While you're in there making changes, I have the following request: please set up Firefox as a generic XML reader.
You can pre-load XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument schemas and pre-load one stylesheet for each. But allow other, user-specified style sheets to be used and other XML schemas or DTDs to be loaded by the user. Valid, well-formed XML allows that to be doable.
Firefox doesn't have to do more than render, but that will be of value.
You liars are annoying. H.264 is still a closed standard and it does not matter how many Microsoft Partners tell you that closed is open or that open means "buy our stuff". H.264 fails on points 2, 3, and 4 of the formal definition of open standard:
The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
The relevant copyright and patents for the standard are made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard
Canonical is free to re-sell proprietary standards, but let's not pretend that helping establish vendor lock-in was or is a goal of Free and Open Source Software. Oh, wait, Canonical is not re-selling H.264 except for the OEM editions. The rest of you are still on the hook for the bill because it is merely a distributor. I notice that the enGadget article on H.264 patents leaves out the price for the third category obligated to pay under patent law: the user. GIF should have been a lesson about software patents.
Obviously the Microsoft Party and its members have problems with the above definition and seek to disparage it and the process itself. Keeping the second version of the European Interoperability Framework clean, free from M$ damage, takes work.
The problems with Flash are many and technical. It's so badly designed from a security perspective, that it's almost like a Microsoft product. The giveaway that it is not is that it runs on a handful of linux architectures. Games could just as well be written as Java Applets, which would increase the security and portability of the games. For movies, Flash is just plain wrong and other wrappers should be used, Ogg Theora being the obvious choice after MPEG or QuickTime.
It's a sad day when most know so little about architectures that PPC and Sparc are re-flagged as mere 'alternatives' rather than being recognized for the areas they excel in. The Wintel ideal is a ratio of worse that 2:1 of hardware to services. Each box burning tens if not hundreds of watts. Sparc is an open architecture and handles many threads per core, so for most things you should be able to replace a rack of Wintel boxes with a single Sparc. We'll see how long Oracle allows you to access that Sun paper.
No, that is incorrect. Stock value has relatively little correlation with how a company is actually performing. Paying executives in stock, vested or not, is still giving a bonus without regard to company improvement. The only difference is will that stock pay a little or a lot, but again, to drive the point home, does not have anything to do with performance, only speculation on the stock price itself. What we need is a 180-degree turn and find a way to tie bonuses to performance.
"However, bonus schemes in many cases are inherently flawed and encourage people to cut corners or do their job in a known inefficient way in order to maximize the bonus."
One way around that would be to hold the bonuses in escrow for two years, to be release only on the condition that the company performs at least satisfactorily during that time. The money could be invested in two twelve-month certificates or funds and repossessed at the end of either one.
What to do with the repossessed bonuses is another question because if done wrong it provides further incentive to sabotage or under perform. Tricks like donating the bonus to charity won't work because they would only end up at a charity presided over by the loser or a family member or, worse, end up channeled into a PAC like the Gates' Foundation.
Why don't the people responsible for it just make a new service that does functionally the same thing?
That would not change what the service does. Patents affect what something does not where it came from. So it does not matter at all where the code came from, you could have written it yourself, if it does functionally the same thing as what is covered by the patent, then it is infringing. That goes even for functionality that does something you think is wholly new and original, but turns out to have been granted a patent 16.999999 years ago. That's why software patents suck and should stay out of Europe and why, in the case of patents, US law should be harmonized with EU law.
"I've never had any of my computers, running Mac/Windows infected by anything that I know of, I don't use any sort of protection either..."
Well there's you're problem right there. If you're running Windows and connecting it to the net, it is infected as a matter of course whether you choose to become aware of it or not. The only way to prevent it, is to not use Windows.
So on behalf of all the Fortune 500 companies, for whom I do not represent, and on behalf of all the rest of us, whom I don't represent either, who feel the pinch from there elevated operational costs may I be the first to extend a heartfelt, sincere "FUCK YOU, VERY MUCH" to you and any horse you might have ridden in on.
In a situation like that the correct answer, before hanging up, is, "I do not recall. I don't work there anymore. Ask someone who works there. Have a nice day. Bye."
There are so many things wrong with that trial that it's hard to fathom how it got as far as it did. But one thing stands out, that is mentioned here elsewhere that is absolutely shocking and ought to be understandable and worrisome to all citizens, technical or non-technical:
"The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours."
