It looks more like it is not a cross-licensing deal. Usually, those go along the lines of a swap for the duration of the agreement. This agreement does not do that. It is an exchange of cash. That's a very different activity and establishes a practice that can be continued when the agreement is over (either on schedule or pre-maturely). Furthermore, the prices could change any time.
Cutting a deal with Microsoft for temporary licensing of their sw patents is a set up for accusations of patent violations.
The USPTO has handed out far too many sw patents for all kinds of material skimmed from curricula, text books, and established best practices. There are just too many to go through and laywers can fight over even the worst of them for years. No. The only option is to annull all patents the USPTO has accidentally given out for software, algorithms, formulas or business methods, and to ban granting new ones.
Patents have no place in software. Copyright has been fine and has the added advantage that it is far less a hinder to progress.
...If there are patent violations, and no doubt there are some areas of code that bear more than a slight resemblance to patented software design...
Copyright and (sw) patents are completely different, unrelated things. Copyright has to do with an expression. Patents have to do with an activity. So to determine copyright infringement, it is necessary to compare the actual code for similarities. For patent infringement, it's only necessary to look at what the code purports to do.
And also one of the reasons why it is important to get said open standards into daily usage. In your page's call to action, it would help to name specific open standards. OpenDocument, iCalendar, IMAP, and POP come to mind from the examples given there.
I recall that on the US network channel that won the bid for a monopoly on broadcasting the 1996 Olympics an hour of prime time TV contained about 7 minutes of actual sports. The few shows I see nowadays, I see without ads. On US commercial network tv these shows take an hour. Without the ads, they're about 35 minutes, less if you skip the intro music and closing credits.
The web does have the potential to take those guys out, but they key is to promote DRM-free technology and open standards. If we get into a situation on the web where access is controlled by other than the audience, then we have the same mess as with television and radio...
MSI packages support unattended installation (with any install options selected ahead of time), and can be made an automatic part of an unattended installation of Windows, or automatically pushed to computers or users attached to a domain via group policy at any time...
That, like many of MS gimmicks, sounds good in theory. However, many sites I run across have MS Windows admins that tell their users that such practices don't work with non-MS apps. If it were just one or two, I'd blame the third party vendor, but from where I stand MSI seems to have some impediments.
The fact that it's been out for so many years, yet still not widely utilized suggest some deficiencies or defects which prevent its use in practice. Either that or MS only shops are flat out lying when they tell users that other software can't be remotely installed. It's a message spouted at far to many sites for it to be an anomaly.
It's not like UNIX platforms don't have programs that use non APT style installers that are fragile and need heavy modification and babysitting to work correctly.
Perhaps individual programs here and there, though that's quite rare these days in general, and more or less a non-issue for medium and large projects/products. Even if it can occur, there are easy ways around it. In such a situation, odds are you're compiling locally. If you're doing that, then with only two or three extra steps, you can roll it into a local package which can then be handled automatically by the package manager such as APT or RPM.
Windows is no more prone to malware than any other OS...
If you follow any of the security lists, you'll find that's not quite the case. Removing admin access for the users helps a bit, but most spyware, rootkits, and other malware roll right in through MSIE or MS Outlook.
Anyway, the point is that users (aka customers) are not to blame for defects in the vendor's products.
In fact Clear Channel would rather try to play the same music in every market,...
Maybe the corrected statement should reach In fact Clear Channel would rather try to play the same recording in every market
ClearChannel is not about music or "entertainment". It's about delivering advertising to your ears. You should be able to figure that out from its actions: just enough filler between the ads.
Back when the company was still prefering to keep a low profile, I stumbled across a rare interview with one of the top executives. He confirmed what I suspected even back then by saying flat out that ClearChannel was about advertising and if they could get by without music, they would.
It didn't help that with the lack of really independent radio stations
From it's start, up until sometime around the epicenter of the Reagan years, radio had been about public service.
There used to be many, many local and regional stations. Most large high schools and many small ones even had their own broadcasting stations. All these low power stations were banned in prep for media consolidation. High power equipment required by law now is neither cheap to acquire nor operate.
Before that consolidatoin, news was largely about passing information about current events, not pushing an agenda, propagandizing or preaching. Music and such was played because people liked it, not because a cartel was promoting. There was even other entertainment like serials and radio theater. I must be old, I can recall when the weatherman/woman stood off to the side and didn't block the weather map.
