If I were a Napster creditor (the only financial stakeholders left), I'd try to sue whomever is responsible for this colossal blunder.
No cause of action against the other creditors since they have no duty of care towards you. The court has immunity.
When a company goes into Chapter 11 with huge debts creditors will often prefer a total loss to allowing the company to be sold to an original investor for a few cents on the dollar. This is a prisoner dillema type paradox, the optimal strategy is paradoxical if you only consider one case.
The reason why I will force a company into chapter 7 rather than allow a buyout is that I would prefer to get 0 cents on the dollar than allow the company insiders to get control of $100 million worth of assets for $5 million and pay me 5 cents on the dollar. I would rather lose $5K or so than encourage VCs to start doing this type of thing deliberately.
In this case Bertelseman jetissoned the idiot CEO who entered the deal in the first place only after the original objections were made.
In the excite at home case however, the creditors were complete idiots. AT&T bid way over the value of the assets they were acquiring and the creditors were essentially trying to blackmail AT&T into paying for continuity of service. Then despite having rejected the bid the creditors went to the court after AT&T had suffered the disruption and tried to get the original deal!!!
Another reason for forcing a company into Chapter 7 is that rather than get paid 5cents on the dollar on the debt I might prefer to buy certain assets of the company at firesale prices.
You can have my C compiler when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers.
Well I said that when I looked at C++. I mean bleeuurgh!
If you have a good set of macros to deal with memory management, string allocation etc then C is still pretty good. The noce thing about C# is that you get all that without having to lose any of the traditional C ways of doing things.
Thing about Java was that I always got the feeling I was somehow being preached at and told the 'right' way to do things, and if it was not 100% pure then you get cast into the pit of hell etc. If the Christian Coalition wrote a language it would be like Java.
Hey just what else are you going to do on a box that has a low end pentium and outputs only to a TV?
It is a cool hack but at the end of the day you can get the same effect much more easily by adding a $60 TV out card to a PC. I just put together a PC upgrade with a new motherboard, processor, video card and memory for $350. So OK thats a tad more expensive than the $200 of an Xbox but the result is a heck of a lot more useful.
And don't get me started on the 'cheap supercomputer' idea, no you can put as many Xboxen together as you like, you are not going to break any price performance barriers because the price/performance of your basic block is simply not cutting edge, even with Microsoft making a loss on every unit. Also whatever you gained in hardware savings would be rapidly lost through the cost of powering a farm of the damn things. If you want cutting edge price/performance get boxes that don't waste money on a disk, have a larger processor, more RAM and come with multiple LAN ports.
So logically once you have the X-box running linux the next thing to do is run Wine and then the Xbox emulator. The Multics or Lisp machine emulators would also be pretty cool. Alternatively if someone could get a ZXSpectrum emulator up and running on it.
As it stands this hack is pretty much like the fact my Zaurus runs Linux, kewl but completely irrelevant to why I have the device.
This is one aspect of the problem, the research model of Comp Scie is an engineering model, that is distinct from the model of physics and completely different from the arts.
When Sokol made his idiotic point about the arts 'journal' Social Texts the points never made by any of the attacks on post-modernism were that (1) the journal is not that prominent in the field and (2) getting an article in a journal of that sort is like getting an article accepted by Slashdot, it means precisely nothing.
Sokol's wider point that lots of people in the arts are pretentious farts is completely correct. However it is only a special case of the more general truth that many people in every academic field are pretentious farts.
The point is that in science the litterature has a specific role, it reports incremental discoveries. There is also a secondary role in reporting theories, however this is vastly overrated by the scientists as the Popper/Kuhne debate demonstrated.
The engineering litterature is quite different because it is in almost every case a secondary litterature. We publish our major findings as books, manuals, programs and documentation. If I want to find the latest on any piece of work I go to the Web.
The arts litterature is different again because there are no right answers. Points are awarded not for what is said but how it is said. Of course this is not science, but nobody ever claimed it was. For example Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument is a basic text of the philosophy of AI. It didn't get that status because anyone agreed with it and found it perceptive, in fact the reverse, everyone has multiple ways to demolish the argument which is of course the point, I can't publish my rebuttal of Searle without giving him yet another citation. I call texts of that type Koan texts because the role they play is completely separate from whether the argument is correct or even whether the argument is correctly stated.
McLuhan falls into the same category, he is almows always wrong on pretty much every assertion he makes (television is a COLD medium? - NOT!), however reading his books is a useful way to start thinking about things.
So given that the litterature is not monolithic and serves multiple purposes, what can be done? Well first look at the way that the publishing houses established themselves. They started off by publishing the proceedings of conferences. These are a very special form of publication because they are largely stand alone and the whole editorial infrastructure is ready made.
People send papers to conferences so they can go to the conference, not necessarily just to get publication credits. The prominence of the conference is independent of the prominence of the journal.
The way to get open publication off the ground is to start by publishing conference proceedings. Get a small number of the worlds most prominent research libraries to kick in some funds to maintain a server infrastructure - MIT, Stanford, Oxford Bodleian, Cambridge, the cost would be less than the cost of a few journals and certainly less than the cost of book storage! Start small and work up, don't try to displace Science and Nature on the first day. Most journals are nowhere near that level of credibility, start with the low hanging fruit.
