A lot can happen in 15 years - specs change, newer designs come out, etc.
Yeah, and the GP's point was that in those 15yrs the personal info you provided for marketing purposes to get the docs _hasn't_ changed:
>> 15 years ago, you would have phoned them up, given them the EXACT SAME INFO
In those 15yrs what has changed is that in some jurisdictions at least (eg. EU, but probably not US) you do now have more rights over the personal info companies keep on you and how they use it. Including not allowing them to send it to the US govt. (except for airline passenger details where the EU decided it could disregard its own laws).
They're kind of like the BOFH, really, only they use expulsion and no graduation rather than killing people
Er, BOFHs do not kill people. Accidents kill people. These are important facts to learn/recite/correct your statement with (prior to next visit to the tape safe...).
This is France we're talking about - protest (and/or strikes) is a national pastime.
100k people (nationally) actually caring enough to hit the streets is common.
100k on the streets of Paris alone, plus a lot more nationwide is a big issue (but not uncommon, and probably still doesn't get you an audience with the PM).
100k names on a piece of paper, for the entire nation, (and delivered by an american at that) is very likely in "nobody cares" territory.
The GPL is a copyright licence, not a contract. No consideration is required, equally, you never have to agree to its terms - negotiate different terms with the copyright holder, or don't copy the software.
"How about if you pirate software" - then there are penalties under copyright law. Irrespective of the EULA.
I don't know what world you were living in [...] servers
I was living in workstation world, not server. Moving the grapics layer wasn't much of an issue on server, since most servers aren't doing heavy graphics. That said, for the same reason it couldn't have been a beneficial step either.
On the client, it was a big step backwards for stablility in the name of performance.
Not the case for me. Most cheaper (OEM) dvd drives come with no software - typically you have to order a full retail pack to get that.
If you are, like I was, for example, buying a DVD-RW drive to add to a box that already has a DVD-ROM, then this is not an issue - you already have the old dvd player software from the other drive.
Sewage will most likely smell like... er... sewage.
Biodiesel made from algae will most likely smell like... algae. Whether or not they feed on sewage (eg. I have yet to have a steak that smelled like grass - unless someone dropped it on actual grass off the bbq).
Funnily enough... NT 3.51 was rock solid, NT4 was flaky (and although its successors have got better, they still aren't really back to where they were with 3.51).
Windows even had GDI in user space before, and later moved into the kernel for performance reasons, and GDI in user space didn't provide more stability
You have to be joking. It was a massive step backwards in stability. NT 3.51 was rock solid, NT 4 was far more flaky.
Not only that, but with GDI in kernel all sorts of resource limits came in that just weren't there before. Writing heavy graphics was much more of a pain - no matter how careful you were with GDI, other programs could consume limited kernel resources and your graphics calls would start to randomly fail.
Image sizes (bitmaps) that you could allocate were also constrained by kernel limits. Not in a way you could handle nicely in the app either - CreateCompatibleBitmap() simply fails once the kernel memory is maxed out, something you can't predict. On NT 3.51 you just added more memory to your system.
We had people still on 3.51 even in (I think) 2000, because NT4 wouldn't let them edit images as large as they needed - eventually the whole application graphics engine had to be re-architected to work with the gdi kernel limits.
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just buy Windows and use MS Office
Yep that's right, every corporation, every public body, every charity that has (or might have) a disabled employee... just buy MS windows and office.
Oh, you wanted a single standard solution across your org? - no problem, an MS enterprise license is sooo much cheaper per seat, why not just give it to everyone, no interop issues, and it is the de-facto standard you know (after all everyone with a disabled employee has to...).
ain't going to cut it if you are an organisation planning a migration now.
Equivalently accessible functionality is going to have to be there right at the point you take a disabled employee's MS software away.
Otherwise what are you going to do ? Say "in the long run we'll have something that'll let you do your job again, meantime could you take a few years vacation" ?
I can hear the lawyers laughing (all the way to the bank) already.
No, I'll tell you what you are going to do, you are going to leave those MS systems right where they are until the OSS alternative works as well for your disabled users. Anything else is financial/legal/political suicide.
The fact that more than 3 (or 4?) compartments were compromised meant that the compartment separators were overtopped.
Had the compartments been higher it might have stayed afloat even with the number that were holed. Had fewer been holed, it would (in theory) have stayed afloat, because the compartments wouldn't have been overtopped.
Nope, the 48hrs includes overtime - it can be met averaged over a number weeks though, so you can legitimately do 50+ one week as long as you do 40 the next.