Yeah. Looking back it seems rather naive and no it wasn't perfect, but there was significantly more substance.
We still think of it that way, though that world is long gone and replaced long since by corporate output. Very few want to admit how bad it has become, it's much more comfortable to pretend otherwise. Even fewer want to 'rock the boat' and shape it back into something useful. Net radio might be the opportunity.
Hmm. It seems that the thriving ecosystem of spyware, viruses, worms and trojans is also the direct result of MS' coding practices. Or perhaps to be more precise because of fundamental design flaws in the product. Either way, the problem is not the user, but the vendor.
But that does bring up a very important second point. The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows. Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually. In that case, especially for large scale sites, the IT dept decides it's too much work to go for best of breed and knuckle under to convenience. Even if they do go with third party apps, time limitations (lunch, meetings, end of shift, project deadlines, etc.) may intervene and prevent completion of installation of the third party apps. With 10's or 100's of millions of PC's, just shifting the frequency a small amount means large numbers of units.
Using a system which is not prone to spyware, viruses, worms or trojans and does well with low system requirements is also an option for many. Power users and hard core gamers may have trouble. Some, a surprisingly small number, of business apps may cause trouble. But low-tech users who just surf or e-mail or play music will do just fine and may not notice.
So there are three choices there:
toss the spyware machine and buy a new one - an ecologically bad choice
re-format, re-install and genuflect to Chairman Gates' photo - a choice that damages the free market
upgrade to Linux, BSD, or something that extends the effective life of the hardware - a change which some users may not notice, but which may traumatize gamers and powerusers
Hardware is toxic and energy intensive to produce and to dispose of. MS pushes a short hardware upgrade cycle, aiming to get its customers to make new hardware purchases every two years or so. Remember not only do later versions require newer hardware, eventually out-growing old hardware, most of MS' income is from Windows sales and nearly all of that is from OEM sales. Thus, MS is economically dependent on a short life span of units with unreasonably large ecological footprints.
Say the ecological footprint of hardware is the same over time.
A 3 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 30% reduction in ecological impact
A 4 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 50% reduction
A 5 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 60% reduction
A 6 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 70% reduction
You get the idea. Or...
A 4 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 25% reduction in ecological impact
A 5 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 40% reduction
A 6 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 50% reduction
A 3, 4 or 5 year hardware cycle is perfectly reasonable, unless the software/operating systems gets so slow and bloated that performance suffers. Or unless the vendor stops supporting the software or operating system and their is no way to get third party or home grown support. So, MS-enforced hardware upgrades are definitely not green.
Anyway, the blog (it's not a real article) is way off base about energy consumption. Shame on/. for pushing MS' hype.
MS' coding practices make the company un-ecological: As the blog points out, currently, most MS machines get left on 24/7 (or as close to that as possible) to allow crackers to get in -- I mean to allow the system administrators to push out patches on "patch tuesday" or whatever it's called now.
Turning the machines off would also make them invulnerable to exploits, at least for the duration of the inactive period. Wake-on-LAN is an underutilized feature and could allow that. But it has nothing to do with any specific operating system.
It's possible that was a factor, it's certainly a quick way to change policy.
But Thailand was about due for another coup around now anyway, so it's hard to guess what factors are really involved. The "free" trade "negotiations" with Thailand were also going poorly in the eyes of the MPAA/RIAA/Disney/MS crowd.
There has been a history of one country *cough*USA*cough or another nudging along uprisings here and there to advance specific corporate interests or agendas. Many governments toppled that way have been toppled for less.
The point is that without patents, big companies like Microsoft can easily out muscle and out market little guys with good ideas. With patents, the little guys can win more.
Though I can understand why people get paid to say or write that, I find it difficult to accept that anyone actually believes that. It doesn't work that way even in theory:
Maybe just maybe Bricklin could have gotten the concept of electronic spreadsheet accepted by the USPTO. But getting there to the initial product, he would have tread on dozens of patents utilized countless algorithms and concepts from Computer Science curricula and industry best practices which are owned by portfolio companies. They would have eaten his lunch even with cross licensing.
If he had patented (which, bizarrely, is allowed for software in the US), then neither Apple's nor IBM's PCs would have taken off. The combination of Apple and Visicalc got PCs into most businesses. Later, IBM and Lotus 1-2-3 got PCs into all businesses. So as far as the PC is concerned, Visicalc was the killer app.
