoft, it is quite possible that they pay only $30 - $40 per copy they bundle with their PCs.
If so, they can afford to sell it for $50. If you pay hundreds when buying Vista separately, it is a matter of Microsoft's pricing policy. No slap in the face from Dell.
As I wrote in my other post (two levels above) some of that is unavoidable. To elaborate, each time we communicate with some service on the internet, we give away some information. Even if it is only the fact that we are interested in a particular thing.
But this discussion is about a case of rather brazen data-grabbing, far more than what I consider reasonable for the purpose of installing and running an operating system. To this, we can and should resist. For instance, by boycotting the product in question.
If you want to be part of the whole, you have to accept the inherit lose of privacy that is associated with it. Doesn't matter how much you dislike it, but as a whole EVERYTHING is becoming more connected, you can't truly expect your privacy to somehow remain immune from all this "openness".
;-)
To some extent this is true, but that does not mean we should give up more privacy than what is unavoidable.
In the context of this article, I think it is bad to have a bunch of services on my computer that send more data to the software vendor than immediately necessary. It might be useful for Microsoft to run statistics about the habits of Windows users, but that does not mean I have to accept being monitored.
BTW, my private computers are still on Windows 2000, because I found the product activation in XP too annoying. Vista is completely disqualified. The new machine I've just bought will probably be my last Windows PC, because it already approaches the limits of what Windows 2000 Professional can handle (Dual Core, 2 GByte RAM).
Any significant upgrades from that will make a switch to a proper 64 bit OS necessary
* AFAIK, making wasteful products is not illegal.
o ntrol/20041026_Ruling.pdf
* The antitrust argument might have some merit, but I'm not sure if it is good enough to take to court.
* Finally, I've found a case about DMCA and printer cartridges that has already be decided in court:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Lexmark_v_Static_C
Here, Lexmark failed with a lawsuit against a company that reverse engineered its cartridges.
My rule number one in dealing with Microsoft: Unless forced by circumstances, never upgrade to a new version of Windows until the second service pack is released. Let other people have the grief. The huge number of bugs in Windows XP before SP2 was very expensive for us. If I remember correctly, SP2 fixed more than 630 bugs, and some of the fixes were not documented. It is not only the vulnerabilities that are expensive.
Better yet:
Wait until the service pack is out and independent reviewers are happy with it. Because if people stick to the rule "after SP X things are fine", it is merely an incentive for Microsoft to rush the service packs until the number X in question is reached.
In the case of Vista, it seems Microsoft was already organizing the beta testing for SP1 before the OS was released to end users:
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6152704.html
That article was from January 23rd. Looks like the beginning of a trend to increase the SP count as fast as possible.
Single-user systems would not be affected.
Except in the case that you don't trust some software and run it with a non-administrator account to be safe against hijacking of your system.
These CPU bugs may allow malware to get around limitations of the user account it is running on. Thus making an otherwise very sensible precaution useless. The same goes for things like Vista's UAC, if the malware can hack into the OS itself thanks to a CPU bug.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs.
I think you are correct in analyzing their behaviour. At the same time, however, this means their own developers are stuck with an increasingly difficult to maintain system. NOT breaking up a complex system into modules is a recipe for trouble, and it shows. Vista reviews are mostly negative, and the (few) people I know who actually tried it were not so happy either.
Thus I believe that keeping Windows obfuscated will protect their business model in the short run, but make it harder for Microsoft to compete in terms of quality. Vista seems to be a sign that such problems are already growing at Microsoft.
If China still was a communist country in the traditional sense, they would not be much of an economic threat. IMHO, the inefficiency of the central planning bureaucracy was the downfall of the USSR in the cold war.
The Chinese have recognized that and allow their companies a lot more freedom. In effect, they still have a one-party dictatorship but with a semi-capitalist economy.
Actually, 2000 was quite a good system for the home user with a bit of NT knowledge (aka geek who wanted an OS for his private computer). It introduced up-to-date Direct X and USB support to the NT line, and in 2007 it still supports most games in the market. It was, however, not 100% compatible to existing DOS games, and that may have kept Microsoft from marketing it to home users at the time.
Another reason might have been price differentiation:
Windows 2000 was only available as "professional" or server version at a hefty price tag. Not exactly suitable for computer discount shops.
That changed with XP, which has a separate "home edition" that is IMHO pretty crippled when it comes to administration. This way, Microsoft can sell it cheaply to home users without cannibalizing the "professional" version too much.
Michael Moore "forgot" to mention that the bank did a background check (had to by law?) to find out if he had a criminal history. The gun was handed over after that check.
The film made it appear as if everybody could walk into the bank, open an account and immediately take a rifle away. Technically Michael Moore did not lie, but the way he reported the proceedings was definitely misleading.
I guess it would be used to calibrate a (limited by wear and tear, yes) number of "second generation" reference weights. Which would obviously not be quite as accurate, but still good enough to serve as reference to calibrate commercially weights and weighing machines.
The great advantage of this approach is that you can reproduce the original reference weight if necessary, while the loss of the current prototype would mean a much bigger problem.
Transfer based as in "20 GBytes per month included, after that we charge extra"?
