All privacy issues aside the financial value of this sort of thing is tremendous. But what confuses me is that I though LDAP was supposed to make it so everyone could find everyone. Wouldn't they be better to incent people to give their personal information (name, address, ip number, etc). Then they could sell access to the DB to companies that care, it's a lot more likely to be up to date, and nobody's undies get bunched up.
The way I look at it, anyone can already have my name -> (address || phone number) by just buying the phone book on CD. Letting them know my IP number on top of it isn't going to subject me to anything but more advertising which is largly getting ignored anyway. If I need my some or all of my information to be secret, I'll have to encrypt it anyway so how cares if they're sniffing, monitoring, etc.
1) Unauthorised reviews are illegal.
2) In order to bring suit, MS writes a statement that SecurityFocus is publishing unwelcome bug reports, an illegal review of their product.
3) SecurityFocus never gave MS the right to issue a statement about the SecurityFocus product/service.
4) Therefore MS is breaking the law it's trying to prosecute on, just by bringing the suit.
Or you could just write server side java, which is MUCH easier to develop than windows code and work with both of them. Ease of development is a strawman argument.
Maybe my threshold is set to high, but I can't believe no one is making a bigger deal out of the fact that the court restraining order was a publicity stunt. Any time a large corporation issues an order like this (especially against one of it's supports *GASP*) it makes news.
Which do you think cost more, issueing a restraining order, or buying enough advertising to generate the same amount of attention that the court order controversy generated?
And the rumor site gets both publicity AND underdog respect. Both sides win big!
What do you want to bet that someone an MS is trying to stifle discussion about this bill and so is mounting a DOS against the message system by spamming it with useless bullshit.
Does this law specifically deny the right to speak out against the product or is that merely an extrapolation?
They made a law saying that you can't have a minute flash of an image in a video stream in order to make you crave hamburgers at the movie theatre. This will be no different. A few people will abuse the current lack of standards, people will get pissed and a law to this effect will be passed:
Any video stream marked as "live" may not contain any image manipulation except the addition of visual borders around the side of the image to convey the live status or other information about the feed. The border may cover part of the live feed, but may not at any time appear to be a part of the live stream of images.
Once that goes in to law no one will be concerned about this any more. Drake42
The government is simply acting as an exception handler in this case. All other checks to MS growth were unable to catch and handle this exception, so now the government must handle it. If the government cannot handle the exception, then MS will eventually consume all available resources and the industry will crash.
That's not entirely true. The real source of a story is all of the disparate comments, opinions, quotes and references that get culled down and polished to make the final story.
Since all of this material is available to be read on/. you could say that the source of this article is open. The article itself will probably only be a fifth of the size of all source material, plus the article will have a great deal of polish that the source will lack.
Additionally, Open Source is a term that people are coming to understand. It could and should be applied to other areas, as long as the term is used accurately. In this case I think it is.
What we REALLY need to be doing is drop an incredibly strong tether down from the satellite to earth, the ultra-way-way-long orange extension cord!
I have no scientific training at all, but I'd thought that I had read that woven bucky tubes might be strong enough to actually do that. (I.E. the geo-synchronous orbit tether ball, space Elevator, etc.) Is that true? If it were possible (no matter how unlikely) we could just set up a controlled air space around the cord, trust flying animals to not bump into things.
Of course, if the cord ever broke it'd be kinda messy, but still pretty cool!
When I read this report my primary response was: "So?"
The software development industry is young, but not that young. Ever read the date on most of RFCs? They are in computer terms ancient, thus from "archeaological" data we can infer that computer programmers did in fact exist before 1985 and thus the computer industry, having lasted this long, will probably last just a bit longer. (Like, perhaps for the rest of our lives) No news there.
Will there be a glut after 2000? Probably for a while. Then the COBOL programmers will either retrain, or change jobs, or join middle management. Not much news there.
"I want to claw my way up through middle management" , "I want to be expendable" , "I want a brown nose." I love that commercial.
Less people in school: This is because of low unemployement. Everyone knows that when you can't find work you strudy, and when you have work you don't. This is not newsworthy.
More Indian/Russian/Where-ever-ian programmers: WORLD WIDE web. I think it's great to hire and train more foreign programmers. You get multiple perspectives, and they're not going to bring down the salaries of American counter parts. That is a myth! If anything they'll get their visa and demand real money or they'll go home to start business on their own soil. Again, not really newsworthy.