The IETF should give Jabber recognition as the industry standard, and then it is up to the other software manufacturers to comply to the Jabber standard or fall behind.
That is not what the IETF does. Standards do not 'recognize' anything, and plenty of IETF standards fail to be used outside the Working Group.
As for manufacturers 'falling behind', an IETF working group is not going to force them to adopt a standard.
In the IETF adoption is a criteria for recognition. The cases where the IETF has tried to drive adoption have been the least successful (BEEP, GSSAPI, DNSSEC).
Moreover, the only reason I bought a zaurus was that it was the only device then available in PDA format with a keyboard and a compactflash slot. I use mine to surf the web via my 802.11b card.
Without the keyboard the Zaurus is no different to a Palm.
SMTP and FTP examples of good work, but I think that when these were under consideration, IETFed still worked much more smoothly than it does today.
I doubt that either FTP or SMTP would be passed in their current form today.
SMTP was introduced as a quick and dirty 'Gordian knot' solution to email transport. The good part is that it was introduced as a far simpler solution than the competing UUCP, MTP etc specs...
The bad part is that SMTP has plenty of features that are poorly thought out and still more that are not well specified. For example most of the problems with mailing lists could have been avoided if the design of SMTP had considered mailing lists more thoroughly.
Now as it happens none of the alternatives to SMTP address the real problems of email any better than SMTP. However the real failing of the IETF process is that once something like SMTP becomes a standard changing the spec is far harder than the initial design. Only a small part of that difficulty is the problem of compatibility with the legacy base.
In the early days of IETF specifications were published as 'Request For Comments' - the original concept was that they were nothing more than a lengthy email. Today there is layer upon layer of protocol.
The organisation seems to be very slow moving, full of politics - and also, full of clever minds. It is ofcourse good to get official recognition and other good things that can come out of it, but one of the obvious minuses I see is: it s..l...o...w.e..s. d...o...w...n . ..t..h..e d..e...v...e..l..o..p...m..e...n.....?
The big problem with IETF process is that it is very easy to block a specification indefinitely and plenty of folk try to do so.
The problem is not so much the companies as individuals with their own private agenda. I think it very unlikely that a Jabber group would be derailed by AOL seeking to defend its IM turf. But one or two people with an agenda to push some other spec like BEEP could easily bring the group down.
The IETF also has a large number of procedural problems, like insisting that all the group development take place on the mailing list rather than through a mailing list and regular teleconferences as is standard in OASIS or W3C. Another problem is that the RFC format freezes the format of specs in the era of the teletype. Not only is the output ugly, it is damn hard to read.
Another problem with the IETF is that it really does not play well with other children. Most standards bodies have by now got used to interacting with other bodies, not the IETF which has a massive NIH complex. The PKIX group which has been profiling the X.509 standard developed by the ITU is a case in point rather than an exception, the ITU standard had to be profiled before it could be used in IETF standards.
A graphic example of this is BEEP. The Web Services vendors stated at the outset that all their infrastructure was being designed arround XML schema, they would not support BEEP if it was specified as a DTD. So the IETF rushes BEEP to draft standard in less than a year with a DTD based spec and now wonders why none of the major platform vendors intend to use it. The only 'justification' for this decision ever given has been Marshall Rose saying 'well there are some problems with XML Schema', but no details to substantiate the assertion which basically comes down to the whole 'trust us, we know what we are doing and if you disagree with us then you obviously do not'.
The inner circles of the IETF are largely closed to anyone who has not been arround the IETF for 15 years or more. The big problem is that the fine words about being open etc etc are simply not backed by any accounability process with the inevitable result that 'meritocracy' quickly degenereates to cronyism.
The part where things fall apart is at the IESG level. In theory the IESG is charged with maintaining some sort of consistency across IETF work. The problem is that maintaining consistency can easily be a cover for trying to propagate some piece of lossage that should probably be taken off to the woodshed and shot instead. So a lot of groups have been pressured into considering BEEP even though it is inappropriate to their application.
Finally the IETF has a whole rack of shiboleths that have passed their prime. For a long time the IETF was absolutely against NAT 'if you're NAT on the NET you're NOT on the net', to the extent that the IPSEC protocol was designed to be incompatible with NAT (I was there at the meeting). This might have been a defensible position if the IETF had not been responsible for the 32 bit address space allocation scheme that would already have been exhausted in several countries without NAT.
I was giving the keynote at a security track of a Web Services conference recently. A member of the IESG spoke on the IETF approach to standards and inevitably a question about firewalls came up. Not suprisingly the IETF mantra of 'end to end security' was repeated. The problem being that when Alice and Bob are both working for different enterprises the 'ends' of the communication are not identical to the 'ends' of the security context (the enterprise network) or the ends of the trust relationship (the enterprises as a logical construct).
From a design point of view no specification should rely upon security services provided by a firewall. However that is not the same as saying that firewalls provide no protection or add no value. Fifteen years ago, before the ubiquitous availability of crack answered the question a very large number of UNIX sysops argued against the use of shadow passwords as being an exemplar of 'security through obscurity'. The IESG argument on firewalls falls into the same category - although hopefully with Steve Bellovin now on the IESG as a security area director he will be able to do some clue insertion.
