For the 2006 Formula SAE competition (think college level F1)
Lets see Formula SAE budget $100K, Formula 1 budget $400 million.
The fact you would even make the comparison shows how little you understand F1. The budget of the back of the grid F1 teams is much larger than the winning Indie car teams. The budget for Ferrari or Renault is larger than the whole of NASCAR.
This is absolutely not about making things simple or 'cheap'. It is about making it easier to determine what program logic is running in the cars and thus about controlling the actual logic used.
What may be an issue for some of the teams is the possible loss of certain sponsors. But HP is also a Windows seller so they are unlikely to withdraw on that basis.
The term 'operating system' has to be understood somewhat loosely here. It is quite probable that what they actually develop looks more like an industrial ladder logic controler than a Windows box.
Perhaps it will simply be a branding thing for MS, c.f. the McLaren "Mercedes" engine of a few years ago which was actually built by Ilmor and only ever entered Germany if there was a race there:-)
Microsoft is undoubtedly paying a lot of money to do this, probably in the tens of millions plus the engineering time. Formula one is the most expensive sponsorship platform there is.
The benefit to the sport is partly cost but mostly to ensure that the teams own software can be kept within limits. In particular Microsoft can use their trusted computing environment to ensure that the teams only run the homologated code they have submitted to FISA for signing. So after the race there can be no questions as to whether they used driver aids like traction control or remote engine management.
Contrary to assertions an F1 car does need an O/S. It is not like a street car. The engine itself is not the issue, it is the wireless link, the telemetry, the fuel management and so on that is critical.
I could see Microsoft using a stock Windows kernel as a start but I suspect that most of this is going to be about custom coding the system to develop a new breed of O/S.
And even then, do not believe it. It is fairly easy to substitue another body with a little bit of makeup.
Nah, wrong conspiracy theory, the real question is whether it was Cheney or Rove who ordered the hit to keep the truth from comming out.
Question is whether the lawyers got the appeal in first. In MA a convicted criminal who has a pending appeal automatically gets a pardon. That would mean that the Lay family may get to keep some of the money he stole. Although his estate is still liable for damages Texas bankruptcy law protects certain assets like the family home, no matter how many millions it is worth. The criminal fines would have wiped those out as well.
How in the name of @#$(@$#* is knowing how to circumvent the great firewall going to do any good if you don't tell anyone about it.
This is not helping China. They know how their firewall works, they built it. They also know where Cambridge University is (unlike half the readers of Slashdot).
Slashdot is helping China by bringing the article to their attention.
This has been circulating in the security blogs for a week now. There are basically two schools of thought. One is that we might fix the IP stack to ignore/filter out RST packets. The second is that we might make it easier to turn on SSL.
Rather than monkey about with changing the protocols to ignore RST we would probably do better turning on SSL encryption on Wikipedia &ct with some cheap domain authentication certs.
eally? What would he have done? Banned all Arabs from flying in airplanes? Or maybe take a card out from FDR's playbook and lock them all up in prison camps?
He should have done what Clinton did faced with similar news in 1999. He should have convened an all agency meeting, put the coastguard and customs on high alert, put the FBI on notice &ct.
Richard Clark did not have the report written on a whim, he had a very specific plan of action he wanted Presidential endorsement to enact. The same plan they used in 1999 when Clinton made terrorism the number one issue for the security services.
That is how the Al Qaeda attack on LA in 1999 was foiled. The customs agents were on the alert for a terrorist threat. So when they discovered a suspicious pair trying to smuggle in suspicious stuff from Canada they knew that it could be a very serious issue.
The FBI already had one of the plotters. Louis Freeh did not want the investigators to ask for a warrant to search his computer because the priority was on drug cases.
Instead Bush went out to cut brush in his yard. He asked no questions about the plans for protecting the country against the attack. He took no interest in how the plans were being executed.
Every time something that is completely foreseable happens the incompetents in the administration say 'nobody could have predicted'. The fact is that people did predict an Al Qaeda attack. People did predict that if the US invaded Iraq there would be a civil war between the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds and that Iran would emerge as the regional superpower. People did predict that Katrina would flood New Orleans. People did predict that cutting taxes and raising spending would create a huge budget defecit.
Currently the idiot is pretending that Global warming does not exist. If he gets his way and nothing is done his response to the catastrophe will be 'nobody expected this to happen'.
Yeah, because before 9-11, terrorism was completely unknown in the United States. Its not like anyone had ever tried to detonate a bomb in the parking garage of the world trade center, or someone had tried to blow up the Federal Builing in Oklahoma City (ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
True, but when Bush was handed the report titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack USA' he replied 'OK so you have covered your asses' and instead of doing something that might have stopped the attack took the afternoon off.
