"the web means anyone can sell anything to anyone."
The web means anyone can sell anything to anyone but it doesnt mean the consumer channels have to be open to everyone. Just like in the pre-internet era there was nothing preventing you from selling your creative content out of your garage or on a bazaar.
Dont expect to get shelfspace or radiotime tho.
"you actually punish the small guy and keep the status quo where big businesses are the only ones who make any cash."
It punishes anyone whose expenses are too high (there are several examples of indie labels that do just fine economically, as well as a whole host of self-publishing outfits). The big businesses can certainly survive for a long time by simply feeding off their fat and they have soooo much of it, and certainly a whole lot of small-to-mid level companies unable to adapt will bite the dust before them. But as their market control shrinks the availability and ease of finding non-mainstream material will also increase the popularity and size of the long tail.
In the long term, copy control is as dead as the dodo. It no longer matters what legal and technical measures are taken, the pressure has already evolved next-gen transfer methods and darknets that will be undetectable and unmonitorable.
So the only question that remains is wether society needs to support creative talent economically beyond what a free market makes available (which the vast availability of open and free material indicates might not be necessary), and in that case how to construct a new system to accomplish that.
Personally I'd favour dismantling the whole copyright concept and simply slapping a tax on revenue derived from producing copies of material, then dividing along the long tail according to popularity with max-payouts per instance of work (or something). Easy to finance, easy to measure effectiveness of and it would avoid the whole litigation issue. It would also restore competition to the distribution channels, and it would put a solid limit on the usefulness of payola and marketing, as they would no longer be profitable beyond a fairly low level, leaving it up to everyone to follow their own taste.
And if there is a story here it would have been much better spent investigating wether Bagley or Byrne had a point about naked short selling. Wikipedia countering obviously obnoxious spam/kooks isnt particularly interesting. Actually proving the kooks correct (and subject to a massive conspiracy to silence them, perpetrated not just by Wikipedia but most media as well) would be of much more journalistic value.
Otherwise, most of us prefer our reality moderately kook-prefiltered.
"If you are an author, musician or other content creator, the copyright law also helps protect you."
Except, of course, that the monopolistic nature of copyright law works as a force multiplier for marketing investments. Which in turn means that the market will be strongly biased against any small or one-man owners; they'll be utterly and completely marginalized. Out of the money consumers are spending on 'copyright', only a pittance ever reaches the actual creators.
The 'small author' is, and has always been, the excuse. They have no leverage to wield the power supposedly given to them; they take the terms the owners of the presses give to them or they can get lost.
Had copyright ever been intended to reward authors or other creative talent, it would have been formulated so they actually got paid as their works generated revenue.
Consider the extent to which creative talent could have been paid, were the money consumers are spending today even remotely equitably distributed between actual creators rather than financing the coke snorting parties of media execs.
"Sometimes such regulation is actually used to protect the interests of established businesses in a market"
Such as copyright. Which is the fundamental anti-free-market regulation that supports Microsofts market control and monopoly (and would support any other non-FOSS replacement just as well).
Mmm. No. This would be if you try to go into the store to buy a 100GB disk and the owner of the parking lot outside pretends to be a store clerk and sells you a nicely packaged brick (to encourage you not to shop there anymore because other people need his parking spaces).
Fortunately there's a whole host of options for stopping this method from working (google 'linux firewall comcast rst' or something), but as this method is an actual attack on TCP/IP itself, it will _really_ screw with the internet if this becomes commonplace.
"I know the people who made laws establishing copyright went into it with noble intentions"
Mmm, actually, no they didnt. Originally the 'copyright' had nothing to do with authors but were a pure and simple monopoly of the licensed printers guild, granted by the king in exchange for censorship control.
As it got slightly more codified the authors were used as an excuse to lobby for it; the authors didnt particularly matter anyway as they couldn't afford the printer, leaving them in pretty much the same situation as before.
IIRC, as far as the US was concerned, integration of IP rights into the US constitution was mostly with great hesitation and doubt about its legitimacy.
"it was originally intended to prevent exploitation of creators."
