You have a contract that they can't change at will. So the best course of action is simply not to accept a paycut.
Chances are that the employee's contracts state that they are 'at will'. However Illinois labor law may well overide the contract.
Looking over the company financials I can see why they would be pushed to this. However even in a downturn IT skills are still in demand.
If employees are thinking of jumping ship what I would do in this situation is to look for a way of nullifying any non-compete that they may alledge is enforceable. Cutting pay in half looks like a material breach of contract on the company's part. They probably don't have the cash to fight a lawsuit. So see a lawyer and find out if they can dump some sort of demand letter on the company, then cut out the middleman and work for the end customer direct...
The phone book analogy is not quite relevant because the information in a phone book is public information, and the information in MS documentation is not, and as I recall, it is the public nature of the data in a phone book that was the reason it could not be
Perhaps a tax on amateur lawyers on slashdot would close the WBush budget deficit and help save social security.
IANAL but I know the basics of copyright law having spent time trying to stop people extending them. Copyright has no connection to trade secret law as you imply. In fact under European law copyright is a bargain, you get copyright protection in return for disclosure. In the US that bargain aspect has largely been erased as the doctrine of intellectual property as intrinsic right developed.
The point about the phone book is that copyright is meant to protect only the representation of the idea, not the idea itself. In the case of a phone book the representation is so lacking in creativity - alphabetical order, that there is only an idea.
The Microsoft 'license' is not something I would want to spend money attempting to enforce. The information in the document is clearly not a trade secret, bars on redistribution of ideas are unlikely to work in a US court. Copyright doctrine even in the US is not favorable.
What the license does do however is to make it clear that anyone developing a samba type implementation knows that there is a patent on the implementation.
The license also makes it impossible for someone to claim that they have acquired any rights as a result of a GPL license. While folk on slashdot try to claim otherwise the explicit purpose of RMS's scheme was to make it impossible to sell software. You might think RMS is with you but whatever RedHat and co say, RMS turned down offers to join their advisory boards because their business is contrary to his 'principles'. What this comes down to is that Gates understands what RMS is really up to better than most slashdotters.
Yes, sortof. The point is that ten years ago C++ was hyped to the same extent as Java is today, but that largely evaporated and today C++ is no more interesting than any of the other legacy languages. OK for getting a job but no longer considered the future direction of the industry.
WRT your comments on Python etc (which I used back in '95) the most significant thing about C# is that Java is no longer the only player in town. Clearly Microsoft and many windows developers will be using C# and for them Java is an irrelevance. Java is no longer the only mainstream object oriented extension to C that is not as demented in syntax as C++.
But as anyone who has used C# could tell you,.NET is not really about C#, all C# is is the C style syntax that accesses the.NET framework. There are already python and smalltalk compilers available.
C#, smalltalk, Python are all languages that a sane person with knowledge of several languages could use from choice. I just don't believe Fortan, Cobol or C++ fall into that category.
While C++ has not stopped moving yet it is clearly on its way to join Cobol, Fortran, Smalltalk and the rest as onetime mainstream languages that are no longer hot.
If C++ had had its act together in 1992 and had a decent set of libraries agreed upon etc etc things might have been different. At this point however the announcement appears to be about as significant as when Fortran 8X was finally accepted and became Fortran 90, would have been nice to have happened five years earlier.
At this point the momentum in the software industry lies firmly with Java and C#. I know plenty of programmers who thought that C++ was worse than C. Java would have been the answer if Sun had not insisted on maintaining absolute control over it. [I don't care how open they claim to be, open means that other companires can make changes that Sun might not like, no language can be kept 100% pure and be open to unrestricted modification]
Todays announcement is not likely to have much relevance for existing projects. Once you have started to code to one library you is kinda stuck. I don't think many people will be kicking off completely green field C++ projects in the near future.
Only for poorly designed security models. There are security models out there that have been mathematically proven secure
Secure in what sense? Security is risk control, what risks are they attempting to control here? To what extent do they succeed?
The big problem with O/S level security has been usability. There are plenty of Orange book A level O/S arround, but using one is no fun at all and only likely to happen if you are ordered to do so.
UNIX did not originaly have a security architecture, it eventually absorbed a bunch of ideas from Multix but even then it was often too little too late. Even the oft quoted claim that UNIX is equivalent to C2 security is actually false, one of the most important aspects of the orange book series were the principles of shipping the O/S in a safe condition and that there should be a security guide with a specific set of instructions. I am not aware that either ever happened.
Not that WNT is any better on this front, OK so there is a security guide, but the O/S certainly does not ship in a default secure configuration.
From a security point of view I found Plan-9 a major disappointment from the start. What was needed was a major redesign and a reduction of the O/S to its essentials. Instead we just see yet more UNIX style featureitis. Yet more poorly documented niche programs that come bundled with the O/S for no good reasons.
Maybe the new version is better, but I doubt it. All in all it tends to reinforce my view that these people largely just got lucky by being in the right place at the right time with the right software license.
Why on earth do they need a consortium? ITV Digital's debts are in the region of a few hundred million pounds, as far as I know, but Microsoft is sitting on an actual cash pile of tens of billions.
Microsoft do not have much experience in the TV business and none in the UK. Partners bring more to the table than money, they bring contacts and expertise.