Visicalc led to Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3 became ubiquitous, though sorely needed improvements, which led to Quattro. Which was too fast and could exchange data with other spreadsheets so that was stopped by Excel and later corrected by OpenOffice.org's Calc. OOo Calc and a few others even fix some of the calculation errors that have been persistent in Excel functions across many versions and many years.
Patents here would have stifled that progression. Most likely PCs would never have become common in business and homes beyond the occasional hobbyist. Who knows where we would be without the PC revolution? Maybe not even any WWW. But who knows? Maybe it would have come 10 years later and been based around Next, though that too has been in some ways dependent on the success of the Apple ][.
Interesting that it involves the exchange of money. This lays the ground work for MS to keep collecting after they sever the agreement with Novell. The agreement runs out in 5 years, but there is a clause in the contract which allows MS to terminate it earlier.
Either way, it tries to fool people into accepting software patents. For the short term, many projects can be moved to European servers, just like when encryption export was illegal in the US. However, in the long term, the US needs to adopt a more common sense approach to patents and revoke any involving intangibles like software, mathematical formulas, and literature. Expression of those is already protected by copyright. What we have now is a broken system which allows restricting ideas.
I've been reading on the GPLv3 and I don't like it.
Now's your chance to debug it while it's still in development by providing your input. There is an
open invitation to contribute. GPL3 is coming whether individuals here or there like it or not, so at least try to make sure it addresses your concerns.
You can't stop progress, but you can help define it.
"Unlike some other peer-to-peer downloading methods, BitTorrent is a protocol that offloads some of the file tracking work to a central server (called a tracker)."
I'm guessing it could be set up otherwise, but as long as it offloads work to a central server, it's as good as centralized -- at least where lawyers and police are concerned.
e-Mail per se has the same level of security as a postcard. Any company rellying on the mail being kept secret are just complete idiots.
As you point out, the only solution is to keep the data safe. In case of e-Mail, any critically confident information should be PGP/GPG crypted,
That makes it safe not only on the server, but in transit as well which may be more of a benefit.
Interestingly, this very topic came up recently and you might find the following interesting:
"
29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;
30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;
31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;
32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;..."
(my emphasis above)
That's an EC resolution - a finished decision. We've known about the problem for years and years, we've had the solution at hand since PGP/GPG, and even the politicians have caught on: EU member states are called on to use encryption for e-mail, not only use software which can be independently code audited. Now, why aren't we following it yet?
That's generally how it works. The places I've worked so far, the sysadmins have pretty good about not reading mail, or at least able to keep up appearances. But making sure that your sysadmins have integrity is only one part of the puzzle.
The few sites I have observed running MS Exchange seem to spend a significant number of days per year compromised in one way or another. Usually it's warez, pron or films, but it could just as easily be a competitor. Many of those sysadmins don't exactly rush to sanitize the server because it takes so long, so they'll let it slide until someone complains or until it interferes with services in some way or other. A quiet unobtrusive intruder could be there reading the mail quite some time before having to find his way in again. But I digress, that's only one MTA of many possible.
A more problematic aspect that affects nearly all mail servers, regardless of which one, is that more or less all mail goes in clear text still, not even encrypted from server to server. I mean GPG has been out how many years and we're still working this way? The web caught up and starting using HTTPS many years ago, but not mail. All it takes is a sniffer on the same subnet as the mail server and all the mail can be collected and read. Set it up right and it's not detected either. Many developers and non-mail sysadmins would be in position to set up such a beast.
At one site, I figured out that a consultant was doing just that, sniffing e-mail. I was on my way to a new job and eager to leave all that site's problems so I only dropped some hints to my boss about it, but stopped at that. I came close to baiting the consultant with a false e-mail that would have caused him to act on the fictional message. It would have been best, looking back now, if I had done that.
Read the post you're replying to again. It's about kennismigrants (knowledge immigrants), specifically those with IT skills. What kind of "professional" degree are you talking about? Unless it's an MD or similar, there's no demand and that's why you're getting treated like anybody else and not fast tracked.
I have to admire the system described there in the Netherlands, as well as the one in Candada. It makes perfect sense to try hard to attract workers with skills that benefit your country instead of those that only break even or drag it down.
Netscape had a product, which filled in a need customers had: a web browser.
Symantect and McCafe are only parasites, leeching from Microsoft's -mistakes-. It was unevitable that Microsoft would one day try to fix those mistakes...
