He was paid to shill for Netscape in the Microsoft case.
While there is nothing wrong with a lawyer putting his clients case, it is important to separate the clients case from whatever expertise or reputation the lawyer might have when he is not a paid shill.
As for Bork's legal 'expertise', it is somewhat noticeable that respect for it tends to be confined to the extreeme right.
Still, he would have made a better member of the Supreme court than Clarence Thomas.
Look, I have my Road Runner connected to a firewall that routes my internal machine to it. Therefore I have more than one machine (technically) hooked up to Road Runner.
RR's past policy to NAT was that they would not support it but people could deploy it at their own risk.
Unfortunately I have no idea what their current policy is because the dipsticks have redirected all their URLs to crap 'portal' sites. The mediaone address points to Yahoo and the roadrunner address to a crapy portal that tells me the weather in Mass (which I can tell by sticking my head out the window) and lots of news about stuff that I am not interested in. All the links to tech support are broken.
I often wonder if the decline of Netscape was caused in part by the errection of the stupid portal that told you almost anything apart from how to download Navigator. Of course AOL did pay for the portal site rather than Navigator so maybe not a bad business idea.
So i`m not qualified to say that the whole field is bollocks. I`m not even sure what the field is called.
The field is called Hermeneutics, it is the interpretation of texts. It has its origins in Theology, in the Middle Ages interpretation of the Bible was everything. Dante's divine comedy is a four level alegory that applied the then trendy ideas of Hermeneutics.
In the early half of last century Heidegger applied Hermeneutics to the study of being. This lead to Satre's existentialism and to the work of people like Habbermas.
The significance of this work is that it forms an integral part of the design of the Web.
Huh? That doesn't even make any sense. Why would the company get in trouble for advising proper safety measure?
Often when a story of this type is made to demonstrate a particular political point that does not make sense it is because there is some additional piece of information which we are not being told. The original poster uses language that indicates a certain degree of contempt for the injured workers.
My guess would be that the factory using the machine would have had to do something like ask the manufacturer about removing the guard for the suit to have gone the way it did.
In any case the mere fact that a saftey guard was included would establish that the manufacturer knew that there was a likelihood of injury.
I`m sorry, but it IS bollocks - total bollocks. Yes, he cut and pasted stuff to make it look plausible, but it means nothing!
The problem is that it is quite reasonable for a journal that takes an article that is interdisciplinary to look at the part of the article that is in their domain and take the part that is outside on trust.
The media and yourself take it on trust that Sokal is telling the truth when he says he was lying. This is a somewhat odd position to take. But if you start by wanting to believe that the whole field is bollocks then you are likely to believe the assertion because you want to.
In private correspondence Sokal admits that the 'gobbledygok' is in the quotes he uses rather than the main text. And here the problem is that the quotes are 'bollocks' because Sokal claims that to be the case.
The other problem is that journals like Social Text do not claim to be edited like science journals. Nor is Social Text exactly a journal of the front rank.
$8.75 per hour huh? To some of the brightest minds in the world? I say cut the stupid first class travel, cut the nice office equipment, but save that salary. These "kids" are cutting edge innovators.
The problem is that the university administration charges an utterly ludicrous overhead. The student gets $8.75 an hour, the administration deducts $35 an hour from the grant.
So even though the Media lab is 'loosing' money, MIT is still raking in cash hand over fist.
But $8.75/hr isn't competitive even with other easily obtainable undergrad jobs, especially if a student has workstudy.
I believe that there is also some reduction in fees which is actually far more valuable.
The main reason the students do UROPs however is that it is a good way to get experience with a research group if you want to do a Masters or Doctorate.
OK so you might get paid as much sorting mail or the like, but doing a Media Lab UROP looks much better on your CV.
Read about the Sokal Hoax at http://skepdic.com/sokal.html
Unfortunately it is not as good if you happen to know about quantum theory and hermeneutics. The problem with the Sokal article is that it is not actually as nonsensical as he claims. The Quantum mechanics pieces are pure bullshit, the hermenutics pieces are a cut and past job from other sources.
So the hoax does not actually demonstrate what it is meant to. The other problem I have with Sokal is that he is very happy to allow people to believe he is rubishing top rank continental philosophers like Derrida, in fact he only goes after figures that are marginal at best. The only front rank philosopher he goes after in 'Imposteurs Intellectuele' is Kristava, who gained respect for her early work rather than the later work he criticises.
