Well, I'm puzzled by one thing: This SCO FUD is going for a long while now and I've read a lot of comments on/. and other forums where people announced that they filed a complaint against SCO at the Stock Exchange Commision (or however that "control organ" is called) because its almost obvious that SCO is pushing up the stocks to earn some profits.
Anyway, lets assume that a lot of people has filed complaints against the behaviour of SCO... then why don't we see any results of those complaints? Are the people that received the complaints all sleeping or is SCO protected from legal investigation?
Sorry for my little understanding of US law, but here in Germany SCO had to shut up quite quickly after complaints were filed, but it looks like that in the US nothing of that sort happens.
I live in Germany where we have that feature for some while. One problem now is that I call a number that "belongs" to the same provider that I'm using, so I think that I do a call inside the providers net (which usually is cheap), but in fact the one that I call has switched to another provider and my call costs much more than I expect.:-(
Windows: It frequently tells me that the DLLs on my system are newer than the one to be installed and I have to make a decision what should happen, even not knowing what side effects my decision will cause.
Linux: Thanks to a good packet management I install things easily. No questions that put me in a Catch22 situation.
But that is not the point! Installation of software is a thing that I do once and after I did it I use this software. So I think that the installation process should be excluded from a "usability test". As you see from my example above there are different point of views. And if I compare for example the usability of a Mercedes and a BMW I usally don't bother how difficult it is to install a radio or a GPS module, that is job of my car service center and I just use it.
The patches have been available for a LOOOOONG time now. They should have patched. They can't whine now. End of story.
And how do they get notice about that "bug" that they have to patch? Pardon me, but if you buy a car which has a bug in the brakes usually the car manufacturer sends you a nice letter and tells you to proceed to the next car service center immediately. And yes, they fix it at their costs.
I've been filling out lots of registration cards for Microsoft products, but I never got any notice about a bug that needs to be fixed. All I got was marketing bubbles to announce new products.
Sorry, I think in that case it is Microsoft's duty to inform all registered users about critical bugs in their products. Otherwise I think Microsoft is liable for all damages that result out of such an incident.
Working in a test lab for PCs I encountered one problem with heat conducting paste: Since Intel introduced the mPGA 478 housing for their CPUs the ZIF socket on the mainboard is much smaller than the heatsink above. That means, if the paste between processor and heatsink is too much adhesive it is like the processor is glued to the heatsink and every time you remove the heatsink (e.g. for changing the CPU) you pull out the processor from a closed ZIF socket! Ok, so far the processors survived but I don't think that this is nice anyway.
Well, usually I pay for what I have ordered. In that case the glass placed the order without my approval, so I pay only the first one and all refills have to be charged to the glass.:-)
shows me that most of the examples from the wild use HTML in their spam mails. So my tiny solution here in the office (behind a lousy working spam filter) is to redirect mails with content-type "text/html" to a spam folder, and yes 99.9% of it is really spam that can be thrown away. The other sort of spam that arrives here is encoded with Korean charset and also easy to filter out.
They will take care of it and will find evidences that your code is already illegally included in all major distributions, the kernel and the rest of the world. And they will offer a license for using it.
Being in Germany what language would you expect the speeches to be done?
Since the event was in Karlsruhe and Karlsruhe is a part of Baden-Württemberg I really wonder about it. Why? Well, the "state" Baden-Württemberg had its 50 year anniversary lately and on the TV spots they said (translated) "we can do everything except German". *grin*
Ok, getting serious I think that the language of speeches is depending on two factors. One is of course the language of the audience and the other is the language that the person who is holding the speech speaking. I mean, I really prefer an understandable speech in German over a speech that you don't understand at all because the person doing it has some pronounciation problems.
Referring to the audience I think this is a clear indicator that Linux has found its way to the average "John Doe" (Or the German equivalent "Lieschen Müller"), that means you have users that are not Geeks and they don't understand other things than their mother tounge. From my experience as a German Geek I know that sometimes you don't even remember if some speech, article or book is in your mother tongue or in English. Sometimes that's funny because you give books to people that have problems with English and they make you notice that this was not written in their mother tounge.
The problem is not techical its social
on
Opengroupware
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm working for a "big enterprise" firm and we tried out Groupware several times. All the projects more or less failed not because of technical problems, the real problem is that using Groupware also means that the user has to be "open-minded". Our users unnfortuantely were afraid that by using Groupware others could do some "data mining" on their work and that they have no secrets anymore. Everybody could see what they are working on, how much they do and so on. And they didn't want that. As long as people don't want to share their knowledge and data about their actual jobs you won't get Groupware working, no matter if its proprietary Groupware solutions or OpenGroupware.
