Hey, don't give EDMONTON as an example of a Canadian city without ethnic diversity! I'm from Michigan, now living in Edmonton, and there's more diversity of culture here than even Ann Arbor or Detroit. A *lot* more. Huge proportions of Native, Chinese, East Indian, Ukranian, and other ethnicities and/or immigrants, and plenty of Germans, Dutch, Ethiopians, and people from other Eastern European, African, and Asian countries! It's the "Go West Young Man" (er, oh, is that a US expression?) or "There's Work in Alberta" thing, apparently.
What, isn't Safe Perl done yet? There was a lot of (obviously pretty localized) noise about how much better Perl would be than Java or even (or especially?) JavaScript as the extension language for web clients. Ah, it doesn't look like Safe Perl got past the proposal stage back in 1995. Then again, "man Safe" gets me documentation for it. Time for a visit to CPAN!
Safe TCL was actually discussed as a possible extension language for e-mail, with prototypes done in Metamail.
A lot of people have talked about Java's "sandbox" security as being pretty feeble. A language designed from the start to be "Safe" may be able to provide more powerful constructs with fewer vulnerabilities.
With VNC (Virtual Network Computing) or something like it, any dropped connection means you just pick up where you left off when you get your connection back. This just follows the "ASP" (Application Service Provider) concept that Sun and Oracle have been pushing for a while.
That's not the end of their continued dirty tricks. It's almost as if they're stepping up every kind of nastiness to make up for lost time!
There are reports like these cropping up. Like any publisher, Micro~6 doesn't like the resale market. Unlike some, they're in a position to bully small resellers out of business.
Nobody seems to have brought this up, so here's one direct answer to the original question, grounded in basic linguistics:
Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are not full human languages at least because they have no native speakers.
Someone brought up pidgins in another post, pointing out that they're not full languages, either. Scientific language study has shown that when children grow up in a community where a pidgin is spoken, they will invent words to complete a new language, called a creole.
It's hard to think of a situation where children could be brought up with Loglan as their native language that wouldn't be abusive to those children.
By the way, as I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet: Spoken language works very differently from written language. The whole question of whether the Internet will get us to all speak the same language would depend on whether some big change in the Internet would cause us to all speak to each other at all. Up to this point, I've corresponded, posted, commented in writing, but never held a spoken conversation over the Net. Granted, it's possible, but so far I'm still more likely to pick up a telephone if I want to speak with a friend overseas. That hasn't influenced my spoken dialect particularly.
Speculation that the telephone would change people's dialects would have made a lot more sense, actually. Too bad they didn't know much about language contact when the telephone was introduced.
What he was talking about was human language. He raises some good points. Unfortunately, the scientific study of language goes largely ignored. People seem to have the attitude, "I speak a language, so I'm a language authority!" With a bit of objective observation, a linguistics student can quickly verify that people don't know much at all about even their own language use.
If you're after linguistics jargon (and note that I Am Not A Linguist), you'll find that a pidgin is not strictly a dialect at all. A pidgin is not a language because it doesn't have native speakers. If it did, it'd be a creole. There's also a rule of thumb about the distinction between a language and a dialect: A language is a dialect with a standing army. So-called "dialects" of English are unintelligible to other English speakers. I'm told it's even worse between some dialects of German. Since you mention Yiddish, by the way, it's pretty intelligible to German speakers. Some "dialects of German" are more intelligible to Dutch speakers than most Germans, but since it's spoken in Germany...
It seems like Gates & Ballmer care a lot more what the investment community think than about pissing off the DOJ and judge in the trial. Investors who just listen to Micro~6 rhetoric are happy to believe whatever looks best for MSFT. Based on the CNNFN poll asking about the remedies, the investors sure seem to be listening to Micro~6. Maybe some Slashdot Effect can show that other viewpoints are prevalent?
For a long time it didn't work, but the cypherpunk/cypherpunk user/password combo is back. In case it's broken again (unless as a result of this post), another pair that will work are cypherpundit/cypherpundit.