Terrorism was a real threat but Bush showed zero interest in terrorist threats prior to 9/11.
When people talk of the incompetent fool as if he was a leader it really gets my pet goat.
1) Shiver Metimbers made a clear indication, with full intention to deceive, that if the mark sent goods there was potential for financial gain. Degrees of audacity are irrelevant.
So its technically a criminal fraud. The 'victim' is unlikely to make a criminal complaint.
The concern I have is that this type of thing may be putting money into the 419 scammers pockets rather than hurting them.
There are successful 419 scams but at this point the sheer volume of attack spam means that the pool of potential marks is pretty thin.
The original gangs now run a scheme involving buying goods on EBay with fake cashiers checks, asking for part of the money paid to be forwarded to a 'shipper' after it clears. Its the same advance fee scheme but in a different presentation.
I think that the scammers sell 'franchises' for their original scam, setting people up with all the tools they need to do this stuff for an up front fee. Then they take further commissions from the would be scammers for moving money if they are successful, taking photographs of them holding a fish on their head, etc. Getting carved art samples is just another service to provide and make money off.
The point is, does OpenOffice or whatever apps are currently available that use the OpenDoc format has the same level of help for people with disabilities as Office? Obviously it's (mostly) the app not the format that addresses this, but it's a valid bitch:
The more relevant question would be: "why such a short time?"
Clearly Microsoft could support OpenDoc but the timescale was clearly choosen to make sure any support would come too late.
This is an old trick in government procurement (and the term is meant in both senses). You have a contractor who you want to throw a plump contract to, you stack the requirements of the RFP so only that company can bid. Do a search on Shirlinton limo for more examples.
The first is the actual SCO licenses MS bought, right? Well, I recall reading a tiny paragraph in a magazine from around then of Ballmer mentioning having a lab studying Linux. So of course, since Ballmer was on the record saying "Linux might have IP issues!! Linux might have IP issues!!", it would seem plausible that they bought the licenses just in case ($699 is pennies compared to $125,000 per infringement). Now, we all doubt that Ballmer really believed Linux was doomed, but it's hard to prove he didn't believe what he was preaching.
I think you are taking this all way to personally.
First I think that Ballmer is right that the way Linux people were carrying on at that time probably would lead to IP issues. There is a lot of code and not a lot of tracking going on. Today people understand that this is a bad thing, people are much more careful about accepting external code with dubioius provenance. RMS has said the same sort of thing from time to time.
Microsoft has recently settled a large number of IP cases that I personally regard as frivolous. Its not just SCO they paid off and at least the SCO people did actually have title to some actual code.
If Microsoft were being really devious (yes) and exclusively concerned about sabotaging Linux (not)they would want to do everything they could to prevent SCO bringing its case to court and finally settling the question of Linux IP. You can't do FUD without Uncertainty and Doubt.
Microsoft's wider interest is to have the case settled in IBM's favor at IBM's cost. IBM's core interest here is not simply defeating SCO, it is settling the basis on which an IP infringement claim can be made. If they allow the precedent that SCO style littigation leads to a settlement everyone in the IT industry will be facing similar 'I have a case here but I am not going to tell you what it is' lawsuits.
Windows has 100 million lines of code, much written by outside contractors. There are many people who might come along and claim that there were ten lines of code inside that might belong to them.
At this point Boies is hardly putting up a stellar performance. He has been out lawyered in all four of the high profile cases he has been involved in of late.
BTW, just so you know, many conservatives complain about GWB not being conservative enough. Many don't consider him a true conservative.
Neither do I as it happens. But folk who get hot under the collar about such issues should have some idelogical consistency.
One of the more interesting effects of the blogosphere is that liberal bloggers have been attacking Jefferson and Mollohan. Both involved in some stinky deals. No quarter is given despite the fact they are both Democrats.
Neither party wanted to go after the slew of crooked earmarks that several members on both sides, including Hastert have been involved in. It was a nice little earner: buy some land, get an earmark that increases the value, sell out. I can see why neither side would want to lift the lid on that cess pool.
But heres the new rules, the blogosphere does not care that some folk on their own side may be taken out as collateral damage. It would be nice if the Republican blogs were attacking Hastert as assiduously as the Liberal blogs are attacking Mollohan for the same thing. But don't worry, that will happen soon enough.
We are retaking the US government for the people one crooked politician at a time.
It is somewhat strange to find conservatives so hot under the collar about the property developer issue. It is a matter of record that President George W. Bush made his millions from precisely this type of theft. The reason the other owners of the ball team wanted him to be their public face was that they wanted the local government to pay to build them a new ball park and as part of the process use their compulsory purchase powers to buy large amounts of adjoining property at considerably below market price.
