... charges that Microsoft buys (bought?) shelf space in stores to prevent competing products from even being visible?
So, in other words, this is really nothing new. This is Microsoft being Microsoft; now, does anyone seriously doubt that this is an organization bent on doing whatever it takes, including things that are not just immoral, or violate common sense, but possibly things that are criminal, in order to... what, make money?
Has American society fallen so far into the pit of jade and cynicism that we shrug off the Enrons and Microsofts of the world as merely maladjusted money-seeking sycophants, instead of being so violently outraged that we take every chance to make them wish they'd never even started a business? What the hell are we doing?
Every person who reads about Microsoft's behavior should be so sickened that they vomit. This is not normal. This is not acceptable. This is not "business as usual" in the United States. Just because it seems to happen a lot does not make it something we should tolerate, not even for a millisecond, and not for any reason.
Which is funny, because VMware has exactly this capability.
It needs some refinement, and sometimes it's slow when it picks back up again, but it generally works in my experience. It is obviously not only possible, but implementable using current technology
I find it personally and professionally offensive that you would mention Star Trek and Windows in the same sentence.
In your opinion, the tv series (franchise?) Star Trek, then, has a monopoly on television viewing? Is the content of Star Trek insecure? Are there issues with the Klingons beaming into local tv stations to catalog the tape library and report back to His High Holiness Chancellor Gates about what shows are available in each one?
You don't have to like Star Trek. I don't like Baby-lon Vee. But it doesn't even come close, as a television show, to being in the same category as Windows does in the software world. Not by a long shot.
Maybe its me, but something seems kinda strange with this situation. What he seems to be saying is "Reverse engineering is ok, but don't reverse engineer my code."
He didn't say that reverse engineering is okay only if he does it; he's saying that you can't use his reverse engineering, verbatim, without giving him credit for it. In fact, there wouldn't be any issue here at all if the ATA code monkeys in this case reverse engineered it themselves. They didn't do that, apparently.
It seems to me that the new owner of the product has grounds to recover any licensing or sales money they paid to Microtest, and recover damages for Microtest's having failed to fully disclose what the product's origins and licensing status were at the time of the sale.
That, of course, assumes that Microtest didn't actually tell them that the boxes were covered under the GPL...
The real problem of Microsoft's bundling, IMO, is not what software the vendor chooses to offer for free instead of a fee. Rather, it's what happens when the Monopoly Desktop OS vendor includes the Media Player which only plays a small selection of media formats (.wmp, for example). If every desktop OS ships with Windows Media Player, there's no incentive for server side Real, QuickTime, or just about any other format of streaming content. Microsoft doesn't necessarily extend its desktop monopoly with WMP; instead, it creates a new monopoly in streaming server software.
This is where the real issue is: does the bundling of a MS-produced software package extend MS's monopoly into other areas, specifically on the server end? In WMP's, case, it certainly does. If it was capable of viewing QuickTime streaming video, or Real Video, I wouldn't care. Neither Real nor Apple makes a dime off the players; it's the server software (or, in Apple's case, the Pro version of the software) that makes the money.
Note: the above is based on the last information I have, which indicates that WMP can play.AVI,.WMP, and not.ram,.ra, or.MOV files. I try not to keep up with what Microsoft thinks is important as far as file types unless they ask my opinion.
Actually, unified scrap in X (KDE, Gnome) is the single largest remaining obstacle to Linux as a Desktop OS. Without global cut-and-paste, there will never be a userbase.
tcsh:
set prompt = " ---- %M | %/ ---- \
myuser > "
displays a two line prompt:
---- Full.Host.NAME |/full/dir/loc ----
myuser >
it makes it a lot easier to use than a command prompt which expands and contracts with the directory location in it, and really helps when I shell into other boxes, to keep track of which box I'm currently talking to!
More to the point, I think, is the last sentence: "If you need ______, get the cube." The cube is a great piece of work, if you can figure out who would use one. I would have bought one if I had the spare money because of the cool factor, but for no other reason. If the cube had been the same price as the high end iMac, maybe $50-$100 cheaper, and been a bit more upgradable (maybe 1 short PCI slot), with a bigger HD than the highest-end iMac, it might have sold in that in-between slot. Even still, it would have been a tough sell.
Interstate commerce is covered under Article I, Section 8, clause 3, of the Constitution. The 14th Amendment primarly requires states to provide Due Process and Equal Protection under the Law to all citizens of those states, in accordance with the 4th, 5th, 8th, and 13th Amendments.
