If you dig into the copious records, you will find that being bought by IBM is one of the things SCO set out to achieve. The idea was that various people would walk off with a large pile of cash from IBM just to get rid of them. They have now discovered that it is not that easy to squeeze cash out of IBM by being irritating.
The principle is much like that of not paying a blackmailer or extortionist. If you pay one, they will queue up for their handout. If you grind the first one into the dust, others are not so likey to try it on.
If you read the article, you will see it is not a matter of testing. The tests have been done, problems have been found.
Any company that either has non-trivial IT requirements, or has chosen not to give Microsoft total control of its IT systems will have third party or custom software installed. The more you have, the more likely it is that SP2 breaks something in a way that does not have a trivial workaround.
I expect that IBM are working with their third party software suppliers and the development teams for their internal applications to fix the known problems. I expect that IBM are not the only ones doing this right now.
The article says it causes problems with some IBM internal applications. Microsoft probably does not run those applications.
If SP2 breaks third party software that is installed on business critical machines (e.g. laptop of person working on 8 figure deal), a sensible company will not install it. IBM is not the only company working on known problems with SP2, and issuing "do not install" memos internally.
Router manufacturers compete on features, and that includes security. See for example Cisco's "Network Admission Control", or HPs "ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture". It may take a while for those sort of security features to appear in consumer products, but defending the rest of your enterprise network against an infected PC is a real market for the router and switch manufacturers. If a particular idea is not taken up it is more likely that the people who really know the business think it will not work.
I find it amusing that VeriSign's chief scientist has the initials PHB.
I read the article and found it to have very little substantial content. It makes some vague suggestions in areas where the devil is in the detail. It ends up with a sales pitch for a VeriSign service - a very bad sign for any article that purports to be technical.
If you look at the headers of a message resent by what mutt (and eudora IIRC) calls 'bounce', you will find "Resent-From:", "Resent-To:" and perhaps other "Resent-*" headers. This is a perfectly valid way to send "the same" (i.e. same message-id) message to extra recipients after it has been delivered.
The trick with.forward causes the message to continue on its way to new destinations without really leaving the SMTP world, and without adding these extra headers.
I believe that a message that is 'resent' should go out with the envelope showing whoever resent it as the MAIL FROM, so provided that that is what SPF uses, it should work. Perhaps things that curently use.forward should be rewritten to 'resend' instead when going via public routes, thus eliminating the essentially anonymous and transparent redirection that is harder to distinguish from spam tactics.
The Rolex Awards website is Flash only, so don't bother going there if you don't have/want to pollute your system with that technology.
I was hoping to find out what the criteria for the award were by going to the source, and hoping that it was for making the idea available in a way they can afford to people who need it by use of appropriate technology. Unfortunately, I was frustrated by an inappropriate use of technology on the web site. Those giving the award would do well to learn from those to whom it was given.
See The Last One for a writeup from 1981 of "a program which could become the last one ever written by a human being." The hype was spectacular, but those with some clue knew that while it would be useful in a narrow application domain, it would not make any significant dent in the quantity of code being written.
Bill Gates may be rich, but I don't believe his prediction that programming will somehow magically become simpler, and be done with visual tools any more that it could be automated 20 years ago. Writing the code may seem hard to those who do not do it, but knowing what code to write is much harder, and the kind of tools Bill was talking about are not going to do much to help there.
As for hardware prices, for general purpose systems, we now get a lot more for slightly less money than we did a few years ago, and this pattern seems to be fairly constant. I see nothing to suggest that the trend will not continue. More things will have embedded chips, and they will become even cheaper, but with general purpose machines we will continue to increase what we want from them to consume all the extra processing, memory etc. that can be bought for the same money.
How hard would it be for China to force its scientists to work there at a brain farm?
You don't have to force scientists or engineers to work at a brain farm, all you have to do is give it enough money to pay them a reasonable salary, and to provide good facilities, then just tell them that their job is "do good science/engineering" rather than "make money".
The difficult part about running a well funded brain farm is separating those who can and will do good science or engineering from those whose primary talent is self-publicity. You need management that can tell the difference between bullshit and fertiliser, and that seems to be a very rare skill.
