Charging $10 - $24 per hour for Internet access at airports is rather stupid. First, you have the problems of quality of service, etc. If you pay and, for whatever reason, you want your money back, it's quite inconvenient.
However, a big problem is phishing.
Most people are using pretty weak systems that are easy to crack or intercept. From there its just a matter of sniffing to get at least a handful of credit card numbers. The fool on the other end will think that the network or their computer is broken or that it simply didn't work and the first try. Due to being in transit, illegal use of that card number won't be caught for hours or even days so there is plenty of time for the criminals to max out the card. Odds are that both the person and machine used to capture the card numbers is in a different state or country by the time the compromise is noticed.
Free access, or skimming a flat fee from all tickets, elminates that risk. No credit card use == no risk of credit card abuse.
... in the 1980s - for example to describe the suicide truck bombing of American Marines stationed in Beruit.
And a similarity there is that the commanding officer had a heads up in advance of the type of attack, the targets, and approximate vehicle type. Instead of setting up obstacles between the main gate and the barracks, a clear drive-through path was left. Instead of increasing guard, the existing guards were ordered to unload their weapons, keeping ammunition in the belt pack.
Actually, Norway should not be on the list, it has had assasinations/terrorist attacks recently. The
Mossad gunned down some random immigrant a few years ago. Wan't even the guy they were after, jut had the bad luck to be at the wrong place. IIRC it was the first terrorist incident in modern times on Norwegian soil.
Nor should Sweden be on the list.
Sweden has had two political assasinations in as many decades. Going back further, there is quite a bit of uncertainty about how accidental the demise of Dag Hammarskjöld really was. So the total could be three in modern times. That doesn't count Russian mafia gunning people down in parking lots, which would bring the total much higher.
Denmark had the Banditos and the Hells Angels in all-out war, even breaking into prison to kill. Now they collaborate... That doesn't count the street fights between ethnic groups nor the daylight gang rapes etc. Nor does it count the random eastern european mule here and there who drops dead from radiation poisoning because of a hot cargo in his vehicle.
The point here is that those that count above are all tied, or supspected to be tied, to the West, and the US in particular.
If your iPod or MP3 player does not already support Ogg Vorbis, then file a bugreport for it already. Get over the fact that Vorbis is Free codec, it's got excellent sound quality and compression.
Regardless of its technical merits, the MBAs, PHBs and other suits making the players are going avoid Vorbis simply because it is free unless 1) you point out examples like the seizure of players or 2) request Ogg Vorbis explicity. You can do both by filing a bug report.
There's more published, especially in local papers, but as you see in the Salon article, it's part of an combination investment/PR campaign and both MS reps and shills come down on any thing other than "Yay Bill!" So questions and/or critique stay low profile and is hard to find.
Also, the mention of tax breaks is a bit of an under statement. MS pays almost nothing: IT giants who don't pay tax part 2: how Microsoft does it. There's a bit of a stink about MS in Europe using foreign tax havens. And, by the way, MS seems to make more money buying and selling its own stock that in does even from sales of MS Windows. Bill hopped off as CEO the same year MS ran an $18,000,000,000 USD loss. Now he's stepped down completely. That could be interpreted to suggest that this summer's massive stock buyback could be an indication of real bad situation in Redmond.
Many single board computers also have ruggedized models which can operate in a wider range of temperatures. Often the ruggedized models can operate in from -40 C to +85 C or at least -25 C to +50 C. So use those. Most come with something useful like linux or QNX pre-installed. Many are designed for what you are describing and have many data ports.
You don't say in detail what types of data they will be collecting. But I'd try to keep as much equipment, especially power supplies, out of the chilled area as possible and have each unit run as many sensors as possible.
The servers and workstations should definitely be out of the chilled area or at least in their own insulated locker.
Going a step further, try thin clients if you need terminals in the cold area. No sense in adding extra heat where it's not wanted or needed.
Sounds like maybe a grand but futile gesture, but who knows, maybe it will get the CTRL key(s) back to the right place. So I'll support the gesture in case it does work.
Caps lock is never used that I know of. I've seen numlock used, only rarely, but never capslock.
The CTRL keys, however, are used all the time, yet are currently in an ergonomically unsound position.
For some of use, they're used even more than the shift keys. Either way, they should be back away from the space bar and up above the shift keys where they belong. If that can be done by ditching the capslock key, then more power to it.