This touches on one of my overriding pet peeves. Most companies, and many people, forget that money-making is the reward for doing good business. Companies that strive to provide good customer service, and produce quality products, will make more money as a consequence than those who provide poor customer service and poor quality products (exception: Monpolies. A monopoly, by definition, can provide either high or low quality in either case, because there are no options for consumers).
Providing top-quality customer support will create more business for a company, and, therefore, they will make more money. Good support is not a money-losing proposition, and there isn't any reason why it shouldn't be free, for that reason.
By themselves, perhaps, nanotubes are not going to make computers faster. But if one can pack the current equivalent of 8 CPUs onto the space currently occupied by one, and run them SMP, or even (perhaps!) MMP, that would in fact be a speed increase in terms of end use.
What I think makes this even more exciting is the article I read via/. yesterday about a 1x1x1 cm glass cube holding 1TB of data. Add together the space of a current IDE drive (say, 8x10x21 cm, or 1680 cm^3/1680 TB) and a nanotube CPU running the equivalent of 8 CPUs as SMP, and all in the space of a current small desktop machine.
Have you submitted this to the Patent Office?
If it is an instance of prior art (and it certainly looks like it from this end, although I'm not a patent attorney), then it should be submitted and the patent revoked.
And a woman who has been raped (by definition, a lack of consent)?
Is she then required to consent to the baby? Now we're not talking a rape alone, but upwards of a million dollars to raise the child, and the time and potential lack of income the raped woman faces for the near-term, after the birth of the baby.
Even giving the baby up for adoption doesn't solve the problem of the lack of consent.
Next, the issue of a value difference between human and non-human life. Who are we to say that human life is more precious than fungal life? Or animal life? Or vegetable? That's speciesism of the highest order of magnitude: "we're more important because we're human."
Just because we can't prove that athlete's foot fungus doesn't have a moral system, and worship a deity (they may even be Christians, or Muslims, or Jews, or whatever for crying out loud... we just don't know it yet. Maybe in the bible of the athlete's foot fungus world, God created fungus in his own image, and the fungal version of Jesus of Nazereth is the Christ Colony of Tile #7) doesn't mean that we can determine, out of hand, that their lives are worth less than ours.
Restricting our ability to view certain web pages at a public library, or in a public school, is no more censorship than requiring a permit for parades, or declaring that the city council office building is a peaceable assembly-free zone. The goverment isn't restricting what we can see, only where we can see it, and that has been long settled as within the authority of the government to do.
If any of us are using a computer at a publicly funded institution, the state owns the resource. The state has a compelling interest in making it available for use to all state citizens, and part of that compelling interest involves not allowing users of the resource to:
Monoplize the resource
Make the resource unavailable to other citizens
Configure or set the resource in a way that prevents the legitmate use of the resource
We can bitch about it until we're blue in the face, but filters on public computers is a non-issue. If the government started filtering our personal computers, we should rightly be upset. The state owns computers in public schools. If we don't like that fact, we should send our children to private schools, and fight to lower property taxes on our property to avoid paying for computers in public schools. If you're a student in a public school, demand that your parents remove you from a school that filters. Other than that, our choices are pretty minimal.
Remember: the government owns the computer, and the network, in public schools and most public libraries. They have a compelling interest to protect it. They do not have any right, perogative, or authority, to restrict access on your personal computer.
Let's make sure we're fighting the right battles.
Oh, and for any arguments that speak to tax money being spent on it, lay them straight down. The Supreme Court many years ago ruled that merely being a taxpayer has no bearing on these kinds of issues, and that individual taxpayers cannot make demands on individual spending decisions. Why? Because that's what we elect our officials in government for. If we don't like how tax money is being spent, we must lobby, write, attend town halls and council meetings, and vote the morons, who are mismanaging out money, out.
Problem: even Big Bang reeks of infinite recursion. The same rules about not being able to say anyting, or really caring (in a scientific sense) much, about what happens before the Big Bang also apply to the "rubber sheets floating in 5th dimensional space-time-whatever" theory.
Occam's razor only applies if you have two theories with identical features, save their complexity. The big collision theory has explanatory power that the Big Bang does not have (such as, explaining the lack of monopoles), and therefore trying to shave it off ala Occam is premature.
Slashdot Mirror
... charges that Microsoft buys (bought?) shelf space in stores to prevent competing products from even being visible?
So, in other words, this is really nothing new. This is Microsoft being Microsoft; now, does anyone seriously doubt that this is an organization bent on doing whatever it takes, including things that are not just immoral, or violate common sense, but possibly things that are criminal, in order to ... what, make money?