But in the context of my comment it does not explain why you can not buy a blank laptop. A blank laptop in a fair market should surly be cheaper than the same laptop without a software licence shouldn't it ?
The problem is that if you are making laptops by the truck-load, all the same, then any variation from the standard version is expensive, even if it involves leaving things out. You can't sell a bare laptop in packaging that says it has Windows loaded, so you are hit for a separate set of packaging, and all the process for ensuring that the right versions go into the right boxes. You have to make sure that the sub-contractors who actually assemble the things get it right, and that is added cost in setting up the contract. If you are making enough, or the margin is big enough, the variant with something missing can be sold for less, but for a low volume variant of a high volume product, reduced inputs may not lead to a lower manufacturing+inventory+marketing+etc. cost.
There is a cost in setting up the process for producing, selling and supporting bare or Linux laptops, and the vendors will go for it when they think the sales volume will give a better return on that investment than using the money to do something else.
Well in Ireland its pretty much impossible to buy a laptop without windows or a windows licence due to the fact that microsoft will cut discounts to any vendor that would sell such a thing....
Let me offer an alternative hypothesis. Laptop vendors do not see the market for Linux on a laptop as large enough to be worth investing the R+D, manufacturing and marketing it would take to offer it. It is convenient to let Microsoft take whatever heat the Linux enthusiasts manage to generate, so the hardware vendors have no motive to deny the assertions that Microsoft is abusing its position.
I suspect that Linux on corporate desktops will be followed by a demand for Linux on corporate laptops before too long, and the vendors will respond. The real turning point will be when a significant corporate buyer decides to equip their army of road-warriors with Linux laptops, and wants support from a major vendor. That is when we will find out whether or not Microsoft really are prepared to go against whatever competition law applies in the relevant jurisdiction, and if so who does what about it.
As for the granting discounts or other commitments, what is your source? This is common practice all over the world in all kinds of markets so I'd be curious to know exactly at the EU differs.
According to a handy guide to EU competition law that I have been given, the key issue is that Article 82 of the EC Treaty prohibits the abuse of a "dominant position". Having a "dominant position" is not illegal in itself, but it means that a company cannot do various things that would be allowed for companies that do not have a "dominant position". An insignificant company is permitted to offer a discount to customers who do not do business with their competitors, a company with a "dominant position" is not. I think the idea is that a customer can tell an insignificant supplier to install their discount in a suppository configuration, and just go to the competing supplier instead. It is not so easy for a customer to do that to a supplier who has a "dominant position", so it is the courts who can tell the supplier where to put their discount.
The other issue is whether or not the courts (and the politicians) are prepared to enforce the competition law in their jurisdiction. It is always more politcally acceptable to crack down on foreign companies.
Microsoft does that the option to terminate their contract with HP because it is a contract so unless the DOJ is in the business of avoiding contracts I'm fairly certain both parties are still following the lettering....
That may be the case in the USA, but in the EU it is prohibited for a company with a dominant position to grant discounts or rebates that are based on a commitment to not purchase from a competitor. If a French company is being harmed by unfair competition practices of a US company that operates in the EU, you can be sure that the French will use their political influence to ensure that that US company faces stiff penalties. If Microsoft tries to hurt HP for doing business with Mandrake, they may run into a lot of expensive problems in the EU. The EU is a big market and Microsoft cannot afford for it to become an even more fertile ground for the growth of a real alternative to their offerings than it is already.
I've got an HP Officejet D Series and have always wondered why black is printed with CMYK by default instead of pure black. Perhaps the manufacturers are trying to come up with the MOST INEFFICIENT way to consume your consumeables. =P
I have heard that printing K over one (or more) of CMY gives a darker/denser black than K alone. Unfortunately, I can't find a source to confirm this for inkjet printers, but see the section titled "The dark side of Black" in Nomad printing's hints page. It is not clear that it is a big issue for text, but I have seen similar things about printing large black areas from other sources too.
Try http://localhost:8888/; it is a real URL, but Firebird 0.7 (I haven't upgraded yet) will take you to an SEO company via www.localhost.net.au if you are not running a local web server on that port. It will do this even if you follow it as a link, it is not limited to things explicitly typed in the address bar.