The IETF does some usefull work, but they really need to radically reasses what their future role is going to be and how they are going to fill it. They need to shed a lot of the dogma and look into ways that they can improve upon the way things have been done for twenty years rather than continuously praising themselves.
The only thing keeping those regimes alive is the ability of the leaders to blame the US for the results of their own incompetence.
Same thing just happened with Iran. After 9/11 the democratic reformers had an ideal opportunity to take on the unelected mullahs who were then on the defensive. His Inadequacy gives his idiotic 'Axis of Evil' speech and that is all over, the mullahs are back in control and everyone has to denounce the great satan again.
Attacks from US politicians to boost their own ratings do nothing for reform.
Chineese comunism is going to be dumped in the garbage can of history sooner or later. They have already dumped the economic theory and the political part will follow soon enough. Ironically the main thing that holds the party in place is fear of a return to the instability and famines of Mao's great leap forward.
Come on now, do you really think that Bush will be impeached?
The status is currently guarded, or blue on the Ashcroft/Ridge scale.
I certainly think that Bush has done far more worthy of impeachment than Clinton. Harken and the Rangers stadium deal implicate him in outright fraud.
If Bush does start a war with Iraq without a vote in Congress and the attack is a fiasco then impeachment will be a distinct possibility if not a probability. Given that Bush has so far failed to capture Bin Laden or any senior Al Qaeda leader the idea that an invasion of Iraq would be a costless walkover is probably wishfull thinking.
One reason for that is because Fortran is simply better for doing advanced mathematics, is FAR faster, is better known in the sciences, and is more mature.
That has nothing to do with why it is used. If there were no libraries and it ran at half the speed they would still refuse to move.
When I worked at CERN I took a look at the quality of some of the code they were using. CERNlib then was riddled with bugs. I was one of the first people to evaluate PAW, the damn thing was uttter crap with fundamental modelling errors caused by using a histogram as the basic represenatation of a graph. A competent comp sci student could do better in a couple of weeks, ten years later it is still in common use.
Why? I'm not disagreeing (the C# IDE is very nice. A good job, and from Microsoft no less!) but I was wondering if you would give specific reasons for your preference to the Microsoft platform if they don't have anything to do with market share.
Well the main reason I am using it is that my engineering team use Java, I need to know what the constraints are from the MSFT side of the fence (I architect industry standards). Besides that however, emacs simply is not in the same class as Visual Studio, sorry. Visual Studio is the first IDE that has surpassed the Lisp Machine and the VMS Language Sensitive Editor. There is no feature of either system that is missing - with the irritating exception of being able to select text from the keyboard alone!
Now if I had only ever used emacs I might not think it worthy moving, but the claim that Windows programmers would queue up to move to linux and emacs is just idiotic.
I mentioned C and one of them, admittedly a person that doesn't like changing anything, said that he had tried C and found that it had inferior math libraries.
That is where.NET and VMS have major advantages. Both O/S are completely language neutral. You can code in C# and call FORTRAN libraries. You can even program in perl and call any.NET library. So every.NET language has high quality math libraries.
Show a Windows programmer how much easier it is to write code for linux and see how fast they switch
I have twenty years experience of UNIX, ten years of Linux. I use Visual Studio and C# out of choice.
There are very few people that have used as many programming environments as I have. Most people learn one and stick with it, no matter how utterly crap it is. There are people who still argue the merits of EDLN, EDT line mode and vi. You can show a physicist Java and they will still use FORTRAN.
Not a difficult list (note the general lack of MS Office, since I use OpenOffice), but not easy to overcome. I'm sure there are other people with far more obscure programmes they need.
I can hear it now:
"You should use ButtLint instead of project, it doesn't have all the features of project (yet) but you can add any that are missing yourself, while you are at it you can fix a few bugs. I have been using it for over a day. We are just waiting for the next edition which will handle projects with more than 2 people or last over a week.
Fact is that getting Windows programmers to use Linux is going to be at least as hard as getting Mac users to use a PC.
When stuck in traffic it always appears that the other lines of traffic are moving faster. This is because you don't notice when you are moving, you notice when you are stopped and the other lines are moving. O/S hacking is wiredly reversed. You notice when you spend an hour fixing up a problem on an O/S you hate or don't understand too well, but a similar problem on favorite O/S gets written off.
Hmm, wasn't it Pres Reagan who said, "...tear down this wall!" Besides, this has nothing to do with the GOP...
A speach that went down well in the US but you miss out the start of the phrase, "Mr Gorbachev". Gorbachev did far more to end communism in the USSR than Reagan could.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the Communist party had visibly lost control and Gorbachev was clearly not prepared to reassert it by force. The loss of control began in Poland and spread through Eastern Europe. It was the students from East Germany that tore down the wall, not Gorbachev or Reagan.
If huffing and puffing from US politicians would blow down communist regimes then Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea would have fallen first. Instead they are still standing and it is pretty obvious that the regime is using the external hostility as an excuse.
Cancel the sanctions against Cuba and the regime would be lucky to last more than five years. The right is keen to spend money on broadcast propaganda to attack Cuba but completely ignores the propaganda effect of tourists carrying fat wallets. Of course the Cuba sanctions policy is not about bringing down Fidel and has everything to do with getting votea in Florida so the effectiveness is not exactly the issue.
