Interesting to see some of the strange bedfellows the anti-microsoft crew has... Senator Herb Khol (D) Wisconsin And Kenneth Starr both weigh in against the settlement... go figure.
"The 58-year-old electrical engineer, who lives in the Irish republic and intends -- for ``security and publicity-avoidance reasons'' -- to keep his identity a secret, has spent 23 years perfecting the Jasker Power System."
Ummm... Mr. Jasker... I think we let the cat out of the bag.
Is Microsoft painting itself into the same corner it has in other endevours? It looks like they are going to put UltimateTV function into the successor to the X-Box. Will that be enough to get X-box owner's to upgrade, or did they make X-Box too good to begin with? Throw in that the new features would likely have some sort of subscription fee, and would you upgrade?
The biggest barrier to the success of Microsoft's new products has always been the success of their old products. Office 97 still hods 57% of the market share, because there is just no need to upgrade it for the majority of users.
Keep in mind that if you do this, you probably *still* have to pay for the credits as if you actually took the class! If you register as a full-time students, you may be able to take several tests up to the maximum credit load, so that can be a savings.
Also, the tests will cover course knowledge... you'll probably still want to review the institution's text for a particular course before taking the test, no matter how confident you fee.
"The giveaways would go to any school with at least 70 percent of its
children on subsidized school lunch programs, sources said."
AP: Washington.
The Bush Administration today acted to introduce legislation in the House of
Representatives to vastly restrict direct government subsidies of public
institutions. "The government is usurping the role of private,
religious charities to provide for the needy," said Bush. "This
legislation will return to the people of America the great privilege and solemn
responsibility of reaching out to their neighbors and loved ones. This is
the core of compassionate conservatism." The bill is expected to
breeze through the House. While conservatives applaud the bill, many
leading philanthropists expressed uncertainty of the private sectors ability to
pick up the slack. "Take school lunch subsidies, for example,"
suggested financier George Soros, "what private institution would pick up
such a program?" Others are less skeptical. "This is
simply great," said noted philanthropist, Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
"A great burden has clearly been lifted."
It seems like a lot of the harmful side effects come from using actinium-225, which self-decays, not necessarily waiting until it has accumulated in it's targeted host. I wonder if they could use boron instead, which is fairly inert, and a beam of neutrons to accomplish the same task.
Back in my college co-op days, I worked at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in Reactor Design. Down the hall they were doing brain tumor studies on rats treated with a technique called BNCT: Boron Neutron Capture Therapy. The theory was to inject a water soluble boron compound into the body. Water soluble molecules do not pass well through the "blood-brain barrier", therefore, will not easily pass into healthy nerve cells. They do, however, accumulate in cancer tissues. Boron is nice because it is fairly inert until it interacts with neutrons and breaks down into alpha particles and non-threatening elements. So the theory was that the Boron would accumulate in the tumors and they could then bombard the tumor with neutrons, producing an explosion of alpha radiation... no more tumor. I didn't work on this project, and I'm not sure what became of it.... I think this technique may be used in other countries.
I think the nice thing about the current technique is the ability to target specific proteins. I wonder if a boron/neutron might have an additional advantage - unlike actinium which would decay over time (like the oven on "warm", the boron approach would be more immediate. Think "broil".
So, does the FunLove virus get DMCA protection like the rest of the content on the DVD? If so, would it be illegal for the virus to install itself? What if an infected computer subsequently spreads the virus to others? Hmmm... I smell a rat...
All Microsoft has to do is develop encrypted "secure" document formats to protect their "customers" from piracy, and it will be illegal for any 3rd party to write compatible software. At this point, you will not only be renting software from Microsoft, you will be paing *ransom* to access *your own work* created with said software.
It seems that this is just another case of the "small" ISP not making it. The profitable ones get bought up, and the rest... well...
I've had great difficulty finding an independent ISP in Eugene, OR. The two best, pond.net and continet.com, have both been sold to EarthLink in the last 8 months. Qwest.net has gone MSN, except for Macintosh.