Or maybe its not so strange to find out that politicians are hypocrites.
The problem with that particular case was that there are certain cases where there is very good reason to allow a local government to use compulsory purchase powers. Without them it would be impossible to build roads.
There are even cases where it makes sense for the government to purchase land and then sell it to developers. There are large areas of New York City that are slums owned by property speculators who have no interest in developing the land themselves, they are just holding the land until someone else develops the adjoining land and makes their plot increase in value.
The supreme court wisely decided that it could not set a general rule for such cases beyond the most basic question of requiring a fair price to be paid (defining what a fair price might be being a much harder question).
In this case patent law is an entirely a creation of government. Without government there are no patents. The question of where the balance should be between patent rights and competition is something that they can and will rule on in very general terms.
HP should have saved their money and sponsored something less controversial, a NAMBLA convention for example.
I don't get what SCO think they are achieving here, the company is dead. Most developers are not going to support their platform on principle and those who don't have a problem with the lawsuit are still going to avoid it because there is no critical mass. Thats why the nimrods started the lawsuit in the first place.
With that said, people need to stop comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica as if it's some sort of holy grail of quality to reach. Wikipedia is already better than Brittanica. There are two main uses people have for encyclopedias: as a casual source of information and as a starting point for research. Wikipedia is a better casual source of information because it provides far more information about more topics than Britannica does
The question is better for what. Wikipedia has more articles, many of them are fancruft entries on garage bands written by their members.
The problem with applying the open source model of a select mumber of editors to wikipedia is that they need vastly more participants.
There is a problem with vandalism though, the spanish inquisition article is regularly replaced with 'nobody expects'.
The bigger problem is POV peddling and quite often you can tell that an 'editor' is actually a paid flack of some politician. Read the 'Katherine Harris' article to see this, there is a series of edits from an editor who claims not to think that Ed Rolins is not a notable GOP strategist, Jeb Bush's comments that she has no chance of winning should not be included and that the fact she had a $2,800 dinner with a corrupt defense contractor currently waiting sentencing for admitting bribing Cunningham is not a notable political issue.
The Cindy Sheehan article attracted so many opposing POV peddlers that the article itself was protected and thus out of date for most of the time it was relevant.
Looks like people have stopped reading moderator guidelines. "Do not mod based on wether it matches your opinion" But its not followed, sadly. If anybody writes a lame post which goes with the idiology of the mods, its insightful, but you go against it, no matter how true your post is, it will be modded to oblivion.
That is what metamoderation is for, but quite a few people use that for voting as well. And then there are the people who mod down posts a 'overrated' in the hope the metamods don't catch them.
The parent is making a valid point. When you are selling something on your website, the avg joe user does not care about evil or good. All he/she wants is a site where no silly warnings prop up. Self sign certificates scare even so called geeks.
If you are selling something you need to demonstrate that you are a real business. It was not my idea to make a CA issued cert a requirement to turn on encryption.
The browser should turn on SSL without bothering the user when a self signed certificate is presented. I have argued that consistently for several years despite being Principal Scientist for a major CA. (Who I am not speaking on bahelf of here).
The point is though that the user should not be told that a self signed certificate is secure either. It should just enable the use of encryption.
Incidentally it is not really true to say that Microsoft uses self signed certs, OK they do issue their own certs but they chain up to the Microsoft root. And they have an extensive physical security infrastructure to support the control of their cryptographic keys. Doing so costs them much more than it would to outsource those tasks.
It has been a while since I've seen a post unanswered for so long
That is probably because it wasn't really a question, more sort of a flame against the idea of Certificate Authorities with some unoriginal gratuitous insults thrown in.
Without knowing what he wants to do with the certificate it is impossible to answer the question. If he just wants to connect up to his POP3 server via SSL then self signed is fine. If on the other hand he is setting up the online banking service for a money center bank he probably wants something that offers a somewhat higher degree of assurance.
Until recently there has been no differentiation as far as the user is concerned. That changes with Extended Validation in IE7 and the comming versions of firefox
The point of a certificate is that it should say who you are. If this does not matter in your application fine. If it does matter then get a cert that provides the necessary level of assurance for your app.
Think I'm exaggerating? Look at what happened to SGI, for example, and then tell me I'm exaggerating. It only took one bright new CEO to do more than half of what I wrote above, and set SGI on a downwards spiral from which it never recovered. Where SGI is now, you already know.
I think you make the point precisely. Short term shareholder value is not what Microsoft cares about, they care about the long term
Thats why the point about Oracle is so silly. Microsoft began to seriously challenge Oracle only 3-4 years ago. Their SQL server is certainly winning a lot of orders off Oracle, it is vastly cheaper and at this stage is equally viable. Of course it is also true that most applications simply don't need anything more complex than MySQL.