There are also some exceptions and opt-outs (and abuses and...)
Even then though, in the UK (usually flagged as among the worst in the EU for working hours) the figures are around 15% working over 48hrs a week.
So for 85% of the UK workforce (and a higher percentage on the continent) 50+hrs a week is a lot.
Given that "breakage" is a bullshit accounting scam of the record companies to extort more money from people, I'm wondering why its taken "online" sales for artists to get pissy about it.
Maybe (speculating) because of the way it's defined. Say the contract said "... for breakage in distribution to retailers...":
With CDs there is still distribution, there is still some risk of breakage, they agreed a fixed rate to cover that - higher breakages and Sony loses, lower and they win. Now with online sales, there effectively is no distribution to retail - not only is the distribution not physical, it doesn't happen, Sony simply does not transmit each downloaded copy to iTunes.
Try an analogy, suppose your employer has a fixed mileage rate for travel expenses (eg. £0.40 per mile is typical in the UK), and you do a job a few hundred miles away.
Now, say you:
a) drive a 10mpg porshe. Oops, most likely you lose. Too bad. b) drive an 80mpg diesel. Oh, now the employer lost out... well - too bad for them, you win.
Now, the online case:
c) you agree with the client that the job can be done over VPN and you never actually travel. But you still claim the mileage.
I think c) is the point at which most employers would cry foul.
You upgrade your computer, and bam... whoops, can't read the data anymore.
Only if you were dumb enough to not turn it off before the upgrade, or you lost your recovery password - RTFM.
And of course in the upgrade scenario, you can always put the original hardware back and boot from it. Just like the forensics really don't want to do. Of course you could give them the recovery key... if you created one, if you can find it, if it's in your possession...
Sure, some dumb folks will lose their keys and hence their data, sooner or later - just like happens now with (lack of) backups.
But we should see a lot less of the cancel all your cards because all your details were on a laptop which mr dumb employee left in the back of a taxi (or whatever) - because corps will be able to issue locked down laptops.
Some benefits, some downsides - just like most technologies.
With a "gratuitously inconvenient" install, they are pissing off(perhaps) a very very small percentage of customers. Because probably well over 95% of their customers never, ever see the install.
Linux, time after time, year after year, has been slated for being "too hard to install", and yet it has had (IMO) better installs available (than the comparative Windows OS of the time) since about ooh Slackware 1.x (and maybe SLS before that, but I'm not sure on that one - I recall SLS was pretty fragile).
So why does the myth persist ? - because the vast majority of people have never had to install Windows. Someone else did it for them. You can't get simpler than that - so Linux will always be "too hard" in comparison.
The Windows installer is a non-problem for MS. They solved it by the non-technical route, long ago, and exceptionally successfully.
Er, they've been doing this for 30 years, and making shedloads of money out of it.
Exactly how will it be in their best interest to change this ?
How much difference will it make to their sales ?
Answer: it's completely irrelevant
MS people aren't dumb - they know their install has problems. They don't care. There are other things they will fix first.
Why ?
Because they already have a non-technical solution to this problem - ensure almost noone has to install the OS. Tried, tested, proven-profitable solution.
The "panic" is not just becuase it encrypts, but because with the right hardware, it can (will by default?) do it in conjuntion with the machine hardware (TPM).
So you can't unencrypt the disc if you disconnect it from the machine. First thing forensics want to do ? - image the disc (outside of the system) and analyse the images elsewhere, and under no circumstances turn system on with data in it.
Vista + "Trusted Computing" could stop them doing this:
If someone doesn't know what TCP/IP means or what a CNAME record is, I can direct him to appropriate RFCs that define them.
Just like your MBA will point you to the definitions of P&L, EBITDA, Gross Profit, etc.
Now, I wouldn't actually direct an MBA to an RFC, because his eyes would glaze over about the time he got to "this memo has unlimited distribution."
Depending on your MBA. Some of them have a tech background and could probably recite the history of the RFC. Or maybe you think they couldn't because they'd be poor/failed techs who couldn't hack it and did the MBA as an easy way out ? Certianly wouldn't be renowned kernel programmers now would they... oh, wait...
But what matters is that I can direct him to such a document, because such a document exists. Tech-speak is done with well-defined terms that have standardized meaning, and it is used to clarify how we talk to each other.
Bullshit. Some tech terms are well defined and standardised (just like some business terms).
Others are ambiguous, vague, domain/language/product dependent or just "defined" differently depending on who you speak to.