A TV station needs content, content providers need a distribution channel. Practicaly every cable TV station has significant ownershop from the cable networks.
Tibet would not survive without China. have you seen the conditions there? they have no practically no farmland. no economy at all. they rely on the eastern side of China for food, money, etc.
While it may be true that they have 'nothing' by Western standards that is pretty much true of the whole area. Nepal is equaly impoverished.
The farming land is certainly adequate to support the population with access to modern methods. There is ample scope for economic development through tourism etc.
While China is certainly bringing resources into the region in an attempt to buy off the local population the ability of China to do so is not the point. The point is whether the locals want their current situation or independence.
Of course this situation is considerably more complex 50 years later. A large portion of the population is now ethnic Chinese settlers. While they were imported by the communist government to create 'facts on the ground' to make it harder for Tibet to succeed, many were sent against their will and most are by now second generation descendants.
I do not believe that the GOP and those attempting to start a cold war with China have the interests of the Tibetan people at heart. They want no more than an excuse to justify more spending on any type of armament that will enrich their core supporters.
On the other hand I think you're dreaming if you really believe China has no serious designs on invading Taiwan. It's far from a certain thing but they certainly think about it.
I have no doubt that their military leadership is as reactionary, xenophobic, short sighted, politically naive and imperialist as our own.
The question is how best to avoid that outcome. I do not believe that President Bubblehead has much of a clue as far as that is concerned.
Yes, last I heard China invaded fifty years ago, as I said China has not invaded anywhere recently. Not since Mao died and the gang of four were put on trial.
Don't tell me you believe the Chinese propaganda that Tibet has always been part of China
The 'propaganda' has considerably more truth than the US media admit. But the issue of what country has been part of another is irrelevant. The relevant question is what the people who live in Tibet want. You don't have to go back very far to find Texas and California used to be part of Mexico and were acquired through conquest. That does not mean that Mexico has rights to have the land back.
The nearest equivalent to the Tibet situation is in Turkey which is the remnants of the Ottoman empire which was formed through conquest. We don't know for sure whether the Kurds really want to be independent or not, all we do know is that the Turkish government ruthlessly supresses their language and culture, oh and they are one of our glorious NATO allies.
Call me a cynic, but I for one don't think it a good idea to blindly accept the administration telling us who the enemy is. I think the enemy of democracy are the folk who were busy organizing a coup in Venezuela. If we accept the administration line we have to consider that the governments who did not oppose deposing a democratically elected President, closure of the legislature, supreme court, etc. etc. were in favor of it.
I am quite willing to support organizations like Amnesty who report the attrocities committed against both the Tibetans and the Kurds. I am less willing to listen to the administration crying crocodile tears while selecting causes by the extent to which they meet their own ends.
They're essentially hackers and rippers," Hemming said. "Basically our brand name is being damaged quite significantly by these activities
Quite, but what is Kazza if it is not a network for rippers who want to get toons for free. The whole Kazaa business model is to help people take the property of the music industry for free. So just why do these guys get suprised when their not-so-honest customers decide to deprive them of their revenue stream as well? Like just why did they ever think there was a business to be had out of infringement-ware?
The legalistic approach is somewhat humorous, while they might have a case it would be interesting to see how they would intend to bring it. The problem is that it is rather difficult to bring a suit in a jurisdiction while you are simultaneously evading a suit in the same jurisdiction.
Another problem they may have is that there is a longstanding principle that the courts do not arbitrate disputes between criminals, nor do they get involved collecting gambling debts or resolving a host of other issues. The defense might well be able to argue that the courts should not intervene in this type of dispute as a matter of public policy. Kazaa is arguably a program to facilitate contributory infringement for which there are no (or marginal) legitimate purposes. So it is iniquitous for the US taxpayer to arbitrate a dispute in which Kazza is attempting to protect its illegitimate revenue stream.
If the RIAA had a clue they would be in there handing the court an amicus brief.
China invades a country, and the only think you are concerned about is motherboard prices?
Hang on a second, China has not invaded anywhere I am aware of, at least not recently and it certainly has not invaded Taiwan.
There are a lot of folk who would like to reignite the cold war and are looking for an enemy to pick a fight with. Great way to justify more increases in the 'defense' budget, the US is defenseless! yesss really, the US gets absolutely nothing in return for spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world (including allies) put together.
During the cold war we in Europe were told repeatedly that if the red army invaded (and they were itching to do so) that NATO could only last 3 days before resorting to nukes. Ignore the fact that the USSR were having their ass handed to them in Afghanistan. The military simulations started from the assumption that the USSR tanks were equal to the NATO tanks, ignore the fact that 60% of the Russian tanks were relics from WWII and they only had enough fuel to train for a few days a year and their troops were unwilling conscripts etc.
If we are not careful we will be driven to the same sort of destructive and pointless standoff with China.
The China/Taiwan situation is much more complex than the US media make it appear. First Taiwan agrees that it is part of China, in fact it still lays claims to the rest of China. More importantly however the Chineese politicians are not the Maoist revolutionaries the US media would have us believe. In fact the horrors of the cultural revolution are the principal fear, that and another round of foreign domination such as the one that practically reduced China to collonial status in the late 19th century.