Nah. It's more for publicity than recruiting. Look at the venue. Those in the US that want to go to NYC are already there. Those overseas will have trouble with customs, given that they are 1) foreign, and 2) good at hacking code. It would have been smarter to choose Toronto or Vancouver, where it would be safer and easier for the contestants to travel.
I can see several reasons why it's to Google's, the contest's, and the contestants' advantage to have the final elimination round take place at the same phsycial location, but NYC is so 20th century.
Perhaps an explanation is that you perceive that platform to be more stable because the crashes cause a quiet re-boot, which is quickly (for you) forgotten.
Anyway, since we're swapping anecdotes, my experience is that XP goes belly up about once a week. I can't remember the last time I haven't seen a public XP site (kiosks, public stations, displays, visible staff stations) without at least one machine noticiably hung. When I ask XP users how often they have an unplanned restart, it's usually several times a month. Sometimes it's more, depending on how much they use the machine. That does not meet my definition of stable.
Perhaps it's 'more stable' simply through a re-definition of stable. When I hear Windows fanbois going an about how 'stable' XP is, rather than refuting directly I have started to ask that they explain what they mean by that. Generally they seem to mean 'more stable' as in 'more stable than NT 4.5'. When asked how it compares to Newtare or Solaris, they go on about how those don't count as they are in a whole other (better) class of 'stable'.
But the blind XP bashing really needs to stop around here
Cry me a river./. is not 'anti-MS' just for something to do. Real, legitimate gripes about poor quality, over-priced products and predatory business practices cannot be dismissed simply as bashing. Enough problems from one company and you get the back side of brand recognition. The 'bashing' will stop when the products and behaviors improve, but to-date it looks like more of the same instead.
People respond to how they are treated and what is expected of them. It's known as the Pygmalion Effect and well documented. If the staff get treated poorly or like dishonest people and management is always expecting the worst behavior, then, surprise, the staff will generally meet those expectations. Or if the staff get treated honestly and well and management is always expecting the best, then the staff will generally meet those expectations too. Obviously there are more factors than just how staff are treated and what is expected of their behavior, but those two are very, very large yet often not addressed.
Employees, despite what MBAs may say and act, are people and will act to meet expectations, good expectations or bad ones.
"... and if you have something that can't leak outside the company no matter what, don't put it somewhere that anyone else can get to it."
Ah, but that would preclude the use of MS products, especially server products and mandate solutions from other vendors and even Free/Open Source software. Networked storage (aka filesharing) on a MS-Windows server , MSIE and MS-Outlook have been invaluable boons to corporate and international espionage. However, it's no wonder that the media, beholden to MS via the advertising budget at the least, tends to focus on employees.
Do not expose your internal network
Make sure that intermediate storage is secure
The Groklaw analysis itself is spot on. It was my citation of it that was flawed. As you mention, it is for the MS Office 2003 format's specification. Currently MOOX is a big unknown. So actually the GP or GGP was flawed in claiming that MS guarantees anything at all about MOOX.
No. That's not exactly what Microsoft is doing with MOOX (MS Office 'Open' XML). What MS has done is blow some smoke about not suing:
"Patent protection is contingent on a conformant implementation. "Conformant" is not defined, meaning there is uncertainty needing legal advice."
"There is no provision for partial implementation, meaning true community-based development is not covered until complete."
The problems with first point there are obvious, without guidelines to say what is and is not conformant, there is no way any one who takes the risk of working with MOOX can be sure that MS won't come in later and take their lunch money... until it's too late.
The second point is more subtle. Take a look at the full MOOX spec, several thousand pages of it. Aside from the problems that much of the mark up is focused on formatting rather than structure, there is a lot missing from the spec and a lot only revelant to support of legacy document formats. It's so convoluted
that the only one likely to be fully compliant is MS itself, and even then only because it is writing the specification around existing products rather than with an eye to the future. Any competitor, even one with deep pockets, has little hope of actually successfully creating a complete implementation. So, given that no one except MS has much of a chance of creating a full implementation and there are no provisions for partial implementations, it's not much of an assurance.
Just those two weak points are a real bitch, and there are more.
No. The whole MSO 2007 / MOOX thing is just spin to keep the press munching on MS press releases and press release byproducts. When you dissect the MS 'covenant not to sue', there are really no assurances. Not only are you on your own, but by attempting to implment MOOX, MS has a very good idea of what they can go after in court.