I think "keyword.enabled" should be 'false' by default. You can at least switch the feature off if you do not want it; there will be no such switch if VeriSign deploy their service.
I generally dislike features where someone else has decided what they think I ought to want to happen if something does not work. "I was only trying to be helpful" is a feeble excuse for covering up the first warning that something is wrong.
See Research Disclosure. It is a place where ideas can be published so as to establish prior art. Publishing other than in a patent means giving up the right to patent; that means you can't stop other people using the idea, and they can't stop you.
The people who stamp documents are notaries. If that is not good enough for you then you need to focus on what will stand up in court against whatever adversary you are considering.
If you can prove that you knew something before it was patented, there are some very limited rights to carry on using the idea at least in some jurisdictions, but don't expect this to be a cheap option if the issue arises.
The residents of the large town of Scunthorpe in the north of England have a well known problem with filters.
If you are coming from Penistone you will enter Scunthorpe from the West on the A18. It does make it a bit difficult to give travel directions to someone if a filter decides to modify things
they're one of the ones with the inkjet cartridge chips and DMCA and all that jazz
I think you will find it was Lexmark who were in trouble with chips, and that was laser toner cartridges. The only HP ink cartridges with chips that restrict usage are certain ink-only ones for high volume business inkjets, where running out of ink, or using 5 year old ink, may damage the separate printhead.
There was briefly some DMCA nonsense some time ago, but I think you will find it was part of a disupte with someone who appeared not to be acting in good faith. I don't thing wielding DMCA is a regular tactic - I don't think it has been used again.
Whenever, at any time, someone says "that is the exception that proves the rule"...
I've always wondered how this expression ever came about. It is nonsense on its face.
If you look up "prove" in a good dictionary, you will find that one of the meanings is "test", and this is how it is used in the context of spirits and guns, and also in this proverb (as well as "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"). Substituting into the given phrase we have "the exception that tests the rule".
The hypothesis was that all other froms of Unix are being displaced by Linux.
Put it to the proof (i.e. test) by looking for an exception (counter-example).
We have a counter-example, so the hypothesis is false.
Linux is, and deserves to be very popular, but some of the wilder claims can be shown to be false.
Yes, it does look rather like one of the things you get with HP's CoolTown. Anyone who wants to play with it can download some of the CoolTown stuff. If you just want to speculate about what you could do with it, then HP has lots of papers to give you some ideas too.
He isn't to be taken lightly. Jim developed the first ORB, was the lead architect of Jini and he had prominent role in RMI. However, the most interesting thing about him is that he holds masters in linguistics and philosophy (in addition to his PhD in distributed computing).
Note that those are his claims about himself. He is also the author of an article (with three others) "A Note on Distributed Computing" claiming that transparent distributed computing (i.e. what CORBA tries to do, and what RMI takes to a more extreme point) is a terrible idea. The article also says that it is impossible to create a language like Java and get it accepted.
As for the politics of standardization, Waldo knows all about that. He was with HP when CORBA was first being defined, HP had an implementation based on DCE, somehow DCE became incorporated into the OMG CORBA standards. The most promising implementation of object-based distributed computing offered at the time was killed by the politics, most of which emanated from the unreconstructed HP of the time. I do not know if Waldo was personally responsible for that, but I have heard that he had a reputation for NIH hostility to anything not of his own invention, and for political intrigue.
Either he has realised the error of his ways, or he is playing politics again. Given his self description, I suspect the latter.
The European Parliament approved a directive that requires member states to prohibit devices that are specifically designed to prevent re-use or recycling. It is part of a directive about recycling waste from electronic systems, and say absolutely nothing at all about monopolies.
The European Parliament Daily Notebook : 18-12-2002 has an item on the directive. Note that although "printer cartridges" are mentioned in the daily notebook, and in various reports of the discussions, they are not specifically mentioned in the product design part of the directive.