Sokal is quite happy to admit that he does not demolish Derrida in private (we have exchanged email) but is quite happy to let the 'misunderstanding' continue in private.
What it really comes down to is that many theoretical physicists have to have this feeling that they are discovering absolute truth and thus have an irrational hatred of folk who tell them their idea is nuts.
When a car like this is modified it usually means that it was just a rich kids toy. Not someone that bought it because they loved the car. For the true lover, there's nothing but the original.
Absolutely, unless you plan to actually race the car, kewl modifications almost always detract from the value.
I have a '77 MGB which probably hasn't lost any value because it lost its CA emissions system many years ago and picked up some Weber Carbs. to replace the standard SU units, but the same mods on an E-Type or a TR would cut into value.
As a performance car the problem with the TR is that it will spend more time in the shop than on the road. For not much more than the current bid price you can buy a brand new XK8 that will likly be trouble free. For less than the current bid price ($50K) you can buy a clean TR of the same year which has not been messed with.
The last thing you want to do with a Ferrari is make it less reliable.
The other problem with the car is that it is the wrong color, Ferraris are RED.
Yep, that is billion with a B. Do you think that the timing of the lawsuit against Microsoft had anything to do with the fact the press is catching onto the mistakes AOL has made during the merger.
Bovine excrement
AOL made zero mistakes in the merger. They took a hyperinflated dotcom stock and used it to buy a real business right at the peak of the dotcom market. If they had waited they would have watched their stock lide the way Yahoo did.
The question that puzzles me is why the Tme Warner executives sold out.
Man I envy you, and I do stupid things like play with my children and interact with them... they dont get TV to watch except for 2 hours a week, and that is usually on saturday.
Clearly the sense of irony was lost on you.
We just did walking yesterday. It sounds as if we have a linux hacker as his speech consists almost entirely of UNIX command line sequences, AWK! AwK!
How about simply using a text compression on the XML? Since gzip has a backwards token index it compresses XML quite nicely. It is availabe on java as well as C based implementations.
The problem with the gzip approach is that it is best on long files rather than short ones. The problem with XML is that SOAP messages that should take one or 2 packets end up taking 5. Gzip tends to make 5 packets 4, but it *will* make 50 packets 25.
The other problem with GZIP is that the implementation is fairly computation intensive. It is not something that you can implement as a simple filter with almost no memory overhead.
GZIP is a great general purpose compression scheme for largeish quantities of data, but a scheme that is highly domain specific can usually do better.
The main mistake we made with the Web was to not include a simple compression scheme that was optimized for HTML at an early stage. The Content encoding tag was a good idea, but we should have shipped a lightweight compressor as well.
The approach in XMill is a good one, but I am not too happy with the table switching codes, also I think that an extra 25% compression can be wrung out at low cost. The big problem with XMill is that it was not progressed as a standard anywhere. I would give more details on the scheme, however there has been a recent rash of Patent Trolls filing patents on ideas they find on mailing lists. I call that type of behavior fraud, the courts call it a cause of action that will cost me $2 million to defend against. Congress call this situation an opportunity to collect campaign bribes.
XML Compression is something that I am working on, but I am already the point person in two major XML working groups and this is not a high priority. I really need an intern to crank through measuring efficiency on various document sets.
There is some interesting work going on with XML/ASN.1 translation
No there is not. ASN.1 is an utter crock. The original idea was good, the implementation sucketh, especialy the DER encoding.
ASN.1 is not particularly efficient, unless you use something like PER which if it is supported requires a support library that comes on 2 CDROMS.
The XML in ASN.1 proposal is simply an attempt by the die hard OSI/EDI types to try to preserve the work they have done.
The problem with XML is the over complex schema notation, the problem with ASN.1 is the over complex encoding. So put them together and you have a perfect platform for information engineering consultants to suck an IT budget dry. If that is your objective then go for XML in ASN.1.
Having just bought an XBox it does seem a little odd that MSFT has two hardware platforms with almost identical purposes.
I suspect that the reorganization is more to do with internal politics and ability to deliver than a strategic shift. The WebTV project was never quite there. The cost of the device was just too much for what it delivered. Plus the WebTV platform is slow and underpowered to support UltimateTV, XBox is overkill.
WebTV could be reduced to a program that is loaded onto the console. Adding ultimate TV requires nothing more than a bigger hard drive and TV signal acquisition hardware.