[ How many copies of a one gigabyte file fit in two gigbytes of RAM, how many fit on a forty gigbyte hard drive, how many bits are in each of those bytes and how many seconds would the file take to send over a 1-kilobit-per-second link ?]
Even when there is one, having an RFC or other "standard" that defines a term is no use in understanding unless that document is itself clear. Which is "better" - having no agreed definition (c-speak) or having (or claiming to have) a "standard" definition that is in fact ambiguous ?
Can techies even get "unambiguous" right in the first place ?
The allowable regular expressions are those that are "unambiguous" as defined by the standard. Unfortunately, the standard's use of the term "unambiguous" does not correspond to the two well known notions, since not all regular languages are denoted by "unambiguous" expressions. Furthermore, the standard's definition of "unambiguous" is somewhat vague. Therefore, we provide a precise definition of "unambiguous expressions" and rename them deterministic regular expressions to avoid any confusion.
The only problem with this is that Eolas has freely admitted that they are not going to go after any other browser, only IE
I'm sure that's worth every penny of the paper it's written on... oh, wait they didn't write it down at all... they just said it.
Wonder who said this then:
It doesn't matter whether they're making, using, selling or offering to sell the product - they have to come to grips with the reality of the patent...I think anybody who's in the browser business should be taking a look at this verdict, and obviously, if they need a licence, they should get one
Oh, yeah, that's right - Eolas (obviously that was their lawyer's other face).
They haven't "got" it yet. It is still on appeal (AFAIK), and probably will be for a few years more.
Moreover the $500+M was just for three years (1998 - 2001) so the stakes are $100m+ per year future earnings.
I'm pretty sure MS would have settled for a one-off few tens of million or so a few years ago. Me, I'd have taken that and gone - ten mil now or maybe a lot more but years down the line when I'm too old to enjoy it ? I'll cash out now thanks.
Obviously the Eolas guy has a more long term view... Risks losing everything though. MS is being asked to pay 2.5% of the gross windows revenues in the damages award. There is no way they can pay (set precedent) that much to just one patent troll. So they will fight - and I reckon they (MS) scent victory now with the USPTO invalidating the patent.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot can happen in 15 years - specs change, newer designs come out, etc.
Yeah, and the GP's point was that in those 15yrs the personal info you provided for marketing purposes to get the docs _hasn't_ changed:
>> 15 years ago, you would have phoned them up, given them the EXACT SAME INFO
In those 15yrs what has changed is that in some jurisdictions at least (eg. EU, but probably not US) you do now have more rights over the personal info companies keep on you and how they use it. Including not allowing them to send it to the US govt. (except for airline passenger details where the EU decided it could disregard its own laws).
They're kind of like the BOFH, really, only they use expulsion and no graduation rather than killing people
Er, BOFHs do not kill people. Accidents kill people. These are important facts to learn/recite/correct your statement with (prior to next visit to the tape safe...).
This is France we're talking about - protest (and/or strikes) is a national pastime.
100k people (nationally) actually caring enough to hit the streets is common.
100k on the streets of Paris alone, plus a lot more nationwide is a big issue (but not uncommon, and probably still doesn't get you an audience with the PM).
100k names on a piece of paper, for the entire nation, (and delivered by an american at that) is very likely in "nobody cares" territory.
Interesting reading of TFA seeing as it does not in fact contain the word "copyright".
The GPL is a copyright licence, not a contract. No consideration is required, equally, you never have to agree to its terms - negotiate different terms with the copyright holder, or don't copy the software.
"How about if you pirate software" - then there are penalties under copyright law. Irrespective of the EULA.
I don't know what world you were living in [...] servers
I was living in workstation world, not server. Moving the grapics layer wasn't much of an issue on server, since most servers aren't doing heavy graphics. That said, for the same reason it couldn't have been a beneficial step either.
On the client, it was a big step backwards for stablility in the name of performance.
Not the case for me. Most cheaper (OEM) dvd drives come with no software - typically you have to order a full retail pack to get that.
If you are, like I was, for example, buying a DVD-RW drive to add to a box that already has a DVD-ROM, then this is not an issue - you already have the old dvd player software from the other drive.
Sewage will most likely smell like... er... sewage.
Biodiesel made from algae will most likely smell like... algae. Whether or not they feed on sewage (eg. I have yet to have a steak that smelled like grass - unless someone dropped it on actual grass off the bbq).
Graphics moved into the kernel in NT4.
Funnily enough... NT 3.51 was rock solid, NT4 was flaky (and although its successors have got better, they still aren't really back to where they were with 3.51).