Has American society fallen so far into the pit of jade and cynicism that we shrug off the Enrons and Microsofts of the world as merely maladjusted money-seeking sycophants, instead of being so violently outraged that we take every chance to make them wish they'd never even started a business? What the hell are we doing?
Every person who reads about Microsoft's behavior should be so sickened that they vomit. This is not normal. This is not acceptable. This is not "business as usual" in the United States. Just because it seems to happen a lot does not make it something we should tolerate, not even for a millisecond, and not for any reason.
Which is funny, because VMware has exactly this capability.
It needs some refinement, and sometimes it's slow when it picks back up again, but it generally works in my experience. It is obviously not only possible, but implementable using current technology
I find it personally and professionally offensive that you would mention Star Trek and Windows in the same sentence.
In your opinion, the tv series (franchise?) Star Trek, then, has a monopoly on television viewing? Is the content of Star Trek insecure? Are there issues with the Klingons beaming into local tv stations to catalog the tape library and report back to His High Holiness Chancellor Gates about what shows are available in each one?
You don't have to like Star Trek. I don't like Baby-lon Vee. But it doesn't even come close, as a television show, to being in the same category as Windows does in the software world. Not by a long shot.
Maybe its me, but something seems kinda strange with this situation. What he seems to be saying is "Reverse engineering is ok, but don't reverse engineer my code."
He didn't say that reverse engineering is okay only if he does it; he's saying that you can't use his reverse engineering, verbatim, without giving him credit for it. In fact, there wouldn't be any issue here at all if the ATA code monkeys in this case reverse engineered it themselves. They didn't do that, apparently.
It seems to me that the new owner of the product has grounds to recover any licensing or sales money they paid to Microtest, and recover damages for Microtest's having failed to fully disclose what the product's origins and licensing status were at the time of the sale.
That, of course, assumes that Microtest didn't actually tell them that the boxes were covered under the GPL ...
The real problem of Microsoft's bundling, IMO, is not what software the vendor chooses to offer for free instead of a fee. Rather, it's what happens when the Monopoly Desktop OS vendor includes the Media Player which only plays a small selection of media formats (.wmp, for example). If every desktop OS ships with Windows Media Player, there's no incentive for server side Real, QuickTime, or just about any other format of streaming content. Microsoft doesn't necessarily extend its desktop monopoly with WMP; instead, it creates a new monopoly in streaming server software.
This is where the real issue is: does the bundling of a MS-produced software package extend MS's monopoly into other areas, specifically on the server end? In WMP's, case, it certainly does. If it was capable of viewing QuickTime streaming video, or Real Video, I wouldn't care. Neither Real nor Apple makes a dime off the players; it's the server software (or, in Apple's case, the Pro version of the software) that makes the money.
Note: the above is based on the last information I have, which indicates that WMP can play .AVI, .WMP, and not .ram, .ra, or .MOV files. I try not to keep up with what Microsoft thinks is important as far as file types unless they ask my opinion.
Actually, unified scrap in X (KDE, Gnome) is the single largest remaining obstacle to Linux as a Desktop OS. Without global cut-and-paste, there will never be a userbase.
Let's make this readable
set prompt = " ---- %M | %/ ---- \
myuser > "
which displays:
---- Full.Host.NAME | /full/dir/path ----
myuser >
tcsh: set prompt = " ---- %M | %/ ---- \ myuser > " displays a two line prompt: ---- Full.Host.NAME | /full/dir/loc ----
myuser >
it makes it a lot easier to use than a command prompt which expands and contracts with the directory location in it, and really helps when I shell into other boxes, to keep track of which box I'm currently talking to!
More to the point, I think, is the last sentence: "If you need ______, get the cube." The cube is a great piece of work, if you can figure out who would use one. I would have bought one if I had the spare money because of the cool factor, but for no other reason. If the cube had been the same price as the high end iMac, maybe $50-$100 cheaper, and been a bit more upgradable (maybe 1 short PCI slot), with a bigger HD than the highest-end iMac, it might have sold in that in-between slot. Even still, it would have been a tough sell.
FYI:
Interstate commerce is covered under Article I, Section 8, clause 3, of the Constitution. The 14th Amendment primarly requires states to provide Due Process and Equal Protection under the Law to all citizens of those states, in accordance with the 4th, 5th, 8th, and 13th Amendments.
