The reason ISPs cap upstream bandwidth at XX KB/sec is to indirectly limit download bandwidth. The upstream cap limits the rate at which you can ACK received packets, depending on fragmentation, multi-packet adaptive ACKing for streaming, etc. Simple, huh? Or, at least that's why I think they're doing this upstream speed cap.
But I might be wrong and would welcome more knowledgable comments.
and Microsoft's targets are all non-M$ servers. But they'll have a hard time convincing all but the most naive IT executives with a commissioned "independent" study. I don't know about Sun or HP, but IBM has actual case studies for various industries to back up their sales presentations. And IBM will do an onsite competitive analysis using your actual and projected costs, comparing their offerings against your current environment and the costs of competing vendors. Microsoft better pack a lunch.
However, M$ will still be able to buy some business somehow. I can hear the CTO office conversations now....
"So Mr/Ms M$ sales-droid, why do you think Microsoft offers lower Total Cost of Ownership - that's what TCO means right?
"Well, our higher licensing costs include support that Linux doesn't offer. There is no one firm responsible for Linux - but Microsoft is there for you with support."
"I can buy Linux support for less than your licenses cost.... Why would I want to pay you more for bad service? Licensing terms that say you're not responsible for anything bad that happens to us by using your software, no way no how, never? Support that costs EXTRA, over and above licensing? Tier 1 tech support that needs help getting dressed in the morning? Added charges for Tier 2/3 support? And NOT TO MENTION most of our problems are caused by your own sloppy code, insecure defaults, arcane proprietary system internals, file format incompatibilities! Where is my credit for all these costs?"
"Er, Microsoft makes the best software; everyone uses this."
"Yes, everyone in our offices surfs the 'net, downloads porn and music files, and wastes time chatting online - all well enabled by your promiscuous everything-enabled Windows! And I have a dozen MSCE-papered dweebs running around fixing peoples' self-disabled capabilities to do that instead of work! I can replace that dozen MSCEs with just 2 or 3 Linux people tomorrow. What does that do for your TCO calculations, huh? Do you have any real answer to Linux? I'm very interested."
"Well, we do have some er, confidential partnership offers."
"Is this where you offer me a rather... personal incentive?"
"Um, why yes, now that you mention it. Do you have a non-US bank account by any chance?"
"(Sliding paper over the desk). Well, harumph, having dealt with all my considerations, on balance it's Microsoft here."
I disagree -/. gets these every once in a while and the community provides some good advice.
Gather documentation: you should have copies of your reviews and be allowed to see everything in your personnel file, maybe even get a copy of it. Take copies of your email, and take them offsite.
Does your company have an Employee Handbook or other HR publications describing their personnel and termination policies and procedures? If so, they must follow what they publish or face potential liability for wrongful reassignment or termination. Get copies of whatever they publish.
What State do you work in? Do you know what your State Labor Board/Commission requires of employers? If not, find out.
Get a lawyer. Most will talk with you for an initial assessment of your situation without charge. But you'll have to retain them ($$$) to get them to take any action on your behalf, from writing letter(s) to filing suit ($$$$+).
As SirCam virus e-mails average 250kb per message, each month we pass over a gigabyte of bandwidth on this crap.
Hmmm. You've probably got T3 or better pipe, but lets say you only have a T1 (1.5 Mbps). A GB takes a only a couple of minutes of your monthly bandwidth capacity. You're incensed at this? You're going to devote major efforts to stop it? If so, you don't have enough to do to keep you busy with business mission-critical work there. Less than 1% of bandwidth capacity is just noise.
Of course, destructive worms are a much different matter, and where worms destroy systems and data causing lost productivity, overtime, and business losses I agree with you, somewhat. But clueless choices to use Microsoft software are where the blame really should be placed in such circumstances. The worm/virus writers are just opportunists preying on fundamentally insecure Microsoft based systems. And that's your fault.
that Microsoft's relentless expansion of Office "features" and condescending dictation of how everyone organizes files and uses productivity software is _reducing_ usability of the products.
With Office95 I could set each application to save its files in a specific directory by default. So I had separate directories for Word, Excel, etc., and I'd use Save-As to place files in Client folders as needed. Lately with Office2000 I have to use Save-As for every frickin file plus having to click up and down the directory tree to reach my file structure. Its painful and it wastes time - all simply because Microsoft _enforces_ their "easy" (dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator) approach to saving files. It insults me to use it. What I want is software that's easier for me to use in the way I want to work. And that is Not M$ Office. I do hope Star Office 6 will be more usable in this sense and wish Sun would finish it up and finally release it real soon.
The CNN article's apparent deference (or pandering) to Microsoft's plans seems rather strange, seeing as how CNN is part of that other Great Satan - AOL/Time-Warner - which is positioning resources to take on Microsoft wherever it can in a battle for consumer control of media and transactions.
