I know a lot of people here (including myself) would like to see the breakup of Microsoft a'la the AT&T breakup. However, it appears to me that a breakup is not warranted given the limited scope of the Findings of Fact.
Given the Findings, do you believe that Judge Jackson may be leaning towards some other form of relief, such as perhaps banning Microsoft from engaging in coersive activities in order to squash "middleware" and otherwise limit activities by it's competitors which may not be in Microsoft's own interests?
No text; just three D to A converters controlling the horizontal, vertical and intensity of an oscilloscope. Quite elegant, really.
I once dismantled an Atari Asteroids machine to see how it worked (I wish I kept it, damn it!), and it did more or less the same thing. The only thing it had that I suspect the Digital PDP didn't was specialized circuitry which controlled the horizontal and vertical using a simple "stepping" state machine. That is, you would program the start point of the electron gun as (x,y) in two registers, and a counter "stepper" in two registers. A counter would increment, and as it hit the values in the stepper registers, it would either increment or decrement the (x,y) value, changing the value of the electron gun. It was a fairly primitive mechanism for doing line drawings on the display, offloading that task from the 6502 processor that powered the machine. Quite clever, really.
Of course this is all from memory; I've long lost the schematics and the video game motherboard. Makes me long for the days when I used to do embedded code...
Communism isn't socialism, by the way--communism is the eventual state that evolves (at least according to Marx) after mankind has evolved past the petty need for self-regulatory bodies offered by governments and economic processes. Think of it as Star Trek without Star Fleet. Even the so-called "communist" states of yesteryear didn't make believe that they were really communist--just on the road to communism.
Of course it's all hogwash--and as far as I can figure only the folks who are being hornswaggled by the psudo-Luddite "primitivist" junk of the last century still buys it. But that's an aside.
I hate to pop the tiny little bubble you're living in, but Shell Oil (refered to in the article you provided a pointer to) is Dutch, not American. It's clear the writer of that little piece of propaganda was trying to target the "big bad" Americans in that article by focusing on Cheveron--because of all the oil companies in Nigeria, only Cheveron is American.
Or did you think that all Multinationals are American?
If you start digging into international affairs and all the "America-bashing" that goes on at that level, you'll find three things. (1) Most people criticize the United States for things that are also being done to a greater extent by multinationals owned and operated out of other countries. (I'll note that US law is more strict on the behavior of multinationals operating out of the US than other countries are.) (2) People do this because they are either ignorant of things like the fact that the Royal Dutch Shell Company is called that because it's Dutch, not because of some anacronistic Madison Avenue type deciding that the name was cool. (3) People tend to target the United States because as we have the largest economy in the world, we're more likely to simply step in and write a large check. (The amount of money the US gives out in foreign aid grants is larger tha many countries's total GNP.)
Best to dig into the propaganda and find out what's really going on, rather than speak out of ignorance and contribute to the problem.
Ask yourself, had oil not been found in Nigeria, do you think the Nigerian Dictatorships that have repressed its people would have never formed, or would have turned power over to a Democracy? Absolutely not. Further, before criticising the Dutch for their "evil company" (oh, excuse me, that should be "American," as we are the root of all evil in the world today), note that multinationals are generally operated locally by local citizens--in fact, most multinationals simply act as holding companies for companies incorporated in the nation where they do business. So when the Nigerian dictator put to death a half-dozen folks for criticizing Shell, was it an American who was responsible for ordering their deaths? No; it was a Nigerian. That is, it was Nigerians killing Nigerians over money. The fact that the money came from a Dutch company doesn't make it the fault of the Americans. (Oh, excuse me, Dutch--but it can't be the Dutch because it's the Americans who are evil; the Dutch only make good chocolate and dance around in funny wooden shoes. Oh, hey; it's all confusing--let's just pretend Shell is an American company. No, wait--let's blaim Cheveron! That's a good answer: we'll blaim Cheveron even though Ken Saro-wiwa was criticizing Shell; Ken Saro-wiwa must have made a typo and must have really been criticizing Cheveron, not Shell, as Cheveron is American and Shell is Dutch. That's it!)
Does it bother you how stupid all of this "Evil American multinational corporations" bullshit is?
What's the point? I'm evil, because I'm a native american--no, wait, I'm one of the "repressed people" so I mustn't be evil--in fact, why I'm not out on the front lines picketing Cheveron because some activists were put to death for the actions of Shell in Nigeria is beyond me.
I'm confused. Am I a good guy or a bad guy? And am I supposed to be friendly to Dutch people, or should I be throwing my Dutch chocolate out the window in protest? And should I be...
Ah, the hell with it. I'm going to read some cartoons at http://www.userfriendly.org instead.
Is it possible that Linux, the Open Source Movement, and the Internet could change a country? Yes, though China is fighting it tooth and nail. As the cost of transfering information across international boundaries decreases, it is inevitable that the people across those boundaries will come to undestand eachother, and come to appreciate the traits of those on the other side.