That's where you see the importance of independent standards bodies like the W3C and OASIS. Using their standards, you get what you see and there is no worries about predation later down the road.
It's a Non-Disclosure Agreement dressed up by marketing. Calling 'shared' source or anything else for that matter won't change that.
...although the license doesn't allow developing a non-MS platform using the emulator, or porting the emulator to a non-MS platform.
You cannot use the emulator on/with/for any non-MS operating systems at all:
3.Conditions and Limitations
. ..
(B)Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) & 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product.Further, you may only use the software to emulate running Windows operating system products.
So the point of emulating Windows on Windows is what? The restrictions on the emulator seem to prevent any real use. Perhaps it's just to get some code out there so that MS can later go after Samba or other competition. SCO, round II, or something like that.
A strong case has be made elsewhere that the NDAs governing 'shared' source exists mostly to prevent developers from working on any non-MS platforms at all, not just Linux. Even viewing MS' code can taint a developer so that later work can be attacked, not necessarily successfully, in court claiming violation of the NDA.
It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
Loss or deterioration of the physical medium is the simplest to deal with, yet is an area where failure is seen currently.
Loss of codecs or data specs is another: who's going to fund/spend time reverse engineering a format or codec just to read a file to see if it is worth reverse engineering or decoding? DRM adds a whole new dimension to data loss. When the keys or authorization is lost, the file and it's contents are essentially lost.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of people go on about not attributing to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. With the case of the missing Apollo 11 tapes the are arguments for a case of malice, indifference or simple incompetence. And any of these can be the direct result of political appointees, rather than qualified individuals. But guess what, whether malice, indifference, or incompetence, the results are the same: lost data (which was damned expensive to acquire and/or irreplaceable) and lost cultural heritage.
Yeah. They're expensive as all get out. So the 'economic benefits' from harvesting are a bit of an understatement. But the point is that you don't have to eat them, just get rid of them.
Research already showed that those guys are quite temperature-sensitive. It is rather unlikely that they will be able to leave the artic water and reach as far as Gibraltar.
It doesn't matter so much. For various reasons, including elevated water temperatures, fish stocks are gone from the sea quite far north. The crabs have been encroaching on the regions containing the last commericial stocks. Even Bergen and Trondheim, which were once great fishing ports, are dead and tropic species are occasionally sighted in the waters.
With the quotas preventing the harvesting of the crabs, they are spreading more widely and more rapidly at an accelerating pace. Eventually the population will level off, but not before the last of the fish stock is ruined. The crabs pretty much wipe all organic matter from the bottom, especially tasty fish eggs. Without the eggs, there are no new fish. Without the fish, no fishing. Without the fishing, there will be no monied interests hindering oil drilling in the Barents.
The Norwegians are in a hard place because of the oil and their ties to the petro dollar. They also can't risk pissing of the last western military power, Russia, over the oil either.
They will eventually lose that game, unless they deal with the crabs. Open season and no catch limits on the crabs would give several enviromental and economic boosts to the region. They're quite good eating and can be sold for food, decimating them would help the fishing, but the crabs are just as good as materials for biofuels.
Looking at the way some of the national governments handle things, it almost looks like many leaders are kind of secretly hoping that a pandemic will help them avoid addressing the population problem. However, we still need some kind of planning in place otherwise, the population curve will recover in a few decades just like it did with the Black Plague.
For good and bad many things in society have changed since the turn of the previous century. One mixed blessing was that in the old days when one had to pass an ordeal to become and adult and receive adult privileges and responsibilities. The good side of those was that desirable societal traits were enabled and undesirable dampened. Ok, now debate what is desirable and undesirable. One thing that has certainly been undesirable, but has nonetheless grown, is the separation between action and responsibility, or even authority and responsibility. For example in housing, it's not the greedy developers that parcel land in substandard locations or use substandard materials and workmanship that suffer, but the poor slobs that for various reasons have to buy them. Or for example, the decision to expose a population to very harmful pollutants, seldom has immediate biological (reproductive or ability to thrive) repercussions for those behind the decisions. However, many other similar examples abound of individuals and group escaping responsibility for acts and decisions harmful to the group at large.
... Bank on the children. If you raise a child, it's your duty to make sure that they become far smarter than you are....
I gather from the context that "smarter" there was meant to be "more educated" instead.