The following are all options, none of which are particularly linux-friendly: MSN, AOL, JUNO/NetZero, Earthlink. You can still get ppp by telling Qwest that you have a Macintosh... that's it; everybody else seems to have proprietary software. I think this is a big challenge for getting joe-user to try a linux desktop.
Are the days of the simple, no-strings-attached ppp account gone?
What we need is a corporate desktop distribution. One of the problems with existing commercial distributions is that they contain *too much* software. As an enthusiast, this is great, I've got a 2GB Mandrake installation and I like having 2000 packages to play with.
Corporate desktop needs are different. They need a few essential tools and not a lot more. They need a single desktop environment, spreadsheet, word processer, presentation, e-mail, robust terminal client, and a few other packages... It seems someone could have a great deal of success if they would make a corporate-focused distro and offer support for a limited but robust set of packages.
All Microsoft has to to in a future mandatory "upgrade" is introduce new file formats that contain a trivial form of encryption, in the name of security, and then Microsoft doesn't only own the tools that you use to work.... they own the work that you do with those tools. It would be illegal for any software but Microsoft's to read your work. Don't pay, they disable the software, and your work is worthless. How's that for a scenario?
So this is touch; we've had sound for a good while, and of course sight. Throw in aromatherapy and you've got the whole experience. I seem to recall that about 6 years ago the hot topic was the "3D Virtual Reality" interface, but nothing really came of that. Fundamentally, I don't think these technologies make the computer more productive as a work device - on the contrary, they tend to get in the way. Is there anybody out there that does productive computing that actually uses systems sounds beyond the basic "bell"?
Personally, I prefer fluid motion - I don't want an interface to get in the way. This doesn't mean that I don't think this technology could have an application in the computer as an entertainment device, but I'll believe it when I see it. For my 3D-sense-enabled experiences, I prefer going for a walk.
I think that both attitudes can exist... fear and kenship. Fundamentally, the Mindstorm folks understand the difference between "buzz" and "hype". Hype is self-promotion or the blind regurgitation thereof; Buzz is promotion that others freely give.
The hacker community was providing buzz... that's what sells 100,000 units when you had forecasted 12,000.
"They'll shut down your website," sounds a little toung-and-cheek to me. The real fear is more subtle - piss these people off and you kill the buzz.
So, to use a software analogy, Red Hat and Mandrake are performances of the work Linux. Well, does Mandrake really trumpet the fact that it?s Red Hat based? Not really anymore. Does Red Hat actively recognize Mandrake's contributions to popularizing linux? No. Do both distributions include proper credit to the authors of their content? Yes.
I think the OAL is more about song writers than performers. I do not believe that a performer could release a conventionally copyrighted song under the OAL. This would probably be a copyright violation because no royalty would be paid to the work's owner under the original copyright. On the other hand, if Willie Nelson had released "Crazy" under something like the OAL, then he would be associated with the work, not Patsy Cline.
Ultimately, though, songwriters make money on royalties. I don't see how they can do this under the OAL, so I don't think it has a chance for any group or artist that relies on album sales. For those that rely on performance revenue (like the Grateful Dead), the the license would make perfect sense, because it would promote distribution of the performance recordings and create new consumers. For example, I always thought the Grateful Dead were about a hippie drug culture until I downloaded and burned a concert for a fried and discovered that they were a really, really good performance band. I would have never discovered this if they had not given away the rights to record their concerts.
So, in the interest of spreading the love:-)> . (Beginners should try anything from '77 or '78. That's Gerry Garcia on lead guitar, BTW.)
It doesn't sound like having the protections built into the kernel would be enough... those protections would have to be approved by the Commerce Department.
The implications of this are staggering - it sounds like this bill may give the DoC the power to ban Linux unilaterally, without trial, at the recommendation of the RIAA.
You've got it wrong. Leasing costs more. Always. At the end of your lease, what do you have? $0. Nothing. At the end of a 60 month loan on that car, what would you have? A $5-9000 asset.... so the lease cost more.
That's why no one in there right mind should go for.NET as I understand it... you have to keep paying and paying and paying. If you stop, the application is gone; you've got no asset, and given the propriatary nature of data formats, the DMCA, etc., you might not even have the right to buy a third party viewer to see the work you did while you leased the software! Crazy.