For example, it really supprises me the number of comments here about how "wow, the Chinese seem like really nice people, dispite their government." That sort of stupid, obvious comment can only come from those who have never dealt with a Chinese person before. My parents, on the other hand, have traveled to China, and my father is extremely fascinated by the people living there. The people my parents met were extremely courteous, friendly, and just downright nice people. Note that my parents were granted permission to leave their tour group and go, unescorted, through various parts of China, including areas which are traditionally "closed" to foreigners--so they weren't just seeing some sort of propaganda. (Also note that my parents saw some of the worst living conditions they have ever experienced. My parents are builders, and I know my father would jump at the opportunity to go to China and teach the people who live in the smaller villages there how to build more modern housing than the mud huts covered with corrogated aluminum they're in now.)
Knowledge is power--and if that knowledge permits an entire country improve their lot in life, I'm all for it.
I hate to disappoint you, but it turns out that there are a number of examples of a communist-like environment thriving in the world today. None of them are behind the iron curtain, of course--the best is the communist-style interrelationships between various Israeli farming cooperatives who (at least as of the 80's when I studied such things) were the best example of the cooperative spirit promoted by the theory of the Communist "ideal" state theorized by Marx et.al.
Of course these cooperatives exist within the context of a capitalist state, and so interface to the outside world using capitalism. But then, the same could be said about the self-proclaimed Communist states: they didn't exist in a vaccuum, but traded with other nations in a competitive capitalist world market.
The problem with people who would criticize capitalism is that they don't understand the nature of valuation or the nature of risk: if you don't understand risk valuation, it's easy to see a capitalist world as filled with fat cats who do nothing but live off the hard work of others. (Don't worry--Marx made the same mistake, and he was a bright social philosopher, so if you don't see how risk valuation works, you're in good company.)
As to your comment that capitalism and communism are economic models, while democracy and dictatorships are different political models, well there are those who believe that the two are intrinsically linked. That is, with a few notable exceptions such as Singapore, capitalism cannot exist unless it exists in a democracy, while "communism" (actually socialism, as none of the self-proclaimed communist states were really communist economic models) cannot exist unless it exists in a dictatorship. And there are those, including some very notable folks in Washington DC, who believe that capitalism necessarly leads to democracy--meaning that for a dictatorship to survive, it must eventually force socialism on it's people. Personally I don't buy it: the freedom to buy or to work as you choose doesn't necessarly translate into the freedom to choose the politicians who oversee the system. But that's just me...
Because the alternative to Communism in Russia so far has been a sort of "mafia"-style "capitalism" without any safeguards which make capitalism work. Essentially nothing has changed in Russia: the same arrogant bastards who used to run everything for the good of the Motherland and skim the profits to line their own pockets have simply borrowed from the Chicago 20's mobster playbook and stopped giving a shit about the Motherland.
When faced between evil and really really nasty evil, it's not hard to see why folks are choosing evil...
All I know is that I was working at JPL in Building 310 on the fourth floor when a report hit the press that JPL was "hiding UFOs in order to investigate their advanced technologies, including propulsion and computer systems in building 310."
Funny; building 310 was not a hanger but a 4 story office building on the JPL campus. But did anyone tell the UFO folks that? Yep--but it was part of the coverup and conspiracy.
Ah, well; feel free to ignore me as I'm obviously sent by the Government Conspiracy in order to plant Disinformation!
by the FDA before that piece of equipment may be placed in production. The code review process that is used for medical equipment makes the code review process used by almost any other company look like a peacemeal process.
The long and the short of it is that it seems to me that using open source techniques on medical equipment won't significantly improve the quality of the code--but it may reduce the amount of time it takes before the code quality demanded by an FDA review can be met. Further, code reuse of pieces of code that has already been verified as correct by the FDA may help reduce the development time. And that would be a Great Thing...
In theory it would be nice if e-mail was marked "spam" in order to simplify deleting it. In practice, this won't work.
Why? Companies who do direct mailing go to great lengths to make sure that you open their (physical) mail--including stooping to sleazy practices such as making the envelop look like an IRS refund check or a bill. (One morgage company's offers to refinance my home comes in envelops which look a hell of a lot like the envelop used by California to send out refunds. The only difference is that the return address in the upper corner is not an address in Sacramento.)
So why should companies mark e-mail differently to simplify deletion? Instead, they'll ignore the bit (even if the law forces them to), and try to figure out ways to make the e-mail message look like it was sent by a personal friend.
I'll also note the reason why "receive pays" direct advertising, such as junk faxes, are fair game for regulation is because by forcing you to pay for the advertising you receive (you do pay for your bandwidth, by the way), is because forcing the listener to listen to speech is a violation of the listener's freedom of speech. That is, our notion of "freedom of speech" includes the freedom *not* to participate in speech. And forcing you to pay for unwanted messages (unlike direct mail where sender pays) is forcing you to give up your freedom not to participate by forcing you to flip the bill.
From when I attended the WinNT conference when NT was first introduced a half-dozen years ago, I believe that question was asked. And as I recall, the GUI is not part of the "NT Kernel", which the Kernel engineers considered the "real" operating system, but Marketing refered to as the "core kernel."