What the heck is that for a travesty of process? It looks like the One Microsoft Way of thinking entering the courts with fakery all through. He was a city employee, arrested by city cops who had assisted in inappropriate baiting (conference call), held in a city jail, prosecuted by a city district attorney, in a trial presided over by a city judge, tried by a city jury, and presumably staying and continuing to stay in a city jail. That's not going to result in even the possibility of a fair trial. Then when the jury drags in deliberation, it's rebuilt to return the verdict desired by all these other city employees.
Monopolies are not illegal
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It is not illegal to have a monopoly, it is illegal to abuse that monopoly. Whether Apple gets a monopoly or not in the handset market is not relevant until it looks like the position is being abused.
It seems like slashdot is getting fewer and fewer user posts and more and more M$ related astroturf.
Fuck you for pushing Microsoft whitewashing and trying to frame every company, product or service in the context of Fighting the Microsoft. Apple has its problems but you are utterly full of shit to try to claim that Apple's claim to fame is other than a company focused on providing a good user experience with (usually) quality software and (often) quality hardware.
Yes, IBM was the relatively big evil back then. It turned out to be small, very small, compared to Gates who was created by IBM as a side effect of the anti-trust remedies. Talk about Gates being only hated recently is nothing but pure whitewashing. ESR's comments are updated in 2004, but date back from 1998 a time when the views he expresses in the rant are a toned-down version of what was prevalent at the time. Or scroll down to readers' comments in Phil's page. Those are from 1999. You can find material going back to the mid-1970's he's always been perceived as an obnoxious dweeb.
Huh? I know there are a handful of US States that have experimented with this but they are in the minority. Most US States and the Federal Government still run their own prisons.
Even using data from 1999, that is not true: Prison privatization in just one instance of corporate welfare. By itself it skims many billions of dollars and actually creates many societal problems. From the student paper linked there you can see that the main argument for privatized prisons is a circular argument.
Need for incarceration is an indication that something failed and needs to be fixed in how society builds its communities and cultivates citizens. Corrective action never is more cost effective than prevention. Happy, well-adjusted, well-fed, individuals busy doing useful things that they find interesting aren't going to get into crime.
Warehousing prisoners as an industry
on
ACTA Treaty Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Buy stocks in companies that build jails . ..
There you hit the nail on the head. Once the US moved to a privatize prison system, we ended up with an economic incentive to increase crime while at the same time jacking up penalties for increasingly trivial non-white collar crime. We also now have a whole industry related to shipping, importing, exporting and warehousing prisoners across state lines and even from one region of the country to the next.
the "villain" that he was seen as being in the 1990s.
Gates marketeers never get tired of getting paid to whitewash his reputation, do they? Here is the
whine he wrote in 1976. He wasn't always big, but he was always annoying and wrong. The myth of Horatio Alger is just that a myth, and Gates was a rich kid from rich parents and rich grandparents who's mom's connections were in a lucky place at a lucky time.
Bigjeff5, you describe the shithole small tech schools I complain about. It's not just one school, but an epidemic across many, many schools like the one you describe going to.
And at most junior colleges, there are posers on the engineering staff and IT departments manning the labs that actively hunt down students that aren't toeing the Microsoft line. They come down on those students softly at first increasingly hard until the student knuckles under or quits. Often it's just simple bullshit that is enough, such as putting it off indefinitely with kindly sounding blow-off phrases: "sure, we'll look at linux later, if there is time", ensuring that there never is time. Or other bullshit like "start with Windows and when you have proved yourself, you can try other systems", or still more shit like "why, yes, we teach both Windows and Linux" while actually cutting out all non-MS systems and languages except for leaving a handful of electives with NO hands-on lab work. They also find all kinds of ways to break any non-MS packages that the faculty forced them to install. "Oops, sorry, that last upgrade must have erased it. We'll get right on that next month."
Some places even relegate all non-MS technologies to a tiny handful of elective course, only available in the final year, which the student might not even have time for even if the interest and motivation have not been rubbed out.
The problem is not a joke. It's not just kernel developers we are not producing, but programmers, system administrators and software engineers. There are almost no new people coming into the workforce with even a basic knowledge of correct design or methods. Even the big names are noticing this, but they're isolated far enough at the top that they miss sight of the fundamental staffing problems that have allowed Microsoft products anywhere near campus.
There is a lot of mention of technical failures and cost overruns. That's something associated with Windows usage and Microsoft resellers. Those aren't the sole cause of the cost overruns, but they pretty much guarantee that the project won't run well and will come in late with a higher price tag than planned for.