Except, of course, that was never the intended purpose. Which is why copyright law is the way it is, or we'd have an actual system guaranteeing a specific cut to authors, a tax/benefit scheme, or something like that. Think 'monopoly', 'control' and 'aristocrats' or you will just get confused about why IP law is the way it is. It's a 16th century throwback from the time the king granted monopolies on salt and spices to enrich his friends (as the population tended to be on the brink of killing him over taxes so it was much less troublesome to grant monopolies that didnt seem quite like taxes...).
"Ordinarily, non-commercial uses that do not affect the value of the copyrighted work tend towards fair use."
Yep. More reasonably the copyright holder would sue the tattoo artist, who would be the one performing the actual copying and the main commercial beneficiary of the possible infringement. As far as I can recall, simple possession of an infringing copy has rarely been considered illegal for the purpose of copyright law.
"would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established"
Perhaps. But consider the alternatives we've already seen like rack-in-a-trailer container mounts. You could basically move to the where the power's cheap (hmmm, I'd better patent putting computer centers on Iceland as they dont appear to have gotten that idea yet). Anyways, the rapid commoditization of server capacity works against the first-mover advantage, in ten years I wouldn't be surprised to see us having compute-cubes you could put together like Legos, with builtin PXE-to-mesh-complete servers that join up new nodes.
The main advantage, I think, would be the roll-out infrastructure and software managing the specific tasks, but thanks largely to OSS clusters have become much easier. Perhaps there are some huge advances in paralellized computing waiting around the corner (a welcome one would be vastly improved languages for the purpose), but I think it'll be hard to lock that market in.
"How much computing power would you need to, say, search all recorded video on the net using a single frame from the video?"
Probably a lot:) I can imagine IO would be even worse tho. Not to mention the lawyer power you'd need defending your right to search those video archives.
I get where you're coming from tho, I'd be worried too, but while I agree there are a whole host of upcoming new data-analysis possibilities I dont think it'll be that easy to either corner the market nor to monetize them.
"These guys are playing Risk for ten, perhaps twenty years from now"
Mmm. I wouldn't worry that much. You know, someone who's actually been in the IT industry for ten, twenty years knows that in ten, twenty years you can buy the capacity in their datacenter for $100 and keep it in your pocket.
Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the drift. Computers are the absolutely worst thing to ever sink money into. You buy the capacity you need today at todays prices, you dont build a huge farm of junk that will be obsolete before you finish plugging in cables.
I find the whole thing rather amusing. It's like the 80's all over again, I just expect Ballmer to come out with 'five datacenters will be enough for the whole world' any day now.
What I cant quite figure out is if google is just playing with MS and half their datacenters are in cardboard and just intended to trick MS into wasting money, or if google actually has use for the amount of power they seem to be using.
What I can say is this; simply having the biggest datacenter has never been particularly profitable for anyone, and I dont expect that to change soon.
Dumping is not merely defined as selling below marginal cost, in international trade selling below the price you charge your domestic market can also be considered dumping.
"How do you lose 15 million sets of personal data in the post?"
I dont find it the least surprising. I find it more amazing that anyone can actually believe this isnt an everyday occurance; they must never have worked in either IT or a government run organization.
The only surprising part is that a) it actually reached someone that high and b) that someone in the middle didn't immediately slap a 'national-secrets cover your ass and throw anyone blabbing in jail' order all over it. There must have been a drastic invasion of n00bness throughout the chain of command. Or it's a case of externalized office politics.
"Don't the government have couriers for this sort of thing?"
Mmm, no. At best, like most large organizations they probably have a policy for how to ship sensitive data. And like in most organizations it's probably buried on the intranet somewhere sorted next to the policy for paper towel refills, in the offline archive for very rarely used documents.
"the breathalyzer tests have been shown to read higher than actual in more than 25% of tests"
Heck, DNA labs have had 10% error rates. There have been cases where they run first the DNA sample from the suspect, then run the comparison with the crimescene sample in the same batch, insufficiently cleaning equipment between so the suspects sample is actually transferred into the crimescene sample during the testing procedure. And labs that refuse to change such flawed procedures due to cost.
