They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.
I think more interesting than any of these very lame articles individually is the fact that collectively they've all chosen to spin IPv6 negatively. That includes the red herring about address space. So, who is benefitting directly from keeping the US on IPv4?
There are serious security problems with IPv4 that are costing a lot of money every day. With all the squawking about rolling out IPSEC, why not just skip that step and go to IPv6 which has IPSEC built in? Or can key vendors *cough*M$&cough* provide systems or applications that can handle IPv6 yet?
The routing for IPv6 is both simpler and more hierarchical than for IPv4, that's also got to be a cost saver.
Is is also possible that the same children that have a weak immune system and get more colds would also be more susceptable to cancer?
That was indeed my first thought.
The article only seems to point to a correlation not a causal relationship.
It could well be that the kids who are more susceptible to certain viruses are also susceptible to certain cancers when the right evironmental and genetic triggers are also present.
There are other related costs that need to be considered with a large changeover to a different document standard. Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software.
That's only if the old software does not support the new standard and can't be patched to do so.
Anyway, if Massachusetts (or anybody else for that matter) decides instead to wait for MS Office 12 (if/when it is ready) to use MOOX format (if/when it is ready) then you still have the retraining costs. If anything they may even be higher than when switching from current versions of MS Office to OpenOffice.org.
"Power users can probably worm their way through, though there are enough advanced features that they'll almost certainly screw something up without proper documentation."
and
"But average users will be lost if confronted with these screens out of the blue, and you'll wind up with a help desk nightmare. Moreover, it's easy to see that this version is going to impact even network and desktop administrators in a big way."
Both quotes from Be prepared for Office 12 last month. And that's all just from the perspective of features the user is already familiar with. There has been no discussion (news blackout?) of the server ties and digital restriction management (DRM) issues that are part of MS Office 12. You get all the standard migration problems plus new functionallity, plus new interfaces, plus dependence on connectivity, plus dependence on server based responses. Not a recipe for a smooth transition. Going over to OpenOffice.org could even be cheaper and easier.
Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave.. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks.. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.
Things change. Eventually, maybe sooner maybe later, MS Office will go away just as WordPerfect faded and before that WordStar faded. However, most secretarial staff probably don't care what word processor they use as long as it works.
The new MS formats are not gaining significant market share and that's what MS has historically used to drive new sales of MS Office. So it is possible that a universal format like OpenDocument could take over. In that case, those same secretaries will be fluffing their resumes with mention of OpenOffice or some other OpenDocument compliant tool.
My point is that given what you've just said, and given that Linux certainly hasn't been hindered by a lack of media attention, it's surprising how little headway has been made in adoption by anyone but enthusiasts.
Many more use F/OSS than you'd expect, however most won't make a big deal about it.
A very real hinderance is that any time a big customer gets some visibility in moving to F/OSS on the desktop, resellers highly dependent on MS' continued good will must step in or lose that. If it's a big enough account, then MS will step in directly and try to cut certain people out of the decision making process. In some cases the vendor will hinder hardware orders for the evaluation or pilot. Or MS will set a handful of their own staff full time to work on site to "help" with the evaluation.
Anyway, some of the rest can be explained in that most non-power users won't remember or even know which specific hardware, OS, or apps they are using. So of course you won't hear about it. Put them on WordPerfect, Appleworks, AbiWord or OpenOffice.org and to them it's still "Word". For a lot of end users "Windows" means any graphical user interface including, but not limited to, Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, and so on. Correspondingly "Word" means any word processor, "Excel" means a spreadsheet, and "Powerpoint" means those time-wasting presentation graphics. Even some die-hard F/OSS programmers do that. It's like the trademark dilution you had with "Kleenex" and "Xerox" or ordering a "Coke" down south.
Yeah, just look at the inuit. It's just unbelivable that Greenland has a native population at all. If stone-age people can adapt to that, we should be able to adapt, too, even if the oil runs short (which of course it eventually will).