Microsoft's push in that space is based on Web Services and that market only began to move early this year when folk got excited about mashups. Mashups are simply another name for Web services that might not be based on SOAP.
I don't think anyone at Microsoft expected to unseat the 20 year incumbent in the ERP market place in the space of three years however disruptive they hoped that their technology would be.
As for MGP standards, the logic here is backwards. It makes no sense to tell Ford and GM "make your customers buy different cars". Rather, if the government wants to change the average MPG of the fleet, the GOVERNMENT has to do this. It easily can, and should, by raising the gasoline tax to the point where all of the externalities of gasoline use are accounted for. This would be an addition dollar to $1.50. Fat chance of that happening
The benefit is a much faster reduction in dependence on foreign oil. The US could eliminate its dependence on gulf oil entirely by adopting European fuel efficiency standards.
The oil reserves in ANWR should be kept as just that - reserves. Leave them untouched until all the other options are exhausted.
My Jaguar XK8 is hardly an exercise in self sacrifice but I get four times the MPG from that as the Hummer gets. I don't think there are many people who look at a Hummer and say 'wow what a beautiful car', instead they think 'there goes a complete bastard who is alos a moron'.
We also have a minivan made by Honda which does 28 mpg on highways by turning off half the cylinders in the engine when they are uneeded. Ford actually owns the patent on the technology which was first developed by Volvo. But you don't see it on their US based trucks, SUVs or Vans because the government does not give them any incentive to.
The result is that the US car industry is facing a massive decline in demand for its products now that people realize that $3/gallon oil is a permanent state of affairs.
I am much less interested in the freedom to buy a Hummer when there are National Guardsmen and Reservists being told that they have to serve in Iraq to secure our oil supply.
A luxury car does not need to be a gas guzzler. The sad thing is that the latest version of the XK8, a luxury sports car that is going to be the strongest contender on the professional rally circuit for the production car classes gives above average fuel economy for the US. The Honda Odyssey carries 7 people in comfort (8 with a squeeze) plus luggage but manages considerably above that.
The US minivans are competative because they are required to conform to the milage requirements, it is idiotic that the SUVs are exempt.
Maybe I shouldn't have named my fake vendor company Enron...
That reminds me of the recent case where a guy was caught trying to pass a counterfeit billion dollar bill. Most criminals avoid detection by trying to fly under the radar with a scam so low level it is undetected. This guy was caught because the attack was so ridiculously visible - which reminds me I blogged on this and forgot to actually publish the post, must do that.
These frauds are all pretty standard ones that any good auditor should be able to spot. Placing orders with a cutout company is an old ruse. What is suprising is the way that an exec of a public company would put it all on the line for what was actually chickenfeed compared to his salary and $900K stock options. I did that rant on my blog already though
The only part of this that is Internet specific is the attempt to shut down the whistle blowers with court orders in the fourth case. Again it happend in Enrons home base of Texas.
The blogosphere recently uncovered a series of frauds committed by Duke Cunningham and a number of other congressmen. The mainstream media has yet to tell the public anything close to the whole tale which is still being investigated but has already cased the dismissal of Porter-Goss as head of the CIA, the uncovering of a prostitutes and poker game held by lobbyists at the Watergate hotel and a peculiar series of limosine contracts. The bloggers are also currently getting their teeth into what appears to be a bipartisan scam where a legislator buys land up cheap, gets an earmark appropriation passed to build on or close to it that massively increases the value of the land and then sells dear.
In the UK the magazine Private Eye has traditionally been the whistle blower. The US has never had a true equivalent. Private Eye has dramatically reduced the amount of graft in UK public life by bringing to light many schemes that would otherwise have continued for decades.
Perhaps the Internet can be the Private Eye for the US.
Some people are concerned with more than what's going on today. You know, like geologic history? There are people who are called paleoclimatologists who study climate change over time scales which far exceed your lifetime. These would be 'climate change experts' and yet would have no particular reason to believe in global warming at the current time, and whether it's attributable to human activities based solely on their vocation. Contrast this with your selection of a contrasting group of people who have been shown to believe in fairy tales and to promulgate their beliefs to make a living and control people.
The sad thing is that I am utterly unable to understand which side of the argument you are attempting to argue is unfounded. If you want to rely on the opinion of experts then name some.
I am not a climatologist but I did use to build computers for folk doing that work. I also have a doctorate in physics. My reading of the litterature gives me no reason to believe that there is any serious doubt as to the fact of climate change, indeed it is absolutely beyond dispute that the climate is warmer today than during the Victorian period when the Thames regularly froze. Nor is there serious dispute that human factors are the principal cause and the rate of climate change is considerably more rapid than in any other period bar the catastrophes that triggered mass extinctions.