What made NT so cool way back then was that as a Kernel, it borrowed a lot from Mach--you could create new OS API "modules" which could run concurrently which provided different API services. Thus, you could run a Win16 and Win32 app side-by-side; each would load their own API module which would provide the similar (but not identical) APIs. They also planned to provide things like POSIX support in a similar manner.
At the time (though I understand they changed this), the GUI actually operated similarly to X: the graphics rendering engine operated in it's own process, and an application using the Win32 GDI calls would connect to the graphics process and send/receive messages to it. In theory, you could replace the graphics rendering "server" with a different server. (In fact, when Bill Gates offered Apple the NT kernel so that Apple and Microsoft could build a new version of the operating system--just before Apple bought NeXT--that's exactly what Bill Gates planned: to build an Apple Macintosh "service" with the NT kernel underneath.)
In practice, as far as I know none of these "service" APIs were ever exposed. So while in theory the graphics rendering engine for NT is not part of the kernel, and in theory you can run NT sans graphical interface, in practice you can't do that because Microsoft hasn't provided the proper tools to do so.
By the way, I *have* crashed the graphics server on NT without taking the entire operating system down. Wierd--being able to connect to NT from a TCP/IP port, but having the screen totally frozen...
Huh? I don't see Sony mentioned anywhere in Revelations. Oh, sure, Sun is mentioned in the Bible, but I think they're talking about the orb in the sky and not the thing on my desk. (Okay, I don't have a Sun on my desk. Wishful thinking.) And I don't think there is one mention of Computers anywhere in either the old or new testiments.
I am assuming you are talking about the Christian Bible and not the Linux Bible. Right?
Um, perhaps the Chinese in China are cheap because they're *poor*? We're not talking about a per-capita income which permits the average joe off the street to buy a 500MHz Pentium III system.
Besides, I wouldn't necessarly call it "leaching"--after all, I write some open source stuff, and I'd be flattered if someone my code and tinkered with it. You don't produce open source and worry about "leaching"...
The links provided on your site are interesting, but many of the essays linked there seem to miss the central point of the findings of fact issued against Microsoft.
The vast majority of the essays miss two facts. First, it's hard to write cross-platform software without some form of "middleware" or some form of library which simplifies cross-platform development. Microsoft's actual "crime", if there is one here, is to suppress any innovation in the "middleware" market in order to prevent Windows from being reduced to a "commody" status. If you read the findings, you'll find several examples of Microsoft's attempts to reduce or destroy the "middleware" market through use of their Windows monopoly. (That is, it's not the fact that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly which is at issue. It's how Microsoft used that monopoly to coerce other companies to dismantle any software product which threatens Microsoft's Windows monopoly which is at issue here.)
The second thing that most of the essays missed is the fact that while we may have a choice, our choice is dictated by the high cost of writing portable software--a barrier which Microsoft did everything they could to artifically preserve. And a barrier that has no real technical reason to exist, as many people here can tell you.
By missing these two essential points, most of the essays you have linked to, while sounding all nice and warm and patriotic, so completely miss the point that they are largely irrelevant.
Of course I won't get into the fact that some of the essays you have linked to have apparently missed the boat from a macro-economic standpoint, but I digress...
Prior damage may have been done, but future damage--have you noticed the flood of press releases from various computer manufacturers who are going to start bundling other operating systems with their product?
So long as the DOJ is looking at Microsoft under a microscope, I'll bet we'll see more manufacturers feeling free to put BeOS, OS/2 Warp or Linux on their boxes instead of Windows.
And while previous middleware manufacturers may have gotten hosed, my bet is that future players who know how to provide cross-platform portability APIs will feel a hell of a lot more free to act...
because it's not useful. If we can create a TCP/IP stack on a chip and the chip costs about $5, then adding that chip will push the cost of the toaster up $20, just for the chip. The connector and the rest would probably cost as much as it does to produce the entire toaster.
So let's see: I can pay $30 for a toaster that I push the lever down on, or I can pay $80 for one which allows me to pop the toast down from an IP port from my Linux box. Of course the add-on to grab the toast and put it into my toaster is extra, as is the device that takes the toast and runs it down the garbage disposal. (Necessary as if I'm too damned lazy to get up and make my own toast, I'm probably too lazy to chew it and swallow.)
The only place where this sort of connectivity makes sense is in devices where someone is in charge of checking on it's status. Something like a cola vending machine, for example. Then, instead of having to make regular trips to a site to check on the cola machine's status, you can check over a wire. Same may go for larger office coffee machines, I suppose...
At least in the United States, most banks require you to carry homeowners insurance. And yes, this is covered by my policy. Basically, unless they can demonstrate that I caused the fire myself on purpose to collect the insurance, then I'm covered in case of fire. (Well, I do have a 15% deductable in the event of total loss, but that's another topic.)
OTOH, the few times I've collected on my insurance in instances when it was someone else's fault (such as when I was hit while driving), I know the insurance company landed on that other person like a ton of bricks...
Act, law; *shrug*--lawyers pretty much split the difference between what they call it.
At any rate, the hundred year old law still applies today, albeit in a modified form. (The Sherman act has been modified several times since it's first passage in 1890 for use against the railroads.)