The Chinese leadership show every sign of understanding that the one thing they can do that would absolutely make reuinification with Taiwan impossible is to invade.
What we have to do is to make sure that China continues on its present path which is definitely heading towards a more open, more democratic society. The US is certainly not in a position to extol the virtues of democracy after the administrations recent meddling in Venezuela. Presidents who go to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted do not have much credibility with me on that score, and GOP clones aside don't have much credibility in the rest of the world either.
Re:Arms race leading to a pitched battle
on
Spyware Fights Back
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Dueling license agreements? Dueling subroutines in realtime
That would be known as core wars, a favourite passtime on the MIT Incompatible Timeshare System (ITS) about 20 years ago. The objective being to write a piece of code that would take over as much processing time as possible, deleting competing code.
You show your own ignorance. The Web was originally a code base - CERN Libwww, part of which I wrote. Mosaic was based on that code base as were almost all the original browsers, the only exceptions from the early years I know of being Arena and a couple that were never released to the public.
Just because a fact does not match you pre-conceived notions doe not make it untrue. There are plenty of folk on Slashdot who know who I am and my work.
As I said we made a mistake in putting the code in the public domain rather than under a BSD license. That meant that the NCSA team were not under an obligation to cite our work which is why they could legally plagarize it as their own. The original Mosaic documentation did not mention the term World Wide Web. In fact the term was only used by the NCSA people after they left NCSA and tried to set up Netscape under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation.
If he's reading VSB instead of BSD and didn't catch it, don't you think maybe that he's talking out of his ass?
Try reading the article:
We say there should be an eco-system so something like VSB, which is a free form of UNIX, but it's not - -doesn't have this GPL with it, versus Linux which does -- there's a big contrast. A government can fund research work on BFP, UNIX,
Now if Bill was reading it is unlikely that he would have mistated the O/S name twice and coincidentaly used a name that sounds kinda similar.
It is pretty obvious that this is a stenography blooper if you read the article. However we can be sure that slashheads will be wittering on in years to come about 'Gates does not know what BSD is'.
Gates definitely knows what BSD is because at one stage he was reselling UNIX as Xenix. Before NT became stable Microsoft was largely a Unix shop on the development side. more recently Microsoft has ported.NET to BSD UNIX.
All the taxes will be paid by those guys or something -- I don't know. And the farmers will go home at night and work on the source code.
I think you guys are reading way too much into this. The issue is not Open Source or proprietary, or even Free as in Beer. The issue is what should happen when the government pays money for software reasearch.
Under the old model the government would spend a few million supporting a research team who would then start a company to exploit the copyright. The University might get a share or might not.
The GPL is something of an improvement on this situation, but it is designed to prevent proprietary versions being created. That can be a good thing, but unless you are a religious nut on the subject there are often times when it is bad. For example, if the original code would require a lot of effort to turn it into something that was merchantable quality or if the code is of no use unless it is built into something bigger. For those cases BSD is a much better choice.
There is a reason why we released the Web into the public domain and did not make it GPL. GPL would have closed the door on commercial versions which was absolutely the opposite of our objective. We were changing the flow of information, not engaging in an RMS power play.
BTW RMS has said things to me in person that are way wierder than anything in the article, anything Gates has said to me personaly and for that matter stupider than anything said or attributed to Dan Quayle or GWB. Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
If governments are looking at ways to get the maximum out of their research programs it would be a good idea for them to consider the restrictions they intend to place on the distribution of their code at the same time that they apply for the grant. The 'we will keep it private and sell it' approach should be least favoured, 'free for non commercial use' should be next favoured and 'free for any purpose' should be most favoured. I would consider GPL and LGPL to be equivalent to free for non commercial use since in practice a lot of 'open source' code under GPL is often reclaimed by the original owners and commercialised.
As for the utility of source, I think it is overated. I would much prefer an API that is written well enough that I do not need to see the source to work out what is going on.
Actually, the article does not explicitly mention porn. The new domain would be for "material harmful to minors".
By whose definition? The tyope of material I would not want my child to see is:
All hate material produced by the "Christian" Coalition and like groups
The Fox news network
The hate material produced by both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the appologists for the extremists on both sides.
William Safire's op-ed pieces (see above)
Advertisements for mighty morphin power rangers, pokeemon, and other plastic junk I am expected to buy.
Somehow I very much doubt that this is the type of material that congress considers harmful to minors.
What this really comes down to is that the Republicans are affraid that their children might ask them awkward questions they don't want to answer. To which I say tough titties, how do they think we all feel when we have to explain GWB to our kids?
I really don't know have any intention of getting into a flame war with you
Then maybe if you were a bit more courteous and did not begin the way you did you would not have had your post modded into oblivion.
My archos device is most probably earlier than yours. It shiped with a warning to upgrade the firmware because the stuff it shipped with was faulty. The newer models do not look very different though.
If Archos ship the device with a warning that you can't change the batteries I am tempted to take them at face value. I tend not to expect consumer gadgets to take more than a PhD in Nuclear Physics (which I have) to work out how to change the damn batteries.
As for being please with the thing, I would be much more pleased if 1) Archos had actually told people you can change the batteries instead of telling them you can't and 2) the thing did not skip tracks so often.