International Intellectual Property (IIP) issues might arise when Hungary gets around to applying to join the European Union (or NATO). But the EU politicians haven't AFAIK been quite as corrupt as US congress-critters about pandering to Big Music and Hollywood, so there's some hope that they'll maintain First Sale and (noncommercial) Fair Use types of consumer media rights. The EU is fairly tough about protecting consumers' privacy rights, so one can hope the RIAA/MPAA won't prevail there. (Vivendi owning Universal is a worry, but they're in France and can't buy laws one hopes.)
In any case, it won't matter. The horse is out of the barn already. The RIAA/MPAA can close the barn door (in the US, maybe), but they won't ever catch the horse again. To paraphrase someone's famous quote about the Internet, open source software interprets authoritarian oppression as damage... and routes around it.
If Office runs on Lindows or on Wine, you can trust Microsoft will find ways to make it runeable [sic] only on Windows,...
So in other words, "Office isn't done until Lindows and Wine won't run it."
There are several sides to this. On the one hand, Wine translates Windows applications to run under other OSs, while Lindows provides services for native Windows APIs, so Microsoft will have to continually "innovate"... er, obfuscate these to prevent compatibility. Who is placed on the "treadmill" of forced code extension then, Microsoft?
That strikes me as a Good Thing because in doing so Microsoft will have to break the ability of Windows XP+1 to run Office XP (and Office 2000, etc), thus alienating a lot of customers who won't choose to upgrade MS Office. Mike Magee at The Inquirer still runs an early release of WinWord because the next release broke the glossary. And I still use WinWord95 because it works under OS/2 and later versions can still read the files it produces. Microsoft better not break backwards compatibility for its Office applications, or it will see a major customer backlash involving wholesale defection to other applications (like StarOffice) that can handle all the older MS Office formats.
On another hand, a large part of Microsoft's revenues proceed from its hammerlock on the OEMs (Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, etc.) to preload Windows (and only Windows) on consumer and business PCs. If that monopoly is broken, a big chunk of Microsoft's revenues are suddenly at risk. If more reliable and secure OSs are found capable of running MS Office applications, this risk to MS increases. This will also be a Good Thing, IMHO. So Lindows and Wine are backing Microsoft into a corner - I applaud it.
By the way, if you have any comments about the Proposed Settlement of the Microsoft Antitrust Case, you can send them to:
microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Subject: Microsoft Settlement
You have 60 days from Nov 28. By law, all public comments received must be published in the Federal Register. One hopes public comments will be reviewed by the Court.
Well, this is basically targeted to California power utility failures. These are much less likely now. The blackouts were 1/2 - 2 hours when they were imposed. This product is still too expensive and too late, I think. Want to tell me how you'd justify $15+K for a home website backup? This is just a far too ezpensive solution seeking a problem.
at $7,500 for the "Starter Pack", $10K for 24 hours. A generic (Honda, or something) gasoline generator is only a hundred bucks or so, and gasoline is only about $1.25/gal here in the US now. Who does Coleman think might buy this stuff? Osama bin f-ing Ladin? (Just the thing to keep your satellite phone lit in the caves on those long winter nights in Nowhere, Afghanistan?) It's amazing that they'd even advertise this product at the prices they're quoting. Until they meet reality, they'll never sell these things.
Backwards compatibility is a requirement in the commercial software world. Microsoft has observed it in the past and it's simply arrogant of them to break with this tradition. All the more reason not to run Microsoft software, if you ask me.
Urm... who said that? Got any quotes or sources? I didn't think so. The Internet isn't mostly pornography (though I'll admit there's a lot of it out there), it's mostly _information_ and _commerce_. If you think otherwise, you're obviously spending too much time surfing one-handed. And how would your vision be any different than now?
Oh, hi honey! Just reading the WSJ on my ePaper. Yeah, it's blank now, I was just switching over to USA Today, they have such insightful and more in-depth editorials.
Once it becomes reliable and relatively cheap to produce (compared to the dead-tree stuff plus its recurring production and distribution costs), publishers of all stripes will be all over this, mark my words. Eliminating most of those recurring production and distribution costs will drive the adoption of ePaper by publishers (consumers won't pull this, except by choosing lower costs of data delivery). Here's my off the cuff analysis of how the markets will treat this new medium (and I will welcome all comments):
1) Ephemeral publishers - all newspapers, plus the major consumer networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, AOL/TW, FOX, Sky, etc.) will be falling all over each other to offer X pages of ePaper to subscribers, where the cost of the blank "product" will be _inversely_ proportional on a per-page basis to the number of ePages purchased initially (the rationale here will be that the more ePages you buy, the more ads they get to winkle into your "viewing experience" every few hours or each day). Just economics, actually.