The fact of the matter is I don't necessarly want Microsoft to go down in flames. But had you actually read the finding, you'd find that the principle thing Microsoft has been accused of is doing everything in their power to prevent the development of cross-platform "middleware" APIs which reduce the cost to port software from one operating system to another operating system. That's the core of the finding, by the way--a point which many commentators on the Internet have apparently missed.
Had Microsoft not acted in the manner they did (by doing everything they could to suppress or destroying any technology which would reduce the cost to port software from one platform to another), who knows where we would be today.
Also, let me note that had you actually read the finding of fact, you'd realize that Microsoft is being taken to task on a very narrow fundamental point. The Judge apparently had no problem with Microsoft developing a monopoly; only with using that monopoly to destroy innovation in the cross-platform middleware market. It strikes me as highly unlikely that this very narrow finding could possibly affect free enterprise, innovative solutions, or true genius--unless you believe spending millions to develop anti-competitive interlocking relationships in order to destroy Netscape and Sun's Java technology, as well as wiping out Intel's IAL group and their NSP software is "free enterprise", "innovative" or "true genius."
Of course the administration had nothing to do with this lawsuit or with the litigation troubles facing Microsoft, which has had some sort of run-in with the Feds since the Regan administration.
Further, voting this administration out of office won't change the way the Feds apply the Sherman Anti-trust act (a ~100 year old law) to the computer industry.
Frankly, we could have had Ross Perot in office, and Microsoft would still have had it's problems...
That's the thing: when you start removing messages, this implies that you have somehow stamped your editorial "okey-dokey" on the rest of them. So if one slanderous message manages to get through, Yahoo is going to find itself a co-defendant in some really icky lawsuit.
Best to hide behind the "we don't regulate the content; we're simply in the business of providing the wire" defense.
Do you realize that most SOFTWARE LICENSES prevent you from suing the software company for anything more than the price of the software if they wrote buggy code???? This isn't just a "M$" practice, it's practically universal in the software industry.
Yes it is. In fact, it's even part of the GNU GPL and the BSD licenses. (Gasp!)
So what?
People have to be responsible for what they do. Period.
I see you don't write software for a living.
Okay, here's the deal. There are two ways software can be written. The first technique is what is commonly used for non-fault-tolerant processing, customarly for things where failure to operate does not risk someone's life. For example, perhaps your Word document got munched when you saved it to a floppy; while it's annoying, it's not life threatening.
It's because systems can fail that you back up your work and make multiple copies of important documents. (You DO back-up, don't you? You DO make multiple copies of your work, don't you?) Even if the software was perfect, and the hardware was perfect, and there were absolutely no bugs whatsoever in the system, such systems can fail and lose work anyways due to things like ionizing background radiation blowing holes in the contents of the RAM on your system.
For mission-critical systems where fault-tolerance is important (such as for medical equipment), techniques do exist to make the software resistant to problems. For example, buggy microcode in a floppy controller wouldn't cause data loss in a fault-tolerant system because the higher level floppy drivers assume the floppy controller is faulty, and verifies that the data has been written correctly.
Fault tolerant systems operate on the assumption that subsystems are faulty, and so take extra steps to make sure that an operation actually succeeds, or at least rolls back the operation if a subsystem fails.
The reason why most non-mission-critical systems aren't written in a fault-tolerant manner is because frankly, the cost of creating a fault-tolerant system is very high. Further, using a fault-tolerant system is like using the air-bags in your car: unless you follow the instructions and also wear the seat-belt (or, in the case of fault-tolerant systems, buy the redundant hard disk and the backup tape drive and make daily backups), it's just a useless and expensive option that one day will blow up in your face.
To use an analogy, car manufacturers have known for years how to create a car so durable, so safe, so secure to the passengers of the car, that a passenger can pretty much walk away from a 120+MPH collision with a brick wall. This technology has been perfected over years of racing cars in dangerous conditions at very high speeds.
Yet you won't see most of these technologies migrate over to the family car. Why? Because they're expensive and extremely inconvenient. Fat chance Joe Bloe will ever use a 5-point restraint harness, and asking him to wear a helmet and a fire-retardant racing jacket to go to work is probably too much to hope for.
Sure, people have to be responsible for what they do. But to presume that software should always be bug-free, or else the programmers should be sued into oblivion--that comment is about as ignorant of the issues as they come.
I dunno; "will always be" seems too strong. After all, RMS may have a stroke, lose part of his brain, and rewrite the GPL to permit proprietary developers to use GPL'd code...
True. For instance, I've released a bunch of code under a modified BSD license where I essentially said "by using this code you promise not to sue me if the code crashes, and you promise to preserve my copyright notice in the source kit." There are folks out there who basically think GPL is way to restrictive, and who wish their code to be completely free--including being free to those who wish to develop proprietary systems using the source code.
I know the feeling the first time I put something out there under GPL. But really, most of the community is very nice about not splitting off a chunck of your work and making it their own, even if you do license your stuff under a weakened variety of BSD. And the handfull of folks who would walk off with your code and make it their own without even a passing nod to you are generally the same folks who would have done the same thing even if you put your source kit out there under very tight control anyways...