At my company (US/multinational bank in the UK), all employees are offered a chance to sign away our WTD rights. In fact, most people do. Knowing how our legal department checks things out, I'm pretty sure that it's enforcable...
Let us see, US bank in the UK, very likely to observe labor laws and be expert in them.
My experience is that employers frequently find it impossible to believe that the labour laws apply the them. When I was at Southampton University I was a member of the University Council. The union pointed out that the proposed disciplinary procedure that gave the VC the power to dismiss employees without notice were illegal. The VC insisted on this plan despite the head of the law dept telling the VC repeatedly that the proposal was illegal and would mean a dismissed employee would automatically win compensation if they took it to a tribunal. He just kept saying 'but I need this power' and the Head of the law school kept saying 'the union is right you can't have it'.
Unless you have taken legal advice and been told your US bank is legal I would not assume it is.
The idea that the great firewall of China will protect the communist party is farcical. As with any wall it can do nothing against the threat that comes from inside the country.
Of course in the mind of lunatic GOP nationalists nobody in the world outside of the US ever had an idea about freedom or human rights. But the Berlin wall failled and so will the great firewall.
The criticism that will bring down the communist party is local. That is why they are so afraid of an AIDS activist who described how careless officials spread AIDS to whole villiages collecting blood plasma.
Outside comment can play a useful role but politicians who agrandize themselves by claiming to have brought down communism in other countries are largely hot air bags.
Well, that's the letter of the law, but in practice, employers will add a clause to your contract saying you waive your rights under the Working Time Directive. No clause, no job...
Ever heard of an unenforceable contract term?
The EU working time directive trumps the language of the contract. In fact trying to put language in the contract might be used as evidence against the management at a tribunal.
It would be like adding a contract term in the US that said the employee waives rights under the equal opportunity laws.
Labor law is taken very seriously in the EU. Overall the costs of disputes is probably less than in the US however because jury awards in the few types of case allowed in the US tend to be much higher than EU awards.
Be reasonable. This box was not (initially) clicked by default,
Why is that so unreasonable? Like soooo bad?
At the time J++ came out Java was not a particularly well developed language and quite a few things were changing.
What Sun has been demanding is that Java be crippled so that it could not be used as a general purpose programing language for Windows. I don't see how that was a reasonable demand. I don't see why anyone should blame Microsoft for doing what they did.
Part of creating an open industry standard is making the technology available for people who have different objectives. Microsoft wanted to support Java as a replacement for C++. Sun wanted to sabotage that idea.
If Sun had announced Java as a closed, proprietary language that would only be used for purposes they approved i.e. honestly, Microsoft would never have adopted it and neither would anyone else.
wasn't aware that there was a great debate over French vs English.
Kinda demonstrates the futilitiy of french policy in this area, non?
France spends hundreds of millions anually to promote the use of French abroad.
They did not get it perfect, but Microsoft's VM and dev tools completely destroyed any chance of having your "Java" code run on any platform but Windows
Not at all, if you wanted to have compatibility you just clicked a box and you got a warning about any extension use. Same way that every other language compiler does it.
What Sun objected to was the very idea that you might want to use native Windows features in place of the crap they supplied. AWT did not produce pretty results at the time.
The "java" that was taken out of the browser was not a compliant version. It did not pass all the tests in the JCK; as such it was not, in fact, Java
Sun's own implementation did not pass those tests, the tests were only written after the fact. The dispute was over whether Microsoft was bound by future changes in the language. The contract they signed made it very clear in advance that they did not want this.
Given that Sun is the party that is squeaking with rage after the settlement it does not appear to me that Sun really won the dispute.
It does not appear to me that Microsoft ever intended to do anything more than promote Java as an open industry standard. Sun has been completely against Java being an open standard, so why should they expect to have any right to force Microsoft to use it?
I much prefered the MS version. This argument is kind of like the argument over French vs English. French is great if you like a language that is controlled by 9 unelected and unaccountable old farts in the academe franglais. But in the real world we all use English because it is a democratic language where everyone has equal opportunity to extend and improve. English is the Lingua Franca of the Web and is effectively the common language of the EU. Nothing the French government does is going to change that.
Java is not that great that it is not capable of improvement. Sun crippled Java so that it would only work within the area that suited their business objective. Microsoft removed the restriction. Sun then tried to force Microsoft to observe their restrictions by introducing stricter conformance criteria in their next release, Microsoft declined to upgrade.
The initial article is not only insulting by comparing Microsoft's actions to murder, it is also wrong as a matter of fact. The Java case was settled out of court. The anti-trust case did not consider Microsoft extensions to Java.
The only reason why Java was taken out of the browser was the legal action by Sun. If that killed java then sun killed java.
Furthermore the people who claim that C# is unnecessary because we already have java should not also complain that Microsoft tried to modify Java. What Microsoft has made clear they want is an object oriented language that is similar to C, simpler than C++ and open to development. Sun has made it abundantly clear that Java does not meet the third criteria. Therfore Java does not meet the criteria defined by Microsoft, do not complain if they propose something else.
Java was not a novel language. The only novel thought at the time was the idea that anything might displace C++ from the position it had established.