No single news service will ever report all stories first. The original point of Slashdot was to get Rob Malda's editorial slant on the news. It's cool that a lot of stuff is reported here before I'd see it anywhere else, but when I want to follow a particular issue closely, I make a point of reading closer to the source! When you want blow-by-blow details on Micro~6 abuses and remedies, look at the appropriate site. I count on getting stories about the latest game console stuff from Slashdot -- eventually -- because it doesn't matter whether a few days go by before I skim past that kind of news.
You obviously still read Slashdot. Go easier on the people who run it. You can criticize the site without bashing it.
Since you mention Tcl/Tk, it's also worth considering Perl/Tk. See the Perl/Tk FAQ, or just all the Perl/Tk links at perl.com.
Re:But is this really for the better?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
Notice that the DOW climbed as much as the Nasdaq dropped. What posessed the administrators of the Nasdaq to add MS just at a time when they're being prosecuted for antitrust violations? That helps only MS. Was there some kind of favoritism there? Somebody managing mutual funds with lots of MSFT content who didn't like seeing the MSFT price slide as it's done since the findings of fact were released?
Even the rumours only suggest that MS offered to license source code. Nobody credible seems to suggest that MS offered to open source anything. They've licensed OS source in the past, so it's not much of an offer. As for "dis-integrating" MSIE, we can all just hop over to the 98lite site to do that, already!
Interesting how MS advocates always emphasize that having a monopoly is not against the law. Never mind that it was their abuse of monopoly power that got them in trouble? If there's a reasonable way to take away their monopoly, so they'd have to compete on their products' merit, that would be highly appropriate!
As for MS claims that breaking up the company would ruin them: How credible is that?! It looks like they're taking the most obvious remedy and claiming that it's extreme just to gain sympathy when it's exactly what happens. Never mind that they already seem to be reorganizing along the divisions that would leave them most profitable?
It's obvious why the DOJ would like a settlement: The remedies would go into effect right away. I'd much prefer to see a ruling for the same reason MS would not: There would be an unambiguous statement of exactly how they've broken the law.
Here's a company with everything in place for the perfect open source commercial product, even running on top of Linux, and they're not. The TiVo box would still sell, since it's nicely configured to run the TiVo software. The subscription to programming data would still sell. They may be afraid of a competitor stealing the software if it were open source, but apart from the illegality of doing so, the competitor would have trouble making money trying to offer something TiVo couldn't.
What actually concerns me most about these guys at the moment is that their web site is running IIS.
As Hugh points out, there are some inherent problems with some ergonomic keyboards. In particular, MS has led a trend (of two, that I've seen so far) toward putting the "6" key on the wrong hand.
The really odd thing is that there are split keyboards available from a number of manufacturers for about half what the MS Natural costs, with the "6" in the right place, and I've never had one fail on me. Lite-On, PC-Concepts, and others make split keyboards (without the touch pad) which retail around US$30.
As for the "forward slash" key -- has anyone really seen a keyboard with a US layout which moves the slash/question-mark key?! Backslash, sure... it might be interesting just to catalog all the places mfgs have put that sucker.
It would be nice to get split keyboards without the MS keys on 'em. Those keys are a pain even when I'm stuck running a Micros~6 product!
Hm. Linux may be getting ported to more (modern) platforms, but one of the attractions for OpenBSD for me has been that it will run on my MIPS R3000 based DEC workstations. There's no Linux port (likely ever -- it would be pointless).
So I'd never have asserted that Linux is available on more platforms than OpenBSD.
Note that IE is not "irrevocably tied" into the filesystem browsing for Win98. See 98lite for one method of completely extracting IE from windos.
For a while, it looked like the DOJ was paying attention to some of the better potential remedies they elecited. It's disappointing to see them go with the old, obvious, easy-to-implement plan.
This is very discouraging news. I'm afraid I'll have to ignore it and hope it goes away.:-(
If they would at least split the windos and NT products into separate companies, there'd be some hope that all this litigation would make a difference. I suppose Micros~6 just points to its efforts to merge them into one OS to get out of that one.
Damn.
Re:A Correction: Not the Largest!
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Interesting to note, tho'...