Of course it is possible I bought a unit that turns out to be a lemon and I should get another.
Having applied injudicious voltages to a wide range of hardware over the years I am not aware that hard drives are especially sensitive to overvoltage. Of course I have not done so recently and the hard drives for portables may indeed be hypersensitive, I am inclined to doubt this however. The only component likely to be especially sensitive would be the read head which probably has a whole rack of conditioning circuitry surrounding it.
Their website [archos.com] claims they offer a 20GB MP3 recorder.
That is new then , I looked only last month.
However the MP3 recorder is clearly not the device to go for now, look at the media player, it is a much better device, it has the microphone input etc and can be used to store and view image files from a camera.
Only yet again the dweebs have opted for a 10Gb disk instead of 20, like people are going to buy now when there will be a bigger one out pretty soon.
The device also uses Lithium ion batteries, but yet again no apparent means of using a spare battery, could get anoying when the battery goes soft.
So with archos doing genuinely interesting stuff, why do we get the puff piece for the creative junk that offers nothing new except a slightly bigger disk???
You've obviously never owned an Archos player in your life
You are either a pathalogical liar or you have a different model to mine. Mine quite definitely requires a 6 point star screwdriver to open it, plus it has a notice to the effect over one screw that states opening it will void the warranty. Having opened up the case I can assure folk that there is no simple means of access. It is possible to pry apart the rubber doohdads on the corners but doing so puts a lot of pressure on parts that are clearly not made to stand it.
If the manual says no user servicable parts I for one am inclined to accept that. My device came with the batteries inserted.
If you owned an Archos, you'd know that the batteries used are indeed standard, run-of-the-mill rechargeable 1.2V NiMH AA batteries;
Gee, can't read either, I said it would be good if there was a standard form factor for Lithium Ion, I know that the batteries are NiMH.
I know that the unit claims 8 hours use, my experience using the piece of shit is that the claims are untrue.
since you'd need to be carrying around charged NiMH batteries (which don't hold a charge for all that long, if not being used), because regular 1.5 volt batteries would destroy the player.
As for batteries that do not hold charge if unused, I would hope that they would at least last long enough for an in flight change over. I seriously doubt that the type of battery would matter unless you tried to charge an alkaline battery.
No, my archos jukebox is a hard drive. it holds 20 gigs and is much smaller than this one (btw, hard drive cases are rectangular)
Looking at the software side the Nomad device looks pretty febble. You still have to download software into the thing. The Archos device is just a USB hard drive that will attempt to play any file with a.mp3 extension if you tell it to.
There are a bunch of drawbacks with the Archos. First the idiots hardwired the batteries into the case. So even though the batteries are standard AA NiMh batteries you have to carry arround a screwdriver and void your warranty to change them. I get about 4 hours actual use from the things so I often want to change batteries in mid flight and I doubt my scrwdriver is compatible with the new security regulations.
It would be much better if Archos et al adopted a common standard form factor for a smallish LiIon battery. Nikon have already developed a camera battery in a form factor that matches one of the new alkaline battery form factors.
The other problem with the archos is that mine skips tracks frequently and often. It is just not robust enough. It appears that errors or what it thinks are errors in the mp3 encoding cause the thing to stop playing.
The other problem with the archos is that the numbskulls have a 20Mb version and a 6Mb version that records but no 20Mb version that records. Also it is not apparent whether the recording version has a microphone input so that it can be used as a dictation machine. The guys appear to be concentrating on the MP3 market and ignoring the tens of millions of people who buy dictation machines. I would like to be able to dictate into the machine and then play back the recording into dragon dictate or Office XP for analysis.
I would love to see MS required to keep releasing Office, etc. for the Mac. I would also love to see Mac release OSX for the x86 world. They kind of go hand in hand...and neither are likely to happen. C'est la vie.
Microsoft makes plenty of $$$$ selling Office for the Mac. It is almost certain to continue to sell office for purely commercial reasons.
Strategically MSFT has every reason to want Apple to continue in business, makes it easier to defend antitrust lawsuits. If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac a competitor would move in soon enough. Given that Microsoft originally displaced Lotus and Wordperfect by developing a product for the Mac when the majors refused it is hard to see anyone at Redmond arguing that Microsoft repeat that mistake and keeping their job for very long.
Now then, if you read the official definition of text/richtext [w3.org], you'll note that it is an SGML application! Simpler than most, and implementable by somebody who doesn't know SGML, but it's still SGML.
Ah that would be why the spec says the following:
Richtext is decidedly not SGML, and must not be used to transport arbitrary SGML documents.
What Bornstein did was to use the angle brackets that the SGML encoding uses, but he wisely junked the majority of Goldfarb's lunacy.
Yeah, I know, that's pure fantasy. But my point is that HTML's problems have nothing to do with its SGML origins.
HTML was arround for two years before we wrote a DTD for it, and that was because we had the silly idea that we needed the traditional publishing industry to buy in.
The real mistake we made was not introducing style sheets earlier, before Netscape fragmented the HTML standard for its own commercial interests. We also made the mistake of using a completely different syntax for the stylesheets which delayed adoption.
Or, if your fob dies (and I've seen about 60% of ours fail over the last 3 years)... Or if you break it (about 10% of our fobs)... If the fobs are available in a credit card form factor (thickness, too!), they'd be easier to keep on your person than the ones we have.