The climate and ecology there has been more or less stable for so many thousands of years that both there has been time to adapt both culturally and genetically. It may be 'stone age', but there's a f* of a lot of knowledge required to even just survive let alone thrive. Also keep in mind that Inuit can expose bare skin to wind that would give many other ethnicities frostbite in minutes.
As a species we can sure adapt, however civilization is much more sensitive. Without it we do not have the skills to survive or even the knowledge to do it without further depleting life giving resources. If electricity or food stopped, what would all the spare people stored in the megacities do? Look at Haiti now as compared to 200 years ago.
The Xbox is less about games than it is about working out a platform with a totally closed architecture on commodity hardware.
No one takes games or music seriously, they're just entertainment, so it makes an ideal playground to test out digital restrictions technologies without getting the consumer backlash that happened with Palladium. Since that, it's something that MS would like people to not pay attention to.
Components of digital restriction technology get added to MS' applications (MS Office 2003, Windows Media Player, MSIE, etc) and operating system with most every upgrade or patch. However, messing with the peripherals, BIOS and CPU or other big changes would be too disruptive especially for a company that doesn't get things working until v 3 or so. That's what the Xbox is for. If it worries Nintendo and Sony or someday even hurts their bottom line, then so much the better.
It's not so much about games as it is about working the bugs out of a closed architecture on commodity hardware.
... someone used to the Gimp finds Photoshop cumbersome.
In some ways I think the Gimp has better menus and interface. I used to be a big time Photoshop user, going back to somewhere around version 2.x and have had most versions since. I still have version 7.x for OS X. However, I now find it clunky and awkward to use compared to the Gimp.
There are still reasons that a professional graphics person will continue to use Photoshop. It's quite good. There are also shortcomings in the Gimp, but for your average user only interested in editing digital photos for the web, logos or icons, it beats Photoshop.
The Xbox is less about games than it is about working out a platform with a totally closed architecture on commodity hardware. No one takes games or music seriously, they're just entertainment, so it makes an ideal playground to test out digital restrictions technologies without getting the consumer backlash that happened with Palladium.
Components of digital restriction technology get added to MS' applications (MS Office 2003, Windows Media Player, MSIE, etc) and operating system with most every upgrade or patch. However, messing with the peripherals, BIOS and CPU or other big changes would be too disruptive especially for a company that doesn't get things working until v 3 or so. That's what the Xbox is for. If it worries Nintendo and Sony or someday even hurts their bottom line, then so much the better.
Why are we reading about a product that has never made a profit? And if we must, why is the question of price dumping ignored? Or what about the fires started by the power supply, but blamed by the media on the cable?
"If your app/OS can't live securely in a networked environment w/o a firewall then it shouldn't be using TCP/IP anyway"
The big problem here is that paying customers have been convinced that design defects are normal. Of course the only place they get information these days is from the vendors who sell the defective products or other vendors which have business models dependent on high maintenance defects in them.
Why not celebrate all defects: salmonella in the food is a sign of thriving food production, toxins in drinking water are a sign of a thriving industry, exploding tires and self-igniting gas tanks are a sign of short time to market, etc.
Botnets are a sign of two problems no amount of spin meistering can make go away : One, that there are some severely defective products on the market that cannot operate safely in any kind of networked environment. Two, a large portion of the UK has been suckered into buying and using those products instead of more suitable or robust ones.
Of course MS doesn't want you to know that there is a difference between patching and upgrading. That would cut back on unnecessary sales.
In contrast, with a linux or BSD distro, even an ancient one, it's standard practice to fix only the problem and not change any functionality unnecessarily.
It's not just that they leave lights on all night, but that a good portion of that energy is directed upwards. Shining light into the sky is simply a waste of energy and hides an important scientific / education resource which has been part of our cultural heritage as well.
It's good that there are starting to be light pollution ordinances. The International Dark-Sky Association works to reduce light pollution and increase the efficacy of night time lighting. I've lived in areas where the street lights are turned off after a certain hour. That is really nice. Though it sucks having to stay up so late just in order to see the stars properly.