The news stories are rather misleading in their focus (no surprise there then). The directive behind the story is about recycling, and does not mention printers, cartridges or chips except in the general list of all kinds of equipment to which the recycling should apply. The relevant part (article 4, quoted below) is about design for recyclability and re-use. Printer cartridges may have been part of the motivation, and anti re-use chips would be prohibited, but they are not singled out as a target in the directive itself:
Member States shall encourage the design and production of electrical and electronic equipment which take into account and facilitate dismantling and recovery, in particular the re-use and recycling of WEEE, their components and materials. In this context, Member States shall take appropriate measures so that producers do not prevent, through specific design features or manufacturing processes, WEEE from being re-used, unless such specific design features or manufacturing processes present overriding advantages, for example, with regard to the protection of the environment and/or safety requirements.
Re:DNS may take a while to update, eh?
on
Slashdot is Moving
·
· Score: 2
Since the change, the daily headlines are coming from a machine whose name does not resolve. the headers of the incoming mail now say (among other things)
Received: from sc8-osdn-mail-1.osdn.com (66-35-250-105.osdn.com [66.35.250.105] (may be forged))
sc8-osdn-mail-1.osdn.com resolves to 10.1.55.1 which I thought was one of those addresses you do not use on the public parts of the Internet. I think I saw the actual IP 66.35.250.105 resolve to the 66-... name, but it seems not any more, and that name does not resolve to anything. I guess the machine is a dual homed mail relay, giving out its internal name in its HELO, and the errors in the DNS setup are just adding to that problem.
My spam trap sees "may be forged" as a sign that someone is trying to hide, and that is the mark of a spammer. The Slashdot headlines now go in my spam bucket.
This topic is now so old that I doubt if anyone will read this - that is probably going to be true of anything I post now that I don't see the headlines.
I remember that! We used to joke that version 2 would be called THE NEXT ONE.
I hate Word because it imposes its fixed ideas of how I ought to work, and makes it very hard for me to work in the way that suits me. It is just about adequate for trivial documents like business letters, but is hopeless for anything serious. Some so-called high-level programming tools have the same characteristic - if your problem is within the space they are designed for they can get a result quickly, but for problems outside that space, they are a total disaster.
If some new programming system has the same characteristics, then those who see only the trivial problems will love it, and, if they are foolish, impose it on those who are working on serious large scale projects. Those who have superior tools that they are prohibited from using will be blamed for the resulting mess, and once again anyone who speaks up saying anything sensible will be branded a troublemaker.
Slashdot Mirror
If you dig into the copious records, you will find that being bought by IBM is one of the things SCO set out to achieve. The idea was that various people would walk off with a large pile of cash from IBM just to get rid of them. They have now discovered that it is not that easy to squeeze cash out of IBM by being irritating.
The principle is much like that of not paying a blackmailer or extortionist. If you pay one, they will queue up for their handout. If you grind the first one into the dust, others are not so likey to try it on.
If you read the article, you will see it is not a matter of testing. The tests have been done, problems have been found.
Any company that either has non-trivial IT requirements, or has chosen not to give Microsoft total control of its IT systems will have third party or custom software installed. The more you have, the more likely it is that SP2 breaks something in a way that does not have a trivial workaround.
I expect that IBM are working with their third party software suppliers and the development teams for their internal applications to fix the known problems. I expect that IBM are not the only ones doing this right now.
The article says it causes problems with some IBM internal applications. Microsoft probably does not run those applications.
If SP2 breaks third party software that is installed on business critical machines (e.g. laptop of person working on 8 figure deal), a sensible company will not install it. IBM is not the only company working on known problems with SP2, and issuing "do not install" memos internally.
Router manufacturers compete on features, and that includes security. See for example Cisco's "Network Admission Control", or HPs "ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture". It may take a while for those sort of security features to appear in consumer products, but defending the rest of your enterprise network against an infected PC is a real market for the router and switch manufacturers. If a particular idea is not taken up it is more likely that the people who really know the business think it will not work.
I find it amusing that VeriSign's chief scientist has the initials PHB.
I read the article and found it to have very little substantial content. It makes some vague suggestions in areas where the devil is in the detail. It ends up with a sales pitch for a VeriSign service - a very bad sign for any article that purports to be technical.