There was a case in the UK where a man with advanced Parkinsons who couldnt drive and who could barely dress himself became a suspect in a burglary 200 miles away, after a DNA database search popped his name out as a match. He put in jail for several months, until his lawyer demanded a test on more loci and they noticed that, ooops, DNA isnt really that accurate, and seeing as human beings do not vary in size and form between flatworm through elephant, they can have quite a lot of matching loci without actually being the same person.
Forensic science isnt questioned anywhere near as much as it should be. Which gives us idiotic ideas like fingerprint and dna databases that will be so diluted by irrelevant false positives they can only either waste resources and slow down police work or provide a whole host of scapegoats to throw in jail even when there's not the slightest chance they could actually be guilty.
Yes, well, one would think so, but it turns out that the ability to extract revenue and spend billions isnt what drives progress or encourages development.
It turns out competition is.
So much for granting monopoly rights to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'.
"55k operations and 230 MB/s is ludicrously insane performance for a single drive relative to current spinning disks."
Yep. Still, in the pricerange they're in it's hardly single disks they're competing against, so comparing to those is about as useful as comparing with the performance of 5 1/4 inch floppys. Perhaps they want to have a market position as an SAN accelerator, but SAN cabinets in that range are pretty generous with RAM caches anyway and stripe storage over many spindles.
I tend to be sceptical about these storage techs, as they seem to aim at either very small niches of the market space or very defective applications. I'm not at all sure there is any useful market (yet, and apart from the low-space applications like laptops) between the curve points of todays GB price for hard disks and todays pricepoint for merely throwing more RAM into the servers. It doesnt come close to comparing on price with disks, and it doesnt come close to comparing on speed with RAM.
Perhaps there is some exploitable niche between, but frankly, this isnt the first time I've seen tech aimed at filling that niche (conceptually it goes back to various extended BIOSes and before that) but it didn't become a big hit back then, nor do I expect it to now.
"The ECU is typically housed in something metal, "
Two something metal. The other metal housing is something typically known as a 'car'. Unless they're aiming squarely at the market for stopping Trabants.
The article mentions beaming the microwaves through holes in the metal casing, but really, aiming a cumbersome microwave device into a possible unmetallic passage through a window into some hole in the panel between the engine and the inside of the car during a car chase sounds... far fetched.
In fact, it sounds like the police would be far better off simply firing anti-tank ammo (or some ammo designed for stopping cars) into the engine block.
This is a really classic management philosophy conflict (and one that appears to go in popularity waves), and the 'right' answer really depends on your position in the market. For an employee who doesnt want to change jobs, or for a family/few-owner business, diversification and protection of total assets is a priority.
But for the diversified stock-owner you dont want each and every one of your stocks weighted down by the dead fat they're trying to protect. You want lean companies generating high profits in a single area. If you wanted diverse, you'd _buy_ diverse. And then _sell_ it when a niche looked about to tank.
Diversification is for those with a sentimental attachment to an organization. Understandable, but not necessarily the way it always works.
"Does anyone actually expect it to cost them sales or other revenue,"
Personally I have no idea. You'd have to ask the virus writers if someone's planning on writing a database transmitted virus. If one of them decides a guaranteed unpatched hole with a finished exploit available is just too good an opportunity to pass up, well, then I could certainly see how the subsequent fallout would affect Oracle's financial status.
I mean, sure, anyone who's actually dealt with Oracle on a daily basis has a fair idea of the number of bugs and the response time of the company, but a situation in which massive amounts of corporate financial data is spread over the world by a nasty virus might actually make it to the CEOs desk.
"I wonder if this is how the British Empire collapsed too."
At the very least it's very close to how the Soviet Union collapsed.
Corrupt politicians supporting state granted monopolies while the economy gets less and less competetive, and labour is shifted into non-producing roles such as marketing, administration and legal.
It's Microsofts standard way of bribing, you mean. Offering 'marketing incentives' is the way they've done everything from get people on certain ISO boards to making sure PC makers dont install Linux.
They seem to get away with it on some technicality, even if they couldn't get away with giving actual money directly.
In the end it's a legal grey area. For some companies and some situations it would be perfectly fine, but in the case of the convicted monopolist, I dont think there's any doubt that it's their practice of getting around legal language prohibiting certain anti-competetive behaviour.