Windows even had GDI in user space before, and later moved into the kernel for performance reasons, and GDI in user space didn't provide more stability
You have to be joking. It was a massive step backwards in stability. NT 3.51 was rock solid, NT 4 was far more flaky.
Not only that, but with GDI in kernel all sorts of resource limits came in that just weren't there before. Writing heavy graphics was much more of a pain - no matter how careful you were with GDI, other programs could consume limited kernel resources and your graphics calls would start to randomly fail.
Image sizes (bitmaps) that you could allocate were also constrained by kernel limits. Not in a way you could handle nicely in the app either - CreateCompatibleBitmap() simply fails once the kernel memory is maxed out, something you can't predict. On NT 3.51 you just added more memory to your system.
We had people still on 3.51 even in (I think) 2000, because NT4 wouldn't let them edit images as large as they needed - eventually the whole application graphics engine had to be re-architected to work with the gdi kernel limits.
"Gee, who would have expected that?"
Anyone who read section 508.
Unlike laypeople, disabled folks are often not able to fix their own accessibility problems, so they have to ask you to do it.
Eventually they got bored of asking you and asked the politicians to make you do it. Which the politicians did.
Now they get to _tell_ you to do it.
Welcome to programming in the real world.
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just buy Windows and use MS Office
Yep that's right, every corporation, every public body, every charity that has (or might have) a disabled employee... just buy MS windows and office.
Oh, you wanted a single standard solution across your org? - no problem, an MS enterprise license is sooo much cheaper per seat, why not just give it to everyone, no interop issues, and it is the de-facto standard you know (after all everyone with a disabled employee has to...).
Now just sign here on the contract please...
[nice one Bill]
"should be more accessible in the long run"
ain't going to cut it if you are an organisation planning a migration now.
Equivalently accessible functionality is going to have to be there right at the point you take a disabled employee's MS software away.
Otherwise what are you going to do ? Say "in the long run we'll have something that'll let you do your job again, meantime could you take a few years vacation" ?
I can hear the lawyers laughing (all the way to the bank) already.
No, I'll tell you what you are going to do, you are going to leave those MS systems right where they are until the OSS alternative works as well for your disabled users. Anything else is financial/legal/political suicide.
Actually it was both causes together.
The fact that more than 3 (or 4?) compartments were compromised meant that the compartment separators were overtopped.
Had the compartments been higher it might have stayed afloat even with the number that were holed. Had fewer been holed, it would (in theory) have stayed afloat, because the compartments wouldn't have been overtopped.
you can use it for cases where a member of the family is sick. In the UK you cannot.
Umm, if you can't you should discuss your rights with your employer - in the UK there is a legal _right_ to unpaid leave to care for dependents.
Nope, the 48hrs includes overtime - it can be met averaged over a number weeks though, so you can legitimately do 50+ one week as long as you do 40 the next.
There are also some exceptions and opt-outs (and abuses and...)
Even then though, in the UK (usually flagged as among the worst in the EU for working hours) the figures are around 15% working over 48hrs a week.
So for 85% of the UK workforce (and a higher percentage on the continent) 50+hrs a week is a lot.
50 hours per week is a lot?
It's 2hrs over the legal _maximum_ anywhere in the EU, so yes, for most of the EU audience it is a lot.
Given that "breakage" is a bullshit accounting scam of the record companies to extort more money from people, I'm wondering why its taken "online" sales for artists to get pissy about it.
Maybe (speculating) because of the way it's defined. Say the contract said "... for breakage in distribution to retailers
With CDs there is still distribution, there is still some risk of breakage, they agreed a fixed rate to cover that - higher breakages and Sony loses, lower and they win. Now with online sales, there effectively is no distribution to retail - not only is the distribution not physical, it doesn't happen, Sony simply does not transmit each downloaded copy to iTunes.
Try an analogy, suppose your employer has a fixed mileage rate for travel expenses (eg. £0.40 per mile is typical in the UK), and you do a job a few hundred miles away.
Now, say you:
a) drive a 10mpg porshe. Oops, most likely you lose. Too bad.
b) drive an 80mpg diesel. Oh, now the employer lost out... well - too bad for them, you win.
Now, the online case:
c) you agree with the client that the job can be done over VPN and you never actually travel. But you still claim the mileage.
I think c) is the point at which most employers would cry foul.
You upgrade your computer, and bam... whoops, can't read the data anymore.