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lot of people here (including myself) would like to see the breakup of Microsoft a'la the AT&T breakup. However, it appears to me that a breakup is not warranted given the limited scope of the Findings of Fact.
Given the Findings, do you believe that Judge Jackson may be leaning towards some other form of relief, such as perhaps banning Microsoft from engaging in coersive activities in order to squash "middleware" and otherwise limit activities by it's competitors which may not be in Microsoft's own interests?
No text; just three D to A converters controlling the horizontal, vertical and intensity of an oscilloscope. Quite elegant, really.
I once dismantled an Atari Asteroids machine to see how it worked (I wish I kept it, damn it!), and it did more or less the same thing. The only thing it had that I suspect the Digital PDP didn't was specialized circuitry which controlled the horizontal and vertical using a simple "stepping" state machine. That is, you would program the start point of the electron gun as (x,y) in two registers, and a counter "stepper" in two registers. A counter would increment, and as it hit the values in the stepper registers, it would either increment or decrement the (x,y) value, changing the value of the electron gun. It was a fairly primitive mechanism for doing line drawings on the display, offloading that task from the 6502 processor that powered the machine. Quite clever, really.
Of course this is all from memory; I've long lost the schematics and the video game motherboard. Makes me long for the days when I used to do embedded code...
Communism isn't socialism, by the way--communism is the eventual state that evolves (at least according to Marx) after mankind has evolved past the petty need for self-regulatory bodies offered by governments and economic processes. Think of it as Star Trek without Star Fleet. Even the so-called "communist" states of yesteryear didn't make believe that they were really communist--just on the road to communism.
Of course it's all hogwash--and as far as I can figure only the folks who are being hornswaggled by the psudo-Luddite "primitivist" junk of the last century still buys it. But that's an aside.
I hate to pop the tiny little bubble you're living in, but Shell Oil (refered to in the article you provided a pointer to) is Dutch, not American. It's clear the writer of that little piece of propaganda was trying to target the "big bad" Americans in that article by focusing on Cheveron--because of all the oil companies in Nigeria, only Cheveron is American.
Or did you think that all Multinationals are American?
If you start digging into international affairs and all the "America-bashing" that goes on at that level, you'll find three things. (1) Most people criticize the United States for things that are also being done to a greater extent by multinationals owned and operated out of other countries. (I'll note that US law is more strict on the behavior of multinationals operating out of the US than other countries are.) (2) People do this because they are either ignorant of things like the fact that the Royal Dutch Shell Company is called that because it's Dutch, not because of some anacronistic Madison Avenue type deciding that the name was cool. (3) People tend to target the United States because as we have the largest economy in the world, we're more likely to simply step in and write a large check. (The amount of money the US gives out in foreign aid grants is larger tha many countries's total GNP.)
Best to dig into the propaganda and find out what's really going on, rather than speak out of ignorance and contribute to the problem.
Ask yourself, had oil not been found in Nigeria, do you think the Nigerian Dictatorships that have repressed its people would have never formed, or would have turned power over to a Democracy? Absolutely not. Further, before criticising the Dutch for their "evil company" (oh, excuse me, that should be "American," as we are the root of all evil in the world today), note that multinationals are generally operated locally by local citizens--in fact, most multinationals simply act as holding companies for companies incorporated in the nation where they do business. So when the Nigerian dictator put to death a half-dozen folks for criticizing Shell, was it an American who was responsible for ordering their deaths? No; it was a Nigerian. That is, it was Nigerians killing Nigerians over money. The fact that the money came from a Dutch company doesn't make it the fault of the Americans. (Oh, excuse me, Dutch--but it can't be the Dutch because it's the Americans who are evil; the Dutch only make good chocolate and dance around in funny wooden shoes. Oh, hey; it's all confusing--let's just pretend Shell is an American company. No, wait--let's blaim Cheveron! That's a good answer: we'll blaim Cheveron even though Ken Saro-wiwa was criticizing Shell; Ken Saro-wiwa must have made a typo and must have really been criticizing Cheveron, not Shell, as Cheveron is American and Shell is Dutch. That's it!)
Does it bother you how stupid all of this "Evil American multinational corporations" bullshit is?
What's the point? I'm evil, because I'm a native american--no, wait, I'm one of the "repressed people" so I mustn't be evil--in fact, why I'm not out on the front lines picketing Cheveron because some activists were put to death for the actions of Shell in Nigeria is beyond me.
I'm confused. Am I a good guy or a bad guy? And am I supposed to be friendly to Dutch people, or should I be throwing my Dutch chocolate out the window in protest? And should I be...
Ah, the hell with it. I'm going to read some cartoons at http://www.userfriendly.org instead.
Is it possible that Linux, the Open Source Movement, and the Internet could change a country?
Yes, though China is fighting it tooth and nail. As the cost of transfering information across international boundaries decreases, it is inevitable that the people across those boundaries will come to undestand eachother, and come to appreciate the traits of those on the other side.