2) Periodical publishers - i.e., magazines, see above for the consumer cost and rationale for it. A twist here if one wants a hard copy of an issue, but I'm sure it will be done.
3) Book publishers - limited adoption; when I buy a book I want to own it, dammit. As a consumer of books, I certainly don't want that book I bought to disappear when I buy another one. Here, ePaper will be limited to perusal before purchase of the real thing (bye bye, Borders etc. coffee-shops), but this might stimulate the higher value online presentation of books (cover art, reviews, et al - Amazon, are you listening?). A tricky dimension, verging on the periodical model: Do you want to lease a book for a month? Do you also want an option to buy the real paper version eventually? The marketing models for this will be trial and error (mostly error) initially, but they all _will_ get done.
ePaper is coming, it would seem. One can mourn the Library of Alexandria (lost in a great fire over two thousand years ago), silently revere the generations of medieval monks who doggedly copied the learned manuscripts on parchment, celebrate the invention of the printing press, deplore the recent debasement of popular "information" by the major networks (those mass-media "entertainment" conglomerates), and be wary of this new medium (I will). But maybe that's just my own double-plus-ungood outlook.
Show me a government owned power company in the USA.
OK, I'll mention a few: TVA (i.e., Tennesse Valley Authority, which lifted an entire region out of utter abject poverty during the Depression, SoCal's DWP (which not only distributes water and generates power, but also manages to generate power while distributing water), Sacramento's Municipal Utility District (MUD) which generates and distributes most of the power in north-central CA, and finally the BPA (i.e., Bonneville Power Administration) which built and still operates most of the hydroelectric power generation and transmission in the Columbia watershed. The Northwest has a lower cost of living partly due to low power costs (though it isn't guaranteed and it has been rising) and low water costs (likely to continue given near term global warming effects). Water, Power (and soon, Broadband) are _exactly_ the infrastructure investments that our government does well and should control. Private utilities are very vulnerable to economic fluctuations where their executives' self-interest leads them to try foolish deals and daft accounting tricks in search of short-term performance, while government can weather tough quarters (and years) without worrying about the stock analysts.
In case you hadn't noticed, the major private power utilities in California are in bankruptcy and are desperately beseeching the State to bail them out (and might yet stick the tax and rate paying citizens after all, given how cozy their lobbyists have been with the CA PUC, Legislature, and Executive branch fixers, just about forever). One can only hope that the CA government and regulators now realize that the public is watching with interest and will nail them if they screw it up further, so they might fix it properly.
Of course, private utility executives and board members never do get held accountable, nor do their government co-conspirators, but if things were to be really just, there'd be a few of them hung from lamp-posts in San Francisco before this is over. Screwing the public for private gain is just the sort of thing that deserves "extreme prejudice."
Government utilities are a good thing, mostly (WPPS notwithstanding, but that was a _private_ boondoggle admittedly triggered by a BPA error). Private utilities are simply disasters waiting to ripen, explode, and be discovered, unless they are regulated into castrated quasi-governmental entities. The term "private utility" really is an oxymoron.
Honestly, if the phone and cable companies hadn't been in competition with their own customers I think all of this wouldn't have happened.
Agreed (someone please mod this guy above up as Insightful). The phone and cable companies' customers are the broadband resellers (Northpoint, Covad,etc.) allied with ISPs. So the Baby Bells and cable companies (all local monopolies) multiply red tape, drag their feet on installs, screw up provisionings, drag their feet some more, then raise local loop prices to squeeze out their competition by giving their inhouse broadband services and ISPs preferential cost advantages. Meanwhile the State PUCs and the FCC are busy looking the other way, helped along by "pro-[big-]business" Federal and State administrations and legislators beholden to campaign contributions from these same large telecommunications and cable companies. It stinks to high heaven, but all Joe Six-Pack knows is that his choices were few initially and later tonight his cablemodem won't be working anymore. Maybe this will get some attention paid to the corruption that underlies present US national, State, and local telecommunications and cable policies. The only country where it's worse is the UK, where the government monopoly BT is even more evil and incompetent and the Oftel watchdog is toothless.
Well, I can see both sides. First-world cultures have progressed from the naive Victorian view that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" (from before WWI up through the Chamberlin appeasement of Germany's "National Socialism" between the two big wars) through the hard-headed pragmatism of some very perilous Cold War times, up to the present (which has turned out not to be such a kindler and gentler era as we might once have thought and wished). But then again, there is also The Constitution of the United States, which is our blueprint for Liberty which is not to be lightly ignored and cannot be run over roughshod. If anyone tries it... we do have an armed citizenry.