Microsoft $576.6 billion
General Electric 496.5
Cisco Systems 362.2
Wal-Mart 305.1
Exxon-Mobil 293.3
NTT 287.3
Intel 274.0
AOL-Time Warner 261.0
Which of these companies have the small margins imposed by maintaining and producing equipment? Of these, only Micro~6 and AOL/T-W sell predominantly Intellectual Property!
Given what problems there are in politics all over the world, it's not just the US where regulatory control over child rearing is a scary concept. Perhaps setting a lower age of majority, but keeping voting, driving, and drug use (smoking and drinking) ages higher would have some benefit?
Some of us have reasonable fears in opposing directions: We don't want to see kids raised to be ignorant and unthinking, but we don't want them thrown to the wolves either.
No, there is not a user consensus for a Slashdot where articles are posted based on moderation in a queue.
Some of us read Slashdot to a large extent because of the editorial bias.
It might be interesting to see a separate site (maybe a ``queue.slashdot.org'' or so?) which displays articles based on how well moderated they are out of a queue. It's a cool concept. It would be great to see it done as an offshoot of Shashdot, to take advantage of the quantity of submissions. Just please don't hasten the demise of the existing Slashdot by replacing it with an all-moderated version!
It's far worse to think courts will be able to subpoena private keys than that prosecutors might invent incriminating plaintext and claim it was derived from a defendant's cyphertext. You wouldn't have to reveal your key just to demonstrate that a particular plaintext wasn't encrypted by it.
On the question of whether "obvious to a computer" would deny someone a patent: Once it's practical for computers to make that sort of declaration, I'd certainly hope the Patent Office would employ (er, utilize) some of those computers!
Okay, now I'm really looking forward to that sort of advance...:-)
Your suggestion that we vote exactly what we believe is great. Sadly, this disgustingly biased Harris Poll only offers choices that imply Microsoft is some kind of victim rather than the abusive perpetrator the courts are showing them to be!
"Did Microsoft get what they deserved?" means what? Microsoft hasn't gotten anything yet! Then the choice of three answers includes two which favour Microsoft? Nice to see anyway that those two don't get as many responses combined as the "yes" does.
For "what do you think will happen next?" the only choices are for Microsoft to get the best it can still hope for or else it's "drawn out" and "bitter"?!
Amazing. I'll have to save this as a reminder not to ever trust Harris Poll results even as far as the Slashdot ones.
There's nothing irrevocable about breaking up MICROS~9 into "baby bill" companies. As others have pointed out, it doesn't achieve the goal of a hands-off remedy, since it would still be necessary prevent them from, say, rolling MS Office into an "OS" product -- or even vice-versa!
Forcing them to open-source the OS, on the other hand, would inherently give everyone a chance to work from common APIs, provide a baseline platform, and would be irrevocable.
The interesting question here is: How would MICROS~9 likely react once their OS products had been made open source? Is it possible at all that it would have a good effect on the company overall?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't give EDMONTON as an example of a Canadian city without ethnic diversity! I'm from Michigan, now living in Edmonton, and there's more diversity of culture here than even Ann Arbor or Detroit. A *lot* more. Huge proportions of Native, Chinese, East Indian, Ukranian, and other ethnicities and/or immigrants, and plenty of Germans, Dutch, Ethiopians, and people from other Eastern European, African, and Asian countries! It's the "Go West Young Man" (er, oh, is that a US expression?) or "There's Work in Alberta" thing, apparently.
Safe TCL was actually discussed as a possible extension language for e-mail, with prototypes done in Metamail.
A lot of people have talked about Java's "sandbox" security as being pretty feeble. A language designed from the start to be "Safe" may be able to provide more powerful constructs with fewer vulnerabilities.
With VNC (Virtual Network Computing) or something like it, any dropped connection means you just pick up where you left off when you get your connection back. This just follows the "ASP" (Application Service Provider) concept that Sun and Oracle have been pushing for a while.
That's not the end of their continued dirty tricks. It's almost as if they're stepping up every kind of nastiness to make up for lost time!
There are reports like these cropping up. Like any publisher, Micro~6 doesn't like the resale market. Unlike some, they're in a position to bully small resellers out of business.
Nobody seems to have brought this up, so here's one direct answer to the original question, grounded in basic linguistics:
Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are not full human languages at least because they have no native speakers.
