What have you been smoking? It's the United NATIONs, not the United PEOPLE. It's a forum for nations to hammer out disagreements and provide aid to one another, not a world government. And there are a lot of us who are glad its not.
Are you sure you want to be taxed by an organization whose executive committee gives China a veto? I know I don't.
Fairfax County, Virginia? When I was in high school ('80-'84), the school district here had an HP3000 shared by 26 high schools. I even think it was used for administrative purposes in addition to academic computing. My school had three 300-baud terminals for 2400 students to share. My senior year they acquired their first PCs -- two NEC CP/M machines with DUAL floppy drives (woohoo!).
I can't get to the Samba statement (appears Slashdotted)
Here it is:
Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell: Analysis of the MS Settlement and What It Means for Samba.
Nov 6, 2001, 08:28 UTC (21 Talkback[s]) (10223 reads)
(Other stories by Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell)
The Samba Team would welcome Microsoft documenting its proprietary server protocols. Unfortunately this isn't what the settlement stipulates. The settlement states:
"E. Starting nine months after the submission of this proposed Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall make available for use by third parties, for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (consistent with Section III.I), any Communications Protocol that is, on or after the date this Final Judgment is submitted to the Court, (i) implemented in a Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer, and (ii) used to interoperate natively (i.e., without the addition of software code to the client or server operating system products) with Windows 2000 Server or products marketed as its successors installed on a server computer. "
Sounds good for Samba, doesn't it. However, in the "Definition of terms" section it states:
"Communications Protocol" means the set of rules for information exchange to accomplish predefined tasks between a Windows Operating System Product on a client computer and Windows 2000 Server or products marketed as its successors running on a server computer and connected via a local area network or a wide area network. These rules govern the format, semantics, timing, sequencing, and error control of messages exchanged over a network. Communications Protocol shall not include protocols used to remotely administer Windows 2000 Server and products marketed as its successors. "
If Microsoft is allowed to be the interpreter of this document, then it could be interpreted in a very broad sense to explicitly exclude the SMB/CIFS protocol and all of the Microsoft RPC calls needed by any SMB/CIFS server to adequately interoperate with Windows 2000. They would claim that these protocols are used by Windows 2000 server for remote administration and as such would not be required to be disclosed. In that case, this settlement would not help interoperability with Microsoft file serving one bit, as it would be explicitly excluded.
We would hope that a more reasonable interpretation would allow Microsoft to ensure the security of its products, whilst still being forced to fully disclose the fundamental protocols that are needed to create interoperable products.
The holes in this document are large enough for any competent lawyer to drive several large trucks through. I assume the DoJ lawyers didn't get any technical advice on this settlement as the exceptions are cleverly worded to allow Microsoft to attempt to evade any restrictions in previous parts of the document.
Microsoft has very competent lawyers, as this weakly worded settlement by the DoJ shows. It is to be hoped the the European Union investigators are not so easily fooled as the USA.
A secondary problem is the definition of "Reasonable and non-Discriminatory" (RAND) licensing terms. We have already seen how such a term could damage the open implementation of the protocols of the Internet. If applied in the same way here, Open Source/Free Software products would be explicitly excluded.
... if Linux didn't exist? I think these analyses ignore the loss of momentum that Linux has caused Windows.
Five years ago, as NT was replacing Netware in most enterprises, many predicted that Unix systems would be the next to fall under the Windows steamroller. However, in cases where simplicity and the availability of commodity hardware are more important than raw performance and scalability, people are turning to Linux to replace Unix systems, not Windows.
So while Linux may not have made major inroads in replacing existing Windows servers, it has prevented Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop to spread to the server side, and has given Unix (generically) a new lease on life.
... that Microsoft was an investor in Road Runner, but the "Company Profile" on Road Runner's Web site says they're "owned and operated by Time Warner Cable" with no mention of other investors. Did Microsoft cash out?
Oh, relax. Microsoft is not constraining your ability to use any words you want. They're just tailoring their reference materials to match the sensibilities of their audience.