There is dispute over the likely extent, pace, implications of future climate change.
Some people are seriously worried that the melting artic frost will disrupt the circulation of ocean currents causing a new ice age in Europe. Others dispute these claims. And there is the bunch of engineers who want to drop a large amount of cast iron into the sea in such a way as to encourage algae to do something or other.
If your grasp of the subject is so tenuous that you can;t even make clear which side you are on I suggest you read something on the subject before posting further.
Another problem with the left is that they ignore economics. When the economists crunch the numbers, they often find that even assuming GW is real, adaption is simply the cheaper option as compared to prevention. To put it simply, doing anything about GW that would actually make a difference could be far more expensive than it is worth. It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
That depends on what you mean by 'adapting'.
I don't think that there would be any net costs to the US if GM and Ford were forced to stop making gas guzzlers like the Hummer that have single digit MPG. Or the nabobs on Natucket were told they are going to have to live with Cape Wind.
If the national security interest requires opening up the ANWR to oil drilling then it certainly requires the imposition of fuel economy requirements that Europe already has that would save several times the annual production from ANWR.
The US is a big country, large parts of it will probably be unaffected by climate change. The problem for the US is that the parts of the country where most people live are also the parts that are already under significant environmental stress. The entire West of the US has a major water shortage problem that climate change is almost certain to make worse. Much of Florida is low lying and sinking in any case because the swamps have been drained. Give it another hundred years and there will be quite a few cities like New Orleans where most of the place is under sea level even without climate change. Climate change accelerates the process.
You don't get paid to say "The world isn't going to end." There's no profit in it.
On the contrary, the Competative Enterprise Institute is paid handsomely by Exxon to shill for them.
Not that they employ actual scientists for this work, they employ people with degrees in economics and classics and political 'science' to scour the academic litterature and cherry pick passages that concur with their masters views.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see Formula SAE budget $100K, Formula 1 budget $400 million.
The fact you would even make the comparison shows how little you understand F1. The budget of the back of the grid F1 teams is much larger than the winning Indie car teams. The budget for Ferrari or Renault is larger than the whole of NASCAR.
This is absolutely not about making things simple or 'cheap'. It is about making it easier to determine what program logic is running in the cars and thus about controlling the actual logic used.
What may be an issue for some of the teams is the possible loss of certain sponsors. But HP is also a Windows seller so they are unlikely to withdraw on that basis.
The term 'operating system' has to be understood somewhat loosely here. It is quite probable that what they actually develop looks more like an industrial ladder logic controler than a Windows box.
Microsoft is undoubtedly paying a lot of money to do this, probably in the tens of millions plus the engineering time. Formula one is the most expensive sponsorship platform there is.
The benefit to the sport is partly cost but mostly to ensure that the teams own software can be kept within limits. In particular Microsoft can use their trusted computing environment to ensure that the teams only run the homologated code they have submitted to FISA for signing. So after the race there can be no questions as to whether they used driver aids like traction control or remote engine management.
Contrary to assertions an F1 car does need an O/S. It is not like a street car. The engine itself is not the issue, it is the wireless link, the telemetry, the fuel management and so on that is critical.
I could see Microsoft using a stock Windows kernel as a start but I suspect that most of this is going to be about custom coding the system to develop a new breed of O/S.
Nah, wrong conspiracy theory, the real question is whether it was Cheney or Rove who ordered the hit to keep the truth from comming out.
Question is whether the lawyers got the appeal in first. In MA a convicted criminal who has a pending appeal automatically gets a pardon. That would mean that the Lay family may get to keep some of the money he stole. Although his estate is still liable for damages Texas bankruptcy law protects certain assets like the family home, no matter how many millions it is worth. The criminal fines would have wiped those out as well.
This is not helping China. They know how their firewall works, they built it. They also know where Cambridge University is (unlike half the readers of Slashdot).
Slashdot is helping China by bringing the article to their attention.
This has been circulating in the security blogs for a week now. There are basically two schools of thought. One is that we might fix the IP stack to ignore/filter out RST packets. The second is that we might make it easier to turn on SSL.
Rather than monkey about with changing the protocols to ignore RST we would probably do better turning on SSL encryption on Wikipedia &ct with some cheap domain authentication certs.
He should have done what Clinton did faced with similar news in 1999. He should have convened an all agency meeting, put the coastguard and customs on high alert, put the FBI on notice &ct.
Richard Clark did not have the report written on a whim, he had a very specific plan of action he wanted Presidential endorsement to enact. The same plan they used in 1999 when Clinton made terrorism the number one issue for the security services.
