Note: the issue, on examination, is that MSWindows doesn't support assistive technology, and thus the disabled count on companies which add assistive support on a per-application basis.
Well, DUH! -- under those terms the disabled remain hostages to the market-share leader.
Saying, "We love Microsoft because they have the best assistive technology [1], and therefore oppose anything that Microsoft doesn't support" becomes a roundabout way to establish Microsoft as a de jure monopoly. In the logical extreme, laws like the ADA give Microsoft the power of law by the use of its human shields in the disabled community.
And, yes, those are horribly mixed metaphors. Sue me.
Now that Microsoft has turned lack of assistive technology into a powerful weapon against having to compete on the merits, would anyone care to guess how long it will be before MS offers platform support for assistive technology? Get used to the plantation, folk, cause'n yo suit Massah jes' fine wheah yo is.
[1] Well, actually it isn't theirs. But we tend to overlook that part and give them credit anyway.
If Microsoft, Apple, Ebay/Paypal, Verisign, a few banks etc... got together, agreed to a SINGLE existing standard, and implemented it in a transparent and easy to use way, it might go a long way to reducing spam.
It's been tried. Microsoft won't support anything that doesn't ultimately give them control of all e-mail.
Beyond that, encryption or signing of the contents requires that the MTA accept the whole stinking pink pile before even considering routing it to/dev/null -- and then it has to burn a huge number of cycles doing the cryptography. That's a deal-breaker for serious mailservers, which handle mindboggling numbers of messages every second.
Blacklists are easily defeated by zombies and content based filters will always have problems because spam content can be very similar to valid content.
That only works if the zombies aren't on a DUL [1].
Beyond that, it's pretty easy to spot zombies locally because they hit spamtrap addresses. Once they do, the sending IP gets locally blackholed on the spot without SMTP ever getting beyond "RCPT-TO"
[1] Dial-Up List: list of dynamic IP addresses, not always dialup.
The reason they don't do this now is that the spammers doing it are not geeks. They're taking pre-built scripts, modifying some parameters, and letting them go.
Don't be so sure about that "modifying parameters" part. I sure see a lot of pink stuff with "Subject:" lines of "%SUBJECT" and so forth. Certainly doesn't lead you to doubt Rule #3 of the Rules of Spam.
The whole point of the spam business model is that it's low-cost. Any filtering would raise costs compared to simply flooding the world with the same payload.
If spammers were in the slightest interested in addressing their markets, I wouldn't be seeing several thousand Asian-language spam per day addressed to a North American mail server. None of us would be seeing spam with hash-busters, mangled "Subject:" lines, and other filter avoidance hacks.
This seems like one more attempt to promote the idea of "good spam" for mainsleazers like Kohl's department stores.
Right now, large companies amass huge throw weights of patents. In general, the outcome of a patent war is Mutually Assured Destruction, so they also enter into mutual cross-licensing agreements that in effect create a patent-free zone for the Fortune 500.
What Intellectual Ventures could do is create a patent pool for the present members of the club.
It works like this: Microsoft transfers its patent portfolio to IV in return for a license to IV's patent portfolio. This is no loss to MS because they've already cross-licensed everything with Philips, Cisco, etc. -- all of whom do the same. From the POV of club members, nothing changes, except perhaps that they spend much less money negotiating cross-licensing agreements and pay a bit to IV for the convenience.
On the other hand, now IV has practically all of that throw weight. Anyone not an "Executive Member" of the club will have to pay (dearly!) to use any of the IV portfolio. What's more, Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't work because IV doesn't actually do anything -- they can't be sued for infringing patents when they don't make anything.
The upside to the club (aside from convenience noted above) is that any of the "little people" who get uppity are now facing the combined throw weight of all of the patents in the world -- and the club members don't have to accept the public-relations liabilities.
It's a total win-win situation. For instance, if done right Microsoft could keep Linux tied up in court forever without ever themselves taking a PR hit. Sort of like the BSA except for suppressing potential competition instead of keeping customers in line.