The biggest Office XP competitor is Office 97. IT departments tend to take an all-or-none approach to upgrades, and the law of the convoy tends to win out - slowest ship.
That said, Office 2000 and XP seem to offer no real advantages/features what-so-ever over good old '97.
So, in the context of the article, I don't think Sun's competition is the current incarnation of Office or even with.NET... the competition is with Office 97. When there is a technical innovation or a IT shop just has to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, I think SO has to be a consideration. Hopefully the OS and total cost of ownership get considered at the same time.
As far as guessing where the market is going to be, well who the hell knows that? Besides, who wants to rent software? It's sort of like leasing a car - you do it because you want the latest status symbol - the guy who paid cash for the '88 civic gets from point A to B with the lowest cost of ownership. There's so status symbol with software - some works better than others, so you go with what works best, and there we're back to Office '97. If you own it, why change?
I don't think the RIAA is going through this trouble to insure the distribution of properties that they currently own. What I see right now throughout the "content producing industry" is intense interest in controlling the distribution mechanisms of all content - film, video, audio, print. Why? Because if they control the distribution then they control the production!
Remember back in the day when content and distribution were basically independent? Studios made movies, movie theaters distributed them. Recording companies made albums, record stores distributed them. You're an independent film producer? Independent artists didn't have the same access to distribution at large producers, but they had access. Well, that's all out the window.
AOL/Time-Warner and other giants are content and distribution, right to the wire that comes into your house. They're the cable company, the ISP, the censor, the news, they buy the policiticans... you get the picture.
Notice how many small ISP's are beign bought up by large ISP's and offering more homogonized and restrictive services? How long until the die-hard independents start facing industry-sponsored legal hardships for offering dangerous technology like shell accounts? How long until it is legally impossible to buy bandwidth from anybody but a media giant or they're interests?
To me, this is all part of the pattern. The big guys are content to fight it out with eachother, they just don't want to share it with anybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting link... mod up, please.
Interesting to see some of the strange bedfellows the anti-microsoft crew has... Senator Herb Khol (D) Wisconsin And Kenneth Starr both weigh in against the settlement... go figure.
"The 58-year-old electrical engineer, who lives in the Irish republic and intends -- for ``security and publicity-avoidance reasons'' -- to keep his identity a secret, has spent 23 years perfecting the Jasker Power System."
Ummm... Mr. Jasker... I think we let the cat out of the bag.
Is Microsoft painting itself into the same corner it has in other endevours? It looks like they are going to put UltimateTV function into the successor to the X-Box. Will that be enough to get X-box owner's to upgrade, or did they make X-Box too good to begin with? Throw in that the new features would likely have some sort of subscription fee, and would you upgrade?
The biggest barrier to the success of Microsoft's new products has always been the success of their old products. Office 97 still hods 57% of the market share, because there is just no need to upgrade it for the majority of users.
Keep in mind that if you do this, you probably *still* have to pay for the credits as if you actually took the class! If you register as a full-time students, you may be able to take several tests up to the maximum credit load, so that can be a savings.
Also, the tests will cover course knowledge... you'll probably still want to review the institution's text for a particular course before taking the test, no matter how confident you fee.
From the Wired article:
"The giveaways would go to any school with at least 70 percent of its children on subsidized school lunch programs, sources said."
AP: Washington.
The Bush Administration today acted to introduce legislation in the House of Representatives to vastly restrict direct government subsidies of public institutions. "The government is usurping the role of private, religious charities to provide for the needy," said Bush. "This legislation will return to the people of America the great privilege and solemn responsibility of reaching out to their neighbors and loved ones. This is the core of compassionate conservatism." The bill is expected to breeze through the House. While conservatives applaud the bill, many leading philanthropists expressed uncertainty of the private sectors ability to pick up the slack. "Take school lunch subsidies, for example," suggested financier George Soros, "what private institution would pick up such a program?" Others are less skeptical. "This is simply great," said noted philanthropist, Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "A great burden has clearly been lifted."