Oregon has refused to cooperate with the FBI seeking "voluntary" interviews with visa holders from Middle Eastern countries. (I am from Oregon, by the way, and The Oregonian printed my Letter To The Editor when I was 17 supporting our Senator Wayne Morse when he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that unleashed (Vice) President Johnson's war machine which eventually killed 50,000 of my contemporaries in my generation's unjust war.) I would hope that the authorities in Oregon grow some balls and insist on being present at such "voluntary" interviews, just to make sure that innocent kids from places east of Gibraltar are not rounded up wholesale for political opinions and not contacts, actions, or evidence. The first duty of every citizen is to maintain a healthy skepticism about the motives of governmental minions, at all levels.
But where should the line be drawn with regard to government snooping? This is not an easy question to answer but some guidance is to be found in the Constitution and in the Common Law heritage that provides the foundations for all of our Courts. These include "reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause" as well as the citizen Grand Jury.
To the extent the time-honored standards of our justice system might be abridged by the current administration's "emergency" powers extracted from legislators too afraid of being seen as "soft on terrorism" - they are illegitimate and will not stand. We have a (mostly) independent judiciary. They'll sort it out in due time. If not, then revolution.
Jefferson was right: the power to govern is based only upon the consent of the governed, and the power elites in the beltway had better not forget this political fact. And it was Lincoln (a Republican) who said that this "...Government Of the People, By the People, and For the People, Shall Not Perish From The Earth." He was right too, surely.
since hyperlinks are simply the "mechanization" of references. Think of footnotes as prior art here. And what is a list of phone numbers printed in a book, relative to a set of linked email addresses? But one shudders to see the means of most web based communications and commerce subjected to the arcane and so finely split hairs of legaldom.
how much data the European Space Agency thinks can be stored on a "PC Hard Disk" nowadays... 1 GB, 10 GB, 100 GB? They're a little short on meaningful statistics. But it's a press release - the only time the press does math is when one of them gets stuck with the bar tab and figures out a tip.
It would also be interesting to hear what storage technology they're using. Surely they're not flying a Terabyte RAID5 array (what with launch vibration, etc.). More likely dense and hardened DRAM (and lots of it), I'd guess. It almost makes me want to go read the article to find this out.
All attorneys are Officers of the Court, so they not only have privileged status but also defined responsibilities.
A parallel is the legally mandated Tarasoff Warning required of psychiatrists when they believe a third party might be in real danger from a patient.
Attorneys have similar requirements. In other words, I can talk with my attorney about a bank robbery I committed and that's privileged, but if I tell that same attorney about a bank robbery I plan to commit tomorrow, that's not privileged and the lawyer must warn the authorities. It's a fairly clear line.
What are the price expectations for a processor like this? I mean from the specs alone (with so much stuff integrated into the die), it's going to be a fairly big beast.
Expect AMD's Hammer chips to cost much less than Intel's Itanium CPUs. Intel spent several years and likely Billions to develop the Itanium, whereas AMD needed only about one year for the Hammer. The first model will be the Sledgehammer, targeted to Servers, so those won't be exactly cheap. But the second model Clawhammer CPU will be for Workstations/Desktops and probably comparable in price to current high-end Athlons.
you can tuck something inside a second battery slot or empty drive slot. But then again, laptops are required to still go through the xray machine, where something would (hopefully) be found.
Not really. LiMH has a density (what airport xray machines "see") similar to C4/Semtex, i.e., rather dense. That's one reason why the FAA has installed explosives "sniffer machines" at major airports. I guess they figure terrorists will be sloppy enough to fashion their bombs in the same space where they keep the luggage they'll use to carry them. Of course, the FAA never dreamed anyone would hijack airplanes with box-cutters either.
Of course, people _really_ interested in personal defense capability have been carrying concealed ceramic knives for 10 years or more on airplanes.
And after reloading small-arms ammo, always wash your hands before packing. Not doing so might result in major inconvenience later at the airport.
If the FBI routes all packets through one or a few Internet Monitoring Point(s), this will create a (few) single point(s) of failure. If they do this, next year it _will_ be possible to take down the Internet... at least, in the US. For this reason alone, letting the FBI monitor all packets is a Really Bad Idea.
Re:Since when did MS ever set any standards?
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Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 2
It's really amazing how much Microsoft astroturfiing has been showing up on Slashdot lately, such as your post, for example. Does Bill pay you overtime for posting garbage to Slashdot in the middle of the night?
Stac had a valid patent, as was found in court. The case didn't go to the penalty phase because Microsoft bought their way out after losing on the merits. They settled on patent infringement and licensed Stac technology for disk compression.
And you didn't apparently have ad-hominem attacks at hand for the other transgressions mentioned. Perhaps Bill should dock your astroturf bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason ISPs cap upstream bandwidth at XX KB/sec is to indirectly limit download bandwidth. The upstream cap limits the rate at which you can ACK received packets, depending on fragmentation, multi-packet adaptive ACKing for streaming, etc. Simple, huh? Or, at least that's why I think they're doing this upstream speed cap.