Someone brought up pidgins in another post, pointing out that they're not full languages, either. Scientific language study has shown that when children grow up in a community where a pidgin is spoken, they will invent words to complete a new language, called a creole.
It's hard to think of a situation where children could be brought up with Loglan as their native language that wouldn't be abusive to those children.
Speculation that the telephone would change people's dialects would have made a lot more sense, actually. Too bad they didn't know much about language contact when the telephone was introduced.
What he was talking about was human language. He raises some good points. Unfortunately, the scientific study of language goes largely ignored. People seem to have the attitude, "I speak a language, so I'm a language authority!" With a bit of objective observation, a linguistics student can quickly verify that people don't know much at all about even their own language use.
If you're after linguistics jargon (and note that I Am Not A Linguist), you'll find that a pidgin is not strictly a dialect at all. A pidgin is not a language because it doesn't have native speakers. If it did, it'd be a creole. There's also a rule of thumb about the distinction between a language and a dialect: A language is a dialect with a standing army. So-called "dialects" of English are unintelligible to other English speakers. I'm told it's even worse between some dialects of German. Since you mention Yiddish, by the way, it's pretty intelligible to German speakers. Some "dialects of German" are more intelligible to Dutch speakers than most Germans, but since it's spoken in Germany...
CNN also covered this story.
It seems like Gates & Ballmer care a lot more what the investment community think than about pissing off the DOJ and judge in the trial. Investors who just listen to Micro~6 rhetoric are happy to believe whatever looks best for MSFT. Based on the CNNFN poll asking about the remedies, the investors sure seem to be listening to Micro~6. Maybe some Slashdot Effect can show that other viewpoints are prevalent?
For a long time it didn't work, but the cypherpunk/cypherpunk user/password combo is back. In case it's broken again (unless as a result of this post), another pair that will work are cypherpundit/cypherpundit.
No single news service will ever report all stories first. The original point of Slashdot was to get Rob Malda's editorial slant on the news. It's cool that a lot of stuff is reported here before I'd see it anywhere else, but when I want to follow a particular issue closely, I make a point of reading closer to the source! When you want blow-by-blow details on Micro~6 abuses and remedies, look at the appropriate site. I count on getting stories about the latest game console stuff from Slashdot -- eventually -- because it doesn't matter whether a few days go by before I skim past that kind of news.
You obviously still read Slashdot. Go easier on the people who run it. You can criticize the site without bashing it.
Since you mention Tcl/Tk, it's also worth considering Perl/Tk. See the Perl/Tk FAQ, or just all the Perl/Tk links at perl.com.
Notice that the DOW climbed as much as the Nasdaq dropped. What posessed the administrators of the Nasdaq to add MS just at a time when they're being prosecuted for antitrust violations? That helps only MS. Was there some kind of favoritism there? Somebody managing mutual funds with lots of MSFT content who didn't like seeing the MSFT price slide as it's done since the findings of fact were released?
Even the rumours only suggest that MS offered to license source code. Nobody credible seems to suggest that MS offered to open source anything. They've licensed OS source in the past, so it's not much of an offer. As for "dis-integrating" MSIE, we can all just hop over to the 98lite site to do that, already!
Interesting how MS advocates always emphasize that having a monopoly is not against the law. Never mind that it was their abuse of monopoly power that got them in trouble? If there's a reasonable way to take away their monopoly, so they'd have to compete on their products' merit, that would be highly appropriate!
As for MS claims that breaking up the company would ruin them: How credible is that?! It looks like they're taking the most obvious remedy and claiming that it's extreme just to gain sympathy when it's exactly what happens. Never mind that they already seem to be reorganizing along the divisions that would leave them most profitable?
It's obvious why the DOJ would like a settlement: The remedies would go into effect right away. I'd much prefer to see a ruling for the same reason MS would not: There would be an unambiguous statement of exactly how they've broken the law.
Here's a company with everything in place for the perfect open source commercial product, even running on top of Linux, and they're not. The TiVo box would still sell, since it's nicely configured to run the TiVo software. The subscription to programming data would still sell. They may be afraid of a competitor stealing the software if it were open source, but apart from the illegality of doing so, the competitor would have trouble making money trying to offer something TiVo couldn't.