An annoyingly large number of EDA tools -- it's gotten better, but there are still quite a few that do. For another example, I could name a Nortel VPN client and a well-known meeting-host service that still seem to be fixated on RH7.x -- I think it dates to the bubble, when they thought RH was going to replace Microsoft. Since then they haven't bothered.
I want to know when we'll get LSB support from the application vendors.
No matter what the roadmap from the EDA Consortium says, too freaking many of the tools I use at $WORK refuse to run on anything other than Red Hat 7.2 (I kid you not!)
Philips has been trying to get out of the consumer electronics business for several years.
It looks like they've finally managed it.
I, for one, wish to be first to welcome our new Korean/Chinese/Malaysian/... consumer electronics manufacturers who are more concerned with providing value to the people who actually PAY for their products than with sucking up to the MPAA.
Superscalar refers to having multiple execution paths inside of a single processor, allowing the dispatch of multiple instructions in a single clock cycle. However, the register sets (etc.) maintain a common state (although keeping the out-of-order updates straight sucks a huge amount of complexity and power.)
In this case, AMD appears to be trying to decouple the states enough that the out-of-order resolution doesn't require micromanaging all of the processes from a single control point.
Some years back I replaced about half of the lighting controls in the house with X10 stuff (I would have done more but I have quite a bit of fluorescent lighting and they don't do fluorescents.)
A year later I ripped it all out and threw it away. The crap was just too flaky -- the ones that didn't go totally Tango Uniform would change state spontaneously at totally random times. Changing addresses didn't help at all.
So, IMHO, the "better than X10" technology has been around since the 195h century.
This "new" contract revelation only applies to the updated/new claim brought by SCO - it doesnt spoil their ongoing IBM case with regard to their other (bogus) claims.
Actually, it does. A finding against them is in effect a judicial finding since Judge Kimball will effectively read the arbitration ruling into his Court's record.
"So?" you say. However, the UL agreement included sublicensing rights. Which means that any IP Caldera had that appeared in the UL distribution was sublicensed under the GPL -- and IBM therefore has rights regardless of SCOX' claim that they ceased distributing Linux (OK, that was proven bogus. Still....)
You can file motions all you'd like. That doesn't mean they'll be carried out.
However, arbitration clauses are, for all practical purposes, automatically upheld by courts. It's not just the law, it's a well-established way to reduce the workload of horribly overworked judges.
This is one of those "knew or should have known" slam dunks. Judges aren't terribly fond of finding lawsuits frivilous, but a case where there was a clear contract estopping the plaintiff from the exact actions they took goes well over the bar. Boies, Schiller & Flexner could end up paying all of IBM's, Novell's, and Red Hat's legal bills.
Then there's the SEC disclosure requirements -- the fact that SCOX' stock runup happened while the Management sat on a contract that gutted the basis of the whole lawsuit lottery makes them personally liable. Even the SEC might wake up for that one, but the NYAG's office must be smelling blood in the water.
Once upon a time, my VP bought into a firm that had discovered a guaranteed-perfect compression algorithm: it would reduce the size of any data file, no exceptions.
A cow-orker asked if it could be used on its own ouput.
Unfortunately many apps on Windows need admin permission to run, especially in the CAD and 3D Animation world (Modellers, Renderers, Compositors etc). They're slowly being updated and pulled into line but it'll be many years away.
Which doesn't explain the need to have users running Linux as root.
Yes, there are advantages to having clued users able to do things on their systems [1] -- which is quite a different thing from having root access to the network stores.
In other words, I don't see the problem unless you've created it.
[1] Example: my system at $WORK. Note that most of the other engineers neither have, nor need, root access and I neither need nor have root access to anything but my own box.
Frankly, I doubt it. It sounds like something that mutated from either:
60% of modules require some change (as distinct from "rewritten") or
60% of <insert section> needs to be rewritten (as distinct from "Vista).