Only if you were dumb enough to not turn it off before the upgrade, or you lost your recovery password - RTFM.
And of course in the upgrade scenario, you can always put the original hardware back and boot from it. Just like the forensics really don't want to do. Of course you could give them the recovery key... if you created one, if you can find it, if it's in your possession...
Sure, some dumb folks will lose their keys and hence their data, sooner or later - just like happens now with (lack of) backups.
But we should see a lot less of the cancel all your cards because all your details were on a laptop which mr dumb employee left in the back of a taxi (or whatever) - because corps will be able to issue locked down laptops.
Some benefits, some downsides - just like most technologies.
You've missed the point.
With a "gratuitously inconvenient" install, they are pissing off(perhaps) a very very small percentage of customers. Because probably well over 95% of their customers never, ever see the install.
Linux, time after time, year after year, has been slated for being "too hard to install", and yet it has had (IMO) better installs available (than the comparative Windows OS of the time) since about ooh Slackware 1.x (and maybe SLS before that, but I'm not sure on that one - I recall SLS was pretty fragile).
So why does the myth persist ? - because the vast majority of people have never had to install Windows. Someone else did it for them. You can't get simpler than that - so Linux will always be "too hard" in comparison.
The Windows installer is a non-problem for MS. They solved it by the non-technical route, long ago, and exceptionally successfully.
Er, they've been doing this for 30 years, and making shedloads of money out of it.
Exactly how will it be in their best interest to change this ?
How much difference will it make to their sales ?
Answer: it's completely irrelevant
MS people aren't dumb - they know their install has problems. They don't care. There are other things they will fix first.
Why ?
Because they already have a non-technical solution to this problem - ensure almost noone has to install the OS. Tried, tested, proven-profitable solution.
The "panic" is not just becuase it encrypts, but because with the right hardware, it can (will by default?) do it in conjuntion with the machine hardware (TPM).
m /
So you can't unencrypt the disc if you disconnect it from the machine.
First thing forensics want to do ? - image the disc (outside of the system) and analyse the images elsewhere, and under no circumstances turn system on with data in it.
Vista + "Trusted Computing" could stop them doing this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4713018.st
Just like your MBA will point you to the definitions of P&L, EBITDA, Gross Profit, etc.
Now, I wouldn't actually direct an MBA to an RFC, because his eyes would glaze over about the time he got to "this memo has unlimited distribution."
Depending on your MBA. Some of them have a tech background and could probably recite the history of the RFC. Or maybe you think they couldn't because they'd be poor/failed techs who couldn't hack it and did the MBA as an easy way out ? Certianly wouldn't be renowned kernel programmers now would they... oh, wait...
But what matters is that I can direct him to such a document, because such a document exists. Tech-speak is done with well-defined terms that have standardized meaning, and it is used to clarify how we talk to each other.
Bullshit. Some tech terms are well defined and standardised (just like some business terms).
Others are ambiguous, vague, domain/language/product dependent or just "defined" differently depending on who you speak to.
[ How many copies of a one gigabyte file fit in two gigbytes of RAM, how many fit on a forty gigbyte hard drive, how many bits are in each of those bytes and how many seconds would the file take to send over a 1-kilobit-per-second link ?]
Even when there is one, having an RFC or other "standard" that defines a term is no use in understanding unless that document is itself clear. Which is "better" - having no agreed definition (c-speak) or having (or claiming to have) a "standard" definition that is in fact ambiguous ?
Can techies even get "unambiguous" right in the first place ?
well, somewhat vaguely it would appear...
The only problem with this is that Eolas has freely admitted that they are not going to go after any other browser, only IE
I'm sure that's worth every penny of the paper it's written on... oh, wait they didn't write it down at all... they just said it.
Wonder who said this then:
Oh, yeah, that's right - Eolas (obviously that was their lawyer's other face).
They haven't "got" it yet. It is still on appeal (AFAIK), and probably will be for a few years more.
Moreover the $500+M was just for three years (1998 - 2001) so the stakes are $100m+ per year future earnings.
I'm pretty sure MS would have settled for a one-off few tens of million or so a few years ago. Me, I'd have taken that and gone - ten mil now or maybe a lot more but years down the line when I'm too old to enjoy it ? I'll cash out now thanks.
Obviously the Eolas guy has a more long term view... Risks losing everything though. MS is being asked to pay 2.5% of the gross windows revenues in the damages award. There is no way they can pay (set precedent) that much to just one patent troll. So they will fight - and I reckon they (MS) scent victory now with the USPTO invalidating the patent.