IP legislation, representing a state-enforced monopolization of commodities that would otherwise be freely traded in a competitive marketplace, seems to me a lot more socialistic than absence of IP legislation
Apple has some nice stuff, but other stuff that Steve doesn't care about are absolutely atrocious (perfect example: Quicktime for Windows).... Not every company can be a personality cult.
Bad example. Development for MS platforms is highly dependent on cooperation and support from MS. In the case of Apple, MS has been more obstreperous than usual. In the case of Quicktime for MS Windows in particular, MS has tried repeatedly to kill it off even as far back as 1997 and 1998 (warning: PDF). See page 52.
Sure Steve may be a problem, but the particulars around that specific example tend to indicate that the problem may be elsewhere...
And speaking of personality cult, or just plain cult, when's ol' Chairman Gates there going to drop the fascade of having anything to do with IT?
Not the same at all. Windows and... can't be "turned off" in a time of war. Blackberry's system's can.
Wrong: Windows Product Activation.
If M$ can officially turn off the computer, then so can anyone that has cracked M$' product disactivation mechanism. Given the company's track record on both security and key managment, that's not a far fetched scenario. Another official entrance point would be the remote admin privileges granted by MS Window 2000 SP3, XP SP2 and later.
If it can happen it will happen. That's how things work.
Given the way MS has been flouting the law, maybe it's time for the US government to reconsider how much control it really has over MS and its products.
It's one thing to create a buzz with a brief period of scarcity. It's another thing to extend it so long that you eat up all of your much touted lead time on the competition.
One could make a case for either option. However, until I see more evidence I'm interpreting as trying to spin lack of demand into buzz. Losing lead time to competition doesn't tell me anything. Look at how delayed W95 was and Vista still is, just to name two of many.
My own observations are that since 2002, I've had to go past shops selling consoles at least once a week. The thing I have noticed is that no matter how much 'facing' MS drones do with their products and machines, the queue and crowd around the PlayStation is always largest. Nintendo is next and then the MS attempt is usually vacant. Again, purely anecdotally, I inquired the last two years towards Christmas regarding the availability of games for the three consoles (the first time I was actually considering buying, the second time I was merely curious): both times GameCube and PlayStation games sold out early, MS' were available even after the holiday.
The whole marketing gimmick this time around seems to be to try to use an artificial scarcity to create the illusion of demand.
The MS PR firm is marketing Chairman Gates the same way: limiting access to him for the press and at other PR functions like hype sessions at universities.
To be honest, IPv6 never really made sense to me either. I mean, OK, so we're running out of IP addresses and we need more...
That's probably because all press coverage of IPv6 neglects all other aspects except for the address space non-issue.
You've been around long enough to know that 1) IPv6 address space is the least relevant reason, but in a way that's kind of the point there, and 2) that NAT is nothing more than a kludge anyway. It's just that the address space troll always takes up nearly 100% of the discussion.
What seems to be consistently neglected in nearly all discussion of IPV6 are its real advantages:
Expanded routing and addressing
Simplified packet headers
Header and payload compression
Quality of service capabilities
Authentication and privacy
Multicast / Anycast
Local-use addresses
Integrity and key managment
Autoconfiguration
Multi-homing capabilities
Those that have rolled out IPv6 networks include NYU, CERNIC, and ICANN. Japan, China and Korea have also committed to larger scale rollouts all between 2005 and 2011.
Routers by Cisco, Nokia and Juniper already support IPv6.
Does anyone remember when Bungie was first and foremost a Mac developer?
Yes. That was prior to MS buying them out. I'm sure the timing is just a coincidence though. Really. MS reps say so. They'd never be allowed to tell an untruth. I mean there was no connection between MS investment and stopping WordPerfect for Linux, so why should there be any with Bungie....
Indeed. Some countries made an effort to distribute their transmigrants evenly around the country. However, many take issue with ending up in a small town or out in the country, so they move to the city, creating their own ghettos. Sweden is one example. Language and cultural problems then create further isolation.