Look at the activecard tags, we switched to them because they are half the price of SecureID and more reliable to boot.
I agree with much of what you write, but cannot agree with that above. Rich text does not belong in email.
That is what it was designed for. I get pretty pissed of by plaintext biggots sitting on 300 baud dialup lines running Multics complaining about the rest of us. This is technology if you can't hack it consider checking in to an OAP home, only make sure its not one of those with broadband or you will find you are being overtaken on the information superhighway by an octogenarian in a weheelchair.
Email should not be used for over-large documents--honestly, a 32K limit should be enforced:
Fortunately for you Outlook allows you to enforce exactly that restriction. Of course you might find that you get fewer emails.
Just what is your problem with email size, the protocols work fine up to about a hundred meg.
If one wishes to transfer formatted documents, use LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, PDF, even Word.
And the difference between Richtext and HTML would be?
Richtext was proposed by Borenstein in about 1990. It is very similar to HTML 1.0, the only difference being that we made the mistake of making HTML an SGML application and had to suffer the SGML idiots. Since Richtext does not actually support most of the features Outlook 'richtext' does I suspect that Outlook's richtext is actually HTML.
Hope your Apple ]I[ does not blow a fuse trying to download this
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are that the employee's contracts state that they are 'at will'. However Illinois labor law may well overide the contract.
Looking over the company financials I can see why they would be pushed to this. However even in a downturn IT skills are still in demand.
If employees are thinking of jumping ship what I would do in this situation is to look for a way of nullifying any non-compete that they may alledge is enforceable. Cutting pay in half looks like a material breach of contract on the company's part. They probably don't have the cash to fight a lawsuit. So see a lawyer and find out if they can dump some sort of demand letter on the company, then cut out the middleman and work for the end customer direct...
Perhaps a tax on amateur lawyers on slashdot would close the WBush budget deficit and help save social security.
IANAL but I know the basics of copyright law having spent time trying to stop people extending them. Copyright has no connection to trade secret law as you imply. In fact under European law copyright is a bargain, you get copyright protection in return for disclosure. In the US that bargain aspect has largely been erased as the doctrine of intellectual property as intrinsic right developed.
The point about the phone book is that copyright is meant to protect only the representation of the idea, not the idea itself. In the case of a phone book the representation is so lacking in creativity - alphabetical order, that there is only an idea.
The Microsoft 'license' is not something I would want to spend money attempting to enforce. The information in the document is clearly not a trade secret, bars on redistribution of ideas are unlikely to work in a US court. Copyright doctrine even in the US is not favorable.
What the license does do however is to make it clear that anyone developing a samba type implementation knows that there is a patent on the implementation.
The license also makes it impossible for someone to claim that they have acquired any rights as a result of a GPL license. While folk on slashdot try to claim otherwise the explicit purpose of RMS's scheme was to make it impossible to sell software. You might think RMS is with you but whatever RedHat and co say, RMS turned down offers to join their advisory boards because their business is contrary to his 'principles'. What this comes down to is that Gates understands what RMS is really up to better than most slashdotters.
Yes, sortof. The point is that ten years ago C++ was hyped to the same extent as Java is today, but that largely evaporated and today C++ is no more interesting than any of the other legacy languages. OK for getting a job but no longer considered the future direction of the industry.
WRT your comments on Python etc (which I used back in '95) the most significant thing about C# is that Java is no longer the only player in town. Clearly Microsoft and many windows developers will be using C# and for them Java is an irrelevance. Java is no longer the only mainstream object oriented extension to C that is not as demented in syntax as C++.
But as anyone who has used C# could tell you, .NET is not really about C#, all C# is is the C style syntax that accesses the .NET framework. There are already python and smalltalk compilers available.
C#, smalltalk, Python are all languages that a sane person with knowledge of several languages could use from choice. I just don't believe Fortan, Cobol or C++ fall into that category.
If C++ had had its act together in 1992 and had a decent set of libraries agreed upon etc etc things might have been different. At this point however the announcement appears to be about as significant as when Fortran 8X was finally accepted and became Fortran 90, would have been nice to have happened five years earlier.
At this point the momentum in the software industry lies firmly with Java and C#. I know plenty of programmers who thought that C++ was worse than C. Java would have been the answer if Sun had not insisted on maintaining absolute control over it. [I don't care how open they claim to be, open means that other companires can make changes that Sun might not like, no language can be kept 100% pure and be open to unrestricted modification]
Todays announcement is not likely to have much relevance for existing projects. Once you have started to code to one library you is kinda stuck. I don't think many people will be kicking off completely green field C++ projects in the near future.
Secure in what sense? Security is risk control, what risks are they attempting to control here? To what extent do they succeed?
The big problem with O/S level security has been usability. There are plenty of Orange book A level O/S arround, but using one is no fun at all and only likely to happen if you are ordered to do so.
UNIX did not originaly have a security architecture, it eventually absorbed a bunch of ideas from Multix but even then it was often too little too late. Even the oft quoted claim that UNIX is equivalent to C2 security is actually false, one of the most important aspects of the orange book series were the principles of shipping the O/S in a safe condition and that there should be a security guide with a specific set of instructions. I am not aware that either ever happened.