You can think as little as you like of Microsoft's management (and you'd have to go pretty low to match me) but I can't see even them being so flagrantly (stupid|dishonest) as to promise a 2007Q1 delivery of a 60% rewrite of something that took five years to get this far.
Cato has clout. Especially in a Republican Congress, where any support from Hollywierd and the music industry is, shall we say, less than whole-hearted.
Looks like this is going to come around to a very interesting game of bedfellow swapping:
On one side, the nominally populist Democrats supporting:
the fat cats of the Content Cartel (mainly because they get a lot of nonmonetary support from that quarter) and
the very biggest of tech firms (the biggest of big business) vs.
The Republicans (who talk a better personal-liberty line than they deliver) supporting
The relatively libertarian thinktanks (Cato, etc.)
the smaller tech firms, and
Actual citizens (don't read too much into this.)
I'll get the beer if you bring the pretzels -- this should be fun to watch going into an off-year election. Wonder if any of our Ruling Class are going to make a campaign issue of it?
There's an installed base that will only play standard CDs, but they're also totally rippable. In other words, they can either kiss off the installed base market to bet the farm on DRM or they can keep selling standard CDs and render DRM largely pointless.
Selling non-DRM ISO images (a la MagnaTune is, of course, Not Gonna Happen.
Decisions, decisions...
Hardly surprising, then, that it has that effect on distributed development. Apple has the advantage of keeping its developers together, which is fine as long as you have a narrow product base.
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Well, DUH! -- under those terms the disabled remain hostages to the market-share leader.
Saying, "We love Microsoft because they have the best assistive technology [1], and therefore oppose anything that Microsoft doesn't support" becomes a roundabout way to establish Microsoft as a de jure monopoly. In the logical extreme, laws like the ADA give Microsoft the power of law by the use of its human shields in the disabled community.
And, yes, those are horribly mixed metaphors. Sue me.
Now that Microsoft has turned lack of assistive technology into a powerful weapon against having to compete on the merits, would anyone care to guess how long it will be before MS offers platform support for assistive technology? Get used to the plantation, folk, cause'n yo suit Massah jes' fine wheah yo is.
[1] Well, actually it isn't theirs. But we tend to overlook that part and give them credit anyway.
It's been tried. Microsoft won't support anything that doesn't ultimately give them control of all e-mail.
Beyond that, encryption or signing of the contents requires that the MTA accept the whole stinking pink pile before even considering routing it to /dev/null -- and then it has to burn a huge number of cycles doing the cryptography. That's a deal-breaker for serious mailservers, which handle mindboggling numbers of messages every second.
That only works if the zombies aren't on a DUL [1].
Beyond that, it's pretty easy to spot zombies locally because they hit spamtrap addresses. Once they do, the sending IP gets locally blackholed on the spot without SMTP ever getting beyond "RCPT-TO"
[1] Dial-Up List: list of dynamic IP addresses, not always dialup.
Don't be so sure about that "modifying parameters" part. I sure see a lot of pink stuff with "Subject:" lines of "%SUBJECT" and so forth. Certainly doesn't lead you to doubt Rule #3 of the Rules of Spam.
The whole point of the spam business model is that it's low-cost. Any filtering would raise costs compared to simply flooding the world with the same payload.
If spammers were in the slightest interested in addressing their markets, I wouldn't be seeing several thousand Asian-language spam per day addressed to a North American mail server. None of us would be seeing spam with hash-busters, mangled "Subject:" lines, and other filter avoidance hacks.
This seems like one more attempt to promote the idea of "good spam" for mainsleazers like Kohl's department stores.
What Intellectual Ventures could do is create a patent pool for the present members of the club.
It works like this: Microsoft transfers its patent portfolio to IV in return for a license to IV's patent portfolio. This is no loss to MS because they've already cross-licensed everything with Philips, Cisco, etc. -- all of whom do the same. From the POV of club members, nothing changes, except perhaps that they spend much less money negotiating cross-licensing agreements and pay a bit to IV for the convenience.