It's also society's role to police itself and ensure that problems are nipped in the bud and problem individuals don't reproduce. Prior to 1900, nearly every society that I've heard of had some sort of initiation or competency test, whether over or de facto, to sort out who could reproduce and who could not. Some even had the additional requirement that an individual actively cull as part of that step. In other words, there one could not marry without taken an enemy off the planet.
However, more generally, some test or ordeal had to be passed to move from child status to adult.
Population growth is not necessarily a good thing, especially when the demands of population exceed sustainable resources. That currently includes most of our food which needs fossil fuels to achieve the high levels of production which keep us from starving and the long supply chains which literally span the globe to keep us from starving. In many regions, staple food items are no longer produced.
Also in many areas, the carrying capacity is already exceeded, breeding or importing more people will only make that problem worse. Some credible (at least to me) biologists and ecologists posit that we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Most can see that in regards to renewable resources and sustainable development, we're probably pretty far over the red line. The question is, have we crossed the point of no return yet?
Sure a redistribution of wealth might ease the pain for a few years or months, but it doesn't address the issue of diminishing resources needed for our civilization and increased population pressure on these remaining resources. Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed gives an interesting analysis of the current situation. As an amateur anthropoligist and dyed-in-the-wool misanthrope, after extensive travel, dialogues and reading, I myself arrived at a more pessimistic prognosis than he did, based mostly on different case studies and a few years before even hearing of him. Agree or disagree with his conclusion, it's still a very interesting read. Alternatively, a softer, lighter read might be his earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Unlike some other technologies, societies do not generally degrade gracefully. In the case of most readers here, neither arable land nor the appropriate skills remain to "wind back" to an agrarian society. The land most easily farmed with muscle power has long since been paved.
Something both seem to have forgotten was that WordPerfect was dependent on the official APIs which were neither fully functional nor well documented. In contrast, MS Word was able to use various shortcuts to improve how it interacted with system activities like printing.
A lot of company court records from that era were later destroyed, but there's still enough damning evidence left in the government records to show that MS was throwing sand in the gears on an ongoing basis.
In this case, the [pro-free market] argument is flawed because no tool currently available that uses ODF is even close to beating MS Office in several important areas, which apparently include support for people with various disabilities. Mandating the use of ODF would thus not be in the immediate interests of those who use office applications in MA and use those areas of the product.
The key modifier there is currently. If you read up
on the topic you'll notice that accessibility support currently in MS Office is all from third parties and possible in spite of MS. Looking even a few quarters ahead, these third party vendors would have a much easier time dealing with the well-documented, relatively stable APIs provided by applications currently supporting the OpenDocument format, rather than dealing with undocumented, and often hidden APIs that change with each new version. In other words, the makers of accessibility software would have an easer time (read: more money) if they could get people enough people away from MS Office.
Another key point is that Massachusetts is talking about a phased roll out, not a Ballmeresque "rip and replace". There will be a place in the system for a few years where legacy apps can be used by those that have to.
However, MS could always choose to support OpenDocument and render the whole debate about applications moot. MS has been encouraged and invited to participate in OpenDocument's development since very early on. And wasn't MS talking a lot of crap recently about how MS Office could support arbitrary XML schemas? If that's the case, then it should be able to handle OpenDocument just fine. However, I'd bet about 99% of your typical non-visually impaired government office workers probably can't tell which office suite they're using anyway. WordPerfect, AppleWorks, KOffice, OpenOffice.org, etc. - to them they're all just MS Word, no joke. "Word ®" seems to have become generic for "Word Processing".
The debate there in Massachusetts was about formats anyway and not applications. Besides it's over, and OpenDocument will be rolled out as departments can begin supporting it. There are a lot of vendors that would like a piece of that action.
New Orleans has and still does badly need investment. However, don't confuse who will benefit from the donation of an infrastructure locked entirely into one single company's product lines: It's not New Orleans.
In other words, that corporation has made an investment, which that same corporation expects financial gain from. For New Orleans, it's just another foot on the neck holding it down.
New Orleans has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by getting locked into a defective network infrastructure that, in addition to all the other defects of that product line, locks out other vendors entirely, thus eliminating competition and the benefits of the free market.
Locking out competition is not charity. In fact, from the way American values used to be described and looked up to, preventing a free market (by locking out competition alone or in combination with other means) is just down right anti-American.
First: Yes, Slate was launched in 1996 and intended to compete with Salon which was launched in 1995. The article from 1997 seems to have struck a nerve both then and now.