And morally, it's reprehensible and easily equatable with bribery. Both for those accepting the money and for those giving it.
"The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer."
Essentially they've developed their own interaction layer around the virtualization layer. While Xen is the furthest along for the moment, RedHat, it seems, aims to be hypervisor agnostic as far as the management goes.
"Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time."
Including Fedora and Redhat (and as far as stabilizing Xen3 enough to be usable on various mainstream kernels they've done an impressive job; having played around with Xen since FC4 I can recall the fun of building my own xen kernels from the xen mainline and getting them to play nice. It used to be significantly more painful back then.).
"Architects on projects like this always, always, always work with qualified structural engineers either on staff or from an outside consulting agency."
According to the article, both Skanska and an outside consultant formally objected to the design, requesting soft joints and drainage systems. Gehry told them to shut up and go ahead with his design.
"An architect can't do all the work"
Yes, that would be obvious to most people. Unfortunately, it appears that the architect in this case isnt 'most people'.
That said, personally I used to think it would be hard to design eyesores worse than 70's projects concrete horros, but frankly I'd say Gehry's work actually qualifies. Apart from the fact that they look like someones three year old got hold of a 3d modelling program (which, as far as I can tell, is more or less exactly how he makes them), they instinctively evoke the desire, not merely to fix them, but to actually tear the buildings down and start from scratch.
I guess it's the architectural version of Defective by Design.
"The good thing is that is easy to work with and works really good."
I'd heard that it was really good too. Then I noticed that if I wanted IPv6 support I'd have to patch and compile it myself. Thanks for playing, but there are more modern secure MTA's available.
"The bad thing is that the license is NOT FOSS."
Yep, and that's probably why qmail ends up lacking in some areas. Perhaps it could be called a security feature, but I prefer spending time learning applications that dont depend on some single person for having any future at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"the web means anyone can sell anything to anyone."
The web means anyone can sell anything to anyone but it doesnt mean the consumer channels have to be open to everyone. Just like in the pre-internet era there was nothing preventing you from selling your creative content out of your garage or on a bazaar.
Dont expect to get shelfspace or radiotime tho.
"you actually punish the small guy and keep the status quo where big businesses are the only ones who make any cash."
It punishes anyone whose expenses are too high (there are several examples of indie labels that do just fine economically, as well as a whole host of self-publishing outfits). The big businesses can certainly survive for a long time by simply feeding off their fat and they have soooo much of it, and certainly a whole lot of small-to-mid level companies unable to adapt will bite the dust before them. But as their market control shrinks the availability and ease of finding non-mainstream material will also increase the popularity and size of the long tail.
In the long term, copy control is as dead as the dodo. It no longer matters what legal and technical measures are taken, the pressure has already evolved next-gen transfer methods and darknets that will be undetectable and unmonitorable.
So the only question that remains is wether society needs to support creative talent economically beyond what a free market makes available (which the vast availability of open and free material indicates might not be necessary), and in that case how to construct a new system to accomplish that.
Personally I'd favour dismantling the whole copyright concept and simply slapping a tax on revenue derived from producing copies of material, then dividing along the long tail according to popularity with max-payouts per instance of work (or something). Easy to finance, easy to measure effectiveness of and it would avoid the whole litigation issue. It would also restore competition to the distribution channels, and it would put a solid limit on the usefulness of payola and marketing, as they would no longer be profitable beyond a fairly low level, leaving it up to everyone to follow their own taste.
But copyright as it is today is dead.
"There may be a story right there"
And if there is a story here it would have been much better spent investigating wether Bagley or Byrne had a point about naked short selling. Wikipedia countering obviously obnoxious spam/kooks isnt particularly interesting. Actually proving the kooks correct (and subject to a massive conspiracy to silence them, perpetrated not just by Wikipedia but most media as well) would be of much more journalistic value.
Otherwise, most of us prefer our reality moderately kook-prefiltered.
"If you are an author, musician or other content creator, the copyright law also helps protect you."
Except, of course, that the monopolistic nature of copyright law works as a force multiplier for marketing investments. Which in turn means that the market will be strongly biased against any small or one-man owners; they'll be utterly and completely marginalized. Out of the money consumers are spending on 'copyright', only a pittance ever reaches the actual creators.