Not that WNT is any better on this front, OK so there is a security guide, but the O/S certainly does not ship in a default secure configuration.
From a security point of view I found Plan-9 a major disappointment from the start. What was needed was a major redesign and a reduction of the O/S to its essentials. Instead we just see yet more UNIX style featureitis. Yet more poorly documented niche programs that come bundled with the O/S for no good reasons.
Maybe the new version is better, but I doubt it. All in all it tends to reinforce my view that these people largely just got lucky by being in the right place at the right time with the right software license.
Microsoft do not have much experience in the TV business and none in the UK. Partners bring more to the table than money, they bring contacts and expertise.
A TV station needs content, content providers need a distribution channel. Practicaly every cable TV station has significant ownershop from the cable networks.
While it may be true that they have 'nothing' by Western standards that is pretty much true of the whole area. Nepal is equaly impoverished.
The farming land is certainly adequate to support the population with access to modern methods. There is ample scope for economic development through tourism etc.
While China is certainly bringing resources into the region in an attempt to buy off the local population the ability of China to do so is not the point. The point is whether the locals want their current situation or independence.
Of course this situation is considerably more complex 50 years later. A large portion of the population is now ethnic Chinese settlers. While they were imported by the communist government to create 'facts on the ground' to make it harder for Tibet to succeed, many were sent against their will and most are by now second generation descendants.
I do not believe that the GOP and those attempting to start a cold war with China have the interests of the Tibetan people at heart. They want no more than an excuse to justify more spending on any type of armament that will enrich their core supporters.
I have no doubt that their military leadership is as reactionary, xenophobic, short sighted, politically naive and imperialist as our own.
The question is how best to avoid that outcome. I do not believe that President Bubblehead has much of a clue as far as that is concerned.
Yes, last I heard China invaded fifty years ago, as I said China has not invaded anywhere recently. Not since Mao died and the gang of four were put on trial.
Don't tell me you believe the Chinese propaganda that Tibet has always been part of China
The 'propaganda' has considerably more truth than the US media admit. But the issue of what country has been part of another is irrelevant. The relevant question is what the people who live in Tibet want. You don't have to go back very far to find Texas and California used to be part of Mexico and were acquired through conquest. That does not mean that Mexico has rights to have the land back.
The nearest equivalent to the Tibet situation is in Turkey which is the remnants of the Ottoman empire which was formed through conquest. We don't know for sure whether the Kurds really want to be independent or not, all we do know is that the Turkish government ruthlessly supresses their language and culture, oh and they are one of our glorious NATO allies.
Call me a cynic, but I for one don't think it a good idea to blindly accept the administration telling us who the enemy is. I think the enemy of democracy are the folk who were busy organizing a coup in Venezuela. If we accept the administration line we have to consider that the governments who did not oppose deposing a democratically elected President, closure of the legislature, supreme court, etc. etc. were in favor of it.
I am quite willing to support organizations like Amnesty who report the attrocities committed against both the Tibetans and the Kurds. I am less willing to listen to the administration crying crocodile tears while selecting causes by the extent to which they meet their own ends.
Quite, but what is Kazza if it is not a network for rippers who want to get toons for free. The whole Kazaa business model is to help people take the property of the music industry for free. So just why do these guys get suprised when their not-so-honest customers decide to deprive them of their revenue stream as well? Like just why did they ever think there was a business to be had out of infringement-ware?
The legalistic approach is somewhat humorous, while they might have a case it would be interesting to see how they would intend to bring it. The problem is that it is rather difficult to bring a suit in a jurisdiction while you are simultaneously evading a suit in the same jurisdiction.
Another problem they may have is that there is a longstanding principle that the courts do not arbitrate disputes between criminals, nor do they get involved collecting gambling debts or resolving a host of other issues. The defense might well be able to argue that the courts should not intervene in this type of dispute as a matter of public policy. Kazaa is arguably a program to facilitate contributory infringement for which there are no (or marginal) legitimate purposes. So it is iniquitous for the US taxpayer to arbitrate a dispute in which Kazza is attempting to protect its illegitimate revenue stream.
If the RIAA had a clue they would be in there handing the court an amicus brief.
Hang on a second, China has not invaded anywhere I am aware of, at least not recently and it certainly has not invaded Taiwan.
There are a lot of folk who would like to reignite the cold war and are looking for an enemy to pick a fight with. Great way to justify more increases in the 'defense' budget, the US is defenseless! yesss really, the US gets absolutely nothing in return for spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world (including allies) put together.
During the cold war we in Europe were told repeatedly that if the red army invaded (and they were itching to do so) that NATO could only last 3 days before resorting to nukes. Ignore the fact that the USSR were having their ass handed to them in Afghanistan. The military simulations started from the assumption that the USSR tanks were equal to the NATO tanks, ignore the fact that 60% of the Russian tanks were relics from WWII and they only had enough fuel to train for a few days a year and their troops were unwilling conscripts etc.
If we are not careful we will be driven to the same sort of destructive and pointless standoff with China.
The China/Taiwan situation is much more complex than the US media make it appear. First Taiwan agrees that it is part of China, in fact it still lays claims to the rest of China. More importantly however the Chineese politicians are not the Maoist revolutionaries the US media would have us believe. In fact the horrors of the cultural revolution are the principal fear, that and another round of foreign domination such as the one that practically reduced China to collonial status in the late 19th century.