That is how the Al Qaeda attack on LA in 1999 was foiled. The customs agents were on the alert for a terrorist threat. So when they discovered a suspicious pair trying to smuggle in suspicious stuff from Canada they knew that it could be a very serious issue.
The FBI already had one of the plotters. Louis Freeh did not want the investigators to ask for a warrant to search his computer because the priority was on drug cases.
Instead Bush went out to cut brush in his yard. He asked no questions about the plans for protecting the country against the attack. He took no interest in how the plans were being executed.
Every time something that is completely foreseable happens the incompetents in the administration say 'nobody could have predicted'. The fact is that people did predict an Al Qaeda attack. People did predict that if the US invaded Iraq there would be a civil war between the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds and that Iran would emerge as the regional superpower. People did predict that Katrina would flood New Orleans. People did predict that cutting taxes and raising spending would create a huge budget defecit.
Currently the idiot is pretending that Global warming does not exist. If he gets his way and nothing is done his response to the catastrophe will be 'nobody expected this to happen'.
True, but when Bush was handed the report titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack USA' he replied 'OK so you have covered your asses' and instead of doing something that might have stopped the attack took the afternoon off.
Terrorism was a real threat but Bush showed zero interest in terrorist threats prior to 9/11.
When people talk of the incompetent fool as if he was a leader it really gets my pet goat.
So its technically a criminal fraud. The 'victim' is unlikely to make a criminal complaint.
The concern I have is that this type of thing may be putting money into the 419 scammers pockets rather than hurting them.
There are successful 419 scams but at this point the sheer volume of attack spam means that the pool of potential marks is pretty thin.
The original gangs now run a scheme involving buying goods on EBay with fake cashiers checks, asking for part of the money paid to be forwarded to a 'shipper' after it clears. Its the same advance fee scheme but in a different presentation.
I think that the scammers sell 'franchises' for their original scam, setting people up with all the tools they need to do this stuff for an up front fee. Then they take further commissions from the would be scammers for moving money if they are successful, taking photographs of them holding a fish on their head, etc. Getting carved art samples is just another service to provide and make money off.
The more relevant question would be: "why such a short time?"
Clearly Microsoft could support OpenDoc but the timescale was clearly choosen to make sure any support would come too late.
This is an old trick in government procurement (and the term is meant in both senses). You have a contractor who you want to throw a plump contract to, you stack the requirements of the RFP so only that company can bid. Do a search on Shirlinton limo for more examples.
I think you are taking this all way to personally.
First I think that Ballmer is right that the way Linux people were carrying on at that time probably would lead to IP issues. There is a lot of code and not a lot of tracking going on. Today people understand that this is a bad thing, people are much more careful about accepting external code with dubioius provenance. RMS has said the same sort of thing from time to time.
Microsoft has recently settled a large number of IP cases that I personally regard as frivolous. Its not just SCO they paid off and at least the SCO people did actually have title to some actual code.
If Microsoft were being really devious (yes) and exclusively concerned about sabotaging Linux (not)they would want to do everything they could to prevent SCO bringing its case to court and finally settling the question of Linux IP. You can't do FUD without Uncertainty and Doubt.
Microsoft's wider interest is to have the case settled in IBM's favor at IBM's cost. IBM's core interest here is not simply defeating SCO, it is settling the basis on which an IP infringement claim can be made. If they allow the precedent that SCO style littigation leads to a settlement everyone in the IT industry will be facing similar 'I have a case here but I am not going to tell you what it is' lawsuits.
Windows has 100 million lines of code, much written by outside contractors. There are many people who might come along and claim that there were ten lines of code inside that might belong to them.
At this point Boies is hardly putting up a stellar performance. He has been out lawyered in all four of the high profile cases he has been involved in of late.
Neither do I as it happens. But folk who get hot under the collar about such issues should have some idelogical consistency.
One of the more interesting effects of the blogosphere is that liberal bloggers have been attacking Jefferson and Mollohan. Both involved in some stinky deals. No quarter is given despite the fact they are both Democrats.
Neither party wanted to go after the slew of crooked earmarks that several members on both sides, including Hastert have been involved in. It was a nice little earner: buy some land, get an earmark that increases the value, sell out. I can see why neither side would want to lift the lid on that cess pool.
But heres the new rules, the blogosphere does not care that some folk on their own side may be taken out as collateral damage. It would be nice if the Republican blogs were attacking Hastert as assiduously as the Liberal blogs are attacking Mollohan for the same thing. But don't worry, that will happen soon enough.
We are retaking the US government for the people one crooked politician at a time.
Or maybe its not so strange to find out that politicians are hypocrites.
The problem with that particular case was that there are certain cases where there is very good reason to allow a local government to use compulsory purchase powers. Without them it would be impossible to build roads.