They're doing it for the same reason that dictionaries and thesauri targeted at school children exclude the very same words. You want an unabridged reference? Fine. Buy one.
Me again: It looks like the "Web Browser Upgrade Required" filtering is only happening at the main MSN home page, and maybe other front doors like the Hotmail home page.
If you follow TrumpetPower's advice and click the "Advertise" link on the "Upgrade Required" page, that page itself not only loads fine, but you can click on any link to any MSN content and the pages load just fine.
Slate sort of seems to be working, too. I'm using Moz 0.9.5, and noticed this morning that Slate has a new page design. Everthing was accessible to me (within Slate) at that time. Now, about half the time I'm getting the following error message:
Page you are trying to view cannot be displayed right now.
Contact help@slate.com.
I wrote to help@slate.com asking, "Why not?" I have not yet gotten a reply. They may be having server-side problems, or it might be User-Agent related. Dunno.
Hey Moderators. Someone moderated the post I'm responding to down as a 'troll,' but it's the only accruate post here thus far. Please moderate this back up. The cited article is a humor column, folks.
I disagree. Yes, Microsoft has vanquished its enemies, but it may have more trouble protecting itself from its own greed.
What happens when Win98, ME and 2000 Workstation (or whatever they were calling it) are no longer for sale? I think consumers' calculus will change when only WinXP and its successors are on the market
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily. Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software. Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I too gagged on the notion that "less than a thousand dollars" enough of a bargain to squeeze a $16 product out of the market.
I see this a the Polaroid of the future, and part of the reason that the Polaroid of the past is circling the drain.
It used to be that if you were headed to a wedding or to the beach or to a graduation and you wanted a cheap way to take some pictures and make prints with no hassles, you could go to a drug store, pay $30 bucks or so for a cheap Polaroid and a cartridge or two of film, and you were in business. No advanced planning required. No photographic ability. Just point, shoot and share pictures.
This product seems to have the same virtues, so I don't see why it doesn't have a decent chance of success.
I haven't ever turned a TV upside down, but I have turned computer monitors upside down. Try it yourself and you'll see that the colors distort (and that the distortion can be corrected with the degauss button, if available).
I've always been curious about the cause of this (hint, hint, Slashdot readers); I assume it's related to the effect of the earth's magnatic field on the stream of electrons painting the scren.
Since I've never seen a TV with a degauss button, and since I presume a TV would suffer discoloration just like a monitor, this would seem to be another reason not to bother with this kludgy setup.
The difference is when you are a monopoly, or when you are a group of competing companies acting together to form a monopoly.
Phillip Morris can cut deals with retailers to deny display space to other cigarette manufacturers, because they only have 50% or so market share in cigarettes. But American Tobacco (Skoal, Copenhagen, Red Man) will probably lose a lawsuit over the same practices because they have over 90% market share in smokeless tobacco.
I would guess that if the record companies wanted to do this individually, they'd be okay. But because they're cooperating to restrain trade for the whole industry, they won't be allowed to do this.
Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
Star Office 6 does have a "quickstarter" which installs by default and lives in the system tray. You can turn it off if you don't like it.
Everyone is making a big deal at how it doesn't open Word Documents very well.... Well HECK, there isn't ANY support for opening WordPerfect documents.
Before folks complain about what's missing or doesn't work well, it would pay to spend a few minutes actually installing the software and checking it out.
I've only used StarOffice for about half an hour so far, but it appears that the import/export filters are actually quite extensive. There is ALL KINDS of support for opening WordPerfect documents from ver 4.1 to ver 7. No, there's no ver 8 filter, but considering the length of the filter list, I'm assuming it's just a matter of time before they write it (there are filters for Xywrite and Wordstar, ferchrissakes).
Choose "Custom Install" or to to the setup app after installing and pick from their very extensive list of filters.
As for Word support, Star Office opened a bunch of very complex (but macro-free) documents for me without a burp. I was even able to set Word (and Excel) as my default file types for saving.
No. The domain name in question is not an abbreviation, but the full name of the company. I didn't identify the company/domain, because I don't work there anymore and don't represent them. I also don't want to give any attention to the Nazi assholes with the similar domain name.