That would make sense, but where I live (Germany), such offers have become rare. The few you can still find outside the mobile market tend to have a pretty low data volume (2-5 GByte/month), and the price for extra volume is very steep.
Instead, most vendors sell "flatrates" (supposedly unlimited traffic) and then try to get rid of the "Petes" by throttling their traffic and sometimes cutting off their service. Which obviously causes all kinds of legal and PR risks. Stupid gits...
Things like that are one reason why I
-only have one account at a time in any online game
-and pay for 3 months in advance at most.
So if anything along these lines happens to my account, my financial loss will be rather limited and the company in question will never see me again as a customer.
BTW, I'm talking about MMOGs in general, not Blizzard in particular. Blizzard are already on my personal boycott list for different (political) reasons.
If you look around on the internet, you will find a few reports from people who managed to return their copy of Windows directly to Microsoft and got a few dollars out of it. Usually in the case of preinstalled OEM versions.
;-)
But the same reports tend to say that it takes quite a bit of perseverance to get through to the right department. So even if you can technically return the software, it will cost you time and effort.
A problem that is best avoided by using free software where it is available
Microsoft Office doesn't KNOW which subset is 'standardized', so how can it possibly limit the files it writes to that subset.
If someone were to define THAT subset and program MS Office to 'know about it', then we'd essentially have a whole new standard. (And it would look pretty much like ODF.)
The subset is defined in the infamous 6000 page document. Or it will be defined if Microsoft gets its wish to have it accepted as a standard.
Programming MS Office to 'know about it' would obviously be Microsofts problem. After all they drafted the proposed MSOOXML standard and should know best how to implement it. If they are unable to do that and are as a result unable to sell their office suite to the government - tough luck.
In fact, I think accepting the MSOOXML standard as proposed by Microsoft would be a pretty big favour towards them, because they could keep all the quirks that are part of the current MS Office implementations and have been made part of the MSOOXML draft.
A possible solution would be that government limits its documents to using only the standardized features in MS Office Open XML.
Technologically that may be an inferior solution, as a 6000 page standard is probably unnecessarily complex (and in this case, reportedly skewed to accomodate known bugs in Microsoft Office). Which may be reason enough to reject it for lack of quality.
But it would fulfill the legal goal of having a format for which everyone may implement a reader. It would also disqualify MS Office for government use if it actually uses these unspecified features
It's a good game NOT to play since it isn't really a game. Seems to me they've spent too much time thinking about what's "realistic" and "hardcore" and not enough time thinking about what is fun.
I think that particular problem arises when you have player-controlled territory and the need to defend it (because your stations there CAN be blown up while you are offline). Suddenly it is not a game anymore, but work you have to do unless you want to lose your prior conquests.
My own EVE Char will avoid that particular style of gameplay and tour the lawless regions now and then in "hit and run" style once she is fit enough. We will see how well this works out, and at this point it will be decided if I stick to EVE for a longer time. Because EVE is a great game in many ways, but I won't let it turn into a second job.
Player-level espionage and corruption is expected in EVE and part of the game. But cheating by GMs is just lame, for the reasons Skycraft-fu has explained.
That some key events are rigged is a given. Sorry, but it can't be any other way. Storylines are developed months in advance, the developers need time to implement them. You can't develop two or more stories and possible outcomes just in case it turns out this or that way. That's even quite understandable.
Solid reasoning so far, but I draw another conclusion from it:
When you cannot make your storyline play out as desired without cheating, you should not have long, preplanned storylines. At best, you can have one where irresistible forces that are credibly outside player control drive the plot.
In EVE's case such forces could be stargates going defective or some star going nova, as controlling such events is outside the skills available to player characters. But if CCP only spawns something like a medium-sized pirate fleet, they should be prepared for players wiping it out before it achieves its storyline purpose.
Hmm...
;-)
one could view it that way, but unlike free TV, Microsoft gains much of its income from the licenses the "user base" buys. So they are as much customers as the big business partners of Microsoft. Your analogy works a lot better for Google, which charges its users nothing and lives entirely off advertising revenue.
But either way, Microsoft cannot afford to lose its user base by annoying it too much
Wrong, people are still buying their stuff despite its increasingly user-unfriendly restrictions. So Microsoft gets away with pleasing big business by including DRM stuff.
I wonder when they will go too far and trigger an avalanche of dissatisfied users moving off Windows.
Personally, I'm somewhere in between at the moment (playing with Linux now and then, but mostly holding out on Win 2000). But I guess the way Microsoft is going will eventually drive me to make the transition.
Interesting long term view, but as several people (including yourself) have said, Microsoft might fail to wriggle out of the obligations imposed by the GPL.
If they want to "pull an Apple" and still maintain their vendor lock-in, I believe they will have to do it in the same way as Apple, by building on something with a license that allows closing the source. BSD, for instance, like Apple did.
If they do that, it will be interesting to see how well they can reproduce their own APIs on the new underpinnings. Sometimes it looks like they have trouble with that on the old Windows platform
IANAL too, but AFAIK part of #1 already exists:
;-)
after being hit with a frivolous lawsuit, you can sue the plaintiff to recover your legal fees and have a good chance of winning.
In this case, I think plaintiff is asking for it (by suing some big corporations who can afford fighting this bullshit in court