I say transmigrants because many (far from all, but definitely many) have no intention of adopting the language, culture or values of their new country. merely creating a defacto colony in a new territory.
Denmark has had really severe problems with that, but so far the groups fight eachother. None of the European countries have faced up to the transmigration problem and still handle them and immigrants alike under antiquated immigration laws designed to handle a slow trickle of individuals back in the 1950's. No system is really in place to get the people new job skills for those that need it, proper language skills, and an acceptance or appreciation of existing values and mores.
As a result, you get situations like in the Netherlands where each of the 4 largest cities in the country have a first generation immigrant/transmigration populations of over 40% each. Or in Malmö, Sweden where Swedes are now the single largest ethnic minority, even counting second generation immigrants/transmigrants as Swedes, regardless of assimilation.
There is also the problem of double standards. Any questioning or criticism of the system results in personal verbal attacks and accusations of intolerance. Any criticism of the behaviour of the new comers is likewise attacked with accusations of intolerance and racism. In contrast, newcomers can get away with statements and actions that would put a 'native' in serious legal trouble, resulting in jail or fines. That has to stop and the reality of the situation be looked at as well as the intended goals.
How does importing 5 million transmigrants into a country of 5 million or even 60 million help the situation for either the people (both new and old) in the new country or those left in the country they have escaped from? We all know what happens to a business if there is high turn over, what about whole cities or countries?
No. I'd be taking away the ability of individual states to customize this particular facet of the law.
That's probably the point of the proposal in the first place. It remains to be seen for whom the proposed changes are good for, but not having seen an analysis one way or the other, I'd guess it's not the average citizen who gains or even breaks even.
I seem to recall that some anthropologists or similar group had been able to categorized that there are only about 3 dozen basic story lines. Patent these and you patent the framework for not only existing literature, but most likely future literature too.
Yes. Australia / New Zealand will have to honor the literature and software patents as part of the recent 'free trade' agreement had them as riders. So far Europe has escaped, but only because the antagonists thought that the proposed legislation would not go far enough. They've had half a year already to cook some new tricks up to drag out next summer while everyone steps out for holidays. It's easier to fight it now, but as usual people will wait until it's late or too late to even say anything to their political representatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that an allusion to Tecumseh's Curse? ;)
There are serious security problems with IPv4 that are costing a lot of money every day. With all the squawking about rolling out IPSEC, why not just skip that step and go to IPv6 which has IPSEC built in? Or can key vendors *cough*M$&cough* provide systems or applications that can handle IPv6 yet?
The routing for IPv6 is both simpler and more hierarchical than for IPv4, that's also got to be a cost saver.
The article only seems to point to a correlation not a causal relationship. It could well be that the kids who are more susceptible to certain viruses are also susceptible to certain cancers when the right evironmental and genetic triggers are also present.
Anyway, if Massachusetts (or anybody else for that matter) decides instead to wait for MS Office 12 (if/when it is ready) to use MOOX format (if/when it is ready) then you still have the retraining costs. If anything they may even be higher than when switching from current versions of MS Office to OpenOffice.org.
and Both quotes from Be prepared for Office 12 last month. And that's all just from the perspective of features the user is already familiar with. There has been no discussion (news blackout?) of the server ties and digital restriction management (DRM) issues that are part of MS Office 12. You get all the standard migration problems plus new functionallity, plus new interfaces, plus dependence on connectivity, plus dependence on server based responses. Not a recipe for a smooth transition. Going over to OpenOffice.org could even be cheaper and easier. Things change. Eventually, maybe sooner maybe later, MS Office will go away just as WordPerfect faded and before that WordStar faded. However, most secretarial staff probably don't care what word processor they use as long as it works. The new MS formats are not gaining significant market share and that's what MS has historically used to drive new sales of MS Office. So it is possible that a universal format like OpenDocument could take over. In that case, those same secretaries will be fluffing their resumes with mention of OpenOffice or some other OpenDocument compliant tool.Wouldn't a mylar liner between the shell and the real liner on any jacket do the job? Is the rate of tazer use going up or something?