For example, it really supprises me the number of comments here about how "wow, the Chinese seem like really nice people, dispite their government." That sort of stupid, obvious comment can only come from those who have never dealt with a Chinese person before. My parents, on the other hand, have traveled to China, and my father is extremely fascinated by the people living there. The people my parents met were extremely courteous, friendly, and just downright nice people. Note that my parents were granted permission to leave their tour group and go, unescorted, through various parts of China, including areas which are traditionally "closed" to foreigners--so they weren't just seeing some sort of propaganda. (Also note that my parents saw some of the worst living conditions they have ever experienced. My parents are builders, and I know my father would jump at the opportunity to go to China and teach the people who live in the smaller villages there how to build more modern housing than the mud huts covered with corrogated aluminum they're in now.)
Knowledge is power--and if that knowledge permits an entire country improve their lot in life, I'm all for it.
I hate to disappoint you, but it turns out that there are a number of examples of a communist-like environment thriving in the world today. None of them are behind the iron curtain, of course--the best is the communist-style interrelationships between various Israeli farming cooperatives who (at least as of the 80's when I studied such things) were the best example of the cooperative spirit promoted by the theory of the Communist "ideal" state theorized by Marx et.al.
Of course these cooperatives exist within the context of a capitalist state, and so interface to the outside world using capitalism. But then, the same could be said about the self-proclaimed Communist states: they didn't exist in a vaccuum, but traded with other nations in a competitive capitalist world market.
The problem with people who would criticize capitalism is that they don't understand the nature of valuation or the nature of risk: if you don't understand risk valuation, it's easy to see a capitalist world as filled with fat cats who do nothing but live off the hard work of others. (Don't worry--Marx made the same mistake, and he was a bright social philosopher, so if you don't see how risk valuation works, you're in good company.)
As to your comment that capitalism and communism are economic models, while democracy and dictatorships are different political models, well there are those who believe that the two are intrinsically linked. That is, with a few notable exceptions such as Singapore, capitalism cannot exist unless it exists in a democracy, while "communism" (actually socialism, as none of the self-proclaimed communist states were really communist economic models) cannot exist unless it exists in a dictatorship. And there are those, including some very notable folks in Washington DC, who believe that capitalism necessarly leads to democracy--meaning that for a dictatorship to survive, it must eventually force socialism on it's people. Personally I don't buy it: the freedom to buy or to work as you choose doesn't necessarly translate into the freedom to choose the politicians who oversee the system. But that's just me...
I've rambled enough.
Because the alternative to Communism in Russia so far has been a sort of "mafia"-style "capitalism" without any safeguards which make capitalism work. Essentially nothing has changed in Russia: the same arrogant bastards who used to run everything for the good of the Motherland and skim the profits to line their own pockets have simply borrowed from the Chicago 20's mobster playbook and stopped giving a shit about the Motherland.
When faced between evil and really really nasty evil, it's not hard to see why folks are choosing evil...
While your point may or may not have any merit, the "F" actually stands for "Food." As in Food and Drug Administration.
So I suppose while the Feds may or may not be trustworthy, I wouldn't go around denouncing "Food" quite so quickly...
All I know is that I was working at JPL in Building 310 on the fourth floor when a report hit the press that JPL was "hiding UFOs in order to investigate their advanced technologies, including propulsion and computer systems in building 310."
Funny; building 310 was not a hanger but a 4 story office building on the JPL campus. But did anyone tell the UFO folks that? Yep--but it was part of the coverup and conspiracy.
Ah, well; feel free to ignore me as I'm obviously sent by the Government Conspiracy in order to plant Disinformation!
by the FDA before that piece of equipment may be placed in production. The code review process that is used for medical equipment makes the code review process used by almost any other company look like a peacemeal process.
The long and the short of it is that it seems to me that using open source techniques on medical equipment won't significantly improve the quality of the code--but it may reduce the amount of time it takes before the code quality demanded by an FDA review can be met. Further, code reuse of pieces of code that has already been verified as correct by the FDA may help reduce the development time. And that would be a Great Thing...
In theory it would be nice if e-mail was marked "spam" in order to simplify deleting it. In practice, this won't work.
Why? Companies who do direct mailing go to great lengths to make sure that you open their (physical) mail--including stooping to sleazy practices such as making the envelop look like an IRS refund check or a bill. (One morgage company's offers to refinance my home comes in envelops which look a hell of a lot like the envelop used by California to send out refunds. The only difference is that the return address in the upper corner is not an address in Sacramento.)
So why should companies mark e-mail differently to simplify deletion? Instead, they'll ignore the bit (even if the law forces them to), and try to figure out ways to make the e-mail message look like it was sent by a personal friend.
I'll also note the reason why "receive pays" direct advertising, such as junk faxes, are fair game for regulation is because by forcing you to pay for the advertising you receive (you do pay for your bandwidth, by the way), is because forcing the listener to listen to speech is a violation of the listener's freedom of speech. That is, our notion of "freedom of speech" includes the freedom *not* to participate in speech. And forcing you to pay for unwanted messages (unlike direct mail where sender pays) is forcing you to give up your freedom not to participate by forcing you to flip the bill.
From when I attended the WinNT conference when NT was first introduced a half-dozen years ago, I believe that question was asked. And as I recall, the GUI is not part of the "NT Kernel", which the Kernel engineers considered the "real" operating system, but Marketing refered to as the "core kernel."