NSA is not alone. Arlington National Cemetery also looks like it was hit by Microsoft resellers under the Bush junta.
a) buy another new console so you have one for your other OS; and one for games. This adds revenue for Sony, but causes them a loss as they subsidize the basic console (i.e. the will lose the subsidy twice on such a customer).
Except that they probably would by not just another console but another brand of console. Wii is much more popular if games are the deciding factor. Plus, I can't see anyone buying an additional console from Sony if they got burned by Sony's microsoft-style dicking. Sony can still fix this and come out looking relatively ok by releasing a fixed version of the firmware update. I wonder what kind of pressure cause the change and how it was applied, it seems it might be similar as to what Tivo went through though it was a much smaller company.
If nothing else, this incident shows the importance of eradicating closed firmware.
A lot of countries consumer protection laws provide for protection that devices should operate as advertised. Sony advertised the "Other OS" option and many purchased PS3's instead of Wii because it could run Linux. Sony pulling that feature retroactively after the purchase is worse than a bait-and-switch, which is also illegal.
Sony has always had a slightly dodgy rep, but given the popularity of the "Run Other [Linux] OS" feature, it is possible that they have rats or cockroaches in their larder:
"Find and Lean on your insider friend, 'the fox' Having a trusted MS friend in the account is critical. Some people (unix Bigots) can think of lots of reasons not to have a MS solution. MS folks may not be the strongest voice but they are true believers (Protect them, make them look good)". Sony can gain a lot of goodwill, and thus cash, by cleaning house if these are present. Yahoo's is not the only company Microsofters have worked at destroying through entryism.
Or if they want to make sure their developers get paid, they could release it dual license GPL / proprietary. That way everyone brings something to the table: cash or code.
And, no, despite the talking points from this season's blusterings from M$partners, the project maintainer is not required to accept the code. That stands regardless of the license used, GPL, BSD or other. And regardless of the license, they are still in the best position to earn money from customization or deployment. Even if something is FOSS and easy to deploy, there are still a lot of companies that would rather pay you to set it up right the first time and walk their staff through the process. Do it in a way that they're happy about and they'll call back with more orders.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're in there making changes, I have the following request: please set up Firefox as a generic XML reader.
You can pre-load XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument schemas and pre-load one stylesheet for each. But allow other, user-specified style sheets to be used and other XML schemas or DTDs to be loaded by the user. Valid, well-formed XML allows that to be doable.
Firefox doesn't have to do more than render, but that will be of value.
A year too late :(
It's a well known fact that it can be done retroactively. It's just that it's an awful lot of bureaucracy, paperwork and hassle to do it that way.
You liars are annoying. H.264 is still a closed standard and it does not matter how many Microsoft Partners tell you that closed is open or that open means "buy our stuff". H.264 fails on points 2, 3, and 4 of the formal definition of open standard:
Canonical is free to re-sell proprietary standards, but let's not pretend that helping establish vendor lock-in was or is a goal of Free and Open Source Software. Oh, wait, Canonical is not re-selling H.264 except for the OEM editions. The rest of you are still on the hook for the bill because it is merely a distributor. I notice that the enGadget article on H.264 patents leaves out the price for the third category obligated to pay under patent law: the user. GIF should have been a lesson about software patents.
Obviously the Microsoft Party and its members have problems with the above definition and seek to disparage it and the process itself. Keeping the second version of the European Interoperability Framework clean, free from M$ damage, takes work.
The problems with Flash are many and technical. It's so badly designed from a security perspective, that it's almost like a Microsoft product. The giveaway that it is not is that it runs on a handful of linux architectures. Games could just as well be written as Java Applets, which would increase the security and portability of the games. For movies, Flash is just plain wrong and other wrappers should be used, Ogg Theora being the obvious choice after MPEG or QuickTime.
If you listen to Faux "News"
There. Fixed that for you.
It's a sad day when most know so little about architectures that PPC and Sparc are re-flagged as mere 'alternatives' rather than being recognized for the areas they excel in. The Wintel ideal is a ratio of worse that 2:1 of hardware to services. Each box burning tens if not hundreds of watts. Sparc is an open architecture and handles many threads per core, so for most things you should be able to replace a rack of Wintel boxes with a single Sparc. We'll see how long Oracle allows you to access that Sun paper.
Fujitsu also provides info sparc architecture because it also sells server hardware.
No, that is incorrect. Stock value has relatively little correlation with how a company is actually performing. Paying executives in stock, vested or not, is still giving a bonus without regard to company improvement. The only difference is will that stock pay a little or a lot, but again, to drive the point home, does not have anything to do with performance, only speculation on the stock price itself. What we need is a 180-degree turn and find a way to tie bonuses to performance.