But I might be wrong and would welcome more knowledgable comments.
and Microsoft's targets are all non-M$ servers. But they'll have a hard time convincing all but the most naive IT executives with a commissioned "independent" study. I don't know about Sun or HP, but IBM has actual case studies for various industries to back up their sales presentations. And IBM will do an onsite competitive analysis using your actual and projected costs, comparing their offerings against your current environment and the costs of competing vendors. Microsoft better pack a lunch.
However, M$ will still be able to buy some business somehow. I can hear the CTO office conversations now....
"So Mr/Ms M$ sales-droid, why do you think Microsoft offers lower Total Cost of Ownership - that's what TCO means right?
"Well, our higher licensing costs include support that Linux doesn't offer. There is no one firm responsible for Linux - but Microsoft is there for you with support."
"I can buy Linux support for less than your licenses cost.... Why would I want to pay you more for bad service? Licensing terms that say you're not responsible for anything bad that happens to us by using your software, no way no how, never? Support that costs EXTRA, over and above licensing? Tier 1 tech support that needs help getting dressed in the morning? Added charges for Tier 2/3 support? And NOT TO MENTION most of our problems are caused by your own sloppy code, insecure defaults, arcane proprietary system internals, file format incompatibilities! Where is my credit for all these costs?"
"Er, Microsoft makes the best software; everyone uses this."
"Yes, everyone in our offices surfs the 'net, downloads porn and music files, and wastes time chatting online - all well enabled by your promiscuous everything-enabled Windows! And I have a dozen MSCE-papered dweebs running around fixing peoples' self-disabled capabilities to do that instead of work! I can replace that dozen MSCEs with just 2 or 3 Linux people tomorrow. What does that do for your TCO calculations, huh? Do you have any real answer to Linux? I'm very interested."
"Well, we do have some er, confidential partnership offers."
"Is this where you offer me a rather... personal incentive?"
"Um, why yes, now that you mention it. Do you have a non-US bank account by any chance?"
"(Sliding paper over the desk). Well, harumph, having dealt with all my considerations, on balance it's Microsoft here."
I disagree - /. gets these every once in a while and the community provides some good advice.
Gather documentation: you should have copies of your reviews and be allowed to see everything in your personnel file, maybe even get a copy of it. Take copies of your email, and take them offsite.
Does your company have an Employee Handbook or other HR publications describing their personnel and termination policies and procedures? If so, they must follow what they publish or face potential liability for wrongful reassignment or termination. Get copies of whatever they publish.
What State do you work in? Do you know what your State Labor Board/Commission requires of employers? If not, find out.
Get a lawyer. Most will talk with you for an initial assessment of your situation without charge. But you'll have to retain them ($$$) to get them to take any action on your behalf, from writing letter(s) to filing suit ($$$$+).
Best wishes to you.
As SirCam virus e-mails average 250kb per message, each month we pass over a gigabyte of bandwidth on this crap.
Hmmm. You've probably got T3 or better pipe, but lets say you only have a T1 (1.5 Mbps). A GB takes a only a couple of minutes of your monthly bandwidth capacity. You're incensed at this? You're going to devote major efforts to stop it? If so, you don't have enough to do to keep you busy with business mission-critical work there. Less than 1% of bandwidth capacity is just noise.
Of course, destructive worms are a much different matter, and where worms destroy systems and data causing lost productivity, overtime, and business losses I agree with you, somewhat. But clueless choices to use Microsoft software are where the blame really should be placed in such circumstances. The worm/virus writers are just opportunists preying on fundamentally insecure Microsoft based systems. And that's your fault.
that Microsoft's relentless expansion of Office "features" and condescending dictation of how everyone organizes files and uses productivity software is _reducing_ usability of the products.
With Office95 I could set each application to save its files in a specific directory by default. So I had separate directories for Word, Excel, etc., and I'd use Save-As to place files in Client folders as needed. Lately with Office2000 I have to use Save-As for every frickin file plus having to click up and down the directory tree to reach my file structure. Its painful and it wastes time - all simply because Microsoft _enforces_ their "easy" (dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator) approach to saving files. It insults me to use it. What I want is software that's easier for me to use in the way I want to work. And that is Not M$ Office. I do hope Star Office 6 will be more usable in this sense and wish Sun would finish it up and finally release it real soon.
The CNN article's apparent deference (or pandering) to Microsoft's plans seems rather strange, seeing as how CNN is part of that other Great Satan - AOL/Time-Warner - which is positioning resources to take on Microsoft wherever it can in a battle for consumer control of media and transactions.