I don't know if you meant this as a hypothetical or not, but it does happen.
Here's another example: I discouraged a former employer from snapping up every possible related domain name. We had the.com version of our brand name, and that's where people were going to look for us, so I argued that grabbing the.net and.org versions was unnecessary.
Well a few years later, we found that a British neo-Nazi group had acquired the.org version we passed up. Guess who looked like an idiot?
Because they're in different lines of business, there's no conflict and no reason for one to sue the other.
The latter doesn't always follow from the former. This is America, after all, and a lot of trademark holders will litigate at the drop of a hat.
It's just these sorts of gray areas that keep trademark lawyers in business. For example, the company that eventually became Circuit City began as a chain of TV & hi-fi stores called "Wards." Only after years of litigation did they come to an agreement with Montgomery Wards about how they could use their brand in advertising without stepping on the toes of the larger, deeper-pocketed company. (If Monkey Wards had given that much attention to merchandizing and customer service, maybe they'd still be in business.)
This could help explain why it's going to be hard to pin this on Bin Laden. The smart move for him is never to write anything or say anything on the phone, even if he thinks it's encrypted. In fact, he should avoid talking about the details of anything, even in one-on-one conversations.
That's how John D. Rockefeller was able to claim ignorance of Standard Oil's devious methods. When he did talk about the company's tactics, he only did it verbally, and in a lot of cases he just insulated himself from day-to-day decision to insure "plausible deniability."
When government does stuff private businesses do, everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it.
Not necessarily. Most public utilities (water, electricity, etc.) are government-owned "authorities" which are not tax supported. All their revenue comes from user fees (which also means that they have the same profit and loss pressures as a private company, which is a good thing).
At most, the impact on taxpayers is that the municipality's credit is used to float bonds. If the capitalization of the authority requires a lot of borrowing, it can hurt the municipality's bond rating, making future borrowing for tax-supported projects (like school construction) more expensive.
I don't know for sure, but I'd assume that's how these broadband networks are being structured.
Slashdot Mirror
What have you been smoking? It's the United NATIONs, not the United PEOPLE. It's a forum for nations to hammer out disagreements and provide aid to one another, not a world government. And there are a lot of us who are glad its not.
Are you sure you want to be taxed by an organization whose executive committee gives China a veto? I know I don't.
Fairfax County, Virginia? When I was in high school ('80-'84), the school district here had an HP3000 shared by 26 high schools. I even think it was used for administrative purposes in addition to academic computing. My school had three 300-baud terminals for 2400 students to share. My senior year they acquired their first PCs -- two NEC CP/M machines with DUAL floppy drives (woohoo!).
Here it is:
Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell: Analysis of the MS Settlement and What It Means for Samba. Nov 6, 2001, 08
(Other stories by Jeremy Allison & Andrew Tridgell)
The Samba Team would welcome Microsoft documenting its proprietary server protocols. Unfortunately this isn't what the settlement stipulates. The settlement states
Sounds good for Samba, doesn't it. However, in the "Definition of terms" section it states
If Microsoft is allowed to be the interpreter of this document, then it could be interpreted in a very broad sense to explicitly exclude the SMB/CIFS protocol and all of the Microsoft RPC calls needed by any SMB/CIFS server to adequately interoperate with Windows 2000. They would claim that these protocols are used by Windows 2000 server for remote administration and as such would not be required to be disclosed. In that case, this settlement would not help interoperability with Microsoft file serving one bit, as it would be explicitly excluded.
We would hope that a more reasonable interpretation would allow Microsoft to ensure the security of its products, whilst still being forced to fully disclose the fundamental protocols that are needed to create interoperable products.
The holes in this document are large enough for any competent lawyer to drive several large trucks through. I assume the DoJ lawyers didn't get any technical advice on this settlement as the exceptions are cleverly worded to allow Microsoft to attempt to evade any restrictions in previous parts of the document.