I find the assumption that reporters are automatically entitled to protect criminals somewhat irritating. Of course there are instances in which it is important to keep the identity of a source confidential for the good of society. All to often however protecting a source is more about the private interest of the journalist.
There was a piece on NPR this morning where a reporter from the BBC described testifying at Milosevic's war crimes trial. She dismissed the argument that testifying might bring journalists into danger, "we bear witness".
In the case of journalists interviewing hackers the journalist is often being used for propaganda purposes by the hackers allowing them to propagate myths like they don't try to do harm (most do). It is astonishing (OK no it isn't it is infuriating) how often the hacker's boasts are reported as fact without question. Unfortunately it appears that only the trade press bothers to call up someone like Bruce or myself for a fact check.
What is worse is that by legitimizing hacking these reports may well come back and cause havoc. The RIAA demand to be allowed to carry out vigillante hacking to stop piracy would if implemented cause serious damage to the network. Hacking attacks frequently cause damage far beyond the immediate target.
Slashdot Mirror
No cause of action against the other creditors since they have no duty of care towards you. The court has immunity.
When a company goes into Chapter 11 with huge debts creditors will often prefer a total loss to allowing the company to be sold to an original investor for a few cents on the dollar. This is a prisoner dillema type paradox, the optimal strategy is paradoxical if you only consider one case.
The reason why I will force a company into chapter 7 rather than allow a buyout is that I would prefer to get 0 cents on the dollar than allow the company insiders to get control of $100 million worth of assets for $5 million and pay me 5 cents on the dollar. I would rather lose $5K or so than encourage VCs to start doing this type of thing deliberately.
In this case Bertelseman jetissoned the idiot CEO who entered the deal in the first place only after the original objections were made.
In the excite at home case however, the creditors were complete idiots. AT&T bid way over the value of the assets they were acquiring and the creditors were essentially trying to blackmail AT&T into paying for continuity of service. Then despite having rejected the bid the creditors went to the court after AT&T had suffered the disruption and tried to get the original deal!!!
Another reason for forcing a company into Chapter 7 is that rather than get paid 5cents on the dollar on the debt I might prefer to buy certain assets of the company at firesale prices.
Well I said that when I looked at C++. I mean bleeuurgh!
If you have a good set of macros to deal with memory management, string allocation etc then C is still pretty good. The noce thing about C# is that you get all that without having to lose any of the traditional C ways of doing things.
Thing about Java was that I always got the feeling I was somehow being preached at and told the 'right' way to do things, and if it was not 100% pure then you get cast into the pit of hell etc. If the Christian Coalition wrote a language it would be like Java.
Yeah, it should have been +5 Insightful.
Hey just what else are you going to do on a box that has a low end pentium and outputs only to a TV?
It is a cool hack but at the end of the day you can get the same effect much more easily by adding a $60 TV out card to a PC. I just put together a PC upgrade with a new motherboard, processor, video card and memory for $350. So OK thats a tad more expensive than the $200 of an Xbox but the result is a heck of a lot more useful.
And don't get me started on the 'cheap supercomputer' idea, no you can put as many Xboxen together as you like, you are not going to break any price performance barriers because the price/performance of your basic block is simply not cutting edge, even with Microsoft making a loss on every unit. Also whatever you gained in hardware savings would be rapidly lost through the cost of powering a farm of the damn things. If you want cutting edge price/performance get boxes that don't waste money on a disk, have a larger processor, more RAM and come with multiple LAN ports.
So logically once you have the X-box running linux the next thing to do is run Wine and then the Xbox emulator. The Multics or Lisp machine emulators would also be pretty cool. Alternatively if someone could get a ZXSpectrum emulator up and running on it.
As it stands this hack is pretty much like the fact my Zaurus runs Linux, kewl but completely irrelevant to why I have the device.
When Sokol made his idiotic point about the arts 'journal' Social Texts the points never made by any of the attacks on post-modernism were that (1) the journal is not that prominent in the field and (2) getting an article in a journal of that sort is like getting an article accepted by Slashdot, it means precisely nothing.
Sokol's wider point that lots of people in the arts are pretentious farts is completely correct. However it is only a special case of the more general truth that many people in every academic field are pretentious farts.
The point is that in science the litterature has a specific role, it reports incremental discoveries. There is also a secondary role in reporting theories, however this is vastly overrated by the scientists as the Popper/Kuhne debate demonstrated.
The engineering litterature is quite different because it is in almost every case a secondary litterature. We publish our major findings as books, manuals, programs and documentation. If I want to find the latest on any piece of work I go to the Web.
The arts litterature is different again because there are no right answers. Points are awarded not for what is said but how it is said. Of course this is not science, but nobody ever claimed it was. For example Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument is a basic text of the philosophy of AI. It didn't get that status because anyone agreed with it and found it perceptive, in fact the reverse, everyone has multiple ways to demolish the argument which is of course the point, I can't publish my rebuttal of Searle without giving him yet another citation. I call texts of that type Koan texts because the role they play is completely separate from whether the argument is correct or even whether the argument is correctly stated. McLuhan falls into the same category, he is almows always wrong on pretty much every assertion he makes (television is a COLD medium? - NOT!), however reading his books is a useful way to start thinking about things.