The Chinese leadership show every sign of understanding that the one thing they can do that would absolutely make reuinification with Taiwan impossible is to invade.
What we have to do is to make sure that China continues on its present path which is definitely heading towards a more open, more democratic society. The US is certainly not in a position to extol the virtues of democracy after the administrations recent meddling in Venezuela. Presidents who go to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted do not have much credibility with me on that score, and GOP clones aside don't have much credibility in the rest of the world either.
That would be known as core wars, a favourite passtime on the MIT Incompatible Timeshare System (ITS) about 20 years ago. The objective being to write a piece of code that would take over as much processing time as possible, deleting competing code.
Just because a fact does not match you pre-conceived notions doe not make it untrue. There are plenty of folk on Slashdot who know who I am and my work.
As I said we made a mistake in putting the code in the public domain rather than under a BSD license. That meant that the NCSA team were not under an obligation to cite our work which is why they could legally plagarize it as their own. The original Mosaic documentation did not mention the term World Wide Web. In fact the term was only used by the NCSA people after they left NCSA and tried to set up Netscape under the name Mosaic Communications Corporation.
Try reading the article:
We say there should be an eco-system so something like VSB, which is a free form of UNIX, but it's not - -doesn't have this GPL with it, versus Linux which does -- there's a big contrast. A government can fund research work on BFP, UNIX,
Now if Bill was reading it is unlikely that he would have mistated the O/S name twice and coincidentaly used a name that sounds kinda similar.
It is pretty obvious that this is a stenography blooper if you read the article. However we can be sure that slashheads will be wittering on in years to come about 'Gates does not know what BSD is'.
Gates definitely knows what BSD is because at one stage he was reselling UNIX as Xenix. Before NT became stable Microsoft was largely a Unix shop on the development side. more recently Microsoft has ported .NET to BSD UNIX.
I think you guys are reading way too much into this. The issue is not Open Source or proprietary, or even Free as in Beer. The issue is what should happen when the government pays money for software reasearch.
Under the old model the government would spend a few million supporting a research team who would then start a company to exploit the copyright. The University might get a share or might not.
The GPL is something of an improvement on this situation, but it is designed to prevent proprietary versions being created. That can be a good thing, but unless you are a religious nut on the subject there are often times when it is bad. For example, if the original code would require a lot of effort to turn it into something that was merchantable quality or if the code is of no use unless it is built into something bigger. For those cases BSD is a much better choice.
There is a reason why we released the Web into the public domain and did not make it GPL. GPL would have closed the door on commercial versions which was absolutely the opposite of our objective. We were changing the flow of information, not engaging in an RMS power play.
BTW RMS has said things to me in person that are way wierder than anything in the article, anything Gates has said to me personaly and for that matter stupider than anything said or attributed to Dan Quayle or GWB. Like the time he suggested building particle accelerators in space because there is lots of free vacum there...
If governments are looking at ways to get the maximum out of their research programs it would be a good idea for them to consider the restrictions they intend to place on the distribution of their code at the same time that they apply for the grant. The 'we will keep it private and sell it' approach should be least favoured, 'free for non commercial use' should be next favoured and 'free for any purpose' should be most favoured. I would consider GPL and LGPL to be equivalent to free for non commercial use since in practice a lot of 'open source' code under GPL is often reclaimed by the original owners and commercialised.
As for the utility of source, I think it is overated. I would much prefer an API that is written well enough that I do not need to see the source to work out what is going on.
By whose definition? The tyope of material I would not want my child to see is:
Somehow I very much doubt that this is the type of material that congress considers harmful to minors.
What this really comes down to is that the Republicans are affraid that their children might ask them awkward questions they don't want to answer. To which I say tough titties, how do they think we all feel when we have to explain GWB to our kids?
Then maybe if you were a bit more courteous and did not begin the way you did you would not have had your post modded into oblivion.
My archos device is most probably earlier than yours. It shiped with a warning to upgrade the firmware because the stuff it shipped with was faulty. The newer models do not look very different though.
If Archos ship the device with a warning that you can't change the batteries I am tempted to take them at face value. I tend not to expect consumer gadgets to take more than a PhD in Nuclear Physics (which I have) to work out how to change the damn batteries.
As for being please with the thing, I would be much more pleased if 1) Archos had actually told people you can change the batteries instead of telling them you can't and 2) the thing did not skip tracks so often.
Of course it is possible I bought a unit that turns out to be a lemon and I should get another.
Having applied injudicious voltages to a wide range of hardware over the years I am not aware that hard drives are especially sensitive to overvoltage. Of course I have not done so recently and the hard drives for portables may indeed be hypersensitive, I am inclined to doubt this however. The only component likely to be especially sensitive would be the read head which probably has a whole rack of conditioning circuitry surrounding it.
That is new then , I looked only last month.
However the MP3 recorder is clearly not the device to go for now, look at the media player, it is a much better device, it has the microphone input etc and can be used to store and view image files from a camera.
Only yet again the dweebs have opted for a 10Gb disk instead of 20, like people are going to buy now when there will be a bigger one out pretty soon.