But MS is not trying to fix those mistakes. MS has figured out that it can take Symantic and co.'s lunch and there's nothing they can do to stop it. Read the article, it is simply muscling in on Symantec, McAfee and the others by not fixing and charging for not fixing.
To a certain exent, the anti-malware companies have shot themselves in their collective foot by letting the public perceive all that malware as "computer" viruses or "e-mail" viruses. That rather eliminates any reminder of just how dependent on the MS monopoly those companies are. Calling the malware by what it actually is like "MS Windows viruses", "MS Outlook viruses", "MSIE viruses", etc. would have maintain a more better perception by the public of the anti-malware companies' situation. However, they probably couldn't have done that or anything else like it because that would have brought attention, even indirectly, to more robust options and weakened the operating system monopoly upon which they are so dependent.
No one survives a partnership with MS. These anti-malware companies have had a longer run than most anyone else in the same situation.
Bittorrent is more or less centralized. Centralized targets are easy to shutdown and pillage.
Usenet is decentralized and distributed. It would be very hard to deal with. So this is just a matter of the MPAA/RIAA picking the low hanging fruits. Governments had trouble censoring Usenet, the MPAA/RIAA aren't going to do much better.
The easy money is going after the centralized servers and then getting the big ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet. First, steer people away from the clients. If they don't know that it exists, they don't get the service. Second, stop providing clients. That raises the bar even further. So no NNTP client from the ISPs, and I bet MS Windows doesn't even ship with a program that can handle NNTP either. Even ten years ago, back when people were constantly fiddling with their computers, something like 65% kept the default programs and configurations, the percentage must be much higher nowadays. Lastly, when their Usenet usage drops enough, they can quietly pull the plug.
Since as a side effect of being distributed and decentralized, Usenet is dreadfully difficult
to track or censor or charge extra for. The largest ISPs are owned by MPAA/RIAA interests anyway and not being able to charge extra rubs them the wrong way. So, these interests steer people instead to Facebook, MySpace, and other ad revenue generators. Many western governments appear to have issues with free flow of information, and especially troubled by sources that are difficult to censor. Remember, Usenet got around blocks that even seasoned reporters couldn't when covering dramatic events like the fall of eastern block governments or even China's Tienamen Square massacre.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which
predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep
in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were
probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
If (when) the One Laptop Per Child project takes, of then the mesh network will need a new communications network with many of the characteristics of Usenet. HTTP just is not practical over slow, intermittent connections, so without a distributed, decentralized communications system, mesh users are cut out of web forums and such. Even e-mail is difficult if several of the nodes between you and your correspondents are frequently down or out of contact.
Cattle could be replaced with buffalo. They need far less maintenance, are immune to many cattle diseases, and their hooves + movement patterns actually help cultivate the grasslands.
what is the evolutionary pressure? If everyone lives, then evolution stops.
Death is not the only way to reduce the fitness of an individual. Delaying reproduction is almost as effective, so is interfering with raising children and grandchildren.
Do the math. How many more descendents will an individual have after 5 generations, assuming 3 offspring starting age 20 than assuming 3 offspring starting age 25 or 30 for each generation? Or compare that to 2 offspring or to 1.5 per generation, or a combination of lower litter sizes and longer generations. Quite a difference, isn't it?
A lot of evolutionary pressure is going on since industrialization. Hard work gets you and ulcer and an early grave, more than it gets you better chances for your descendents. Being healthy and at least average smarts gets you military service, which these days includes more than physical and psychological stress. Exposure to toxic materials (strange vaccines, industrial pollutants like DU and asbestos, etc.) is now part of the plan. Being above average smarts means more education, which can push reproduction back a decade or more.
It's the same principle behind investments and compound interest. Evolutionary pressure is still there, if you choose to look.
Education and culture have roles, too, since their resulting behaviors, while negligable for an individual can affect a population. Some studies have found that smoking, for example, lowers IQ by 2 points or something like that. Skipping the arguments about IQ relevance, such a small change is irrelevant to any individual, but when it affects a population, the effects are very pronounced. Chicken and biscuits, for another example, are made with lard and fried in lard and served with a lard gravy -- if they are to be tasty -- shorten the average life span of their proponents, losing the 'inclusive fitness' value of that even older individuals contribute. Or whale blubber, which was once nourishing and full of vitamins and needed for an extremely active way life, is now full of PCBs, dioxins and other poison in addition to providing too many calories and too much saturated fat for a highly sedentary lifestyle. Or cultures where women have sex with anyone they meet whom they happen to like did well from the increased genetic diversity, until the advent of interstates, air travel and bonuses like chlamydia and AIDS.