What would be cool is some sort of PVR that has a firewire interface so you can plug in extra disk drives. I love my DishPlayer, but 33 hours is not enough, nor is 120. What I really need is the ability to add extra storage as I need it. I want the ability to record at least 2000 hours of video, which won't be a lot of hard drives soon.
In case you are wondering, the more seasame street I can record, the more my 11 month old will let me go online. Otherwise he comes over for computing lessons.
The QL was misdelivered and mismarketed but what killed Sinclair waas Clive Sinclair losing his personal fortune on the Sinclair C5 t
The QL had a couple of fatal flaws. First the display model was almost impossible to use for games. Second the microdrive was no substitute for a floppy drive. On top of that they had no strategy for attracting developers, the keyboard also sucked and being unable to buy one without a nine month wait hardly helped.
The problem with the car was not the effect on Sir Clive's fortune, it was the effect of the shoemobile on his reputation. The idea was so ridiculously underbaked he became a laughing stock.
In the end a drop in the price of the Atari ST stole the market, a much better machine for the same price. I even got a monitor thrown in with mine for the same price I paid for the QL.
Pinball was always profitable, still is. The problem is that the machines need a lot more TLC than a video game these days. To work well a pinball has to be set up properly and maintained constantly.
A coin op can rake in a good profit with a pinball, but maintenance takes much more than a guy to go round and collect the money. Ms Pacman does not get stuck behind a bumper.
Palm has succeeded in the market [~20m is pretty impressive] because they know precisely what they're about.
Has Palm made a profit ever?
The stockmarket is down on Palm because they are having to chase ever lower margins at the low end of the business.
I am none too happy with my Palm VII's use of batteries. I would much prefer a rechargeable battery provided it recharges in the cradle. I understand that that is available on some models, but none with the power sucking wireless capability.
As for the new models, I have watched too many technology companies die waiting for the radical reshaping of their product line. Sinclair died when the QL turned out to fall just short of the PC competitor it was meant to be. Apple almost went belly-up with the Apple III.
Just wait for the looney audiophiles who will claim that they can hear the difference between 'lossless' compression and no compression.
The more I talk to (to be acurate the more I am talked at by) audiophiles the more I get the feeling that its a geek weenie measuring contest and has nothing to do with what stuff sounds like. One guy I know told me at great length how his $2,000 cd player was superior to the cheapie Philips unit it shares its main circuit board with because of the accuracy and freedom from wow/flutter of the CD drive mechanism.
So when I hear about golden ears and such I tend to think Bovine Excrement.
I would much prefer to use Ogg or Windows Media Player than MP3 because they are better compression formats and allow more tracks to fit on my Archos device. Problem is that the Archos won't play them to the better compression is moot.
I am not that much interested in the Napster/Gnutella scene any more than I am aware of any other WareZ scene so use of the codec by others is not that interesting to me. However if someone came along with a 6Gb Hard Drive of 'stuff' I could well imagine preferring to do swapsies than encoding the stuff myself. Ripping off tracks one at a time over Napster while being spamvertised is not my idea of fun.
The stock market analysts love a software revenue model, the marginal cost of production is close to zero so when software companies grow their margins grow faster than their revenues. Hardware companies on the other hand usually have fixed margins which often erode over time. Microsoft has been king of the software hill for 20 years, in that time the lead hardware manufacturer has changed from Comodore/Apple to IBM, to Compaq, to Dell and is likely to shift again in the future.
The problem for Palm is that their hardware business has a stronger consumer presence than their software. They also appear to have been asleep at the wheel for some time, while Microsoft was busy reinventing the PDA, Palm have not done anything of note since the Palm VII which is still as big and bulky as ever.
Palm are in a hole because Microsoft are producing a pocket computer while Palm are producing a single purpose appliance.
The problem with a Palm is that is appeals to the same people who used their Filofaxes in the 1980s, those obnoxious organized people who can actually remember to charge the damn thing each night. The Palm VII could have been the answer - a PDA and comunicator in one. Unfortunately using a Palm VII is a bit like using a dual boot Linux/Windows PC. It can play Tombraider, or it can run Gnome but not both at once. Same with the Palm VII, it can download email from Palm net, but it does not integrate seamlessly into my corporate mail system, not without some plugin in the sever my IT dept would never install.
The pocket PC on the other hand is not just a PDA, it has Word and Excell and Outlook. It also has an MP3 player that looks pretty solidly aimed at the consumer market.