Second: I did not write that Gates is footing the bill for the whole thing. His program is only providing seed money to get regional governments to supplement with a ratio of matching funding. Money put into the system by the governments increases revenue, which drives stock prices. The choice of corrective treatment, rather than proactive, means that there will be an ongoing demand for the pills, which will then be bought from the same pharma.
So if a small investment of a few million (or billion) causes one's stock holdings to jump by more than that, whether in the short term or the long term then it's a net gain.
I've seen a lot of attacks against RMS personally, but very, very few which try to refute his basic thesis. Even those which address his ideas tend to avoid the use of facts or logically sound arguments.
Personally, I'd like to see some quality in the counter arguments for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
However, a big problem is phishing.
Most people are using pretty weak systems that are easy to crack or intercept. From there its just a matter of sniffing to get at least a handful of credit card numbers. The fool on the other end will think that the network or their computer is broken or that it simply didn't work and the first try. Due to being in transit, illegal use of that card number won't be caught for hours or even days so there is plenty of time for the criminals to max out the card. Odds are that both the person and machine used to capture the card numbers is in a different state or country by the time the compromise is noticed.
Free access, or skimming a flat fee from all tickets, elminates that risk. No credit card use == no risk of credit card abuse.
Actually, Norway should not be on the list, it has had assasinations/terrorist attacks recently. The Mossad gunned down some random immigrant a few years ago. Wan't even the guy they were after, jut had the bad luck to be at the wrong place. IIRC it was the first terrorist incident in modern times on Norwegian soil.
Nor should Sweden be on the list. Sweden has had two political assasinations in as many decades. Going back further, there is quite a bit of uncertainty about how accidental the demise of Dag Hammarskjöld really was. So the total could be three in modern times. That doesn't count Russian mafia gunning people down in parking lots, which would bring the total much higher.
Denmark had the Banditos and the Hells Angels in all-out war, even breaking into prison to kill. Now they collaborate... That doesn't count the street fights between ethnic groups nor the daylight gang rapes etc. Nor does it count the random eastern european mule here and there who drops dead from radiation poisoning because of a hot cargo in his vehicle.
The point here is that those that count above are all tied, or supspected to be tied, to the West, and the US in particular.
If your iPod or MP3 player does not already support Ogg Vorbis, then file a bugreport for it already. Get over the fact that Vorbis is Free codec, it's got excellent sound quality and compression.
Regardless of its technical merits, the MBAs, PHBs and other suits making the players are going avoid Vorbis simply because it is free unless 1) you point out examples like the seizure of players or 2) request Ogg Vorbis explicity. You can do both by filing a bug report.
Interesting link, but it's missing MS' use of "charitable contributions", epsecially in the developing world.
There's more published, especially in local papers, but as you see in the Salon article, it's part of an combination investment/PR campaign and both MS reps and shills come down on any thing other than "Yay Bill!" So questions and/or critique stay low profile and is hard to find.
Also, the mention of tax breaks is a bit of an under statement. MS pays almost nothing: IT giants who don't pay tax part 2: how Microsoft does it. There's a bit of a stink about MS in Europe using foreign tax havens. And, by the way, MS seems to make more money buying and selling its own stock that in does even from sales of MS Windows. Bill hopped off as CEO the same year MS ran an $18,000,000,000 USD loss. Now he's stepped down completely. That could be interpreted to suggest that this summer's massive stock buyback could be an indication of real bad situation in Redmond.
Many single board computers also have ruggedized models which can operate in a wider range of temperatures. Often the ruggedized models can operate in from -40 C to +85 C or at least -25 C to +50 C. So use those. Most come with something useful like linux or QNX pre-installed. Many are designed for what you are describing and have many data ports.
You don't say in detail what types of data they will be collecting. But I'd try to keep as much equipment, especially power supplies, out of the chilled area as possible and have each unit run as many sensors as possible. The servers and workstations should definitely be out of the chilled area or at least in their own insulated locker. Going a step further, try thin clients if you need terminals in the cold area. No sense in adding extra heat where it's not wanted or needed.
Sounds like maybe a grand but futile gesture, but who knows, maybe it will get the CTRL key(s) back to the right place. So I'll support the gesture in case it does work.
Caps lock is never used that I know of. I've seen numlock used, only rarely, but never capslock.