Pre-industrial societies had a lot of negative factors, but on average seemed to work out what was best for the population as a whole, given the technolgies and rate of travel. Post-industrial society could take an active lead in advancing at least intelligence and health in the population rather than suppressing it.
Most if not all mail transfer agents no longer operate as open relays by default, a problem which used to be the main contribution to spam. People blamed the complexity of Sendmail for that and other problems, so many distros moved to other mail transfer agents for their default. A few years ago Sendmail was still about 65% of the mail servers.
What is the current marketshare of Sendmail now and what is the frequency of others like Exim, qmail, and Postfix?
Slashdot Mirror
It looks more like it is not a cross-licensing deal. Usually, those go along the lines of a swap for the duration of the agreement. This agreement does not do that. It is an exchange of cash. That's a very different activity and establishes a practice that can be continued when the agreement is over (either on schedule or pre-maturely). Furthermore, the prices could change any time.
Cutting a deal with Microsoft for temporary licensing of their sw patents is a set up for accusations of patent violations. The USPTO has handed out far too many sw patents for all kinds of material skimmed from curricula, text books, and established best practices. There are just too many to go through and laywers can fight over even the worst of them for years. No. The only option is to annull all patents the USPTO has accidentally given out for software, algorithms, formulas or business methods, and to ban granting new ones.
Patents have no place in software. Copyright has been fine and has the added advantage that it is far less a hinder to progress.
And also one of the reasons why it is important to get said open standards into daily usage. In your page's call to action, it would help to name specific open standards. OpenDocument, iCalendar, IMAP, and POP come to mind from the examples given there.
You meant Novell debacle, right?
I recall that on the US network channel that won the bid for a monopoly on broadcasting the 1996 Olympics an hour of prime time TV contained about 7 minutes of actual sports. The few shows I see nowadays, I see without ads. On US commercial network tv these shows take an hour. Without the ads, they're about 35 minutes, less if you skip the intro music and closing credits.
The web does have the potential to take those guys out, but they key is to promote DRM-free technology and open standards. If we get into a situation on the web where access is controlled by other than the audience, then we have the same mess as with television and radio...
That, like many of MS gimmicks, sounds good in theory. However, many sites I run across have MS Windows admins that tell their users that such practices don't work with non-MS apps. If it were just one or two, I'd blame the third party vendor, but from where I stand MSI seems to have some impediments.
The fact that it's been out for so many years, yet still not widely utilized suggest some deficiencies or defects which prevent its use in practice. Either that or MS only shops are flat out lying when they tell users that other software can't be remotely installed. It's a message spouted at far to many sites for it to be an anomaly.
Perhaps individual programs here and there, though that's quite rare these days in general, and more or less a non-issue for medium and large projects/products. Even if it can occur, there are easy ways around it. In such a situation, odds are you're compiling locally. If you're doing that, then with only two or three extra steps, you can roll it into a local package which can then be handled automatically by the package manager such as APT or RPM.
If you follow any of the security lists, you'll find that's not quite the case. Removing admin access for the users helps a bit, but most spyware, rootkits, and other malware roll right in through MSIE or MS Outlook.
Anyway, the point is that users (aka customers) are not to blame for defects in the vendor's products.
Maybe the corrected statement should reach In fact Clear Channel would rather try to play the same recording in every market
ClearChannel is not about music or "entertainment". It's about delivering advertising to your ears. You should be able to figure that out from its actions: just enough filler between the ads.
Back when the company was still prefering to keep a low profile, I stumbled across a rare interview with one of the top executives. He confirmed what I suspected even back then by saying flat out that ClearChannel was about advertising and if they could get by without music, they would.
From it's start, up until sometime around the epicenter of the Reagan years, radio had been about public service. There used to be many, many local and regional stations. Most large high schools and many small ones even had their own broadcasting stations. All these low power stations were banned in prep for media consolidation. High power equipment required by law now is neither cheap to acquire nor operate.
Before that consolidatoin, news was largely about passing information about current events, not pushing an agenda, propagandizing or preaching. Music and such was played because people liked it, not because a cartel was promoting. There was even other entertainment like serials and radio theater. I must be old, I can recall when the weatherman/woman stood off to the side and didn't block the weather map.
