Well, it may be "ambitious," but when you're talking healthcare, which can quite literally mean matters of life and death, maybe it's also necessary.
Just think: with 99.5 percent uptime, for every 100 days that an application is running, it's down for half a day. That's a half-day outage at least three times a year. Is that acceptable for a critical healthcare system?
What if the iPhone isn't also an MP3 player? What if it's just a phone? Here's my thoughts: my phone sucks. The interface is horrible.
Sounds like a great idea to me. FWIW, though, I think Apple has some competition in that market. For my money, BlackBerry is doing it right -- not strictly a phone, but a predictable, highly usable UI that has remained consistent throughout multiple generations of the hardware. RIM has many loyal users (my last two phones were BlackBerrys, myself) and not just because you get your e-mail on the go. It's still not as pretty as what Apple could come up with, though.
"Consumers are the final arbiters because they can vote with their wallets," Usher added. "This is as it should be in any well-functioning market, and we believe the improvements in Windows Vista play to this strength."
Usher is failing to take into account one important point, however. In some cases, consumers can't vote with their wallets. In cases where there exists a monopoly, for example.
when people are actually forced to honour copyright they might actually start thinking about copyright, and that can only drive people not to want copyright.
I fail to see the logic there. I've done a lot of thinking about copyright and I want it.
Copyright is very important. The GPL, among other things, depends on copyright.
Corporations lobbying the government to have grossly exaggerated term lengths for copyrights, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.
I rent stuff that's really great --Ken Burns stuff (jazz..), The Sopranos (isn't organized crime SO MUCH MORE interesting than the disorganized variety?), HBO and Showtime specials..... Other than that, TV is a wasteland. .... But mostly, TV's PURE drek. DREK!! Makes kids stupid, and adults, even stupider. DON'T DO IT!! Resist your corporate overlords!!
Considering that you don't have a TV, it sounds like you're not really qualified to judge whether TV is good or not. A lot of people would say that we're in a virtual renaissance of TV drama today. Some of the most-rented DVDs are not Hollywood movies, but TV shows. I'm sure people can list lots more great shows than what you mention here. But hey, if you wanna sound like your grandfather, go right on ahead... pound that cane on the floor.
So, it is medically effective. But it is banned from being a valid medical treatment.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that shaneh0 concedes your point. You have yet to answer his question, however: Why is that a problem? There exist alternatives that are readily available to medical practitioners that are affordable and equally if not more effective. Why are you so obsessed with heroin? Maybe you should really save this argument for your social worker.
And it makes me mad that in the 21st century I have to resort to using a text based editor to design Graphical UIs. How dumb. Yes there are some WYSIWYG editors but they NEVER get you to where you want to go. Any good web application (of which I guess there 3 or 4) had the HTML written by hand.
Um... you do realize that there's good reason for this? Namely that HTML is not now, has never been, and never will be designed to be "one size fits all"? Any given HTML page is meant to be rendered in the way that's most appropriate to the client that loads it. Graphic designers bang and bang their heads against the wall trying to make the same page look identical on every browser. To a certain extent, browser bugs make this difficult... but that the same time they are trying to shoehorn HTML into doing something it was never meant to do, namely provide a WYSIWYG user interface experience.
What's really stupid, though, is when designers give up and write a Web application that's only functional on Internet Explorer in Windows. At that point, it really seems like they should have written it as a desktop app using.Net. They would have picked up additional capabilities that aren't possible with HTML-based apps, plus they could have avoided some design headaches by laying out their UI using Visual Studio and related tools.
Sun does two things well. Rock solid hardware and excellent service.
Not to mention the fact that, although it is true that Sun is gradually open sourcing all of its software, most of what Sun makes it enterprise software. What company is really going to use Sun's RFID software to run a warehouse floor, or use Sun's identity management software to manage authentication and access control for an entire enterprise, and not get a support contract from Sun? Open sourcing this type of stuff probably doesn't impact Sun's sales negatively one iota. Open sourcing Java may be riskier, but I'm curious to see how it really pans out.
In return, lets see, they get.. your source code, YAST, AppArmor, mindshare, and info on your business.
Heh. Nice troll. You really think Microsoft had to pay $380 million for Suse's source code? If that's what happened then Ron Hovsepian must be have been doubled over laughing all week.
On the other hand, is this Sun's way of wiping their hands clean of everything besides their only Java moneymaker (J2EE)?