International Intellectual Property (IIP) issues might arise when Hungary gets around to applying to join the European Union (or NATO). But the EU politicians haven't AFAIK been quite as corrupt as US congress-critters about pandering to Big Music and Hollywood, so there's some hope that they'll maintain First Sale and (noncommercial) Fair Use types of consumer media rights. The EU is fairly tough about protecting consumers' privacy rights, so one can hope the RIAA/MPAA won't prevail there. (Vivendi owning Universal is a worry, but they're in France and can't buy laws one hopes.)
In any case, it won't matter. The horse is out of the barn already. The RIAA/MPAA can close the barn door (in the US, maybe), but they won't ever catch the horse again. To paraphrase someone's famous quote about the Internet, open source software interprets authoritarian oppression as damage... and routes around it.
so I won't be giving him a dime for anything.
If Office runs on Lindows or on Wine, you can trust Microsoft will find ways to make it runeable [sic] only on Windows,...
So in other words, "Office isn't done until Lindows and Wine won't run it."
There are several sides to this. On the one hand, Wine translates Windows applications to run under other OSs, while Lindows provides services for native Windows APIs, so Microsoft will have to continually "innovate"... er, obfuscate these to prevent compatibility. Who is placed on the "treadmill" of forced code extension then, Microsoft?
That strikes me as a Good Thing because in doing so Microsoft will have to break the ability of Windows XP+1 to run Office XP (and Office 2000, etc), thus alienating a lot of customers who won't choose to upgrade MS Office. Mike Magee at The Inquirer still runs an early release of WinWord because the next release broke the glossary. And I still use WinWord95 because it works under OS/2 and later versions can still read the files it produces. Microsoft better not break backwards compatibility for its Office applications, or it will see a major customer backlash involving wholesale defection to other applications (like StarOffice) that can handle all the older MS Office formats.
On another hand, a large part of Microsoft's revenues proceed from its hammerlock on the OEMs (Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, etc.) to preload Windows (and only Windows) on consumer and business PCs. If that monopoly is broken, a big chunk of Microsoft's revenues are suddenly at risk. If more reliable and secure OSs are found capable of running MS Office applications, this risk to MS increases. This will also be a Good Thing, IMHO. So Lindows and Wine are backing Microsoft into a corner - I applaud it.
By the way, if you have any comments about the Proposed Settlement of the Microsoft Antitrust Case, you can send them to:
microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov
Subject: Microsoft Settlement
You have 60 days from Nov 28. By law, all public comments received must be published in the Federal Register. One hopes public comments will be reviewed by the Court.
Well, this is basically targeted to California power utility failures. These are much less likely now. The blackouts were 1/2 - 2 hours when they were imposed. This product is still too expensive and too late, I think. Want to tell me how you'd justify $15+K for a home website backup? This is just a far too ezpensive solution seeking a problem.
A big marine battery with a DC/AC inverter and a trickle charger can match these specs (or close, anyway) for about 1/10th the price.
at $7,500 for the "Starter Pack", $10K for 24 hours. A generic (Honda, or something) gasoline generator is only a hundred bucks or so, and gasoline is only about $1.25/gal here in the US now. Who does Coleman think might buy this stuff? Osama bin f-ing Ladin? (Just the thing to keep your satellite phone lit in the caves on those long winter nights in Nowhere, Afghanistan?) It's amazing that they'd even advertise this product at the prices they're quoting. Until they meet reality, they'll never sell these things.
Bullshit.
Backwards compatibility is a requirement in the commercial software world. Microsoft has observed it in the past and it's simply arrogant of them to break with this tradition. All the more reason not to run Microsoft software, if you ask me.
I think you're just a Microsoft astroturf troll.
Urm... who said that? Got any quotes or sources? I didn't think so. The Internet isn't mostly pornography (though I'll admit there's a lot of it out there), it's mostly _information_ and _commerce_. If you think otherwise, you're obviously spending too much time surfing one-handed. And how would your vision be any different than now?
Oh, hi honey! Just reading the WSJ on my ePaper. Yeah, it's blank now, I was just switching over to USA Today, they have such insightful and more in-depth editorials.
Yeah, right.
to figure out how ePaper might actually be used.
Once it becomes reliable and relatively cheap to produce (compared to the dead-tree stuff plus its recurring production and distribution costs), publishers of all stripes will be all over this, mark my words. Eliminating most of those recurring production and distribution costs will drive the adoption of ePaper by publishers (consumers won't pull this, except by choosing lower costs of data delivery). Here's my off the cuff analysis of how the markets will treat this new medium (and I will welcome all comments):
1) Ephemeral publishers - all newspapers, plus the major consumer networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, AOL/TW, FOX, Sky, etc.) will be falling all over each other to offer X pages of ePaper to subscribers, where the cost of the blank "product" will be _inversely_ proportional on a per-page basis to the number of ePages purchased initially (the rationale here will be that the more ePages you buy, the more ads they get to winkle into your "viewing experience" every few hours or each day). Just economics, actually.