There are even cases where it makes sense for the government to purchase land and then sell it to developers. There are large areas of New York City that are slums owned by property speculators who have no interest in developing the land themselves, they are just holding the land until someone else develops the adjoining land and makes their plot increase in value.
The supreme court wisely decided that it could not set a general rule for such cases beyond the most basic question of requiring a fair price to be paid (defining what a fair price might be being a much harder question).
In this case patent law is an entirely a creation of government. Without government there are no patents. The question of where the balance should be between patent rights and competition is something that they can and will rule on in very general terms.
I don't get what SCO think they are achieving here, the company is dead. Most developers are not going to support their platform on principle and those who don't have a problem with the lawsuit are still going to avoid it because there is no critical mass. Thats why the nimrods started the lawsuit in the first place.
Nielsen make their money conducting market research surveys.
I doubt Google is going to be conducting research surveys or distributing their own rating monitoring boxes.
The part they are going to overlap on is a small part of the publicly visible loss leader.
The question is better for what. Wikipedia has more articles, many of them are fancruft entries on garage bands written by their members.
The problem with applying the open source model of a select mumber of editors to wikipedia is that they need vastly more participants.
There is a problem with vandalism though, the spanish inquisition article is regularly replaced with 'nobody expects'.
The bigger problem is POV peddling and quite often you can tell that an 'editor' is actually a paid flack of some politician. Read the 'Katherine Harris' article to see this, there is a series of edits from an editor who claims not to think that Ed Rolins is not a notable GOP strategist, Jeb Bush's comments that she has no chance of winning should not be included and that the fact she had a $2,800 dinner with a corrupt defense contractor currently waiting sentencing for admitting bribing Cunningham is not a notable political issue.
The Cindy Sheehan article attracted so many opposing POV peddlers that the article itself was protected and thus out of date for most of the time it was relevant.
That is what metamoderation is for, but quite a few people use that for voting as well. And then there are the people who mod down posts a 'overrated' in the hope the metamods don't catch them.
The parent is making a valid point. When you are selling something on your website, the avg joe user does not care about evil or good. All he/she wants is a site where no silly warnings prop up. Self sign certificates scare even so called geeks.
If you are selling something you need to demonstrate that you are a real business. It was not my idea to make a CA issued cert a requirement to turn on encryption.
The browser should turn on SSL without bothering the user when a self signed certificate is presented. I have argued that consistently for several years despite being Principal Scientist for a major CA. (Who I am not speaking on bahelf of here).
The point is though that the user should not be told that a self signed certificate is secure either. It should just enable the use of encryption.
Incidentally it is not really true to say that Microsoft uses self signed certs, OK they do issue their own certs but they chain up to the Microsoft root. And they have an extensive physical security infrastructure to support the control of their cryptographic keys. Doing so costs them much more than it would to outsource those tasks.
That is probably because it wasn't really a question, more sort of a flame against the idea of Certificate Authorities with some unoriginal gratuitous insults thrown in.
Without knowing what he wants to do with the certificate it is impossible to answer the question. If he just wants to connect up to his POP3 server via SSL then self signed is fine. If on the other hand he is setting up the online banking service for a money center bank he probably wants something that offers a somewhat higher degree of assurance.
Until recently there has been no differentiation as far as the user is concerned. That changes with Extended Validation in IE7 and the comming versions of firefox
The point of a certificate is that it should say who you are. If this does not matter in your application fine. If it does matter then get a cert that provides the necessary level of assurance for your app.
I think you make the point precisely. Short term shareholder value is not what Microsoft cares about, they care about the long term
Thats why the point about Oracle is so silly. Microsoft began to seriously challenge Oracle only 3-4 years ago. Their SQL server is certainly winning a lot of orders off Oracle, it is vastly cheaper and at this stage is equally viable. Of course it is also true that most applications simply don't need anything more complex than MySQL.
Microsoft's push in that space is based on Web Services and that market only began to move early this year when folk got excited about mashups. Mashups are simply another name for Web services that might not be based on SOAP.
I don't think anyone at Microsoft expected to unseat the 20 year incumbent in the ERP market place in the space of three years however disruptive they hoped that their technology would be.
I just modded you Underated, happy now?
Why can't there be a prize for flaming on slashdot?
The benefit is a much faster reduction in dependence on foreign oil. The US could eliminate its dependence on gulf oil entirely by adopting European fuel efficiency standards.
The oil reserves in ANWR should be kept as just that - reserves. Leave them untouched until all the other options are exhausted.
My Jaguar XK8 is hardly an exercise in self sacrifice but I get four times the MPG from that as the Hummer gets. I don't think there are many people who look at a Hummer and say 'wow what a beautiful car', instead they think 'there goes a complete bastard who is alos a moron'.