The CTRL keys, however, are used all the time, yet are currently in an ergonomically unsound position. For some of use, they're used even more than the shift keys. Either way, they should be back away from the space bar and up above the shift keys where they belong. If that can be done by ditching the capslock key, then more power to it.
Nah. It's more for publicity than recruiting. Look at the venue. Those in the US that want to go to NYC are already there. Those overseas will have trouble with customs, given that they are 1) foreign, and 2) good at hacking code. It would have been smarter to choose Toronto or Vancouver, where it would be safer and easier for the contestants to travel.
I can see several reasons why it's to Google's, the contest's, and the contestants' advantage to have the final elimination round take place at the same phsycial location, but NYC is so 20th century.
Hurray for anecdotal evidence!
Perhaps an explanation is that you perceive that platform to be more stable because the crashes cause a quiet re-boot, which is quickly (for you) forgotten.
Anyway, since we're swapping anecdotes, my experience is that XP goes belly up about once a week. I can't remember the last time I haven't seen a public XP site (kiosks, public stations, displays, visible staff stations) without at least one machine noticiably hung. When I ask XP users how often they have an unplanned restart, it's usually several times a month. Sometimes it's more, depending on how much they use the machine. That does not meet my definition of stable.
Perhaps it's 'more stable' simply through a re-definition of stable. When I hear Windows fanbois going an about how 'stable' XP is, rather than refuting directly I have started to ask that they explain what they mean by that. Generally they seem to mean 'more stable' as in 'more stable than NT 4.5'. When asked how it compares to Newtare or Solaris, they go on about how those don't count as they are in a whole other (better) class of 'stable'.
Cry me a river. /. is not 'anti-MS' just for something to do. Real, legitimate gripes about poor quality, over-priced products and predatory business practices cannot be dismissed simply as bashing. Enough problems from one company and you get the back side of brand recognition. The 'bashing' will stop when the products and behaviors improve, but to-date it looks like more of the same instead.
Simply calling product 'stable' doesn't make it stable, nor does whinging about critique.
People respond to how they are treated and what is expected of them. It's known as the Pygmalion Effect and well documented. If the staff get treated poorly or like dishonest people and management is always expecting the worst behavior, then, surprise, the staff will generally meet those expectations. Or if the staff get treated honestly and well and management is always expecting the best, then the staff will generally meet those expectations too. Obviously there are more factors than just how staff are treated and what is expected of their behavior, but those two are very, very large yet often not addressed. Employees, despite what MBAs may say and act, are people and will act to meet expectations, good expectations or bad ones.
Ah, but that would preclude the use of MS products, especially server products and mandate solutions from other vendors and even Free/Open Source software. Networked storage (aka filesharing) on a MS-Windows server , MSIE and MS-Outlook have been invaluable boons to corporate and international espionage. However, it's no wonder that the media, beholden to MS via the advertising budget at the least, tends to focus on employees.
Do not expose your internal network Make sure that intermediate storage is secureThe Groklaw analysis itself is spot on. It was my citation of it that was flawed. As you mention, it is for the MS Office 2003 format's specification. Currently MOOX is a big unknown. So actually the GP or GGP was flawed in claiming that MS guarantees anything at all about MOOX.
The link to the analysis on Groklaw got munged. This reply is to post it.
No. That's not exactly what Microsoft is doing with MOOX (MS Office 'Open' XML). What MS has done is blow some smoke about not suing:
The problems with first point there are obvious, without guidelines to say what is and is not conformant, there is no way any one who takes the risk of working with MOOX can be sure that MS won't come in later and take their lunch money ... until it's too late.
The second point is more subtle. Take a look at the full MOOX spec, several thousand pages of it. Aside from the problems that much of the mark up is focused on formatting rather than structure, there is a lot missing from the spec and a lot only revelant to support of legacy document formats. It's so convoluted that the only one likely to be fully compliant is MS itself, and even then only because it is writing the specification around existing products rather than with an eye to the future. Any competitor, even one with deep pockets, has little hope of actually successfully creating a complete implementation. So, given that no one except MS has much of a chance of creating a full implementation and there are no provisions for partial implementations, it's not much of an assurance.
Just those two weak points are a real bitch, and there are more.
No. The whole MSO 2007 / MOOX thing is just spin to keep the press munching on MS press releases and press release byproducts. When you dissect the MS 'covenant not to sue', there are really no assurances. Not only are you on your own, but by attempting to implment MOOX, MS has a very good idea of what they can go after in court.