The 'small author' is, and has always been, the excuse. They have no leverage to wield the power supposedly given to them; they take the terms the owners of the presses give to them or they can get lost.
Had copyright ever been intended to reward authors or other creative talent, it would have been formulated so they actually got paid as their works generated revenue.
Consider the extent to which creative talent could have been paid, were the money consumers are spending today even remotely equitably distributed between actual creators rather than financing the coke snorting parties of media execs.
"Sometimes such regulation is actually used to protect the interests of established businesses in a market"
Such as copyright. Which is the fundamental anti-free-market regulation that supports Microsofts market control and monopoly (and would support any other non-FOSS replacement just as well).
"Why would it be illegal? It's their wires."
Mmmhmm, so a phone company tech can call you and pretend to be your boss and fire you?
Falsifying messages and pretending to be someone else is frowned upon whatever the ownership situation of the medium in question is.
Mmm. No. This would be if you try to go into the store to buy a 100GB disk and the owner of the parking lot outside pretends to be a store clerk and sells you a nicely packaged brick (to encourage you not to shop there anymore because other people need his parking spaces).
Fortunately there's a whole host of options for stopping this method from working (google 'linux firewall comcast rst' or something), but as this method is an actual attack on TCP/IP itself, it will _really_ screw with the internet if this becomes commonplace.
"I know the people who made laws establishing copyright went into it with noble intentions"
Mmm, actually, no they didnt. Originally the 'copyright' had nothing to do with authors but were a pure and simple monopoly of the licensed printers guild, granted by the king in exchange for censorship control.
As it got slightly more codified the authors were used as an excuse to lobby for it; the authors didnt particularly matter anyway as they couldn't afford the printer, leaving them in pretty much the same situation as before.
IIRC, as far as the US was concerned, integration of IP rights into the US constitution was mostly with great hesitation and doubt about its legitimacy.
"it was originally intended to prevent exploitation of creators."
Except, of course, that was never the intended purpose. Which is why copyright law is the way it is, or we'd have an actual system guaranteeing a specific cut to authors, a tax/benefit scheme, or something like that. Think 'monopoly', 'control' and 'aristocrats' or you will just get confused about why IP law is the way it is. It's a 16th century throwback from the time the king granted monopolies on salt and spices to enrich his friends (as the population tended to be on the brink of killing him over taxes so it was much less troublesome to grant monopolies that didnt seem quite like taxes...).
"Ordinarily, non-commercial uses that do not affect the value of the copyrighted work tend towards fair use."
Yep. More reasonably the copyright holder would sue the tattoo artist, who would be the one performing the actual copying and the main commercial beneficiary of the possible infringement. As far as I can recall, simple possession of an infringing copy has rarely been considered illegal for the purpose of copyright law.
"would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established"
:) I can imagine IO would be even worse tho. Not to mention the lawyer power you'd need defending your right to search those video archives.
Perhaps. But consider the alternatives we've already seen like rack-in-a-trailer container mounts. You could basically move to the where the power's cheap (hmmm, I'd better patent putting computer centers on Iceland as they dont appear to have gotten that idea yet). Anyways, the rapid commoditization of server capacity works against the first-mover advantage, in ten years I wouldn't be surprised to see us having compute-cubes you could put together like Legos, with builtin PXE-to-mesh-complete servers that join up new nodes.
The main advantage, I think, would be the roll-out infrastructure and software managing the specific tasks, but thanks largely to OSS clusters have become much easier. Perhaps there are some huge advances in paralellized computing waiting around the corner (a welcome one would be vastly improved languages for the purpose), but I think it'll be hard to lock that market in.
"How much computing power would you need to, say, search all recorded video on the net using a single frame from the video?"
Probably a lot
I get where you're coming from tho, I'd be worried too, but while I agree there are a whole host of upcoming new data-analysis possibilities I dont think it'll be that easy to either corner the market nor to monetize them.
"These guys are playing Risk for ten, perhaps twenty years from now"
Mmm. I wouldn't worry that much. You know, someone who's actually been in the IT industry for ten, twenty years knows that in ten, twenty years you can buy the capacity in their datacenter for $100 and keep it in your pocket.
Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the drift. Computers are the absolutely worst thing to ever sink money into. You buy the capacity you need today at todays prices, you dont build a huge farm of junk that will be obsolete before you finish plugging in cables.
I find the whole thing rather amusing. It's like the 80's all over again, I just expect Ballmer to come out with 'five datacenters will be enough for the whole world' any day now.
What I cant quite figure out is if google is just playing with MS and half their datacenters are in cardboard and just intended to trick MS into wasting money, or if google actually has use for the amount of power they seem to be using.
What I can say is this; simply having the biggest datacenter has never been particularly profitable for anyone, and I dont expect that to change soon.
Dumping is not merely defined as selling below marginal cost, in international trade selling below the price you charge your domestic market can also be considered dumping.
Oh, it's quite easy.
Just get elected and armageddon away. Sanity is (obviously) not a required trait for holding the presidential office.
"How do you lose 15 million sets of personal data in the post?"
I dont find it the least surprising. I find it more amazing that anyone can actually believe this isnt an everyday occurance; they must never have worked in either IT or a government run organization.
The only surprising part is that a) it actually reached someone that high and b) that someone in the middle didn't immediately slap a 'national-secrets cover your ass and throw anyone blabbing in jail' order all over it. There must have been a drastic invasion of n00bness throughout the chain of command. Or it's a case of externalized office politics.
"Don't the government have couriers for this sort of thing?"
Mmm, no. At best, like most large organizations they probably have a policy for how to ship sensitive data. And like in most organizations it's probably buried on the intranet somewhere sorted next to the policy for paper towel refills, in the offline archive for very rarely used documents.
"the breathalyzer tests have been shown to read higher than actual in more than 25% of tests"
Heck, DNA labs have had 10% error rates. There have been cases where they run first the DNA sample from the suspect, then run the comparison with the crimescene sample in the same batch, insufficiently cleaning equipment between so the suspects sample is actually transferred into the crimescene sample during the testing procedure. And labs that refuse to change such flawed procedures due to cost.
There was a case in the UK where a man with advanced Parkinsons who couldnt drive and who could barely dress himself became a suspect in a burglary 200 miles away, after a DNA database search popped his name out as a match. He put in jail for several months, until his lawyer demanded a test on more loci and they noticed that, ooops, DNA isnt really that accurate, and seeing as human beings do not vary in size and form between flatworm through elephant, they can have quite a lot of matching loci without actually being the same person.
Forensic science isnt questioned anywhere near as much as it should be. Which gives us idiotic ideas like fingerprint and dna databases that will be so diluted by irrelevant false positives they can only either waste resources and slow down police work or provide a whole host of scapegoats to throw in jail even when there's not the slightest chance they could actually be guilty.
Yes, well, one would think so, but it turns out that the ability to extract revenue and spend billions isnt what drives progress or encourages development.
It turns out competition is.
So much for granting monopoly rights to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'.
"55k operations and 230 MB/s is ludicrously insane performance for a single drive relative to current spinning disks."
Yep. Still, in the pricerange they're in it's hardly single disks they're competing against, so comparing to those is about as useful as comparing with the performance of 5 1/4 inch floppys. Perhaps they want to have a market position as an SAN accelerator, but SAN cabinets in that range are pretty generous with RAM caches anyway and stripe storage over many spindles.
I tend to be sceptical about these storage techs, as they seem to aim at either very small niches of the market space or very defective applications. I'm not at all sure there is any useful market (yet, and apart from the low-space applications like laptops) between the curve points of todays GB price for hard disks and todays pricepoint for merely throwing more RAM into the servers. It doesnt come close to comparing on price with disks, and it doesnt come close to comparing on speed with RAM.
Perhaps there is some exploitable niche between, but frankly, this isnt the first time I've seen tech aimed at filling that niche (conceptually it goes back to various extended BIOSes and before that) but it didn't become a big hit back then, nor do I expect it to now.
"The ECU is typically housed in something metal, "
Two something metal. The other metal housing is something typically known as a 'car'. Unless they're aiming squarely at the market for stopping Trabants.