What actually concerns me most about these guys at the moment is that their web site is running IIS.
As Hugh points out, there are some inherent problems with some ergonomic keyboards. In particular, MS has led a trend (of two, that I've seen so far) toward putting the "6" key on the wrong hand.
The really odd thing is that there are split keyboards available from a number of manufacturers for about half what the MS Natural costs, with the "6" in the right place, and I've never had one fail on me. Lite-On, PC-Concepts, and others make split keyboards (without the touch pad) which retail around US$30.
As for the "forward slash" key -- has anyone really seen a keyboard with a US layout which moves the slash/question-mark key?! Backslash, sure... it might be interesting just to catalog all the places mfgs have put that sucker.
It would be nice to get split keyboards without the MS keys on 'em. Those keys are a pain even when I'm stuck running a Micros~6 product!
Hm. Linux may be getting ported to more (modern) platforms, but one of the attractions for OpenBSD for me has been that it will run on my MIPS R3000 based DEC workstations. There's no Linux port (likely ever -- it would be pointless).
So I'd never have asserted that Linux is available on more platforms than OpenBSD.
For a while, it looked like the DOJ was paying attention to some of the better potential remedies they elecited. It's disappointing to see them go with the old, obvious, easy-to-implement plan.
This is very discouraging news. I'm afraid I'll have to ignore it and hope it goes away. :-(
If they would at least split the windos and NT products into separate companies, there'd be some hope that all this litigation would make a difference. I suppose Micros~6 just points to its efforts to merge them into one OS to get out of that one.
Damn.
Interesting to note, tho'...
Which of these companies have the small margins imposed by maintaining and producing equipment? Of these, only Micro~6 and AOL/T-W sell predominantly Intellectual Property!
Good to see an "I don't know" here.
Given what problems there are in politics all over the world, it's not just the US where regulatory control over child rearing is a scary concept. Perhaps setting a lower age of majority, but keeping voting, driving, and drug use (smoking and drinking) ages higher would have some benefit?
Some of us have reasonable fears in opposing directions: We don't want to see kids raised to be ignorant and unthinking, but we don't want them thrown to the wolves either.
No, there is not a user consensus for a Slashdot where articles are posted based on moderation in a queue.
Some of us read Slashdot to a large extent because of the editorial bias.
It might be interesting to see a separate site (maybe a ``queue.slashdot.org'' or so?) which displays articles based on how well moderated they are out of a queue. It's a cool concept. It would be great to see it done as an offshoot of Shashdot, to take advantage of the quantity of submissions. Just please don't hasten the demise of the existing Slashdot by replacing it with an all-moderated version!
It's far worse to think courts will be able to subpoena private keys than that prosecutors might invent incriminating plaintext and claim it was derived from a defendant's cyphertext. You wouldn't have to reveal your key just to demonstrate that a particular plaintext wasn't encrypted by it.
Okay, now I'm really looking forward to that sort of advance... :-)
Your suggestion that we vote exactly what we believe is great. Sadly, this disgustingly biased Harris Poll only offers choices that imply Microsoft is some kind of victim rather than the abusive perpetrator the courts are showing them to be!
"Did Microsoft get what they deserved?" means what? Microsoft hasn't gotten anything yet! Then the choice of three answers includes two which favour Microsoft? Nice to see anyway that those two don't get as many responses combined as the "yes" does.
For "what do you think will happen next?" the only choices are for Microsoft to get the best it can still hope for or else it's "drawn out" and "bitter"?!
Amazing. I'll have to save this as a reminder not to ever trust Harris Poll results even as far as the Slashdot ones.
There's nothing irrevocable about breaking up MICROS~9 into "baby bill" companies. As others have pointed out, it doesn't achieve the goal of a hands-off remedy, since it would still be necessary prevent them from, say, rolling MS Office into an "OS" product -- or even vice-versa!
Forcing them to open-source the OS, on the other hand, would inherently give everyone a chance to work from common APIs, provide a baseline platform, and would be irrevocable.
The interesting question here is: How would MICROS~9 likely react once their OS products had been made open source? Is it possible at all that it would have a good effect on the company overall?