We still think of it that way, though that world is long gone and replaced long since by corporate output. Very few want to admit how bad it has become, it's much more comfortable to pretend otherwise. Even fewer want to 'rock the boat' and shape it back into something useful. Net radio might be the opportunity.Yeah. Looking back it seems rather naive and no it wasn't perfect, but there was significantly more substance.
Hmm. It seems that the thriving ecosystem of spyware, viruses, worms and trojans is also the direct result of MS' coding practices. Or perhaps to be more precise because of fundamental design flaws in the product. Either way, the problem is not the user, but the vendor.
But that does bring up a very important second point. The "re-format and re-install" mantra has the effect of reducing competition because of the difficulty in auto-installing third-party software on MS-Windows. Unlike Red Hat's kick start or Debian's APT, the third party apps have to wait until they can be installed manually. In that case, especially for large scale sites, the IT dept decides it's too much work to go for best of breed and knuckle under to convenience. Even if they do go with third party apps, time limitations (lunch, meetings, end of shift, project deadlines, etc.) may intervene and prevent completion of installation of the third party apps. With 10's or 100's of millions of PC's, just shifting the frequency a small amount means large numbers of units.
Using a system which is not prone to spyware, viruses, worms or trojans and does well with low system requirements is also an option for many. Power users and hard core gamers may have trouble. Some, a surprisingly small number, of business apps may cause trouble. But low-tech users who just surf or e-mail or play music will do just fine and may not notice.
So there are three choices there:
Hardware is toxic and energy intensive to produce and to dispose of. MS pushes a short hardware upgrade cycle, aiming to get its customers to make new hardware purchases every two years or so. Remember not only do later versions require newer hardware, eventually out-growing old hardware, most of MS' income is from Windows sales and nearly all of that is from OEM sales. Thus, MS is economically dependent on a short life span of units with unreasonably large ecological footprints.
Say the ecological footprint of hardware is the same over time.
You get the idea. Or ...
A 3, 4 or 5 year hardware cycle is perfectly reasonable, unless the software/operating systems gets so slow and bloated that performance suffers. Or unless the vendor stops supporting the software or operating system and their is no way to get third party or home grown support. So, MS-enforced hardware upgrades are definitely not green.
Anyway, the blog (it's not a real article) is way off base about energy consumption. Shame on /. for pushing MS' hype.
MS' coding practices make the company un-ecological: As the blog points out, currently, most MS machines get left on 24/7 (or as close to that as possible) to allow crackers to get in -- I mean to allow the system administrators to push out patches on "patch tuesday" or whatever it's called now.
Turning the machines off would also make them invulnerable to exploits, at least for the duration of the inactive period. Wake-on-LAN is an underutilized feature and could allow that. But it has nothing to do with any specific operating system.
It's possible that was a factor, it's certainly a quick way to change policy. But Thailand was about due for another coup around now anyway, so it's hard to guess what factors are really involved. The "free" trade "negotiations" with Thailand were also going poorly in the eyes of the MPAA/RIAA/Disney/MS crowd.
There has been a history of one country *cough*USA*cough or another nudging along uprisings here and there to advance specific corporate interests or agendas. Many governments toppled that way have been toppled for less.
Though I can understand why people get paid to say or write that, I find it difficult to accept that anyone actually believes that. It doesn't work that way even in theory:
Maybe just maybe Bricklin could have gotten the concept of electronic spreadsheet accepted by the USPTO. But getting there to the initial product, he would have tread on dozens of patents utilized countless algorithms and concepts from Computer Science curricula and industry best practices which are owned by portfolio companies. They would have eaten his lunch even with cross licensing.
Here's a quote from your leader around 1994:
'nuff said.If he had patented (which, bizarrely, is allowed for software in the US), then neither Apple's nor IBM's PCs would have taken off. The combination of Apple and Visicalc got PCs into most businesses. Later, IBM and Lotus 1-2-3 got PCs into all businesses. So as far as the PC is concerned, Visicalc was the killer app.
Visicalc led to Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3 became ubiquitous, though sorely needed improvements, which led to Quattro. Which was too fast and could exchange data with other spreadsheets so that was stopped by Excel and later corrected by OpenOffice.org's Calc. OOo Calc and a few others even fix some of the calculation errors that have been persistent in Excel functions across many versions and many years.