The article mentions beaming the microwaves through holes in the metal casing, but really, aiming a cumbersome microwave device into a possible unmetallic passage through a window into some hole in the panel between the engine and the inside of the car during a car chase sounds... far fetched.
In fact, it sounds like the police would be far better off simply firing anti-tank ammo (or some ammo designed for stopping cars) into the engine block.
This is a really classic management philosophy conflict (and one that appears to go in popularity waves), and the 'right' answer really depends on your position in the market. For an employee who doesnt want to change jobs, or for a family/few-owner business, diversification and protection of total assets is a priority.
But for the diversified stock-owner you dont want each and every one of your stocks weighted down by the dead fat they're trying to protect. You want lean companies generating high profits in a single area. If you wanted diverse, you'd _buy_ diverse. And then _sell_ it when a niche looked about to tank.
Diversification is for those with a sentimental attachment to an organization. Understandable, but not necessarily the way it always works.
"Does anyone actually expect it to cost them sales or other revenue,"
Personally I have no idea. You'd have to ask the virus writers if someone's planning on writing a database transmitted virus. If one of them decides a guaranteed unpatched hole with a finished exploit available is just too good an opportunity to pass up, well, then I could certainly see how the subsequent fallout would affect Oracle's financial status.
I mean, sure, anyone who's actually dealt with Oracle on a daily basis has a fair idea of the number of bugs and the response time of the company, but a situation in which massive amounts of corporate financial data is spread over the world by a nasty virus might actually make it to the CEOs desk.
Feh. Save in UTF-8 Unicode text format and typeset in whatever presentation format you need.
Word processor formats are the computer version of toilet paper. You dont use it for longterm retention of important information.
"I wonder if this is how the British Empire collapsed too."
At the very least it's very close to how the Soviet Union collapsed.
Corrupt politicians supporting state granted monopolies while the economy gets less and less competetive, and labour is shifted into non-producing roles such as marketing, administration and legal.
"That's not really a bribe, it's just business."
It's Microsofts standard way of bribing, you mean. Offering 'marketing incentives' is the way they've done everything from get people on certain ISO boards to making sure PC makers dont install Linux.
They seem to get away with it on some technicality, even if they couldn't get away with giving actual money directly.
In the end it's a legal grey area. For some companies and some situations it would be perfectly fine, but in the case of the convicted monopolist, I dont think there's any doubt that it's their practice of getting around legal language prohibiting certain anti-competetive behaviour.
And morally, it's reprehensible and easily equatable with bribery. Both for those accepting the money and for those giving it.
"The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer."
Essentially they've developed their own interaction layer around the virtualization layer. While Xen is the furthest along for the moment, RedHat, it seems, aims to be hypervisor agnostic as far as the management goes.
"Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time."
Including Fedora and Redhat (and as far as stabilizing Xen3 enough to be usable on various mainstream kernels they've done an impressive job; having played around with Xen since FC4 I can recall the fun of building my own xen kernels from the xen mainline and getting them to play nice. It used to be significantly more painful back then.).
"Architects on projects like this always, always, always work with qualified structural engineers either on staff or from an outside consulting agency."
According to the article, both Skanska and an outside consultant formally objected to the design, requesting soft joints and drainage systems. Gehry told them to shut up and go ahead with his design.
"An architect can't do all the work"
Yes, that would be obvious to most people. Unfortunately, it appears that the architect in this case isnt 'most people'.
That said, personally I used to think it would be hard to design eyesores worse than 70's projects concrete horros, but frankly I'd say Gehry's work actually qualifies. Apart from the fact that they look like someones three year old got hold of a 3d modelling program (which, as far as I can tell, is more or less exactly how he makes them), they instinctively evoke the desire, not merely to fix them, but to actually tear the buildings down and start from scratch.
I guess it's the architectural version of Defective by Design.
"The good thing is that is easy to work with and works really good."
I'd heard that it was really good too. Then I noticed that if I wanted IPv6 support I'd have to patch and compile it myself. Thanks for playing, but there are more modern secure MTA's available.
"The bad thing is that the license is NOT FOSS."
Yep, and that's probably why qmail ends up lacking in some areas. Perhaps it could be called a security feature, but I prefer spending time learning applications that dont depend on some single person for having any future at all.