What made NT so cool way back then was that as a Kernel, it borrowed a lot from Mach--you could create new OS API "modules" which could run concurrently which provided different API services. Thus, you could run a Win16 and Win32 app side-by-side; each would load their own API module which would provide the similar (but not identical) APIs. They also planned to provide things like POSIX support in a similar manner.
At the time (though I understand they changed this), the GUI actually operated similarly to X: the graphics rendering engine operated in it's own process, and an application using the Win32 GDI calls would connect to the graphics process and send/receive messages to it. In theory, you could replace the graphics rendering "server" with a different server. (In fact, when Bill Gates offered Apple the NT kernel so that Apple and Microsoft could build a new version of the operating system--just before Apple bought NeXT--that's exactly what Bill Gates planned: to build an Apple Macintosh "service" with the NT kernel underneath.)
In practice, as far as I know none of these "service" APIs were ever exposed. So while in theory the graphics rendering engine for NT is not part of the kernel, and in theory you can run NT sans graphical interface, in practice you can't do that because Microsoft hasn't provided the proper tools to do so.
By the way, I *have* crashed the graphics server on NT without taking the entire operating system down. Wierd--being able to connect to NT from a TCP/IP port, but having the screen totally frozen...
Huh? I don't see Sony mentioned anywhere in Revelations. Oh, sure, Sun is mentioned in the Bible, but I think they're talking about the orb in the sky and not the thing on my desk. (Okay, I don't have a Sun on my desk. Wishful thinking.) And I don't think there is one mention of Computers anywhere in either the old or new testiments.
I am assuming you are talking about the Christian Bible and not the Linux Bible. Right?
Um, perhaps the Chinese in China are cheap because they're *poor*? We're not talking about a per-capita income which permits the average joe off the street to buy a 500MHz Pentium III system.
Besides, I wouldn't necessarly call it "leaching"--after all, I write some open source stuff, and I'd be flattered if someone my code and tinkered with it. You don't produce open source and worry about "leaching"...
The links provided on your site are interesting, but many of the essays linked there seem to miss the central point of the findings of fact issued against Microsoft.
The vast majority of the essays miss two facts. First, it's hard to write cross-platform software without some form of "middleware" or some form of library which simplifies cross-platform development. Microsoft's actual "crime", if there is one here, is to suppress any innovation in the "middleware" market in order to prevent Windows from being reduced to a "commody" status. If you read the findings, you'll find several examples of Microsoft's attempts to reduce or destroy the "middleware" market through use of their Windows monopoly. (That is, it's not the fact that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly which is at issue. It's how Microsoft used that monopoly to coerce other companies to dismantle any software product which threatens Microsoft's Windows monopoly which is at issue here.)
The second thing that most of the essays missed is the fact that while we may have a choice, our choice is dictated by the high cost of writing portable software--a barrier which Microsoft did everything they could to artifically preserve. And a barrier that has no real technical reason to exist, as many people here can tell you.
By missing these two essential points, most of the essays you have linked to, while sounding all nice and warm and patriotic, so completely miss the point that they are largely irrelevant.
Of course I won't get into the fact that some of the essays you have linked to have apparently missed the boat from a macro-economic standpoint, but I digress...
Prior damage may have been done, but future damage--have you noticed the flood of press releases from various computer manufacturers who are going to start bundling other operating systems with their product?
So long as the DOJ is looking at Microsoft under a microscope, I'll bet we'll see more manufacturers feeling free to put BeOS, OS/2 Warp or Linux on their boxes instead of Windows.
And while previous middleware manufacturers may have gotten hosed, my bet is that future players who know how to provide cross-platform portability APIs will feel a hell of a lot more free to act...
because it's not useful. If we can create a TCP/IP stack on a chip and the chip costs about $5, then adding that chip will push the cost of the toaster up $20, just for the chip. The connector and the rest would probably cost as much as it does to produce the entire toaster.
So let's see: I can pay $30 for a toaster that I push the lever down on, or I can pay $80 for one which allows me to pop the toast down from an IP port from my Linux box. Of course the add-on to grab the toast and put it into my toaster is extra, as is the device that takes the toast and runs it down the garbage disposal. (Necessary as if I'm too damned lazy to get up and make my own toast, I'm probably too lazy to chew it and swallow.)
The only place where this sort of connectivity makes sense is in devices where someone is in charge of checking on it's status. Something like a cola vending machine, for example. Then, instead of having to make regular trips to a site to check on the cola machine's status, you can check over a wire. Same may go for larger office coffee machines, I suppose...
*ping* Coffee is low *ping* Coffee is low *ping*
At least in the United States, most banks require you to carry homeowners insurance. And yes, this is covered by my policy. Basically, unless they can demonstrate that I caused the fire myself on purpose to collect the insurance, then I'm covered in case of fire. (Well, I do have a 15% deductable in the event of total loss, but that's another topic.)
OTOH, the few times I've collected on my insurance in instances when it was someone else's fault (such as when I was hit while driving), I know the insurance company landed on that other person like a ton of bricks...
Act, law; *shrug*--lawyers pretty much split the difference between what they call it.