So given that the litterature is not monolithic and serves multiple purposes, what can be done? Well first look at the way that the publishing houses established themselves. They started off by publishing the proceedings of conferences. These are a very special form of publication because they are largely stand alone and the whole editorial infrastructure is ready made.
People send papers to conferences so they can go to the conference, not necessarily just to get publication credits. The prominence of the conference is independent of the prominence of the journal.
The way to get open publication off the ground is to start by publishing conference proceedings. Get a small number of the worlds most prominent research libraries to kick in some funds to maintain a server infrastructure - MIT, Stanford, Oxford Bodleian, Cambridge, the cost would be less than the cost of a few journals and certainly less than the cost of book storage! Start small and work up, don't try to displace Science and Nature on the first day. Most journals are nowhere near that level of credibility, start with the low hanging fruit.
So the question now is whether you can run the X-Box emulator on the result.
That is not what the IETF does. Standards do not 'recognize' anything, and plenty of IETF standards fail to be used outside the Working Group.
As for manufacturers 'falling behind', an IETF working group is not going to force them to adopt a standard.
In the IETF adoption is a criteria for recognition. The cases where the IETF has tried to drive adoption have been the least successful (BEEP, GSSAPI, DNSSEC).
Without the keyboard the Zaurus is no different to a Palm.
I doubt that either FTP or SMTP would be passed in their current form today.
SMTP was introduced as a quick and dirty 'Gordian knot' solution to email transport. The good part is that it was introduced as a far simpler solution than the competing UUCP, MTP etc specs...
The bad part is that SMTP has plenty of features that are poorly thought out and still more that are not well specified. For example most of the problems with mailing lists could have been avoided if the design of SMTP had considered mailing lists more thoroughly.
Now as it happens none of the alternatives to SMTP address the real problems of email any better than SMTP. However the real failing of the IETF process is that once something like SMTP becomes a standard changing the spec is far harder than the initial design. Only a small part of that difficulty is the problem of compatibility with the legacy base.
In the early days of IETF specifications were published as 'Request For Comments' - the original concept was that they were nothing more than a lengthy email. Today there is layer upon layer of protocol.
The big problem with IETF process is that it is very easy to block a specification indefinitely and plenty of folk try to do so.
The problem is not so much the companies as individuals with their own private agenda. I think it very unlikely that a Jabber group would be derailed by AOL seeking to defend its IM turf. But one or two people with an agenda to push some other spec like BEEP could easily bring the group down.
The IETF also has a large number of procedural problems, like insisting that all the group development take place on the mailing list rather than through a mailing list and regular teleconferences as is standard in OASIS or W3C. Another problem is that the RFC format freezes the format of specs in the era of the teletype. Not only is the output ugly, it is damn hard to read.
Another problem with the IETF is that it really does not play well with other children. Most standards bodies have by now got used to interacting with other bodies, not the IETF which has a massive NIH complex. The PKIX group which has been profiling the X.509 standard developed by the ITU is a case in point rather than an exception, the ITU standard had to be profiled before it could be used in IETF standards.
A graphic example of this is BEEP. The Web Services vendors stated at the outset that all their infrastructure was being designed arround XML schema, they would not support BEEP if it was specified as a DTD. So the IETF rushes BEEP to draft standard in less than a year with a DTD based spec and now wonders why none of the major platform vendors intend to use it. The only 'justification' for this decision ever given has been Marshall Rose saying 'well there are some problems with XML Schema', but no details to substantiate the assertion which basically comes down to the whole 'trust us, we know what we are doing and if you disagree with us then you obviously do not'.
The inner circles of the IETF are largely closed to anyone who has not been arround the IETF for 15 years or more. The big problem is that the fine words about being open etc etc are simply not backed by any accounability process with the inevitable result that 'meritocracy' quickly degenereates to cronyism.
The part where things fall apart is at the IESG level. In theory the IESG is charged with maintaining some sort of consistency across IETF work. The problem is that maintaining consistency can easily be a cover for trying to propagate some piece of lossage that should probably be taken off to the woodshed and shot instead. So a lot of groups have been pressured into considering BEEP even though it is inappropriate to their application.
Finally the IETF has a whole rack of shiboleths that have passed their prime. For a long time the IETF was absolutely against NAT 'if you're NAT on the NET you're NOT on the net', to the extent that the IPSEC protocol was designed to be incompatible with NAT (I was there at the meeting). This might have been a defensible position if the IETF had not been responsible for the 32 bit address space allocation scheme that would already have been exhausted in several countries without NAT.
I was giving the keynote at a security track of a Web Services conference recently. A member of the IESG spoke on the IETF approach to standards and inevitably a question about firewalls came up. Not suprisingly the IETF mantra of 'end to end security' was repeated. The problem being that when Alice and Bob are both working for different enterprises the 'ends' of the communication are not identical to the 'ends' of the security context (the enterprise network) or the ends of the trust relationship (the enterprises as a logical construct).
From a design point of view no specification should rely upon security services provided by a firewall. However that is not the same as saying that firewalls provide no protection or add no value. Fifteen years ago, before the ubiquitous availability of crack answered the question a very large number of UNIX sysops argued against the use of shadow passwords as being an exemplar of 'security through obscurity'. The IESG argument on firewalls falls into the same category - although hopefully with Steve Bellovin now on the IESG as a security area director he will be able to do some clue insertion.