CS is too hard/boring: My degree is in Applied Math. I took that because I knew it would be more meaningful in the long term than a CS degree might have been. The vast majority of people are not suited to or interested in the kind of mental training that is required to do computer science. THAT is why programmers will eventually be regarded in the same way as architects, IT people will be seen as Construction Foremen and the 'grunt' laborers. (But did you ever wonder how much training the guy operating that big hydralic arm has had? I bet it is more than the name 'grunt' implies)
I don't have a problem with this future, and to me it seems fairly likely.
What is up with C|Net and CNN that give you these damn 2 paragraph stories? Why do they even bother? Why not just give us a head line, with no text underneath it?
As for the story itself, this is a doomed concept.
Let's say I own a small business and I have these choices:
A) A Wintel machine that the saleman says will be easy to install, but will perform only very limited function and come with no support except the phrase "Buy a bigger server"
B) A friend of the company who says,"I'll just set you up with Linux." Small Business Owner: "With what?" Friend: "It's cheaper, it works, I'll be done quickly. Oh and it's fully functional, so don't worry about expansion."
Only a PHB buys Microsoft because of the name, but most PHBs don't start small businesses. Thus, no market for for thin servers, IMHO.
Obviously it's only a re-org, but we are not the target audience for these 'big announcements'.
The target audience is the shareholders. The people who desperately want everything to be OK at microsoft so that they can keep collecting nice dividend checks. These are the people who will read this, assume the problem is solved and that the DOJ will be happy now, and not sell off all of their stock. And of course its 'big news' because Microsoft is paying top dollar for it to be published as big news.
However, I don't think the DOJ will fall for it. They're going to be after blood. MS was way to disrespectful in the courtroom to not get a full out beating.
Personally, I think splitting them into smaller companies where all deals and intercompany communication is publicly posted is a good idea for the community and the shareholder. All of the mini-MS companies will continue to grow and be profitable so nobody gets too screwed, but the ability to form collusions will be decreased. That's the only solution I've heard so far that I would have real faith in.
Slashdot Mirror
All privacy issues aside the financial value of this sort of thing is tremendous. But what confuses me is that I though LDAP was supposed to make it so everyone could find everyone. Wouldn't they be better to incent people to give their personal information (name, address, ip number, etc). Then they could sell access to the DB to companies that care, it's a lot more likely to be up to date, and nobody's undies get bunched up.
The way I look at it, anyone can already have my name -> (address || phone number) by just buying the phone book on CD. Letting them know my IP number on top of it isn't going to subject me to anything but more advertising which is largly getting ignored anyway. If I need my some or all of my information to be secret, I'll have to encrypt it anyway so how cares if they're sniffing, monitoring, etc.
This fairly dumb, but struck me as funny.
1) Unauthorised reviews are illegal.
2) In order to bring suit, MS writes a statement that SecurityFocus is publishing unwelcome bug reports, an illegal review of their product.
3) SecurityFocus never gave MS the right to issue a statement about the SecurityFocus product/service.
4) Therefore MS is breaking the law it's trying to prosecute on, just by bringing the suit.
Sorry. I'll be quiet now...
Drake42
Or you could just write server side java, which is MUCH easier to develop than windows code and work with both of them. Ease of development is a strawman argument.
Maybe my threshold is set to high, but I can't believe no one is making a bigger deal out of the fact that the court restraining order was a publicity stunt. Any time a large corporation issues an order like this (especially against one of it's supports *GASP*) it makes news.
Which do you think cost more, issueing a restraining order, or buying enough advertising to generate the same amount of attention that the court order controversy generated?
And the rumor site gets both publicity AND underdog respect. Both sides win big!
What do you want to bet that someone an MS is trying to stifle discussion about this bill and so is mounting a DOS against the message system by spamming it with useless bullshit.
Does this law specifically deny the right to speak out against the product or is that merely an extrapolation?
Drake42
They made a law saying that you can't have a minute flash of an image in a video stream in order to make you crave hamburgers at the movie theatre. This will be no different. A few people will abuse the current lack of standards, people will get pissed and a law to this effect will be passed:
Any video stream marked as "live" may not contain any image manipulation except the addition of visual borders around the side of the image to convey the live status or other information about the feed. The border may cover part of the live feed, but may not at any time appear to be a part of the live stream of images.
Once that goes in to law no one will be concerned about this any more.