If you look at the headers of a message resent by what mutt (and eudora IIRC) calls 'bounce', you will find "Resent-From:", "Resent-To:" and perhaps other "Resent-*" headers. This is a perfectly valid way to send "the same" (i.e. same message-id) message to extra recipients after it has been delivered.
The trick with .forward causes the message to continue on its way to new destinations without really leaving the SMTP world, and without adding these extra headers.
I believe that a message that is 'resent' should go out with the envelope showing whoever resent it as the MAIL FROM, so provided that that is what SPF uses, it should work. Perhaps things that curently use .forward should be rewritten to 'resend' instead when going via public routes, thus eliminating the essentially anonymous and transparent redirection that is harder to distinguish from spam tactics.
The Rolex Awards website is Flash only, so don't bother going there if you don't have/want to pollute your system with that technology.
I was hoping to find out what the criteria for the award were by going to the source, and hoping that it was for making the idea available in a way they can afford to people who need it by use of appropriate technology. Unfortunately, I was frustrated by an inappropriate use of technology on the web site. Those giving the award would do well to learn from those to whom it was given.
See The Last One for a writeup from 1981 of "a program which could become the last one ever written by a human being." The hype was spectacular, but those with some clue knew that while it would be useful in a narrow application domain, it would not make any significant dent in the quantity of code being written.
Bill Gates may be rich, but I don't believe his prediction that programming will somehow magically become simpler, and be done with visual tools any more that it could be automated 20 years ago. Writing the code may seem hard to those who do not do it, but knowing what code to write is much harder, and the kind of tools Bill was talking about are not going to do much to help there.
As for hardware prices, for general purpose systems, we now get a lot more for slightly less money than we did a few years ago, and this pattern seems to be fairly constant. I see nothing to suggest that the trend will not continue. More things will have embedded chips, and they will become even cheaper, but with general purpose machines we will continue to increase what we want from them to consume all the extra processing, memory etc. that can be bought for the same money.
How hard would it be for China to force its scientists to work there at a brain farm?
You don't have to force scientists or engineers to work at a brain farm, all you have to do is give it enough money to pay them a reasonable salary, and to provide good facilities, then just tell them that their job is "do good science/engineering" rather than "make money".
The difficult part about running a well funded brain farm is separating those who can and will do good science or engineering from those whose primary talent is self-publicity. You need management that can tell the difference between bullshit and fertiliser, and that seems to be a very rare skill.
But in the context of my comment it does not explain why you can not buy a blank laptop. A blank laptop in a fair market should surly be cheaper than the same laptop without a software licence shouldn't it ?
The problem is that if you are making laptops by the truck-load, all the same, then any variation from the standard version is expensive, even if it involves leaving things out. You can't sell a bare laptop in packaging that says it has Windows loaded, so you are hit for a separate set of packaging, and all the process for ensuring that the right versions go into the right boxes. You have to make sure that the sub-contractors who actually assemble the things get it right, and that is added cost in setting up the contract. If you are making enough, or the margin is big enough, the variant with something missing can be sold for less, but for a low volume variant of a high volume product, reduced inputs may not lead to a lower manufacturing+inventory+marketing+etc. cost.
There is a cost in setting up the process for producing, selling and supporting bare or Linux laptops, and the vendors will go for it when they think the sales volume will give a better return on that investment than using the money to do something else.
Well in Ireland its pretty much impossible to buy a laptop without windows or a windows licence due to the fact that microsoft will cut discounts to any vendor that would sell such a thing. ...
Let me offer an alternative hypothesis. Laptop vendors do not see the market for Linux on a laptop as large enough to be worth investing the R+D, manufacturing and marketing it would take to offer it. It is convenient to let Microsoft take whatever heat the Linux enthusiasts manage to generate, so the hardware vendors have no motive to deny the assertions that Microsoft is abusing its position.
I suspect that Linux on corporate desktops will be followed by a demand for Linux on corporate laptops before too long, and the vendors will respond. The real turning point will be when a significant corporate buyer decides to equip their army of road-warriors with Linux laptops, and wants support from a major vendor. That is when we will find out whether or not Microsoft really are prepared to go against whatever competition law applies in the relevant jurisdiction, and if so who does what about it.