We also have a minivan made by Honda which does 28 mpg on highways by turning off half the cylinders in the engine when they are uneeded. Ford actually owns the patent on the technology which was first developed by Volvo. But you don't see it on their US based trucks, SUVs or Vans because the government does not give them any incentive to.
The result is that the US car industry is facing a massive decline in demand for its products now that people realize that $3/gallon oil is a permanent state of affairs.
I am much less interested in the freedom to buy a Hummer when there are National Guardsmen and Reservists being told that they have to serve in Iraq to secure our oil supply.
A luxury car does not need to be a gas guzzler. The sad thing is that the latest version of the XK8, a luxury sports car that is going to be the strongest contender on the professional rally circuit for the production car classes gives above average fuel economy for the US. The Honda Odyssey carries 7 people in comfort (8 with a squeeze) plus luggage but manages considerably above that.
The US minivans are competative because they are required to conform to the milage requirements, it is idiotic that the SUVs are exempt.
That reminds me of the recent case where a guy was caught trying to pass a counterfeit billion dollar bill. Most criminals avoid detection by trying to fly under the radar with a scam so low level it is undetected. This guy was caught because the attack was so ridiculously visible - which reminds me I blogged on this and forgot to actually publish the post, must do that.
These frauds are all pretty standard ones that any good auditor should be able to spot. Placing orders with a cutout company is an old ruse. What is suprising is the way that an exec of a public company would put it all on the line for what was actually chickenfeed compared to his salary and $900K stock options. I did that rant on my blog already though
The only part of this that is Internet specific is the attempt to shut down the whistle blowers with court orders in the fourth case. Again it happend in Enrons home base of Texas.
The blogosphere recently uncovered a series of frauds committed by Duke Cunningham and a number of other congressmen. The mainstream media has yet to tell the public anything close to the whole tale which is still being investigated but has already cased the dismissal of Porter-Goss as head of the CIA, the uncovering of a prostitutes and poker game held by lobbyists at the Watergate hotel and a peculiar series of limosine contracts. The bloggers are also currently getting their teeth into what appears to be a bipartisan scam where a legislator buys land up cheap, gets an earmark appropriation passed to build on or close to it that massively increases the value of the land and then sells dear.
In the UK the magazine Private Eye has traditionally been the whistle blower. The US has never had a true equivalent. Private Eye has dramatically reduced the amount of graft in UK public life by bringing to light many schemes that would otherwise have continued for decades.
Perhaps the Internet can be the Private Eye for the US.
The sad thing is that I am utterly unable to understand which side of the argument you are attempting to argue is unfounded. If you want to rely on the opinion of experts then name some.
I am not a climatologist but I did use to build computers for folk doing that work. I also have a doctorate in physics. My reading of the litterature gives me no reason to believe that there is any serious doubt as to the fact of climate change, indeed it is absolutely beyond dispute that the climate is warmer today than during the Victorian period when the Thames regularly froze. Nor is there serious dispute that human factors are the principal cause and the rate of climate change is considerably more rapid than in any other period bar the catastrophes that triggered mass extinctions.
There is dispute over the likely extent, pace, implications of future climate change.
Some people are seriously worried that the melting artic frost will disrupt the circulation of ocean currents causing a new ice age in Europe. Others dispute these claims. And there is the bunch of engineers who want to drop a large amount of cast iron into the sea in such a way as to encourage algae to do something or other.
If your grasp of the subject is so tenuous that you can;t even make clear which side you are on I suggest you read something on the subject before posting further.
That depends on what you mean by 'adapting'.
I don't think that there would be any net costs to the US if GM and Ford were forced to stop making gas guzzlers like the Hummer that have single digit MPG. Or the nabobs on Natucket were told they are going to have to live with Cape Wind.
If the national security interest requires opening up the ANWR to oil drilling then it certainly requires the imposition of fuel economy requirements that Europe already has that would save several times the annual production from ANWR.
The US is a big country, large parts of it will probably be unaffected by climate change. The problem for the US is that the parts of the country where most people live are also the parts that are already under significant environmental stress. The entire West of the US has a major water shortage problem that climate change is almost certain to make worse. Much of Florida is low lying and sinking in any case because the swamps have been drained. Give it another hundred years and there will be quite a few cities like New Orleans where most of the place is under sea level even without climate change. Climate change accelerates the process.
On the contrary, the Competative Enterprise Institute is paid handsomely by Exxon to shill for them.
Not that they employ actual scientists for this work, they employ people with degrees in economics and classics and political 'science' to scour the academic litterature and cherry pick passages that concur with their masters views.
Its called prostitution.