So OK at the moment there are relatively few consumers with $500 to spend on a pocket PC, but within a year that price will be $300 and the year after $200. There are an awful lot more consumers interested in a consumer gadget than are interested in a cheap PDA.
OK so you can buy lots of software to make a Palm do the same as a PocketPC - only no MP3 output as there is no audio output. The problem is that by the time you do that you have spent more than you would for the PocketPC and you have a processor that is a third the speed and a third the amount of RAM.
The problem for Palm Software is that they have to quickly get to the point where they can make their platform as a package match Pocket PC. They may be able to buy in some software from third parties and bundle. As things stand they are playing Lotus 123 to Microsoft Office.
I have never heard a Microsoft Exec spend most of their time talking about the competition in a presentation. With Sun and McNealy I have several times heard an entire sales proposition put to me as 'this is how you can put one in the eye of Mcrosoft'.
Unfortunately for Sun they have not quite figured out that I am not interested in their proposals because they will hurt Microsoft. My only interest is whether they will make money for my company.
There are times when Microsoft goes into a market for strategic reasons, XBox, Messenger/Passport, Explorer. But Microsoft always tell me why their way is better for me. They don't simply ask for me to help them break the AOL Instant Messenger monopoly or the Netscape browser monopoly.
I can see why a CNN person would object to AOL. Since the takeover there has been a deliberate policy of shifting the news coverage to the right. This move appears to be comming from inside CNN however rather than AOL.
What I hear from CNN people is that the top level execs are terrified of Fox News. For some reason they believe that Fox is beating them because of the rightwing bias in all their reporting. In fact the reason CNN is loosing the cable news battle is obvious if you are a viewer, they don't do news, they do soap operas. Over last summer CNN became the Gary Condit channel. CNN had saturation coverage day after day even though nothing new had come out, the world had already decided that Condit probably didn't do it but has been exposed as a hypocrite, a liar and a fool and thus not fit for re-election. Before Condit we got the Florida recount (which actually was a compelling news story for a change), but also the Monica Lewisnsky saga, Jon Bennet Ramsey, all the way back to the O.J. Simpson saga. The idea seems to be that if there is no blockbuster story that will drive the ratings, go out there and manufacture one.
This weekend I tuned in for reliable sources, only to find that it had been switched for a half hour 'documentary' to PR 'Black Hawk Down' in a theatre near you. The problem with the 'synergy' idea is that each time you use a news organization to plug your own products you loose credibility. Murdoch is much cleverer in that regard, he does not often shill for his own products in his quality newspapers, he does in his tabloids.
In the early days of the Internet boom, Time-Warner did try to sabotage the Internet with their cyberporn smear. The background to that story is that Time-Warner were trying to kill the Internet because they still believed that their Interactive TV model with centralized control would win. But shortly after Time-Warner switched tracks and decided the Internet was what they had been about all the time.
AOL Time-Warner does not appear to be quite as clueless on the DMCA and the Hollings bill. In fact it appears that Hollings is off in a world of his own along with a bunch of lobyists who are trying to make policy for their clients rather than present and purchase it in the legislature.
I don't personaly see much of a fit between Time Warner and Red Hat. The idea is probably that they are somehow going to compete against Microsoft in the computer market, just as Microsoft is competing against Time Warner in the content market. The Video Game market now execeeds the film market, Microsoft is a major distributor in games software and owns the X-Box platform.
What I suspect and fear the buyout might be about is AOL Time Warner getting Microsoft paranoia. It is never a good idea when a company stops thining about how it will make money for itself and instead concentrates on blocking a competitor.
Yes, the slashcrew got together one night at one of their debauched drinking sessions. After swigging a six pack of jolt apiece they started talking about nerdish hobbies, like hacking an XBox to run linux, or hacking a dishwasher to run linux, or running linux on a snowblower.
The cafeine laden air was then pierced by a cry, "lets invent the dorkiest, nerdiest hobby ever and use slashdot to persuade people to do it!".
Their first idea was to have people stand at airports and train stations taking the numbers of the trains as they pass. Then someone did a search on Google (which runs Linux) and found that 'trainspoting' has been thought of already, they even found a Web site giving advice on the best model of parker to wear while doing it.
The GPS drawing idea was the result. $3 Billion dollars of orbiting infrastructure and they use it to make an etch-a-sketch.