I mean, did in all the years of Microsoft history ever a promise come true?
Microsofts business model is based on not fulfilling the promises they make, otherwise nobody would ever need to buy a new product. And of course its much easier to have a vision than to make this vision become reality.
And is there anybody that really remembers the promises they made 3 years ago? People are so used to get screwed by Microsoft that they don't even memorize the things that will never come true. All I personally remember of that.net thing is that even 3 years ago people were saying that this is just a big vapoware thing.
I definitely say NO to this. Yes, I grew up in the good old VC-64 times and I played a lot, but that time I was already a teenager.
In German we use the verb "begreifen" for the process of understanding something that you learn. That verb contains the "greifen" which means that you can grab something. And yes, I believe that kids of 3 years old learn the world by touching it and grabbing things and not by simulating the world on a TV monitor.
And BTW, for my kid I found a sort of "catalyst" to make her learn. Its simple, cheap, runs without batteries and she enjoys it a lot: Books.
DARPA is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Officials claim that the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas
So I guess the officials can also tell us why the hell overseas cities should provide the camera installation for US troops to fight there more easily?
To install the cameras you usually need to control the city and to control a city in a military operations requires some fighting before. Looks like a perfect Catch22 to me.
and besides the fact that this study is just a big piece of FUD sponsored by the VSI (which is practically equal to Microsoft) you should know that also the EULA is invalid according to the german laws.
The only problem is that justice is not a matter of laws and "being right" anymore, actually (thanks to the lawyers) its more a matter of money. And sadly money is the resource that Microsoft has in big ammounts.
This false positive problem is quite severe in ASI tools and typically exeeds 50 false positives for each true positive.
In other words they compare 2 numbers which are generated by a process that has an accuracy of less than 2 percent and then they draw their conclusions out of that. Wow! Looks to me like a real scientist's nightmare.
If I read the Datasheet for the automatic code inspector there is a funny example. They find a memory leak in their example. I had a quick code review and found the following bugs:
First of all it looks like line 29 is disappeared, but maybe it was just whitespace. Looking at the code above show me that the strlen function is called with the pointer returned by the malloc in line 27. That's great, since strlen is looking for the "null termination byte" in the string it will return the position of whatever random zero byte will be next in the allocated memory because nobody was writing anything to the allocated space. I suspect, that line 28 should refer to "fspec" instead of "filespec" but since the program obviously compiled it can also be that filespec is a valid global identifier.
Anyway, this simple example from them shows, that their automatic tool doesn't find all bugs and so the numbers returned can be just a sort of wild guess. BTW: I would really like to know what their code inspection tool will report if they use it on their own code inspection software.:-)
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Since LAN is an Acronym and stands for "Local Area Network" a Local LAN must be a very very local area network. :-)
But I know, its all PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry's Acronyms). :-)
Anyway, lets assume that a lot of people has filed complaints against the behaviour of SCO... then why don't we see any results of those complaints? Are the people that received the complaints all sleeping or is SCO protected from legal investigation?
Sorry for my little understanding of US law, but here in Germany SCO had to shut up quite quickly after complaints were filed, but it looks like that in the US nothing of that sort happens.
Sorry, couldn't resist this one. :-)
I live in Germany where we have that feature for some while. One problem now is that I call a number that "belongs" to the same provider that I'm using, so I think that I do a call inside the providers net (which usually is cheap), but in fact the one that I call has switched to another provider and my call costs much more than I expect. :-(
Linux: Thanks to a good packet management I install things easily. No questions that put me in a Catch22 situation.
But that is not the point! Installation of software is a thing that I do once and after I did it I use this software. So I think that the installation process should be excluded from a "usability test". As you see from my example above there are different point of views. And if I compare for example the usability of a Mercedes and a BMW I usally don't bother how difficult it is to install a radio or a GPS module, that is job of my car service center and I just use it.
And how do they get notice about that "bug" that they have to patch? Pardon me, but if you buy a car which has a bug in the brakes usually the car manufacturer sends you a nice letter and tells you to proceed to the next car service center immediately. And yes, they fix it at their costs.
I've been filling out lots of registration cards for Microsoft products, but I never got any notice about a bug that needs to be fixed. All I got was marketing bubbles to announce new products.