That's where you see the importance of independent standards bodies like the W3C and OASIS. Using their standards, you get what you see and there is no worries about predation later down the road.
It's a Non-Disclosure Agreement dressed up by marketing. Calling 'shared' source or anything else for that matter won't change that.
You cannot use the emulator on/with/for any non-MS operating systems at all:
So the point of emulating Windows on Windows is what? The restrictions on the emulator seem to prevent any real use. Perhaps it's just to get some code out there so that MS can later go after Samba or other competition. SCO, round II, or something like that.
A strong case has be made elsewhere that the NDAs governing 'shared' source exists mostly to prevent developers from working on any non-MS platforms at all, not just Linux. Even viewing MS' code can taint a developer so that later work can be attacked, not necessarily successfully, in court claiming violation of the NDA.
Loss or deterioration of the physical medium is the simplest to deal with, yet is an area where failure is seen currently.
Loss of codecs or data specs is another: who's going to fund/spend time reverse engineering a format or codec just to read a file to see if it is worth reverse engineering or decoding? DRM adds a whole new dimension to data loss. When the keys or authorization is lost, the file and it's contents are essentially lost.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of people go on about not attributing to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. With the case of the missing Apollo 11 tapes the are arguments for a case of malice, indifference or simple incompetence. And any of these can be the direct result of political appointees, rather than qualified individuals. But guess what, whether malice, indifference, or incompetence, the results are the same: lost data (which was damned expensive to acquire and/or irreplaceable) and lost cultural heritage.
Yeah. They're expensive as all get out. So the 'economic benefits' from harvesting are a bit of an understatement. But the point is that you don't have to eat them, just get rid of them.
It doesn't matter so much. For various reasons, including elevated water temperatures, fish stocks are gone from the sea quite far north. The crabs have been encroaching on the regions containing the last commericial stocks. Even Bergen and Trondheim, which were once great fishing ports, are dead and tropic species are occasionally sighted in the waters.
With the quotas preventing the harvesting of the crabs, they are spreading more widely and more rapidly at an accelerating pace. Eventually the population will level off, but not before the last of the fish stock is ruined. The crabs pretty much wipe all organic matter from the bottom, especially tasty fish eggs. Without the eggs, there are no new fish. Without the fish, no fishing. Without the fishing, there will be no monied interests hindering oil drilling in the Barents.
The Norwegians are in a hard place because of the oil and their ties to the petro dollar. They also can't risk pissing of the last western military power, Russia, over the oil either. They will eventually lose that game, unless they deal with the crabs. Open season and no catch limits on the crabs would give several enviromental and economic boosts to the region. They're quite good eating and can be sold for food, decimating them would help the fishing, but the crabs are just as good as materials for biofuels.
Looking at the way some of the national governments handle things, it almost looks like many leaders are kind of secretly hoping that a pandemic will help them avoid addressing the population problem. However, we still need some kind of planning in place otherwise, the population curve will recover in a few decades just like it did with the Black Plague.
For good and bad many things in society have changed since the turn of the previous century. One mixed blessing was that in the old days when one had to pass an ordeal to become and adult and receive adult privileges and responsibilities. The good side of those was that desirable societal traits were enabled and undesirable dampened. Ok, now debate what is desirable and undesirable. One thing that has certainly been undesirable, but has nonetheless grown, is the separation between action and responsibility, or even authority and responsibility. For example in housing, it's not the greedy developers that parcel land in substandard locations or use substandard materials and workmanship that suffer, but the poor slobs that for various reasons have to buy them. Or for example, the decision to expose a population to very harmful pollutants, seldom has immediate biological (reproductive or ability to thrive) repercussions for those behind the decisions. However, many other similar examples abound of individuals and group escaping responsibility for acts and decisions harmful to the group at large.
I gather from the context that "smarter" there was meant to be "more educated" instead.
It's also society's role to police itself and ensure that problems are nipped in the bud and problem individuals don't reproduce. Prior to 1900, nearly every society that I've heard of had some sort of initiation or competency test, whether over or de facto, to sort out who could reproduce and who could not. Some even had the additional requirement that an individual actively cull as part of that step. In other words, there one could not marry without taken an enemy off the planet. However, more generally, some test or ordeal had to be passed to move from child status to adult.