The more time people who do that kind of thing can be persuaded to do that kind of thinginstead of finding members of the opposite sex and procreating the happier I feel about the future of the world.
Can you cite examples of the gov't using secret evidence?
The Rosenbergs were executed after a trial in which the US Govt used selected parts of intercept evidence. The parts that indicated that the wife probably had no knowledge of the spying were suppressed.
At the last military tribunal to be held in the US the government claimed that the saboteurs had been caught by surveilance methods they had to keep secret. In fact two of the sabotage team went to the FBI within hours of landing and tried to turn themselves in, only to not be believed. The military tribunal was arranged so that the administration did not look stupid for giving Hoover a medal for his detective work.
The DVD consortium is backed by deep pockets in Hollywood, so it's unlikely that a one-time fine will convince them... and a tax on regioned DVDs
The EU commission can fine a company up to approximately a years revenues from the products whose price was manipulated. So for the DVD scam the fine would be in the billions or tens of billions.
The EU commission has imposed fines of that scale in the past - they fined IBM 1 billion for anti-trust practices back in the 80s. There would be no way the studios could avoid paying since their assets in Europe (including copyrights) could be siezed to pay the fine.
The EU can also prohibit the sale of region locked DVD players, mandating all players sold in the EU to be multi-zone (with the exception of those for public audiences). This has already happened in New Zealand.
Ultimately the studios are in a weak position. They have a US corporate, Enronesque view of regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
He was paid to shill for Netscape in the Microsoft case.
While there is nothing wrong with a lawyer putting his clients case, it is important to separate the clients case from whatever expertise or reputation the lawyer might have when he is not a paid shill.
As for Bork's legal 'expertise', it is somewhat noticeable that respect for it tends to be confined to the extreeme right.
Still, he would have made a better member of the Supreme court than Clarence Thomas.
RR's past policy to NAT was that they would not support it but people could deploy it at their own risk.
Unfortunately I have no idea what their current policy is because the dipsticks have redirected all their URLs to crap 'portal' sites. The mediaone address points to Yahoo and the roadrunner address to a crapy portal that tells me the weather in Mass (which I can tell by sticking my head out the window) and lots of news about stuff that I am not interested in. All the links to tech support are broken.
I often wonder if the decline of Netscape was caused in part by the errection of the stupid portal that told you almost anything apart from how to download Navigator. Of course AOL did pay for the portal site rather than Navigator so maybe not a bad business idea.
The field is called Hermeneutics, it is the interpretation of texts. It has its origins in Theology, in the Middle Ages interpretation of the Bible was everything. Dante's divine comedy is a four level alegory that applied the then trendy ideas of Hermeneutics.
In the early half of last century Heidegger applied Hermeneutics to the study of being. This lead to Satre's existentialism and to the work of people like Habbermas.
The significance of this work is that it forms an integral part of the design of the Web.
Often when a story of this type is made to demonstrate a particular political point that does not make sense it is because there is some additional piece of information which we are not being told. The original poster uses language that indicates a certain degree of contempt for the injured workers.
My guess would be that the factory using the machine would have had to do something like ask the manufacturer about removing the guard for the suit to have gone the way it did.
In any case the mere fact that a saftey guard was included would establish that the manufacturer knew that there was a likelihood of injury.
The problem is that it is quite reasonable for a journal that takes an article that is interdisciplinary to look at the part of the article that is in their domain and take the part that is outside on trust.
The media and yourself take it on trust that Sokal is telling the truth when he says he was lying. This is a somewhat odd position to take. But if you start by wanting to believe that the whole field is bollocks then you are likely to believe the assertion because you want to.
In private correspondence Sokal admits that the 'gobbledygok' is in the quotes he uses rather than the main text. And here the problem is that the quotes are 'bollocks' because Sokal claims that to be the case.
The other problem is that journals like Social Text do not claim to be edited like science journals. Nor is Social Text exactly a journal of the front rank.
The problem is that the university administration charges an utterly ludicrous overhead. The student gets $8.75 an hour, the administration deducts $35 an hour from the grant.
So even though the Media lab is 'loosing' money, MIT is still raking in cash hand over fist.
I believe that there is also some reduction in fees which is actually far more valuable.
The main reason the students do UROPs however is that it is a good way to get experience with a research group if you want to do a Masters or Doctorate.
OK so you might get paid as much sorting mail or the like, but doing a Media Lab UROP looks much better on your CV.