The IETF does some usefull work, but they really need to radically reasses what their future role is going to be and how they are going to fill it. They need to shed a lot of the dogma and look into ways that they can improve upon the way things have been done for twenty years rather than continuously praising themselves.
Not unless you are a communist sympathizer.
The only thing keeping those regimes alive is the ability of the leaders to blame the US for the results of their own incompetence.
Same thing just happened with Iran. After 9/11 the democratic reformers had an ideal opportunity to take on the unelected mullahs who were then on the defensive. His Inadequacy gives his idiotic 'Axis of Evil' speech and that is all over, the mullahs are back in control and everyone has to denounce the great satan again.
Attacks from US politicians to boost their own ratings do nothing for reform.
Chineese comunism is going to be dumped in the garbage can of history sooner or later. They have already dumped the economic theory and the political part will follow soon enough. Ironically the main thing that holds the party in place is fear of a return to the instability and famines of Mao's great leap forward.
The status is currently guarded, or blue on the Ashcroft/Ridge scale.
I certainly think that Bush has done far more worthy of impeachment than Clinton. Harken and the Rangers stadium deal implicate him in outright fraud.
If Bush does start a war with Iraq without a vote in Congress and the attack is a fiasco then impeachment will be a distinct possibility if not a probability. Given that Bush has so far failed to capture Bin Laden or any senior Al Qaeda leader the idea that an invasion of Iraq would be a costless walkover is probably wishfull thinking.
That has nothing to do with why it is used. If there were no libraries and it ran at half the speed they would still refuse to move.
When I worked at CERN I took a look at the quality of some of the code they were using. CERNlib then was riddled with bugs. I was one of the first people to evaluate PAW, the damn thing was uttter crap with fundamental modelling errors caused by using a histogram as the basic represenatation of a graph. A competent comp sci student could do better in a couple of weeks, ten years later it is still in common use.
Why? I'm not disagreeing (the C# IDE is very nice. A good job, and from Microsoft no less!) but I was wondering if you would give specific reasons for your preference to the Microsoft platform if they don't have anything to do with market share.
Well the main reason I am using it is that my engineering team use Java, I need to know what the constraints are from the MSFT side of the fence (I architect industry standards). Besides that however, emacs simply is not in the same class as Visual Studio, sorry. Visual Studio is the first IDE that has surpassed the Lisp Machine and the VMS Language Sensitive Editor. There is no feature of either system that is missing - with the irritating exception of being able to select text from the keyboard alone!
Now if I had only ever used emacs I might not think it worthy moving, but the claim that Windows programmers would queue up to move to linux and emacs is just idiotic.
I mentioned C and one of them, admittedly a person that doesn't like changing anything, said that he had tried C and found that it had inferior math libraries.
That is where .NET and VMS have major advantages. Both O/S are completely language neutral. You can code in C# and call FORTRAN libraries. You can even program in perl and call any .NET library. So every .NET language has high quality math libraries.
I have twenty years experience of UNIX, ten years of Linux. I use Visual Studio and C# out of choice.
There are very few people that have used as many programming environments as I have. Most people learn one and stick with it, no matter how utterly crap it is. There are people who still argue the merits of EDLN, EDT line mode and vi. You can show a physicist Java and they will still use FORTRAN.
I can hear it now:
"You should use ButtLint instead of project, it doesn't have all the features of project (yet) but you can add any that are missing yourself, while you are at it you can fix a few bugs. I have been using it for over a day. We are just waiting for the next edition which will handle projects with more than 2 people or last over a week.
Fact is that getting Windows programmers to use Linux is going to be at least as hard as getting Mac users to use a PC.
When stuck in traffic it always appears that the other lines of traffic are moving faster. This is because you don't notice when you are moving, you notice when you are stopped and the other lines are moving. O/S hacking is wiredly reversed. You notice when you spend an hour fixing up a problem on an O/S you hate or don't understand too well, but a similar problem on favorite O/S gets written off.
A speach that went down well in the US but you miss out the start of the phrase, "Mr Gorbachev". Gorbachev did far more to end communism in the USSR than Reagan could.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the Communist party had visibly lost control and Gorbachev was clearly not prepared to reassert it by force. The loss of control began in Poland and spread through Eastern Europe. It was the students from East Germany that tore down the wall, not Gorbachev or Reagan.
If huffing and puffing from US politicians would blow down communist regimes then Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea would have fallen first. Instead they are still standing and it is pretty obvious that the regime is using the external hostility as an excuse.
Cancel the sanctions against Cuba and the regime would be lucky to last more than five years. The right is keen to spend money on broadcast propaganda to attack Cuba but completely ignores the propaganda effect of tourists carrying fat wallets. Of course the Cuba sanctions policy is not about bringing down Fidel and has everything to do with getting votea in Florida so the effectiveness is not exactly the issue.
Let us see, US bank in the UK, very likely to observe labor laws and be expert in them.