Patents here would have stifled that progression. Most likely PCs would never have become common in business and homes beyond the occasional hobbyist. Who knows where we would be without the PC revolution? Maybe not even any WWW. But who knows? Maybe it would have come 10 years later and been based around Next, though that too has been in some ways dependent on the success of the Apple ][.
Dude, grow up. Racists aren't only white.
Interesting that it involves the exchange of money. This lays the ground work for MS to keep collecting after they sever the agreement with Novell. The agreement runs out in 5 years, but there is a clause in the contract which allows MS to terminate it earlier.
Either way, it tries to fool people into accepting software patents. For the short term, many projects can be moved to European servers, just like when encryption export was illegal in the US. However, in the long term, the US needs to adopt a more common sense approach to patents and revoke any involving intangibles like software, mathematical formulas, and literature. Expression of those is already protected by copyright. What we have now is a broken system which allows restricting ideas.
But since a manual count is not part of the system, a manual recount will never be granted.
Now's your chance to debug it while it's still in development by providing your input. There is an open invitation to contribute. GPL3 is coming whether individuals here or there like it or not, so at least try to make sure it addresses your concerns.
You can't stop progress, but you can help define it.
That makes it safe not only on the server, but in transit as well which may be more of a benefit.
Interestingly, this very topic came up recently and you might find the following interesting:
(my emphasis above)
That's an EC resolution - a finished decision. We've known about the problem for years and years, we've had the solution at hand since PGP/GPG, and even the politicians have caught on: EU member states are called on to use encryption for e-mail, not only use software which can be independently code audited. Now, why aren't we following it yet?
That's generally how it works. The places I've worked so far, the sysadmins have pretty good about not reading mail, or at least able to keep up appearances. But making sure that your sysadmins have integrity is only one part of the puzzle.
The few sites I have observed running MS Exchange seem to spend a significant number of days per year compromised in one way or another. Usually it's warez, pron or films, but it could just as easily be a competitor. Many of those sysadmins don't exactly rush to sanitize the server because it takes so long, so they'll let it slide until someone complains or until it interferes with services in some way or other. A quiet unobtrusive intruder could be there reading the mail quite some time before having to find his way in again. But I digress, that's only one MTA of many possible.
A more problematic aspect that affects nearly all mail servers, regardless of which one, is that more or less all mail goes in clear text still, not even encrypted from server to server. I mean GPG has been out how many years and we're still working this way? The web caught up and starting using HTTPS many years ago, but not mail. All it takes is a sniffer on the same subnet as the mail server and all the mail can be collected and read. Set it up right and it's not detected either. Many developers and non-mail sysadmins would be in position to set up such a beast.
At one site, I figured out that a consultant was doing just that, sniffing e-mail. I was on my way to a new job and eager to leave all that site's problems so I only dropped some hints to my boss about it, but stopped at that. I came close to baiting the consultant with a false e-mail that would have caused him to act on the fictional message. It would have been best, looking back now, if I had done that.
Read the post you're replying to again. It's about kennismigrants (knowledge immigrants), specifically those with IT skills. What kind of "professional" degree are you talking about? Unless it's an MD or similar, there's no demand and that's why you're getting treated like anybody else and not fast tracked.
I have to admire the system described there in the Netherlands, as well as the one in Candada. It makes perfect sense to try hard to attract workers with skills that benefit your country instead of those that only break even or drag it down.
But MS is not trying to fix those mistakes. MS has figured out that it can take Symantic and co.'s lunch and there's nothing they can do to stop it. Read the article, it is simply muscling in on Symantec, McAfee and the others by not fixing and charging for not fixing.
To a certain exent, the anti-malware companies have shot themselves in their collective foot by letting the public perceive all that malware as "computer" viruses or "e-mail" viruses. That rather eliminates any reminder of just how dependent on the MS monopoly those companies are. Calling the malware by what it actually is like "MS Windows viruses", "MS Outlook viruses", "MSIE viruses", etc. would have maintain a more better perception by the public of the anti-malware companies' situation. However, they probably couldn't have done that or anything else like it because that would have brought attention, even indirectly, to more robust options and weakened the operating system monopoly upon which they are so dependent.
No one survives a partnership with MS. These anti-malware companies have had a longer run than most anyone else in the same situation.
Bittorrent is more or less centralized. Centralized targets are easy to shutdown and pillage.