Unfortunately it is not as good if you happen to know about quantum theory and hermeneutics. The problem with the Sokal article is that it is not actually as nonsensical as he claims. The Quantum mechanics pieces are pure bullshit, the hermenutics pieces are a cut and past job from other sources.
So the hoax does not actually demonstrate what it is meant to. The other problem I have with Sokal is that he is very happy to allow people to believe he is rubishing top rank continental philosophers like Derrida, in fact he only goes after figures that are marginal at best. The only front rank philosopher he goes after in 'Imposteurs Intellectuele' is Kristava, who gained respect for her early work rather than the later work he criticises.
Sokal is quite happy to admit that he does not demolish Derrida in private (we have exchanged email) but is quite happy to let the 'misunderstanding' continue in private.
What it really comes down to is that many theoretical physicists have to have this feeling that they are discovering absolute truth and thus have an irrational hatred of folk who tell them their idea is nuts.
Turns out that this scam is actually by the editors of Social Texts who have been waiting all this time to get their own back on Alan Sokol.
Absolutely, unless you plan to actually race the car, kewl modifications almost always detract from the value.
I have a '77 MGB which probably hasn't lost any value because it lost its CA emissions system many years ago and picked up some Weber Carbs. to replace the standard SU units, but the same mods on an E-Type or a TR would cut into value.
As a performance car the problem with the TR is that it will spend more time in the shop than on the road. For not much more than the current bid price you can buy a brand new XK8 that will likly be trouble free. For less than the current bid price ($50K) you can buy a clean TR of the same year which has not been messed with.
The last thing you want to do with a Ferrari is make it less reliable.
The other problem with the car is that it is the wrong color, Ferraris are RED.
Bovine excrement
AOL made zero mistakes in the merger. They took a hyperinflated dotcom stock and used it to buy a real business right at the peak of the dotcom market. If they had waited they would have watched their stock lide the way Yahoo did.
The question that puzzles me is why the Tme Warner executives sold out.
Clearly the sense of irony was lost on you.
We just did walking yesterday. It sounds as if we have a linux hacker as his speech consists almost entirely of UNIX command line sequences, AWK! AwK!
The problem with the gzip approach is that it is best on long files rather than short ones. The problem with XML is that SOAP messages that should take one or 2 packets end up taking 5. Gzip tends to make 5 packets 4, but it *will* make 50 packets 25.
The other problem with GZIP is that the implementation is fairly computation intensive. It is not something that you can implement as a simple filter with almost no memory overhead.
GZIP is a great general purpose compression scheme for largeish quantities of data, but a scheme that is highly domain specific can usually do better.
The main mistake we made with the Web was to not include a simple compression scheme that was optimized for HTML at an early stage. The Content encoding tag was a good idea, but we should have shipped a lightweight compressor as well.
The approach in XMill is a good one, but I am not too happy with the table switching codes, also I think that an extra 25% compression can be wrung out at low cost. The big problem with XMill is that it was not progressed as a standard anywhere. I would give more details on the scheme, however there has been a recent rash of Patent Trolls filing patents on ideas they find on mailing lists. I call that type of behavior fraud, the courts call it a cause of action that will cost me $2 million to defend against. Congress call this situation an opportunity to collect campaign bribes.
XML Compression is something that I am working on, but I am already the point person in two major XML working groups and this is not a high priority. I really need an intern to crank through measuring efficiency on various document sets.
No there is not. ASN.1 is an utter crock. The original idea was good, the implementation sucketh, especialy the DER encoding.
ASN.1 is not particularly efficient, unless you use something like PER which if it is supported requires a support library that comes on 2 CDROMS.
The XML in ASN.1 proposal is simply an attempt by the die hard OSI/EDI types to try to preserve the work they have done.
The problem with XML is the over complex schema notation, the problem with ASN.1 is the over complex encoding. So put them together and you have a perfect platform for information engineering consultants to suck an IT budget dry. If that is your objective then go for XML in ASN.1.
I suspect that the reorganization is more to do with internal politics and ability to deliver than a strategic shift. The WebTV project was never quite there. The cost of the device was just too much for what it delivered. Plus the WebTV platform is slow and underpowered to support UltimateTV, XBox is overkill.
WebTV could be reduced to a program that is loaded onto the console. Adding ultimate TV requires nothing more than a bigger hard drive and TV signal acquisition hardware.