Drake42
The government is simply acting as an exception handler in this case. All other checks to MS growth were unable to catch and handle this exception, so now the government must handle it. If the government cannot handle the exception, then MS will eventually consume all available resources and the industry will crash.
industry.lang.StockIndexOutOfBoundsException
Microsoft.ruleWorld():1995
Netscape.compete():213
User.makeWiseChoice():545
OEM.haveBackBone():32
Apple.dontDropTheBAll():1232
USGov.smiteTheNaughty()
Now we just watch to see if USGov knows how to handle this exception.
That's not entirely true. The real source of a story is all of the disparate comments, opinions, quotes and references that get culled down and polished to make the final story.
/. you could say that the source of this article is open. The article itself will probably only be a fifth of the size of all source material, plus the article will have a great deal of polish that the source will lack.
Since all of this material is available to be read on
Additionally, Open Source is a term that people are coming to understand. It could and should be applied to other areas, as long as the term is used accurately. In this case I think it is.
"Spoon!!!" -The Tick
Drake42
Is it a copyright violation to put a SQUID server?
Effectively it's a mirror, but since it's all in some strange program's cache, who could say anything?
What we REALLY need to be doing is drop an incredibly strong tether down from the satellite to earth, the ultra-way-way-long orange extension cord!
I have no scientific training at all, but I'd thought that I had read that woven bucky tubes might be strong enough to actually do that. (I.E. the geo-synchronous orbit tether ball, space Elevator, etc.) Is that true? If it were possible (no matter how unlikely) we could just set up a controlled air space around the cord, trust flying animals to not bump into things.
Of course, if the cord ever broke it'd be kinda messy, but still pretty cool!
Drake42
When I read this report my primary response was:
"So?"
The software development industry is young, but not that young. Ever read the date on most of RFCs? They are in computer terms ancient, thus from "archeaological" data we can infer that computer programmers did in fact exist before 1985 and thus the computer industry, having lasted this long, will probably last just a bit longer. (Like, perhaps for the rest of our lives) No news there.
Will there be a glut after 2000? Probably for a while. Then the COBOL programmers will either retrain, or change jobs, or join middle management. Not much news there.
"I want to claw my way up through middle management" , "I want to be expendable" , "I want a brown nose." I love that commercial.
Less people in school:
This is because of low unemployement. Everyone knows that when you can't find work you strudy, and when you have work you don't. This is not newsworthy.
More Indian/Russian/Where-ever-ian programmers:
WORLD WIDE web. I think it's great to hire and train more foreign programmers. You get multiple perspectives, and they're not going to bring down the salaries of American counter parts. That is a myth! If anything they'll get their visa and demand real money or they'll go home to start business on their own soil. Again, not really newsworthy.
CS is too hard/boring:
My degree is in Applied Math. I took that because I knew it would be more meaningful in the long term than a CS degree might have been. The vast majority of people are not suited to or interested in the kind of mental training that is required to do computer science. THAT is why programmers will eventually be regarded in the same way as architects, IT people will be seen as Construction Foremen and the 'grunt' laborers. (But did you ever wonder how much training the guy operating that big hydralic arm has had? I bet it is more than the name 'grunt' implies)
I don't have a problem with this future, and to me it seems fairly likely.
Any comments?
What is up with C|Net and CNN that give you these damn 2 paragraph stories? Why do they even bother? Why not just give us a head line, with no text underneath it?
As for the story itself, this is a doomed concept.
Let's say I own a small business and I have these choices:
A) A Wintel machine that the saleman says will be easy to install, but will perform only very limited function and come with no support except the phrase "Buy a bigger server"
B) A friend of the company who says,"I'll just set you up with Linux." Small Business Owner: "With what?" Friend: "It's cheaper, it works, I'll be done quickly. Oh and it's fully functional, so don't worry about expansion."
Only a PHB buys Microsoft because of the name, but most PHBs don't start small businesses. Thus, no market for for thin servers, IMHO.
Drake42
Obviously it's only a re-org, but we are not the
target audience for these 'big announcements'.
The target audience is the shareholders. The people who desperately want everything to be OK at microsoft so that they can keep collecting nice dividend checks. These are the people who will read this, assume the problem is solved and that the DOJ will be happy now, and not sell off all of their stock. And of course its 'big news' because Microsoft is paying top dollar for it to be published as big news.
However, I don't think the DOJ will fall for it. They're going to be after blood. MS was way to disrespectful in the courtroom to not get a full out beating.
Personally, I think splitting them into smaller companies where all deals and intercompany communication is publicly posted is a good idea for the community and the shareholder. All of the mini-MS companies will continue to grow and be profitable so nobody gets too screwed, but the ability to form collusions will be decreased. That's the only solution I've heard so far that I would have real faith in.