As for the granting discounts or other commitments, what is your source? This is common practice all over the world in all kinds of markets so I'd be curious to know exactly at the EU differs.
According to a handy guide to EU competition law that I have been given, the key issue is that Article 82 of the EC Treaty prohibits the abuse of a "dominant position". Having a "dominant position" is not illegal in itself, but it means that a company cannot do various things that would be allowed for companies that do not have a "dominant position". An insignificant company is permitted to offer a discount to customers who do not do business with their competitors, a company with a "dominant position" is not. I think the idea is that a customer can tell an insignificant supplier to install their discount in a suppository configuration, and just go to the competing supplier instead. It is not so easy for a customer to do that to a supplier who has a "dominant position", so it is the courts who can tell the supplier where to put their discount.
The other issue is whether or not the courts (and the politicians) are prepared to enforce the competition law in their jurisdiction. It is always more politcally acceptable to crack down on foreign companies.
Microsoft does that the option to terminate their contract with HP because it is a contract so unless the DOJ is in the business of avoiding contracts I'm fairly certain both parties are still following the lettering. ...
That may be the case in the USA, but in the EU it is prohibited for a company with a dominant position to grant discounts or rebates that are based on a commitment to not purchase from a competitor. If a French company is being harmed by unfair competition practices of a US company that operates in the EU, you can be sure that the French will use their political influence to ensure that that US company faces stiff penalties. If Microsoft tries to hurt HP for doing business with Mandrake, they may run into a lot of expensive problems in the EU. The EU is a big market and Microsoft cannot afford for it to become an even more fertile ground for the growth of a real alternative to their offerings than it is already.
I've got an HP Officejet D Series and have always wondered why black is printed with CMYK by default instead of pure black. Perhaps the manufacturers are trying to come up with the MOST INEFFICIENT way to consume your consumeables. =P
I have heard that printing K over one (or more) of CMY gives a darker/denser black than K alone. Unfortunately, I can't find a source to confirm this for inkjet printers, but see the section titled "The dark side of Black" in Nomad printing's hints page. It is not clear that it is a big issue for text, but I have seen similar things about printing large black areas from other sources too.
Try http://localhost:8888/; it is a real URL, but Firebird 0.7 (I haven't upgraded yet) will take you to an SEO company via www.localhost.net.au if you are not running a local web server on that port. It will do this even if you follow it as a link, it is not limited to things explicitly typed in the address bar.
I think "keyword.enabled" should be 'false' by default. You can at least switch the feature off if you do not want it; there will be no such switch if VeriSign deploy their service.
I generally dislike features where someone else has decided what they think I ought to want to happen if something does not work. "I was only trying to be helpful" is a feeble excuse for covering up the first warning that something is wrong.
See Research Disclosure. It is a place where ideas can be published so as to establish prior art. Publishing other than in a patent means giving up the right to patent; that means you can't stop other people using the idea, and they can't stop you.
The people who stamp documents are notaries. If that is not good enough for you then you need to focus on what will stand up in court against whatever adversary you are considering.
If you can prove that you knew something before it was patented, there are some very limited rights to carry on using the idea at least in some jurisdictions, but don't expect this to be a cheap option if the issue arises.
The residents of the large town of Scunthorpe in the north of England have a well known problem with filters.
If you are coming from Penistone you will enter Scunthorpe from the West on the A18. It does make it a bit difficult to give travel directions to someone if a filter decides to modify things
they're one of the ones with the inkjet cartridge chips and DMCA and all that jazz
I think you will find it was Lexmark who were in trouble with chips, and that was laser toner cartridges. The only HP ink cartridges with chips that restrict usage are certain ink-only ones for high volume business inkjets, where running out of ink, or using 5 year old ink, may damage the separate printhead.
There was briefly some DMCA nonsense some time ago, but I think you will find it was part of a disupte with someone who appeared not to be acting in good faith. I don't thing wielding DMCA is a regular tactic - I don't think it has been used again.
Whenever, at any time, someone says "that is the exception that proves the rule" ...
I've always wondered how this expression ever came about. It is nonsense on its face.