A very real hinderance is that any time a big customer gets some visibility in moving to F/OSS on the desktop, resellers highly dependent on MS' continued good will must step in or lose that. If it's a big enough account, then MS will step in directly and try to cut certain people out of the decision making process. In some cases the vendor will hinder hardware orders for the evaluation or pilot. Or MS will set a handful of their own staff full time to work on site to "help" with the evaluation.
So there are good reasons why open source projects are not publicised. In general, it pays to keep quiet if for no other reason than to avoid the persistent whining and shouting from the MS vendors. Some however, either have nothing to lose or have been pushed too far by MS (or its designated reps the BSA) or both.
Anyway, some of the rest can be explained in that most non-power users won't remember or even know which specific hardware, OS, or apps they are using. So of course you won't hear about it. Put them on WordPerfect, Appleworks, AbiWord or OpenOffice.org and to them it's still "Word". For a lot of end users "Windows" means any graphical user interface including, but not limited to, Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, and so on. Correspondingly "Word" means any word processor, "Excel" means a spreadsheet, and "Powerpoint" means those time-wasting presentation graphics. Even some die-hard F/OSS programmers do that. It's like the trademark dilution you had with "Kleenex" and "Xerox" or ordering a "Coke" down south.
As a species we can sure adapt, however civilization is much more sensitive. Without it we do not have the skills to survive or even the knowledge to do it without further depleting life giving resources. If electricity or food stopped, what would all the spare people stored in the megacities do? Look at Haiti now as compared to 200 years ago.
No one takes games or music seriously, they're just entertainment, so it makes an ideal playground to test out digital restrictions technologies without getting the consumer backlash that happened with Palladium. Since that, it's something that MS would like people to not pay attention to.
Components of digital restriction technology get added to MS' applications (MS Office 2003, Windows Media Player, MSIE, etc) and operating system with most every upgrade or patch. However, messing with the peripherals, BIOS and CPU or other big changes would be too disruptive especially for a company that doesn't get things working until v 3 or so. That's what the Xbox is for. If it worries Nintendo and Sony or someday even hurts their bottom line, then so much the better.
It's not so much about games as it is about working the bugs out of a closed architecture on commodity hardware.
There are still reasons that a professional graphics person will continue to use Photoshop. It's quite good. There are also shortcomings in the Gimp, but for your average user only interested in editing digital photos for the web, logos or icons, it beats Photoshop.
Components of digital restriction technology get added to MS' applications (MS Office 2003, Windows Media Player, MSIE, etc) and operating system with most every upgrade or patch. However, messing with the peripherals, BIOS and CPU or other big changes would be too disruptive especially for a company that doesn't get things working until v 3 or so. That's what the Xbox is for. If it worries Nintendo and Sony or someday even hurts their bottom line, then so much the better.
It's not about games.
Even the new version, assuming it doesn't have an igniting power supply like earlier versions, is expected to cost 40% more than its retail price. The total cost to manufacture and test a premium Xbox 360 is $552.27 compared with its retail price of $399. So MS is losing money on each one, unlike the market leaders the Playstation or the GameCube.
Why not celebrate all defects: salmonella in the food is a sign of thriving food production, toxins in drinking water are a sign of a thriving industry, exploding tires and self-igniting gas tanks are a sign of short time to market, etc.
Botnets are a sign of two problems no amount of spin meistering can make go away : One, that there are some severely defective products on the market that cannot operate safely in any kind of networked environment. Two, a large portion of the UK has been suckered into buying and using those products instead of more suitable or robust ones.
In contrast, with a linux or BSD distro, even an ancient one, it's standard practice to fix only the problem and not change any functionality unnecessarily.
It's good that there are starting to be light pollution ordinances. The International Dark-Sky Association works to reduce light pollution and increase the efficacy of night time lighting. I've lived in areas where the street lights are turned off after a certain hour. That is really nice. Though it sucks having to stay up so late just in order to see the stars properly.