On the other hand, now IV has practically all of that throw weight. Anyone not an "Executive Member" of the club will have to pay (dearly!) to use any of the IV portfolio. What's more, Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't work because IV doesn't actually do anything -- they can't be sued for infringing patents when they don't make anything.
The upside to the club (aside from convenience noted above) is that any of the "little people" who get uppity are now facing the combined throw weight of all of the patents in the world -- and the club members don't have to accept the public-relations liabilities.
It's a total win-win situation. For instance, if done right Microsoft could keep Linux tied up in court forever without ever themselves taking a PR hit. Sort of like the BSA except for suppressing potential competition instead of keeping customers in line.
An annoyingly large number of EDA tools -- it's gotten better, but there are still quite a few that do. For another example, I could name a Nortel VPN client and a well-known meeting-host service that still seem to be fixated on RH7.x -- I think it dates to the bubble, when they thought RH was going to replace Microsoft. Since then they haven't bothered.
No matter what the roadmap from the EDA Consortium says, too freaking many of the tools I use at $WORK refuse to run on anything other than Red Hat 7.2 (I kid you not!)
And, yes, they actually check /etc/redhat-release
Philips has been trying to get out of the consumer electronics business for several years.
It looks like they've finally managed it.
I, for one, wish to be first to welcome our new Korean/Chinese/Malaysian/... consumer electronics manufacturers who are more concerned with providing value to the people who actually PAY for their products than with sucking up to the MPAA.
In this case, AMD appears to be trying to decouple the states enough that the out-of-order resolution doesn't require micromanaging all of the processes from a single control point.
What I want to know is which of the premises underlying Amdahl's Law they've managed to escape?
A year later I ripped it all out and threw it away. The crap was just too flaky -- the ones that didn't go totally Tango Uniform would change state spontaneously at totally random times. Changing addresses didn't help at all.
So, IMHO, the "better than X10" technology has been around since the 195h century.
Actually, it does. A finding against them is in effect a judicial finding since Judge Kimball will effectively read the arbitration ruling into his Court's record.
"So?" you say. However, the UL agreement included sublicensing rights. Which means that any IP Caldera had that appeared in the UL distribution was sublicensed under the GPL -- and IBM therefore has rights regardless of SCOX' claim that they ceased distributing Linux (OK, that was proven bogus. Still ....)
However, arbitration clauses are, for all practical purposes, automatically upheld by courts. It's not just the law, it's a well-established way to reduce the workload of horribly overworked judges.
Then there's the SEC disclosure requirements -- the fact that SCOX' stock runup happened while the Management sat on a contract that gutted the basis of the whole lawsuit lottery makes them personally liable. Even the SEC might wake up for that one, but the NYAG's office must be smelling blood in the water.
... will it infect an ebuild?
A cow-orker asked if it could be used on its own ouput.
Which doesn't explain the need to have users running Linux as root.
Yes, there are advantages to having clued users able to do things on their systems [1] -- which is quite a different thing from having root access to the network stores.
In other words, I don't see the problem unless you've created it.
[1] Example: my system at $WORK. Note that most of the other engineers neither have, nor need, root access and I neither need nor have root access to anything but my own box.
You can think as little as you like of Microsoft's management (and you'd have to go pretty low to match me) but I can't see even them being so flagrantly (stupid|dishonest) as to promise a 2007Q1 delivery of a 60% rewrite of something that took five years to get this far.
Looks like this is going to come around to a very interesting game of bedfellow swapping:
I'll get the beer if you bring the pretzels -- this should be fun to watch going into an off-year election. Wonder if any of our Ruling Class are going to make a campaign issue of it?
There's an installed base that will only play standard CDs, but they're also totally rippable. In other words, they can either kiss off the installed base market to bet the farm on DRM or they can keep selling standard CDs and render DRM largely pointless.
Selling non-DRM ISO images (a la MagnaTune is, of course, Not Gonna Happen. Decisions, decisions ...
Hardly surprising, then, that it has that effect on distributed development. Apple has the advantage of keeping its developers together, which is fine as long as you have a narrow product base.