At any rate, the hundred year old law still applies today, albeit in a modified form. (The Sherman act has been modified several times since it's first passage in 1890 for use against the railroads.)
The fact of the matter is I don't necessarly want Microsoft to go down in flames. But had you actually read the finding, you'd find that the principle thing Microsoft has been accused of is doing everything in their power to prevent the development of cross-platform "middleware" APIs which reduce the cost to port software from one operating system to another operating system. That's the core of the finding, by the way--a point which many commentators on the Internet have apparently missed.
Had Microsoft not acted in the manner they did (by doing everything they could to suppress or destroying any technology which would reduce the cost to port software from one platform to another), who knows where we would be today.
Also, let me note that had you actually read the finding of fact, you'd realize that Microsoft is being taken to task on a very narrow fundamental point. The Judge apparently had no problem with Microsoft developing a monopoly; only with using that monopoly to destroy innovation in the cross-platform middleware market. It strikes me as highly unlikely that this very narrow finding could possibly affect free enterprise, innovative solutions, or true genius--unless you believe spending millions to develop anti-competitive interlocking relationships in order to destroy Netscape and Sun's Java technology, as well as wiping out Intel's IAL group and their NSP software is "free enterprise", "innovative" or "true genius."
Of course the administration had nothing to do with this lawsuit or with the litigation troubles facing Microsoft, which has had some sort of run-in with the Feds since the Regan administration.
Further, voting this administration out of office won't change the way the Feds apply the Sherman Anti-trust act (a ~100 year old law) to the computer industry.
Frankly, we could have had Ross Perot in office, and Microsoft would still have had it's problems...
That's the thing: when you start removing messages, this implies that you have somehow stamped your editorial "okey-dokey" on the rest of them. So if one slanderous message manages to get through, Yahoo is going to find itself a co-defendant in some really icky lawsuit.
Best to hide behind the "we don't regulate the content; we're simply in the business of providing the wire" defense.
Yes it is. In fact, it's even part of the GNU GPL and the BSD licenses. (Gasp!)
So what?
I see you don't write software for a living.
Okay, here's the deal. There are two ways software can be written. The first technique is what is commonly used for non-fault-tolerant processing, customarly for things where failure to operate does not risk someone's life. For example, perhaps your Word document got munched when you saved it to a floppy; while it's annoying, it's not life threatening.
It's because systems can fail that you back up your work and make multiple copies of important documents. (You DO back-up, don't you? You DO make multiple copies of your work, don't you?)
Even if the software was perfect, and the hardware was perfect, and there were absolutely no bugs whatsoever in the system, such systems can fail and lose work anyways due to things like ionizing background radiation blowing holes in the contents of the RAM on your system.
For mission-critical systems where fault-tolerance is important (such as for medical equipment), techniques do exist to make the software resistant to problems. For example, buggy microcode in a floppy controller wouldn't cause data loss in a fault-tolerant system because the higher level floppy drivers assume the floppy controller is faulty, and verifies that the data has been written correctly.
Fault tolerant systems operate on the assumption that subsystems are faulty, and so take extra steps to make sure that an operation actually succeeds, or at least rolls back the operation if a subsystem fails.
The reason why most non-mission-critical systems aren't written in a fault-tolerant manner is because frankly, the cost of creating a fault-tolerant system is very high. Further, using a fault-tolerant system is like using the air-bags in your car: unless you follow the instructions and also wear the seat-belt (or, in the case of fault-tolerant systems, buy the redundant hard disk and the backup tape drive and make daily backups), it's just a useless and expensive option that one day will blow up in your face.
To use an analogy, car manufacturers have known for years how to create a car so durable, so safe, so secure to the passengers of the car, that a passenger can pretty much walk away from a 120+MPH collision with a brick wall. This technology has been perfected over years of racing cars in dangerous conditions at very high speeds.
Yet you won't see most of these technologies migrate over to the family car. Why? Because they're expensive and extremely inconvenient. Fat chance Joe Bloe will ever use a 5-point restraint harness, and asking him to wear a helmet and a fire-retardant racing jacket to go to work is probably too much to hope for.
Sure, people have to be responsible for what they do. But to presume that software should always be bug-free, or else the programmers should be sued into oblivion--that comment is about as ignorant of the issues as they come.
I dunno; "will always be" seems too strong. After all, RMS may have a stroke, lose part of his brain, and rewrite the GPL to permit proprietary developers to use GPL'd code...
Firstly, some things are *more* open than "GPL"
True. For instance, I've released a bunch of code under a modified BSD license where I essentially said "by using this code you promise not to sue me if the code crashes, and you promise to preserve my copyright notice in the source kit." There are folks out there who basically think GPL is way to restrictive, and who wish their code to be completely free--including being free to those who wish to develop proprietary systems using the source code.
I know the feeling the first time I put something out there under GPL. But really, most of the community is very nice about not splitting off a chunck of your work and making it their own, even if you do license your stuff under a weakened variety of BSD. And the handfull of folks who would walk off with your code and make it their own without even a passing nod to you are generally the same folks who would have done the same thing even if you put your source kit out there under very tight control anyways...