2) Periodical publishers - i.e., magazines, see above for the consumer cost and rationale for it. A twist here if one wants a hard copy of an issue, but I'm sure it will be done.
3) Book publishers - limited adoption; when I buy a book I want to own it, dammit. As a consumer of books, I certainly don't want that book I bought to disappear when I buy another one. Here, ePaper will be limited to perusal before purchase of the real thing (bye bye, Borders etc. coffee-shops), but this might stimulate the higher value online presentation of books (cover art, reviews, et al - Amazon, are you listening?). A tricky dimension, verging on the periodical model: Do you want to lease a book for a month? Do you also want an option to buy the real paper version eventually? The marketing models for this will be trial and error (mostly error) initially, but they all _will_ get done.
ePaper is coming, it would seem. One can mourn the Library of Alexandria (lost in a great fire over two thousand years ago), silently revere the generations of medieval monks who doggedly copied the learned manuscripts on parchment, celebrate the invention of the printing press, deplore the recent debasement of popular "information" by the major networks (those mass-media "entertainment" conglomerates), and be wary of this new medium (I will). But maybe that's just my own double-plus-ungood outlook.
Show me a government owned power company in the USA.
OK, I'll mention a few: TVA (i.e., Tennesse Valley Authority, which lifted an entire region out of utter abject poverty during the Depression, SoCal's DWP (which not only distributes water and generates power, but also manages to generate power while distributing water), Sacramento's Municipal Utility District (MUD) which generates and distributes most of the power in north-central CA, and finally the BPA (i.e., Bonneville Power Administration) which built and still operates most of the hydroelectric power generation and transmission in the Columbia watershed. The Northwest has a lower cost of living partly due to low power costs (though it isn't guaranteed and it has been rising) and low water costs (likely to continue given near term global warming effects). Water, Power (and soon, Broadband) are _exactly_ the infrastructure investments that our government does well and should control. Private utilities are very vulnerable to economic fluctuations where their executives' self-interest leads them to try foolish deals and daft accounting tricks in search of short-term performance, while government can weather tough quarters (and years) without worrying about the stock analysts.
In case you hadn't noticed, the major private power utilities in California are in bankruptcy and are desperately beseeching the State to bail them out (and might yet stick the tax and rate paying citizens after all, given how cozy their lobbyists have been with the CA PUC, Legislature, and Executive branch fixers, just about forever). One can only hope that the CA government and regulators now realize that the public is watching with interest and will nail them if they screw it up further, so they might fix it properly.
Of course, private utility executives and board members never do get held accountable, nor do their government co-conspirators, but if things were to be really just, there'd be a few of them hung from lamp-posts in San Francisco before this is over. Screwing the public for private gain is just the sort of thing that deserves "extreme prejudice."
Government utilities are a good thing, mostly (WPPS notwithstanding, but that was a _private_ boondoggle admittedly triggered by a BPA error). Private utilities are simply disasters waiting to ripen, explode, and be discovered, unless they are regulated into castrated quasi-governmental entities. The term "private utility" really is an oxymoron.
Honestly, if the phone and cable companies hadn't been in competition with their own customers I think all of this wouldn't have happened.
Agreed (someone please mod this guy above up as Insightful). The phone and cable companies' customers are the broadband resellers (Northpoint, Covad,etc.) allied with ISPs. So the Baby Bells and cable companies (all local monopolies) multiply red tape, drag their feet on installs, screw up provisionings, drag their feet some more, then raise local loop prices to squeeze out their competition by giving their inhouse broadband services and ISPs preferential cost advantages. Meanwhile the State PUCs and the FCC are busy looking the other way, helped along by "pro-[big-]business" Federal and State administrations and legislators beholden to campaign contributions from these same large telecommunications and cable companies. It stinks to high heaven, but all Joe Six-Pack knows is that his choices were few initially and later tonight his cablemodem won't be working anymore. Maybe this will get some attention paid to the corruption that underlies present US national, State, and local telecommunications and cable policies. The only country where it's worse is the UK, where the government monopoly BT is even more evil and incompetent and the Oftel watchdog is toothless.
Middle East. Should I have said East and South of Gibraltar? (Yes, I know Italy's east of there.)
Well, I can see both sides. First-world cultures have progressed from the naive Victorian view that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" (from before WWI up through the Chamberlin appeasement of Germany's "National Socialism" between the two big wars) through the hard-headed pragmatism of some very perilous Cold War times, up to the present (which has turned out not to be such a kindler and gentler era as we might once have thought and wished). But then again, there is also The Constitution of the United States, which is our blueprint for Liberty which is not to be lightly ignored and cannot be run over roughshod. If anyone tries it... we do have an armed citizenry.