Microsoft has very competent lawyers, as this weakly worded settlement by the DoJ shows. It is to be hoped the the European Union investigators are not so easily fooled as the USA.
A secondary problem is the definition of "Reasonable and non-Discriminatory" (RAND) licensing terms. We have already seen how such a term could damage the open implementation of the protocols of the Internet. If applied in the same way here, Open Source/Free Software products would be explicitly excluded.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Andrew Tridgell,
Samba Team.
... if Linux didn't exist? I think these analyses ignore the loss of momentum that Linux has caused Windows.
Five years ago, as NT was replacing Netware in most enterprises, many predicted that Unix systems would be the next to fall under the Windows steamroller. However, in cases where simplicity and the availability of commodity hardware are more important than raw performance and scalability, people are turning to Linux to replace Unix systems, not Windows.
So while Linux may not have made major inroads in replacing existing Windows servers, it has prevented Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop to spread to the server side, and has given Unix (generically) a new lease on life.
I think that's a pretty major story.
No, I'm thinking of Road Runner. As of June, 1998 Microsoft had a 10% stake in RR.
... that Microsoft was an investor in Road Runner, but the "Company Profile" on Road Runner's Web site says they're "owned and operated by Time Warner Cable" with no mention of other investors. Did Microsoft cash out?
$162,557.28 for full-page black & white in all three U.S. editions.
Oh, relax. Microsoft is not constraining your ability to use any words you want. They're just tailoring their reference materials to match the sensibilities of their audience.
They're doing it for the same reason that dictionaries and thesauri targeted at school children exclude the very same words. You want an unabridged reference? Fine. Buy one.
Sheesh.
Me again: It looks like the "Web Browser Upgrade Required" filtering is only happening at the main MSN home page, and maybe other front doors like the Hotmail home page.
If you follow TrumpetPower's advice and click the "Advertise" link on the "Upgrade Required" page, that page itself not only loads fine, but you can click on any link to any MSN content and the pages load just fine.
Slate sort of seems to be working, too. I'm using Moz 0.9.5, and noticed this morning that Slate has a new page design. Everthing was accessible to me (within Slate) at that time. Now, about half the time I'm getting the following error message:
Page you are trying to view cannot be displayed right now. Contact help@slate.com.
I wrote to help@slate.com asking, "Why not?" I have not yet gotten a reply. They may be having server-side problems, or it might be User-Agent related. Dunno.
Hey Moderators. Someone moderated the post I'm responding to down as a 'troll,' but it's the only accruate post here thus far. Please moderate this back up. The cited article is a humor column, folks.
Sheesh.
I disagree. Yes, Microsoft has vanquished its enemies, but it may have more trouble protecting itself from its own greed.
What happens when Win98, ME and 2000 Workstation (or whatever they were calling it) are no longer for sale? I think consumers' calculus will change when only WinXP and its successors are on the market
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily. Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software. Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I too gagged on the notion that "less than a thousand dollars" enough of a bargain to squeeze a $16 product out of the market.
I see this a the Polaroid of the future, and part of the reason that the Polaroid of the past is circling the drain.
It used to be that if you were headed to a wedding or to the beach or to a graduation and you wanted a cheap way to take some pictures and make prints with no hassles, you could go to a drug store, pay $30 bucks or so for a cheap Polaroid and a cartridge or two of film, and you were in business. No advanced planning required. No photographic ability. Just point, shoot and share pictures.
This product seems to have the same virtues, so I don't see why it doesn't have a decent chance of success.
you have to turn your TV upside down
I haven't ever turned a TV upside down, but I have turned computer monitors upside down. Try it yourself and you'll see that the colors distort (and that the distortion can be corrected with the degauss button, if available).
I've always been curious about the cause of this (hint, hint, Slashdot readers); I assume it's related to the effect of the earth's magnatic field on the stream of electrons painting the scren.
Since I've never seen a TV with a degauss button, and since I presume a TV would suffer discoloration just like a monitor, this would seem to be another reason not to bother with this kludgy setup.
Whats the difference?