Usenet is decentralized and distributed. It would be very hard to deal with. So this is just a matter of the MPAA/RIAA picking the low hanging fruits. Governments had trouble censoring Usenet, the MPAA/RIAA aren't going to do much better.
The easy money is going after the centralized servers and then getting the big ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet. First, steer people away from the clients. If they don't know that it exists, they don't get the service. Second, stop providing clients. That raises the bar even further. So no NNTP client from the ISPs, and I bet MS Windows doesn't even ship with a program that can handle NNTP either. Even ten years ago, back when people were constantly fiddling with their computers, something like 65% kept the default programs and configurations, the percentage must be much higher nowadays. Lastly, when their Usenet usage drops enough, they can quietly pull the plug.
Since as a side effect of being distributed and decentralized, Usenet is dreadfully difficult to track or censor or charge extra for. The largest ISPs are owned by MPAA/RIAA interests anyway and not being able to charge extra rubs them the wrong way. So, these interests steer people instead to Facebook, MySpace, and other ad revenue generators. Many western governments appear to have issues with free flow of information, and especially troubled by sources that are difficult to censor. Remember, Usenet got around blocks that even seasoned reporters couldn't when covering dramatic events like the fall of eastern block governments or even China's Tienamen Square massacre.
For those who don't know, Usenet is a distributed, decentralized, threaded messaging network which predates the Internet. There are problems with how it is designed, but keep in mind that it was set up in the mid-70's and back then if you were on the network, you were probably supposed to be there, eventally helped improve it, and for the most part were accountable.
If (when) the One Laptop Per Child project takes, of then the mesh network will need a new communications network with many of the characteristics of Usenet. HTTP just is not practical over slow, intermittent connections, so without a distributed, decentralized communications system, mesh users are cut out of web forums and such. Even e-mail is difficult if several of the nodes between you and your correspondents are frequently down or out of contact.
Cattle could be replaced with buffalo. They need far less maintenance, are immune to many cattle diseases, and their hooves + movement patterns actually help cultivate the grasslands.
Death is not the only way to reduce the fitness of an individual. Delaying reproduction is almost as effective, so is interfering with raising children and grandchildren.
Do the math. How many more descendents will an individual have after 5 generations, assuming 3 offspring starting age 20 than assuming 3 offspring starting age 25 or 30 for each generation? Or compare that to 2 offspring or to 1.5 per generation, or a combination of lower litter sizes and longer generations. Quite a difference, isn't it?
A lot of evolutionary pressure is going on since industrialization. Hard work gets you and ulcer and an early grave, more than it gets you better chances for your descendents. Being healthy and at least average smarts gets you military service, which these days includes more than physical and psychological stress. Exposure to toxic materials (strange vaccines, industrial pollutants like DU and asbestos, etc.) is now part of the plan. Being above average smarts means more education, which can push reproduction back a decade or more.
It's the same principle behind investments and compound interest. Evolutionary pressure is still there, if you choose to look.
Education and culture have roles, too, since their resulting behaviors, while negligable for an individual can affect a population. Some studies have found that smoking, for example, lowers IQ by 2 points or something like that. Skipping the arguments about IQ relevance, such a small change is irrelevant to any individual, but when it affects a population, the effects are very pronounced. Chicken and biscuits, for another example, are made with lard and fried in lard and served with a lard gravy -- if they are to be tasty -- shorten the average life span of their proponents, losing the 'inclusive fitness' value of that even older individuals contribute. Or whale blubber, which was once nourishing and full of vitamins and needed for an extremely active way life, is now full of PCBs, dioxins and other poison in addition to providing too many calories and too much saturated fat for a highly sedentary lifestyle. Or cultures where women have sex with anyone they meet whom they happen to like did well from the increased genetic diversity, until the advent of interstates, air travel and bonuses like chlamydia and AIDS.
Pre-industrial societies had a lot of negative factors, but on average seemed to work out what was best for the population as a whole, given the technolgies and rate of travel. Post-industrial society could take an active lead in advancing at least intelligence and health in the population rather than suppressing it.
Most if not all mail transfer agents no longer operate as open relays by default, a problem which used to be the main contribution to spam. People blamed the complexity of Sendmail for that and other problems, so many distros moved to other mail transfer agents for their default. A few years ago Sendmail was still about 65% of the mail servers.
What is the current marketshare of Sendmail now and what is the frequency of others like Exim, qmail, and Postfix?