It seems like a lot of the harmful side effects come from using actinium-225, which self-decays, not necessarily waiting until it has accumulated in it's targeted host. I wonder if they could use boron instead, which is fairly inert, and a beam of neutrons to accomplish the same task.
Back in my college co-op days, I worked at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in Reactor Design. Down the hall they were doing brain tumor studies on rats treated with a technique called BNCT: Boron Neutron Capture Therapy. The theory was to inject a water soluble boron compound into the body. Water soluble molecules do not pass well through the "blood-brain barrier", therefore, will not easily pass into healthy nerve cells. They do, however, accumulate in cancer tissues. Boron is nice because it is fairly inert until it interacts with neutrons and breaks down into alpha particles and non-threatening elements. So the theory was that the Boron would accumulate in the tumors and they could then bombard the tumor with neutrons, producing an explosion of alpha radiation... no more tumor. I didn't work on this project, and I'm not sure what became of it.... I think this technique may be used in other countries.
I think the nice thing about the current technique is the ability to target specific proteins. I wonder if a boron/neutron might have an additional advantage - unlike actinium which would decay over time (like the oven on "warm", the boron approach would be more immediate. Think "broil".
So, does the FunLove virus get DMCA protection like the rest of the content on the DVD? If so, would it be illegal for the virus to install itself? What if an infected computer subsequently spreads the virus to others? Hmmm... I smell a rat...
Ahhh... so Linux and Windows on the same playing field... "Not Supported". I wonder which one is easier for to set up now...
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
All Microsoft has to do is develop encrypted "secure" document formats to protect their "customers" from piracy, and it will be illegal for any 3rd party to write compatible software. At this point, you will not only be renting software from Microsoft, you will be paing *ransom* to access *your own work* created with said software.
It seems that this is just another case of the "small" ISP not making it. The profitable ones get bought up, and the rest... well...
I've had great difficulty finding an independent ISP in Eugene, OR. The two best, pond.net and continet.com, have both been sold to EarthLink in the last 8 months. Qwest.net has gone MSN, except for Macintosh.
The following are all options, none of which are particularly linux-friendly: MSN, AOL, JUNO/NetZero, Earthlink. You can still get ppp by telling Qwest that you have a Macintosh... that's it; everybody else seems to have proprietary software. I think this is a big challenge for getting joe-user to try a linux desktop.
Are the days of the simple, no-strings-attached ppp account gone?
Corporate desktop needs are different. They need a few essential tools and not a lot more. They need a single desktop environment, spreadsheet, word processer, presentation, e-mail, robust terminal client, and a few other packages... It seems someone could have a great deal of success if they would make a corporate-focused distro and offer support for a limited but robust set of packages.
All Microsoft has to to in a future mandatory "upgrade" is introduce new file formats that contain a trivial form of encryption, in the name of security, and then Microsoft doesn't only own the tools that you use to work.... they own the work that you do with those tools. It would be illegal for any software but Microsoft's to read your work. Don't pay, they disable the software, and your work is worthless. How's that for a scenario?
So this is touch; we've had sound for a good while, and of course sight. Throw in aromatherapy and you've got the whole experience. I seem to recall that about 6 years ago the hot topic was the "3D Virtual Reality" interface, but nothing really came of that. Fundamentally, I don't think these technologies make the computer more productive as a work device - on the contrary, they tend to get in the way. Is there anybody out there that does productive computing that actually uses systems sounds beyond the basic "bell"?
Personally, I prefer fluid motion - I don't want an interface to get in the way. This doesn't mean that I don't think this technology could have an application in the computer as an entertainment device, but I'll believe it when I see it. For my 3D-sense-enabled experiences, I prefer going for a walk.
I think that both attitudes can exist... fear and kenship. Fundamentally, the Mindstorm folks understand the difference between "buzz" and "hype". Hype is self-promotion or the blind regurgitation thereof; Buzz is promotion that others freely give.
The hacker community was providing buzz... that's what sells 100,000 units when you had forecasted 12,000.
"They'll shut down your website," sounds a little toung-and-cheek to me. The real fear is more subtle - piss these people off and you kill the buzz.