The difference is when you are a monopoly, or when you are a group of competing companies acting together to form a monopoly.
Phillip Morris can cut deals with retailers to deny display space to other cigarette manufacturers, because they only have 50% or so market share in cigarettes. But American Tobacco (Skoal, Copenhagen, Red Man) will probably lose a lawsuit over the same practices because they have over 90% market share in smokeless tobacco.
I would guess that if the record companies wanted to do this individually, they'd be okay. But because they're cooperating to restrain trade for the whole industry, they won't be allowed to do this.
Q: How many grad students does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Just one, but it takes ten years.
Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
Star Office 6 does have a "quickstarter" which installs by default and lives in the system tray. You can turn it off if you don't like it.
Everyone is making a big deal at how it doesn't open Word Documents very well.... Well HECK, there isn't ANY support for opening WordPerfect documents.
Before folks complain about what's missing or doesn't work well, it would pay to spend a few minutes actually installing the software and checking it out.
I've only used StarOffice for about half an hour so far, but it appears that the import/export filters are actually quite extensive. There is ALL KINDS of support for opening WordPerfect documents from ver 4.1 to ver 7. No, there's no ver 8 filter, but considering the length of the filter list, I'm assuming it's just a matter of time before they write it (there are filters for Xywrite and Wordstar, ferchrissakes).
Choose "Custom Install" or to to the setup app after installing and pick from their very extensive list of filters.
As for Word support, Star Office opened a bunch of very complex (but macro-free) documents for me without a burp. I was even able to set Word (and Excel) as my default file types for saving.
I say so far so good.
Who is falling for all this and patronizing the sites that trap you like this?
Ho rny people who don't type well?
Like this guy: http://www.herbzipper.com/.
Don't worry, it's funny, not disgusting.
No. The domain name in question is not an abbreviation, but the full name of the company. I didn't identify the company/domain, because I don't work there anymore and don't represent them. I also don't want to give any attention to the Nazi assholes with the similar domain name.
I don't know if you meant this as a hypothetical or not, but it does happen.
.com version of our brand name, and that's where people were going to look for us, so I argued that grabbing the .net and .org versions was unnecessary.
.org version we passed up. Guess who looked like an idiot?
Here's another example: I discouraged a former employer from snapping up every possible related domain name. We had the
Well a few years later, we found that a British neo-Nazi group had acquired the
Because they're in different lines of business, there's no conflict and no reason for one to sue the other.
The latter doesn't always follow from the former. This is America, after all, and a lot of trademark holders will litigate at the drop of a hat.
It's just these sorts of gray areas that keep trademark lawyers in business. For example, the company that eventually became Circuit City began as a chain of TV & hi-fi stores called "Wards." Only after years of litigation did they come to an agreement with Montgomery Wards about how they could use their brand in advertising without stepping on the toes of the larger, deeper-pocketed company. (If Monkey Wards had given that much attention to merchandizing and customer service, maybe they'd still be in business.)
This could help explain why it's going to be hard to pin this on Bin Laden. The smart move for him is never to write anything or say anything on the phone, even if he thinks it's encrypted. In fact, he should avoid talking about the details of anything, even in one-on-one conversations.
That's how John D. Rockefeller was able to claim ignorance of Standard Oil's devious methods. When he did talk about the company's tactics, he only did it verbally, and in a lot of cases he just insulated himself from day-to-day decision to insure "plausible deniability."
When government does stuff private businesses do, everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it.
Not necessarily. Most public utilities (water, electricity, etc.) are government-owned "authorities" which are not tax supported. All their revenue comes from user fees (which also means that they have the same profit and loss pressures as a private company, which is a good thing).
At most, the impact on taxpayers is that the municipality's credit is used to float bonds. If the capitalization of the authority requires a lot of borrowing, it can hurt the municipality's bond rating, making future borrowing for tax-supported projects (like school construction) more expensive.
I don't know for sure, but I'd assume that's how these broadband networks are being structured.
The entire list seems to be, much like the FBI's monitoring program, generated from keywords
Another good example: Why else would they ban "Wipeout"?