What would be cool is some sort of PVR that has a firewire interface so you can plug in extra disk drives. I love my DishPlayer, but 33 hours is not enough, nor is 120. What I really need is the ability to add extra storage as I need it. I want the ability to record at least 2000 hours of video, which won't be a lot of hard drives soon.
In case you are wondering, the more seasame street I can record, the more my 11 month old will let me go online. Otherwise he comes over for computing lessons.
The QL had a couple of fatal flaws. First the display model was almost impossible to use for games. Second the microdrive was no substitute for a floppy drive. On top of that they had no strategy for attracting developers, the keyboard also sucked and being unable to buy one without a nine month wait hardly helped.
The problem with the car was not the effect on Sir Clive's fortune, it was the effect of the shoemobile on his reputation. The idea was so ridiculously underbaked he became a laughing stock.
In the end a drop in the price of the Atari ST stole the market, a much better machine for the same price. I even got a monitor thrown in with mine for the same price I paid for the QL.
A coin op can rake in a good profit with a pinball, but maintenance takes much more than a guy to go round and collect the money. Ms Pacman does not get stuck behind a bumper.
Has Palm made a profit ever?
The stockmarket is down on Palm because they are having to chase ever lower margins at the low end of the business.
I am none too happy with my Palm VII's use of batteries. I would much prefer a rechargeable battery provided it recharges in the cradle. I understand that that is available on some models, but none with the power sucking wireless capability.
As for the new models, I have watched too many technology companies die waiting for the radical reshaping of their product line. Sinclair died when the QL turned out to fall just short of the PC competitor it was meant to be. Apple almost went belly-up with the Apple III.
The more I talk to (to be acurate the more I am talked at by) audiophiles the more I get the feeling that its a geek weenie measuring contest and has nothing to do with what stuff sounds like. One guy I know told me at great length how his $2,000 cd player was superior to the cheapie Philips unit it shares its main circuit board with because of the accuracy and freedom from wow/flutter of the CD drive mechanism.
So when I hear about golden ears and such I tend to think Bovine Excrement.
I would much prefer to use Ogg or Windows Media Player than MP3 because they are better compression formats and allow more tracks to fit on my Archos device. Problem is that the Archos won't play them to the better compression is moot.
I am not that much interested in the Napster/Gnutella scene any more than I am aware of any other WareZ scene so use of the codec by others is not that interesting to me. However if someone came along with a 6Gb Hard Drive of 'stuff' I could well imagine preferring to do swapsies than encoding the stuff myself. Ripping off tracks one at a time over Napster while being spamvertised is not my idea of fun.
The problem for Palm is that their hardware business has a stronger consumer presence than their software. They also appear to have been asleep at the wheel for some time, while Microsoft was busy reinventing the PDA, Palm have not done anything of note since the Palm VII which is still as big and bulky as ever.
Palm are in a hole because Microsoft are producing a pocket computer while Palm are producing a single purpose appliance.
The problem with a Palm is that is appeals to the same people who used their Filofaxes in the 1980s, those obnoxious organized people who can actually remember to charge the damn thing each night. The Palm VII could have been the answer - a PDA and comunicator in one. Unfortunately using a Palm VII is a bit like using a dual boot Linux/Windows PC. It can play Tombraider, or it can run Gnome but not both at once. Same with the Palm VII, it can download email from Palm net, but it does not integrate seamlessly into my corporate mail system, not without some plugin in the sever my IT dept would never install.
The pocket PC on the other hand is not just a PDA, it has Word and Excell and Outlook. It also has an MP3 player that looks pretty solidly aimed at the consumer market.
So OK at the moment there are relatively few consumers with $500 to spend on a pocket PC, but within a year that price will be $300 and the year after $200. There are an awful lot more consumers interested in a consumer gadget than are interested in a cheap PDA.
OK so you can buy lots of software to make a Palm do the same as a PocketPC - only no MP3 output as there is no audio output. The problem is that by the time you do that you have spent more than you would for the PocketPC and you have a processor that is a third the speed and a third the amount of RAM.
The problem for Palm Software is that they have to quickly get to the point where they can make their platform as a package match Pocket PC. They may be able to buy in some software from third parties and bundle. As things stand they are playing Lotus 123 to Microsoft Office.