I'm willing to offer myself as a test subject to verify this hypothesis.
Cool. We'll write you down as being in the control group. ;)
"However, bonus schemes in many cases are inherently flawed and encourage people to cut corners or do their job in a known inefficient way in order to maximize the bonus."
One way around that would be to hold the bonuses in escrow for two years, to be release only on the condition that the company performs at least satisfactorily during that time. The money could be invested in two twelve-month certificates or funds and repossessed at the end of either one.
What to do with the repossessed bonuses is another question because if done wrong it provides further incentive to sabotage or under perform. Tricks like donating the bonus to charity won't work because they would only end up at a charity presided over by the loser or a family member or, worse, end up channeled into a PAC like the Gates' Foundation.
Why don't the people responsible for it just make a new service that does functionally the same thing?
That would not change what the service does. Patents affect what something does not where it came from. So it does not matter at all where the code came from, you could have written it yourself, if it does functionally the same thing as what is covered by the patent, then it is infringing. That goes even for functionality that does something you think is wholly new and original, but turns out to have been granted a patent 16.999999 years ago. That's why software patents suck and should stay out of Europe and why, in the case of patents, US law should be harmonized with EU law.
Don't confuse patents with copyright.
"I've never had any of my computers, running Mac/Windows infected by anything that I know of, I don't use any sort of protection either..."
Well there's you're problem right there. If you're running Windows and connecting it to the net, it is infected as a matter of course whether you choose to become aware of it or not. The only way to prevent it, is to not use Windows.
So on behalf of all the Fortune 500 companies, for whom I do not represent, and on behalf of all the rest of us, whom I don't represent either, who feel the pinch from there elevated operational costs may I be the first to extend a heartfelt, sincere "FUCK YOU, VERY MUCH" to you and any horse you might have ridden in on.
In a situation like that the correct answer, before hanging up, is, "I do not recall. I don't work there anymore. Ask someone who works there. Have a nice day. Bye."
There are so many things wrong with that trial that it's hard to fathom how it got as far as it did. But one thing stands out, that is mentioned here elsewhere that is absolutely shocking and ought to be understandable and worrisome to all citizens, technical or non-technical:
What the heck is that for a travesty of process? It looks like the One Microsoft Way of thinking entering the courts with fakery all through. He was a city employee, arrested by city cops who had assisted in inappropriate baiting (conference call), held in a city jail, prosecuted by a city district attorney, in a trial presided over by a city judge, tried by a city jury, and presumably staying and continuing to stay in a city jail. That's not going to result in even the possibility of a fair trial. Then when the jury drags in deliberation, it's rebuilt to return the verdict desired by all these other city employees.
It is not illegal to have a monopoly, it is illegal to abuse that monopoly. Whether Apple gets a monopoly or not in the handset market is not relevant until it looks like the position is being abused.
It seems like slashdot is getting fewer and fewer user posts and more and more M$ related astroturf.
Fuck you for pushing Microsoft whitewashing and trying to frame every company, product or service in the context of Fighting the Microsoft. Apple has its problems but you are utterly full of shit to try to claim that Apple's claim to fame is other than a company focused on providing a good user experience with (usually) quality software and (often) quality hardware.
Yes, IBM was the relatively big evil back then. It turned out to be small, very small, compared to Gates who was created by IBM as a side effect of the anti-trust remedies. Talk about Gates being only hated recently is nothing but pure whitewashing. ESR's comments are updated in 2004, but date back from 1998 a time when the views he expresses in the rant are a toned-down version of what was prevalent at the time. Or scroll down to readers' comments in Phil's page. Those are from 1999. You can find material going back to the mid-1970's he's always been perceived as an obnoxious dweeb.
Huh? I know there are a handful of US States that have experimented with this but they are in the minority. Most US States and the Federal Government still run their own prisons.
Even using data from 1999, that is not true: Prison privatization in just one instance of corporate welfare. By itself it skims many billions of dollars and actually creates many societal problems. From the student paper linked there you can see that the main argument for privatized prisons is a circular argument.
Need for incarceration is an indication that something failed and needs to be fixed in how society builds its communities and cultivates citizens. Corrective action never is more cost effective than prevention. Happy, well-adjusted, well-fed, individuals busy doing useful things that they find interesting aren't going to get into crime.