Actually, J2ME is a primary Java moneymaker for Sun, also. I work for an enterprise IT weekly (InfoWorld) and my colleagues and I always end up rolling our eyes whenever we are invited for a big press chat at Sun only to be regaled for half an hour with stories about running games on Java-powered cell phones. We could care less about games, but it's obviously a big issue for Sun and something they want their shareholders to know about.
I don't know how many good-sized projects I've seen[1] (e.g., division-wide CRM) that get originally proposed for.NET implementation, only to founder when someone points to the hardware requirements and says "I have to buy $50K worth of new Windows servers? Why can't we run it on the Oracle server? That thing's huge and cost us a mint."
Sounds like you should have gone with SQL Server instead of Oracle. You'd have saved a mint. Then you could have hung Microsoft Dynamics off your SQL Server database and saved yourself the trouble of writing your own CRM app.
P.S. No, this is not what I really think... but seriously, SQL Server is a very competitive database these days and who in their right mind would write their own CRM software in 2006?
...and as I'm writing this it's still 6:57pm in the State of California. Your polling place is probably right down the street from your home, and you've still got an hour to get over there. (Tough luck if you're not on the West Coast.)
I've heard you can type much faster in Word2007. If that's not a reason to upgrade I don't know what is.
Heh! From time to time I relate this story, and someday I hope somebody can produce an original copy of the ad, but...
In a very early issue of PC Magazine -- or PC World, or one of the others -- circa 1984, I saw an ad for this amazing new word processing program, called WordPerfect. The selling point of the program was that it, unlike other word processors of the time, was able to keep up with a 90wpm typist. Apparently the other word processors of the day couldn't keep pace with that speed. As people who've been around a while know, WordPerfect gained a strong foothold in law offices that persists to some degree to this day. I don't doubt that the emphasis on touch typing had something to do with that.
IBM also has one of the largest patent portfolios ever assembled. Right now, somewhere in Redmond, a Microsoft programmer is infringing on IBM patents.
The difference is that if IBM and Microsoft come to loggerheads over patents, they meet in a closed room, sign a patent cross-licensing agreement, and away they both go, free to continue to make money. There are probably numerous such agreements in effect between Microsoft and IBM right now. That doesn't really work with a community-based open source project, however, because who do you sign the agreement with?
In this case, Microsoft picked something it could understand -- a commercial entity -- and signed an agreement with that. The agreement applies to Novell's customers and other people that enter into agreements with Novell (e.g. OpenSuse.org contributors) but nobody else. Microsoft is characterizing it as a revolutionary move, but I think a lot of people are not so sure about that.
Not only what the parent said, but everybody always wants to talk about which candidate to vote for. If you don't feel confident voting for any of the candidates on your ballot -- and you really don't think you're affiliated with any party, including the Green party, Libertarians, what-have-you -- then you can always leave those boxes blank, if your conscience just won't let you pick one.
Nonetheless, there are lots of other things on the ballot you might be interested in voting for. Are you really, really, really against cigarette taxes? You might want to show up at the polls. Do you think that bond measures are just borrowing money we don't have, and you don't want to float any more bonds for your local schools? You might have an opinion on that, and the information on the ballot is going to be pretty straightforward. Do you think immigrants are great for America and all the crying about how they steal our jobs is hogwash? You might want to see what kind of things your legislators have proposed in the name of tightening up the borders. People have opinions, and the elections give you the opportunity to vote not just on candidates but on specific bills and measures that affect your local community.
My gut feeling, of course, is that the statement "I don't pay any attention to politics" is a total cop-out. Do you not watch the news? Do you have absolutely no idea about what's going on in the world and no opinions about it, either? I have a hard time buying this. There's a certain little voice in my gut that thinks that "I don't pay attention to politics" is tantamount to saying "I am a lazy couch potato with no sense of ethics or civic duty, who's totally happy with the status quo because I'm too self centered to ever be involved with my community or care what happens to it."
I think it's really questionable. The link you reference says the service provider has to have "no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, the infringing activity." If I'm a content site and I'm advertising-supported, the value of my ad impressions goes up relative to the quality of my content. So the ability to offer infringing content would confer financial benefit to me, no?
Actually, I'm not saying that is definitely the case, and IANAL, but I can definitely see smart lawyers having a field day with these issues.
As much as the Slashdot community hates it, the DMCA is utterly clear on the topic. If a copyright owner can't even be bothered to send a DMCA-takedown notice about their content, then no harm, no foul.
Whoah! Where did you get this wrong-headed, crackpot idea? As much as the Slashdot community may hate it -- yourself included, apparently -- the DMCA is not the be-all, end-all of copyright law. It's an addendum to a lot of law that was already on the books.