I have never heard a Microsoft Exec spend most of their time talking about the competition in a presentation. With Sun and McNealy I have several times heard an entire sales proposition put to me as 'this is how you can put one in the eye of Mcrosoft'.
Unfortunately for Sun they have not quite figured out that I am not interested in their proposals because they will hurt Microsoft. My only interest is whether they will make money for my company.
There are times when Microsoft goes into a market for strategic reasons, XBox, Messenger/Passport, Explorer. But Microsoft always tell me why their way is better for me. They don't simply ask for me to help them break the AOL Instant Messenger monopoly or the Netscape browser monopoly.
What I hear from CNN people is that the top level execs are terrified of Fox News. For some reason they believe that Fox is beating them because of the rightwing bias in all their reporting. In fact the reason CNN is loosing the cable news battle is obvious if you are a viewer, they don't do news, they do soap operas. Over last summer CNN became the Gary Condit channel. CNN had saturation coverage day after day even though nothing new had come out, the world had already decided that Condit probably didn't do it but has been exposed as a hypocrite, a liar and a fool and thus not fit for re-election. Before Condit we got the Florida recount (which actually was a compelling news story for a change), but also the Monica Lewisnsky saga, Jon Bennet Ramsey, all the way back to the O.J. Simpson saga. The idea seems to be that if there is no blockbuster story that will drive the ratings, go out there and manufacture one.
This weekend I tuned in for reliable sources, only to find that it had been switched for a half hour 'documentary' to PR 'Black Hawk Down' in a theatre near you. The problem with the 'synergy' idea is that each time you use a news organization to plug your own products you loose credibility. Murdoch is much cleverer in that regard, he does not often shill for his own products in his quality newspapers, he does in his tabloids.
In the early days of the Internet boom, Time-Warner did try to sabotage the Internet with their cyberporn smear. The background to that story is that Time-Warner were trying to kill the Internet because they still believed that their Interactive TV model with centralized control would win. But shortly after Time-Warner switched tracks and decided the Internet was what they had been about all the time.
AOL Time-Warner does not appear to be quite as clueless on the DMCA and the Hollings bill. In fact it appears that Hollings is off in a world of his own along with a bunch of lobyists who are trying to make policy for their clients rather than present and purchase it in the legislature.
I don't personaly see much of a fit between Time Warner and Red Hat. The idea is probably that they are somehow going to compete against Microsoft in the computer market, just as Microsoft is competing against Time Warner in the content market. The Video Game market now execeeds the film market, Microsoft is a major distributor in games software and owns the X-Box platform.
What I suspect and fear the buyout might be about is AOL Time Warner getting Microsoft paranoia. It is never a good idea when a company stops thining about how it will make money for itself and instead concentrates on blocking a competitor.
The cafeine laden air was then pierced by a cry, "lets invent the dorkiest, nerdiest hobby ever and use slashdot to persuade people to do it!".
Their first idea was to have people stand at airports and train stations taking the numbers of the trains as they pass. Then someone did a search on Google (which runs Linux) and found that 'trainspoting' has been thought of already, they even found a Web site giving advice on the best model of parker to wear while doing it.
The GPS drawing idea was the result. $3 Billion dollars of orbiting infrastructure and they use it to make an etch-a-sketch.
The more time people who do that kind of thing can be persuaded to do that kind of thinginstead of finding members of the opposite sex and procreating the happier I feel about the future of the world.
The Rosenbergs were executed after a trial in which the US Govt used selected parts of intercept evidence. The parts that indicated that the wife probably had no knowledge of the spying were suppressed.
At the last military tribunal to be held in the US the government claimed that the saboteurs had been caught by surveilance methods they had to keep secret. In fact two of the sabotage team went to the FBI within hours of landing and tried to turn themselves in, only to not be believed. The military tribunal was arranged so that the administration did not look stupid for giving Hoover a medal for his detective work.
The EU commission can fine a company up to approximately a years revenues from the products whose price was manipulated. So for the DVD scam the fine would be in the billions or tens of billions.
The EU commission has imposed fines of that scale in the past - they fined IBM 1 billion for anti-trust practices back in the 80s. There would be no way the studios could avoid paying since their assets in Europe (including copyrights) could be siezed to pay the fine.
The EU can also prohibit the sale of region locked DVD players, mandating all players sold in the EU to be multi-zone (with the exception of those for public audiences). This has already happened in New Zealand.
Ultimately the studios are in a weak position. They have a US corporate, Enronesque view of regulation.