If you look up "prove" in a good dictionary, you will find that one of the meanings is "test", and this is how it is used in the context of spirits and guns, and also in this proverb (as well as "the proof of the pudding is in the eating"). Substituting into the given phrase we have "the exception that tests the rule".
The hypothesis was that all other froms of Unix are being displaced by Linux.
Put it to the proof (i.e. test) by looking for an exception (counter-example).
We have a counter-example, so the hypothesis is false.
Linux is, and deserves to be very popular, but some of the wilder claims can be shown to be false.
Yes, it does look rather like one of the things you get with HP's CoolTown. Anyone who wants to play with it can download some of the CoolTown stuff. If you just want to speculate about what you could do with it, then HP has lots of papers to give you some ideas too.
He isn't to be taken lightly. Jim developed the first ORB, was the lead architect of Jini and he had prominent role in RMI. However, the most interesting thing about him is that he holds masters in linguistics and philosophy (in addition to his PhD in distributed computing).
Note that those are his claims about himself. He is also the author of an article (with three others) "A Note on Distributed Computing" claiming that transparent distributed computing (i.e. what CORBA tries to do, and what RMI takes to a more extreme point) is a terrible idea. The article also says that it is impossible to create a language like Java and get it accepted.
As for the politics of standardization, Waldo knows all about that. He was with HP when CORBA was first being defined, HP had an implementation based on DCE, somehow DCE became incorporated into the OMG CORBA standards. The most promising implementation of object-based distributed computing offered at the time was killed by the politics, most of which emanated from the unreconstructed HP of the time. I do not know if Waldo was personally responsible for that, but I have heard that he had a reputation for NIH hostility to anything not of his own invention, and for political intrigue.
Either he has realised the error of his ways, or he is playing politics again. Given his self description, I suspect the latter.
The European Parliament approved a directive that requires member states to prohibit devices that are specifically designed to prevent re-use or recycling. It is part of a directive about recycling waste from electronic systems, and say absolutely nothing at all about monopolies.
The European Parliament Daily Notebook : 18-12-2002 has an item on the directive. Note that although "printer cartridges" are mentioned in the daily notebook, and in various reports of the discussions, they are not specifically mentioned in the product design part of the directive.
The news stories are rather misleading in their focus (no surprise there then). The directive behind the story is about recycling, and does not mention printers, cartridges or chips except in the general list of all kinds of equipment to which the recycling should apply. The relevant part (article 4, quoted below) is about design for recyclability and re-use. Printer cartridges may have been part of the motivation, and anti re-use chips would be prohibited, but they are not singled out as a target in the directive itself:
Since the change, the daily headlines are coming from a machine whose name does not resolve. the headers of the incoming mail now say (among other things)
Received: from sc8-osdn-mail-1.osdn.com (66-35-250-105.osdn.com [66.35.250.105] (may be forged))
sc8-osdn-mail-1.osdn.com resolves to 10.1.55.1 which I thought was one of those addresses you do not use on the public parts of the Internet. I think I saw the actual IP 66.35.250.105 resolve to the 66-... name, but it seems not any more, and that name does not resolve to anything. I guess the machine is a dual homed mail relay, giving out its internal name in its HELO, and the errors in the DNS setup are just adding to that problem.
My spam trap sees "may be forged" as a sign that someone is trying to hide, and that is the mark of a spammer. The Slashdot headlines now go in my spam bucket.
This topic is now so old that I doubt if anyone will read this - that is probably going to be true of anything I post now that I don't see the headlines.
Perhaps you mean THE LAST ONE.
I remember that! We used to joke that version 2 would be called THE NEXT ONE.
I hate Word because it imposes its fixed ideas of how I ought to work, and makes it very hard for me to work in the way that suits me. It is just about adequate for trivial documents like business letters, but is hopeless for anything serious. Some so-called high-level programming tools have the same characteristic - if your problem is within the space they are designed for they can get a result quickly, but for problems outside that space, they are a total disaster.
If some new programming system has the same characteristics, then those who see only the trivial problems will love it, and, if they are foolish, impose it on those who are working on serious large scale projects. Those who have superior tools that they are prohibited from using will be blamed for the resulting mess, and once again anyone who speaks up saying anything sensible will be branded a troublemaker.