There you hit the nail on the head. Once the US moved to a privatize prison system, we ended up with an economic incentive to increase crime while at the same time jacking up penalties for increasingly trivial non-white collar crime. We also now have a whole industry related to shipping, importing, exporting and warehousing prisoners across state lines and even from one region of the country to the next.
the "villain" that he was seen as being in the 1990s.
Gates marketeers never get tired of getting paid to whitewash his reputation, do they? Here is the whine he wrote in 1976. He wasn't always big, but he was always annoying and wrong. The myth of Horatio Alger is just that a myth, and Gates was a rich kid from rich parents and rich grandparents who's mom's connections were in a lucky place at a lucky time.
Bigjeff5, you describe the shithole small tech schools I complain about. It's not just one school, but an epidemic across many, many schools like the one you describe going to.
And at most junior colleges, there are posers on the engineering staff and IT departments manning the labs that actively hunt down students that aren't toeing the Microsoft line. They come down on those students softly at first increasingly hard until the student knuckles under or quits. Often it's just simple bullshit that is enough, such as putting it off indefinitely with kindly sounding blow-off phrases: "sure, we'll look at linux later, if there is time", ensuring that there never is time. Or other bullshit like "start with Windows and when you have proved yourself, you can try other systems", or still more shit like "why, yes, we teach both Windows and Linux" while actually cutting out all non-MS systems and languages except for leaving a handful of electives with NO hands-on lab work. They also find all kinds of ways to break any non-MS packages that the faculty forced them to install. "Oops, sorry, that last upgrade must have erased it. We'll get right on that next month."
Some places even relegate all non-MS technologies to a tiny handful of elective course, only available in the final year, which the student might not even have time for even if the interest and motivation have not been rubbed out.
The problem is not a joke. It's not just kernel developers we are not producing, but programmers, system administrators and software engineers. There are almost no new people coming into the workforce with even a basic knowledge of correct design or methods. Even the big names are noticing this, but they're isolated far enough at the top that they miss sight of the fundamental staffing problems that have allowed Microsoft products anywhere near campus.
There are times I suspect the government actually paying the terrorists to be terrorists.
What? You mean like illegally smuggling cocaine and weapons to steer the outcome of US elections?
There is a lot of mention of technical failures and cost overruns. That's something associated with Windows usage and Microsoft resellers. Those aren't the sole cause of the cost overruns, but they pretty much guarantee that the project won't run well and will come in late with a higher price tag than planned for.
NSA is not alone. Arlington National Cemetery also looks like it was hit by Microsoft resellers under the Bush junta.
a) buy another new console so you have one for your other OS; and one for games. This adds revenue for Sony, but causes them a loss as they subsidize the basic console (i.e. the will lose the subsidy twice on such a customer).
Except that they probably would by not just another console but another brand of console. Wii is much more popular if games are the deciding factor. Plus, I can't see anyone buying an additional console from Sony if they got burned by Sony's microsoft-style dicking. Sony can still fix this and come out looking relatively ok by releasing a fixed version of the firmware update. I wonder what kind of pressure cause the change and how it was applied, it seems it might be similar as to what Tivo went through though it was a much smaller company.
If nothing else, this incident shows the importance of eradicating closed firmware.
A lot of countries consumer protection laws provide for protection that devices should operate as advertised. Sony advertised the "Other OS" option and many purchased PS3's instead of Wii because it could run Linux. Sony pulling that feature retroactively after the purchase is worse than a bait-and-switch, which is also illegal.
Sony has always had a slightly dodgy rep, but given the popularity of the "Run Other [Linux] OS" feature, it is possible that they have rats or cockroaches in their larder: "Find and Lean on your insider friend, 'the fox' Having a trusted MS friend in the account is critical. Some people (unix Bigots) can think of lots of reasons not to have a MS solution. MS folks may not be the strongest voice but they are true believers (Protect them, make them look good)". Sony can gain a lot of goodwill, and thus cash, by cleaning house if these are present. Yahoo's is not the only company Microsofters have worked at destroying through entryism.
Or if they want to make sure their developers get paid, they could release it dual license GPL / proprietary. That way everyone brings something to the table: cash or code.
And, no, despite the talking points from this season's blusterings from M$partners, the project maintainer is not required to accept the code. That stands regardless of the license used, GPL, BSD or other. And regardless of the license, they are still in the best position to earn money from customization or deployment. Even if something is FOSS and easy to deploy, there are still a lot of companies that would rather pay you to set it up right the first time and walk their staff through the process. Do it in a way that they're happy about and they'll call back with more orders.