This touches on one of my overriding pet peeves. Most companies, and many people, forget that money-making is the reward for doing good business. Companies that strive to provide good customer service, and produce quality products, will make more money as a consequence than those who provide poor customer service and poor quality products (exception: Monpolies. A monopoly, by definition, can provide either high or low quality in either case, because there are no options for consumers).
Providing top-quality customer support will create more business for a company, and, therefore, they will make more money. Good support is not a money-losing proposition, and there isn't any reason why it shouldn't be free, for that reason.
By themselves, perhaps, nanotubes are not going to make computers faster. But if one can pack the current equivalent of 8 CPUs onto the space currently occupied by one, and run them SMP, or even (perhaps!) MMP, that would in fact be a speed increase in terms of end use.
What I think makes this even more exciting is the article I read via /. yesterday about a 1x1x1 cm glass cube holding 1TB of data. Add together the space of a current IDE drive (say, 8x10x21 cm, or 1680 cm^3/1680 TB) and a nanotube CPU running the equivalent of 8 CPUs as SMP, and all in the space of a current small desktop machine.
Have you submitted this to the Patent Office? If it is an instance of prior art (and it certainly looks like it from this end, although I'm not a patent attorney), then it should be submitted and the patent revoked.
And a woman who has been raped (by definition, a lack of consent)?
Is she then required to consent to the baby? Now we're not talking a rape alone, but upwards of a million dollars to raise the child, and the time and potential lack of income the raped woman faces for the near-term, after the birth of the baby.
Even giving the baby up for adoption doesn't solve the problem of the lack of consent.
Next, the issue of a value difference between human and non-human life. Who are we to say that human life is more precious than fungal life? Or animal life? Or vegetable? That's speciesism of the highest order of magnitude: "we're more important because we're human."
Just because we can't prove that athlete's foot fungus doesn't have a moral system, and worship a deity (they may even be Christians, or Muslims, or Jews, or whatever for crying out loud ... we just don't know it yet. Maybe in the bible of the athlete's foot fungus world, God created fungus in his own image, and the fungal version of Jesus of Nazereth is the Christ Colony of Tile #7) doesn't mean that we can determine, out of hand, that their lives are worth less than ours.
Restricting our ability to view certain web pages at a public library, or in a public school, is no more censorship than requiring a permit for parades, or declaring that the city council office building is a peaceable assembly-free zone. The goverment isn't restricting what we can see, only where we can see it, and that has been long settled as within the authority of the government to do.
The "censorship" issue is the red herring here.
If any of us are using a computer at a publicly funded institution, the state owns the resource. The state has a compelling interest in making it available for use to all state citizens, and part of that compelling interest involves not allowing users of the resource to:
We can bitch about it until we're blue in the face, but filters on public computers is a non-issue. If the government started filtering our personal computers, we should rightly be upset. The state owns computers in public schools. If we don't like that fact, we should send our children to private schools, and fight to lower property taxes on our property to avoid paying for computers in public schools. If you're a student in a public school, demand that your parents remove you from a school that filters. Other than that, our choices are pretty minimal.
Remember: the government owns the computer, and the network, in public schools and most public libraries. They have a compelling interest to protect it. They do not have any right, perogative, or authority, to restrict access on your personal computer.
Let's make sure we're fighting the right battles.
Oh, and for any arguments that speak to tax money being spent on it, lay them straight down. The Supreme Court many years ago ruled that merely being a taxpayer has no bearing on these kinds of issues, and that individual taxpayers cannot make demands on individual spending decisions. Why? Because that's what we elect our officials in government for. If we don't like how tax money is being spent, we must lobby, write, attend town halls and council meetings, and vote the morons, who are mismanaging out money, out.
Lying next to a scantily clad, sunburning Ms. Portman, with a Palm VIIx, Terminal, ircing from the comfort of the beaches of Europe.
Damnit, was I drooling the whole time?
Heresy, probably not.
But, since I'm a bit of a troll afficinado, I'll bite:
Ms. Portman could very well be the sexiest woman who's ever lived, too-thin or not. A damn sight fine, and edible to boot.
Whoops, did I say that outloud?
Problem: even Big Bang reeks of infinite recursion. The same rules about not being able to say anyting, or really caring (in a scientific sense) much, about what happens before the Big Bang also apply to the "rubber sheets floating in 5th dimensional space-time-whatever" theory. Occam's razor only applies if you have two theories with identical features, save their complexity. The big collision theory has explanatory power that the Big Bang does not have (such as, explaining the lack of monopoles), and therefore trying to shave it off ala Occam is premature.