Oregon has refused to cooperate with the FBI seeking "voluntary" interviews with visa holders from Middle Eastern countries. (I am from Oregon, by the way, and The Oregonian printed my Letter To The Editor when I was 17 supporting our Senator Wayne Morse when he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that unleashed (Vice) President Johnson's war machine which eventually killed 50,000 of my contemporaries in my generation's unjust war.) I would hope that the authorities in Oregon grow some balls and insist on being present at such "voluntary" interviews, just to make sure that innocent kids from places east of Gibraltar are not rounded up wholesale for political opinions and not contacts, actions, or evidence. The first duty of every citizen is to maintain a healthy skepticism about the motives of governmental minions, at all levels.
But where should the line be drawn with regard to government snooping? This is not an easy question to answer but some guidance is to be found in the Constitution and in the Common Law heritage that provides the foundations for all of our Courts. These include "reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause" as well as the citizen Grand Jury.
To the extent the time-honored standards of our justice system might be abridged by the current administration's "emergency" powers extracted from legislators too afraid of being seen as "soft on terrorism" - they are illegitimate and will not stand. We have a (mostly) independent judiciary. They'll sort it out in due time. If not, then revolution.
Jefferson was right: the power to govern is based only upon the consent of the governed, and the power elites in the beltway had better not forget this political fact. And it was Lincoln (a Republican) who said that this "...Government Of the People, By the People, and For the People, Shall Not Perish From The Earth." He was right too, surely.
since hyperlinks are simply the "mechanization" of references. Think of footnotes as prior art here. And what is a list of phone numbers printed in a book, relative to a set of linked email addresses? But one shudders to see the means of most web based communications and commerce subjected to the arcane and so finely split hairs of legaldom.
how much data the European Space Agency thinks can be stored on a "PC Hard Disk" nowadays... 1 GB, 10 GB, 100 GB? They're a little short on meaningful statistics. But it's a press release - the only time the press does math is when one of them gets stuck with the bar tab and figures out a tip.
It would also be interesting to hear what storage technology they're using. Surely they're not flying a Terabyte RAID5 array (what with launch vibration, etc.). More likely dense and hardened DRAM (and lots of it), I'd guess. It almost makes me want to go read the article to find this out.
All attorneys are Officers of the Court, so they not only have privileged status but also defined responsibilities.
A parallel is the legally mandated Tarasoff Warning required of psychiatrists when they believe a third party might be in real danger from a patient.
Attorneys have similar requirements. In other words, I can talk with my attorney about a bank robbery I committed and that's privileged, but if I tell that same attorney about a bank robbery I plan to commit tomorrow, that's not privileged and the lawyer must warn the authorities. It's a fairly clear line.
What are the price expectations for a processor like this? I mean from the specs alone (with so much stuff integrated into the die), it's going to be a fairly big beast.
Expect AMD's Hammer chips to cost much less than Intel's Itanium CPUs. Intel spent several years and likely Billions to develop the Itanium, whereas AMD needed only about one year for the Hammer. The first model will be the Sledgehammer, targeted to Servers, so those won't be exactly cheap. But the second model Clawhammer CPU will be for Workstations/Desktops and probably comparable in price to current high-end Athlons.
you can tuck something inside a second battery slot or empty drive slot. But then again, laptops are required to still go through the xray machine, where something would (hopefully) be found.
Not really. LiMH has a density (what airport xray machines "see") similar to C4/Semtex, i.e., rather dense. That's one reason why the FAA has installed explosives "sniffer machines" at major airports. I guess they figure terrorists will be sloppy enough to fashion their bombs in the same space where they keep the luggage they'll use to carry them. Of course, the FAA never dreamed anyone would hijack airplanes with box-cutters either.
Of course, people _really_ interested in personal defense capability have been carrying concealed ceramic knives for 10 years or more on airplanes.
And after reloading small-arms ammo, always wash your hands before packing. Not doing so might result in major inconvenience later at the airport.
If the FBI routes all packets through one or a few Internet Monitoring Point(s), this will create a (few) single point(s) of failure. If they do this, next year it _will_ be possible to take down the Internet... at least, in the US. For this reason alone, letting the FBI monitor all packets is a Really Bad Idea.
It's really amazing how much Microsoft astroturfiing has been showing up on Slashdot lately, such as your post, for example. Does Bill pay you overtime for posting garbage to Slashdot in the middle of the night?
Stac had a valid patent, as was found in court. The case didn't go to the penalty phase because Microsoft bought their way out after losing on the merits. They settled on patent infringement and licensed Stac technology for disk compression.
And you didn't apparently have ad-hominem attacks at hand for the other transgressions mentioned. Perhaps Bill should dock your astroturf bonus.