Some points you apparently fail to grasp:
Copyright protection is automatic. As soon as you put down the pen, what you wrote is copyrighted.
Notification of copyright is not necessary, though it does confer additional benefits. Your copyright can be protected even if you never put a circle-C on the work.
You don't even have to publish a work for it to be copyrighted.
Even if an author has no idea what a work is "worth" -- even if he was giving it away for free -- he can still recover statuatory damages from a copyright infringer. That is, the civil courts have a mechanism to punish copyright infringers even when it's impossible to calculate the actual damages or money lost by the author.
Willfully violating copyright for financial gain -- meaning you knew something was copyrighted (see the first three points, above) and you distributed it anyway, and you're a business, so presumably everything you do is to make money -- is a criminal offense. If you do it more than once -- say you're a Web site and you do it hundreds of times -- each offense after the first can land you ten years in prison.
Based on the laws on the books as they stand, YouTube is in a very precarious position. Probably the only thing that's kept the hammer from coming down already (or the guillotine) is that the owners of the videos on YouTube are trying to figure out if they can make more money by killing the goose or keeping it around.
Mine was that the USPS delivers packages, also, but UPS still manages to compete.
I wonder whether UPS would even be interested in getting into the letter-post business if that opportunity was available to it. UPS's expertise is more in large scale shipping logistics.
Government "competing" with industry is not a free market and there is no "market darwinism" to play out. Of the two competitors here, one can confiscate any amount of money they choose from everyone to pay for their service. It doesn't matter if anyone wants it, they need no voluntary "customers." They take whatever money they want and provide whatever service they want.
That's maybe true in a totalitarian state, but less so in real-world US of A.
Take the Post Office, for example. It's technically a government service, but for years it has been operated pretty much as a business, and a profitable one. And it's a business that competes with other, private businesses -- take, for example, UPS.
What's more, the USPS has for several years signed business agreements with FedEx, UPS's main competitor. If that's not the government messing around with the free market, I don't know what is.
Full disclosure: I think UPS is a great company. I own stock in UPS. And, quite frankly, that stock is doing just fine.
My point? While what you say is superficially true, as with most issues, the world doesn't really work as black-and-white as all that. Yes, there are opportunities for businesses to compete in areas that local municipalities operate in. Some private businesses even compete directly with branches of the federal government.
Is UPS happy about the USPS's relationships with FedEx? Oh hell no. They complained til they were blue in the face. But at the end of the day, they keep their business running, they seize their opportunities, and that's life.
You want municipal wireless? Fine, but understand that means you'll ONLY get whatever products and quality of service your town's government is capable of.
The current trend is for municipalities to take bids from private companies. It's the same way a lot of government services operate... you don't think there's an office at city hall where a guy interviews ironworkers for jobs building bridges, do you? I have faith that at least some of the companies that are interested in building out and servicing municipal wireless networks have the wherewithal to do a good job.
Regulations, licensing, taxations, embargoes, tariffs, duties and other "pro-market" structures are "legal" uses of force by the State for one thing and one thing only: to take care of the businesses friendly with the State.
Yeah. Because businesses like paying license fees, taxes, tariffs, and duties, and having their goods embargoed.
TIME OUT! Hi, Slashdot. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that YOU, too, Slashdotters, can vote against the American two-party system in the upcoming election. If you believe in social Darwinism and unrestricted free-market economics, like our Libertarian friend here, feel free to seek out Libertarian candidates for local office on your ballots this coming Tuesday, November 7. If you have differing views, there are a variety of other, third-party options to choose from as well. However you choose to vote this Tuesday, November 7, just remember to register in time to participate in the democratic system, because that's the only thing that can make our government really work. We now return you to our regularly scheduled myopic GeekPolitik...
Seriously, with the number of interviews required to get a job at Google down to a mere 5.1, I wonder which is easier: Getting a job at Google or just starting your own company and waiting for them to buy you out?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it may be "ambitious," but when you're talking healthcare, which can quite literally mean matters of life and death, maybe it's also necessary.
Just think: with 99.5 percent uptime, for every 100 days that an application is running, it's down for half a day. That's a half-day outage at least three times a year. Is that acceptable for a critical healthcare system?
Sounds like a great idea to me. FWIW, though, I think Apple has some competition in that market. For my money, BlackBerry is doing it right -- not strictly a phone, but a predictable, highly usable UI that has remained consistent throughout multiple generations of the hardware. RIM has many loyal users (my last two phones were BlackBerrys, myself) and not just because you get your e-mail on the go. It's still not as pretty as what Apple could come up with, though.