The device also uses Lithium ion batteries, but yet again no apparent means of using a spare battery, could get anoying when the battery goes soft.
So with archos doing genuinely interesting stuff, why do we get the puff piece for the creative junk that offers nothing new except a slightly bigger disk???
You are either a pathalogical liar or you have a different model to mine. Mine quite definitely requires a 6 point star screwdriver to open it, plus it has a notice to the effect over one screw that states opening it will void the warranty. Having opened up the case I can assure folk that there is no simple means of access. It is possible to pry apart the rubber doohdads on the corners but doing so puts a lot of pressure on parts that are clearly not made to stand it.
If the manual says no user servicable parts I for one am inclined to accept that. My device came with the batteries inserted.
If you owned an Archos, you'd know that the batteries used are indeed standard, run-of-the-mill rechargeable 1.2V NiMH AA batteries;
Gee, can't read either, I said it would be good if there was a standard form factor for Lithium Ion, I know that the batteries are NiMH.
I know that the unit claims 8 hours use, my experience using the piece of shit is that the claims are untrue.
since you'd need to be carrying around charged NiMH batteries (which don't hold a charge for all that long, if not being used), because regular 1.5 volt batteries would destroy the player.
As for batteries that do not hold charge if unused, I would hope that they would at least last long enough for an in flight change over. I seriously doubt that the type of battery would matter unless you tried to charge an alkaline battery.
Mod me up!
The guy is peddling flamebait.
Looking at the software side the Nomad device looks pretty febble. You still have to download software into the thing. The Archos device is just a USB hard drive that will attempt to play any file with a .mp3 extension if you tell it to.
There are a bunch of drawbacks with the Archos. First the idiots hardwired the batteries into the case. So even though the batteries are standard AA NiMh batteries you have to carry arround a screwdriver and void your warranty to change them. I get about 4 hours actual use from the things so I often want to change batteries in mid flight and I doubt my scrwdriver is compatible with the new security regulations.
It would be much better if Archos et al adopted a common standard form factor for a smallish LiIon battery. Nikon have already developed a camera battery in a form factor that matches one of the new alkaline battery form factors.
The other problem with the archos is that mine skips tracks frequently and often. It is just not robust enough. It appears that errors or what it thinks are errors in the mp3 encoding cause the thing to stop playing.
The other problem with the archos is that the numbskulls have a 20Mb version and a 6Mb version that records but no 20Mb version that records. Also it is not apparent whether the recording version has a microphone input so that it can be used as a dictation machine. The guys appear to be concentrating on the MP3 market and ignoring the tens of millions of people who buy dictation machines. I would like to be able to dictate into the machine and then play back the recording into dragon dictate or Office XP for analysis.
Microsoft makes plenty of $$$$ selling Office for the Mac. It is almost certain to continue to sell office for purely commercial reasons.
Strategically MSFT has every reason to want Apple to continue in business, makes it easier to defend antitrust lawsuits. If Microsoft dropped Office for Mac a competitor would move in soon enough. Given that Microsoft originally displaced Lotus and Wordperfect by developing a product for the Mac when the majors refused it is hard to see anyone at Redmond arguing that Microsoft repeat that mistake and keeping their job for very long.
Ah that would be why the spec says the following:
Richtext is decidedly not SGML, and must not be used to transport arbitrary SGML documents.
What Bornstein did was to use the angle brackets that the SGML encoding uses, but he wisely junked the majority of Goldfarb's lunacy.
Yeah, I know, that's pure fantasy. But my point is that HTML's problems have nothing to do with its SGML origins.
HTML was arround for two years before we wrote a DTD for it, and that was because we had the silly idea that we needed the traditional publishing industry to buy in.
The real mistake we made was not introducing style sheets earlier, before Netscape fragmented the HTML standard for its own commercial interests. We also made the mistake of using a completely different syntax for the stylesheets which delayed adoption.
Look at the activecard tags, we switched to them because they are half the price of SecureID and more reliable to boot.
That is what it was designed for. I get pretty pissed of by plaintext biggots sitting on 300 baud dialup lines running Multics complaining about the rest of us. This is technology if you can't hack it consider checking in to an OAP home, only make sure its not one of those with broadband or you will find you are being overtaken on the information superhighway by an octogenarian in a weheelchair.
Email should not be used for over-large documents--honestly, a 32K limit should be enforced:
Fortunately for you Outlook allows you to enforce exactly that restriction. Of course you might find that you get fewer emails.
Just what is your problem with email size, the protocols work fine up to about a hundred meg.
If one wishes to transfer formatted documents, use LaTeX, PostScript, HTML, PDF, even Word.
And the difference between Richtext and HTML would be?
Richtext was proposed by Borenstein in about 1990. It is very similar to HTML 1.0, the only difference being that we made the mistake of making HTML an SGML application and had to suffer the SGML idiots. Since Richtext does not actually support most of the features Outlook 'richtext' does I suspect that Outlook's richtext is actually HTML.
Hope your Apple ]I[ does not blow a fuse trying to download this
As I knew quite well because I was sharing an office with Jim Gettys at the time. That is why I said brought up.
Of course given the hash DEC made of Alta Vista business wise they would have been better off well doing almost anything other than they did.