Sorry, I think in that case it is Microsoft's duty to inform all registered users about critical bugs in their products. Otherwise I think Microsoft is liable for all damages that result out of such an incident.
Working in a test lab for PCs I encountered one problem with heat conducting paste: Since Intel introduced the mPGA 478 housing for their CPUs the ZIF socket on the mainboard is much smaller than the heatsink above. That means, if the paste between processor and heatsink is too much adhesive it is like the processor is glued to the heatsink and every time you remove the heatsink (e.g. for changing the CPU) you pull out the processor from a closed ZIF socket! Ok, so far the processors survived but I don't think that this is nice anyway.
I suggest that the Indian government reads this study (PDF) about the security of EVMs first and then thinks if they really want to have it.
Well, usually I pay for what I have ordered. In that case the glass placed the order without my approval, so I pay only the first one and all refills have to be charged to the glass. :-)
... that now my firm approves it when I sleep off at my desk? Well, its a sort of meditation too, isn't it?
No, the will change business and make a fortune from selling phone lines to antispam fighters.
...that SCO is not claiming any rights on that digital copy of the bible?
shows me that most of the examples from the wild use HTML in their spam mails. So my tiny solution here in the office (behind a lousy working spam filter) is to redirect mails with content-type "text/html" to a spam folder, and yes 99.9% of it is really spam that can be thrown away. The other sort of spam that arrives here is encoded with Korean charset and also easy to filter out.
They will take care of it and will find evidences that your code is already illegally included in all major distributions, the kernel and the rest of the world. And they will offer a license for using it.
I would turn on MTV or VIVA.
I'm working for a "big enterprise" firm and we tried out Groupware several times. All the projects more or less failed not because of technical problems, the real problem is that using Groupware also means that the user has to be "open-minded". Our users unnfortuantely were afraid that by using Groupware others could do some "data mining" on their work and that they have no secrets anymore. Everybody could see what they are working on, how much they do and so on. And they didn't want that. As long as people don't want to share their knowledge and data about their actual jobs you won't get Groupware working, no matter if its proprietary Groupware solutions or OpenGroupware.
Microsofts business model is based on not fulfilling the promises they make, otherwise nobody would ever need to buy a new product. And of course its much easier to have a vision than to make this vision become reality.
And is there anybody that really remembers the promises they made 3 years ago? People are so used to get screwed by Microsoft that they don't even memorize the things that will never come true. All I personally remember of that .net thing is that even 3 years ago people were saying that this is just a big vapoware thing.
In German we use the verb "begreifen" for the process of understanding something that you learn. That verb contains the "greifen" which means that you can grab something. And yes, I believe that kids of 3 years old learn the world by touching it and grabbing things and not by simulating the world on a TV monitor.
And BTW, for my kid I found a sort of "catalyst" to make her learn. Its simple, cheap, runs without batteries and she enjoys it a lot: Books.
So I guess the officials can also tell us why the hell overseas cities should provide the camera installation for US troops to fight there more easily?
To install the cameras you usually need to control the city and to control a city in a military operations requires some fighting before. Looks like a perfect Catch22 to me.
The only problem is that justice is not a matter of laws and "being right" anymore, actually (thanks to the lawyers) its more a matter of money. And sadly money is the resource that Microsoft has in big ammounts.
This false positive problem is quite severe in ASI tools and typically exeeds 50 false positives for each true positive.
In other words they compare 2 numbers which are generated by a process that has an accuracy of less than 2 percent and then they draw their conclusions out of that. Wow! Looks to me like a real scientist's nightmare.
First of all it looks like line 29 is disappeared, but maybe it was just whitespace. Looking at the code above show me that the strlen function is called with the pointer returned by the malloc in line 27. That's great, since strlen is looking for the "null termination byte" in the string it will return the position of whatever random zero byte will be next in the allocated memory because nobody was writing anything to the allocated space. I suspect, that line 28 should refer to "fspec" instead of "filespec" but since the program obviously compiled it can also be that filespec is a valid global identifier.
Anyway, this simple example from them shows, that their automatic tool doesn't find all bugs and so the numbers returned can be just a sort of wild guess. BTW: I would really like to know what their code inspection tool will report if they use it on their own code inspection software. :-)
Well, they acutally do provide lifetime support for their products. The only problem is that they define when the lifetime of the product is over.
Damn. In the first moment I read "Microsoft systems have an expiration date of July 14th". Well, I guess that's what I would like to read one day. :-)