Usher is failing to take into account one important point, however. In some cases, consumers can't vote with their wallets. In cases where there exists a monopoly, for example.
I fail to see the logic there. I've done a lot of thinking about copyright and I want it.
Copyright is very important. The GPL, among other things, depends on copyright.
Corporations lobbying the government to have grossly exaggerated term lengths for copyrights, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.
Considering that you don't have a TV, it sounds like you're not really qualified to judge whether TV is good or not. A lot of people would say that we're in a virtual renaissance of TV drama today. Some of the most-rented DVDs are not Hollywood movies, but TV shows. I'm sure people can list lots more great shows than what you mention here. But hey, if you wanna sound like your grandfather, go right on ahead... pound that cane on the floor.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that shaneh0 concedes your point. You have yet to answer his question, however: Why is that a problem? There exist alternatives that are readily available to medical practitioners that are affordable and equally if not more effective. Why are you so obsessed with heroin? Maybe you should really save this argument for your social worker.
Um... you do realize that there's good reason for this? Namely that HTML is not now, has never been, and never will be designed to be "one size fits all"? Any given HTML page is meant to be rendered in the way that's most appropriate to the client that loads it. Graphic designers bang and bang their heads against the wall trying to make the same page look identical on every browser. To a certain extent, browser bugs make this difficult... but that the same time they are trying to shoehorn HTML into doing something it was never meant to do, namely provide a WYSIWYG user interface experience.
What's really stupid, though, is when designers give up and write a Web application that's only functional on Internet Explorer in Windows. At that point, it really seems like they should have written it as a desktop app using .Net. They would have picked up additional capabilities that aren't possible with HTML-based apps, plus they could have avoided some design headaches by laying out their UI using Visual Studio and related tools.
Not to mention the fact that, although it is true that Sun is gradually open sourcing all of its software, most of what Sun makes it enterprise software. What company is really going to use Sun's RFID software to run a warehouse floor, or use Sun's identity management software to manage authentication and access control for an entire enterprise, and not get a support contract from Sun? Open sourcing this type of stuff probably doesn't impact Sun's sales negatively one iota. Open sourcing Java may be riskier, but I'm curious to see how it really pans out.
You're serious??
Yes, it is called C-SPAN here.
Heh. Nice troll. You really think Microsoft had to pay $380 million for Suse's source code? If that's what happened then Ron Hovsepian must be have been doubled over laughing all week.
P.S. Yes folks, both YaST and AppArmor are GPL.
Actually, J2ME is a primary Java moneymaker for Sun, also. I work for an enterprise IT weekly (InfoWorld) and my colleagues and I always end up rolling our eyes whenever we are invited for a big press chat at Sun only to be regaled for half an hour with stories about running games on Java-powered cell phones. We could care less about games, but it's obviously a big issue for Sun and something they want their shareholders to know about.
Maybe you want to re-read the post you're replying to. The fact that BSD is more permissive is precisely the reason why Sun opted for the GPL.
Sounds like you should have gone with SQL Server instead of Oracle. You'd have saved a mint. Then you could have hung Microsoft Dynamics off your SQL Server database and saved yourself the trouble of writing your own CRM app.
P.S. No, this is not what I really think ... but seriously, SQL Server is a very competitive database these days and who in their right mind would write their own CRM software in 2006?
...and as I'm writing this it's still 6:57pm in the State of California. Your polling place is probably right down the street from your home, and you've still got an hour to get over there. (Tough luck if you're not on the West Coast.)
Heh! From time to time I relate this story, and someday I hope somebody can produce an original copy of the ad, but...
In a very early issue of PC Magazine -- or PC World, or one of the others -- circa 1984, I saw an ad for this amazing new word processing program, called WordPerfect. The selling point of the program was that it, unlike other word processors of the time, was able to keep up with a 90wpm typist. Apparently the other word processors of the day couldn't keep pace with that speed. As people who've been around a while know, WordPerfect gained a strong foothold in law offices that persists to some degree to this day. I don't doubt that the emphasis on touch typing had something to do with that.
The difference is that if IBM and Microsoft come to loggerheads over patents, they meet in a closed room, sign a patent cross-licensing agreement, and away they both go, free to continue to make money. There are probably numerous such agreements in effect between Microsoft and IBM right now. That doesn't really work with a community-based open source project, however, because who do you sign the agreement with?
In this case, Microsoft picked something it could understand -- a commercial entity -- and signed an agreement with that. The agreement applies to Novell's customers and other people that enter into agreements with Novell (e.g. OpenSuse.org contributors) but nobody else. Microsoft is characterizing it as a revolutionary move, but I think a lot of people are not so sure about that.