Here's an example. WPA is about the same as shutting down your computer. Triggering WPA takes the computer out.
Quibbling over semantics. The effect is the same.
Sure Steve may be a problem, but the particulars around that specific example tend to indicate that the problem may be elsewhere...
And speaking of personality cult, or just plain cult, when's ol' Chairman Gates there going to drop the fascade of having anything to do with IT?
If M$ can officially turn off the computer, then so can anyone that has cracked M$' product disactivation mechanism. Given the company's track record on both security and key managment, that's not a far fetched scenario. Another official entrance point would be the remote admin privileges granted by MS Window 2000 SP3, XP SP2 and later.
If it can happen it will happen. That's how things work.
Given the way MS has been flouting the law, maybe it's time for the US government to reconsider how much control it really has over MS and its products.
My own observations are that since 2002, I've had to go past shops selling consoles at least once a week. The thing I have noticed is that no matter how much 'facing' MS drones do with their products and machines, the queue and crowd around the PlayStation is always largest. Nintendo is next and then the MS attempt is usually vacant. Again, purely anecdotally, I inquired the last two years towards Christmas regarding the availability of games for the three consoles (the first time I was actually considering buying, the second time I was merely curious): both times GameCube and PlayStation games sold out early, MS' were available even after the holiday.
The whole marketing gimmick this time around seems to be to try to use an artificial scarcity to create the illusion of demand. The MS PR firm is marketing Chairman Gates the same way: limiting access to him for the press and at other PR functions like hype sessions at universities.
You've been around long enough to know that 1) IPv6 address space is the least relevant reason, but in a way that's kind of the point there, and 2) that NAT is nothing more than a kludge anyway. It's just that the address space troll always takes up nearly 100% of the discussion.
What seems to be consistently neglected in nearly all discussion of IPV6 are its real advantages:
- Expanded routing and addressing
- Simplified packet headers
- Header and payload compression
- Quality of service capabilities
- Authentication and privacy
- Multicast / Anycast
- Local-use addresses
- Integrity and key managment
- Autoconfiguration
- Multi-homing capabilities
Those that have rolled out IPv6 networks include NYU, CERNIC, and ICANN. Japan, China and Korea have also committed to larger scale rollouts all between 2005 and 2011.Routers by Cisco, Nokia and Juniper already support IPv6.
Denmark has had really severe problems with that, but so far the groups fight eachother. None of the European countries have faced up to the transmigration problem and still handle them and immigrants alike under antiquated immigration laws designed to handle a slow trickle of individuals back in the 1950's. No system is really in place to get the people new job skills for those that need it, proper language skills, and an acceptance or appreciation of existing values and mores.
As a result, you get situations like in the Netherlands where each of the 4 largest cities in the country have a first generation immigrant/transmigration populations of over 40% each. Or in Malmö, Sweden where Swedes are now the single largest ethnic minority, even counting second generation immigrants/transmigrants as Swedes, regardless of assimilation.
There is also the problem of double standards. Any questioning or criticism of the system results in personal verbal attacks and accusations of intolerance. Any criticism of the behaviour of the new comers is likewise attacked with accusations of intolerance and racism. In contrast, newcomers can get away with statements and actions that would put a 'native' in serious legal trouble, resulting in jail or fines. That has to stop and the reality of the situation be looked at as well as the intended goals.
How does importing 5 million transmigrants into a country of 5 million or even 60 million help the situation for either the people (both new and old) in the new country or those left in the country they have escaped from? We all know what happens to a business if there is high turn over, what about whole cities or countries?
Yes. Australia / New Zealand will have to honor the literature and software patents as part of the recent 'free trade' agreement had them as riders. So far Europe has escaped, but only because the antagonists thought that the proposed legislation would not go far enough. They've had half a year already to cook some new tricks up to drag out next summer while everyone steps out for holidays. It's easier to fight it now, but as usual people will wait until it's late or too late to even say anything to their political representatives.