So, to use a software analogy, Red Hat and Mandrake are performances of the work Linux. Well, does Mandrake really trumpet the fact that it?s Red Hat based? Not really anymore. Does Red Hat actively recognize Mandrake's contributions to popularizing linux? No. Do both distributions include proper credit to the authors of their content? Yes.
:-)> . (Beginners should try anything from '77 or '78. That's Gerry Garcia on lead guitar, BTW.)
I think the OAL is more about song writers than performers. I do not believe that a performer could release a conventionally copyrighted song under the OAL. This would probably be a copyright violation because no royalty would be paid to the work's owner under the original copyright. On the other hand, if Willie Nelson had released "Crazy" under something like the OAL, then he would be associated with the work, not Patsy Cline.
Ultimately, though, songwriters make money on royalties. I don't see how they can do this under the OAL, so I don't think it has a chance for any group or artist that relies on album sales. For those that rely on performance revenue (like the Grateful Dead), the the license would make perfect sense, because it would promote distribution of the performance recordings and create new consumers. For example, I always thought the Grateful Dead were about a hippie drug culture until I downloaded and burned a concert for a fried and discovered that they were a really, really good performance band. I would have never discovered this if they had not given away the rights to record their concerts.
So, in the interest of spreading the love
You left out one point, and it's critical:
It doesn't sound like having the protections built into the kernel would be enough... those protections would have to be approved by the Commerce Department.
The implications of this are staggering - it sounds like this bill may give the DoC the power to ban Linux unilaterally, without trial, at the recommendation of the RIAA.
You've got it wrong. Leasing costs more. Always. At the end of your lease, what do you have? $0. Nothing. At the end of a 60 month loan on that car, what would you have? A $5-9000 asset.... so the lease cost more.
.NET as I understand it... you have to keep paying and paying and paying. If you stop, the application is gone; you've got no asset, and given the propriatary nature of data formats, the DMCA, etc., you might not even have the right to buy a third party viewer to see the work you did while you leased the software! Crazy.
That's why no one in there right mind should go for
The biggest Office XP competitor is Office 97. IT departments tend to take an all-or-none approach to upgrades, and the law of the convoy tends to win out - slowest ship.
.NET... the competition is with Office 97. When there is a technical innovation or a IT shop just has to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, I think SO has to be a consideration. Hopefully the OS and total cost of ownership get considered at the same time.
That said, Office 2000 and XP seem to offer no real advantages/features what-so-ever over good old '97.
So, in the context of the article, I don't think Sun's competition is the current incarnation of Office or even with
As far as guessing where the market is going to be, well who the hell knows that? Besides, who wants to rent software? It's sort of like leasing a car - you do it because you want the latest status symbol - the guy who paid cash for the '88 civic gets from point A to B with the lowest cost of ownership. There's so status symbol with software - some works better than others, so you go with what works best, and there we're back to Office '97. If you own it, why change?
I don't think the RIAA is going through this trouble to insure the distribution of properties that they currently own. What I see right now throughout the "content producing industry" is intense interest in controlling the distribution mechanisms of all content - film, video, audio, print. Why? Because if they control the distribution then they control the production!
Remember back in the day when content and distribution were basically independent? Studios made movies, movie theaters distributed them. Recording companies made albums, record stores distributed them. You're an independent film producer? Independent artists didn't have the same access to distribution at large producers, but they had access. Well, that's all out the window.
AOL/Time-Warner and other giants are content and distribution, right to the wire that comes into your house. They're the cable company, the ISP, the censor, the news, they buy the policiticans... you get the picture.
Notice how many small ISP's are beign bought up by large ISP's and offering more homogonized and restrictive services? How long until the die-hard independents start facing industry-sponsored legal hardships for offering dangerous technology like shell accounts? How long until it is legally impossible to buy bandwidth from anybody but a media giant or they're interests?
To me, this is all part of the pattern. The big guys are content to fight it out with eachother, they just don't want to share it with anybody else.
I don't buy it. No way in hell you've figured out how to get women to want you. No guy knows that.