Population growth is not necessarily a good thing, especially when the demands of population exceed sustainable resources. That currently includes most of our food which needs fossil fuels to achieve the high levels of production which keep us from starving and the long supply chains which literally span the globe to keep us from starving. In many regions, staple food items are no longer produced.
Also in many areas, the carrying capacity is already exceeded, breeding or importing more people will only make that problem worse. Some credible (at least to me) biologists and ecologists posit that we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Most can see that in regards to renewable resources and sustainable development, we're probably pretty far over the red line. The question is, have we crossed the point of no return yet?
Sure a redistribution of wealth might ease the pain for a few years or months, but it doesn't address the issue of diminishing resources needed for our civilization and increased population pressure on these remaining resources. Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed gives an interesting analysis of the current situation. As an amateur anthropoligist and dyed-in-the-wool misanthrope, after extensive travel, dialogues and reading, I myself arrived at a more pessimistic prognosis than he did, based mostly on different case studies and a few years before even hearing of him. Agree or disagree with his conclusion, it's still a very interesting read. Alternatively, a softer, lighter read might be his earlier book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Unlike some other technologies, societies do not generally degrade gracefully. In the case of most readers here, neither arable land nor the appropriate skills remain to "wind back" to an agrarian society. The land most easily farmed with muscle power has long since been paved.
Something both seem to have forgotten was that WordPerfect was dependent on the official APIs which were neither fully functional nor well documented. In contrast, MS Word was able to use various shortcuts to improve how it interacted with system activities like printing.
A lot of company court records from that era were later destroyed, but there's still enough damning evidence left in the government records to show that MS was throwing sand in the gears on an ongoing basis.
The key modifier there is currently. If you read up on the topic you'll notice that accessibility support currently in MS Office is all from third parties and possible in spite of MS. Looking even a few quarters ahead, these third party vendors would have a much easier time dealing with the well-documented, relatively stable APIs provided by applications currently supporting the OpenDocument format, rather than dealing with undocumented, and often hidden APIs that change with each new version. In other words, the makers of accessibility software would have an easer time (read: more money) if they could get people enough people away from MS Office.
Another key point is that Massachusetts is talking about a phased roll out, not a Ballmeresque "rip and replace". There will be a place in the system for a few years where legacy apps can be used by those that have to.
However, MS could always choose to support OpenDocument and render the whole debate about applications moot. MS has been encouraged and invited to participate in OpenDocument's development since very early on. And wasn't MS talking a lot of crap recently about how MS Office could support arbitrary XML schemas? If that's the case, then it should be able to handle OpenDocument just fine. However, I'd bet about 99% of your typical non-visually impaired government office workers probably can't tell which office suite they're using anyway. WordPerfect, AppleWorks, KOffice, OpenOffice.org, etc. - to them they're all just MS Word, no joke. "Word ®" seems to have become generic for "Word Processing".
The debate there in Massachusetts was about formats anyway and not applications. Besides it's over, and OpenDocument will be rolled out as departments can begin supporting it. There are a lot of vendors that would like a piece of that action.
New Orleans has and still does badly need investment. However, don't confuse who will benefit from the donation of an infrastructure locked entirely into one single company's product lines: It's not New Orleans.
In other words, that corporation has made an investment, which that same corporation expects financial gain from. For New Orleans, it's just another foot on the neck holding it down.
New Orleans has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by getting locked into a defective network infrastructure that, in addition to all the other defects of that product line, locks out other vendors entirely, thus eliminating competition and the benefits of the free market.
Locking out competition is not charity. In fact, from the way American values used to be described and looked up to, preventing a free market (by locking out competition alone or in combination with other means) is just down right anti-American.
First: Yes, Slate was launched in 1996 and intended to compete with Salon which was launched in 1995. The article from 1997 seems to have struck a nerve both then and now.
Second: I did not write that Gates is footing the bill for the whole thing. His program is only providing seed money to get regional governments to supplement with a ratio of matching funding. Money put into the system by the governments increases revenue, which drives stock prices. The choice of corrective treatment, rather than proactive, means that there will be an ongoing demand for the pills, which will then be bought from the same pharma.
So if a small investment of a few million (or billion) causes one's stock holdings to jump by more than that, whether in the short term or the long term then it's a net gain.
I've seen a lot of attacks against RMS personally, but very, very few which try to refute his basic thesis. Even those which address his ideas tend to avoid the use of facts or logically sound arguments.
Personally, I'd like to see some quality in the counter arguments for a change.