Not only what the parent said, but everybody always wants to talk about which candidate to vote for. If you don't feel confident voting for any of the candidates on your ballot -- and you really don't think you're affiliated with any party, including the Green party, Libertarians, what-have-you -- then you can always leave those boxes blank, if your conscience just won't let you pick one.
Nonetheless, there are lots of other things on the ballot you might be interested in voting for. Are you really, really, really against cigarette taxes? You might want to show up at the polls. Do you think that bond measures are just borrowing money we don't have, and you don't want to float any more bonds for your local schools? You might have an opinion on that, and the information on the ballot is going to be pretty straightforward. Do you think immigrants are great for America and all the crying about how they steal our jobs is hogwash? You might want to see what kind of things your legislators have proposed in the name of tightening up the borders. People have opinions, and the elections give you the opportunity to vote not just on candidates but on specific bills and measures that affect your local community.
My gut feeling, of course, is that the statement "I don't pay any attention to politics" is a total cop-out. Do you not watch the news? Do you have absolutely no idea about what's going on in the world and no opinions about it, either? I have a hard time buying this. There's a certain little voice in my gut that thinks that "I don't pay attention to politics" is tantamount to saying "I am a lazy couch potato with no sense of ethics or civic duty, who's totally happy with the status quo because I'm too self centered to ever be involved with my community or care what happens to it."
I think it's really questionable. The link you reference says the service provider has to have "no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, the infringing activity." If I'm a content site and I'm advertising-supported, the value of my ad impressions goes up relative to the quality of my content. So the ability to offer infringing content would confer financial benefit to me, no?
Actually, I'm not saying that is definitely the case, and IANAL, but I can definitely see smart lawyers having a field day with these issues.
Whoah! Where did you get this wrong-headed, crackpot idea? As much as the Slashdot community may hate it -- yourself included, apparently -- the DMCA is not the be-all, end-all of copyright law. It's an addendum to a lot of law that was already on the books.
Some points you apparently fail to grasp:
Based on the laws on the books as they stand, YouTube is in a very precarious position. Probably the only thing that's kept the hammer from coming down already (or the guillotine) is that the owners of the videos on YouTube are trying to figure out if they can make more money by killing the goose or keeping it around.
Your point?
Mine was that the USPS delivers packages, also, but UPS still manages to compete.
I wonder whether UPS would even be interested in getting into the letter-post business if that opportunity was available to it. UPS's expertise is more in large scale shipping logistics.
That's maybe true in a totalitarian state, but less so in real-world US of A.
Take the Post Office, for example. It's technically a government service, but for years it has been operated pretty much as a business, and a profitable one. And it's a business that competes with other, private businesses -- take, for example, UPS.
What's more, the USPS has for several years signed business agreements with FedEx, UPS's main competitor. If that's not the government messing around with the free market, I don't know what is.
Full disclosure: I think UPS is a great company. I own stock in UPS. And, quite frankly, that stock is doing just fine.
My point? While what you say is superficially true, as with most issues, the world doesn't really work as black-and-white as all that. Yes, there are opportunities for businesses to compete in areas that local municipalities operate in. Some private businesses even compete directly with branches of the federal government.
Is UPS happy about the USPS's relationships with FedEx? Oh hell no. They complained til they were blue in the face. But at the end of the day, they keep their business running, they seize their opportunities, and that's life.
The current trend is for municipalities to take bids from private companies. It's the same way a lot of government services operate ... you don't think there's an office at city hall where a guy interviews ironworkers for jobs building bridges, do you? I have faith that at least some of the companies that are interested in building out and servicing municipal wireless networks have the wherewithal to do a good job.
Yeah. Because businesses like paying license fees, taxes, tariffs, and duties, and having their goods embargoed.
TIME OUT! Hi, Slashdot. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that YOU, too, Slashdotters, can vote against the American two-party system in the upcoming election. If you believe in social Darwinism and unrestricted free-market economics, like our Libertarian friend here, feel free to seek out Libertarian candidates for local office on your ballots this coming Tuesday, November 7. If you have differing views, there are a variety of other, third-party options to choose from as well. However you choose to vote this Tuesday, November 7, just remember to register in time to participate in the democratic system, because that's the only thing that can make our government really work. We now return you to our regularly scheduled myopic GeekPolitik...
Seriously, with the number of interviews required to get a job at Google down to a mere 5.1, I wonder which is easier: Getting a job at Google or just starting your own company and waiting for them to buy you out?