My experience is that employers frequently find it impossible to believe that the labour laws apply the them. When I was at Southampton University I was a member of the University Council. The union pointed out that the proposed disciplinary procedure that gave the VC the power to dismiss employees without notice were illegal. The VC insisted on this plan despite the head of the law dept telling the VC repeatedly that the proposal was illegal and would mean a dismissed employee would automatically win compensation if they took it to a tribunal. He just kept saying 'but I need this power' and the Head of the law school kept saying 'the union is right you can't have it'.
Unless you have taken legal advice and been told your US bank is legal I would not assume it is.
Of course in the mind of lunatic GOP nationalists nobody in the world outside of the US ever had an idea about freedom or human rights. But the Berlin wall failled and so will the great firewall.
The criticism that will bring down the communist party is local. That is why they are so afraid of an AIDS activist who described how careless officials spread AIDS to whole villiages collecting blood plasma.
Outside comment can play a useful role but politicians who agrandize themselves by claiming to have brought down communism in other countries are largely hot air bags.
Ever heard of an unenforceable contract term?
The EU working time directive trumps the language of the contract. In fact trying to put language in the contract might be used as evidence against the management at a tribunal.
It would be like adding a contract term in the US that said the employee waives rights under the equal opportunity laws.
Labor law is taken very seriously in the EU. Overall the costs of disputes is probably less than in the US however because jury awards in the few types of case allowed in the US tend to be much higher than EU awards.
Why is that so unreasonable? Like soooo bad?
At the time J++ came out Java was not a particularly well developed language and quite a few things were changing.
What Sun has been demanding is that Java be crippled so that it could not be used as a general purpose programing language for Windows. I don't see how that was a reasonable demand. I don't see why anyone should blame Microsoft for doing what they did.
Part of creating an open industry standard is making the technology available for people who have different objectives. Microsoft wanted to support Java as a replacement for C++. Sun wanted to sabotage that idea.
If Sun had announced Java as a closed, proprietary language that would only be used for purposes they approved i.e. honestly, Microsoft would never have adopted it and neither would anyone else.
Kinda demonstrates the futilitiy of french policy in this area, non?
France spends hundreds of millions anually to promote the use of French abroad.
They did not get it perfect, but Microsoft's VM and dev tools completely destroyed any chance of having your "Java" code run on any platform but Windows
Not at all, if you wanted to have compatibility you just clicked a box and you got a warning about any extension use. Same way that every other language compiler does it.
What Sun objected to was the very idea that you might want to use native Windows features in place of the crap they supplied. AWT did not produce pretty results at the time.
The "java" that was taken out of the browser was not a compliant version. It did not pass all the tests in the JCK; as such it was not, in fact, Java
Sun's own implementation did not pass those tests, the tests were only written after the fact. The dispute was over whether Microsoft was bound by future changes in the language. The contract they signed made it very clear in advance that they did not want this.
Given that Sun is the party that is squeaking with rage after the settlement it does not appear to me that Sun really won the dispute.
It does not appear to me that Microsoft ever intended to do anything more than promote Java as an open industry standard. Sun has been completely against Java being an open standard, so why should they expect to have any right to force Microsoft to use it?
Java is not that great that it is not capable of improvement. Sun crippled Java so that it would only work within the area that suited their business objective. Microsoft removed the restriction. Sun then tried to force Microsoft to observe their restrictions by introducing stricter conformance criteria in their next release, Microsoft declined to upgrade.
The initial article is not only insulting by comparing Microsoft's actions to murder, it is also wrong as a matter of fact. The Java case was settled out of court. The anti-trust case did not consider Microsoft extensions to Java.
The only reason why Java was taken out of the browser was the legal action by Sun. If that killed java then sun killed java.
Furthermore the people who claim that C# is unnecessary because we already have java should not also complain that Microsoft tried to modify Java. What Microsoft has made clear they want is an object oriented language that is similar to C, simpler than C++ and open to development. Sun has made it abundantly clear that Java does not meet the third criteria. Therfore Java does not meet the criteria defined by Microsoft, do not complain if they propose something else.
Java was not a novel language. The only novel thought at the time was the idea that anything might displace C++ from the position it had established.
There was a piece on NPR this morning where a reporter from the BBC described testifying at Milosevic's war crimes trial. She dismissed the argument that testifying might bring journalists into danger, "we bear witness".
In the case of journalists interviewing hackers the journalist is often being used for propaganda purposes by the hackers allowing them to propagate myths like they don't try to do harm (most do). It is astonishing (OK no it isn't it is infuriating) how often the hacker's boasts are reported as fact without question. Unfortunately it appears that only the trade press bothers to call up someone like Bruce or myself for a fact check.
What is worse is that by legitimizing hacking these reports may well come back and cause havoc. The RIAA demand to be allowed to carry out vigillante hacking to stop piracy would if implemented cause serious damage to the network. Hacking attacks frequently cause damage far beyond the immediate target.
Perhaps you ought to find out what the word semantic means.
Semantic means meaning. So it is hardly a suprise if a change in the meaning of a license turns out to be far from trivial.
Oh right, we take the word of a GOP flack posing as an Anonymous Coward over Prof Sobel from Harvard Medical school in the LA Times.
At least there is no confusion over where I stand concerning my opinion of his inadequacy (follow the link in my .sig).
Too damn right, I mean do you really want the cashier to know you are buying that packet of condoms, butt plug, Ann Coulter book, anal lube etc?